ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST. 



ONE cannot well overpraise the rural and pastoral 

 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 coun- 

 try, the broad, beaming, hospitable beauty of a per- 

 fectly 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 perfect bit of garden-lawn ex- 

 tended till it covers an empire ; it is to see the history 

 of two thousand years written in grass and verdure, 

 and in the Hues of the landscape ; a continent con- 

 centrated 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 vigi- 

 lant husbandry. Those fields look stall-fed, those cat- 

 tle 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 cathe- 

 dral-like aisles, where else can one find beauty like 



