The Kenosha telegraph. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1860-1888, 1882-11-03
ENGLISH NATURE.
How Its Perfect Pastoral Beauty
Impresses One Used to American

ANQA4SA NAL OAb44t
How Its Perfect Pastoral Beauty
Impresses One Used to American
Woods.
John Burroughs in The Critic
For rural and pastoral beauty-beauty Of
fields, parks, downs, Enthusiastically of grass,
trees, groves, ETC., go to England You shall
see there at its full that of which you catch
only glimpses in this countryside broad,
beamlng, hospitable beauty of perfectly cul-
tivated landscape Indeed, to see England is
to take ones fill of the orderly, the permanent,
the well-kept in the works Of man and of the
continent the beniicent, the uniform, IN the
works Of nature. 1t is to see the most perfect
bit Of garden lawn expanded till it covers an
empire; it is to see the history of two thou
sand years written in grass and verdure, and
in the lines of the landscape; continent con-
centrated into state, the deserts and waste
places left out every rood Of it swarm
ing with life; the pith and mar
row of wide tracts eompacted into
narrow fields and recruited and forwarded by
the most vigilant husbandry. Those fields
look Stalled, 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 ind
beauty like that? The wild and the savage
fee away. The rocks pull the green turf over
them. like coYerlids; the hills are plump with
vegetable mold, and when they bend this way
or that their sides are wrinkled or 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 fer
tility upon them; there is no wear and tear
as with our alternately flooded, parched and
frozen hilltops; the soil accumulates, the
mold 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 (his is but
half the TRUTH, but because the very mood and
humor of nature herself Ia domestic and hui
man. She seems to have grown up 18th 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 wet sill
or a soaked howerpot, at rare intervals. 1t is
the opulent nature of the southern seas,
brought by the Gulf stream, and reproduced
and perpetuated here under these cool north
ern skies, the fangs and the poison taken out;
full, but no longer feverish-lusty, but no
longer lewd
But the charm Of the wild, the fascination
Of the savage, the sublime-I did not wonder,
after being in England few months, that SO
many of her sons hungered and thirsted after
these things and pursued them with such zest
to the utteTmost parts of the earth. what
godsend Niagara would be to England-some-
thing they could not saddle or bridle-or
section of that awful chasm below the falls,
or O bit of the Colorado valley. Dover cliffs,
which their poets have magnihed, are pleasing
but not grand; they are broad meadow,
propped up by piece OF chalk 35o feet high.
the brink of them, and there is no
terror in their frown A load of hay the same
height and breadth would be as impressive
Amid these scenes one comes in time to feel as
imagine a well-fed dog feels that mas not had
bone to gnaw in long while; like squirrel
whose teeth are spelling for nut; like hawk
ahunger for the quarry. The sparse, the shy,
the furtive are good too One wants the ele-
ment of surprise that darts upon one
like wild spirit from unexpected places; the
perilous charm that turks on the brink of the
abyss. Amid the daily, gentle, tiresome ruins
Surrey farmer put it, but never actually "com-
ing to head" l could have put up cheerfully
with one or two Of our sky splitters when the
veritable crack of doom seems to have come.
One does not see the stars in England except
now and then, dimly and through veil of
vapor Never is that awful abyss of the heav-
ems stripped bare as with us and brought inn
measurably near, almost overpowering in its
sublimity.
On the Scotch moors, amid the Cumberland
hills under the shadow vof Snowden, on the
heights of Dover, one may find solitude most
profound and impressive, beauty delicious and
satisfying as bath in fountain; but of the
purely wild and sublime only now and then
glimpse, while of aboriginal power and saw
agery, piled cleft, contorted-power elemental
and inhuman, like the sea in a storm-he will
behold none.
THERE'S no wood life in England as there is
here. | could find no distinctive wood birds,
no distinctive wood flowers, as at home Every
thing takes to the fields and the hedges-the
rabbits to the pastures, the hares to the corn.
The iackdaws feed with the poultry, the
crows perch on the chimney-tops All
the birds are semi domestic all the
plants love cultivation. Every weed that has
come to us from Europe takes to the fields.
while most of the natives flee to the woods
or hide in the fence-corners. Our native
minis are delicate and shy, but behold the
bounce and the boldness of the cat-mint, spear
mint, motherwort, basil, balm and the rest
English song birds have not the sweet plain
tiveness and melody Of our songsters, but
more strength, loudness, and vivacity of voice,
rs if they had been trained to sing in the open
dir instead of in the woods
We have nothing like the color of the bloom
ing heather; it suggests the rarest Oriental
dyes and tints; it covers thesloney moors and
the mountains with purple more royal than
that Of kings; we cannot match the dark,
solid soulpturesque foliage of those parks and
groves nor the greenness Of those fields and
hills, nor the witehery of that sunshine, when
sunshine there is; but in the recesses of our
forests, along our unruly streams, on our
mountain tops, about our ragged farms, under
our starry nights, one may catch glimpses Of
grace and beauty, of sublimity, that
Make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs,
and that is TO these as a line of Emerson or
Whitman is to couplet Of Pope or Thomson.