A Countryside Miscellany by Poetry Prose & Quotations

Author:Poetry, Prose & Quotations
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783721320
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd

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 neighbouring 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.

WASHINGTON IRVING, THE SKETCH-BOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON, GENT

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