The
whole scene had an indefinable look of being painted, the colour
was so abstract and correct, and there was something so sketchy and
merely impressional about these distant single trees on the horizon
that one was forced to think of it all as of a clever French
landscape. For it is rather in nature that we see resemblance to
art, than in art to nature; and we say a hundred times, 'How like a
picture!' for once that we say, 'How like the truth!' The forms in
which we learn to think of landscape are forms that we have got
from painted canvas. Any man can see and understand a picture; it
is reserved for the few to separate anything out of the confusion
of nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence.
The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got
by that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a
labyrinth of confined by-roads, my whole view brightened
considerably in colour, for it was the distance only that was grey
and cold, and the distance I could see no longer. Overhead there
was a wonderful carolling of larks which seemed to follow me as I
went. Indeed, during all the time I was in that country the larks
did not desert me. The air was alive with them from High Wycombe
to Tring; and as, day after day, their 'shrill delight' fell upon
me out of the vacant sky, they began to take such a prominence over
other conditions, and form so integral a part of my conception of
the country, that I could have baptized it 'The Country of Larks.
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