XIII.
In Oxfordshire.
(Golden Hours, 1872.)
When the Emperor Alexander I. avowed that if he was not Czar of all the Russias he would choose to be an English gentleman, he expressed a view most of us have entertained, when, wandering about England, our way has led us through some noble park, at once stately and historic.
Let us for a moment recall in imagination one of those stately homes, sacred to the gentle and aristocratic life. Through broad ambrosial aisles of lofty lime, we approach the palatial residence, surrounded by its gardens, its orchards, its streams, and its lakes. We enter it, and find the galleries hung with the masterpieces of ancient and modern art, the library stored with the literature of the world, the halls crowded with curiosities from every clime, the terraces adorned with statues and vases and "flowers of all heavens."
We ascend an eminence, and, watching the fallow deer gently trooping up and down the glades, our eyes wander over the great belt of forest which skirts the park. Beyond it, in the broad expanse of peaceful country, Hes dozing here and there a hamlet. Among the distant trees rises the village church, and hard by the parsonage peeps out, its well-cared-for garden telling of cultured ease. Perchance the golden fields are waving in the sunlight, and the old gable-roofed farmhouses stand out in a sort of comfortable solitude, surrounded by their stacks and their barns. Down in the meadows, by the stream which waters the landscape, cattle are grazing; while afar off, on the uplands which shut in the horizon, flocks of sheep feed among the shadows.
