20 MEADOW SCENERY. 



Such walks and scenes as I have described con- 

 duce to a healthy state both of body and mind, 

 and enable us 



To meet life's peaceful evening with a smile. 



Our beautiful meadow scenery may, perhaps, 

 be called exclusively English. The verdure of the 

 grass, the variety of flowers, the song of the lark 

 on high, and of the nightingale in the tangled 

 hedge, the thrush heard in the distance on the 

 top of some spreading oak, and the swallow taking 

 its persevering and elegant flight, now aloft and 

 then skimming over the surface of the meadow, 

 are to be heard and seen in this country only, at 

 least collectively. Many of the trees, also, which 

 are met with on the banks of some of our streams 

 are full of beauty. It has been remarked that the 

 weeping willow, 



which dips 

 Its pendant boughs, stooping as if to drink, 



was the only one of its species that can be called 

 beautiful ; surely, however, those who have seen 

 our common willow,* unpollarded and uiilopped, 

 as nature intended it to be, must confess that it is 

 not only a beautiful and graceful tree, but also a 

 picturesque one. Even when pollarded, it adds 



* See some beautiful specimens of the willow, in the Poet 

 Young's garden at Welwyn, which have been suffered to grow 

 uninjured and unpruned. 



