The broad, rich
fields, the hedgerow boundaries and stately lines of vigorous trees
guarding their native soil; and above all, the manly bearing of a bold,
an independent, and a peaceful peasantry, the humblest of whom knows
that his cottage is a chartered sanctuary, protected alike from the
aggressions of civil and of ecclesiastical tyranny--these, too, are
English, sacredly English; and they leave upon the heart that has once
expanded among them, an impress never to be effaced. Among national
reformers, what a noble position would he occupy who should prevail upon
our monied countrymen to exchange their habits of periodical vagrancy
into popish lands, for a sojourn in the moral districts of their own
Protestant England, in the confidence that the climate which agreed with
their fathers from generation to generation--as the dates and ages
decipherable on our monuments will testify--would not annihilate them;
and that the sphere in which God had seen good to place them was that
wherein he purposed them to move, to exert their influence, and to
occupy for his glory, with the talents committed to their charge.
I have told you how books of imagination had supplanted the Bible in my
esteem; those books now, in a measure, yielded to the irresistible
attraction of outdoor amusement; but my mind was so abundantly stored
with the glittering tinsel of unsanctified genius, as it shone forth in
the pages of my beloved poets, that no room was left for a craving after
better studies.
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