I should not have spoken of it as “made,” for, when it is most characteristic, an English lane has no suggestion of ever having been man-made like other roads.  It seems as much a natural feature as the woods or meadows through which it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey, when it runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under green boughs, it seems more like an old river-bed than a road, whose sides nature has tapestried with ferns and flowers.  Of all roads in the world it is the dreamer’s road, luring on the wayfarer with perpetual romantic promise and surprise, winding on and on, one can well believe, into the very heart of fairy-land.  Everything beautiful seems to be waiting for us somewhere in the turnings of an English lane.

Had I sat down to write of the English countryside two years ago, I should have done so with a certain amount of cautious skepticism.  I should have said to myself:  “You have not visited England for over ten years.  Are you quite sure that your impressions of its natural beauties are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory?  Are not time and distance lending their proverbial enchantment?” In fact, as I set sail to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of anticipatory disillusion.

After all, I had said to myself, is not the English countryside the work of the English poets—­the English spring, the English wild flowers, the English lark, the English nightingale, and so forth?  That longing of Browning expressed in the lines,

          O to be in England
          Now that April’s there!

was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier, thinking “Home Thoughts, from Abroad”; and are Herrick and Wordsworth quite to be trusted on the subject of daffodils?

Well, I am glad to have to own that my revisiting my native land resulted in an agreeable disappointment.  With a critical American eye, jealously on my guard against sentimental superstition, I surveyed the English landscape and examined its various vaunted beauties and fascinations, as though making their acquaintance for the first time.  No, my youthful raptures had not been at fault, and the poets were once more justified.  The poets are seldom far wrong.  If they see anything, it is usually there.  If we cannot see it, too, it is the fault of our eyes.

Take the English hawthorn, for instance.  As its fragrance is wafted to you from the bushes where it hangs like the fairest of white linen, you will hardly, I think, quarrel with its praises.  Yet, though it is, if I am not mistaken, of rare occurrence in America, it is not absolutely necessary to go to England for the hawthorn.  Any one who cares to go a-Maying along the banks of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of Peekskill, will find it there.  But for the primrose and the cowslip you must cross the sea; and, if you come upon such a wood as I strayed into, my last visit, you will count it worth the trip.