NATURE IN ENGLAND. 9 



look like these Scotch highlands. Cut away their 

 forests, rub down all inequalities in their surfaces, 

 pulverizing their loose bowlders, turf them over, 

 leaving the rock to show through here and there; 

 then, with a few large black patches to represent the 

 heather, and the softening and ameliorating effect of 

 a mild, humid climate, they might in time come to 

 bear some resemblance to these shepherd mountains. 

 Then over all the landscape is that new look that 

 mellow, legendary, half-human expression which na- 

 ture wears in these ancestral lands, an expression 

 familiar in pictures and in literature, but which a 

 native of our side of the Atlantic has never before 

 seen in gross, material objects and open-air spaces, 

 the added charm of the sentiment of time and 

 human history, the ripening and ameliorating influ- 

 ence of long ages of close and loving occupation of 

 the soil, naturally, a deep, fertile soil under a mild, 

 very humid climate. 



There is an unexpected, an unexplained lure and 

 attraction in the landscape, a pensive, reminiscent 

 feeling in the air itself. Nature has grown mellow 

 under these humid skies, as in our fiercer climate she 

 grows harsh and severe. One sees at once why this 

 fragrant Old World has so dominated the affections 

 and the imagination of our artists and poets ; it is sat- 

 urated with human qualities ; it is unctuous with the 

 ripeness of ages, the very marrow-fat of time. 



