solitude. It is passing through a thickly peopled country;
but never was a stream so lonely. The feeblest and most far-away
torrent among the high hills has its companions; the goats browse
beside it; and the traveller drinks from it, and passes over it with
his staff; and the peasant traces a new channel for it down to his
mill-wheel. But this stream has no companions; it flows on in an
infinite seclusion, not secret, nor threatening, but a quietness of
sweet daylight and open air--a broad space of tender and deep
desolateness, drooped into repose out of the midst of human labour and
life; the waves plashing lowly, with none to hear them; and the wild
birds building in the boughs, with none to fray them away; and the
soft, fragrant herbs rising and breathing and fading, with no hand to
gather them;--and yet all bright and bare to the clouds above, and to
the fresh fall of the passing sunshine and pure rain. But above the
brows of these scarped cliffs, all is in an instant changed. A few
steps only beyond the firs that stretch their branches, angular, and
wild, and white, like forks of lightning, into the air of the
ravine,--and we are in an arable country of the most perfect richness;
the swathes of its corn glowing and burning from field to field: its
pretty hamlets all vivid with fruitful orchards, and flowery garden,
and goodly with steep-roofed storehouse and barn; its well-kept, hard,
park-like roads rising and falling from hillside to hillside, or
disappearing among brown banks of moss, and thickets of the wild
raspberry and rose, or gleaming through lines of tall trees, half
glade, half avenue, where the gate opens, or the gateless path turns
trustedly aside, unhindered, into the garden of some statelier house,
surrounded in rural pride with its golden hives, and carved granaries,
and irregular domain of latticed and espaliered cottages, gladdening
to look upon in their delicate homeliness--delicate, yet in some sort,
rude; not like our English homes--trim, laborious, formal,
irreproachable in comfort--but with a peculiar carelessness and
largeness in all their detail, harmonizing with the outlawed
loveliness of their country. For there is an untamed strength even in
all that soft and habitable land. It is indeed gilded with corn, and
fragrant with deep grass, but it is not subdued to the plough or to
the scythe. It gives at its own free will; it seems to have nothing
wrested from it, nor conquered in it. It is