n places that jumped more nearly with my inclination.

The country to which I refer was a level and treeless plateau over which
the winds cut like a whip. For miles on miles it was the same. A river,
indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I resided; but the valley
of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I had the heart
to follow it. There were roads, certainly, but roads that had no beauty
or interest; for, as there was no timber, and but little irregularity of
surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the beginning:
there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by
the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here
and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only
accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-posts
and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind. To one who had
learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean,
it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested
contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as
Hawthorne liked to put it, "taken back to Nature" by any decent covering
of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie
fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, bare sun-burnt
plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue
transparent air; but this was of another description--this was the
nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and
was ashamed and cold.

It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had passed
into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other when
they met with "Breezy, breezy," instead of the customary "Fine day" of
farther south. These continual winds were not like the harvest breeze,
that just keeps an equable pressure against your face as you walk, and
serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you
the smell of the wet surface of the country after a shower. They were of
the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and
respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have
their own merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to see them
brandish great masses of shadow. And what a power they have over the
colour of the world! How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their
passage, and make them shudder and whiten like a single willow! There i