the chief value of the work seems really to lie in this:  it has dignified the rural scenes and the honest rustics of England.  It has invested every hoary-headed swain, every busy housewife, and every little churchyard in the country with a special dignity and a lasting charm.  The traveller cannot look upon these scenes and faces without unconsciously connecting them with the lines he knows so well.  Gray’s “Elegy” will never be forgotten; for it has struck its roots deep in the national language and far down into the national heart.

Very similar to the quiet and leafy lane at Stoke Poges is the brook below the waterfall at A——­ in the Cotswolds.  On your left as you look up stream from the bridge of the “pill,” a moss-grown gravel path runs alongside the water under a hanging wood of leafy elms and smooth-trunked beech trees, where the ringdoves coo all day.  A tangled hedge filled with tall timber trees runs up the right-hand bank.  Here the great convolvulus, queen of wild flowers, twists her bines among the hedge; the bell-shaped flowers are conspicuous everywhere, large and lily-white as the arum, so luxuriant is the growth of wild flowers by the brook-side.

A silver stream is the Coln hereabouts, the abode of fairies and fawns, and nymphs and dryads.  But when the afternoon sun shines upon it, it becomes a stream of diamonds set in banks of emeralds, with an arched and groined roof of jasper, carved with foliations of graceful ash and willow, and over all a sky of sapphire sprinkled with clouds of pearl and opal.  Later on towards evening there will be floods of golden light on the grass and on the beech trees up the eastern slope of the valley and on the bare red earth under the trees, red with fifty years’ beech nuts.  And later still, when the distant hills are dyed as if with archil, the sapphire sky will be striped with bars of gold and dotted with coals of fire; rubies and garnets, sardonyx and chrysolite will all be there, and the bluish green of beryl, the western sky as varied as felspar and changing colour as quickly as the chameleon.  And as the day declines the last beams of the setting sun will find their way through the tracery of foliage that overhangs the brook, and the waters will be tinged with a rosy glow, even as in some ancestral hall or Gothic cathedral the sun at eventide pours through the blazoned windows and floods the interior with rays of soft, mysterious, coloured light.

I have been trying to describe one of the loveliest bits of miniature scenery on earth; yet how commonplace it all reads!  Not a thousandth part of the beauty of this spot at sunset is here set down, yet little more can be said.  How bitter to think that the true beauty of the trees, the path by the brook, and the sunlight on the water cannot be passed on for others to enjoy, cannot be stamped on paper, but must be seen to be realised!  Truly, as Richard Jefferies says somewhere, there is a layer of thought in the human brain for which there are no words in any language.  We cannot express a thousandth part of the beauty of the woods and the stream; we can but dimly feel it when we see it with our eyes.