After the two friends had parted from the young lady, they passed
through the village, and entered the park gate of Braithwaite Hall, pursuing a winding road through its beautiful scenery, which realized all that Redclyffe had read or dreamed about the perfect beauty of these sylvan creations, with the clumps of trees, or sylvan oaks, picturesquely disposed. To heighten the charm, they saw a herd of deer reposing, who, on their appearance, rose from their recumbent position, and began to gaze warily at the strangers; then, tossing their horns, they set off on a stampede, but only swept round, and settled down not far from where they were. Redclyffe looked with great interest at these deer, who were at once wild and civilized; retaining a kind of free forest citizenship, while yet they were in some sense subject to man. It seemed as if they were a link between wild nature and tame; as if they could look back, in their long recollections, through a vista, into the times when England's forests were as wild as those of America, though now they were but a degree more removed from domesticity than cattle, and took their food in winter from the hand of man, and in summer reposed upon his lawns. This seemed the last touch of that delightful conquered and regulated wildness, which English art has laid upon the whole growth of English nature, animal or vegetable.
"There is nothing really wild in your whole island," he observed to the
Warden. "I have a sensation as if somebody knew, and had cultivated and
fostered, and set out in its proper place, every tree that grows; as if
somebody had patted the heads of your wildest animals and played with
them. It is very delightful to me, for the present; and yet, I think, in the course of time, I should feel the need for something genuine, as it were,--something that had not the touch and breath of man upon it. I suppose even your skies are modified by the modes of human life that are going on beneath it. London skies, of course, are so; but the breath of a great people, to say nothing of its furnace vapors and hearth-smokes, make the sky other than it was a thousand years ago."
"I believe we English have a feeling like this occasionally," replied
the Warden, "and it is from that, partly, that we must account for our
adventurousness into other regions, especially for our interest in what
is wild and new. In your own forests, now, and prairies, I fancy we
find a charm that Americans do not. In the sea, too, and therefore we
are yachters. For my part, however, I have grown to like Nature a
little smoothed down, and enriched; less gaunt and wolfish than she
would be if left to herself."
"Yes; I feel that charm too," said Redclyffe. "But yet life would be
slow and heavy, methinks, to see nothing but English parks."