not redeemed from
desertness, but unrestrained in fruitfulness,--a generous land, bright
with capricious plenty, and laughing from vale to vale in fitful
fulness, kind and wild. Nor this without some sterner element mingled
in the heart of it. For, along all its ridges stand the dark masses of
innumerable pines,[11] taking no part in its gladness; asserting
themselves for ever as fixed shadows, not to be pierced or banished
even in the intensest sunlight; fallen flakes and fragments of the
night, stayed in their solemn squares in the midst of all the rosy
bendings of the orchard boughs and yellow effulgence of the harvest,
and tracing themselves in black network and motionless fringes against
the blanched blue of the horizon in its saintly clearness. And yet
they do not sadden the landscape, but seem to have been set there
chiefly to show how bright everything else is round them; and all the
clouds look of pure silver, and all the air seems filled with a whiter
and more living sunshine, where they are pierced by the sable points
of the pines; and all the pastures look of more glowing green where
they run up between the purple trunks; and the sweet field footpaths
skirt the edges of the forest for the sake of its shade, sloping up
and down about the slippery roots, and losing themselves every now and
then hopelessly among the violets and ground-ivy and brown sheddings
of the fibrous leaves, and at last plunging into some open aisle,
where the light through the distant stems shows that there is a chance
of coming out again on the other side; and coming out indeed in a
little while from the scented darkness into the dazzling air and
marvellous landscape, which stretches still farther and farther in new
wilfulness of grove and garden, until at last the craggy mountains of
the Simmenthal rise out of it, sharp into the rolling of the southern
clouds.

[11] Almost the only pleasure I have, myself, in rereading my old books,
is my sense of having at least done justice to the pine. Compare the
passage in this book, No. 47.

19.[12] Although there are few districts of Northern Europe, however
apparently dull or tame, in which I cannot find pleasure; though the
whole of Northern France (except Champagne), dull as it seems to most
travellers, is to me a perpetual paradise; and, putting Lincolnshire,
Leicestershire, and one or two such other perfectly flat districts
aside, there is not an English county which I should not find