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ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST 



/^NE cannot well overpraise the rural and pas- 

 ^-^ toral beauty of England — the beauty of her 

 fields, parks, downs, holms. In England you shall 

 see at its full that of which you catch only glimpses 

 in this country, the broad, beaming, hospitable 

 beauty of a perfectly cultivated landscape. Indeed, 

 to see England is to take one's fill of the orderly, 

 the permanent, the well-kept in the works of man, 

 and of the continent, the beneficent, the uniform, 

 in the works of nature. It is to see the most per- 

 fect bit of garden lawn extended till it covers an 

 empire; it is to see the history of two thousand 

 years written in grass and verdure, and in the lines 

 of the landscape; a continent concentrated into a 

 state, the deserts and waste places left out, every 

 rood of it swarming with life; the pith and marrow 

 of wide tracts compacted into narrow fields and 

 recruited and forwarded by the most vigilant hus- 

 bandry. Those fields look stall-fed, those cattle 

 beam contentment, those rivers have never left 

 their banks; those mountains are the paradise of 

 shepherds; those open forest glades, half sylvan, 

 half pastoral, clean, stately, full of long vistas and 



