agining, and left no space without some
loveliness of its own, let him conceive all this great plain, with its
infinite treasures of natural beauty, and happy human life, gathered
up in God's hands from one edge of the horizon to the other, like a
woven garment, and shaken into deep falling folds, as the robes droop
from a king's shoulders; all its bright rivers leaping into cataracts
along the hollows of its fall, and all its forests rearing themselves
aslant against its slopes, as a rider rears himself back when his
horse plunges, and all its villages nestling themselves into the new
windings of its glens, and all its pastures thrown into steep waves of
greensward, dashed with dew along the edges of their folds, and
sweeping down into endless slopes, with a cloud here and there lying
quietly, half on the grass, half in the air,--and he will have as yet,
in all this lifted world, only the foundation of one of the great
Alps. And whatever is lovely in the lowland scenery, becomes lovelier
in this change; the trees which grew heavily and stiffly from the
level line of plain, assume strange curves of strength and grace as
they bend themselves against the mountain side; they breathe more
freely and toss their branches more carelessly as each climbs higher,
looking to the clear light above the topmost leaves of its brother
tree; the flowers which on the arable plain fall before the plough,
now find out for themselves unapproachable places where year by year
they gather into happier fellowship, and fear no evil; and the streams
which in the level land crept in dark eddies by unwholesome banks, now
move in showers of silver, and are clothed with rainbows, and bring
health and life wherever the glance of their waves can reach....

It may not, therefore, be altogether profitless or unnecessary to
review briefly the nature of the three great offices which mountain
ranges are appointed to fulfil, in order to preserve the health and
increase the happiness of mankind. Their first use is, of course, to
give motion to water. Every fountain and river, from the inch-deep
streamlet that crosses the village lane in trembling clearness, to the
massy and silent march of the everlasting multitude of waters in
Amazon or Ganges, owe their play, and purity, and power, to the
ordained elevations of the earth. Gentle or steep, extended or abrupt,
some determined slope of the earth's surface is of course necessary
before any wave can so much as o