“Or all the dread magnificence of heaven.”
What other region in all the world like that of the Lakes in the north of England! And yet how the true lover of nature, while he carries along with him its delightful character in his heart, and can so revive any spot of especial beauty in his imagination, as that it shall seem in an instant to be again before his very eyes, can deliver himself up, after the lapse of a day, to the genius of some savage scene in the Highlands of Scotland, rent and riven by the fury of some wild sea-loch! Not that the regions do not resemble one another, but surely the prevailing spirit of the one--not so of the other--is a spirit of joy and of peace. Her mountains, invested, though they often be, in gloom--and we have been more than once benighted during day, as a thunder-cloud thickened the shadows that for ever sleep in the deepest dungeons of Helvellyn--are yet--so it seems to us--such mountains as in nature ought to belong to “merry England.” They boldly meet the storms, and seen in storms you might think they loved the trouble; but pitch your tent among them, and you will feel that theirs is a grandeur that is congenial with the sunshine, and that their spirit fully rejoices in the brightness of light. In clear weather, verdant from base to summit, how majestic their repose! And as mists slowly withdraw themselves in thickening folds up along their sides, the revelation made is still of more and more of the beautiful--arable fields below, then coppice woods studded with standard trees--enclosed pastures above and among the woods--broad breasts of close-nibbled herbage here and there adorned by 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.