Giddy people may think the life I lead here staid and humdrum, but they
are mistaken. It is true, I hear no concerts, save those in which the
thrushes are performers in the spring mornings. I see no pictures,
save those painted on the wide sky-canvas with the colours of sunrise
and sunset. I attend neither rout nor ball; I have no deeper
dissipation than the tea-table; I hear no more exciting scandal than
quiet village gossip. Yet I enjoy my concerts more than I would the
great London ones. I like the pictures I see, and think them better
painted, too, than those which adorn the walls of the Royal Academy;
and the village gossip is more after my turn of mind than the scandals
that convulse the clubs. It is wonderful how the whole world reflects
itself in the simple village life. The people around me are full of
their own affairs and interests; were they of imperial magnitude, they
could not be excited more strongly. Farmer Worthy is anxious about the
next market; the likelihood of a fall in the price of butter and eggs
hardly allows him to sleep o' nights. The village doctor--happily we
have only one--skirrs hither and thither in his gig, as if man could
neither die nor be born without his assistance. He is continually
standing on the confines of existence, welcoming the new-comer, bidding
farewell to the goer-away. And the robustious fellow who sits at the
head of the table when the Jolly Swillers meet at the Blue Lion on
Wednesday evenings is a great politician, sound of lung metal, and
wields the village in the taproom, as my Lord Palmerston wields the
nation in the House. His listeners think him a wiser personage than
the Premier, and he is inclined to lean to that opinion himself. I
find everything here that other men find in the big world. London is
but a magnified Dreamthorp.

And just as the Rev. Mr. White took note of the ongoings of the seasons
in and around Hampshire Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks in