he most popular of
English novelists sometimes went to write in the tranquillity of
beautiful scenery, taking his manuscript to the shore of some azure lake
in Switzerland, in sight of the eternal snow; but all that beauty and
peace, all that sweetness of pure air and color, were not seductive
enough to overcome for many days the deep longing for the London
streets. His genius needed the streets, as a bee needs the summer
flowers, and languished when long separated from them. Others have
needed the wild heather, or the murmur of the ocean, or the sound of
autumn winds that strip great forest-trees. Who does not deeply pity
poor Heine in his last sad years, when he lay fixed on his couch of pain
in that narrow Parisian lodging, and compared it to the sounding grave
of Merlin the enchanter, "which is situated in the wood of Brozeliande,
in Brittany, under lofty oaks whose tops taper, like emerald flames,
towards heaven. O brother Merlin," he exclaims, and with what touching
pathos! "O brother Merlin, I envy thee those trees, with their fresh
breezes, for never a green leaf rustles about this mattress-grave of
mine in Paris, where from morning till night I hear nothing but the
rattle of wheels, the clatter of hammers, street-brawls, and the
jingling of pianofortes!"

In the biography of Dr. Arnold, his longing for natural beauty recurs as
one of the peculiarities of his constitution. He did not need very
grand scenery, though he enjoyed it deeply, but some wild natural
loveliness was such a necessity for him that he pined for it unhappily
in its absence. Rugby could offer him scarcely anything of this, "We
have no hills," he lamented, "no plains--not a single wood, and but one
single copse; no heath, no down, no rock, no river, no clear
stream--scarcely any flowers, for the lias is particularly poor in
them--nothing but one endless monotony of enclosed fields and hedgerow
trees. This is to me a daily privation; it robs me of what is naturally
my anti-attrition; and as I grow older I begin to feel it.... The
positive dulness of the country about Rugby makes it to me a mere
working-place: I cannot expatiate there even in my walks."

"The monotonous character of the midland scenery of Warwickshire," says
Dr. Arnold's biographer, "was to him, with his strong love of natural
beauty and variety, absolutely repulsive; there was something almost
touching in the eagerness with which, amidst that 'endless succession of
fields and