and a
sweep of green meadows; whilst the park and its palings are replaced
by a steep bank, on which stands a small, quiet, village alehouse; and
higher up, embosomed in wood, is the little country church, with its
sloping churchyard and its low white steeple, peeping out from amongst
magnificent yew-trees:--

'Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and invet'rately convolved.'
WORDSWORTH.

No village church was ever more happily placed. It is the very image of
the peace and humbleness inculcated within its walls.

Ah! here is a higher hill rising before us, almost like a mountain. How
grandly the view opens as we ascend over that wild bank, overgrown with
fern, and heath, and gorse, and between those tall hollies, glowing with
their coral berries! What an expanse! But we have little time to gaze at
present; for that piece of perversity, our horse, who has walked over so
much level ground, has now, inspired, I presume, by a desire to revisit
his stable, taken it into that unaccountable noddle of his to trot up
this, the very steepest hill in the county. Here we are on the top; and
in five minutes we have reached the lawn gate, and are in the very midst
of that beautiful piece of art or nature (I do not know to which class
it belongs), the pleasure-ground of F. Hill. Never was the 'prophetic
eye of taste' exerted with more magical skill than in these
plantations. Thirty years ago this place had no existence; it was a mere
undistinguished tract of field and meadow and common land; now it is a
mimic forest, delighting the eye with the finest combinations of trees
and shrubs, the rarest effects of form and foliage, and bewildering
the mind with its green glades, and impervious recesses, and apparently
interminable extent. It is the triumph of landscape gardening, and never
more beautiful than in this autumn sunset, lighting up the ruddy beech
and the spotted sycamore, and gilding the shining fir-cones that hang so
thickly amongst the dark pines. The robins are singing around us, as
if they too felt the magic of the hour. How gracefully the road
winds through the leafy labyrinth, leading imperceptibly to the
more ornamented sweep. Here we are at the door amidst geraniums, and
carnations, and jasmines, still in flower. Ah! here is a flower sweeter
than all, a bird gayer than the robin, the little bird that ch