h would have appeared insanely
ridiculous half a century ago, but now reasonable enough. If the
traveller be no geologist, so that he cannot, by his own observation,
determine the nature of the soil, and thence infer, for his general
guidance, the employments and mental and moral state of the people, he
must observe the face of the country along the road he travels. He will
do better still by mounting any eminences which may be within reach,
whether they be churches, pillars, pyramids, pagodas, baronial castles
on rocks, or peaks of mountains; thence he should look abroad, from
point to point, through the whole region, and mark out what he sees
spread beneath him. Are there pastures extended to the horizon, with
herdsmen and flocks sprinkled over them, and in the midst a cloud of
smoke overhanging a town, from which roads part off in many directions?
Or is it a scene of shadowy mountains, with streams leaping from their
fissures, and no signs of human habitation but the machinery of a mine,
with rows of dwellings near heaps of piled rubbish? Or is the whole
intersected with fences, and here dark with fallows, there yellow with
corn, while farmsteads terminate the lanes, and the dwellings and
grounds of rich proprietors are seen at intervals, with each a hamlet
resting against its boundaries? Is this the kind of scene, whether the
great house be called mansion, or chateau, or villa, or schloss; whether
the produce be corn, or grapes, or tea, or cotton? A person gifted with
a precocity of science in the twelfth century might have prophesied what
is now happening from the picture stretched beneath him as he gazed
from an eminence on the banks of the Don or the Calder. He might see,
with the bodily eye, only

"Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide,"

with clusters of houses in the far distance, and Robin Hood with his
merry men lurking in the thickets of the forest, or basking under the
oaks: but with the prophetic eye of science he might discern the
multitudes that were, in course of time, to be living in Sheffield or
Huddersfield; the stimulus that would be given to enterprise, the
thronging of merchants to this region, the physical sufferings, the
moral pressure, that must come; the awakening of intelligence, and the
arousing of ambition. In the real scene, a cloud-shadow might be passing
over a meadow; in the ideal, a smoke-cloud would be resting upon a
hundred thousand human beings.