Читать книгу Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (Vol.1&2). Letters & Travel Sketches from Europe онлайн

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Away we go through Lancashire, wide awake, looking out on all sides for any signs of antiquity. In being thus whirled through English scenery, I became conscious of a new understanding of the spirit and phraseology of English poetry. There are many phrases and expressions with which we have been familiar from childhood, and which, we suppose, in a kind of indefinite way, we understand, which, after all, when we come on English ground, start into a new significance: take, for instance, these lines from L'Allegro:—

"Sometimes walking, not unseen,

By hedge-row elms on hillocks green.

* * * *

Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures,

While the landscape round it measures;

Russet lawns and fallows gray,

Where the nibbling flocks do stray;

Mountains, on whose barren breast

The laboring clouds do often rest;

Meadows trim with daisies pied,

Shallow brooks and livers wide:

Towers and battlements it sees

Bosom'd high in tufted trees."

Now, these hedge-row elms. I had never even asked myself what they were till I saw them; but you know, as I said in a former letter, the hedges are not all of them carefully cut; in fact many of them are only irregular rows of bushes, where, although the hawthorn is the staple element, yet firs, and brambles, and many other interlopers put in their claim, and they all grow up together in a kind of straggling unity; and in the hedges trees are often set out, particularly elms, and have a very pleasing effect.