e compass, a
landscape rich in foliage, full of gentle undulations, and dotted here
and there with fallow fields, spreads itself like another sea that has
been hushed into sudden immutability, and then sown, every wave and
swell of it, with the seeds of exhaustless fertility.

From such points of eminence as these the road sometimes runs with
hurried descent, as if longing for solitude, into the heart of the
woodlands, and there winds slowly and solemnly under the overshadowing
branches; there are no fences here, and the sharp lines of separation
between road-bed and forest were long ago erased in that quiet
usurpation of man's work, which Nature never fails to make the moment
she is left to herself. The ancient spell of the woods is unbroken in
this leafy solitude, and no traveller in whom imagination survives can
hope to escape it. The deep breathings of primeval life are almost
audible, and one feels in a quick and subtle perception the long past
which unites him with the earliest generations and the most remote ages.

Passing out from this brief worship under the arches of the most
venerable roof in Christendom, the road takes on a frolic mood and
courts the open meadows and the flooding sunshine; green, sweet, and
strewn with wild flowers, the open fields call one from either side,
and arrest one's feet at every turn with solicitations to freedom and
joyousness. The white clouds in the blue sky and the long sweep of
these radiant meadows conspire together to persuade one that time has
strayed back to its happy childhood again, and that nothing remains of
the old activities but play in these immortal fields. Here the carpet
is spread over which one runs with childish heedlessness, courting the
disaster which brings him back to the breast of the old mother, and
makes him feel once more the warmth and sweetness out of which all
strength and beauty spring. A little brook crosses the road under a
rattling bridge, and wanders on across the fields, limpid and rippling,
running its little strain of music through the silence of the meadows.
Its voice is the only sound which breaks the stillness, and that itself
seems part of the solitude. By day the clouds marshal their shadows on
it, and when night comes the heavens sow it with stars, until it flows
like a dissolving belt of sky through the fragrant darkness.
Sometimes, as I have come this way after nightfall, I have heard its
call across the invisible fields, and i