Part 4

§ 6

My next walks were in England. For their size, the British Isles probably afford the most varied tramping ground of any country in the world. Within a few hundred miles of radius you get infinite variety: the rolling downs; the quiet weald; hilly Derbyshire; mountainous Wales; Devonshire's lanes; the Westmorland or the Cumberland lakes--these for the seeker of quiet. For the more emprising there is the wild and broken scenery of the northern isles; and the lover of the homeless sea can choose any shore to his liking.

§ 7

There is an impression abroad that in England you must confine your steps to the high-road. That has not been my experience. True, you must not expect everywhere to be allowed to stalk anywhere across country--unless you are following the beagles; but, so numerous are the byways and bridle-paths; so easy has access been made, through centuries of hereditary ownership, from one field or stile or farm to another; so generous, too, are so many landlords, that one can travel for many and many a mile without doing more than cross and recross the road. But true it is also that, in order to do this, you must know something of the locality.

* * * * *

One much-hidden entrance to a most sequestered spot I hope I do no wrong in revealing here.--London stretches out north-west almost to Uxbridge, nearly twenty miles out--that is, habitations line almost every inch of the way. After Uxbridge, the road is hard, dry, and comparatively uninteresting. But, near a cross-road, where is a house on either side, if you look carefully to the right you will dimly discern, beneath the shade of low-bending boughs, and almost hidden by these, a simple, unpretending stile. I recommend you to climb over it, for it is the entrance to a great, quiet, secluded spot, several acres in extent, thickly wooded with superb beeches and firs, so thickly wooded that the sky is invisible and the earth wholly in shade. But for the extreme kemptness of the underbrush (and the fact that you have just stepped out of the London road), you might be in a primæval forest of the West. Nor is this the sum of its beauty. High though it is above the surrounding country, embosomed in this forest is a lovely lake, exquisite in its colouring, reflecting, as it does, the cloud-flecked sky, and, all round its rim, the bending boughs of the beech. Typical of England are this lake and park. They are private property, of course; but the owner gives every wayfarer leave of access. Typical of England: tenacious of rights, yet just, nay, generous, to all.

VII

A Spring Morning in England

§ 8

He who knows not England I will here permit to peep into a page of a diary giving a glimpse of a morning dawdle on the Sussex Downs:

"Royal Oak Inn, "Village of Poynings, "27th March 18--, 11.30 A.M.

"The little maid is laying the other half of this table to supply me with eggs and bacon....

"I got me out of Brighton early, walked through Hassocks and Hurstpierpoint, and strolled on in any direction that invited (for I had the whole lovely day to myself), choosing chiefly byways and sequestered paths approached by stiles.

"The day was superb. The sky, after a rainy night, was a rich deep blue, and across it sailed great white-grey clouds, the shadows of which chased each other--albeit solemnly and with dignity--over field and meadow. The fields, sown with corn already tall, were burnished green--they shone in the sunlight. The meadows were deeper in colour. The slopes of the downs changed their hues every moment; every acre changed, according as it caught the light direct, or through a thin cloud, or was immersed in shade by a big and thick one. The ditches and the little banks by the road, out of which the trim hedgerows sprang, were green with a hundred little plants and weeds--the dock, the nettle, groundsel, stick-a-bobs, ivy of every hue and shape, mullein, the alder well in leaf, and the hawthorn here and there in flower.--

"Breakfast over. The most delicious bacon, the freshest of eggs, milk that might have masqueraded as cream; and all served with the extremity of respectful civility. A fire smouldering in the hearth; a terrier longing to make friends; otherwise they shut the door and leave me to quiet privacy.

"The greenness of the hedges was exquisite. And here and there the primroses in profusion--and the violets--and birds. England teems with life. I heard the thrush--'It is Spring! It is Spring! O the joy! I tell you it is--is--is!' And the blackbirds screaming out of a bush, pretending to be frightened, but only looking for an excuse to shout. The ring-doves, really disturbed and rising with noisy wings. The rooks, lost in real wonderment that anyone should stop and look at them for five minutes, and 'cawing' and 'cahing' in vociferous interrogation. Querulous tits, chirping hedge-sparrows, cheeping linnets and finches--by the hundreds and hundreds."

* * * * *

A mere peep (but a peep photographed on the spot), and giving but a poor glimpse of a scene the exact like of which you will not get elsewhere the wide world over.--And, by the way, shouldst ever find thyself at this self-same village of Poynings, omit not to examine the Early Perpendicular church;--the alms-box is an ancient thurible.

VIII

Autumn Reveries

§ 9

This was in the spring. Autumn in England is equally lovely. In the new world--at least in the northern regions--there is a chill in the fall of the year. The cold north-western winds, cradled amidst palæocrystic ice, and blowing over tundra and prairie, are untempered by Gulf Stream or ocean. Untempered, too, by cloud and moisture, they cut keen, and reveal the leafless landscape in all its bareness. And it may be that they bring with them the thought that for many months to come that landscape will be bare indeed--unless covered with a shroud of snow.

Far different is autumn in England--I write (this time) situate in the basin of the Thames, and for many weeks I have been watching summer slowly give up its glowing glories in order that other glories, not less wonderful in colour, may take their place. For England is never colourless; nay, in England, all through the year, the colours are warm and sweet and comforting. The very trunks and twigs of the trees are warm with browns and greens and purples, the result of the mosses and lichens, minute epiphytic and parasitic vegetation which the humid climate so greatly fosters. Even brick walls, the stepping-stones in brooks, wooden palings--everything constructed by man, Nature soon mellows with a gentle hand; so that, in place of stark and staring edifices where the bare boards or the dull paint form blotches on the scene, you have everywhere a great harmony of colour--violets shading into green; greens gliding into softest yellows; and these again deepening into warm and beautiful orange and gold and red.

A long, long tramp through beechy Buckinghamshire one day revealed at every step beauties that filled the eye--and filled the heart. No pen could do them justice; and, among painters, only the brush of a Corot could attempt their depicture without depriving them of their exquisite, their almost evanescent, softness. A great mist lay over the land; a gentle, noiseless mist that hid from you the horizon and the outer world; that shut you in from the outer world; lured you into that mood of quiet reverence in the presence of quiet, wonder-working Nature; and revealed to you ... I cannot tell all that was revealed. I can only point to this and that beautiful little thing or vision, themselves but emblems of a Beauty and a Mystery invisible.

Again I saw the little ivies in the ditches. Again I saw unnumbered little leaves and stalks and tendrils in the hedges; all, of shape and texture and colour actually and positively divine. The hedges, a tangle of twigs thick with a hundred growths, were mighty marvels that no human clipping and pruning and trimming could diminish. And at every few paces rose out of these hedges, on either hand, old majestic elms, great in girth, tall of stature, interlacing their branches high overhead and making for pygmy me, who walked that winding lane, a wondrous fane in which to worship.--It was not exactly what one saw with one's bodily eye that roused worship in that fane. What was it?...

As morning grew towards noon, and the sun gained power, that gentle mist--so noiseless, like an angel's hand laid soothingly on me and on all that hemmed me in--the mist mysteriously withdrew itself. But only to show fresh loveliness. On either hand were meadows, still lush with grass; or brown and furrowed fields, shot through with the myriad tips of growing corn; and here and there in scattered heaps lay the rich leaves of the oak and the elm and the beech, brilliant in their orange and russet, and here and there lit up, like burnished gold, by glints of sunshine from between the clouds.

For miles, quiet little scenes like this filled the eye and the heart--entrancing, exalting, humbling.

Wherein lay the secret of their appeal? Why is it that field and hedgerow, winding lane and interlacing boughs, strike upon the emotions of man?