nkful if a
bush is left of the old hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where the
delicate ivy-leaved toad-flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of grey
thatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and a troop of
grass-stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. And then the tiled roof
of cottage and homestead, of the long cow-shed where generations of the
milky mothers have stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered barns where
the old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the watch-dog
barked at the timidly venturesome fowls making pecking raids on the
outflying grain--the roofs that have looked out from among the elms and
walnut-trees, or beside the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, or
below the square stone steeple, gathering their grey or ochre-tinted
lichens and their olive-green mosses under all ministries,--let us
praise the sober harmonies they give to our landscape, helping to unite
us pleasantly with the elder generations who tilled the soil for us
before we were born, and paid heavier and heavier taxes, with much
grumbling, but without that deepest root of corruption--the
self-indulgent despair which cuts down and consumes and never plants.

But I check myself. Perhaps this England of my affections is half
visionary--a dream in which things are connected according to my
well-fed, lazy mood, and not at all by the multitudinous links of
graver, sadder fact, such as belong everywhere to the story of human
labour. Well, well, the illusions that began for us when we were less
acquainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to
be illusions. They feed the ideal Better, and in loving them still, we
strengthen the precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly
existent, but a spiritual product of our visible tangible selves.

I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where
my affections were fledged. Since then I have learned to care for
foreign countries, for literatures foreign and ancient, for the life of
Continental towns dozing round old cathedrals, for the life of London,
half sleepless with eager thought and strife, with indigestion or with
hunger; and now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy, anxious
metropolitan sort. My system responds sensitively to the London
weather-signs, political, social, literary; and my bachelor's hearth is
imbedded where by much craning of head and neck I can catch sight of a
sycamore in the Square garden: I belong