sunshine behind us. Cowper says, with that boldness of expressing
in poetry the commonest and simplest feelings, which is perhaps one
great secret of his originality,

'Scenes must be beautiful, which, daily seen,
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.'

Every day I walk up this hill--every day I pause at the top to
admire the broad winding road with the green waste on each side,
uniting it with the thickly timbered hedgerows; the two pretty
cottages at unequal distances, placed so as to mark the bends; the
village beyond, with its mass of roofs and clustered chimneys
peeping through the trees; and the rich distance, where cottages,
mansions, churches, towns, seem embowered in some wide forest, and
shut in by blue shadowy hills. Every day I admire this most
beautiful landscape; yet never did it seem to me so fine or so
glowing as now. All the tints of the glorious autumn, orange,
tawny, yellow, red, are poured in profusion among the bright greens
of the meadows and turnip fields, till the eyes are satiated with
colour; and then before us we have the common with its picturesque
roughness of surface tufted with cottages, dappled with water,
edging off on one side into fields and farms and orchards, and
terminated on the other by the princely oak avenue. What a richness
and variety the wild broken ground gives to the luxuriant
cultivation of the rest of the landscape! Cowper has described it
for me. How perpetually, as we walk in the country, his vivid
pictures recur to the memory! Here is his common and mine!

'The common overgrown with fern, and rough