wave about to break. Byron
uses the image definitely of Soracte; and, in a less clear way, it seems
to present itself occasionally to all minds, there being a general
tendency to give or accept accounts of mountain form under the image of
waves; and to speak of a hilly country, seen from above, as looking
like a "sea of mountains."

Such expressions, vaguely used, do not, I think, generally imply much
more than that the ground is waved or undulated into bold masses. But if
we give prolonged attention to the mountains of the group _b_ we shall
gradually begin to feel that more profound truth is couched under this
mode of speaking, and that there is indeed an appearance of action and
united movement in these crested masses, nearly resembling that of sea
waves; that they seem not to be heaped up, but to leap or toss
themselves up; and in doing so, to wreathe and twist their summits into
the most fantastic, yet harmonious, curves, governed by some grand
under-sweep like that of a tide, running through the whole body of the
mountain chain.

[Illustration: FIG 43.]

For instance, in Fig. 43, which gives, rudely, the leading lines of the
junction of the "Aiguille pourri"[66] (Chamouni) with the Aiguilles
Rouges, the reader cannot, I think, but feel that there is something
which binds the mountains together--some common influence at their heart
which they cannot resist: and that, however they may be broken or
disordered, there is as true unity among them as in the sweep of a wild
wave, governed, through all its foaming ridges, by constant laws of
weight and motion.

[Illustration: FIG. 44.]

Sec. 3. How far this apparent unity is the result of elevatory force _in_
mountain, and how far of the sculptural force of water _upon_ the
mountain, is the question we have mainly to deal with in the present
chapter.

[Illustration: FIG. 45.]

But first look back to Fig. 7, of Plate +8+, Vol. III., there given as
the typical representation of the ruling forces of growth in a leaf.
Take away the extreme portion of the curve on the left, and any segment
of the leaf remaining, terminated by one of its ribs, as _a_ or _b_,
Fig. 44, will be equally a typical contour of a common crested mountain.
If the reader will merely turn Plate +8+ so as to look at the figure
upright, with its stalk downwards, he will see that it is also the base
of the honeysuckle ornament of the Greeks. I may anticipate what we
shall have to note with respect t