n
which they exercised the art its beauty had inspired. Whatever may be
the associations connected with the subjects of their landscapes--and we
know not why they should be higher or holier than those belonging to
innumerable places in our own land--assuredly in themselves they are not
more interesting or impressive; nay, though none who have shared with us
the spirit of the few imperfect sentences we have now written, will, for
a moment, suppose us capable of instituting an invidious comparison
between our own scenery and that of any other country, why should we
hesitate to assert that our own storm-loving Northern Isle is equally
rich in all kinds of beauty as the sunny South, and richer far in all
kinds of grandeur, whether we regard the forms or colouring of
nature--earth, sea, or air,--

"Or all the dread magnificence of heaven."

What other region in all the world like that of the Lakes in the North
of England! And yet how the true lover of nature, while he carries along
with him its delightful character in his heart, and can so revive any
spot of especial beauty in his imagination, as that it shall seem in an
instant to be again before his very eyes, can deliver himself up, after
the lapse of a day, to the genius of some savage scene in the Highlands
of Scotland, rent and riven by the fury of some wild sea-loch! Not that
the regions do not resemble one another, but surely the prevailing
spirit of the one--not so of the other--is a spirit of joy and of peace.
Her mountains, invested, though they often be, in gloom--and we have
been more than once benighted during day, as a thunder-cloud thickened
the shadows that for ever sleep in the deepest dungeons of
Helvellyn--are yet--so it seems to us--such mountains as in nature ought
to belong to "merry England." They boldly meet the storms, and seen in
storms, you might think they loved the trouble; but pitch your tent
among them, and you will feel that theirs is a grandeur that is
congenial with the sunshine, and that their spirit fully rejoices in the
brightness of light. In clear weather, verdant from base to summit, how
majestic their repose! And as mists slowly withdraw themselves in
thickening folds up along their sides, the revelation made is still of
more and more of the beautiful--arable fields below--then coppice woods
studded with standard trees--enclosed pastures above and among the
woods--broad breasts of close-nibbled herbage here and there adorned by