ern
nature--a nature wild and solitary indeed, but still rich, luxuriant,
and friendly to the senses of the traveller, even in its loneliest
places. The heaths and woods of some districts of Surrey are scarcely
more thickly peopled than the fells of Westmoreland; the walker may
wander for miles, and still enjoy an untamed primitive earth, guiltless
of boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows and flies,
where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they
please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded
by his neighbourhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in
these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature
lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling--pink, faintly scented, a
feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into
scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farm-houses, so mellow
in colour, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness
of the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a
wilderness but a paradise. Nature, indeed, here is like some spoilt
petulant child. She will bring forth nothing, or almost nothing, for
man's grosser needs. Ask her to bear corn or pasture flocks, and she
will be miserly and grudging. But ask her only to be beautiful,
enticing, capriciously lovely, and she will throw herself into the task
with all the abandonment, all the energy, that heart could wish.

It is on the borders of one of the wilder districts of a county, which
is throughout a strange mixture of suburbanism and the desert, that we
next meet with Robert and Catherine Elsmere. The rectory of Murewell
occupied the highest point of a gentle swell of ground which sloped
through cornfields and woods to a plain of boundless heather on the
south, and climbed away on the north towards the long chalk ridge of the
Hog's Back. It was a square white house pretending neither to beauty nor
state, a little awkwardly and barely placed, with only a small stretch
of grass and a low hedge between it and the road. A few tall firs
climbing above the roof gave a little grace and clothing to its southern
side, and behind it there was a garden sloping softly down towards the
village at its foot--a garden chiefly noticeable for its grass walks,
the luxuriance of the fruit trees clinging to its old red walls, and the
masses of pink and white phloxes which now in August gave it the
floweriness and