owers, are very frequent; but the showers,
darkening, or brightning, as they fly from hill to hill, are not less
grateful to the eye than finely interwoven passages of gay and sad music
are touching to the ear. Vapours exhaling from the lakes and meadows
after sun-rise, in a hot season, or, in moist weather, brooding upon the
heights, or descending towards the valleys with inaudible motion, give a
visionary character to every thing around them; and are in themselves so
beautiful, as to dispose us to enter into the feelings of those simple
nations (such as the Laplanders of this day) by whom they are taken for
guardian deities of the mountains; or to sympathise with others, who
have fancied these delicate apparitions to be the spirits of their
departed ancestors. Akin to these are fleecy clouds resting upon the
hill-tops; they are not easily managed in picture, with their
accompaniments of blue sky; but how glorious are they in Nature! how
pregnant with imagination for the poet! and the height of the Cumbrian
mountains is sufficient to exhibit daily and hourly instances of those
mysterious attachments. Such clouds, cleaving to their stations, or
lifting up suddenly their glittering heads from behind rocky barriers,
or hurrying out of sight with speed of the sharpest sledge--will often
tempt an inhabitant to congratulate himself on belonging to a country of
mists and clouds and storms, and make him think of the blank sky of
Egypt, and of the cerulean vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a
sad spectacle. The atmosphere, however, as in every country subject to
much rain, is frequently unfavourable to landscape, especially when keen
winds succeed the rain which are apt to produce coldness, spottiness,
and an unmeaning or repulsive detail in the distance;--a sunless
frost, under a canopy of leaden and shapeless clouds, is, as far as it
allows things to be seen, equally disagreeable.

It has been said that in human life there are moments worth ages. In a
more subdued tone of sympathy may we affirm, that in the climate of
England there are, for the lover of Nature, days which are worth whole
months,--I might say--even years. One of these favoured days
sometimes occurs in spring-time, when that soft air is breathing over
the blossoms and new-born verdure, which inspired Buchanan with his
beautiful Ode to the first of May; the air, which, in the luxuriance of
his fancy, he likens to that of the golden age,--to that which gi