The weather was glorious.  A cloudless sun shone upon a little sky-crystalled world of beauty, smaller in every dimension than you ever see in America.  And this is a feature of English scenery that will strike the American traveller most impressively at the first glance, whether he looks at it by night or day.  It is not that Nature, in adjusting the symmetries of her scenic structures, nicely apportions the skyscape to the landscape of a country merely for artistic effect.  It is not because the island of Great Britain is so small in circumference that the sky is proportioned to it, as the crystal is to the dial of a watch; that it is so apparently low; that the stars it holds to its moist, blue bosom are so near at midnight, and the sun so large at noon.  It comes, doubtless, from that constant humidity of the atmosphere which distinguishes the climate of England, and gives to both land and sky an aspect which is quite unknown to our great western continent.  An American, after having habituated himself to this aspect, on returning to his own country, will be almost surprised at a feature of its scenery which he never noticed before.  He will be struck at the loftiness of the sky; at the vividness of its blue and gold, the sharp, unsoftened light of the stars, and, as it were, the contracted pupil of the sun’s eye at mid-day.  The sunset glories of our western heavens play upon a ground of rigid blue.  “The Northern Lights,” which, at their winter evening illuminations, seem to have shredded into wavy filaments all the rainbows that have spanned the chambers of the East since the Flood, and to upspring, in mirthful fantasy, to hang their infinitely-tinted tresses to the zenith’s golden diadem of stars—­ even they sport upon the same lofty concave of dewless blue, which looks through and through the lacework and everchanging drapery of their mingled hues in the most witching mazes of their nightly waltz, giving to each a definiteness that our homely Saxon tongue might fit with a name.

But here, on the lower grounds of instructive meditation, is a humbler individuality of the country to notice.  Here is the most sadly abused and melancholy living creature in all England’s animal realm that meets me in the midst of these reflections on things supernal and glorious.  I will let the Northern Lights go, with their gorgeous pantomimes and midnight revelries, and have a moment’s communing with this unfortunate quadruped.  It is called in derision here a “donkey,” but an ass, in a more generous time, when one of his race and size bore upon his back into the Holy City the world’s Saviour and Re-Creator.  Poor, libelled, hopeless beast!  I pity you from my heart’s heart.  How I wish for Sterne’s pen to do you some measure of justice or condolence under this heavy load of opprobrium that bends your back and makes your life so sunless and bitter!  Come here, sir!—­here is a biscuit for you, of the finest wheat; few of your race get such morsels; so, eat it and be thankful.  What ears!  No wonder our friend Patrick called you “the father of all rabbits” at first sight.  No! don’t turn away your head, as if I were going to strike you.