William Howitt

“ As I have sate in some flowery dale, with the sweetness of May around me, on a week-day, I have thought of all the millions of immortal creatures toiling for their daily life in factories and shops, amid the whirl of machinery and the greedy cravings of mercantile gain, and suddenly this golden interval of time has lain before me in all its brightness,—a time, and a perpetually recurring time, in which the iron grasp of earthly tyranny is loosed, and Peace, Faith, and Freedom, the angels of God, come down and walk once more amongst men! ”

“ I met two gamekeepers, and a thousand hares! In the days when all my soul was tuned to pleasure and vivacity, I hated Houghton and its solitude; yet I loved this garden; as now, with many regrets, I love Houghton;—Houghton, I know not what to call it: a monument of grandeur or ruin! How I wished this evening for Lord Bute! How I could preach to him!—The servants wanted to lay me in the great apartment—what! to make me pass the night as I had done my evening! It were like proposing to Margaret Roper to be a duchess in the court which cut off her father’s head, and imagining it could please her. ”

“ But in Theocritus, as in Homer, they are Arcadian amenities that engross almost all his passion for nature. They are flowery fields, running waters, summer shades, and the hum of bees; all the elements of voluptuous dreaming and indolent entrancement; the most delicious of all idleness, lying abroad with the blue sky above you, and the mossy turf beneath you, and the bubble of running waters, and the whisper of forest branches near, to lull you to repose. Is it not so? When is it that he invites you to out-of-door enjoyment? ”

“ There every turf is covered with a rude beauty to his eyes; there every rock and stone is piled in bold and inimitable shapes of savage grandeur by the spirit of nature for him; and the winds, and rains, and vegetative powers of centuries have been busy tinging them with the hues of his admiration. There, amid the sound of falling waters and the roar of coming tempests, he feels all his faculties called into power and life within him, and brings home, season after season, scenes that cover the walls of our city homes with a wild magnificence. ”

“ Would the country gentleman like to sink into a feudal retainer? The merchant follow his procession of packhorses through narrow roads, and in high peril of bandits? The farmer drop down into the born thrall? The parish priest convert his pleasant parsonage and family into the solitary bachelorship of popery? Would the man most pressed by the cares and heart-griping necessities of this populous and struggling time, be willing to accept the quiet simplicity of those days, with their monotonous solitude, ignorance, servitude, and perpetual danger of arbitrary infliction of death or mutilation? ”

“ Perhaps there is the sound of martial alarm—the clash of sudden onset in the forest glade. The dwellings of the vassals surrounding the lord’s castle are in flames, fired by the band of some hostile noble. Such is the England into which an old forest carries our imagination;—partially peopled with feudal barons and unlettered serfs; without commerce abroad; without union within; brave, yet demi-savage; aspiring, but violent; pious, yet sanguinary in all its penal enactments. When we step out of memory and imagination into the cheerful daylight and conscious present, what an England now! ”

“ When the labourer cuts his ditches, and piles up his banks anew, there is a beauty in the dark, clear, smooth earth, which his spade cleaves so shiningly. As the children of the village hunt over the steep banks for violets or snail-shells, or the early robin’s nest, your eye is made conscious of the beauty of those banks, with their crumbling mould and springing plants. As the drainer cuts his drain in the greensward of the meadows; as the ploughman turns up the broad lea, all is rich and beautiful. ”

“ A garden, after all, is an artificial thing; and though formed from the materials of nature, may be allowed to mould them into something very different from nature. There is a wild beauty of nature, and there is a beauty in nature linked to art: one looks for a very different kind of beauty in fields and mountains, to what one does in a garden. The one delights you by a certain rude freedom and untamed magnificence; the other, by smoothness and elegance—by velvet lawns, bowery arbours, winding paths, fair branching shrubs, fountains, and juxta-position of many rare flowers. ”

“ Nothing is better known than the intelligence and order that distinguish a great portion of the rural population of Scotland. No people are more diligent and persevering in their proper avocations; and yet none are more alive to the delights of literature. Amid wild mountain tracks and vast heaths, where you scarcely see a house as you pass along for miles, and where you could not have passed two generations ago without danger of robbery or the dirk, they have book societies, and send new books to and fro to one another, with an alacrity and punctuality that are most delightful. ”

“ It is the blasted and battered ruin [383] of a forest. A thousand years, ten thousand tempests, lightnings, winds, and wintry violence, have all flung their utmost force on these trees, and there they stand, trunk after trunk, scathed, hollow, grey, gnarled; stretching out their bare, sturdy arms, or their mingled foliage and ruin—a life in death. All is grey and old. The ground is grey beneath, the trees are grey with clinging lichens, the very heather and fern that spring beneath them have a character of the past. ”

“ And are all our experiences of the English climate those of gloom? Are there no glorious sunsets, no summer evenings, balmy as our dreams of heaven, no long sunny days of summer, no dewy mornings, whose freshness brings with it ideas of earth in its youth, and the glades of Paradise trod by the fair feet of Eve? Have we no sweet memories of youth and friendship, in which such hours, such days, in which fields of harvest, hay-harvest and corn-harvest, with all their rejoicing rustic companies, lie in the sunshine? ”

“ Walk up, as I have said, from Salisbury to Stonehenge. Sit down amid that solemn circle, on one of its fallen stones:—contemplate the gigantic erection, reflect on its antiquity, and what England has passed through and become while those stones have stood there. Walk forth over that beautiful and immense plain,—see the green circles, and lines, and mounds, which ancient superstition or heroism have everywhere traced upon it, and which nature has beautified with a carpet of turf as fine and soft as velvet. Join those simple shepherds, and talk with them. ”

