Overhead, without a break, stretched the louring, dun-coloured sky; the low-lying landscape around, as though in sympathy therewith, was all of dull greens and grays, varied by long wide dykes and sedgy pools of a dismal leaden hue. The wild wind blew chilly and fitfully, and made a melancholy sighing sort of sound as it swept over the rank
A FENLAND HOME.
reeds and coarse grasses, whilst it bent into a great curve the solitary tall poplar that alone stood out in relief against the stormy sky—
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
There was plenty of movement everywhere, for the strong breeze made waves of the long lank grass, as it makes waves of the sea; but there were no signs of life except for a few stray storm-loving seagulls that, for reasons best known to themselves, were whirling about thus far inland, uttering peevish cries the while, apparently as much out of their element as a sailor of the old school ashore.
THE FENS
A strange, weird world this English Fenland seems to unfamiliar eyes, especially when seen under a brooding sky; and there is a peculiar quality of mystery, that baffles description and cannot be analysed, in the deep blue-gray palpitating gloom that gathers over the Fenland distances when they lie under the threatening shadow of some coming storm. Under such conditions the scenery of the Fens is pronouncedly striking, but even under ordinary circumstances a man can have but little poetry in his soul who cannot admire its wild beauties, its vast breadths of luxuriant greenery over which the eye can range unrestrained for leagues upon leagues on every side, its space-expressing distances and its mighty cloud-scapes, for the sky-scape is a feature in the Fenland prospect not to be overlooked; in fact, I am inclined to think that its sky scenery—if I may be allowed the term—is the finest and most wonderful in the world. It is worth a long journey to the district if only to behold one of its gorgeous sunsets, when you look upon a moist atmosphere saturated with colour so that it becomes opalescent, and the sinking sun seen through the vibrating air is magnified to twice its real size as it sets in a world of melting rubies and molten gold: from the western slopes of far-off California I have looked down upon the sun dipping into the wide Pacific amidst a riot of colour, but nothing like this! It is not always necessary to leave England in search of the strange and beautiful; the more I travel abroad, the more I am convinced of this!
It almost seemed to us, as we drove along, that somehow we must be travelling in a foreign land, so un-English and unfamiliar did the prospect appear! I have long studied the scenery of Mars through the telescope, have in the silent hours of the night wandered thus over the mighty, water-intersected plains of that distant planet, and had only the vegetation of the Fens been red instead of green, we might in imagination well have fancied ourselves touring in Mars! Truly this may be considered a rather too far-fetched phantasy, but as Bernard Barton, the East Anglian poet, says—