Contrasts Between English Scenery and Our Own

I HAVE never been so struck with the sublimity of great cities as in August eventides in the depths of dog-days. At such an hour, when in London, I used to go to Trafalgar Square. Instead of the usual paltry plots of grass, that square has a broad floor of stone, which immensely enhances its impressiveness.¹ Only a few weary feet broke the stillness of the place. The golden clouds of dust choked the vistas of the streets. Silently out of their grimy mouths the fountains glided. I heard all round the desolate roar of the city. The granite column seemed borne upward, and to swim in the air, and Nelson from its summit looked far away to Egypt and the Nile.

Art is stronger than nature in the old countries. Nowhere in England do you ever get well out of London ; the town inflames the island to its extremities. London is strong as disease is strong. Many a time, swinging about the streets in the “gondola of London,” the hansom cab, I have wondered that so great a place should be so low, should have so little height. The inequalities on the surface of an orange, we are told, vastly exaggerate the hills and valleys of the globe. London is scarcely higher than if the surface of the earth upon which it lies had been scratched with a file. Yet so potent has it been to change the entire face of that part of the world which it dominates!

Nature has been chased out of England into the sea. In Europe, man is scarcely conscious of the presence of nature. Here, nature is scarcely conscious of the presence of man. Perhaps, indeed, on our Atlantic border, she is just waking to a sense that her rest is broken by the foot of the intruder. But in England nature has been quite subjugated. The fence and the furrow are everywhere. You find yourself by a lonely tarn at the bottom of a sweet-breathing ravine, and you say, " Surely here is something primeval ; " but you have only to look up to where the sharp back of the mountain cuts the sky, to see a stone fence riding it with a giddy tenacity, and holding on for dear life. We miss the feelings with which newer and wilder scenes inspire us. English scenery is always pleasing, perhaps the most agreeable for any common condition of mind that can be found. Nowhere is there such a pretty country to have picnics in. What wind so careless as that which fans the cheeks of August tourists, whose table is spread half-way up some hill-side in Devon ? In the morning, when the youth of the day supplements the age of nature, then we see the English landscape in its best. The air is sweet and the sod greener than elsewhere, and the foldings of the hills and hollows are lovely and surprising. But the beauty is for the eye ; it fails to touch the heart. This seemed to be true even of the scenery in Wales. It was very impressive. The Welsh mountains were very old; the wind of the heather wandered gravely from the sweet, sad fields of the most distant past; the verdure of the margin of that shining estuary that sets up to Dollgelly, through the greenest green, is enriched by the yellow of the buttercups.

Nevertheless there was an incompleteness that I could not suppose to be altogether in myself, for the ocean had its moods as sublime or bright as where its evening waves flow round the light-ship at Sandy Hook. The waters came to the cottage thresholds and to the gates of the gardens. Late one afternoon as I sat looking over the blue, bright ocean, there came under my window a proudstepping fellow with a plaid, and a feather in his bonnet, playing upon the bagpipes. A pure and stainless sunset was approaching. The sweet breeze from the heather ran about the streets at will. Far out over the quiet, flickering waters wandered the notes of the bagpipes, flew, and were wafted westward. The children danced about the piper, and their feet moved to the music and to the fastchanging moments of the sunset. But the landlord came out before the door bare-headed and rang the bell, and the bagpiper ceased suddenly and went away with the children, and the sun dropped down behind the wave, and I, with that rude haste with which we extinguish delights we know to be too evanescent, I went to dinner.

For the purposes of comfort the English climate is better than ours. I have. heard this denied, but I am sure that it is so. One has only to remember that the fashionable hour for horseback riding in London is from twelve to two, in the summer months. Nobody can ride at that hour anywhere in this country. The equestrian here has a choice between sunrise, sunset, and moonlight, unless, as used to be common in the South, he rides with an umbrella. But for poetry and the observance of nature, our climate is the better. The English summer never commits itself. It is always lingering April or premature October. If you go out at night to walk in the moonlight or to sit by the sea-shore, you must take an overcoat. Here, about the last of June we have a sweltering week or two in which everybody unlearns the use of overcoats. We then understand that it is summer and that it will stay summer. To be sure, if you are in search of some poor, churlish spot where you may forego nature and the miracle of summer for the sake of keeping cool, yon may find it on the coast of Maine. But if deeper pastimes entice you, and more verdurous hill-sides, if you would sit in some rose-embowered porch, while yet the blue mist lingers in the farthest recesses of the mountain gorge, then it is to the Susquehanna or the Kanawha you must go. There, where the chestnut shade cools the edge of the hot, humming meadow, you may lie, your hands stained with the dark, deep clover. On indolent afternoons your scow will float through those silent scenes, you hearing only the dull lapping of the river at the thirsty keel.

