thquake and foam-fire of the cataract,
the long lines of alternate mirror and mist that lull the imagery of
the hills reversed in the blue of morning,--all these things belong to
those hills as their undivided inheritance.

To this supremacy in wave and stream is joined a no less manifest
pre-eminence in the character of trees. It is possible among plains,
in the species of trees which properly belong to them, the poplars of
Amiens, for instance, to obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which,
as I said, is a better help to the study of gracefulness, as such,
than any of the wilder groupings of the hills; so, also, there are
certain conditions of symmetrical luxuriance developed in the park and
avenue, rarely rivalled in their way among mountains; and yet the
mountain superiority in foliage is, on the whole, nearly as complete
as it is in water: for exactly as there are some expressions in the
broad reaches of a navigable lowland river, such as the Loire or
Thames, not, in their way, to be matched among the rock rivers, and
yet for all that a lowlander cannot be said to have truly seen the
element of water at all; so even in the richest parks and avenues he
cannot be said to have truly seen trees. For the resources of trees
are not developed until they have difficulty to contend with; neither
their tenderness of brotherly love and harmony, till they are forced
to choose their ways of various life where there is contracted room
for them, talking to each other with their restrained branches. The
various action of trees rooting themselves in inhospitable rocks,
stooping to look into ravines, hiding from the search of glacier
winds, reaching forth to the rays of rare sunshine, crowding down
together to drink at sweetest streams, climbing hand in hand among the
difficult slopes, opening in sudden dances round the mossy knolls,
gathering into companies at rest among the fragrant fields, gliding in
grave procession over the heavenward ridges--nothing of this can be
conceived among the unvexed and unvaried felicities of the lowland
forest: while to all these direct sources of greater beauty are added,
first the power of redundance,--the mere quantity of foliage visible
in the folds and on the promontories of a single Alp being greater
than that of an entire lowland landscape (unless a view from some
cathedral tower); and to this charm of redundance, that of clearer
_visibility_,--tree after tree being constantly shown in success