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 ! " 



