It is pleasanter to spend the summer days in an inland country
place, than by the seaside. The sea is too glaring in sunshiny
weather; the prospects are too extensive. It wearies eyes worn
by much writing and reading to look at distant hills across the
water. The true locality in which to enjoy the summer time is a
richly-wooded country, where you have hedges and hedge-rows, and
clumps of trees everywhere: where objects for the most part are
near to you; and, above all, are green. It is pleasant to live in
a district where the roads are not great broad highways, in whose
centre you feel as if you were condemned to traverse a strip of
arid desert stretching through the landscape; and where any carriage
short of a four-in-hand looks so insignificantly small. Give me
country lanes: so narrow that their glare does not pain the eye upon
even the sunniest day: so narrow that the eye without an effort
takes in the green hedges and fields on either side as you drive
or walk along.

And now, looking away mentally from this cool shady verdure amid
which we are sitting, let us think of summer days elsewhere. Let
us think of them listlessly, that we may the more enjoy the quiet
here: as a child on a frosty winter night, snug in his little bed,
puts out a foot for a moment into the chilly expanse of sheet that
stretches away from the warm nest in which he lies, and then pulls
it swiftly back again, enjoying the cozy warmth the more for this
little reminder of the bitter chill. Here, where the air is cool,
pure, and soft, let us think of a hoarding round some old house
which the labourers are pulling down, amid clouds of the white,
blinding, parching dust of lime, on a sultry summer day. I can hardly
think of any human position as worse, if not intended directly as
a position of torture. I picture, too, a crowded wharf on a river