Concerning Aldworth in Tennyson's poetry (see page 12), there is the exquisite stanza to General Hamley:
“You came, and looked, and loved the view
Long known and loved by me,
Green Sussex fading into blue
With one gray glimpse of sea.”
“Green Sussex fading into blue”—it is the motto for every Down summit, South or North.
With reference to Shelley and Sussex, my attention has been drawn to an interesting account of Field Place by Mr. Hale White, the author of the Mark Rutherford novels, in an old Macmillan's Magazine. Says Mr. White, "Denne Park [at Horsham] might easily have suggested—more easily perhaps than any part of the country near Field Place—the well-known semi-chorus in the Prometheus which begins
‘The path through which that lovely twain
Have passed, by cedar, pine, and yew,
And each dark tree that ever grew
Is curtained out from heaven's wide blue.’
The Prometheus, however, was written when Horsham was well-nigh forgotten"—by its author.
Owing to a curious lapse of memory, I omitted to say that Sompting, near Worthing, should be famous as the home of Edward John Trelawny, author of The Adventures of a Younger Son, and the friend of Shelley and Byron. In his Sompting garden, in his old age, Trelawny grew figs, equal, he said, to those of his dear Italy, and lived again his vigorous, picturesque, notable life. Sussex thus owns not only the poet of “Adonais,” but the friend who rescued his heart from the flames that consumed his body on the shores of the Gulf, and bearing it to Rome placed over its resting place in the Protestant cemetery the words from the Tempest (his own happy choice):—
“Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
