One cannot well overpraise the rural and pastoral beauty of England--the
beauty of her fields, parks, downs, holms. In England you shall see at
its full that of which you catch only glimpses in this country, the
broad, beaming, hospitable beauty of a perfectly cultivated landscape.
Indeed, to see England is to take one's fill of the orderly, the
permanent, the well-kept in the works of man, and of the continent, the
beneficent, the uniform, in the works of nature. It is to see the most
perfect bit of garden lawn extended till it covers an empire; it is to
see the history of two thousand years written in grass and verdure, and
in the lines of the landscape; a continent concentrated into a state,
the deserts and waste places left out, every rood of it swarming with
life; the pith and marrow of wide tracts compacted into narrow fields
and recruited and forwarded by the most vigilant husbandry. Those fields
look stall-fed, those cattle beam contentment, those rivers have never
left their banks; those mountains are the paradise of shepherds; those
open forest glades, half sylvan, half pastoral, clean, stately, full of
long vistas and cathedral-like aisles,--where else can one find beauty
like that? The wild and the savage flee away. The rocks pull the green
turf over them like coverlids; the hills are plump with vegetable mould,
and when they bend this way or that, their sides are wrinkled and
dimpled like the forms of fatted sheep. And fatted they are; not merely
by the care of man, but by the elements themselves; the sky rains
fertility upon them; there is no wear and tear as with our alternately
flooded, parched, and frozen hilltops; the soil accumulates, the mould
deepens; the matted turf binds it and yearly adds to it.
All this is not simply because man is or has been so potent in the
landscape (this is but half the truth), but because the very mood and
humor of Nature herself is domestic and human. She seems to have grown
up with man and taken on his look and ways. Her spirit is that of the
full, placid stream that you may lead through your garden or conduct by
your doorstep without other danger than a wet sill or a soaked
flower-plot, at rare intervals. It is the opulent nature of the southern
seas, brought by the Gulf Stream, and reproduced and perpetuated here
under these cool northern skies, the fangs and the poison taken out;
full, but no longer feverish; lusty, but no longer lewd.
Yet there is a certain beauty of nature to be had in much fuller measure
in our own country than in England,--the beauty of the wild, the
aboriginal,--the beauty of primitive forests,--the beauty of
lichen-covered rocks and ledges. The lichen is one of the lowest and
humblest forms of vegetable growth, but think how much it adds to the
beauty of all our wild scenery, giving to our mountain walls and drift
bowlders the softest and most pleasing tints. The rocky escarpments of
New York and New England hills are frescoed by Time himself, painted as
with the brush of the eternal elements. But the lichen is much less
conspicuous in England, and plays no such part in her natural scenery.
The climate is too damp. The rocks in Wales and Northumberland and in
Scotland are dark and cold and unattractive. The trees in the woods do
not wear the mottled suit of soft gray ours do. The bark of the British
beech is smooth and close-fitting, and often tinged with a green mould.
The Scotch pine is clad as in a ragged suit of leather. Nature uses
mosses instead of lichens. The old walls and housetops are covered with
moss--a higher form of vegetation than lichens. Its decay soon
accumulates a little soil or vegetable mould, which presently supports
flowering plants.
Neither are there any rocks in England worth mentioning; no granite
bowlders, no fern-decked or moss-covered fragments scattered through the
woods, as with us. They have all been used up for building purposes, or
for road-making, or else have quite dissolved in the humid climate. I
saw rocks in Wales, quite a profusion of them in the pass of Llanberis,
but they were tame indeed in comparison with such rock scenery as that
say at Lake Mohunk, in the Shawangunk range in New York. There are
passes in the Catskills that for the grandeur of wildness and savageness
far surpass anything the Welsh mountains have to show. Then for
exquisite and thrilling beauty, probably one of our mottled rocky walls
with the dicentra blooming from little niches and shelves in April, and
the columbine thrusting out from seams and crevices clusters of its
orange bells in May, with ferns and mosses clinging here and there, and
the woodbine tracing a delicate green line across its face, cannot be
matched anywhere in the world.
Then, in our woods, apart from their treasures of rocks, there is a
certain beauty and purity unknown in England, a certain delicacy and
sweetness, and charm of unsophisticated nature, that are native to our
forests.
