quotes_habitation3.htm



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They walked towards it through an all abandoned land. Here they found the ghost of a patch of lucerne that had refused to die: there a harsh fallow surrendered to yard-high thistles; and here a breadth of rampant kelk feigning to be lawful crop … At the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge, and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond—old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the walls of a ruined house.

  

This is from “An Habitation Enforced” in Actions and Reactions.

George Chapin, a successful young American businessman. has had a breakdown though overwork. With his wife Sophie he has been travelling in Europe, as a rest cure. Now in England a friend has sent them down to deepest Sussex, where they later make a new life. Here they are discovering abandoned fields in a secret landscape that is new and strange to them,.