The small part which worms play in this direction in our landscape is, I
am convinced, more than neutralized by our violent or disrupting
climate; but England looks like the product of some such gentle,
tireless, and beneficent agent. I have referred to that effect in the
face of the landscape as if the soil had snowed down; it seems the snow
came from the other direction, namely, from below, but was deposited
with equal gentleness and uniformity.
The repose and equipoise of nature of which I have spoken appears in the
fields of grain no less than in the turf and foliage. One may see vast
stretches of wheat, oats, barley, beans, etc., as uniform as the surface
of a lake, every stalk of grain or bean the size and height of every
other stalk. This, of course, means good husbandry; it means a mild,
even-tempered nature back of it, also. Then the repose of the English
landscape is enhanced, rather than marred, by the part man has played in
it. How those old arched bridges rest above the placid streams; how
easily they conduct the trim, perfect highways over them! Where the foot
finds an easy way, the eye finds the same; where the body finds harmony,
the mind finds harmony. Those ivy-covered walls and ruins, those
finished fields, those rounded hedge-rows, those embowered cottages, and
that gray, massive architecture, all contribute to the harmony and to
the repose of the landscape. Perhaps in no other country are the grazing
herds so much at ease. One's first impression, on seeing British fields
in spring or summer, is that the cattle and sheep have all broken into
the meadow and have not yet been discovered by the farmer; they have
taken their fill, and are now reposing upon the grass or dreaming under
the trees. But you presently perceive that it is all meadow or
meadow-like; that there are no wild, weedy, or barren pastures about
which the herds toil; but that they are in grass up to their eyes
everywhere. Hence their contentment; hence another element of repose in
the landscape.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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