One feeling I was particularly struck with, as what I recognized so very lately at Harrow Church on entering in it after a hot and secular day’s pleasure,—­the instantaneous coolness and calming, almost transforming, properties of a country church just entered; a certain fragrance which it has, either from its holiness, or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is let in being pure country,—­exactly what you have reduced into words; but I am feeling that which I cannot express.  The reading your lines about it fixed me for a time a monument in Harrow Church,—­do you know it?—­with its fine long spire, white as washed marble, to be seen, by vantage of its high site, as far as Salisbury spire itself almost.

I shall select a day or two very shortly, when I am coolest in brain, to have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many more; for it will be a stock book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me.  There is a great deal of noble matter about mountain scenery, yet not so much as to overpower and discountenance a poor Londoner, or south-countryman entirely,—­though Mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully; for it was her remark, during reading it, that by your system it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved.  She almost trembled for that invisible part of us in her.

Save for a late excursion to Harrow, and a day or two on the banks of the Thames this summer, rural images were fast fading from my mind, and by the wise provision of the Regent all that was countrified in the parks is all but obliterated.  The very colour of green is vanished; the whole surface of Hyde Park is dry, crumbling sand (Arabia Arenosa), not a vestige or hint of grass ever having grown there; booths and drinking-places go all round it, for a mile and a half, I am confident,—­I might say two miles in circuit; the stench of liquors, bad tobacco, dirty people and provisions, conquers the air, and we are all stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park [2].  Order after order has been issued by Lord Sidmouth in the name of the Regent (acting in behalf of his royal father) for the dispersion of the varlets; but in vain.  The vis unita of all the publicans in London, Westminster, Marylebone, and miles round, is too powerful a force to put down.  The Regent has raised a phantom which he cannot lay.  There they’ll stay probably forever.  The whole beauty of the place is gone,—­that lake-look of the Serpentine (it has got foolish ships upon it); but something whispers to have confidence in Nature and its revival,—­

  “At the coming of the milder day,
  These monuments shall all be overgrown.”

Meantime I confess to have smoked one delicious pipe in one of the cleanliest and goodliest of the booths,—­a tent rather,—­

  “Oh, call it not a booth!”