Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“ At once from copse and heath arose Roundels and fugues and lyric prose, From shingles grey their nocturnes start, The bracken bush cries, `Art is Art', And every tuft of broom is rife With highly beastly views of life. I have met in meadows here some of the most terrible and beautiful people of Fleet Street. ”

“ Go into the country for your health; go into the country for your children; go into the country because the police are after you; go into the country because you like painting in water-colours, or because you like keeping chickens, or because you like spearing otters, or because you want beauty or contentment or the continual presence of cows. ”

“ Then you'd have people--people--people.' Three times he said the sacred word of the republic. This article, you will perceive, is also written in a kitchen garden, and a witchery of onions is wafted with it.
While standing in this kitchen garden I perceived what many of my readers must have perceived long ago, that of all things on earth the one perfectly beautiful thing is a kitchen garden. It has a hundred kinds of beauty richly blent into a solemn harmony. It has the beauty of an embroidery, for all the colours are quiet and yet varied infinitely. ”

“ The people are not going `back to the land' but the cultivated classes are.
But there is something about these intellectual people in flannel shirts who come out and live in the country, where they play tennis and read Thoreau which gives me a haunting notion that they do not really belong to the country; they dwell rather than live in it. ”