English landscape

“ 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. ”

“ Imagine a rolling, wooded, English landscape, under softest of blue skies, dotted at three-mile intervals with fat little, quiet little villages, or aggressive little manufacturing towns that the trees and the folds of the hills mercifully prevented from betraying their presence. ”

“ It is a capital example of that density of feature which is the great characteristic of English scenery. There are no waste details; everything in the landscape is something particular—has a history, has played a part, has a value to the imagination. It is a region of hills and blue undulations, and, though none of the hills are high, all of them are interesting,—interesting as such things are interesting in an old, small country, by a kind of exquisite modulation, something suggesting that outline and colouring have been retouched and refined by the hand of time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I know not that the habitual forms of English landscape, those which are most rural and most unchanged, have ever since found a truer poet, one who so brings before the mind the scene and the spirit of it uncolored by any intervention of his own thought or sentiment. ”

“ It is a typically English scene, full of that hallowed, historic interest, and of that subdued, unobtrusive beauty, where the lineaments of nature are everywhere more or less concealed by the labours of man, which constitute so chief a source of pleasure in the landscapes of England. ”

“ Landscape has been from the first the central tradition of English art. Life spent amidst pictorial scenery like ours that is striking in itself and rendered more impressive and animated by the rapid atmospheric changes, the shifting lights and shadows, the life and movement in the sky, and the vivid intense colouring of our moist climate, has given our tastes a decided bent this way, and fashioned our Arts of Poetry, Painting, and Gardening. Out-of-door life [Pg 71] among such scenery puts our senses on the alert, and the impressions of natural phenomena supply our device with all its images. ”

“ The conquering and lasting potency of it resides not alone in loveliness of expression but in loveliness of character. Having first greatly blessed the British islands with the natural advantages of position, climate, soil, and products, nature has wrought their development and adornment as a necessary consequence of the spirit of their inhabitants. The picturesque variety and pastoral repose of the English landscape spring, in a considerable measure, from the imaginative taste and the affectionate gentleness of the English people. ”

“ But if the English garden cannot boast of singular points of interest, if its art reflects foreign countries, it bears the mark of the English taste for landscape, which gives it distinction and is suggestive of very charming effects. ”

“ On this account, because the roads for the carriages went over hills, and because the method of visiting even a near neighbour would permit you to go over hills, the England of quite a little time ago was familiar with the half-dozen great landscapes of England. You may see it in that most individual, that most peculiar, and, I think, that most glorious school of painters, the English landscape painter, Constable with his thick colours, Turner with his wonderment, and even the portrait painters in their backgrounds depend upon the view of the plains from a height. ”

“ English scenery, on the tracks, is the tamest of the tame, hardly a noticeable hill breaking the ordinary gentle undulation of the landscape, but still the verdure and finish of the fields and parks make it worth while to throw out a glance now and then, as you rush by. ”

“ It is off the noble crags of Holyhead that the voyager first observes with what a deft skill the hand of art has here moulded nature's luxuriance into forms of seeming chance-born beauty; and from that hour, wherever in rural England the footsteps of the pilgrim may roam, he will behold nothing but gentle rustic adornment, that has grown with the grass and the roses—greener grass and redder roses than ever we see in our western world! In the English nature a love of the beautiful is spontaneous, and the operation of it is as fluent as the blowing of the summer wind. ”

“ If my eyes remember well, the French landscapes are more like our own, in spring tone, at least; but the English are a revelation to us strangers of what green really is, and what grass and trees can be. ”

“ The plain itself has a richer and more cheerful and rural appearance than any I have seen since I left England. The beauty of its meadows and gardens, the frequency of its country-houses, the indescribable variety of the landscape, enchant the eye. ”

“ Nothing can be more elegant and beautiful, as it appears lightly spanning the river, and suffering the eye to penetrate its net-like fabric, so as scarcely to offer an obstruction to the landscape which shines through it. The scenery at this point is exceedingly interesting, and presents the works of nature, and art, and human genius, in striking combination. ”

“ The sudden change from the soft, low, and comparatively tame, to the bold, stern, and high, serves admirably to show how much the character of a landscape may depend on the formation which composes it. ”

“ He who stands on a hill and surveys a wide landscape, easily recognizes the leading features of the country—the river and the homestead, the church and the corn-field—they need no guide, they tell their own tale. In like manner the great landmarks of the literature of the past are well defined and unmistakable to him who has eyes to see and a mind to comprehend. ”

“ You see, therefore, that my delight and taste cannot well be riveted by a work of art, unless it imitates such objects of nature as are well known to me, so that I am able to test the imitation by my own experience of the originals. Landscape, with all that lives and moves therein—flowers and fruit-trees. ”

“ The sweet English scenery, which no one ever painted so well, and the sea, which he loved like a true Englishman, show themselves through the belt of wood, calculated to keep the profane vulgar at a distance. It seemed a providential habitat for a man so very open to even petty irritations. ”

