I recollect that in one of my visits to England, (in 1827) I attempted to describe the scenery of India to William Hazlitt—­not the living son but the dead father.  Would that he were still in the land of the living by the side of his friend Leigh Hunt, who has been pensioned by the Government for his support of that cause for which they were both so bitterly persecuted by the ruling powers in days gone by.  I flattered myself into the belief that Hazlitt was interested in some of my descriptions of Oriental scenes.  What moved him most was an account of the dry, dusty, burning, grassless plains of Bundelcund in the hot season.  I told him how once while gasping for breath in a hot verandah and leaning over the rails I looked down upon the sun-baked ground.

    “A change came o’er the spirit of my dream.”

I suddenly beheld with all the distinctness of reality the rich, cool, green, unrivalled meads of England.  But the vision soon melted away, and I was again in exile.  I wept like a child.  It was like a beautiful mirage of the desert, or one of those waking dreams of home which have sometimes driven the long-voyaging seaman to distraction and urged him by an irresistible impulse to plunge headlong into the ocean.

When I had once more crossed the wide Atlantic—­and (not by the necromancy of imagination but by a longer and more tedious transit) found myself in an English meadow,—­I exclaimed with the poet,

                                Thou art free
    My country! and ’tis joy enough and pride
    For one hour’s perfect bliss, to tread the grass
    Of England once again.

I felt my childhood for a time renewed, and was by no means disposed to second the assertion that

    “Nothing can bring back the hour
    Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.”

I have never beheld any thing more lovely than scenery characteristically English; and Goldsmith, who was something of a traveller, and had gazed on several beautiful countries, was justified in speaking with such affectionate admiration of our still more beautiful England,

    Where lawns extend that scorn Arcadian pride.

It is impossible to put into any form of words the faintest representation of that delightful summer feeling which, is excited in fine weather by the sight of the mossy turf of our country.  It is sweet indeed to go,

Musing through the lawny vale: 

alluded to by Warton, or over Milton’s “level downs,” or to climb up Thomson’s

                            Stupendous rocks
    That from the sun-redoubling valley lift
    Cool to the middle air their lawny tops.

It gives the Anglo-Indian Exile the heart-ache to think of these ramblings over English scenes.

ENGLAND.