English countryside

“ The English countryside to-day, still a thing of beauty, with its thatched cottages and old high-timbered roofs and glory of village churches, presents a picture similar to those in which races of dulled intelligence blink and creep within cities of magnificent architecture once raised by their ancestors, the secrets of whose construction they have neither energy nor intelligence to regain. ”

“ The English countryside is not for work; it is for show. It is as green as a park and as immaculate as paradise. I sauntered along a grassy pathway in Surrey during a tepid shower, among the stems of broom with its yellowish blossom and russet heather which stippled the light ferns ”

“ Yet, although all these contrasts are included in the English scene, it is not of solitude or grandeur that we think when we speak of the English countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule of a gentler, more humanized natural beauty, in which the village church and the ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese stringing out across it. ”

“ There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers ”

“ From Kenilworth to Coventry the rural scenery is as various and beautiful as visions of a dream, and the undulating landscape by hill and dale, field and forest, river, marge, cottage, hall, church and castle, grouping themselves in shifting pictures of beauty and grandeur, where lofty elms and sycamores rise and bend their willowy arms to the passing breeze, indelibly impresses the beholder with a splendid kaleidoscopic view of English hospitality and agricultural cultivation. ”

“ And when he looked beyond that low green hill, where there were one or two hares hopping about on their ungainly high haunches, and past that great stretch of receding country in which strips of red-and-white villages peeped here and there from the woods, behold! a horizon as of the sea, faint and blue and far, rising and ever rising in various hues and tones, until it was lost in a quivering mist of heat; and he could only guess that there, too, under the glowing sky, some other fair expanse of our beautiful English landscape lay basking in the sunlight and sweet air of the early summer. ”

“ Still flat, however, unenclosed, without hedgerows, clumps of trees, straying cattle, and the numerous rural peculiarities which give life and variety and interest to an English landscape, almost a single glance suffices to take in all they exhibit of the picturesque, and to satisfy the merely superficial tourist. ”

“ The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied Nature intently, and discovered an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms which, in other countries, she lavishes in wild solitudes, are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.
Nothing can be more imposing than the magnificence of English park scenery. ”

“ Taking our own village as a centre, and describing a circle, with a radius of fifty miles, I greatly question if all England could supply the same field of natural beauty. Our landscapes have much the effect of English park scenery, too, aided by the isolated and graceful woods that belong to every farm, and the negligent accidents of clearing, of which the celebrated art of landscape gardening is merely an imitation. ”

“ The English country-house, with its lawns, its gardens, and its groves, which adds such a singular charm to our landscape, had not its counterpart on the other side of the border. Elderly men could still recall the day when the approach to the laird's dwelling led past the stable and the cow-house, when the dunghill was heaped up close to the hall-door, and when, instead of lawns and beds of flowers, all around grew a plentiful crop of nettles, docks, and hemlocks. ”

“ Rural Scenery in Southern England.
Another marked difference between this country and most parts of ours is the extraordinary finish of the landscape, due to scantiness of forests, absence of undergrowth, thoroughness of tillage, and especially the luxuriance and smoothness of the turf. The quiet beauty of rural England has a perpetual charm. ”

“ Nothing, he says, is now so much wanted to complete the grandeur of the British nation, as noble and magnificent gardens, statues, and water-works; long extended shady walks, and groves, and the adjacent country laid open to view, and not bounded by high walls. The pleasant fields, and paddocks, in all the beautiful attire of nature, would then appear to be a part of it, and look as if the adjacent country were all a garden. Walls take away the rural aspect of any seat; wood, water, and such like, being the noble and magnificent decorations of a country villa. ”

“ The whole group, church, vicarage, and a small hamlet of vine covered and embowered stone cottages, lay in the lap of a gently rising sweep of hills, and all around were spread landscapes of the finished and serene character peculiar to England—rich fields framed in flowering hedges, clumps of forest trees, glimpses of distant parks, country seats, and village spires, and on the horizon a line of mist-clad hills, scarce ever more distinct than the banks of low-lying clouds retiring after a thunder storm in America. ”

“ Still more peculiar is the rural scenery of England, in the various and beautiful landscape it affords—in the undulating surface—the greenness of the enclosures—the hamlets and country churches—and the farm houses and cottages dispersed over the face of the country, instead of being congregated into villages, as in France and Italy. ”

“ The solidity of the structures that compose the towns speaks the industry of ages. Nothing is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, valleys, the sea itself, feel the hand of a master. The long habitation of a powerful and ingenious race has turned every rood of land to its best use, has found all the capabilities, the arable soil, the quarriable rock, the highways, the byways, the fords, the navigable waters; and the new arts of intercourse meet you everywhere; so that England is a huge phalanstery, where all that man wants is provided within the precinct. ”

“ The landscape may remain in part rural, though thickly sprinkled with exotic marks. Sport and agriculture may be active. Ingenuous novelists and essayists in London or the suburbs may write of these regions as representing normal English rural life and society. ”

“ Perhaps one of the most beautiful features that help to make up a truly English rural landscape is the hedgerows, following the windings of our lanes, and mazy bypaths skirting our meadows. England is eminently a land of enclosures. Still all this has been the result of progressing time. If our pinder be now an obsolete officership it is because the lines of appropriation have become more clearly marked. ”

