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 forms and outlines of the country were more familiar, but it seemed a little wanting in colour after the rich tints of the lowlands; by contrast it all appeared too green: green fields, green trees, green crops, for these, with the winding road, chiefly composed the prospect. Moreover, we missed the constant and enlivening accompaniment of water that we had become so accustomed to, with its soft, silvery gleaming under cloud and its cheerful glittering under sun. Water is to the landscape what the eye is to the human face; it gives it the charm of expression and vivacity. At first, also, our visions seemed a little cramped after the wide and unimpeded prospects of the Fens; and the landscape struck us as almost commonplace compared with that we had so lately passed through, which almost deserved the epithet of quaint, at least to non-Dutch eyes. There was no special feature in the present scenery beyond its leafy loveliness. Truly it might be called typically English, but there was nothing to show that it belonged to any particular portion of England—no distant peep of downs, or hills, or moors, that seems so little, but which to the experienced traveller means so much, as by the character and contour of distant hill, or moor, or down he can tell fairly well whether he be in the north or south, the east or west, and may even shrewdly guess the very county he is traversing.

It was, however, a lovely country, full of pastoral peacefulness, sunshine, and grateful sylvan shadiness, lovely yet lonely—a loneliness that aroused within us a feeling akin to melancholy: it may