All sounds are softer in England; the surface of things is less hard.  The eye of day and the face of Nature are less bright.  Everything has a mellow, subdued cast.  There is no abruptness in the landscape, no sharp and violent contrasts, no brilliant and striking tints in the foliage.  A soft, pale yellow is all one sees in the way of tints along the borders of the autumn woods.  English apples (very small and inferior, by the way) are not so highly colored as ours.  The blackberries, just ripening in October, are less pungent and acid; and the garden vegetables, such as cabbage, celery, cauliflower, beet, and other root crops, are less rank and fibrous; and I am very sure that the meats also are tenderer and sweeter.  There can be no doubt about the superiority of English mutton; and the tender and succulent grass, and the moist and agreeable climate, must tell upon the beef also.

English coal is all soft coal, and the stone is soft stone.  The foundations of the hills are chalk instead of granite.  The stone with which most of the old churches and cathedrals are built would not endure in our climate half a century; but in Britain the tooth of Time is much blunter, and the hunger of the old man less ravenous, and the ancient architecture stands half a millennium, or until it is slowly worn away by the gentle attrition of the wind and rain.

At Chester, the old Roman wall that surrounds the town, built in the first century and repaired in the ninth, is still standing without a break or a swerve, though in some places the outer face of the wall is worn through.  The Cathedral, and St. John’s Church, in the same town, present to the beholder outlines as jagged and broken as rocks and cliffs; and yet it is only chip by chip, or grain by grain, that ruin approaches.  The timber also lasts an incredibly long time.  Beneath one of the arched ways, in the Chester wall above referred to, I saw timbers that must have been in place five or six hundred years.  The beams in the old houses, also fully exposed to the weather, seem incapable of decay; those dating from Shakespeare’s time being apparently as firm as ever.

I noticed that the characteristic aspect of the clouds in England was different from ours,—­soft, fleecy, vapory, indistinguishable,—­never the firm, compact, sharply, defined, deeply dyed masses and fragments so common in our own sky.  It rains easily but slowly.  The average rainfall of London is less than that of New York, and yet it doubtless rains ten days in the former to one in the latter.  Storms accompanied with thunder are rare; while the crashing, wrenching, explosive thunder-gusts so common with us, deluging the earth and convulsing the heavens, are seldom known.