I may here say that one great disadvantage for any person desiring to look at an English landscape is the absence of good fences to sit upon; the ground is usually too damp to permit one to lie at full length. I missed very much the rail fences of my own country. I would come to a pretty prospect, and, my legs sinking under me, I would look about for a place to sit. The inhospitable landscape had not a single suggestion. There were no stones, and a hedge was of course not to be thought of. How different the stake-and-rider fences of this land of ours. The top rail of a good fence is as fine a seat as one can wish. Of course, much depends upon the shape and position of the rail. Sometimes the upper rail is sharp and knotted. But one has only to walk on for a rod or two, before a perfect seat can be found, and this point I have discovered to be the very best from which the scene may be viewed. It really appears as if the honest farmer had builded better than he knew. If there is one place from which to overlook a landscape, to be preferred to another, I have always found that nature, so far from betraying him that loved her, had actually put there the properly shaped rail at his disposal.

The streams of England are unclean. Waters that the poets have made famous smell abominably. Consider the task the poets would have, to immortalize all the running waters of our Atlantic slope. Unsung, unnamed even, with pure noises they hasten to their river-beds. For many miles by the railway which traverses North Wales, the Dee brawls along with a tumult of green waters. From the car window it looked enticing, and I thought I would stay over a day at Llangollen and walk along the banks. At Llangollen is The Hand, over which presides a gentle and unique landlady, who carries a bunch of keys, and greets you with that curious cramp of the knees called a courtesy. (If you would see a courtesy, you must go to England very soon, for the radicals will have put a stop to it in a year or two more.) There was hanging in the coffee-room a picture of Sir William Somebody, the great man of the neighborhood. His left arm he rested upon the withers of a great black hunter, while his wife, buxom and beautiful, leaned upon the other. Some happy dogs were playing about his feet. There were two or three more engravings of the kind well known to frequenters of English inns. Upon a table in the middle of the room were the cold meats, the pies, the tarts, the custards, and the berries. In the corner, a lunch was spread for two collegians who were traveling with their tutor. All this you saw to the music of the old blind harper, who sat just outside the door, by the high clock in the windy hall. Here, too, was the prettiest girl I saw in Wales. She told me she was sixteen, and I believed her. You talk, of strawberries and cream, — a namby-pamby and silly expression, — she was blackberries and cream. She was there with her brother Arthur, a youth two years older than herself, the guide, philosopher, and financier of the party; the pair were the children of a Bristol music teacher. We lunched together, and the girl cut the pie with her own hands. She had been twice to London. When I asked her where she stayed when she came there, she said, “ At Mr. Hawkins’s,” as if that were enough. Was there ever such a delightful answer!

I tell this because it is only fair to Llangollen that I should. Any little nameless stream in the Shenandoah Valley is better than the Dee. But in the tavern near there would have been no landlady with the keys, nor the really good music of the harper, nor the table spread with tarts and berries, nor very likely the pretty girl. The green waters of the Dee, cool and clean enough a few rods off, I found, when I came nearer, washing over noisome, stinking rocks. I followed the slipping banks a mile or so, and then took the macadamized road that runs above the river. I very soon found my way back to the inn, and went with Arthur and his sister to a village entertainment. We sat upon the front bench, and saw a burlesque of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, performed by four metropolitan stars, upon a stage eight feet by twelve.

I have spoken of art as strong and of nature as weak in the Old World. In scenes in which art and nature mingle, England, I suppose, is unsurpassed. The little I saw of rural England was mainly on Sundays, and then I could rarely get far away from London. There are influences which nature appears to borrow from society. The Christian Sunday seems to impart to the pristine beauty of our own landscape an intenser purity. Here, where the virgin altars are set up in glades whose stillness is broken only by the noise of the primeval streams, where the spires shine afar over our summer wildernesses, the face of nature is conscious of the religion of man. There is, on a Sunday afternoon, in the long street which climbs the hill of a New England village, an unattainable severity, an almost bitter silence. On a Sunday morning when the village bells are silent, to me sitting under the trees of an orchard in blossom, there is in the air a strange reproof, a pungent purity, which renders obvious a canker in the midst of the blue sunlight and the bloom. These impressions must of course exist in England, though my occupations in London were such as to give me little leisure to taste the wild silences and asperities of the rural Sunday afternoon. In one of the few suburbs of London yet comparatively free from the ravages of convenience and respectability, there was an old greenwalled garden-plot, to which I was permitted to repair at that hour. I sat alone upon a broken, dirty iron bench (I beg the T—s’ pardon for calling their bench dirty), and under an old pear-tree. It was a long patch of sod and flowers. The brick walls were rent and decayed, and, except where the peach and the vine covered them, were green with moss and black with age. The neighboring gardens I only knew by the tops of the pear and may trees. No sound came from them save the rustle of their greenery, which now and then disturbed the heart of the quiet hour. Of the children who played in them, of the maidens who knelt among their flowers, I knew nothing. The same sunshine and yellow haze filled them all, the same Sabbath silence. From out their narrow plots all looked upward to the same blue sky. I used to think that the gardens never ended, but lay side by side the island through, and that the sea washed them all around.

E. S. Nadal.