There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We people who are attracted by the countryside cherish fond memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain ponds, certain hills, which have become familiar sights and can touch our hearts like happy events.
Sometimes indeed the memory goes back towards a forest glade, or a spot on a river bank or an orchard in blossom, glimpsed only once on a happy day, but preserved in our heart.

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.

There is nothing so beautiful, lovable and moving as the English countryside.

The two divinest things the world has got — A lovely woman and a rural spot.

Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.

People have always associated the country with love, and they have done well; nothing affords so fine a frame for the woman whom one loves as the blue sky, the odours, the flowers, the breeze, the shining solitude of fields, or woods. However much one loves a woman, whatever confidence one may have in her, whatever certainty her past may offer us as to her future, one is always more or less jealous. If you have been in love, you must have felt the need of isolating from this world the being in whom you would live wholly.

For love is like a journey in mountainous country, up through the clouds, and down into the shadows to an unknown destination.

Nothing ages a woman like living in the country.

In love of home, the love of country has its rise.

In the highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens
Quiet eyes.

But the dwellers in the country have little understanding of, and therefore little sympathy with, the longing for green fields which haunts the dweller in towns. The secret dream of almost every inhabitant in those dusky streets where even a fresh thought would scarcely seem to enter, is to realise an independence, and go and live in the country. Where is every holiday spent but in the country ! What do the smoky geraniums, so carefully tended in many a narrow street and blind alley attest, but the inherent love of the country ! To whom do the blooming and sheltered villas, which are a national feature in English landscape, belong, but to men who pass the greater part of their lives in small dim counting-houses ! This love of nature is divinely given to keep alive, even in the most toiling and world-worn existence, something of the imaginative and the apart. It is a positive good quality ; and one good quality has some direct, or indirect tendency to produce another.

Some people fall in love and touch the sky. Some people fall in love and find quicksand.

No life is so charming as a country one in England, and no flowers are sweeter or more lovely than the primroses, cowslips, bluebells, and violets that grow in abundance all around me here.

Once settled, I hope to produce masterpieces, because I like the countryside very much.