It is
only for perhaps a week in June that we in America can obtain an idea
of the magnificent richness and freshness of English scenery. How can
I find language airy and delicate enough to picture to you the fields
of harebells, tossing their lovely heads on their threadlike stems,
and bringing heaven to earth in the hue of their petals! Then the pale
golden cuckoo-buds, the yellow gorse, the stately foxglove, standing
in rows, like prismatic candelabra, all along the roadside,--and ah
me, alas!--the endless trees and vines of wild eglantine, with
blossoms of every shade of pink, from carmine to the faintest blush,
wreathing themselves about and throwing out into your face and hands
long streamers of buds and blossoms, so rarely and exquisitely lovely!
One wonders whether it can be true or whether one is dreaming on the
Enchanted Plain. I loved Wordsworth as I never could have done if I
had not been in the very place that knew him, and seen how and why he
worshiped as he did, what really seems there the perpetual Morning of
Creation.
At the right of the doorstep a superb fuchsia-tree stood, and I asked
the man to pluck me one of the jewel blossoms. But he declined to
approach so near, as he feared to disturb Mrs. Wordsworth. And he did
not introduce us into her presence, because he said Lady le Fleming
had told him never to disturb her with visitors, but only show them
the outside of the house. He said Lady le Fleming built the house and
it was hers, as well as everything else round about.
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