Mountains and meadows
For all Britain’s political and social woes, in Wright’s eyes nothing could detract from the majesty of its landscape
“I pronounce material England a paradise. It is not too large, too hot, nor too cold… It is full, naturally, of all conceivable beauties, of mountain and plain, land and water.” At times Elizur Wright seems as intoxicated by the British landscape as he is appalled by British society and politics. “It must,” he imagined, “have been inexpressibly beautiful when the druids lived under its primeval oaks.”
“I have just returned,” he wrote on 17 August, “from a tour of Derbyshire, the cliffs of Scarborough, the valley of the Tyne, Dumbarton Castle… the vale of Leven, Loch Lomond, Ben Lomond, the Cobbler, Edinburgh and Arthur’s Seat.” In the Lake District he beheld “a great flock of mountains which appear to be frolicking for joy” with “white lines streaking down, like little currents of milk… torrents of water dashing down in a perfect foam, falling perhaps 2,000 feet”. “To live where Wordsworth does at Rydal, is enough to make any man – even a Dutchman – a poet.”
In his final letter, Wright exclaimed: “After seeing the golden harvests of the rich eastern counties and Yorkshire, the meadows of the Thames… the garden valley of the Tweed… the springs of Malvern; the valleys of the Severn and the Wye… surely I have a right to say: ‘Avaunt, all geography; this island is the very spot where the human race ought to develop itself in all its power and glory.’”