The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon
diffused a degree of taste and elegance in rural economy that descends
to the lowest class. The very laborer, with his thatched cottage and
narrow slip of ground, attends to their embellishment. The trim hedge,
the grass-plot before the door, the little flower-bed bordered with snug
box, the woodbine trained up against the wall, and hanging its blossoms
about the lattice; the pot of flowers in the window; the holly,
providently planted about the house, to cheat winter of its dreariness,
and to throw in a semblance of green summer to cheer the fireside; all
these bespeak the influence of taste, flowing down from high sources,
and pervading the lowest levels of the public mind. If ever Love, as
poets sing, delights to visit a cottage, it must be the cottage of an
English peasant.
The fondness for rural life among the higher classes of the English has
had a great and salutary effect upon the national character. I do not
know a finer race of men than the English gentlemen. Instead of the
softness and effeminacy which characterize the men of rank in most
countries, they exhibit a union of elegance and strength, a robustness
of frame and freshness of complexion, which I am inclined to attribute
to their living so much in the open air, and pursuing so eagerly the
invigorating recreations of the country. The hardy exercises produce
also a healthful tone of mind and spirits, and a manliness and
simplicity of manners, which even the follies and dissipations of the
town cannot easily pervert, and can never entirely destroy. In the
country, too, the different orders of society seem to approach more
freely, to be more disposed to blend and operate favorably upon each
other. The distinctions between them do not appear to be so marked
and impassable as in the cities. The manner in which property has been
distributed into small estates and farms has established a regular
gradation from the noblemen, through the classes of gentry, small landed
proprietors, and substantial farmers, down to the laboring peasantry;
and while it has thus banded the extremes of society together, has
infused into each intermediate rank a spirit of independence. This, it
must be confessed, is not so universally the case at present as it was
formerly; the larger estates having, in late years of distress, absorbed
the smaller, and, in some parts of the country, almost annihilated the
sturdy race of small farmers. These, however, I believe, are but casual
breaks in the general system I have mentioned.
In rural occupation, there is nothing mean and debasing. It leads a man
forth among scenes of natural grandeur and beauty; it leaves him to the
workings of his own mind, operated upon by the purest and most elevating
of external influences. Such a man may be simple and rough, but he
cannot be vulgar. The man of refinement, therefore, finds nothing
revolting in an intercourse with the lower orders in rural life, as he
does when he casually mingles with the lower orders of cities. He lays
aside his distance and reserve, and is glad to waive the distinctions of
rank, and to enter into the honest, heartfelt enjoyments of common life.
Indeed, the very amusements of the country bring, men more and more
together; and the sound hound and horn blend all feelings into harmony.
I believe this is one great reason why the nobility and gentry are more
popular among the inferior orders in England than they are in any other
country; and why the latter have endured so many excessive pressures and
extremities, without repining more generally at the unequal distribution
of fortune and privilege.
To this mingling of cultivated and rustic society may also be attributed
the rural feeling that runs through British literature; the frequent
use of illustrations from rural life; those incomparable descriptions of
Nature, that abound in the British poets--that have continued down from
“The Flower and the Leaf,” of Chaucer, and have brought into our closets
all the freshness and fragrance of the dewy landscape. The pastoral
writers of other countries appear as if they had paid Nature an
occasional visit, and become acquainted with her general charms; but the
British poets have lived and revelled with her--they have wooed her in
her most secret haunts--they have watched her minutest caprices. A
spray could not tremble in the breeze--a leaf could not rustle to the
ground--a diamond drop could not patter in the stream--a fragrance could
not exhale from the humble violet, nor a daisy unfold its crimson
tints to the morning, but it has been noticed by these impassioned and
delicate observers, and wrought up into some beautiful morality.
The effect of this devotion of elegant minds to rural occupations has
been wonderful on the face of the country. A great part of the island
is rather level, and would be monotonous, were it not for the charms
of culture; but it is studded and gemmed, as it were, with castles and
palaces, and embroidered with parks and gardens. It does not abound in
grand and sublime prospects, but rather in little home scenes of rural
repose and sheltered quiet. Every antique farm-house and moss-grown
cottage is a picture; and as the roads are continually winding, and
the view is shut in by groves and hedges, the eye is delighted by a
continual succession of small landscapes of captivating loveliness.
