GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 49

one sees green England sunning herself in her immemorial peace
—"the same level meadow with geese upon it ... the same
pollard oaks, with now and then the butcher or the washer-
women trundling by in their carts." "I read of mornings the
same old books over and over again," he writes, "walk with my
great dog of an afternoon and at evening sit with open window,
up to which China roses climb, with my pipe while the black-
birds and thrushes begin to rustle bedwards in the garden."
"We have had," he wrote on another occasion, "glorious weather,
new pease and young potatoes, fresh milk (how good!) and a cool
library to sit in of mornings," Down in his native Suffolk this
gentle patriot found the heart of England beating healthily:
whenever he returned from sophisticated London he was amazed
at "the humour and worth and noble feeling in the country."
Fishing in "the land of old Bunyan ... and the perennial Ouse,
making many a fantastic winding . , . to fertilize and adorn,"
he stayed at an inn, "the cleanest, the sweetest, the civillest, the
quietest, the liveliest and the cheapest that was ever built or
conducted. ... On one side it has a garden, then the meadows
through which winds the Ouse: on the other the public road,
with its coaches hurrying on to London, its market people halting
to drink, its farmers, horsemen and foot travellers. So, as
one's humour is, one can have whichever phase of life one pleases:
quietude or bustle; solitude or the busy hum of men: one can
sit in the principal room with a tankard and a pipe and see both
these phases at once through the windows that open upon either."1
To such a one the changing seasons only brought new content-
ment—spring "Tacitus lying at fall length on a bench in the
garden, a nightingale singing and some red anemones eyeing
the sun manfully," and autumn "howling winds and pelting
rains and leaves already turned yellow" with a book before a great
fire in the evening. "In this big London," Fitzgerald wrote to
Bernard Barton, "all full of intellect and pleasure and business,
I feel pleasure in dipping down into the country and rubbing
my hand over the cool dew upon the pastures, as it were.
I should like to.live in a small house just outside a pleasant
English town all the days of my life, making myself useful in a
humble way, reading my books and playing a rubber of whist

i**Through all these delightful places they talk of leading railroads; a sad thing, I
am sure; quite impolitic. But Mammon is blind." Letters and Literary Remains of
Edward Fitzgerald, I, 63.