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Naturally he turned towards Hastings, whence a road now led through the Weald to London. On the tall cliffs he threw up an earthwork, and then marched towards the great town. Harold's army met him on the heights of Senlac, part of the solitary ridge between the marshes, by which alone London could be reached. Harold fell on the spot now marked by the ruined high altar of Battle Abbey-a national monument at present in the inhospitable keeping of an English duke. Once the native army was routed, William marched on resistlessly to London, and Sussex and England were at his feet.

The new feudal organisation of the county is doubtless shadowed forth in the existing rapes. Of these there are six, called respectively after Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings. It will be noticed at once that these were the seats of the new bishopric and of the five great early castles. In one form or another, more or less modernised, Arundel Castle, Bramber Castle, Lewes Castle, Pevensey Castle, and Hastings Castle all survive to our own day. In accordance with their ordinary policy of removing cathedrals from villages to chief towns, and so concentrating the civil and ecclesiastical government, the Normans brought the bishopstool from Selsea to Chichester. The six rapes are fairly coincident— Chichester with the marsh district; Arundel with the dale of Arun; Bramber with the dale of Adur; Lewes with the western dale of Ouse; Pevensey with the eastern dale of Ouse; and Hastings with the insulated region between the marshes. In other words, Sussex seems to have been cut up into six natural divisions along the seashore; while to each division was assigned all the Weald back of its own shore strip as far as the border. Thus the rapes consist of six long longitudinal belts, each with a short sea front and a long stretch back into the Weald.

Increased intercourse with the Continent brought the Cinque Ports into importance; and, as premier Cinque Port, Hastings grew to be one of the chief towns in Sussex. The constant French wars made them prominent in mediæval history. As trade grew up, other commercial harbours gave rise to considerable mercantile towns. Rye and Winchelsea, at the mouth of the Rother, were great ports of entry from France as late as the days of Elizabeth. Seaford, at the mouth of the Ouse, was also an important harbour till 1570, when a terrible storm changed the course of the stream to the town called from that fact Newhaven. Lewes was likewise a port, as the estuary of the Ouse was navigable from the mouth up to the town. Brighthelmstone was still a village; but Old Shoreham on the Adur

was a considerable place. Arundel Haven and Chichester Harbour recall the old mercantile importance of their respective neighbourhoods. The only other places of any note in medieval Sussex were Steyning, under the walls of Bramber Castle; Hurstmonceux, which the Conqueror bestowed upon the lord of Eu; Battle, where he planted his great expiatory abbey; and Hurst Pierpont, which also dates from William's own time. The sole important part of the county was still the strip along the coast between the Weald and the

sea.

During the Plantagenet period, England became a wool-exporting country, like Australia at the present day; and therefore the woolgrowing parts of the island rose quickly into great importance. Sussex, with its large expanse of chalk downs, naturally formed one of the best wool-producing tracts; and in the reign of Edward III., Chichester was made one of the "staples" to which the wool trade was confined by statute. Sussex Proper and the Lewes valley were now among the most thickly populated regions of England.

The Weald, too, was beginning to have its turn. English iron was getting to be in request for the cannon, armour, and arms required in the French wars; and nowhere was iron more easily procured, side by side with the fuel for smelting it, than in the Sussex Weald. From the days of the Edwards to the early part of the eighteenth century, the woods of the Weald were cut down in quantities for the iron works. During this time, several small towns began to spring up in the old forest region, of which the chief are Midhurst, Petworth, Billinghurst, Horsham, Cuckfield, and East Grinstead. Many of the deserted smelting-places may still be seen, with their invariable accompaniment of a pond or dam. The wood supply began to fail as early as Elizabeth's reign, but iron was still smelted in 1760. From that time onward, the competition of Sheffield and Birmingham-where iron was prepared by the "new method" with coal-blew out the Sussex furnaces, and the Weald relapsed once more into a wild heather-clad and wood-covered region, now thickly interspersed with parks and country seats, of which Petworth, Cowdrey, and Ashburnham are the best known.

Modern times, of course, have brought their changes. With the northward revolution caused by steam and coal, Sussex, like the rest of southern England, has fallen back to a purely agricultural life. The sea has blocked up the harbours of Rye, Winchelsea, Seaford, and Lewes. Man's hand has drained the marshes of the Rother, of Pevensey, and of Selsea Bill; and railways have broken down the isolation of Sussex from the remainder of the country. Still, as of

