Recollections of a Gifted Woman

From Leamington to Stratford-on-Avon the distance is eight or nine miles,
over a road that seemed to me most beautiful. Not that I can recall any
memorable peculiarities; for the country, most of the way, is a
succession of the gentlest swells and subsidences, affording wide and far
glimpses of champaign scenery here and there, and sinking almost to a
dead level as we draw near Stratford. Any landscape in New England, even
the tamest, has a more striking outline, and besides would have its blue
eyes open in those lakelets that we encounter almost from mile to mile at
home, but of which the Old Country is utterly destitute; or it would
smile in our faces through the medium of the wayside brooks that vanish
under a low stone arch on one side of the road, and sparkle out again on
the other. Neither of these pretty features is often to be found in an
English scene. The charm of the latter consists in the rich verdure of
the fields, in the stately wayside trees and carefully kept plantations
of wood, and in the old and high cultivation that has humanized the very
sods by mingling so much of man's toil and care among them. To an
American there is a kind of sanctity even in an English turnip-field,
when he thinks how long that small square of ground has been known and
recognized as a possession, transmitted from father to son, trodden often
by memorable feet, and utterly redeemed from savagery by old
acquaintanceship with civilized eyes. The wildest things in England are
more than half tame. The trees, for instance, whether in hedge-row,
park, or what they call forest, have nothing wild about them. They are
never ragged; there is a certain decorous restraint in the freest
outspread of their branches, though they spread wider than any
self-nurturing tree; they are tall, vigorous, bulky, with a look of
age-long life, and a promise of more years to come, all of which will
bring them into closer kindred with the race of man. Somebody or other
has known them from the sapling upward; and if they endure long enough,
they grow to be traditionally observed and honored, and connected with
the fortunes of old families, till, like Tennyson's Talking Oak, they
babble with a thousand leafy tongues to ears that can understand them.

An American tree, however, if it could grow in fair competition with an
English one of similar species, would probably be the more picturesque
object of the two. The Warwickshire elm has not so beautiful a shape as
those that overhang our village street; and as for the redoubtable
English oak, there is a certain John Bullism in its figure, a compact
rotundity of foliage, a lack of irregular and various outline, that make
it look wonderfully like a gigantic cauliflower. Its leaf, too, is much
smaller than