ores of metal
which they collect into spots open to discovery, and easy for working.
All these benefits are of a secondary or a limited nature. But the
three great functions which I have just described, those of giving
motion and change to water, air, and earth, are indispensable to human
existence; they are operations to be regarded with as full a depth of
gratitude as the laws which bid the tree bear fruit, or the seed
multiply itself in the earth. And thus those desolate and threatening
ranges of dark mountain, which in nearly all ages of the world men
have looked upon with aversion, or with terror, and shrunk back from
as if they were haunted by perpetual images of death, are in reality
sources of life and happiness far fuller and more beneficent than all
the bright fruitfulness of the plain. The valleys only feed; the
mountains feed, and guard, and strengthen us. We take our idea of
fearlessness and sublimity alternately from the mountains and the sea;
but we associate them unjustly. The sea-wave, with all its
beneficence, is yet devouring and terrible; but the silent wave of the
blue mountain is lifted towards heaven in a stillness of perpetual
mercy; and the one surge, unfathomable in its darkness, the other
unshaken in its faithfulness, for ever bear the seal of their
appointed symbolism:--

"Thy _righteousness_ is like the great mountains;

"Thy _judgments_ are a great deep."

33. Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent
muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its
anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive
energy, full of expression, passion, and strength; the plains and the
lower hills are the repose and the effortless motion of the frame,
when its muscles lie dormant and concealed beneath the lines of its
beauty,--yet ruling those lines in their every undulation. This then
is the first grand principle of the truth of the earth. The spirit of
the hills is action, that of the lowlands repose; and between these
there is to be found every variety of motion and rest, from the
inactive plain, sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to
the fiery peaks, which, with heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with
the clouds drifting like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up
their Titan heads to Heaven, saying, "I live for ever."

34. Where they are,[23] they seem to form the world; no mere bank of a
river here, or of a lane t