21. Why England is Beautiful - Page 2

blood in his veins, not be proud
of England? England, the mother of poets and thinkers; England, that
gave us Newton, Darwin, Spencer; England, that holds in her lap Oxford,
Salisbury, Durham; England of daisy and heather and pine-wood! Are we
hewn out of granite, to be cold before England?

Upon my soul, your unseasonable interruption has almost made me forget
what I was going to say; it has made me grow warm, and drop into poetry.

England, I take it, is certainly the prettiest country in Europe. It is
almost the most beautiful. I say "almost," because I bethink me of
Norway and Switzerland. I say "country," because I bethink me of Rome,
Venice, Florence. But, taking it as country, and as country alone,
nothing else approaches it. Have you ever thought why? Man made the
town, says the proverb, and God made the country. Not so in England.
There, man made the country, and beautified it exceedingly. In itself,
the land of south-eastern England is absolutely the same as the land of
Northern France--that hideous tract about Boulogne and Amiens which we
traverse in silence every time we run across by Calais to Paris. Chalk
and clay and sandstone stretch continuously under sea from Kent and
Sussex to Flanders and Picardy. The Channel burst through, and made the
Straits of Dover; but the land on either side was and still is
geologically and physically identical. What has made the difference?
Man, the planter and gardener. England is beautiful by copse and
hedgerow, by pine-clad ridge and willow-covered hollow, by meadows
interspersed with great spreading oaks, by pastures where drowsy sheep,
deep-fleeced and ruddy-stained, huddle under the shade of ancestral
beech-trees. Its loveliness is human. In itself, I believe, the actual
contour of England cannot once have been much better than the contour of
northern France--though nowadays it is hard indeed to realise it.
Judicious planting, and a constant eye to picturesque effect in scenery,
have made England what she is--the garden of Europe.

Of course there are parts of the country which owed, and still owe,
their beauty to their wildness--Dartmoor, Exmoor, the West Riding of
Yorkshire, the Surrey hills, the Peak in Derbyshire. Yet even these
depend more than you would believe, when you take them in detail, on the
art of the forester. The view from Leith Hill embraces John Evelyn's
woods at Wotton: the larches that cover one Jura-like gorge were set
there well within your and my memory. But elsewhere in England the hand
of man has done absolutely everything. The American, when he first
visits England, is charmed on his way up from Liverpool to London by the
exquisite air of antique cultivation and soft rural beauty. The very
sward is