Crown land

“ Beautiful green slopes, rich woods, gay looking towns, a picturesque country-house here and there, and a group of cottages crowning a bold cliff or nested at its foot, were seen all along the line of coast, and the very first sight of that country filled the mind with ideas of home comfort, and sweet domestic peace, and the rich prosperity of an industrious, law-fearing people, and an equable, but firm government, more strongly than the aspect of any other land I had ever seen. ”

“ The land looks like the royal carpet of the throne of France, with its thick-sprinkled fleur-de-lis, below which, as beneath that splendid tapestry, lurk many a quagmire and pitfall for the unwary who would strive to grasp at the 'imperial flowers. ”

“ The earliest writers vied one with another in relating legends regarding its sources, the dwellers on its banks, and the countries through which it passed.
This is easy to understand. Those pioneers of civilization who settled in its northern valley, and who, by the help of its beneficent waters, converted the desert into an area unrivalled for its agricultural prosperity—thus amassing the wealth which enabled them to form a mighty Empire—were aware that this river had its beginning in a land far away to the south, barred to them by an intervening wilderness of sand and rock. ”

“ These are the famed that the North has named the "Riders of the Plains,"
And theirs is the might and the meaning and the strength of the bulldog's jaw,
While they keep the peace of the people and the honour of British law.
These are the men of action, who need not the world's renown,
For their valour is known to England's throne as a gem in the British crown;
These are the men who face the front, whose courage the world may scan,
The men who are feared by the felon, but are loved by the honest man ”

“ Think of the last coast you leave—Cornwall, for instance—with its bold rocks, its glorious cliffs, its lofty castles that have been strongholds, at least, of courage and of faith; fit selvage for a land which sometime felt the nobility and the sacrifice of life. ”

“ As to their extent, there is public land enough to found an empire; stretching across the immense continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean, from the Gulf of Mexico to the northwestern lakes, the quantity, according to official surveys and estimates, amounting to the prodigious sum of one billion and eighty millions of acres! ”

“ So it is to the soldier of the ‘Lost Cause’ that all honor and praise must be given for the present prosperity of the land. And it becomes us as heirs of his sacrifice and of the fruits of his toil, to lend our every effort to the full garnering of the harvest.
“As the giant West has sprung up from the sap of the East, so must the South rise up by strength drawn from the soil of the North. ”

“ Eleven thousand acres of fertile hill and dale, sinking and swelling gently, so as to attract all the benignity of sun or breeze—not more densely wooded than is common on our own western shores, and watered to an ornamental perfection—truly on any civilized land, such is a goodly heritage. ”

“ Territory offering nothing more and nothing less than fertile soil and genial climate was little considered in the midst of those visions of gold: since then the whole world has been plunged in blood for the sake of such wide spaces of land. ”

“ One might own a thousand acres of rich soil covered with as fine oak, walnut, and poplar as the world could produce and might still be a poor man, though the timber in these latter days would bring a fortune. Cleared land was wealth at the time of which I write, and in building their houses the settlers used woods from which nowadays furniture is made for royal palaces. Every man on Blue might have said with Louis XIV, "I am housed like a king." ”

“ Colonnades and piles of architecture stretch away in the vast perspective. At the summit of a lofty flight of steps stand conspicuous the throne and the sceptre. Suspended in the air, at the highest point of human reach, is that glittering symbol of royalty, the crown. ”

“ When I behold this rich and varied land, with its castles, churches, convents, stately palaces, and fertile fields, these extensive woods, and that noble river, I know not, my daughter, whether most to admire the bounty of God or the ingratitude of man. ”

“ It was not nobility that gave land, but the possession of land that gave nobility. All the enormous privileges of the nobility of medieval Europe flowed from their position as the owners of the soil. The simple principle of the ownership of the soil produced, on the one side, the lord, on the other, the vassal—the one hav349ing all rights, the other none. The right of the lord to the soil acknowledged and maintained, those who lived upon it could do so only upon his terms. ”

“ Then it is the very land itself that he gives, the land of so many manses, ‘with all the appurtenances, fields, pastures, woods, marshes.’ It is no mere right over the land that he gives, but the very soil itself. ”

“ He does not see before him a beautiful blessed land bright with fadeless flowers, nor a great multitude of people in shining garments and garlands who will come down to the shore to welcome him with sounds of shouting and singing and playing on instruments of divers forms, and who will lead him in triumph to the gardens of everlasting delight and to mansions of crystal with emerald and amethyst colonnades and opal domes and turrets and pinnacles. ”

“ Temples stood upon the hill-tops; cities were studded over the land, their lofty dagobas and palaces reflected on the glassy surface of the lakes, from which their millions of inhabitants derived their food, their wealth and their very life. ”

“ The mounds, with which the forefathers of our Indians dotted our land, remain to us as curious and instructive monuments of savage life in prehistoric times. No castles or grand cathedrals have come down to us, in America, to illustrate the story of the early ages of our own race; but we have in the mounds mute, impressive relics of a still earlier life upon this soil, by our primitive predecessors. It should be considered our duty, as well as our pleasure, to preserve them intact for the enlightenment of coming generations of our people. ”

