thought in it, more than in any
other lowly feature of all the landscape. For a stone, when it is
examined, will be found a mountain in miniature. The fineness of
Nature's work is so great, that into a single block, a foot or two in
diameter, she can compress as many changes of form and structure, on a
small scale, as she needs for her mountains on a large one; and taking
moss for forests, and grains of crystal for crags, the surface of a
stone in by far the plurality of instances is more interesting than
the surface of an ordinary hill; more fantastic in form, and
incomparably richer in colour.

39. On a Highland hillside are multitudinous clusters of fern and
heather; on an Alpine one, multitudinous groves of chestnut and pine.
The number of the things may be the same, but the sense of infinity is
in the latter case far greater, because the number is of nobler
things. Indeed, so far as mere magnitude of space occupied on the
field of the horizon is the measure of objects, a bank of earth ten
feet high may, if we stoop to the foot of it, be made to occupy just
as much of the sky as that bank of mountain at Villeneuve; nay, in
many respects, its little ravines and escarpments, watched with some
help of imagination, may become very sufficiently representative to us
of those of the great mountain; and in classing all water-worn
mountain ground under the general and humble term of Banks, I mean to
imply this relationship of structure between the smallest eminences
and the highest. But in this matter of superimposed _quantity_, the
distinctions of rank are at once fixed. The heap of earth bears its
few tufts of moss, or knots of grass; the Highland or Cumberland
mountain, its honeyed heathers or scented ferns; but the mass of the
bank at Martigny or Villeneuve has a vineyard in every cranny of its
rocks, and a chestnut grove on every crest of them.... The minute
mounds and furrows scattered up the side of that great promontory,
when they are actually approached after three or four hours' climbing,
turn into independent hills, with true _parks_ of lovely pasture-land
enclosed among them, and avenue after avenue of chestnuts, walnuts,
and pines bending round their bases; while in the deeper dingles,
populous villages, literally bound down to the rock by enormous trunks
of vine, which, first trained lightly over the loose stone roofs, have
in process of years cast their fruitful net over the whole village,
and fastened it