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The city courtship may appear the most genteel in the splendid parlor, with the lover on a sofa displaying his stocks and certificates of wealth to the matron, and through her winning his sweetheart; while the maiden at her piano opens absorbing ears to catch his wooing words; but all must confess the country courtship makes the best picture, with the ruddy maiden in the farm-yard, in her cool sun-bonnet and clean checkered frock; the bloom of the season on her cheeks, and its fragrance in her breath; making music with sweet streams in her milk-pail; while her lover at her elbow, or leaning over the wall, as jocund as a bobolink, tells her of his horses and cows; his wheat-lands and meadow-lands; his berry-fields; his melon-patch, and maple-orchard; his nice little rural home, and his pleasant love of her.
We passed through the meadow-lands, studded with slumbering flocks; we followed the branch of the creek, which was linked to its source in the mountains by many a trickling waterfall; we threaded the gloom of stunted, misshapen trees, gnarled with the stringy bark which makes one of the signs of the strata that nourish gold; and at length the moon, now in all her pomp of light, mid-heaven amongst her subject stars, gleamed through the fissures of the cave, on whose floor lay the relics of antediluvian races, and rested in one flood of silvery splendour upon the hollows of the extinct volcano, with tufts of dank herbage, and wide spaces of paler sward, covering the gold below, Gold, the dumb symbol of organized Matter's great mystery, storing in itself, according as Mind, the informer of Matter, can distinguish its uses, evil and good, bane and blessing.
To this end I left the more frequented regions, the wooded valleys, the corn-fields, and the meadow-lands, and proceeded to mount the steep acclivity of Wildfell, the wildest and the loftiest eminence in our neighbourhood, where, as you ascend, the hedges, as well as the trees, become scanty and stunted, the former, at length, giving place to rough stone fences, partly greened over with ivy and moss, the latter to larches and Scotch fir-trees, or isolated blackthorns.
The best way to see the out-of-the-way parts of the country would be to journey about in a barge on the canals. There are a great many canals. You could go all the way from France to the other side of Belgium in a barge, threading your way through fields, and meadow-lands, and villages, and stopping every now and then at some of the big towns.
I would fain that my lady mother were there, for he would not fail us." Perceval is silent, and hath great pity in his heart of this that the damsel saith. She followeth him weeping, and pointeth out to him the Valleys of Camelot and the castles that were shut in by combes and mountains, and the broad meadow-lands and the forest that girded them about.
They saw before them not the Sea of China, as speculators had dreamed, not kingdoms for conquest, which the princes of Europe coveted; not a short road to Asia, of which savants had spun a cobweb of theories. They saw what every Westerner sees to-day, illimitable reaches of prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon.
When the meal was over I went down, in spite of the heat, to the meadow-lands for another sight of the Indre and its isles, the valley and its slopes, of which I seemed so passionate an admirer. But once there, thanks to a swiftness of foot like that of a loose horse, I returned to my punt, the willows, and Clochegourde. All was silent and palpitating, as a landscape is at midday in summer.
Garden and churchyard covered the hill's summit; and from both might be discerned a view such as is rarely seen in level England. It was a panorama, extending some twenty or thirty miles across the country, where, through woodlands and meadow-lands, flowed the silver windings of a small river.
Water buttercups shone silver white in this back-water at spring-time and the water-voles had their haunts in the bank side. Beyond stretched meadow-lands and over the hill that rose behind them climbed the road to the cliffs. Hounds had ascended this road two hours before and their music came faintly from afar to Raymond's ear, then ceased.
Low salt meadow-lands extended east and west, waving fields of corn stretched northward, and the slight knoll on which the building stood sloped smoothly down to the ever-moaning, foam-fretted bosom of the blue Atlantic.
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