Hence our midland plains have
never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me;
yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of
world-wide change, some new direction of human labour has wrought itself
into what one may call the speech of the landscape--in contrast with
those grander and vaster regions of the earth which keep an indifferent
aspect in the presence of men's toil and devices. What does it signify
that a lilliputian train passes over a viaduct amidst the abysses of the
Apennines, or that a caravan laden with a nation's offerings creeps
across the unresting sameness of the desert, or that a petty cloud of
steam sweeps for an instant over the face of an Egyptian colossus
immovably submitting to its slow burial beneath the sand? But our
woodlands and pastures, our hedge-parted corn-fields and meadows, our
bits of high common where we used to plant the windmills, our quiet
little rivers here and there fit to turn a mill-wheel, our villages
along the old coach-roads, are all easily alterable lineaments that seem
to make the face of our Motherland sympathetic with the laborious lives
of her children. She does not take their ploughs and waggons
contemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every sheepfold, every
railed bridge or fallen tree-trunk an agreeably noticeable incident; not
a mere speck in the midst of unmeasured vastness, but a piece of our
social history in pictorial writing.

Our rural tracts--where no Babel-chimney scales the heavens--are without
mighty objects to fill the soul with the sense of an outer world
unconquerably aloof from our efforts. The wastes are playgrounds (and
let us try to keep them such for the children's children who will
inherit no other sort of demesne); the grasses and reeds nod to each
other over the river, but we have cut a canal close by; the very heights
laugh with corn in August or lift the plough-team against the sky in
September. Then comes a crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes and
barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's face
or a new curve of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are cut
through or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level and
the white steam-pennon flies along it.

But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, all signs of
permanence upon it raise a tender attachment instead of awe: some of us,
at least, love the scanty relics of our forests, and are tha