as in some such mood of
anticipatory disillusion.

After all, I had said to myself, is not the English countryside the work
of the English poets--the English spring, the English wild flowers, the
English lark, the English nightingale, and so forth? That longing of
Browning expressed in the lines,

O to be in England
Now that April's there!

was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier, thinking "Home
Thoughts, from Abroad"; and are Herrick and Wordsworth quite to be
trusted on the subject of daffodils?

Well, I am glad to have to own that my revisiting my native land
resulted in an agreeable disappointment. With a critical American eye,
jealously on my guard against sentimental superstition, I surveyed the
English landscape and examined its various vaunted beauties and
fascinations, as though making their acquaintance for the first time.
No, my youthful raptures had not been at fault, and the poets were once
more justified. The poets are seldom far wrong. If they see anything, it
is usually there. If we cannot see it, too, it is the fault of our eyes.

Take the English hawthorn, for instance. As its fragrance is wafted to
you from the bushes where it hangs like the fairest of white linen, you
will hardly, I think, quarrel with its praises. Yet, though it is, if I
am not mistaken, of rare occurrence in America, it is not absolutely
necessary to go to England for the hawthorn. Any one who cares to go
a-Maying along the banks of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of
Peekskill, will find it there. But for the primrose and the cowslip you
must cross the sea; and, if you come upon such a wood as I strayed into,
my last visit, you will count it worth the trip. It was literally
carpeted with clumps of primroses and violets (violets that smell, too)
so thickly massed together in the mossy turf that there was scarcely
room to tread. There are no words rich or abundant enough to suggest the
sense of innocent luxury brought one by such a natural Persian carpet of
soft gold and dewy purple, at once so gorgeous and yet so gentle. In all
this lavish loveliness of English wild flowers there is, indeed, a
peculiar tenderness. The innocence of children seems to be in them, and
the tenderness of lovers.

A lover would not tread
A cowslip on the head--

How appropriately such lines come to mind as one carefully picks one's
way down a green hillside yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhap