An
advertisement of lodgings to let was put up on this cottage.
I question whether any part of the world looks so beautiful as England--
this part of England, at least--on a fine summer morning. It makes one
think the more cheerfully of human life to see such a bright universal
verdure; such sweet, rural, peaceful, flower-bordered cottages,--not
cottages of gentility, but dwellings of the laboring poor; such nice
villas along the roadside, so tastefully contrived for comfort and
beauty, and adorned more and more, year after year, with the care and
after-thought of people who mean to live in them a great while, and feel
as if their children might live in them also, and so they plant trees to
overshadow their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful vines up against
their walls, and thus live for the future in another sense than we
Americans do. And the climate helps them out, and makes everything
moist, and green, and full of tender life, instead of dry and arid, as
human life and vegetable life is so apt to be with us. Certainly,
England can present a more attractive face than we can; even in its
humbler modes of life, to say nothing of the beautiful lives that might
be led, one would think, by the higher classes, whose gateways, with
broad, smooth gravelled drives leading through them, one sees every mile
or two along the road, winding into some proud seclusion. All this is
passing away, and society most assume new relations; but there is no harm
in believing that there has been something very good in English life,--
good for all classes while the world was in a state out of which these
forms naturally grew.
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