D.L.R.

The verdant carpet embroidered with little stars of gold and silver—­the short-grown, smooth, and close-woven, but most delicate and elastic fresh sward—­so soothing to the dazzled eye, so welcome to the wearied limbs—­so suggestive of innocent and happy thoughts,—­so refreshing to the freed visitor, long pent up in the smoky city—­is surely no where to be seen in such exquisite perfection as on the broad meadows and softly-swelling hills of England.  And perhaps in no country in the world could pic-nic holiday-makers or playful children with more perfect security of life and health stroll about or rest upon Earth’s richly enamelled floor from sunrise to sunset on a summer’s day.  No Englishman would dare to stretch himself at full length and address himself to sleep upon an Oriental meadow unless he were perfectly indifferent to life itself and could see nothing terrible in the hostility of the deadliest reptiles.  When wading through the long grass and thick jungles of Bengal, he is made to acknowledge the full force of the true and beautiful expression—­“In the midst of life we are in death.”  The British Indian exile on his return home is delighted with the “sweet security” of his native fields.  He may then feel with Wordsworth how

    Dear is the forest frowning o’er his head. 
    And dear the velvet greensward to his tread.

Or he may exclaim in the words of poor Keats—­now slumbering under a foreign turf—­

    Happy is England!  I could be content
    To see no other verdure than her own.

It is a pleasing proof of the fine moral influence of natural scenery that the most ceremonious strangers can hardly be long seated together in the open air on the “velvet greensward” without casting off for a while the cold formalities of artificial life, and becoming as frank and social as ingenuous school-boys.  Nature breathes peace and geniality into almost every human heart.

“John Thelwall,” says Coleridge, “had something very good about him.  We were sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks when I said to him ‘Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!’ ’Nay, Citizen Samuel,’ replied he, ’it is rather a place to make us forget that there is any necessity for treason!’”

Leigh Hunt, who always looks on nature with the eye of a true painter and the imagination of a true poet, has represented with delightful force and vividness some of those accidents of light and shade that diversify an English meadow.

RAIN AND SUNSHINE IN MAY.

“Can any thing be more lovely, than the meadows between the rains of May, when the sun smites them on the sudden like a painter, and they laugh up at him, as if he had lighted a loving cheek!

I speak of a season when the returning threats of cold and the resisting warmth of summer time, make robust mirth in the air; when the winds imitate on a sudden the vehemence of winter; and silver-white clouds are abrupt in their coming down and shadows on the grass chase one another, panting, over the fields, like a pursuit of spirits.  With undulating necks they pant forward, like hounds or the leopard.