Explore "The Fields" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The pride of rustic life is the child's form of caste-feeling. The country child is the aristocrat; he has "des relations suivies" with game-keepers, nay, with the most interesting mole-catchers. He has a perfectly self-conscious joy that he is not in a square or a suburb. No essayist has so much feeling against terraces and villas.
As for imitation country -- the further suburb -- it is worse than town; it is a place to walk in; and the tedium of a walk to a child's mind is hardly measurable by a man, who walks voluntarily, with his affairs to think about, and his eyes released, by age, from the custom of perpetual observation. The child, compelled to walk, is the only unresting observer of the asphalt, the pavement, the garden gates and railings, and the tedious people. He is bored as he will never be bored when a man.