s
the most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet again, as we pass into
another stretch of woodland, another profusion and another fragrance
await us, the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of the wild
hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches of these hyacinths in the woods,
they seem at first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces of
the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind, and, of them all,
Shakespeare and Milton alone have come near to suggesting the
loveliness, at once so spiritual and so warmly and sweetly of the earth,
that belongs to English wild flowers. I know not if Sheffield steel
still keeps its position among the eternal verities, but in an age when
so many of one's cherished beliefs are threatened with the scrap-heap,
I count it of no small importance to be able to retain one's faith in
the English lark and English wild flowers.

But the English countryside is not all greenness and softness, blossomy
lanes, moated granges, and idyllic villages. It by no means always
suggests the gardener, the farmer, or the gamekeeper. It is rich, too,
in wildness and solitude, in melancholy fens and lonely moorlands. To
the American accustomed to the vast areas of his own enormous continent,
it would come as a surprise to realize that a land far smaller than many
of his States can in certain places give one so profound a sense of the
wilderness. Yet I doubt if a man could feel lonelier anywhere in the
world than on a Yorkshire moor or on Salisbury Plain.

After all, we are apt to forget that, even on the largest continent, we
can see only a limited portion of the earth at once. When one is in the
middle of Lake Erie we are as much out of sight of land, as impressed by
the illusion of boundless water, as if we were in the middle of the
Pacific Ocean. So, on Salisbury Plain, with nothing but rolling billows
of close-cropped turf, springy and noiseless to the tread, as far as the
eye can see, one feels as alone with the universe as in the middle of
some Asian desert. In addition to the actual loneliness of the scene,
and a silence broken only by the occasional tinkle of sheep-bells, as a
flock moves like a fleecy cloud across the grass, is an imaginative
loneliness induced by the overwhelming sense of boundless unrecorded
time, the "dim-grey-grown ages," of which the mysterious boulders of
Stonehenge are the voiceless witnesses. To experience this feeling to
the full one should come upon an old Ro