The pastoral or field life of nature in England is so rank and full,
that no woods or forests that I was able to find could hold their own
against it for a moment. It flooded them like a tide. The grass grows
luxuriantly in the thick woods, and where the grass fails, the coarse
bracken takes its place. There was no wood spirit, no wild wood air. Our
forests shut their doors against the fields; they shut out the strong
light and the heat. Where the land has been long cleared, the woods put
out a screen of low branches, or else a brushy growth starts up along
their borders that guards and protects their privacy. Lift or part away
these branches, and step inside, and you are in another world; new
plants, new flowers, new birds, new animals, new insects, new sounds,
new odors; in fact, an entirely different atmosphere and presence. Dry
leaves cover the ground, delicate ferns and mosses drape the rocks, shy,
delicate flowers gleam out here and there, the slender brown wood-frog
leaps nimbly away from your feet, the little red newt fills its
infantile pipe, or hides under a leaf, the ruffed grouse bursts up
before you, the gray squirrel leaps from tree to tree, the wood pewee
utters its plaintive cry, the little warblers lisp and dart amid the
branches, and sooner or later the mosquito demands his fee. Our woods
suggest new arts, new pleasures, a new mode of life. English parks and
groves, when the sun shines, suggest a perpetual picnic, or Maying
party; but no one, I imagine, thinks of camping out in English woods.
The constant rains, the darkened skies, the low temperature, make the
interior of a forest as uninviting as an underground passage. I wondered
what became of the dry leaves that are such a feature and give out such
a pleasing odor in our woods. They are probably raked up and carried
away; or, if left upon the ground, are quickly resolved into mould by
the damp climate.
While in Scotland I explored a large tract of woodland, mainly of Scotch
fir, that covers a hill near Ecclefechan, but it was grassy and
uninviting. In one of the parks of the Duke of Hamilton, I found a deep
wooded gorge through which flowed the river Avon (I saw four rivers of
this name in Great Britain), a branch of the Clyde,--a dark, rock-paved
stream, the color of brown stout. It was the wildest bit of forest
scenery I saw anywhere. I almost imagined myself on the headwaters of
the Hudson or the Penobscot. The stillness, the solitude, the wild
boiling waters, were impressive; but the woods had no charm; there were
no flowers, no birds; the sylvan folk had moved away long ago, and their
house was cold and inhospitable. I sat a half-hour in their dark
nettle-grown halls by the verge of the creek, to see if they were
stirring anywhere, but they were not. I did, indeed, hear part of a
wren's song, and the call of the sandpiper; but that was all. Not one
purely wood voice or sound or odor. But looking into the air a few yards
below me, there leapt one of those matchless stone bridges, clearing the
profound gulf and carrying the road over as securely as if upon the
geological strata. It was the bow of art and civilization set against
nature's wildness. In the woods beyond, I came suddenly upon the ruins
of an old castle, with great trees growing out of it, and rabbits
burrowing beneath it. One learns that it takes more than a collection of
trees to make a forest, as we know it in this country. Unless they house
that spirit of wildness and purity like a temple, they fail to satisfy.
In walking to Selborne, I skirted Wolmer Forest, but it had an
uninviting look. The Hanger on the hill above Selborne, which remains
nearly as it was in White's time,--a thrifty forest of beeches,--I
explored, but found it like the others, without any distinctive woodsy
attraction--only so much soil covered with dripping beeches, too dense
for a park and too tame for a forest. The soil is a greasy, slippery
clay, and down the steepest part of the hill, amid the trees, the boys
have a slide that serves them for summer "coastings." Hardly a leaf,
hardly a twig or branch, to be found. In White's time, the poor people
used to pick up the sticks the crows dropped in building their nests,
and they probably do so yet. When one comes upon the glades beyond the
Hanger, the mingling of groves and grassy common, the eye is fully
content. The beech, which is the prevailing tree here, as it is in many
other parts of England, is a much finer tree than the American beech.
The deep limestone soil seems especially adapted to it. It grows as
large as our elm, with much the same manner of branching. The trunk is
not patched and mottled with gray, like ours, but is often tinged with a
fine deep green mould. The beeches that stand across the road in front
of Wordsworth's house, at Rydal Mount, have boles nearly as green as the
surrounding hills. The bark of this tree is smooth and close-fitting,
and shows that muscular, athletic character of the tree beneath it which
justifies Spenser's phrase, "the warlike beech." These beeches develop
finely in the open, and make superb shade-trees along the highway. All
the great historical forests of England--Shrewsbury Forest, the Forest
of Dean, New Forest, etc.--have practically disappeared. Remnants of
them remain here and there, but the country they once occupied is now
essentially pastoral.
It is noteworthy that there is little or no love of woods as such in
English poetry; no fond mention of them, and dwelling upon them. The
muse of Britain's rural poetry has none of the wide-eyedness and
furtiveness of the sylvan creatures; she is rather a gentle, wholesome,
slightly stupid divinity of the fields. Milton sings the praises of
"Arched walks of twilight groves."