glens,
Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its
fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural
beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle prettiness to savage grandeur.

Yet, although all these contrasts are included in the English scene, it
is not of solitude or grandeur that we think when we speak of the
English countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule of a gentler,
more humanized natural beauty, in which the village church and the
ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would
represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the
phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese
stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses
climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens,
with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such
old-fashioned flowers. At one end of the village, rising out of a clump
of yews, the mouldering church-tower, with mossy gravestones on one side
and a trim rectory on the other. At the other end of the village a
gabled inn, with a great stable-yard, busy with horses and waggons.
Above the village, the slopes of gently rising pastures, intersected
with footpaths and shadowed with woodlands. A little way out of the
village, an old mill with a lilied mill-pond, a great, dripping
water-wheel, and the murmur of the escaping stream. And winding on
into the green, sun-steeped distance, the blossom-hung English lanes.

XVII

LONDON--CHANGING AND UNCHANGING

I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again
after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of
course, there are men to whom one great city is as another--commercial
travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of
these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in
Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic
cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that,
were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel
as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with
which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically
strange, while remaining so poignantly familiar. The man who is at home
everywhere has nowhere any home. My home was once this London--this
England--in which I am writing; but nothing