The great charm, however, of English scenery, is the moral feeling that
seems to pervade it. It is associated in the mind with ideas of order,
of quiet, of sober well-established principles, of hoary usage and
reverend custom. Every thing seems to be the growth of ages of regular
and peaceful existence. The old church of remote architecture, with its
low, massive portal; its Gothic tower; its windows rich with tracery
and painted glass, in scrupulous preservation; its stately monuments of
warriors and worthies of the olden time, ancestors of the present lords
of the soil; its tombstones, recording successive generations of sturdy
yeomanry, whose progeny still plough the same fields, and kneel at the
same altar;--the parsonage, a quaint irregular pile, partly
antiquated, but repaired and altered in the tastes of various ages and
occupants;--the stile and foot-path leading from the churchyard, across
pleasant fields, and along shady hedgerows, according to an immemorial
right of way;--the neighboring village, with its venerable cottages,
its public green sheltered by trees, under which the forefathers of the
present race have sported;--the antique family mansion, standing apart
in some little rural domain, but looking down with a protecting air on
the surrounding scene; all these common features of English landscape
evince a calm and settled security, a hereditary transmission of
homebred virtues and local attachments, that speak deeply and touchingly
for the moral character of the nation.
It is a pleasing sight, of a Sunday morning, when the bell is sending
its sober melody across the quiet fields, to behold the peasantry in
their best finery, with ruddy faces, and modest cheerfulness, thronging
tranquilly along the green lanes to church; but it is still more
pleasing to see them in the evenings, gathering about their cottage
doors, and appearing to exult in the humble comforts and embellishments
which their own hands have spread around them.
It is this sweet home-feeling, this settled repose of affection in the
domestic scene, that is, after all, the parent of the steadiest virtues
and purest enjoyments; and I cannot close these desultory remarks
better, than by quoting the words of a modern English poet, who has
depicted it with remarkable felicity:
Through each gradation, from the castled hall,
The city dome, the villa crowned with shade,
But chief from modest mansions numberless,
In town or hamlet, shelt’ring middle life,
Down to the cottaged vale, and straw-roof’d shed;
This western isle has long been famed for scenes
Where bliss domestic finds a dwelling-place;
Domestic bliss, that, like a harmless dove,
(Honor and sweet endearment keeping guard,)
Can centre in a little quiet nest
All that desire would fly for through the earth;
That can, the world eluding, be itself
A world enjoyed; that wants no witnesses
But its own sharers, and approving Heaven;
That, like a flower deep hid in rock cleft,
Smiles, though ‘t is looking only at the sky.*
* From a poem on the death of the Princess Charlotte, by the
Reverend Rann Kennedy, A.M.
THE BROKEN HEART.
I never heard
Of any true affection, but ‘t was nipt
With care, that, like the caterpillar, eats
The leaves of the spring’s sweetest book, the rose.
MIDDLETON.
IT is a common practice with those who have outlived the susceptibility
of early feeling, or have been brought up in the gay heartlessness of
dissipated life, to laugh at all love stories, and to treat the tales
of romantic passion as mere fictions of novelists and poets. My
observations on human nature have induced me to think otherwise. They
have convinced me that, however the surface of the character may be
chilled and frozen by the cares of the world, or cultivated into mere
smiles by the arts of society, still there are dormant fires lurking
in the depths of the coldest bosom, which, when once enkindled, become
impetuous, and are sometimes desolating in their effects. Indeed, I am
a true believer in the blind deity, and go to the full extent of his
doctrines. Shall I confess it?--I believe in broken hearts, and the
possibility of dying of disappointed love! I do not, however, consider
it a malady often fatal to my own sex; but I firmly believe that it
withers down many a lovely woman into an early grave.
Man is the creature of interest and ambition. His nature leads him forth
into the struggle and bustle of the world. Love is but the embellishment
of his early life, or a song piped in the intervals of the acts. He
seeks for fame, for fortune for space in the world’s thought, and
dominion over his fellow-men. But a woman’s whole life is a history of
the affections. The heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives
for empire--it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She
sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul in
the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless--for
it is a bankruptcy of the heart.
To a man, the disappointment of love may occasion some bitter pangs;
it wounds some feelings of tenderness--it blasts some prospects of
felicity; but he is an active being--he may dissipate his thoughts in
the whirl of varied occupation, or may plunge into the tide of pleasure;
or, if the scene of disappointment be too full of painful associations,
he can shift his abode at will, and taking, as it were, the wings of the
morning, can “fly to the uttermost parts of the earth, and be at rest.”
But woman’s is comparatively a fixed, a secluded, and meditative life.
She is more the companion of her own thoughts and feelings; and if they
are turned to ministers of sorrow, where shall she look for consolation?
Her lot is to be wooed and won; and if unhappy in her love, her heart
is like some fortress that has been captured, and sacked, and abandoned,
and left desolate.
How many bright eyes grow dim--how many soft cheeks grow pale--how many
lovely forms fade away into the tomb, and none can tell the cause that
blighted their loveliness! As the dove will clasp its wings to its side,
and cover and conceal the arrow that is preying on its vitals--so is
it the nature of woman, to hide from the world the pangs of wounded
affection. The love of a delicate female is always shy and silent. Even