alive amidst the very nature they were wrought into, and of which
they are so completely a part: for there indeed if anywhere, in the
English country, in the days when people cared about such things,
was there a full sympathy between the works of man, and the land
they were made for:- the land is a little land; too much shut up
within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much space for swelling
into hugeness: there are no great wastes overwhelming in their
dreariness, no great solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden
mountain-walls: all is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily
one thing into another: little rivers, little plains; swelling,
speedily-changing uplands, all beset with handsome orderly trees;
little hills, little mountains, netted over with the walls of sheep-
walks: all is little; yet not foolish and blank, but serious
rather, and abundant of meaning for such as choose to seek it: it
is neither prison nor palace, but a decent home.

All which I neither praise nor blame, but say that so it is: some
people praise this homeliness overmuch, as if the land were the very
axle-tree of the world; so do not I, nor any unblinded by pride in
themselves and all that belongs to them: others there are who scorn
it and the tameness of it: not I any the more: though it would
indeed be hard if there were nothing else in the world, no wonders,
no terrors, no unspeakable beauties: yet when we think what a small
part of the world's history, past, present, and to come, is this
land we live in, and how much smaller still in the history of the
arts, and yet how our forefathers clung to it, and with what care
and pains they adorned it, this unromantic, uneventful-looking land
of England, surely by this too our hearts may be touched, and our
hope quickened.