entrance of Bushey Park, and after we had dined we lounged along
into the celebrated avenue of horse-chestnuts. There is a rare
emotion, familiar to every intelligent traveller, in which the
mind seems to swallow the sum total of its impressions at a gulp.
You take in the whole place, whatever it be. You feel England,
you feel Italy, and the sensation involves for the moment a kind
of thrill. I had known it from time to time in Italy and had
opened my soul to it as to the spirit of the Lord. Since my
landing in England I had been waiting for it to arrive. A bottle
of tolerable Burgundy, at dinner, had perhaps unlocked to it the
gates of sense; it arrived now with irresistible force. Just the
scene around me was the England of one's early reveries. Over
against us, amid the ripeness of its gardens, the dark red
residence, with its formal facings and its vacant windows, seemed
to make the past definite and massive; the little village,
nestling between park and palace, around a patch of turfy common,
with its taverns of figurative names, its ivy-towered church, its
mossy roofs, looked like the property of a feudal lord. It was in
this dark composite light that I had read the British classics;
it was this mild moist air that had blown from the pages of the
poets; while I seemed to feel the buried generations in the dense
and elastic sod. And that I must have testified in some form or
other to what I have called my thrill I gather, remembering it,
from a remark of my companion's.

"You've the advantage over me in coming to all this with an
educated eye. You already know what old things can be. I've never
known it but by report. I've always fancied I should like it. In
a small way at home, of course, I did try to stand by my idea of
it. I must be a conservative by nature. People at home used to