Fresh Fields

of which you catch only glimpses in this country, the broad, beaming, hospitable beauty of a perfectly cultivated landscape. Indeed, to see England is to t

sbandry. Those fields look stall-fed, 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 find beauty like that? The wild and the savage flee away. The rocks pull the green turf over them like coverlids; the hills are plum

en 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 a wet sill or a soaked flower-plot, at rare intervals. It is the

ftest and most pleasing tints. The rocky escarpments of New York and New England hills are frescoed by Time himself, painted as with the brush of the eternal elements. But the lichen is much less conspicuous in England, and plays no such part in her natural scenery. The climate is too damp. The rocks in Wales and Northumberland and in Scotland are dark and cold and unattractive. The trees in the woods do not wear the

ss of Llanberis, but they were tame indeed in comparison with such rock scenery as that say at Lake Mohunk, in the Shawangunk range in New York. There are passes in the Catskills that for the grandeur of wildness and savageness far surpass anything the Welsh mountains have to show. Then for exquisite and thrilling beauty, probably one o

ain beauty and purity unknown in England, a certain delicacy and sweetne

these branches, and step inside, and you are in another world; new plants, new flowers, new birds, new animals, new insects, new sounds, new odors; in fact, an entirely different atmosphere and presence. Dry leaves cover the ground, delicate ferns and mosses drape the rocks, shy, delicate flowers gleam out here and there, the slender brown wood-frog leaps nimbly away from your feet, the little red newt fills its infantile pipe, or hides under a leaf, the ruffed grouse bursts up before you, the gray squirrel leaps from tree to tree, the wood pewee utters its plaintive cry, the little warblers lisp and dart amid the branches, an

d over as securely as if upon the geological strata. It was the bow of art and civilization set against nature's wildness. In the woods beyond, I came suddenly upon the ruins of an old castle, with great trees growing out of it, and rabbits burrowing beneath it. One learns that it takes more than a collection of trees to make a forest, as we know it in this country. Unless they house that spirit of wildness and purity like a temple, they fail to satisfy. In walking to Selborne, I skirted Wolmer Forest, but it had an uninviting look. The Hanger on the hill above Selborne, which remains nearly as it was in White's time,-a thrifty forest of beeches,-I explored, but found it like the others, without any distinctive woodsy attraction-only so much soil covered with dripping beeches, too dense for a park and too tame for a forest. The soil is a greasy, slippery clay, and down the steepest part of the hill, amid the trees, the boys have a slide that serves them for summer "coastings." Hardly a leaf, hardly a twig or branch, to be found. In White's time, the poor people used to pick up the sticks the crows dropped in building their nests, a

dwelling upon them. The muse of Britain's rural poetry has none of the wide-eyedness and furtiveness of the sylvan

ks of twili

od is a "d

horror of who

lorn and wander

ai

esolati

erns shagg'd wit

ood is too scarce in Europe. Francis Higginson wrote in 1630: "New England may boast of the element of fire more than all the rest; for all Europe is not able to afford to make so great fires as New England. A poor servant, that is to possess but fifty acres, may afford to give more wood for fire, as good as the world yields, than many noblemen in England." In many parts of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, the same royal fires may still be indulged in. In the chief nature-poet of England, Wordsworth, there is no line that h

ent, there is an Indian's love of forests and forest-solitudes in them both. Neither Bryant's "Forest Hymn" nor Emerson's "Woodnotes" could have been wr

ine he sought the

ndred lakes you

nplanted fores

sun for ages

moose, and walks

ll mast runs

dim aisles, i

n?a hang its t

monument of th

sweet fame through

in the grove,

ar the aged pi

death-hymn of t

close of its

rbanity that is at home in the woods as well as

n is a fo

der fore

e down to the

e to depth

er literatures. The gentle muse of Longfellow, so civil, so cultivated; yet how it delighted in all legends and echoes and Arcadian dreams, that date from the forest primeval. Thoreau was a wood-genius-the spirit of some Indian poet or prophet, gra