It was an excellent standpoint on which to balance Nature and Human Industry; to estimate their separate and joint work upon that vast landscape.  A few centuries ago, perhaps about the time that the Mayflower sighted Plymouth Rock, this valley, now so indescribably beautiful, was almost in the state of nature.  Wolves and wild boars may have been prowling about in the woods and tangled thickets that covered this ridge back for several leagues.  Bushes, bogs and briers, and coarse prairie grass roughened the bottom of this valley; matted heather, furze, broom and clumps of shrubby trees, all those hills and uplands arising in the background to the northward horizon.  This declining sun, and the moon and stars that will soon follow in the pathway of its chariot, like a liveried cortege, shone upon that scene with all the light they will give this day and night.  The rain and dew, and all the genial ministries of the seasons, did their unaided best to make it lovely and beautiful.  The sweetest singing-birds of England came and tried to cheer its solitude with their happy voices.  The summer breezes came with their softest breath, whispering through brake, bush and brier the little speeches of Nature’s life.  The summer bees came and filled all those heather-purpled acres with their industrial lays, and sang a merry song in the door of every wild-flower that gave them the petalled honey of its heart.  All the trained and travelling industrials and all the sweet influences of Nature came and did all they could without man’s help to make this great valley most delightful to the eye.  But the wolves still prowled and howled; the briers grew rough and rank; the grass, coarse and thin; the heathered hills were oozy and cold in their watery beds; the clumpy, shrubby trees wore the same ragged coats of moss; and no feature of the scene mended for the better from year to year.

Then came the great Blind Painter, with his rude, iron pencils, to the help of Nature.  He came with the Axe, Plough and Spade, her mightiest allies.  With these he had driven wild Druidic Paganism back mile by mile from England’s centre; back into her dark fastnesses.  With the Axe, Spade and Plough he chased the foul beasts and barbarisms from the island.  Two centuries long was he in painting this Beautiful Valley.  Nature ground and mixed the colors for him all the while, for he was blind.  He was poor; often cold and hungry, and his children, with blue fingers and pale, silent eyes, sometimes asked for bread in winter he could not give.  He lived in a low cottage, small, damp and dark, and laid him down at night upon a bed of straw.  He could not read; and his thoughts of human life and its hereafter were few and small.  He had no taste for music, and seldom whistled at his work.  He wore a coarse garment, of ghostly pattern, called a smock-frock.  His hat just rounded his head to a more globular and mindless form.  His shoes were as heavy as a horse’s with iron nails.