The Heart of England

Sunday afternoon had perfected the silence of the suburban street. Every one had gone into his house to tea; none had yet started for church or promenade; the street was empty,...

The castle stands high among vast, sharp-edged waves of sand at the edge of a cliff, and looks at the sea and a long, empty shore. At its feet a little river can be seen running...

The village stands round a triangular, flat green that has delicate sycamores here and there at one side; beneath them spotted cows, or horses, or a family of tramps; and among...

Their house is a small russet cave of three dim compartments--part of a farmhouse, the rest having fallen to ruin, and from human hands to the starlings, the sparrows, and the r...

It was one of those early March days in a mountainous country when a warmly clothed man, in good health and walking rapidly, can just foretaste the spring. The icy dark water in...

We had driven ten miles through a country that rose and fell with large, stormy lines of hillock and hill. A March sun was bright, but a sharpness lingered in the air from last...

This is one of the tracts of country which are discovered by few except such as study the railway maps of England in order to know what to avoid. On those maps it is one of seve...

The road curves gently but goes almost east and west; on the north side is a bank surmounted by dense thorns; on the south is a low hedge, over which can be seen two broad meado...

There are a hundred little landscapes on the walls by the roadside--of grey or silver or golden stone, embossed and fretted and chequered by green and gold-pointed mosses, frost...

For a mile, alongside a bright high-road, runs a twelve-foot strip of grass and clover and buttercups, with cinquefoil’s golden embroidery in the turf at the edge. Little circul...

Happiness is not to be pursued, though pleasure may be; but I have long thought that I should recognise happiness could I ever achieve it. It would be health, or at least unthwa...

How nobly the ploughman and the plough and three horses, two chestnuts and a white leader, glide over the broad swelling field in the early morning! Under the dewy, dark-green w...

The sun rose two hours ago, but he is not to be found in the sky. Rather he seems to have disembodied himself and to be lazily concealed in the sweet mist that lies white and lu...

The brook rises in a clear, grey, trembling basin at the foot of a chalk hill, among flowers of lotus and thyme and eyebright and rest-harrow. Here the stone curlew drinks, and...

The sun had not risen though it had long been proclaimed, when the old road led us into a moist wood that grew on the hillside, and here and there overhung a perpendicular chalk...

The morning air of autumn smelt like the musky, wild white rose. The south wind had carried hither all the golden and brown savours from Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey; and the...

The stream going helpless and fast between high banks is gloomy until it is turned to bright, airy foam and hanging crystal by the mill; over the restless pool below hangs a haw...

The night was dark and solid rain tumultuously invested the inn. As I stood in a dim passage I could see through the bar into the cloudy parlour, square and white, surrounded by...

All day the winter seemed to have gone. The horses’ hoofs on the moist, firm road made a clear “cuck-oo” as they rose and fell; and far off, for the first time in the year, a pl...

The cottage gardens are ceremonious and bright with phlox and sunflower and hollyhock; the orchards are yellow with apple, and of all sunburnt hues with plum; in the descending...

I have found only two satisfying places in the world in August--the Bodleian Library and a little reedy, willowy pond, where you may enjoy the month perfectly, sitting and being...

The earliest mower had not risen yet; the only sign of human life was the light that burned all night in a cottage bedroom, here and there; and from garden to garden went the wh...

It was June, but it had been like March for many miles upon the rough moor until, with the dawn, I came to a lowland where there were mossy fields with clear rain pools among th...

Night was soon to pass into a winter day as I looked out of the window to see what kind of a world it was that had been, since I began to read, shutting me off effectually from...

We waited to let the forty cows go past, each of them pausing to lick the forehead of the strawberry cow that leaned over the gate of her stall and lowed continually concerning...

The high, partridge-coloured heathland rolls southward, with small ridges as of a sea broken by cross winds, or as if the heather and the hard gorse cushions had grown over ruin...

The wheat says so, when in the dawn it drips with half-an-hour’s rain and gleams like copper under the fresh, dim sky; it cries aloud the same when it crackles in the midday sun...

In November I returned for a day to a lonely cottage which I had known in the summer; and all its poppies were gone. Here and there, in the garden, could be found a violet, a pr...

Out of the midst of pale wheat lands and tussocky meadow, intersected by streams which butter bur and marigold announce, and soared over by pewit and lark and the first swallows...

The lightning grows upon the sky like a tumultuous thorn tree of fire. The thunder grumbles with interrupted cadences, and then, joyful as a poet, hits the long, grave, reverber...

The white houses on the hill are whiter than ever before in the early light and the south wind from over the sea. The soft, wheat-coloured sand is inscribed far from the water b...

The chestnut blossom is raining steadily and noiselessly down upon a path whose naked pebbles receive mosaic of emerald light from the interlacing boughs. At intervals, once or...

Spring and summer and autumn had come--flowing into one another with that secrecy which, as in the periods of our life, spares us the pain of the irretraceable step--and still a...

The immense, solitary, half-veiled autumn land is hissing with the kisses of rain in elms and hedgerows and grass, and underfoot the tunnelled soil gurgles and croaks. Secret an...

he was at his worst; I think someone told her that he would recover, being so vigorous a man. Some days later they picked her out of the river, and they say she had drowned hers...

The first steep cornfield under the edge of the red moor lay all rough and warm with stubble in the evening light. The corn sheaves themselves were of a shining gold and leaned...

It was a clay country of small fields that rose and fell slightly, not in curves, but in stiff lines which ended abruptly in the low, dividing hedges. Here and there we passed s...

Almost at the end of a long walk, and as a small silver sun was leaving a pale and frosty sky, we began to ascend a broad, heaving meadow which was bordered on our right, on its...

It is a quiet valley in which moist fields of meadow, mowing grass, mangold, and stubble are bounded from one another by deep ditches and good hedges of maple, thorn and hazel,...

The sun has been up for an hour without impediment, but the meadows are rough silver under a mist after last night’s frost. The greens in cottage gardens are of a bright, cold h...

In front, a tall beechen hill closes up the gulf that runs out of the valley into the heart of the chalk down. The hill fills nearly half the sky, and just above it stands the w...

The sun has gone down. Except on one hand, the immense empty marshland expands to the sea, and where it mingles with the grey water would be uncertain, but for the clamour of th...

Close, perpendicular, quiet rain came upon me when I was ten miles from last night’s shelter and ten miles from my end. Shelter was not near, nor indeed to be thought of in an u...

The tide moves the river northward, towards me, under the bridge on which I stand. On both sides it is lined for a little way by houses: on the east in a flat, straight front, o...

From this beechen hill I can see into and across a long pastoral valley at my feet; its gentle sides running east and west are clothed in wood, and at the western end, where the...

This is a simple world. On either hand the shore sweeps out in a long curve and ends in a perpendicular, ash-coloured cliff, carving the misty air as with a hatchet-stroke. The...

As the sun rose I watched a proud ash tree shedding its leaves after a night of frost. It let them go by threes and tens and twenties; very rarely, with little intervals, only o...

THE LOWLAND II. FAUNUS 21 III. NOT HERE, O APOLLO! 26 IV. WALKING WITH GOOD COMPANY 28 V. NO MAN’S GARDEN 31 VI. MARCH DOUBTS 37 VII. A DECORATED CHURCH 41 VIII. GARLAND DAY 44...

THE SEA XLI. A MARCH HAUL 211 XLII. FISHING BOATS 214 XLIII. CLOUDS OVER THE SEA 216 XLIV. THE MARSH 220 XLV. ONE SAIL AT SEA 223 XLVI. THE CASTLE OF CARBONEK 225