PEPACTON 



Distances are not so great in that country; the 

 population occupies less space. Again, the land 

 has been longer occupied and is more thoroughly 

 subdued; it is easier to get about the fields; life 

 has flowed in the same channels for centuries. The 

 English landscape is like a park, and is so thor- 

 oughly rural and mellow and bosky that the temp- 

 tation to walk amid its scenes is ever present to 

 one. In comparison, nature here is rude, raw, and 

 forbidding ; has not that maternal and beneficent 

 look, is less mindful of man, runs to briers and 

 weeds or to naked sterility. 



Then as a people the English are a private, 

 domestic, homely folk: they dislike publicity, dis- 

 like the highway, dislike noise, and love to feel 

 the grass under their feet. They have a genius for 

 lanes and footpaths ; one might almost say they 

 invented them. The charm of them is in their 

 books ; their rural poetry is modeled upon them. 

 How much of Wordsworth's poetry is the poetry of 

 pedestrianism ! A footpath is sacred in England; 

 the king himself cannot close one; the courts recog- 

 nize them as something quite as important and 

 inviolable as the highway. 



A footpath is of slow growth, and it is a wild, 

 shy thing that is easily scared away. The plow 

 must respect it, and the fence or hedge make way 

 for it. It requires a settled state of things, un- 

 changing habits among the people, and long tenure 

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