Of course, the explanation of the
mystery was, that history, poetry, and fiction, books of travel, and the
talk of tourists, had given me pretty accurate preconceptions of the
common objects of English scenery, and these, being long ago vivified by
a youthful fancy, had insensibly taken their places among the images of
things actually seen. Yet the illusion was often so powerful, that I
almost doubted whether such airy remembrances might not be a sort of
innate idea, the print of a recollection in some ancestral mind,
transmitted, with fainter and fainter impress through several descents,
to my own. I felt, indeed, like the stalwart progenitor in person,
returning to the hereditary haunts after more than two hundred years,
and finding the church, the hall, the farm-house, the cottage, hardly
changed during his long absence,--the same shady by-paths and
hedge-lanes, the same veiled sky, and green lustre of the lawns and
fields,--while his own affinities for these things, a little obscured by
disuse, were reviving at every step.
An American is not very apt to love the English people, as a whole, on
whatever length of acquaintance. I fancy that they would value our
regard, and even reciprocate it in their ungracious way, if we could
give it to them in spite of all rebuffs; but they are beset by a curious
and inevitable infelicity, which compels them, as it were, to keep up
what they seem to consider a wholesome bitterness of feeling between
themselves and all other nationalities, especially that of America.
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