There is much reason to fear that the hedge-trees will, in the end, meet with a worse fate still.  Practical farmers are beginning to look upon them with an evil eye—­an eye sharp and severe with pecuniary speculation; that looks at an oak or elm with no artist’s reverence; that darts a hard, dry, timber-estimating glance at the trunk and branches; that looks at the circumference of its cold shadow on the earth beneath, not at the grand contour and glorious leafage of its boughs above.  The farmer who was taking us over his large and highly-cultivated fields, was a man of wide intelligence, of excellent tastes, and the means wherewithal to give them free scope and play.  His library would have satisfied the ambition of a student of history or belles-lettres.  His gardens, lawn, shrubbery, and flowers would grace the mansion of an independent gentleman.  He had an eye to the picturesque as well as practical.  But I could not but notice, as significant of the tendency to which I have referred, that, on passing a large, outbranching oak standing in the boundary of two fields, he remarked that the detriment of its shadow could not have been less than ten shillings a year for half a century.  As we proceeded from field to field, he recurred to the same subject by calling our attention to the circumference of the shadow cast on the best land of the farm by a thrifty, luxuriant ash, not more than a foot in diameter at the butt.  Up to the broad rim of its shade, the wheat on each side of the hedge was thick, heavyheaded and tall, but within the cool and sunless circle the grain and grass were so pale and sickly that the bare earth would have been relief to a farmer’s eye.

The three great, distinctive graces of an English landscape are the hawthorn hedges, the hedge-row trees, and the everlasting and unapproachable greenness of the grass-fields they surround and embellish.  In these beautiful features, England surpasses all other countries in the world.  These make the peculiar charm of her rural scenery to a traveller from abroad.  These are the salient lineaments of Motherland’s face which the memories of myriads she has sent to people countries beyond the sea cling to with such fondness; memories that are transmitted from generation to generation; which no political revolutions nor severances affect; which are handed down in the unwritten legends of family life in the New World, as well as in the warp and woof of American literature and history.  Will the utilitarian and unsparing science of these latter days, or of the days to come, shear away these beautiful tresses, and leave the brow and temples of the Old Country they have graced bare and brown under the bald and burning sun of material economy?  It is not an idle question, nor too early to ask it.  It is a question which will interest more millions of the English race on the American continent than these home-islands will ever contain.  There are influences at work which tend to this unhappy issue.  Some of these have been already indicated, and others more powerful still may be mentioned.