Town and Country
Sir E. B. Lytton, in Blackwood’s Magazine, observes: We who are lovers of the country are not unnaturally disposed to consider that our preference argues some finer poetry of sentiment—some steadier devotion to those ennobling studies which sages commend as the fitting occupations of retirement. But the facts do not justify that self-conceit upon our part. It was said by a philosopher who was charged with all the cares of a world’s empire, that “there is no such great matter in retirement. A man may be wise and sedate in a crowd as well as in a desert, and keep the noise of the world from getting within him. In this case, as Plato observes, the walls of a town and the enclosure of a sheep-fold may be made the same thing.” Certainly, poets, and true poets, have lived by choice in the dingy streets of great towns. Men of science, engaged in reasonings the most abstruse, on subjects the most elevating, have usually fixed their dwelling-place in bustling capitals, as if the din of the streets without deepened, by the force of a contrast, the quiet of those solitary closets wherein they sat analysing the secret heart of that nature whose every-day outward charms they abandoned to commonplace adorers. On the other hand, men perforce engaged in urban occupations, neither bards nor sages but City clerks and traders, feel a yearning of the heart towards a home in the country; loving rural nature with so pure a fervour that, if closer intercourse is forbidden, they are contented to go miles every evening to kiss the skirt of her robe. Their first object is to live out of London, if but in a suburb; to refresh their eyes with the green of a field; to greet the first harbinger of spring in the primrose venturing forth in their own tiny realm of garden. It is for them, as a class, that cities extend beyond their ancient bounds; while our nobles yet clung to their gloomy halls in the Fleet, traders sought homesteads remote from their stalls and wares in the pleasing village of Charing.