Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/140

 landscape from this point,—by far too fine to have escaped the eye of Thomson,—is described in the "Seasons;" and the hill which overlooks it represented as terminating one of the walks of Lyttelton and his lady,—that Lucy Lady Lyttleton whose early death formed, but a few years after, the subject of the monody so well known and so much admired in the days of our great-grandmothers:—

It is not in every nobleman's park one can have the opportunity of comparing such a picture as that in the "Seasons" with such an original. I quote, with the description, the preliminary lines, so vividly suggestive of the short-lived happiness of Lyttelton:—

Perhaps thy loved Lucinda shares thy walk, With soul to thine attuned. Then Nature all Wears to the lover's eye a look of love; And all the tumult of a guilty world, Tossed by the generous passions, sinks away; The tender heart is animated peace; And, as it pours its copious treasures forth In various converse, softening every theme, You, frequent pausing, turn, and from her eyes,— Where meekened sense, and amiable grace, And lively sweetness dwell,—enraptured drink That nameless spirit of ethereal joy,— Unutterable happiness!—which love Alone bestows, and on a favored few. Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow The bursting prospect spreads immense around, And, snatched o'er hill and dale, and wood and lawn, And verdant field, and darkening heath between, And villages embosomed soft in trees, And spiry towns by surging columns marked