When he reached the point where the road diverged to the left, he mounted a little grassy ridge, whence he commanded the whole sweep of the hill rampart from north to west, and the whole expanse of the low country beneath, and there stood gazing for some minutes, lost in many thoughts, while the night fell.
He looked over the central plain of England--the plain which stretches westward to the Thames and the Berkshire hills, and northward through the Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire lowlands to the basin of the Trent.
An historic plain--symbolic, all of it, to an English eye.

There in the western distance, amid the light-filled mists, lay Oxford; in front of him was the site of Chalgrove Field, where Hampden got his clumsy death wound, and Thame, where he died; and far away, to his right, where the hills swept to the north, he could just discern, gleaming against the face of the down, the vast scoured cross, whereby a Saxon king had blazoned his victory over his Danish foes to all the plain beneath.
Aldous Raeburn was a man to feel these things.

He had seldom stood on this high point, in such an evening calm, without the expansion in him of all that was most manly, most English, most strenuous.

If it had not been so, indeed, he must have been singularly dull of soul.

For the great view had an interest for him personally it could hardly have possessed to the same degree for any other man.