21. Why England is Beautiful

As I strolled across the moor this afternoon towards Waverley, I saw
Jones was planting out that bare hillside of his with Douglas pines and
Scotch firs and new strains of silver birches. They will improve the
landscape. And I thought as I scanned them, "How curious that most
people entirely overlook this constant betterment and beautifying of
England! You hear them talk much of the way bricks and mortar are
invading the country; you never hear anything of this slow and silent
process of planting and developing which has made England into the
prettiest and one of the most beautiful countries in Europe."

What's that you say? "Astonished to find I have a good word of any sort
to put in for England!" Why, dear me, how irrational you are! I just
_love_ England. Can any man with eyes in his head and a soul for beauty
do otherwise? England and Italy--there you have the two great glories of
Europe. Italy for towns, for art, for man's handicraft; England for
country, for nature, for green lanes and lush copses. Was it not one
that loved Italy well who sighed in Italy--

"Oh, to be in England now that April's there?"

And who that loves Italy, and knows England, too, does not echo
Browning's wish when April comes round again on dusty Tuscan hilltops?
At Perugia, last spring, through weeks of tramontana, how one yearned
for the sight of yellow English primroses! Not love England, indeed!
Milton's England, Shelley's England; the England of the skylark, the
dog-rose, the honeysuckle! Not love England, forsooth! Why, I love every
flower, every blade of grass in it. Devonshire lane, close-cropped down,
rich water-meadow, bickering brooklet: ah me, how they tug at one's
heartstrings in Africa! No son of the soil can love England as those
love her very stones who have come from newer lands over sea to her
ivy-clad church-towers, her mouldering castles, her immemorial elms, the
berries on her holly, the may in her hedgerows. Are not all these bound
up in our souls with each cherished line of Shakespeare and Wordsworth?
do they not rouse faint echoes of Gray and Goldsmith? Even before I ever
set foot in England, how I longed to behold my first cowslip, my first
foxglove! And now, I have wandered through the footpaths that run
obliquely across English pastures, picking meadowsweet and fritillaries,
for half a lifetime, till I have learned by heart every leaf and every
petal. You think because I dislike one squalid village--"The Wen," stout
English William Cobbett delighted to call it--I don't love England. You
think because I see some spots on the sun of the English character, I
don't love Englishmen. Why, how can any man who speaks the English
tongue, and boasts one drop of English