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To one who had learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, "taken back to Nature" by any decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow.
North Liberty, Connecticut, never on any day a cheerful town, was always bleaker and more cheerless on the seventh, when the Sabbath sun, after vainly trying to coax a smile of reciprocal kindliness from the drawn curtains and half-closed shutters of the austere dwellings and the equally sealed and hard-set churchgoing faces of the people, at last settled down into a blank stare of stony astonishment.
It had no Maori troubles worth speaking of, but the hills that beset its site, rugged and bush-covered, were troublesome to clear and settle, the winter climate is bleaker than that of northern or central New Zealand, and a good deal of Scottish endurance and toughness was needed before the colonists won their way through to the more fertile and open territory which lay waiting for them, both on their right hand and on their left, in the broad province of Otago.
We were on the march early in September, through the blue Bavarian mountains, where the air, though sharp, was like good wine, and then into the wild Bohemian country, full of rocks and bogs and black chasms, and shaggy mountains, ever colder and bleaker, ever farther and farther away from our base.
We had left the fertile country behind and beneath us. We looked back on it now, the slanting rays of a low sun turning the streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new turned by the plough and the broad tangle of the woodlands. The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders.
There was no trace of battlement or turret, nothing in the least suggestive of Warwick or Windsor, or of Sir Walter Scott. In fact, the Castle was not a building of any kind, but a hamlet; a small collection of houses a somewhat scattered collection, it must be owned, such as, on the bleaker and sandier parts of Cape Cod, is distinguished by the name of village.
To one who has learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, "taken back to Nature" by any decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow.
She had to play up to it for a long time, but her love made her wonderfully clever and patient; and of course the day came when she had her reward. Knowing him as she did, she remembered the day and the difference it made. It was toward the end of an afternoon in early April; the discoloured snow still lay huddled in the bleaker fence corners.
We have spoken of the material conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone cities, imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level streets, the warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness of the architecture, among which English children begin to grow up and come to themselves in life.
We had left the fertile country behind and beneath us. We looked back on it now, the slanting rays of a low sun turning the streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new turned by the plough and the broad tangle of the woodlands. The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders.
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