nues, and animating its fields with happy
flocks, and slow wandering spots of cattle; and when he has wearied
himself with endless imagining, and left no space without some
loveliness of its own, let him conceive all this great plain, with its
infinite treasures of natural beauty and happy human life, gathered up
in God's hands from one edge of the horizon to the other like a woven
garment; and shaken into deep, falling folds, as the robes droop from a
king's shoulders; all its bright rivers leaping into cataracts along the
hollows of its fall, and all its forests rearing themselves aslant
against its slopes, as a rider rears himself back when his horse
plunges; and all its villages nestling themselves into the new windings
of its glens; and all its pastures thrown into steep waves of
greensward, dashed with dew along the edges of their folds, and sweeping
down into endless slopes, with a cloud here and there lying quietly,
half on the grass, half in the air; and he will have as yet, in all this
lifted world, only the foundation of one of the great Alps. And whatever
is lovely in the lowland scenery becomes lovelier in this change: the
trees which grew heavily and stiffly from the level line of plain
assume strange curves of strength and grace as they bend themselves
against the mountain side; they breathe more freely, and toss their
branches more carelessly as each climbs higher, looking to the clear
light above the topmost leaves of its brother tree: the flowers which on
the arable plain fell before the plough, now find out for themselves
unapproachable places, where year by year they gather into happier
fellowship, and fear no evil; and the streams which in the level land
crept in dark eddies by unwholesome banks, now move in showers of
silver, and are clothed with rainbows, and bring health and life
wherever the glance of their waves can reach.

Sec. 5. And although this beauty seems at first, in its wildness,
inconsistent with the service of man, it is, in fact, more necessary to
his happy existence than all the level and easily subdued land which he
rejoices to possess. It seems almost an insult to the reader's
intelligence to ask him to dwell (as if they could be doubted) on the
_uses_ of the hills; and yet so little, until lately, have those uses
been understood, that, in the seventeenth century, one of the most
enlightened of the religious men of his day (Fleming), himself a native
of a mountain country, castin