Were I advising a friend abroad who knew nothing of England and wished to make a pilgrimage to its chief shrines of beauty, I think I should urge him to come in the late winter to Plymouth and explore first Cornwall and Devon, seeing, in the first case, how England's "rocky shores beat back the envious siege of watery Neptune." The coming of the waves of an Atlantic storm to Land's End offers a grand spectacle. He should stay in the south-west to see the first breath of spring bring the trees to green, and the earliest of the daffodils to flower. He will very likely encounter some wet weather. The Dartmoor people themselves say:-- The south wind blows and brings wet weather, The north gives wet and cold together, The west wind comes brimful of rain, The east wind drives it back again. Then if the sun in red should set, We know the morrow must be wet; And if the eve is clad in grey The next is sure a rainy day. But despite showers, spring on Dartmoor is a glowing pageant of green and gold. After feasting upon it a week or so, my imaginary pilgrim would make his way to the Thames valley to welcome yet another spring. The Gulf Stream gives the south-west corner of England a softer climate and an earlier spring than the east enjoys. By the time the daffodils are nodding their golden heads in Cornwall, the crocus will be just showing its flame along the borders of the Thames, and the pilgrim will understand Browning's rapture:-- Oh to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm tree hole are in tiny leaf; While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England--now! When once the spring is in full tide towards summer, it is difficult to say where one should search for special beauty in England, for all is so beautiful, from the Yorkshire hills to the Sussex marshes beloved of Coventry Patmore--flat lands whose drowsy beauties glow under the broad sunshine and suggest a tranquil charm of quiet joy tinged with melancholy, too subtle to appeal to the casual "tripper," but of insistent call to all who understood the more intimate charms of Nature. It is spacious is Sussex. It shelters solitudes. Its quiet, slow-voiced people are sympathetic with their surroundings. When storms rage Sussex takes a new aspect. The screaming of the gulls, the sobbing of the sedges in the wind, the wide, flat expanse laid, as it were, bare to the rage of the storm, gives to the wind a sense of poignant desolation.