When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country.

Hazlitt contrasts the mental tempo of urban life—argument, news, sociability, and self-conscious performance—with the slower, more instinctive rhythms he associates with rural space. To “vegetate” here is not simply to be idle in a pejorative sense, but to let thought and ambition subside, allowing the self to become receptive, bodily, and seasonal—more like landscape than like a debating mind. The line suggests a Romantic-era desire for restorative immersion in nature, yet it is characteristically Hazlittian in its candor: he admits he wants not improvement or picturesque stimulation, but a temporary suspension of striving. The wish implies that place shapes consciousness, and that retreat can be a deliberate form of renewal.