and woods of noble beech.  Here I am upon a spur of the Cotswolds, and before me spreads the wide vale of Evesham, with its ripening crops, its fruiting orchards, watered by sacred Avon.  Beyond, softly blue, the hills of Malvern.  On the branch hard by warbles a little bird, glad in his leafy solitude.  A rabbit jumps through the fern.  There sounds the laugh of a woodpecker from the copse in yonder hollow. . . .

In the falling of a summer night, I walk by Ullswater.  The sky is still warm with the afterglow of sunset, a dusky crimson smouldering above the dark mountain line.  Below me spreads a long reach of the lake, steel-grey between its dim colourless shores.  In the profound stillness, the trotting of a horse beyond the water sounds strangely near; it serves only to make more sensible the repose of Nature in this her sanctuary.  I feel a solitude unutterable, yet nothing akin to desolation; the heart of the land I love seems to beat in the silent night gathering around me; amid things eternal, I touch the familiar and the kindly earth.  Moving, I step softly, as though my footfall were an irreverence.  A turn in the road, and there is wafted to me a faint perfume, that of meadow-sweet.  Then I see a light glimmering in the farmhouse window—­a little ray against the blackness of the great hillside, below which the water sleeps. . . .

A pathway leads me by the winding of the river Ouse.  Far on every side stretches a homely landscape, tilth and pasture, hedgerow and clustered trees, to where the sky rests upon the gentle hills.  Slow, silent, the river lapses between its daisied banks, its grey-green osier beds.  Yonder is the little town of St. Neots.  In all England no simpler bit of rural scenery; in all the world nothing of its kind more beautiful.  Cattle are lowing amid the rich meadows.  Here one may loiter and dream in utter restfulness, whilst the great white clouds mirror themselves in the water as they pass above. . . .

I am walking upon the South Downs.  In the valleys, the sun lies hot, but here sings a breeze which freshens the forehead and fills the heart with gladness.  My foot upon the short, soft turf has an unwearied lightness; I feel capable of walking on and on, even to that farthest horizon where the white cloud casts its floating shadow.  Below me, but far off, is the summer sea, still, silent, its ever-changing blue and green dimmed at the long limit with luminous noontide mist.  Inland spreads the undulant vastness of the sheep-spotted downs, beyond them the tillage and the woods of Sussex weald, coloured like to the pure sky above them, but in deeper tint.  Near by, all but hidden among trees in yon lovely hollow, lies an old, old hamlet, its brown roofs decked with golden lichen; I see the low church-tower, and the little graveyard about it.  Meanwhile, high in the heaven, a lark is singing.  It descends; it drops to its nest, and I could dream that half the happiness of its exultant song was love of England. . . .