“ That most ancient and most original of all ladders, a bough with some pegs driven through it, reared against a tree for the keeper to reach the nests of hawks or magpies, or to fetch down a brood of young jackdaws for a pie, quite as savoury a dish as one made with young rooks or pigeons; or for him to sit aloft amongst the foliage, and watch for the approach of deer, or fawn, when he is commissioned to shoot one. The profound and basking silence all around you, as you sit on some dry ferny mound, and look far and wide through the glimmering heat, or the cool shadow. ”

“ Nature is not easily deprived of these; and in summer, when the plover and the lark build there, and send along those brown dales their merry whistle, or loud cries, and in autumn when the whole waste bursts into a blaze of crimson beauty with the blossoming heather, it is still, stripped as it is, a charming place for a contemplative ride or stroll. Here twenty years ago, Captain Cartwright might be seen following his hawks, and here still you meet a few sportsmen, with their fine dogs leaping amongst the long heather and red fern. ”

“ If you could root out the New Forest, you might possibly get as well supplied with timber from some other quarter, but where would you find the landscape painter such a treasury of sylvan and picturesque beauty, such delicious nooks and hollows, and fair streams winding under forest boughs? Where such groupings and endless variety of foliage and forest stems? Where such lights and shades and colours as nature there diffuses over her own regions in the everlasting circulation of the seasons ”

“ How wise that such places as Richmond, Greenwich, and such old parks in the neighbourhood of the Metropolis, are kept up and kept open, that our citizens may occasionally get out of the smoke and noise of the great Babel, and breathe all their freshness, and feel all their influence! Who does not often, in the midst of brick-and-mortar regions, summon up before his imagination this old park or forest scenery? ”

“ Powerfully as the spirit of the ancients was attracted by the sublimity of mortal passion and mortal fortunes; by the strife of families and nations, by the strife of emotions in the soul, and the out-bursting of a blasting or a beneficent sublimity in the deeds of men; and magnificent as are the monuments of tragic or heroic grandeur they have erected on this foundation,—so powerfully is the spirit of the moderns drawn, excited, and inflamed by the sublimity of nature, and beautiful and endearing are the strains it has elicited. ”

“ Their banks are overhung with deep grass, and many a fair flower droops over them; the foliage of the trees that shroud their many windings, is most delicate; and above them grey rocks lift their heads, or greenest hills swell away to the blue sky. And as evening falls over them what a softness clothes those verdant mountains! what a depth of shadow fills those hollows! what a voice of waters rises on the hushed landscape! But even here, in the vale of Trent, it is beautiful. There are a thousand charms gathered about one of these little streams that are hastening towards our fair river. ”

“ There are anglers in such delicious places, by such clear, rapid, winding waters, with such overhanging rocks and foliage, that one longs instantaneously to be an angler. We have all the spirit of Izaak Walton’s book, in two square inches of wood-engraving: his descriptions of natural beauty, his deep feeling of country enjoyment, and his single and thankful contentment in his art. There are men and boys sleeping on sunny grass, or beneath the shade of summer trees! ”

“ But Sunday morning is past: the afternoon is rolling away; but it shall not roll away without its dower of happiness shed on every down, and into every beautiful vale of this fair kingdom. Closed are the doors of the church, but opened are those of thousands and tens of thousands of dwellings to receive friends and kindred. And around the pleasant tea-table, happy groups are gathering in each other’s houses, freed from the clinging, pressing, enslaving cares of the six days; and sweetly, and full of renewing strength to the heart, does the evening there roll away. ”

“ The words which guaranteed the eternity of our spirits, chased a dimness from the sky which had hung there from the days of Adam: they rent down the curtains of death and oblivion, and let fall upon earth such a tide of sunshine as never warmed it till then. The atmosphere of heaven gushed down to earth. From that hour a new and inextinguishable interest was given us in nature. ”

“ See where the downs stretch their solitary heads amid the clear and spiritual hues of the sky. And as you go on, the chime of flocks, and the discovery of sweet hamlets, and the voices of their children at play, and the tinkle of the plough-team bells, shall make you feel that the rural peace and delight of Old England are as strong in her heart as ever. ”

“ What a sunny peace, what a calm yet glad repose lies on its fair hills; over all its solemn woods! How its flowery dales, and deep, secluded valleys reflect the holy tranquillity of heaven! It is morning; and the sun comes up the sky as if he knew it was a day of universal pause in the workings of the world; he shines over the glittering dews, and green leaves, and ten thousand blossoms; and the birds fill the blue fresh air with a rapture of music. The earth looks new and beautiful as on the day of its creation ”

“ Minds even of the noblest class had not arrived at that full comprehension of nature which sees sublimity in the gloom and terror of tempests, independent of their effects; the grandeur of beauty in desolation itself; in splintered mountains, wild wildernesses, and the awfulness of solitude. They had not become tremblingly alive to all the lesser traces and shades of beauty in the face of nature, for they had not reached either of the extremities of perception—the vast on one hand—minute perfection on the other. ”

“ The elegances, the arts, and refinements of the city, are carried out and blended, from end to end of the island, so beautifully with the peaceful simplicity of the country, that nothing excites more the admiration of strangers than those rural paradises, the halls, castles, abbeys, lodges, and cottages, in which our nobility and gentry spend more or less of every year. Let Prince Pückler Muskau, Washington Irving, Willis, Count Pecchio, Rice, and others, tell you how beautiful, in their eyes, appeared the parks, lawns, fields, and the whole country of England, cultivated like a garden. ”

“ If we are naturally proud of making a portion of a mighty and a glorious kingdom, where is the kingdom like England? It is a land of which the most ambitious or magnanimous spirit may well say with a high emotion—“That is my country!” Over what an extent of the earth it stretches its territories; over what swarming and diversified millions it extends its sceptre! On every side of the globe, lie its outspread regions; under every aspect of heaven, walk its free or tributary people. ”