338 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
But that’s all a feeling of long ago, it may be 
answered; it has gone out now, and we have come 
back to Nature—the dear old beautiful mother! 
Have we indeed? Lawns have not gone out; on 
the contrary, it appears to me that the idea of 
the lawn, like the idea of clothes, has entered into 
our souls and manifests itself more and more in all 
our surroundings, our dwellings, our persons, our 
habits. Sir Almroth Wright cried out a little while 
ago against our habit of scrubbing our bodies every 
day and rubbing them dry with rough towels to 
polish and make them shine like our glass, china, 
and plated table-ware. When Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne came to the Old Home from an outlandish 
United States of America where this idea of the 
lawn had not yet penetrated so deeply, he spent 
some time at a great country-house where he 
stayed in running about the lawns and park in 
search of a nettle, or weed, or wilding of some kind 
to rest his eyes on. The novel smoothness and 
artificiality of everything made him mad. And 
if Sir Walter Raleigh himself were to return to us 
in all his glory and splendour, and if some one, 
opening the History of the World, should read that 
passage about lawns to him, I think he would cry 
out: “Oh, but you have now gone too far in that 
direction! Your rooms, your tables, all the 
thousand appointments of your establishment, 
your own appearance, your hard - scraped skins, 
your conversation suffocate me. Let me out— 
let me go back to the place I came from!” 
