Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/85

Rh Pecuniary embarrassments cease to oppress, and the political outlook appears less threatening.

At the bottom of yonder valley three hundred feet above the sea-level, where a steamy, dreamy atmosphere hangs, we see that England is going to the dogs; the end of English commerce, agriculture, the aristocracy, the church, the crown, the constitution is at hand—in a word, the Saturday Review expresses exactly our temper of mind. A little way up the hill, we think the recuperative power of the British nation is so great, the national vigour is so enormous, that it will shake itself free of its troubles in time—in time, and with patience—in a word, we begin to see through the spectacles of the Spectator. But when we have our foot on the heather, and scent the incense of the gorse, and hear the stonechat and the pewit, and see the flicker of the silver cotton grass about us, why then—we feel we are in the best of worlds, and in the best little nook of the whole world, and that all mankind is pushing its way, like us, upward with a scramble over obstacles; it will, like us, in the end breathe the same sparkling air, and enjoy the same extensive outlook, and be like us without care.

From Court what a wonderful prospect was commanded. The Angel in the Apocalypse stood with one foot on the land, and the other in the sea; so Court stood half in the rich cultivated garden of the Western Paradise, and half in the utter desolation of treeless moor. To south and west lay woodlands and pasture, parks and villages, tufts of Scotch fir, cedars, oak and elm and beech, with rooks cawing and doves cooing, and the woodpecker hooting among them; to the east and north lay the haunt of the blackcock and hawk and wimbrel, and tracts of heather flushed with flower, and gorse ablaze with sun, and aromatic as incense.

Far away in the north-west, when the sun went down, he