the dry, dusty, burning, grassless plains of Bundelcund in the hot
season. I told him how once while gasping for breath in a hot verandah
and leaning over the rails I looked down upon the sun-baked ground.

"A change came o'er the spirit of my dream."

I suddenly beheld with all the distinctness of reality the rich, cool,
green, unrivalled meads of England. But the vision soon melted away, and
I was again in exile. I wept like a child. It was like a beautiful
mirage of the desert, or one of those waking dreams of home which have
sometimes driven the long-voyaging seaman to distraction and urged him
by an irresistible impulse to plunge headlong into the ocean.

When I had once more crossed the wide Atlantic--and (not by the
necromancy of imagination but by a longer and more tedious transit)
found myself in an English meadow,--I exclaimed with the poet,

Thou art free
My country! and 'tis joy enough and pride
For one hour's perfect bliss, _to tread the grass
Of England once again_.

I felt my childhood for a time renewed, and was by no means disposed to
second the assertion that

"Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower."

I have never beheld any thing more lovely than scenery
characteristically English; and Goldsmith, who was something of a