rich dyed rocks, that do not break the expanse--till the whole veil has
disappeared, and, lo! the long lofty range, with its wavy line, rising
and sinking so softly in the blue serenity perhaps of an almost
cloudless sky. Yet though we have thus characterised the mountains by
what we have always felt to be the pervading spirit of the region,
chasms and ravines, and cliffs and precipices, are there; in some places
you see such assemblages as inspire the fear that quakes at the heart,
when suddenly struck in the solitude with a sense of the sublime; and
though we have called the mountains green--and during Spring and Summer,
in spite of frost or drought, they are green as emerald--yet in Autumn
they are many-coloured, and are girdled with a glow of variegated light,
that at sunset sometimes seems like fire kindled in the woods.

The larger Vales are all serene and cheerful, and among the sylvan
knolls with which their wide levels highly cultivated are interspersed,
cottages, single or in groups, are frequent, of an architecture always
admirably suited to the scenery, because in a style suggested not by
taste or fancy, which so often disfigure nature to produce the
picturesque, but resorted to for sake of the uses and conveniences of
in-door life, to weather-fend it in storms, and in calm to give it the
enjoyment of sunshine. Many of these dwellings are not what are properly
called cottages, but Statesmen's houses, of ample front, with their many
roofs, overshadowed by a stately grove, and inhabited by the same race
for many generations. All alike have their suitable gardens, and the
porches of the poorest are often clustered with roses; for everywhere
among these hills, even in minds the most rude and uncultivated, there
is a natural love of flowers. The villages, though somewhat too much
modernised in those days of improvement, and indeed not a few of them
with hardly any remains now of their original architecture--nothing old
about them but the church tower, perhaps the parsonage--are nevertheless
generally of a pleasing character, and accordant, if not with the great
features of nature, which are unchanged and unchangeable, with the
increased cultivation of the country, and the many villas and
ornamented cottages that have risen and are rising by every lake and
river side. Rivers indeed, properly so called, there are none among
these mountains; but every vale, great and small, has at all times its
pure and undefiled st