RURAL LIFE IN ENGLAND.

THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW 作者：华盛顿·欧文投票推荐加入书签留言反馈

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Oh! friendly to the best pursuits of man,

 Friendly to thought, to virtue and to peace,

 Domestic life in rural pleasures past!

 COWPER.

 THE stranger who would form a correct opinion of the English character, must not e his observations to the metropolis.

 He must go forth into the try; he must sojourn in villages and hamlets; he must visit castles, villas, farm-houses, cottages; he must wahrough parks and gardens; along hedges and green lanes; he must loiter about try churches; attend wakes and fairs, and other rural festivals; and cope with the people in all their ditions, and all their habits and humors.

 In some tries, the large cities absorb the wealth and fashion of the nation; they are the only ?xed abodes of elegant and intelligent society, and the try is inhabited almost entirely by boorish peasantry. In England, on the trary, the metropolis is a mere gathering-place, eneral rendezvous, of the polite classes, where they devote a small portion of the year to a<s></s> hurry of gayety and dissipation, and, having indulged this kind of ival, return again to the apparently more genial habits of rural life. The various orders of society are therefore diffused over the whole surface of the kingdom, and the more retired neighborhoods afford spes of the different ranks.

 The English, in fact, are strongly gifted with the rural feeling.

 They possess a quick sensibility to the beauties of nature, and a keen relish for the pleasures and employments of the try.

 This passion seems i in them. Even the inhabitants of cities, born and brought up among brick walls and bustling streets, enter with facility into rural habits, and eviact for rural occupation. The mert has his snug retreat in the viity of the metropolis, where he often displays as much pride and zeal in the cultivation of his ?ower-<cite>??</cite>garden, and the maturing of his fruits, as he does in the duct of his business, and the success of a ercial enterprise. Even those less fortunate individuals, who are doomed to pass their lives in the midst of din and traf?c, trive to have something that shall remind them of the green aspect of nature. In the most dark and dingy quarters of the city, the drawing-room window resembles frequently a bank of ?owers; every spot capable of vegetation has its grass-plot and ?ower-bed; and every square its mimic park, laid out with picturesque taste, and gleaming with refreshing verdure.

 Those who see the Englishman only in town, are apt to form an unfavorable opinion of his social character. He is either absorbed in business, or distracted by the thousand es that dissipate time, thought, and feeling, in this huge metropolis. He has, therefore, too only, a look of hurry and abstra. Wherever he happens to be, he is on the point of going somewhere else; at the moment he is talking on one subject, his mind is wandering to another; and while paying a friendly visit, he is calculating how he shall eize time so as to pay the other visits allotted to the m. An immeropolis, like London, is calculated to make men sel?sh and uing.

 In their casual and tra meetings, they but deal brie?y in onplaces. They present but the cold super?ces of character--its rid genial qualities have no time to be warmed into a ?ow.

 It is in the try that the Englishman gives scope to his natural feelings. He breaks loose gladly from the cold formalities aive civilities of town; throws off his habits of shy reserve, and bees joyous and free-hearted. He mao collect round him all the veniences and elegancies of polite life, and to banish <q>藏书网</q>its restraints. His try-seat abounds with every requisite, either for studious retirement, tasteful grati?cation, or rural exercise. Books, paintings, music, horses, dogs, and sp implements of all kinds, are at hand. He puts no straiher upon his guests or himself, but, irue spirit of hospitality, provides the means of enjoyment, and leaves every oo partake acc to his ination.

 The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied Nature ily, and discovered an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious binations. Those charms which, in other tries, she lavishes in wild solitudes, are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.

 Nothing be more imposing than the magni?ce of English park sery. Vast lawns that extend like sheets of vivid green, with here and there clumps of gigantic trees, heaping up rich piles of foliage. The solemn pomp of groves and woodland glades, with the deer trooping in silent herds across them; the hare, bounding away to the covert; or the pheasant, suddenly bursting upon the wing. The brook, taught to wind in natural meanderings, or expand into a glassy lake--the sequestered pool, re?eg the quivering trees, with the yellow leaf sleeping on its bosom, and the trout roaming fearlessly about its limpid waters; while some rustic temple, or sylvan statue, grown green and dank with age, gives an air of classictity to the seclusion.

 These are but a few of the features of park sery; but what most delights me, is the creative talent with which the English decorate the uious abodes of middle life. The rudest habitation, the most unpromising and sty portion of land, in the hands of an Englishman of taste, bees a little paradise.

