see the towers and spires of Cambridge, as of some spiritual city--
the smoke rises over it on still days, hanging like a cloud; to the
east lie the dark pine-woods of Suffolk, to the north an
interminable fen; but not only is it that one sees a vast extent of
sky, with great cloud-battalions crowding up from the south, but
all the colour of the landscape is crowded into a narrow belt to
the eye, which gives it an intensity of emerald hue that I have
seen nowhere else in the world. There is a sense of deep peace
about it all, the herb of the field just rising in its place over
the wide acres; the air is touched with a lazy fragrance, as of
hidden flowers; and there is a sense, too, of silent and remote
lives, of men that glide quietly to and fro in the great pastures,
going quietly about their work in a leisurely calm. In the winter
it is fairer still, if one has a taste for austerity. The trees are
leafless now; and the whole flat is lightly washed with the most
delicate and spare tints, the pasture tinted with the yellowing
bent, the pale stubble, the rich plough-land, all blending into a
subdued colour; and then, as the day declines and the plain is
rimmed with a frosty mist, the smouldering glow of the orange
sunset begins to burn clear on the horizon, the grey laminated
clouds becoming ridged with gold and purple, till the whole fades,
like a shoaling sea, into the purest green, while the cloud-banks
grow black and ominous, and far-off lights twinkle like stars in
solitary farms.

Of the house itself, exteriorly, perhaps the less said the better;
it was built by an earl, to whom the estate belonged, as a
shooting-box. I have often thought that it must have been ordered
from the Army and Navy Stores. It is of yellow brick, blue-slated,
and there has been a pathetic feeling after giving it a meanly