20 FRESH FIELDS 



bees on the heads as at home, some of them white- 

 faced and stingless. Thistles rare in this country. 

 Weeds of all kinds rare except the nettle. The 

 place to see the Scotch thistle is not in Scotland or 

 England, but in America." 



Ill 



England is like the margin of a spring-run, 

 near its source, — always green, always cool, always 

 moist, comparatively free from frost in winter and 

 from drought in summer. The spring-run to which 

 it owes this character is the Gulf Stream, which 

 brings out of the pit of the southern ocean what the 

 fountain brings out of the bowels of the earth — a 

 uniform temperature, low but constant; a fog in 

 winter, a cloud in summer. The spirit of gentle, 

 fertilizing summer rain perhaps never took such 

 tangible and topographical shape before. Cloud- 

 evolved, cloud-enveloped, cloud-protected, it fills 

 the eye of the American traveler with a vision of 

 greenness such as he has never before dreamed of; 

 a greenness born of perpetual May, tender, untar- 

 nished, ever renewed, and as uniform and all- per- 

 vading as the rain-drops that fall, covering moun- 

 tain, cliff, and vale alike. The softened, rounded, 

 flowing outlines given to our landscape by a deep 

 fall of snow are given to the English by this depth 

 of vegetable mould and this all-prevailing verdure 

 which it supports. Indeed, it is caught upon the 

 shelves and projections of the rocks as if it fell 

 from the clouds, — a kind of green snow, — and it 



