1857.] Chronicles of a Oay Farm. 541 



panoramic horizon of three miles on this round globe of ours, even 

 in a district like mine, where not a hill was to be viewed. 



To be sure there is one rather formidable consideration — the hedge- 

 pheasant-shooting — " heating the out-sides " — that pleasant October 

 skirmishing that precedes the coming up of the heavy artillery at 

 Christmas; but is it not rather dearly retained, when land is being 

 cut up for railroads all around us, at two or three hundred pounds 

 the acre and scarcely a vestige or margin left to inclose for the 

 " more, more" cry of an increasing population ? 



It is, at the least, a consolation to think that these huge banks 

 have no prescriptive right; that when Dr Johnson told us '-God 

 made the country," he did not mean to deny that man made the 

 hedge-rows, or the conclusion that what he had raised up, he might 

 pull down ; especially when it is discovered, as each may prove for 

 himself, that the Thorn grows much better, on the level. 



No ! let the Park and the Pleasaunce have their varied and pictur- 

 esque alteration of bush, and tree and green -sward — of broken 

 masses, and winding glades, and labyrinthine glens ; and let the 

 forest have its leafy screen, its deep, and devious mysteries of light 

 and shade ; but let the field of the husbandman have that beauty of 

 its own — the charm that nature delights to throw over every thing in 

 proper turn and place. The waving and extensive corn-field, the 

 deep rich verdure of the green crop, the dark and mellow surface of 

 the turned-up soil, owe little of beauty to the net-work of inter- 

 secting barriers that arrest at once the plow and the prospect, and 

 carry a running nest, of robbers, like earth-works of the enemy^ 

 throuaih the fair fields of human skill and labor, and sacrifice at 

 once the food of man and the profit of the grower. 



It is the eye of Prejudice, not of taste, that sees beauty absent 

 from utility. Even in the flattest districts, even upon the " Clay 

 Farm " itself, there is an undulating outline, a morsel of the varied 

 profile of our mother earth which never revealed itself to the eye 

 until those impediments were abolished, which — like Ignorance — 

 make us mistake for a dull, straight line, that which is only a part of 

 the great Circle. 



