d simplest feelings, which is perhaps one great
secret of his originality,

'Scenes must be beautiful, which, daily seen,
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.'

Every day I walk up this hill--every day I pause at the top to admire
the broad winding road with the green waste on each side, uniting it
with the thickly timbered hedgerows; the two pretty cottages at unequal
distances, placed so as to mark the bends; the village beyond, with its
mass of roofs and clustered chimneys peeping through the trees; and the
rich distance, where cottages, mansions, churches, towns, seem embowered
in some wide forest, and shut in by blue shadowy hills. Every day I
admire this most beautiful landscape; yet never did it seem to me so
fine or so glowing as now. All the tints of the glorious autumn, orange,
tawny, yellow, red, are poured in profusion among the bright greens of
the meadows and turnip fields, till the eyes are satiated with colour;
and then before us we have the common with its picturesque roughness of
surface tufted with cottages, dappled with water, edging off on one side
into fields and farms and orchards, and terminated on the other by the
princely oak avenue. What a richness and variety the wild broken ground
gives to the luxuriant cultivation of the rest of the landscape! Cowper
has described it for me. How perpetually, as we walk in the country, his
vivid pictures recur to the memory! Here is his common and mine!

'The common overgrown with fern, and rough
With prickly gorse, that, shapeless and deform'd
And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom,
And decks itself with ornaments of gold;--
--------------- there the turf
Smells fresh, and, rich in odoriferous herbs
And fungous fruits of earth, regales the sense
With luxury of unexpected sweets.'

The description is exact. There, too, to the left is my cricket-ground
(Cowper's common wanted that finishing grace); and there stands one
solitary urchin, as if in contemplation of its past and future glories;
for, alas! cricket is over for the season. Ah! it is Ben Kirby, next
brother to Joe, king of the youngsters, and probably his successor--for
this Michaelmas has cost us Joe! He is promoted from the farm to the
mansion-house, two miles off; there he cleans shoes, rubs knives,
and runs on errands, and is, as his mother expresses it, 'a sort of
'prentice t