“ The terrible and fatal field of Poictiers, the field of the Black Prince, had stricken down at a single stroke the might of a great, a glorious nation; her king a captive in a foreign dungeon; one third of the best and bravest nobles dead on the field of honor, or languishing in English fetters; a weak and nerveless regent on her throne ”

“ All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light. The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities . . . she declared.
“It's a glorious country; a land to be big in,” she crooned. ”

“ The forest land has become a heath, but we have little cause for rejoicing at our victory over Nature. The inhabitants of other countries see many things to gladden their hearts. Houses, trees, hedges, and corn-fields, reminding them of the thrift of their ancestors, spur them on to increased activity, and inspire them with a desire to fashion the land into a monument of their existence. ”

“ The sun was sunk far in the western heavens, tinting with gold the surface of both lakes, for the rulership of which the nations fought, and outlining the mountains, crests and ridges, sharp and clear against a sky of amazing blue. ”

“ The success of the King invariably meant gifts of land to the victorious nobles fighting under his banner; who, in turn, rewarded their knights and squires by smaller gifts of land, or land privileges, thus building up the feudal system. The holding of lands implied service due to the giver, and as a consequence many of the nobility vied with their king in power and prestige. ”

“ Cities, villages, castles with their luxurious surroundings, country houses of every style of architecture with handsome gardens, boundless grassy meadows with herds of cattle, lakes which had been made by peat-cutters, countless islands upon which long reeds were cultivated as thatch for the houses, serving also as homes for great flocks of waterfowl,—such was the panorama which met the eyes of the Prince. ”

“ It has never been disputed that my kingdom—that is, the forest territory—includes all the land within the limits of the forest, and the forest is held by our greatest fairy lawyers, beyond all doubt, to mean all the land upon and within which trees grow which are not separated from the bulk of the forest by any fence. ”

“ Finally, they made for themselves settlements, built cities, and erected castles, relinquishing more or less their roving and unsettled life, and making for themselves a home in the land which they had gained with their swords. ”

“ And to the West, the nation’s pleasure ground, with its extensive plains, carpeted with luxuriant grasses, with valleys unsurpassed in fertility, many of them overlooked and sheltered by pine-covered mountains in which lies hidden a wealth of nations, can come millions more of our people and live in peace. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We boast of the increase and extent of our physical strength, the sound of populous cities, breaking the silence and solitude of our Western territories,—plantations conquered from the forest, and gardens springing up in the wilderness. Yet the true glory of a nation consists not in the extent of its territory, the pomp of its forests, the majesty of its rivers, the height of its mountains and the beauty of its sky ”

“ Here in the West you are near the centre of a vast empire, you feel its mighty pulse, the throb and heartbeat of its immense and growing strength. Some of you have seen this great civilization actually grow on the vacant prairies, in the unoccupied wilderness, on the sandy shores of the inland seas. ”

“ Once in history two fat kings met in a field of France, between silken tents and on strips of tapestry laid upon the grass, so that this scene of glitter and shimmer was called for every age of schoolboys "The Field of the Cloth of Gold." ”

“ Pleasant to the eye is the sight of the colonists’ sheltered farms, surrounded by waving cornfields, and backed by noble mountains, ascending in the distance, one above another, assuming every hue it is possible to imagine, and finally blending their purple heights with clouds all radiant with gold, or shaping themselves into canopies of sombre colouring, and veiling the glories of heaven from the upturned gaze of man. ”

“ The Trans-Missouri Prairie, the Corn, the Middle West, the Breast-Bone of the Continent, the Cotton, the Oil, are some of these empires. The river is itself an empire with treasures of pearls and a people of its own—the shantyboaters. ”

“ The system was a ladder—the little men held of the great men, who in turn held of some great noble, who held directly of the King. And even some little men came to hold directly of the Crown—or as it was called, in capite. ”

“ The sources of the noblest rivers which spread fertility over continents, and bear richly laden fleets to the sea, are to be sought in wild and barren mountain tracts, incorrectly laid down in maps, and rarely explored by travellers. To such a tract the history of our country during the Thirteenth Century may not unaptly be compared. Sterile and obscure as is that portion of our annals, it is there that we must seek for the origin of our freedom, our prosperity, and our glory. ”

“ Taking it all in all, though, when I ride across the valley or reach a high peak and look down where thousands of cattle graze undisturbed by the in-roads of civilization, I feel it is a royal heritage. ”

“ Then beyond the hill’s crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimneypots, wharves and small bridges, willow trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on gray wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs. ”

“ The remains of roads, cities, and fortifications show that they did much to develop and improve the country, while those of their villas and castles prove that many of the settlers possessed wealth and taste for the ornamental arts. ”

“ The border is necessarily curved, from the evenness of the impression of the river on a soft soil; and the edge is fringed with shrubs. A great part of them are formed into meadows, which are more profitable, and, at the same time, more agreeable to the eye than any other mode of culture. The magnificent elms, for which this country is remarkable, stand singly in the fields; while orchards and groves serve to break the uniformity. ”

“ It was my intention to point out that the land system of the United States is directly descended from the practice of William the Conqueror, whose policy of binding the most active and influential men of the Kingdom to his throne by gifts of land was imitated by his successors down to the period when English subjects began to colonize America. ”