Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet by Charles Kingsley

At length, the wished-for day had arrived; and, with my cousin, I was whirling along, full of hope and desire, towards the cathedral town of D * * * * -- through a flat fen country, which though I had often heard it described as ugly, struck my imagination much.

The vast height and width of the sky-arch, as seen from those flats as from an ocean -- the grey haze shrouding the horizon of our narrow land-view, and closing us in, till we seemed to be floating through infinite space, on a little platform of earth; the rich poplar-fringed farms, with their herds of dappled oxen -- the luxuriant crops of oats and beans -- the tender green of the tall-rape, a plant till then unknown to me -- the long, straight, silver dykes, with their gaudy carpets of strange floating water-plants, and their black banks, studded with the remains of buried forests -- the innumerable draining-mills, with their creaking sails and groaning wheels -- the endless rows of pollard willows, through which the breeze moaned and rung, as through the strings of some vast AEolian harp; the little island knolls in that vast sea of fen, each with its long village street, and delicately taper spire; all this seemed to me to contain an element of new and peculiar beauty.