The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 09Stevenson, Robert Louis
General
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 09
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century
experience of Scots.
England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in
education, and in the very look of nature and men's faces, not always
widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant
White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt
ourselves foreigners on many common provocations.[2]
A Scotsman may tramp the better part of Europe and the United States,
and never again receive so vivid an impression of foreign travel and
strange lands and manners as on his first excursion into England. The
change from a hilly to a level country strikes him with delighted
wonder. Along the flat horizon there arise the frequent venerable towers
of churches. He sees at the end of airy vistas the revolution of the
windmill sails. He may go where he pleases in the future; he may see
Alps, and Pyramids, and lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure
of that moment. There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of
many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody
country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant busyness,
making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their air,
gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance
into the tamest landscape. When the Scottish child sees them first he
falls immediately in love; and from that time forward windmills keep
turning in his dreams. And so, in their degree, with every feature of
the life and landscape. The warm, habitable age of towns and hamlets;
the green, settled, ancient look of the country; the lush hedgerows,
stiles, and privy pathways in the fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers;
chalk and smock-frocks; chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding
English speech--they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to
English airs in the child's story that he tells himself at night. The
sharp edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is blunted, but I doubt
whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the more
rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have been long
accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to enjoyment or heightens
the sense of isolation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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