is graced everywhere at
intervals with fantastic piles of limestone cliff, and certainly, in a
proper light, is pretty; but there is far too much quarrying and
industrialism between Liege and Namur, and far too many residential
villas along the banks between Namur and Dinant, altogether to satisfy
those who have high ideals of scenery. Wordsworth, in a prefatory note
to a sonnet that was written in 1820, and at a date when these signs of
industrialism were doubtless less obtrusive, says: "The scenery on the
Meuse pleases one more, upon the whole, than that of the Rhine, though
the river itself is much inferior in grandeur"; but even he complains
that the scenery is "in several places disfigured by quarries, whence
stones were taken for the new fortifications." Dinant, in particular,
has an exceptionally grand cliff; but the summit is crowned (or was) by
an ugly citadel, and the base is thickly clustered round with houses
(not all, by any means, mediaeval and beautiful) in a way that calls to
mind the High Tor at Matlock Bath. Dinant, in short, is a kind of
Belgian Matlock, and appeals as little as Matlock to the "careful
student" of Nature. If at Dinant, however, you desert the broad valley
of the Meuse for the narrow and secluded limestone glen of the Lesse,
with its clear and sparkling stream, you will sample at once a kind of
scenery that reminds you of what is best in Derbyshire, and is also
best and most characteristic in the Belgian Ardennes. The walk up the
stream from Dinant to Houyet, where the valley of the Lesse becomes
more open and less striking, is mostly made by footpath; and the
pellucid river is crossed, and recrossed, and crossed again, by a
constant succession of ferries. Sometimes the white cliff rises
directly from the water, sheer and majestic, like that which is crowned
by the romantic Chateau Walzin; sometimes it is more broken, and rises
amidst trees from a broad plinth of emerald meadow that is interposed
between its base and the windings of the river. Sometimes we thread the
exact margin of the stream, or traverse in the open a scrap of level
pasture; sometimes we clamber steeply by a stony path along the sides
of an abrupt and densely wooded hillside, where the thicket is yellow
in spring with Anemone Ranunculoides, or starred with green Herb Paris.
This is the kind of glen scenery that is found along the courses of the
Semois, Lesse, and Ourthe, recalling, with obvious differences, that of
Mo