If the beauty of England were only superficial it would produce only a superficial effect. It would cause a passing pleasure and would be forgotten. It certainly would not—as now in fact it does—inspire a deep, joyous, serene and grateful contentment, and linger in the mind, a gracious and beneficent remembrance. The conquering and lasting potency of it resides not alone in loveliness of expression but in loveliness of character. Having first greatly blessed the British islands with the natural advantages of position, climate, soil, and products, nature has wrought their development and adornment as a necessary consequence of the spirit of their inhabitants. The picturesque variety and pastoral repose of the English landscape spring, in a considerable measure, from the imaginative taste and the affectionate gentleness of the English people. The state of the country, like its social constitution, flows from principles within, which are constantly suggested, and it steadily comforts and nourishes the mind with a sense of kindly feeling, moral rectitude, solidity, and permanence.
Thus in the peculiar beauty of England the ideal is made the actual—is expressed in things more than in words, and in things by which words are transcended. Milton's "L'Allegro," fine as it is, is not so fine as the scenery—the crystallised, embodied poetry—out of which it arose. All the delicious rural verse that has been written in England is only the excess and superflux of her own poetic opulence: it has rippled from the hearts of her poets just as the fragrance floats away from her hawthorn hedges. At every step of his progress the pilgrim through English scenes is impressed with this sovereign excellence of the accomplished fact, as contrasted with any words that can be said in its celebration.
Among representative scenes that are eloquent with this instructive meaning,—scenes easily and pleasurably accessible to the traveller in what Dickens expressively called "the green, English summer weather,"—is the region of Windsor. The chief features of it have often been described; the charm that it exercises can only be suggested. To see Windsor, moreover, is to comprehend as at a glance the old feudal system, and to feel in a profound and special way the pomp of English character and history. More than this: it is to rise to the ennobling serenity that always accompanies broad, retrospective contemplation of the current of human affairs. In this quaint, decorous town—nestled at the base of that mighty and magnificent castle which has been the home of princes for more than five hundred years—the imaginative mind wanders over vast tracts of the past and beholds as in a mirror the pageants of chivalry, the coronations of kings, the strife of sects, the battles of armies, the schemes of statesmen, the decay of transient systems, the growth of a rational civilisation, and the everlasting march of thought. Every prospect of the region intensifies this sentiment of contemplative grandeur. As you look from the castle walls your gaze takes in miles and miles of blooming country, sprinkled over with little hamlets, wherein the utmost stateliness of learning and rank is gracefully commingled with all that is lovely and soothing in rural life. Not far away rise the "antique towers" of Eton—
"Where grateful science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade."
It was in Windsor Castle that her Henry was born; and there he often held his court; and it is in St. George's chapel that his ashes repose. In the dim distance stands the church of Stoke-Pogis, about which Gray used to wander,
"Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade."
You recognise now a deeper significance than ever before in the "solemn stillness" of the incomparable Elegy. The luminous twilight mood of that immortal poem—its pensive reverie and solemn passion—is inherent in the scene; and you feel that it was there, and there only, that the genius of its exceptional author—austerely gentle and severely pure, and thus in perfect harmony with its surroundings—could have been moved to that sublime strain of inspiration and eloquence. Near at hand, in the midst of your reverie, the mellow organ sounds from the chapel of St. George, where, under "fretted vault" and over "long-drawn aisle," depend the ghostly, mouldering banners of ancient knights—as still as the bones of the dead-and-gone monarchs that crumble in the crypt below.