old, the natural configuration continues to produce its necessary effects. Even now there are no towns of any size in the Weald : few, save Lewes, Arundel, and Chichester, anywhere but on the coast. The Downs are given up to sheep-farming: the Weald to game and pleasure-grounds: the shore to holiday-making. The proximity to London is now the chief cause of Sussex prosperity. In the old coaching days, Brighton was a foregone conclusion. Sixty miles by road from town, it was the nearest accessible spot by the seaside. As soon as people began to think of annual holidays, Brighton must necessarily attract them. Hence George IV. and the Pavilion. The railroad has done more. It has made Brighton into a suburb, and raised its population to over 100,000. At the same time, the South Coast line has begotten watering-places at Worthing, Bognor, and Littlehampton. In the other direction, it has created Eastbourne. Those who do not love chalk (as the Georges did) choose rather the more broken and wooded country round Hastings and St. Leonards, where the Weald sandstone runs down to the sea. The difference between the rounded Downs and saucer-shaped combes of the chalk, and the deep glens traversing the soft friable strata of the Wealden, is well seen in passing from Beachy Head to Ecclesbourne and Fairlight. Shoreham is kept half alive by the Brighton coal trade: Newhaven struggles on as a port for Dieppe. But as a whole, the county is now one vast seaside resort from end to end, so that to-day the flat coasts at Selsea, Pevensey, and Rye are alone left out in the cold. The iron trade and the wool trade have long since gone north to the coal districts. Brighton and Hastings sum up in themselves all that is vital in the Sussex of 1831.

GRANT ALLEN.

71

RECURRENT IDEAS IN HEINE.

THE

HE circle of original ideas is really very limited. It must frequently have happened to every one who essays literature in any serious way, to find to his chagrin, just after the excogitation of a passage or even a sentence that looked particularly fine, that some "old master" had given tongue to the very same thought in the most effective manner. There, on the dim page of that old book, your "original idea" stares at you, as if with a consciousness of its own power of conviction. The sinking of the heart and sense of blank depression, as if it were quite impossible henceforth to feel the earlier exulting thrill of self-satisfaction over anything of one's own, is an experience for which one need not be envied. But the literary spirit is generally buoyant, and the natural reflection, which is well calculated to restore confidence, soon comes to the rescue: "Well, after all, what is originality? and who is original?" The most creative minds have commonly been the most appropriative, as well as the boldest in self-repetition. Not to speak of Shakespeare, think of such writers as Sterne, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich, among English authors; and Schiller and Jean Paul among German. When reduced to its barest proportions, their stock of really great ideas is not extensive; their peculiarity and claim to distinctive position results rather from their wise and economical application of them. In literature, as in other things, reserve is a valuable capital. "Pity the man who tries to say everything," may be set down as its prevailing axiom.

Of all recent writers, it might appear as though Heine was the least of a borrower or self-repeater. His mind seems so fertile, so spontaneous. And yet he repeats a few favourite ideas with a deal of iteration. One of these is the thought of the likeness between the sea and his soul. In prose and verse alike he follows up the similitude. He dwells upon it, he recurs to it, resets it as a jeweller a fine stone, looks at it at this side and that side, in shadow and in full light.

My heart, like to the ocean,

Hath storm and ebb and flow;

And many a lovely pearl

Lurks in its depths below.'

Then, in No. 7 of "Die Nordsee," we have at the opening these

two stanzas :

The sea hath its pearls,

And the heaven hath its stars ;
But my heart, O my heart!
My heart hath its love.

Great is the sea and the heaven,
But greater still is my heart,
And lovely as pearls and starlets
Glances and shines my love."

And as exhibiting forcibly the hold which this idea of likeness between his soul and the sea had taken upon him, we find him at least twice reinforcing his thought by quoting the following from W. Müller :

Eine schöne Welt is da versunken,
Ihre Trümmer bleiben unten stehn,
Lassen sich als goldne Himmelsfunken
Oft im Spiegel meiner Träume schn.

And in the prose note to Ramsgate in the Nachlass we have, as we have many similar lines elsewhere,

O, dass ich wär' das wilde Meer,

Und du der Felsen drüber her.

Even in his lighter moods and in his younger days Heine seems to have been absorbed in this idea of the sea as a mirror and interpreter of the soul, with which a poet must make actual acquaintance before he could realise the best that was in him. This is the point of view from which we are compelled to read this rather laughable anecdote, which, however, has its own bearing on the point with which we are now concerned. We read in Devrient's Mendelssohn that on one

1 Mein Herz, gleicht ganz dem Meere,
Hat Sturm und Ebb' und Fluth;

Und manche schöne Perle

In seiner Tiefe ruht.

2 Das Meer hat seine Perlen,

Der Himmel seine Sterne,

Aber mein Herz, mein Herz,

Mein Herz hat seine Liebe.

Gross ist das Meer und der Himmel,

Doch grösser ist mein Herz,
Und schöner als Perlen und Sterne,

Leuchtet und strahlt meine Liebe.

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