“ As one wanders about England here and there, one comes to understand that if its landscape is unique in its various charm and soft beauty, it is also inhuman in this, that most often it is without the figure of man, the fields are always empty or nearly always, the hills are uniformly barren of cities or towns or villages, it is a landscape without the gesture of human toil and life, without meaning that is, and we can bear it so. ”

“ The English soil!—'tis hallowed ground:
Its restless children roam
The world, but they have never found
So dear a land as home;
Their passion for its hills and downs
Nor space nor time can spoil;
A golden mist of memory crowns
The good old English soil.
The English race!—its pluck and pith,
Its power to stay and win,—
Wise Alfred's, dauntless Harold's kith,
And Coeur de Lion's kin! ”

“ As for the privileged classes, they go from London to their estates, put on plain clothes, and fish or bunt, or the ladies go into the woods to pick wild-flowers. The real love of nature, which is so honorable a part of the English character, breaks out in great and small. ”

“ For some occult reason in which the two factors of race and psychology are intimately blended, landscape art in its best expression is and ever has been confined within the narrow geographical limits of Northern and Western Europe. ”

“ But even more characteristically English than the attachment to horses and dogs and land, and the witness in literature to the same, is the love of the sea. The Englishman is an amphibious animal. A considerable part of the description of nature in the literature of this period is marine painting. ”

“ It is a noble landscape, where every feature is bold, and throughout which light and shade alternate in broad, effective masses, showing that you are gazing on a scene of great extent, and taking in miles of country with your eye. ”

“ Formerly landscapes had been used as backgrounds, oftentimes attractive and beautiful, while the real purpose of the pictures centred in the human figures. The distinctive feature of nineteenth-century landscape is the representation of Nature alone, and the variety of method used and the differing aims of the artists cover the entire gamut between absolute Realism and the most pronounced Impressionism. ”

“ Now this particular instance of a pregnant brevity reminds me that in descriptions of landscape the very obligations of the short story are an advantage to its art. Nature, in Fiction, requires to be seen, not in endless detail, as a botanical or geographical study, but, as in Classic Landscape Composition, a noble glimpse of it, over a man’s shoulder, under a man’s arm. ”

“ Nature of England, and the rude, shaggy, barbarous Nature which offers us its racier companionship in America. No less a change has been wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit what the English call their forests. ”

“ To know nature at first hand, and to reflect human thought or feeling in nature's pure presence,—this was his chief object. His field, therefore, is a small one, but in that field he is the greatest master that England has thus far produced. ”

“ He who would judge adequately of a landscape must regard it not only with the painter’s eye, but with the poet’s. The feelings which the sight of any scene in Nature conveys to the mind—more especially of any scene on which history or fiction has left its trace—must depend upon our sympathy with those associations which make up what may be called the spiritual character of the spot. ”

“ 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 every where; so that England is a huge phalanstery, where all that man wants is provided within the precinct. ”

“ This quality has almost entirely disappeared from contemporary verse among cultivated races; one must go to the peasants of remote parts of the Continent to discover even a trace of its presence. It has a real, but short-lived charm, like the freshness which shines on meadow and garden in the brief dawn which hastens on to day. ”

“ All Englishmen join in reviling that lovable and admirable English thing, the English climate. Everybody blasphemously rails against those mutable and magnificent skies which are a perpetual transformation scene. ”

“ When, therefore, we see this imitated in any measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted kind of pleasure, than what we receive from the nicer and more accurate productions of art. On this account our English gardens are not so entertaining to the fancy as those in France and Italy, where we see a larger extent of ground covered over with an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial wildness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country. ”

“ From where I sit peacefully, bringing my history uptodate and jotting these notes in my diary, I can see, faintly with the naked eye or quite distinctly through a telescope, that emerald gem set in a silver sea. The great cities are covered; the barren moors, the lovely lakes, the gentle streams, the forbidding crags are all mantled in one grassy sward. England is gone, and with it the world. ”

“ Let us even go further, and say that no one has rendered certain aspects of English scenery with such soft, clear perfection of touch as he has—that no one has produced anything approaching it for years. ”

“ He saw around him an immense landscape—plains and rivers and hills spreading for hundreds of leagues beneath a blue sky—a nature bathed in a pellucid atmosphere that lent all a beauty beyond earth. Scattered over the plain were many cities, and by merely willing it he found himself walking within any of them—strange, beautiful cities of bright colour, whose banner-hung streets were thronged with processions of people clad in a medieval costume. ”

“ New music down from fields of cloud and sun,
Or the sad lapwing's over fields of green
Crying beneath the copse, near but unseen.
Then I remembered. All wide England spread
Before me, hill and wood and meadow and stream
And ancient roads and homes of men long dead,
And all the beauty a familiar dream.
On the green hills a cloud of silver grey
Gave gentle light stranger than light of day. ”