And God knows that the pressure of constant care, and the wolf kept barely at arm's length from the door, do leave little heart for it. O wealthy proprietors of land, you who have so much in your power, try to infuse something of joy and cheerfulness into the lot of your humble neighbours! Read and ponder the essay and the conversation on Recreation, which you will find in the first volume of Friends in Council. And read again, I trust for the hundredth time, the poem from which I quote the lines which follow. Let me say here, that I verily believe some of my readers will not know the source whence I draw these lines. More is the shame: but longer experience of life is giving me a deep conviction of the astonishing ignorance of my fellow-creatures. I shall not tell them. They shall have the mortification of asking their friends the question. Only let it be added, that the poem where the passage stands, contains others more sweet and touching by far, so sweet and touching that in all the range of English poetry they have never been surpassed.

How often have I blest the coming day,
When toil remitting, lent its turn to play;
And all the village train, from labour free,
Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree,
While many a pastime circled in the shade,
The young contending as the old surveyed;
And many a gambol frolick'd o'er the ground,
And sleights of art and feats of strength went round
And still, as each repeated pleasure tired,

Succeeding sports the mirthful band inspired:
The dancing pair that simply sought renown,

By holding out to tire each other down,

The swain mistrustless of his smutted face,
While secret laughter titter'd round the place,—

The bashful virgin's sidelong looks of love,

The matron's glance that would those looks reprove.

These were thy charms, sweet village, sports like these,
With sweet succession. taught even toil to please.

CHAPTER V.

CONCERNING COUNTRY HOUSES AND COUNTRY

LIFE.

NCE upon a time, I lived in the very heart of London: absolutely in Threadneedlestreet. I lived in the house of a near relation, an opulent lawyer, who, after he had become a rich man, chose still to dwell in the locality where he had made his fortune. All around, for miles in every direction, there were nothing but piles of houses - streets and lanes of dingy brick houses everywhere. Not a vestige of nature could be seen, except in the sky above, in the stunted vegetation of a few little City gardens, and in the foul and discoloured river. The very

surface of the earth, for yards in depth, was the work of generations that had lived and died centuries before amid the narrow lanes of the ancient city. There, for months together, I, a boy without youth, under the care of one who, though substantially kind, had not a vestige of sympathy with nature or with home affections, wearily counted the days which were to pass before the yearly visit to a home far away. I cannot by any words express the thirst and craving which I then felt for green fields and trees. The very name of the country was like music in my ear; and when I heard any man say he was going down to the country, how I envied him! It was not so bad in winter: though even then the clear frosty

days called up many pictures of cheerful winter skies away from those weary streets; - of boughs bending beneath the quiet snow; - of the beautiful fretwork of the frost upon the hedges and the grass, and of its exhilarating crispness in the air; - of the stretches of the frozen river, seen through the leafless boughs, covered with happy groups whose merry faces were like a good-natured defiance of the wintry weather. But when the spring revival began to make itself felt; when the days began to lengthen, and the poor shrubs in the squares to bud, and when there was that accession of light during the day which is so cheerful after the winter gloom, then the longing for the country grew painfully strong, like the seaman's calenture, or the Swiss exile's yearning for his native hills. When I knew that the hawthorn hedges were white, and the fruit-trees laden with blossoms, how I longed to be among them! I well remember the kindly feeling I bore to a dingy hostelry in a narrow line off Cheapside, for the sake of its name. It was called Blossom's Inn; and many a time I turned out of my way, and stood looking up at its sign, with eyes that saw a very different scene from the blackened walls. I remember how I used to rise at early morning, and take long walks in whatever direction I thought it possible that a glimpse of anything like the country could be seen: there were some trees,

away up the New North-road and some little plots of grass. There was something at once pleasing and sad about those curious little gardens which still exist here and there in the heart of London, consisting generally of a plot of grass of a dozen yards in length and breadth, surrounded by a walk of yellow gravel, stared at on every side by the back windows of tall brick houses, and containing a few little trees, whose

leaves in spring look so strangely fresh against the smokeblackened branches. I do not wish to be egotistical; and I describe all these feelings merely because I believe that honestly to tell exactly what one has himself felt, is the true way to describe the common feelings of most people in like circumstances. I dare say that if any youth of sixteen, pent up in Threadneedle-street now, should happen to read what I have written, he will understand it all with a hearty sympathy which I shall not succeed in exciting in the minds of many of my readers. But such a one will know, thoroughly and completely, what pictures rise before the mind's eye of one pent up amid miles of brick walls and stone pavements, at the mention of the country, of trees, hedge-rows, fields, quiet lanes and footpaths, and simple rustic people.

I wish to assure the man, shut up in a great city, that he has compensations and advantages of which he probably does not think. The keenness of his relish for country scenes, the intensity of his enjoyment of his occasional glimpses of them, counterbalance in a great degree the fact that his glimpses of them are but few. I live in the country now, and have done so for several years. It is a beautiful district of country too, and amid a quiet and simple population; yet I must confess that my youthful notion of rural bliss is a good deal abated. 'Use lessens marvel, it is said:' one cannot be always in raptures about what one sees every hour of every day. It is the man in populous cities pent, who knows the value of green fields. It is your cockney (I mean your educated Londoner) who reads Bracebridge Hall with the keenest delight, and luxuriates in the thought of country scenes, country houses, country life. He has not come close enough to discern the flaws and blemishes

of the picture; and he has not learned by experience that in whatever scenes led, human life is always much the same thing. I have long since found that the country, in this nineteenth century, is by no means a scene of Arcadian innocence ; that its apparent simplicity is sometimes dogged stupidity; that men lie and cheat in the country just as much as in the town, and that the country has even more of mischievous tittle-tattle; that sorrow and care and anxiety may quite well live in Elizabethan cottages grown over with honeysuckle and jasmine, and that very sad eyes may look forth from windows round which roses twine. The poets (town poets, no doubt) were drawing upon their imagination, when they told how Virtue lives in Irwan's Vale,' and how with peace and plenty there, lives the happy villager.' Virtue and religion are plants of difficult growth, even in the country; and notwithstanding Cowper's exquisite poem, I am not sure that 'The calm retreat, the silent shade, with prayer and praise agree,' better than the closet into which the weary man may enter, in the quiet evening, after the business and bustle of the town. People may pace up and down a country lane, between fragrant hedges of blossoming hawthorn, and tear their neighbours' characters to very shreds. And the eye, that is sharp to see the minutest object on the hillside far away, may be blind to the beauty which is spread over all the landscape. Nor is the country always in the trim holiday dress which delights the summer wayfarer. Country roads are not all nicely gravelled walks between edges of clipped box, or through velvety turf, shaven by weekly mowings. There are many days on which the country looks, to any one without a most decided taste for it, extremely bleak and drear. The roads are pud