ituations for a constant residence, that which appears to
me most delightful is a little village far in the country; a small
neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages and
cottage-like houses, 'messuages or tenements,' as a friend of mine calls
such ignoble and nondescript dwellings, with inhabitants whose faces are
as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our
own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a
hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns in a convent, or sailors in a ship;
where we know every one, are known to every one, interested in every
one, and authorised to hope that every one feels an interest in us. How
pleasant it is to slide into these true-hearted feelings from the kindly
and unconscious influence of habit, and to learn to know and to love the
people about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know
and to love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons
that we pass every day. Even in books I like a confined locality, and so
do the critics when they talk of the unities. Nothing is so tiresome as
to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot-wheels of a hero, to go
to sleep at Vienna, and awaken at Madrid; it produces a real fatigue, a
weariness of spirit. On the other hand, nothing is so delightful as to
sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen's delicious novels,
quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and
every person it contains; or to ramble with Mr. White* over his own
parish of Selborne, and form a friendship with the fields and coppices,
as well as with the birds, mice, and squirrels, who inhabit them; or to
sail with Robinson Crusoe to his island, and live there with him and his
goats and his man Friday;--how much we dread any new comers, any fresh
importation of savage or sailor! we never sympathise for a moment in our
hero's want of company, and are quite grieved when he gets away;--or to
be shipwrecked with Ferdinand on that other lovelier island--the island
of Prospero, and Miranda, and Caliban, and Ariel, and nobody else,
none of Dryden's exotic inventions:--that is best of all. And a small
neighbourhood is as good in sober waking reality as in poetry or prose;
a village neighbourhood, such as this Berkshire hamlet in which I write,
a long, straggling, winding street at the bottom of a fine eminence,
with a road through it, always abounding in carts, horsemen,