ne, and take one or two long walks through its fields,
and he will have other thoughts of it. It is, as I said, an undulating
district of grey sandstone, never attaining any considerable height,
but having enough of the mountain spirit to throw itself into continual
succession of bold slope and dale; elevated, also, just far enough above
the sea to render the pine a frequent forest tree along its irregular
ridges. Through this elevated tract the river cuts its way in a ravine
some five or six hundred feet in depth, which winds for leagues between
the gentle hills, unthought of, until its edge is approached; and then
suddenly, through the boughs of the firs, the eye perceives, beneath,
the green and gliding stream, and the broad walls of sandstone cliff
that form its banks; hollowed out where the river leans against them, at
its turns, into perilous overhanging, and, on the other shore, at the
same spots, leaving little breadths of meadow between them and the
water, half-overgrown with thicket, deserted in their sweetness,
inaccessible from above, and rarely visited by any curious wanderers
along the hardly traceable footpath which struggles for existence
beneath the rocks. And there the river ripples, and eddies, and murmurs
in an utter solitude. It is passing through the midst of a thickly
peopled country; but never was a stream so lonely. The feeblest and most
far-away torrent among the high hills has its companions: the goats
browse beside it; and the traveller drinks from it, and passes over it
with his staff; and the peasant traces a new channel for it down to his
mill-wheel. But this stream has no companions: it flows on in an
infinite seclusion, not secret nor threatening, but a quietness of sweet
daylight and open air,--a broad space of tender and deep desolateness,
drooped into repose out of the midst of human labor and life; the waves
plashing lowly, with none to hear them; and the wild birds building in
the boughs, with none to fray them away; and the soft, fragrant herbs
rising, and breathing, and fading, with no hand to gather them;--and yet
all bright and bare to the clouds above, and to the fresh fall of the
passing sunshine and pure rain.

Sec. 9. But above the brows of those scarped cliffs, all is in an instant
changed. A few steps only beyond the firs that stretch their branches,
angular, and wild, and white, like forks of lightning, into the air of
the ravine, and we are in an arable country of the mos