I should not have spoken of it as "made," for, when it is most
characteristic, an English lane has no suggestion of ever having been
man-made like other roads. It seems as much a natural feature as the
woods or meadows through which it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey,
when it runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under green boughs,
it seems more like an old river-bed than a road, whose sides nature has
tapestried with ferns and flowers. Of all roads in the world it is the
dreamer's road, luring on the wayfarer with perpetual romantic promise
and surprise, winding on and on, one can well believe, into the very
heart of fairy-land. Everything beautiful seems to be waiting for us
somewhere in the turnings of an English lane.

Had I sat down to write of the English countryside two years ago, I
should have done so with a certain amount of cautious skepticism. I
should have said to myself: "You have not visited England for over ten
years. Are you quite sure that your impressions of its natural beauties
are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and
distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail
to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of
anticipatory disillusion.

After all, I had said to myself, is not the English countryside the work
of the English poets--the English spring, the English wild flowers, the
English lark, the English nightingale, and so forth? That longing of
Browning expressed in the lines,

O to be in England
Now that April's there!

was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier, thinking "Home