Elihu Burritt

“ In these beautiful features, England surpasses all other countries in the world. These make the peculiar charm of her rural scenery to a traveller from abroad. These are the salient lineaments of Motherland’s face which the memories of myriads she has sent to people countries beyond the sea cling to with such fondness; memories that are transmitted from generation to generation; which no political revolutions nor severances affect; which are handed down in the unwritten legends of family life in the New World, as well as in the warp and woof of American literature and history. ”

“ And all the while, the furnaces roar and glow by night and day, and the great steam hammers thunder, and hammers from an ounce in weight to a ton, and every kind of machinery invented by man, are ringing, clicking, and whizzing as if tasked to intercept all this raw material of the mines and impress upon it all the labour and skill which human hands could give to it. ”

“ The hill-top of the Wrekin overlooking this buried Roman city, and elevated 1,300 feet above the sea, is not only a grand point of observation but of reflection, commanding landscapes of wonderful extent and variety and scenes of historical interest dotting, like diversely-tinted fields, the checkered expanse of eighteen centuries. As the eye passes from one feature to another of the great valley, so the mind passes from scene to scene and fact to fact in the histories of the land that have been enacted in that space. ”

“ Samuel Johnson!—a nation that could build fifty cathedrals in ten years would need a century for building such another man as he was to the world of mind and thought. Here, as you stand by his monument in the market-place, with several of the most touching incidents of his life carved in the stone, you feel yourself standing in the disk of a living and immortal reputation—more than a reputation; more than the illuminated shadow of a great memory. It is a sensible and commanding presence; it is a great individuality that absorbs and covers the whole city. ”

“ The living Present that overshadows him is a great and solemn vitality, whose breath and pulse he feels all alive and stirring upon him. And, what is more, and the special thought that touches him, this breath and pulse have the glow and throb of twenty successive human generations. Through all these long ages they have breathed and beat without a break. Here is this grand old church, built and baptised by that fair-haired, blue-eyed, good-hearted Saxon woman. ”

“ There is a general, even, diffusive goodwill to men that spreads itself out like a wide and sunny smile of good-nature. It is light, but not heat; still light is good for the eye, and the genial light of such inactive benevolence, if it does not actually produce the working charities, is grateful to society, and is far more useful even than ornamental. Then there is what may be called eccentric philanthropy, or a benevolence with a comet's orbit, narrow in the centre, but running to an extreme length and a sharp point in some special direction. ”

“ The next day I passed through a good sample section of England’s wealth and industry. Mansions and parks of the gentry, hill, valley, wheat-fields, meadows of the most vivid green; crops luxuriant in most picturesque alternations; in a word, the whole a vista of the richest agricultural scenery. And yet out of the brightest and broadest fields of wheat, barley and oats, towered up the colliery chimneys in every direction, like good-natured and swarthy giants smoking their pipes complacently and “with comfortable breasts” in view of the goodly scene. ”

“ From the Castle Hill of Dudley Nature has the under-hand, and from the crown of her head to the sole of her foot she is scourged with cat-o'-nine-tails of red-hot wire, and marred and scarred and fretted, and smoked half to death day and night, year and year, even on Sundays. Almost every square inch of her form is reddened, blackened, and distorted by the terrible tractoration of a hot blister. ”

“ By night and day, year in year out, century in and century out, runs that stream with unabated flow. Narrow canals filled with water as black as the long sharp boats it floats, crossing each other here and there in the thick of the furnaces, twist out into the green lands in different directions, laden with coal for distant cities and villages. The railways, crossing the canals and their creeping locomotion, dash off with vast loads to London and other great centres of consumption. Tons unnumbered of iron for distant manufactures go from the district in the same way. ”

“ For, besides these luxuriant crops then in full verdure, there are pasture lands and twice-mown meadows showing, between long files of hedge-row trees, as vividly green as any our landscape presents on the summer edge of May. Then there are other qualities that not only compensate the season for all its early frosts have abstracted, but give it more than the virgin month of summer can offer to the senses. The bloom and breath of flowers in May delight the eye and that sense which needs not sight for its enjoyment. ”

“ If such a building could be erected in a century, to the finest and last line of the sculptor's chisel, even an amateur of architecture might walk up and down under its lofty arches and roofage with but a forced sentiment of veneration. But the rime of age and history, which six hundred years have breathed upon its gray forests of columns, pillars, and carved work, produces upon a thoughtful mind an impression which no artistic architecture, however grand, can create without such associations. ”

“ There are thousands of less sharp and spangling lustre to the eyes of the multitude, which shine with tenfold more brilliancy from their eternity-face. These are they that halo the homes of good men, whose great hearts drank in the life of God’s love in perpetual streams, and distilled it like a luminous dew around them; men whose thoughts were not mere scintillations of genius, but living labors of beneficence, bearing the proof as well as promise of that immortality guaranteed to the deeds of earth’s saints. ”

“ Some go down pretty evenly, like the Brades Works. Right under those terrible furnaces the moles are at work night and day rooting out walks through deep coal-seams. Under the foundations of tall-steepled churches all a-light with the evening lamps and resounding with the voices of devotion, the pickmen are at work grubbing lanes under towns, hills, railways, and canals. Everybody seems to feel that they live, labour, eat, and sleep on a very uncertain and unsteady footing. But the decline is very gentle. A house seldom if ever sinks so deep that its occupants have to escape through the roof. ”

“ Here, too, is the doublet in which Lord Brooke was killed at Lichfield, in 1643. Three great Gothic windows are set out in deep recesses, as if to embrace and welcome the first and last light of the day, and to soften and diffuse it, a tinted smile, over the spacious apartment and its embellishments. But if the outside world smiles inward through these great windows so graciously, their outward vision opens upon a scene of exquisite beauty, which few can be found to equal. Here a vista deploys before the view full of all the attractions that nature and art can give to a landscape. ”

“ This was the first week of harvest, and the first of August. How wonderfully the seasons are localised and subdivided. How diversified is the economy of light and heat! That field of wheat, thick, tall and ripe for the sickle, was green and apparently growing through all the months of last winter. What a phenomenon it would have been, on the first of February last, to a New England farmer, suddenly transported from his snow-buried hills to the view of this landscape the same day! Not a spire of grass or grain was alive when he left his own homestead. ”

“ As the language he clothed with such power and might shall spread itself over the earth, and be spoken, too, by races born to another tongue, his life-rays will permeate the minds of countless myriads, and the more widely they diverge and the farther they reach, the brighter and warmer will be the glow and the flow of that disk of light that embosoms and illumines his birth-place in England.
What is true of Stratford-upon-Avon is equally true of Abbotsford, of the birth-place of Milton, Burns, Bunyan, Baxter, and other great minds, which have shone each like a sun or star in its sphere. ”

“ Between Coventry and Warwick, in a green, quiet, rural district, stands Kenilworth. And Kenilworth is a castle, which absorbs into itself all of space, population, and history that belongs to the name. Not only novel readers but practical history readers at a distance, never think of anything but the castle when the name is mentioned or suggested. Still, there is a goodly, tidy, and comfortable village near the ruins worth visiting without the lion which attracts so many thousands a year to pay their homage and their admiration—to the genius of Sir Walter Scott. ”