ABSTRACT
in the twenty-first chapter of The Return of the Native we read that, after Clym Yeobright's return to the heath where he had grown up, 'he gazed upon the wide prospect. . . and was glad'. Egdon Heath suited him. He would (we may assume) have had no difficulty in understanding Henry David Thoreau's famous exclamation about Concord, Massachusetts: 'I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world.'
