try, but along a valley walled in by bleak, ridgy hills
extending straight as a rampart, and across black moorlands with here and
there a plantation of trees. Sometimes there were long and gradual
ascents, bleak, windy, and desolate, conveying the very impression which
the reader gets from many passages of Miss Bronte's novels, and still more
from those of her two sisters. Old stone or brick farm-houses, and, once
in a while, an old church-tower, were visible: but these are almost too
common objects to be noticed in an English landscape.

On a railway, I suspect, what little we do see of the country is seen
quite amiss, because it was never intended to be looked at from any point
of view in that straight line; so that it is like looking at the wrong
side of a piece of tapestry. The old highways and footpaths were as
natural as brooks and rivulets, and adapted themselves by an inevitable
impulse to the physiognomy of the country; and, furthermore, every object
within view of them had some subtile reference to their curves and
undulations: but the line of a railway is perfectly artificial, and puts
all precedent things at sixes-and-sevens. At any rate, be the cause what
it may, there is seldom anything worth seeing--within the scope of a
railway traveller's eye; and if there were, it requires an alert marksman
to take a flying shot at the picturesque.

At one of the stations, (it was near a village of ancient aspect, nestling
round a church, on a wide Yorkshire moor,) I saw a tall old lady in black,
who seemed to have just alighted from the train. She caught my attention
by a singular movement of the head, not once only, but continually
repeated, and at regular intervals, as if she were making a stern and
solemn protest against some action that developed itself before her eyes,
and were foreboding terrible disaster, if it should be persisted in. Of
course, it was nothing more than a paralytic or nervous affection; yet one
might fancy that it had its origin in some unspeakable wrong, perpetrated
half a lifetime ago in this old gentlewoman's presence, either against
herself or somebody whom she loved still better. Her features had a
wonderful sternness, which, I presume, was caused by her habitual effort
to compose and keep them quiet, and thereby counteract the tendency to
paralytic movement. The slow, regular, and inexorable character of the
motion,--her look of force and self-control, which had the appearance of
renderin