The pheasant’s crow; the pheasant with all her brood springing around you, one by one, from the turf where you are standing amid the bracken--here one! there one! close under your feet, with a sudden, startling whirr,--to compare nature with art, country scenes with city ones, like so many squibs and crackers fired off about you in smart succession, where you don’t look for them. That most ancient and most original of all ladders, a bough with some pegs driven through it, reared against a tree for the keeper to reach the nests of hawks or magpies, or to fetch down a brood of young jackdaws for a pie, quite as savoury a dish as one made with young rooks or pigeons; or for him to sit aloft amongst the foliage, and watch for the approach of deer, or fawn, when he is commissioned to shoot one. The profound and basking silence all around you, as you sit on some dry ferny mound, and look far and wide through the glimmering heat, or the cool shadow. The far-off sounds--rooks telling of some old Hall that stands slumberously amid the woods; or dogs, sending from their hidden kennel amongst the trees, their sonorous yelling. Forest smells, that rise up deliciously as you cross dim thickets or tread the spongy turf all fragrant with thyme, and sprinkled with the light harebell. Huge limbs of oak riven off by tempests, or the old oak itself, a vast, knotty, and decayed mass, lying on the ground, and perhaps the woodman gravely labouring upon it, lopping its boughs, riving its huge, misshapen stem, piling it in stacks of cord-wood, or binding them into billets. The keeper’s house near, in its own paled enclosure; and all about, old thorns hung with the dried and haggard remains of wild-cats, polecats, weasels, hawks, owls, jays, and other _vermin_, as he deems them; or the same most picturesquely displayed on the sturdy boles of the vast oaks; and lastly, the mere, the lake, in the depth of the woodlands, shrouded in screening masses of flags and reeds, the beautiful flowering-rush, the magnificent great water-dock, with leaves as huge and green as if they grew by some Indian river--the tall club-mace, the thousands of wild-ducks, teals, or wigeons, that start up at your approach with clattering wings, and cries of quick alarm. Who that has wandered through our old parks and forests, is not familiar with all these sights and sounds? does not long to witness them again, ever and anon, when he has been “long in city pent,” till he is fain to mount his horse and ride off into some such ancient, quiet, and dreamy region, as Crabbe suddenly mounted his, and rode forty miles to see again the sea? [Illustration] PART IV. CAUSES OF THE STRONG ATTACHMENT OF THE ENGLISH TO COUNTRY LIFE. CHAPTER I. THE LOVE OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL IN NATURE MORE EMINENTLY DEVELOPED IN MODERN LITERATURE THAN IN THE CLASSICAL.