Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

The weather, on the morning we left Plymouth, was at once cloudy and / fair, and chilly and warm, as it can be only in England. It ended by / cheering up, if not quite clearing up, and from time to time the sun / shone so brightly into our railway carriage that we said it would have / been absurd to supplement it with the hot-water foot-warmer which, in / many trains, still embodies the English notion of car-heating. The sun / shone even more brightly outside, and lay in patches much larger than / our compartment floor on the varied surface of that lovely English / country with which we rapturously acquainted and reacquainted ourselves, / as the train bore us smoothly (but not quite so smoothly as an American / train would have borne us) away from the sea and up towards the heart of / the land. The trees, except the semitropical growths, were leafless yet, / with no sign of budding; the grass was not so green as at Plymouth; but / there were primroses (or cowslips: does it matter which? ) in bloom along / the railroad banks, and young lambs in the meadows where their elders / nosed listlessly among the chopped turnips strewn over the turf. Whether / it was in mere surfeit, or in an invincible distaste for turnips, or an / instinctive repulsion from their frequent association at table, that the / sheep everywhere showed this apathy, I cannot make so sure / as I can of such characteristic features of the landscape as the gray / stone cottages with thatched roofs, and the gray stone villages with / tiled roofs clustering about the knees of a venerable mother-church and / then thinning off into the scattered cottages again.

As yet we were not fully sensible of the sparsity of the cottages; that / is something which grows upon you in England, as the reasons for it / become more a part of your knowledge. Then you realize why a far older / country where the land is in a few hands must be far lonelier than ours, / where each farmer owns his farm, and lives on it. Mile after mile you / pass through carefully tilled fields with no sign of a human habitation, / but at first your eyes and your thoughts are holden from the fact in a / vision of things endeared by association from the earliest moment of / your intellectual nonage. The primroses, if they are primroses and not / cowslips, are a pale-yellow wash in the grass; the ivy is creeping over / the banks and walls, and climbing the trees, and clothing their wintry / nakedness; the hedge-rows, lifted on turf-covered foundations of stone, / change the pattern of the web they weave over the prospect as your train / passes; the rooks are drifting high or drifting low; the little streams / loiter brimful through the meadows steeped in perpetual rains; and all / these material facts have a witchery from poetry and romance to / transmute you to a common substance of tradition. The quick transition / from the present to the past, from the industrial to the feudal, and / back again as your train flies through the smoke of busy towns, and then / suddenly skirts some nobleman's park where the herds of fallow deer lie / motionless on the borders of the lawn sloping up to the stately mansion, / is an effect of the magic that could nowhere else bring the tenth and / twentieth centuries so bewilderingly together. At times, in the open, I / seemed to be traversing certain pastoral regions of southern Ohio; at / other times, when the woods grew close to the railroad track, I was / following the borders of Beverly Farms on the Massachusetts shore, in / either case recklessly irresponsible for the illusion, which if I had / been in one place or the other I could have easily reversed, and so been / back in England.

The run from Plymouth to Exeter is only an hour and a half, but in that / short space we stopped four or five minutes at towns where I should have / been glad to have stopped as many days if I had known what I lost by / hurrying on. I do not know it yet, but I know that one loses so greatly / in every sort of high interest at all the towns one does not stop at in / England that one departs at last a ruined, a beggared man. As it was we / could only avert our faces from the pane as we drew out of each tempting / station, and sigh for the certainty of Exeter's claims upon us. There / our first cathedral was waiting us, and there we knew, from the words / which no guide-book fails to repeat, that we should find "a typical / English city. alike of Briton, Roman, and Englishman, the one great / prize of the Christian Saxon, the city where Jupiter gave way to Christ, / but where Christ never gave way to Wodin. None other can trace up a / life so unbroken to so remote a past. " Whether, when we found it, we / found it equal to the unique grandeur imputed to it, I prefer to escape / saying by saying that the cathedral at Exeter is more than equal to any / expectation you can form of it, even if it is not your first cathedral. / A city of scarcely forty thousand inhabitants may well be forgiven if it / cannot look an unbroken life from so remote a past as Exeter's.

Chicago herself, with all her mythical millions, might not be able to do / as much in the like case; when it comes to certain details I doubt if / even New York would be equal to it.