The verdant carpet embroidered with little stars of gold and silver--the
short-grown, smooth, and close-woven, but most delicate and elastic
fresh sward--so soothing to the dazzled eye, so welcome to the wearied
limbs--so suggestive of innocent and happy thoughts,--so refreshing to
the freed visitor, long pent up in the smoky city--is surely no where to
be seen in such exquisite perfection as on the broad meadows and
softly-swelling hills of England. And perhaps in no country in the world
could _pic-nic_ holiday-makers or playful children with more perfect
security of life and health stroll about or rest upon Earth's richly
enamelled floor from sunrise to sunset on a summer's day. No Englishman
would dare to stretch himself at full length and address himself to sleep
upon an Oriental meadow unless he were perfectly indifferent to life
itself and could see nothing terrible in the hostility of the deadliest
reptiles. When wading through the long grass and thick jungles of Bengal,
he is made to acknowledge the full force of the true and beautiful
expression--"_In the midst of life we are in death_." The British Indian
exile on his return home is delighted with the "sweet security" of his
native fields. He may then feel with Wordsworth how
Dear is the forest frowning o'er his head.
And dear _the velvet greensward_ to his tread.
Or he may exclaim in the words of poor Keats--now slumbering under a
foreign turf--
Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than her own.
It is a pleasing proof of the fine moral influence of natural scenery
that the most ceremonious strangers can hardly be long seated together
in the open air on the "velvet greensward" without casting off for a
while the cold formalities of artificial life, and becoming as frank and
social as ingenuous school-boys. Nature breathes peace and geniality
into almost every human heart.
"John Thelwall," says Coleridge, "had something very good about him. We
were sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks when I said to him
'Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!' 'Nay, Citizen
Samuel,' replied he, 'it is rather a place to make us forget that there
is any necessity for treason!'"
Leigh Hunt, who always looks on nature with the eye of a true painter
and the imagination of a true poet, has represented with delightful
force and vividness some of those accidents of light and shade that
diversify an English meadow.