t perfect
richness; the swathes of its corn glowing and burning from field to
field; its pretty hamlets all vivid with fruitful orchards and flowery
gardens, and goodly with steep-roofed storehouse and barn; its
well-kept, hard, park-like roads rising and falling from hillside to
hillside, or disappearing among brown banks of moss, and thickets of the
wild raspberry and rose; or gleaming through lines of tall trees, half
glade, half avenue, where the gate opens, or the gateless path turns
trustedly aside, unhindered, into the garden of some statelier house,
surrounded in rural pride with its golden hives, and carved granaries,
and irregular domain of latticed and espaliered cottages, gladdening to
look upon in their delicate homeliness--delicate, yet, in some sort,
rude; not like our English homes--trim, laborious, formal,
irreproachable in comfort; but with a peculiar carelessness and
largeness in all their detail, harmonizing with the outlawed loveliness
of their country. For there is an untamed strength even in all that soft
and habitable land. It is, indeed, gilded with corn and fragrant with
deep grass, but it is not subdued to the plough or to the scythe. It
gives at its own free will,--it seems to have nothing wrested from it
nor conquered in it. It is not redeemed from desertness, but
unrestrained in fruitfulness,--a generous land, bright with capricious
plenty, and laughing from vale to vale in fitful fulness, kind and wild;
nor this without some sterner element mingled in the heart of it. For
along all its ridges stand the dark masses of innumerable pines, taking
no part in its gladness, asserting themselves for ever as fixed shadows,
not to be pierced or banished, even in the intensest sunlight; fallen
flakes and fragments of the night, stayed in their solemn squares in the
midst of all the rosy bendings of the orchard boughs, and yellow
effulgence of the harvest, and tracing themselves in black network and
motionless fringes against the blanched blue of the horizon in its
saintly clearness. And yet they do not sadden the landscape, but seem to
have been set there chiefly to show how bright everything else is round
them; and all the clouds look of purer silver, and all the air seems
filled with a whiter and more living sunshine, where they are pierced by
the sable points of the pines; and all the pastures look of more glowing
green, where they run up between the purple trunks: and the sweet field
footpaths ski