 With a nicely discriminating eye, he seizes at once upon its capabilities, and pictures in his mind the future landscape. The sterile spot grows into loveliness under his hand; ahe operations of art which produce the effect are scarcely to be perceived. The cherishing and training of some trees; the cautious pruning of others; the nice distribution of ?owers and plants of tender and graceful foliage; the introdu of a green slope of velvet turf; the partial opening to a peep of blue distance, or silver gleam of water;-all these are managed with a delicate tact, a pervadi quiet assiduity, like the magic tougs with which a painter ?nishes up a favorite picture.

 The residence of people of fortune and re? in the try, has diffused a degree of taste and elegan rural ey that desds 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 ?ower-bed bordered with snug box, the woodbirained up against the wall, and hanging its blossoms about the lattice; the pot of ?owers 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 ?reside; all these bespeak the in?uence of taste, ?owing down from high sources, and pervading the lowest levels of the publid. 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 upoional character. I do not know a ?ner raen than the English gentlemen. Instead of the softness and effeminacy which characterize the men of rank in most tries, they exhibit a union of elegand strength, a robustness of frame and freshness of plexion, which I am ined to attribute to their living so mu the open air, and pursuing so eagerly the invigorating recreations of the try. 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 ot easily pervert, and ever entirely destroy. In the try, too, the different orders of society seem to approach more freely, to be more disposed to blend and operate favorably upon each other. The distins between them do not appear to be so marked and impassable as iies<big></big>. 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 lab peasantry; and while it has thus bahe extremes of society together, has infused into eatermediate rank a spirit of independehis, it must be fessed, 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 try, almost annihilated the sturdy raall 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 ses of natural grandeur ay; it leaves him to the ws of his own mind, operated upon by the purest and most elevating of external in?uences. Such a man may be simple and rough, but he ot be vulgar. The man of re?, therefore, ?nds nothiing 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 distand reserve, and is glad to waive the distins of rank, and to enter into the ho, heartfelt enjoyments of on life. Ihe very amusements of the try 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 ary are more popular among the inferior orders in England than they are in any other try; and why the latter have endured so many excessive pressures aremities, without repining menerally 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 inparable descriptions of Nature, that abound in the British poets--that have tinued 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 tries appear as if they had paid Nature an occasional visit, and bee 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 mi caprices. A spray could not tremble in the breeze--a leaf could not rustle to the ground--a diamond drop could not patter iream--a fragrance could not exhale from the humble violet, nor a daisy unfold its crimson tints to the m, 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 try. 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 ses of rural repose and sheltered quiet.

 Every antique farm-house and moss-grown cottage is a picture; and as the roads are tinually winding, and the view is shut in by groves and hedges, the eye is delighted by a tinual succession of small landscapes of captivating loveliness.

 The great charm, however, of English sery, 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 . Every thing seems to be the growth of ages ular and peaceful existehe 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 mos of warriors and worthies of the olden time, aors of the present lords of the soil; its tombstones, rec successive geions of sturdy yeomanry, whose progeny still plough the same ?elds, and k the same altar;--the parsonage, a quaint irregular pile, partly antiquated, but repaired and altered iastes of various ages and octs;--the stile and foot-path leading from the churchyard, across pleasant ?elds, and along shady hedgerows, acc to an immemorial right of way;--the neighb village, with its venerable cottages, its public greeered by trees, under which the forefath<tt>.99liｂ.t>ers of the present race have sported;--the antique family mansion, standing apart in some little rural domain, but looking down with a proteg air on the surrounding se; all these oures of English landscape evince a calm aled security, a hereditary transmission of homebred virtues and local attats, that speak deeply and tougly for the moral character of the nation.

 It is a pleasing sight, of a Sunday m, when the bell is sending its sober melody across the quiet ?elds, to behold the peasantry in their best ?nery, with ruddy faces, and modest cheerfulness, thronging tranquilly along the green lao 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 forts and embellishments which their own hands have spread around them.

 It is this sweet home-feeling, this settled repose of affe in the domestic se, that is, after all, the parent of the steadiest virtues and purest enjoyments; and I ot 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 ed with shade,

 But chief from modest mansions numberless,

 In town or hamlet, sheltring middle life,

 Down to the cottaged vale, and straw-roofd shed;

 This western isle has long been famed for ses

 Where bliss domestids a dwelling-place;

 Domestic bliss, that, like a harmless dove,

 (Honor and sweet endearment keeping guard,)

 tre in a little quiet 

 All that desire would ?y for through the earth;

 That , the world eluding, be itself

 A world ehat wants no witnesses

 But its own sharers, and approving Heaven;

 That, like a ?ower 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.

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