call density of feature. There are no waste details; everything in the
landscape is something particular--has a history, has played a part, has a
value to the imagination. It is a country of hills and blue undulations,
and, though none of the hills are high, all of them are
interesting--interesting as such things are interesting in an old, small
country, by a kind of exquisite modulation, something suggesting that
outline and coloring have been retouched and refined, as it were, by the
hand of Time. Independently of its castles and abbeys, the definite relics
of the ages, such a landscape seems historic. It has human relations, and
it is intimately conscious of them. That little speech about the
loveliness of his county, or of his own part of his county, was made to me
by my companion as we walked up the grassy slope of a hill, or "edge," as
it is called there, from the crests of which we seemed in an instant to
look away over half of England. Certainly I should have grown fond of such
a view as that. The "edge" plunged down suddenly, as if the corresponding
slope on the other side had been excavated, and one might follow the long
ridge for the space of an afternoon's walk with this vast, charming
prospect before one's eyes. Looking across an English county into the next
but one is a very pretty entertainment, the county seeming by no means so
small as might be supposed. How can a county seem small in which, from such
a vantage-point as the one I speak of, you see, as a darker patch across
the lighter green, the twelve thousand acres of Lord So-and-So's woods?
Beyond these are blue undulations of varying tone, and then another
bosky-looking spot, which you learn to be about the same amount of manorial
umbrage belonging to Lord Some-One-Else. And to right and left of these, in
shaded stretches, lie other estates of equal consequence. It was therefore
not the smallness but the vastness of the country that struck me, and I was
not at all in the mood of a certain American who once, in my hearing, burst
out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my
interlocutor often saw Mr. B----. "Oh no," the answer had been, "we never