“ In England you see twenty good country houses for every one you pass in France—excepting only the district of the Loire; and outdoor life as we know it, on the road and on the river, doesn't seem to exist over here. Somehow I was never so much struck with this contrast before, though I know this country almost as well as I know my hat. Think of the English roads and lanes, of the pretty girls and decent men one meets on horseback or in smart dogcarts, the dowagers in victorias, the crowds of cyclists, the occasional fine motor-car, knickerbockered men walking for the pleasure of exercise! ”

“ The English country is always beautiful in its individual way, but it is especially so on one of these showery days, when every leaf and flower looks fresher than ever with the rain-drops glistening on it. Now and then, they slowed down while passing through a busy town, where pretty ladies and children in little two-wheeled carts drove about doing the morning marketing. Most of the way, however, lay through country roads bordered by green-hedged fields in which the ever-present sheep grazed; and here and there were high brick walls over which the stately, vine-covered homes were just visible. ”

“ The railways do no more than run their fine lines through the rural landscape, making sunny banks for the flowers and shrubs most loved by the English people. Though places which have a name in history are undoubtedly visited by a larger number of strangers than formerly, I am inclined to think there are many nooks and corners of rural England which are more secluded from the world now than when the world's travellers had to journey by the common road. ”

“ The very atmosphere that many of us abuse for its moisture and lack of clarity is no small factor in wrapping this favoured isle in that mantle of velvet, which the graces of English rural life have perfected into a land without equal in mellow finished beauty. ”

“ We sweep at speed past the village green, dogs barking, pigs squealing, geese hissing, children shouting, men huzzaing, women smiling. Through the winding pleasant lanes we go, with their lovely hedgerows on either side, the spire in the distance, the mansion in the park, the glorious old trees, the noble woods, the delicious lakes, the sparkling streams, altogether a landscape of sweetness and beauty which no country but merry England can set before the traveller’s eye. ”

“ Ten minutes suffice to bear the wanderer to such seeming solitude of hill and dale, and glen and wood—will scatter around him such a profusion of ever-varying yet ever beautiful scenery, that it is difficult to believe that all those artificial luxuries and pleasures necessary to the trifler and the fashionest, would we seek them, are close at hand.
Every season has its own charm in England. Even winter, in its stern, rude aspect, its brawling voice of winds and storms, has, in the deep, still haunts of nature, its own peculiar beauty. ”

“ The rural landscape is so formed and trimmed and cultivated that sometimes it achieves the look of a lovely little garden, just as the English landscape sometimes has the look of a great park. Here, much more than in England, every available inch of land is put to use. ”

“ The downs, bare to the skyline, looked lonely enough to satisfy an anchorite. It is refreshing now and again in this crowded England to come upon such silent yet friendly solitudes, for there is nothing frowning or austere about them; hardly does the sunshine cast a shadow upon their spacious slopes of greenery. The charm of English scenery generally lies in its rich detail and finish, the result of the tireless toil of centuries; but the downs afford us broad effects, and broadness of outlook begets broadness of thinking. ”

“ Roads so straight that they might have been cut with a knife, breaking away at the villages round which they make rectilinear patterns, like the petals of meagre flowers. The English country road is less rational and less sensible, but much more shady and companionable. ”

“ There, in that great sloven continent, in high Alleghany pastures, in the sea-wide, sky-skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother, long since driven away from the trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of England. And, in England, I am quite too sensible of this. Every one is on his good behavior, and must be dressed for dinner at six. ”

“ What distinguishes English landscape is a singular luxuriance, an almost unctuous wealth of vegetation. Drive through the country on a bright day on the top of a coach, and look around you; in all directions as far as the eye can reach an endless green carpet is spread over gentle valleys and undulating hills; cereals, vegetables, clover, hops, and glorious meadows with high rich grasses stretch forth; here and there stand a group of mighty oaks flinging their shadows wide, and around are pastures hemmed in by hedges, where splendid cattle lie chewing the cud. ”

“ Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. ”

“ Rural England with its moss-grown farmhouses, its gray steeples, its white cottages clustering under their shadow, its tiny fields, its green hedgerows, garrisoned by the mighty elms, charmed Mary Anderson beyond expression, contrasting so strongly with the vast prairies, the primeval forests, the mighty rivers of her own giant land. ”

“ The summer countryside, as viewed from an aeroplane, is to my mind the finest scene in the world—an unexampled scene, of which poets will sing in the coming days of universal flight. The varying browns and greens of the field-pattern merge into one another delicately; the woods, splashes of bottle-green, relieve the patchwork of hedge from too ordered a scheme; rivers and roads criss-cross in riotous manner over the vast tapestry; pleasant villages and farm buildings snuggle in the valleys or straggle on the slopes. ”

“ Or you may go from Frome, that queer busy little town with its narrow medieval streets straggling up and down hill.
All the country round here is full of interest to the lover of nature or antiquity. It is a country of mild airs, where in the sheltered valleys the flowers bloom amazingly early. Yet the average tourist seldom wanders off the beaten track to enjoy this pleasing stretch of rural England. ”