Page:Over fen and wold; (IA overfenwold00hissiala).pdf/138

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murmuring streams, with winding roads and inviting footpaths leading everywhere. Here and there, too, we caught pleasant peeps of the gray gable-ends of ancient homes amidst the woods, the rest being drowned in foliage. The scenery was thoroughly, intensely English. Had you by some magic been suddenly transplanted there from some distant region of the world, you would have had no hesitation in saying that you were in England, for no other scenery in the world is quite the same as what we looked upon. Here again let an American give his opinion. I find Mark Twain, in his More Tramps Abroad, thus writes: "After all, in the matter of certain physical patent rights, there is only one England. Now that I have sampled the globe, I am not in doubt. There is the beauty of Switzerland, and it is repeated in the glaciers and snowy ranges of many parts of the earth; there is the beauty of the fiord, and it is repeated in New Zealand and Alaska; there is the beauty of Hawaii, and it is repeated in ten thousand islands of the Southern Seas; there is the beauty of the prairie and the plain, and it is repeated here and there in the earth. Each of these is worshipful, each is perfect in its way, yet holds no monopoly of its beauty; but that beauty which is England is alone—it has no duplicate. It is made up of very simple details—just grass, and trees, and shrubs, and roads, and hedges, and gardens, and houses, and churches, and castles, and here and there a ruin, and over it all a mellow dreamland of history. But its beauty is incomparable, and all its own."

It is not always the grandest scenery that affords