place, and people
may talk of the pomegranate-smell between the hedges. So you really
have _hills_ at New Cross, and not hills by courtesy? I was at
Hampstead once--and there was something attractive to me in that
fragment of heath with its wild smell, thrown down ... like a Sicilian
rose from Proserpine's lap when the car drove away, ... into all that
arid civilization, 'laurel-clumps and invisible visible fences,' as
you say!--and the grand, eternal smoke rising up in the distance, with
its witness against nature! People grew severely in jest about cockney
landscape--but is it not true that the trees and grass in the close
neighbourhood of great cities must of necessity excite deeper emotion
than the woods and valleys will, a hundred miles off, where human
creatures ruminate stupidly as the cows do, the 'county families'
es-_chewing_ all men who are not 'landed proprietors,' and the farmers
never looking higher than to the fly on the uppermost turnip-leaf! Do
you know at all what English country-life is, which the English praise
so, and 'moralize upon into a thousand similes,' as that one greatest,
purest, noblest thing in the world--the purely English and excellent
thing? It is to my mind simply and purely abominable, and I would
rather live in a street than be forced to live it out,--that English
country-life; for I don't mean life in the country. The social
exigencies--why, nothing _can_ be so bad--nothing! That is the way by
which Englishmen grow up to top the world in their peculiar line of
respectable absurdities.

Think of my talking so as if I could be vexed with any one of them!
_I!_--On the contrary I wish them all a happy new year to abuse one
another, or visit each of them his nearest neighbour whom he hates,
three times a week, because 'the distance is so convenient,' and give
great dinners in noble rivalship (venison from the Lord Lieutenant
against turbot from London!), and talk popularity and game-law by
turns to the tenantry, and beat down tithes to the rector. This
glorious England of ours; with its peculiar glory of the rural
districts! And _my_ glory of patriotic virtue, who am so happy in
spite of it all, and make a pretence of talking--talking--while I
think the whole time of your letter. I think of your letter--I am no
more a patriot than _that_!

May God bless you, best and dearest! You say things to me which I am
not worthy to listen to for a moment, even if I was deaf dust the next
moment