THE LOVELIEST VILLAGE.
Is it possible that a part of his ideal is being more or less automatically realized, without the purposeful building of garden cities or what politicians would call ad hoc units ? If my vote were solicited for the most beautiful village within Southern England, the nearest to Goldsmith's " Sweet Auburn," that " Loveliest village of the plain," I should name one which nurses a factory for explosives ! The association of ideas does not sound attractive, and many countrymen are horrified at the bare idea of a factory appearing in their midst. But the village will subdue the factory, not the factory the village, if the aesthetic and moral influences are of the right sort. If the larks sing at the factory gates, they will effectively point the way to Heaven's gate ; which, as Shakespeare assures us, with his virile Elizabethan optimism, is their native heath, their ordained choir, their proper pitch. -
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