The first day or half day ashore is, of course, the most novel and exciting; but who, as Mr. Higginson says, can describe his sensations and emotions this first half day?  It is a page of travel that has not yet been written.  Paradoxical as it may seem, one generally comes out of pickle much fresher than he went in.  The sea has given him an enormous appetite for the land.  Every one of his senses is like a hungry wolf clamorous to be fed.  For my part, I had suddenly emerged from a condition bordering on that of the hibernating animals—­a condition in which I had neither eaten, nor slept, nor thought, nor moved, when I could help it—­into not only a full, but a keen and joyous, possession of my health and faculties.  It was almost a metamorphosis.  I was no longer the clod I had been, but a bird exulting in the earth and air, and in the liberty of motion.  Then to remember it was a new earth and a new sky that I was beholding,—­that it was England, the old mother at last, no longer a faith or a fable, but an actual fact there before my eyes and under my feet,—­why should I not exult?  Go to!  I will be indulged.  Those trees, those fields, that bird darting along the hedge-rows, those men and boys picking blackberries in October, those English flowers by the roadside (stop the carriage while I leap out and pluck them), the homely, domestic looks of things, those houses, those queer vehicles, those thick-coated horses, those big-footed, coarsely clad, clear-skinned men and women, this massive, homely, compact architecture,—­let me have a good look, for this is my first hour in England, and I am drunk with the joy of seeing!  This house-fly even, let me inspect it [Footnote:  The English house-fly actually seemed coarser and more hairy than ours.]; and that swallow skimming along so familiarly,—­is he the same I saw trying to cling to the sails of the vessel the third day out? or is the swallow the swallow the world over?  This grass I certainly have seen before, and this red and white clover, but this daisy and dandelion are not the same; and I have come three thousand miles to see the mullein cultivated in a garden, and christened the velvet plant.

As we sped through the land, the heart of England, toward London, I thought my eyes would never get their fill of the landscape, and that I would lose them out of my head by their eagerness to catch every object as we rushed along!  How they reveled, how they followed the birds and the game, how they glanced ahead on the track—­that marvelous track!—­or shot off over the fields and downs, finding their delight in the streams, the roads, the bridges, the splendid breeds of cattle and sheep in the fields, the superb husbandry, the rich mellow soil, the drainage, the hedges,—­in the inconspicuousness of any given feature, and the mellow tone and homely sincerity of all; now dwelling fondly upon the groups of neatly modeled stacks, then upon the field occupations, the gathering of turnips and cabbages, or the digging of potatoes,—­how I longed to turn up the historic soil, into which had passed the sweat and virtue of so many generations, with my own spade,—­then upon the quaint, old, thatched houses, or the cluster of tiled roofs, then catching at a church spire across a meadow (and it is all meadow), or at the remains of tower or wall overrun with ivy.