here, peeping out among the hedges or
forests, but from the lowest valley to the highest clouds, all is
theirs,--one adamantine dominion and rigid authority of rock. We yield
ourselves to the impression of their eternal unconquerable
stubbornness of strength; their mass seems the least yielding, least
to be softened, or in anywise dealt with by external force, of all
earthly substance. And behold, as we look further into it, it is all
touched and troubled, like waves by a summer breeze; rippled far more
delicately than seas or lakes are rippled; _they_ only undulate along
their surfaces--this rock trembles through its every fibre, like the
chords of an Eolian harp, like the stillest air of spring, with the
echoes of a child's voice. Into the heart of all those great
mountains, through every tossing of their boundless crests, and deep
beneath all their unfathomable defiles, flows that strange quivering
of their substance. Other and weaker things seem to express their
subjection to an Infinite Power only by momentary terrors: as the
weeds bow down before the feverish wind, and the sound of the going in
the tops of the taller trees passes on before the clouds, and the
fitful opening of pale spaces on the dark water, as if some invisible
hand were casting dust abroad upon it, gives warning of the anger that
is to come, we may well imagine that there is a fear passing upon the
grass, and leaves, and waters, at the presence of some great spirit
commissioned to let the tempest loose; but the terror passes, and
their sweet rest is perpetually restored to the pastures and the
waves. Not so to the mountains. They, which at first seem strengthened
beyond the dread of any violence or change, are yet also ordained to
bear upon them the symbol of a perpetual fear. The tremor which fades
from the soft lake and gliding river is sealed to all eternity upon
the rock; and while things that pass visibly from birth to death may
sometimes forget their feebleness, the mountains are made to possess a
perpetual memorial of their infancy--that infancy which the prophet
saw in his vision,[24]--"I beheld the earth, and lo, it was without
form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the
mountains, and lo, they _trembled_, and all the hills moved
_lightly_."

[23] Passage written after I had got by some years cooler and wiser than
when I wrote No. 33, describing however the undulation of the gneiss
rocks, which, 'where they are,