stupidity, the message might, like Pan's pipe, be blinding sweet, and bring us near that great mysterious heart of Nature into which Jefferies was ever striving, and not at all in vain, to gaze.

Certain forces, some of them transitory, others more permanent, but most of them disagreeable, have compelled men to crowd together in towns, until a rural life for many of us is a condition of existence to be hopelessly longed for but rarely to be realised. It would almost seem that this enforced absence from the natural environment of the open country has produced the love of Nature in its conscious self-analyzing modern form. We are never tired of investigating the impressions excited by scenery. The Greeks had their love for it, too, but it was a simpler sentiment than ours, nor were the Latin poets without it. If you compare Tennyson with Virgil you will at once perceive the different attitude of the modern and the ancient mind towards the phenomena of the sky, the earth, and the sea.

Ever since man first began to dwell in "walled cities," it has been a matter of dispute whether life in the country or in the town were the more enjoyable. But, argue as you will, there is no logic to prove that the crowded streets, smoke, din, squalor, and microbe-laden air of a great city can confer the physical and moral comfort, health and delight that the country gives ungrudgingly. We are enabled to live with comparative impunity in London only by the aid of science. But science cannot make existence there beautiful, nor ennobling, nor picturesque. If custom did not blind us, and we were able to see things in the same light in which they would appear to some shadowy visitant from Mars, Saturn, or Jove, our minds would be almost overwhelmed by the pathos of four millions of people crowded

into a narrow area, whilst beyond the smoke-stained horizon lay the lovely rural districts of England-the loveliest, perhaps, in all the world-silent, dewy, and peaceful. The Jovian or Saturnian critic, if he were a philosopher, would tell the dwellers on his own planet that our social condition, which dams up the population in huge centres and empties the rural districts, could not possibly be a permanent one.

But it is the contemplative and studious man, who, apart from the question of field-sports, loves the country most. We all know how Matthew Arnold was obliged every year to revivify himself by long draughts of it. Accident has made London the great intellectual centre, but the best intellects amongst us certainly find solace in the woods and fields. There are certain moods, and by no means misanthropic ones, that drive men who think into the deepest solitude they can find.

Swept along by the human tide in Fleet Street, who has not longed to be in the wild bosom of Dartmoor, hearing only the wind sighing over the reeds, or the cry of the bittern from the rushy pool, with the horizon broken by the serrated edges of the ragged Druid Tors? Nature will rebel against the straight waistcoat we impose on ourselves and proudly wear. Man is undoubtedly a gregarious animal, but not to the extent of desiring to be a unit amongst four millions of his fellows. The amount of happiness derived from country surroundings, to one of the right temperament, is out of all proportion to the feverish diversions of life in a great town. What an ideal picture at once comes before the mind of that existence which a healthy man of competent means may make for himself in rural England! How steeped he is in unconscious poetry! The poetry is obvious and a constant quantity. If you cannot from sheer familiarity

find it yourself, turn to the works of Washington Irving or to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Our Old Home." There is the village street, the laburnum trees, perhaps, falling in showers of gold amongst the green leaves; above them, the mossy mellow tiled roof and the red gables, then the Norman church tower, where the jackdaws are clamouring and the swallows circling. Beyond are the green fields-green as only English fields know how to be-dotted with cattle browsing in luxurious languor of placid content. In the air is the scent of roses, of moist meadows. Beneath these are dimmer odours that have their existence in the past-the fragrance of dead summers, of forgotten flowers, when the fulness and beauty of English life first dawned on us, and one found oneself a child in an ancient English orchard, perhaps for the first time, and the voice of the cuckoo was borne on the soft breeze from the top of the distant elms.

I know not how it is, but the exquisite haunting beauty of some days amidst the simple, homelike beauty of our scenery is almost akin to pain. When the whole country-side is steeped in sunshine, and gentle airs rustle the trees, a spirit of peace seems to descend on the lovely English landscape that I have felt in no other land. We know not what it is we dread. Perhaps it is that a rougher breeze should blow and alter the picture, moving the distant shadow of cloud, now remote in the southwestern skies, towards our zenith, hiding the genial face of the sun, marring the fragile loveliness of the day. For there exists a beauty in our climate, perceptible only in those districts where the view is extended, found under no other sky. The fickleness of our skies lends them a peculiar charm, and when Nature smiles here her face is Hours we have of such exquisite loveliness very sweet. which a chillier breeze or a sullen bank of cloud may turn

into other hours, beautiful still, but peevish. These days may come at any season, and the hours pass in an absorbing procession of changing delight, for the fields and trees and softly rolling hills smile beneath the tender blue of the soft skies, and shiver faintly under the clouds that move on us from the Gulf Stream into the Channel, from the Channel over the chalk-seamed summits of the Downs, and on into the glad heart of rural England. It is not everyone who feels this spiritual side of our rural life, but all alike come more or less under the subtle influence of natural phenomena in the country, whilst in the towns the vision is limited to the "long, unlovely street," and we see pass us, under the dazzling sunshine, dimmed somewhat by smoke, the procession of omnibuses instead of the procession of the hours. And where is the laburnum, where the smell of the roses, where the garnered fragrance of the mind odorous by association? The roar of the traffic, the rush of the human tide, has broken the message the friendly English land bears to all who love her. Pygmalion fell in love with a statue. But, alas! too long a sojourn amid the artificialities of London life hides the nameless goddess who presides over rural England whom some of us learnt to love when we were young. If we had the mythologizing spirit of the Greeks, by how lovely an Artemis would the rolling, odorous wooded, dew-sprinkled, flowery land we see in our fits of rural nostalgia be represented!

The country must always be the great delight of England. The chief expression of our national life in the past, in architecture and literature, must be sought there. We are justly proud of our beautiful land, but we have little reason to boast of the grandeur of our towns. The expression that the natural life has taken there is entirely utilitarian and materialistic. In the vast

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accumulation of brick houses, most of them mean and depressing to the senses, the deeply spiritual tendencies of the national character are hardly suspected. The imagination seems to have had no part in their construction; æsthetically they are as meaningless as the burrows of the rabbits. But in our association with the country we have displayed, perhaps unwittingly, a taste that is the unconscious proof of our sympathy with the tender beauties of our landscapes. The old homes of the land, the low-roofed thatched cottage, the stately Elizabethan mansion, the gabled rectory of nameless architecture and doubtful age, seem almost as much a part of the landscape, as the trees that cluster round them. Hence is the delighted harmony we see in all our remoter rural districts. No other race in the world has shown this peculiar faculty of unconscious æsthetic sympathy with its environment to so marked a degree as our own. But it must not be forgotten the very aspect of the country is the result of our forefathers' work. The varied beauty in detail, the position of trees, the miles of magnificent hedgerows, the whole friendly aspect of our land is due to the harmonious blending of humanity and nature. Man" tills the soil and lies beneath," but every generation leaves its monument behind it, and behind us are two thousand years of unwritten history. We can read it notwithstanding. It is tenderly written in the soft turf of our gardens, in the waving branches of our oaks and beech-groves, in the fairy-like loveliness of our deep lanes, where the glimmering pathway sinks deeper century after century under the shadow of vegetation as luxuriant as in a tropical forest.

Children that grow up in towns, and are accustomed to see more hansom cabs pass than swallows on the wing, miss an influence of unknown moulding force to the