194 GARDEN-CRAFT. 



are "poesy all ramm'd with life "shall grate the 

 nerves of the Hamlets of to-day, who live too much 

 in the sun, whom man delights not, nor woman 

 neither ! 



What a land to live in ! when its best landscape 

 painters men like Gainsborough or Constable 

 are so carried away by the influence of agriculture 

 upon landscape, so lost to the superiority of wild 

 solitude, that they will plainly tell you that they like 

 the fields the farmers work in, and the work they do 

 in them ; preferring Nature that was modified by 

 man, painting a well-cultivated country with villages 

 and mills and church-steeples seen over hedges and 

 between trees ! * 



What a land to live in ! when even Nature's wild 

 children of field and forest hug their chains preserve 

 their old ways and habits up to the very frontier-line 

 of civilisation. For here is Jefferies (who ought to 

 know) writing thus : " Modern progress, except where 

 it has exterminated them, has scarcely touched the 

 habits of bird or animal ; so almost up to the very 

 houses of the metropolis the nightingale yearly returns 

 to her old haunts. If we go a few hours' journey 

 only, and then step just beyond the highway, where 

 the steam ploughing-engine has left the mark of its 

 wide wheels on the dust, and glance into the hedge- 

 row, the copse, or stream, there are Nature's children 

 as unrestrained in their wild, free life as they were 



in the veritable backwoods of primitive England." 



. 



* See P. G. Hamerton's " Sylvan Year," p. 112, 



