invariably the case, by slow deposit from a quiet lake in the mountain
hollow, which has been gradually filled by the soil carried into it by
streams, which soil is of course finally left spread at the exact level
of the surface of the former lake, as level as the quiet water itself.
Hence we constantly meet with plains in hill districts, which fill the
hollows of the hills with as perfect and faultless a level as water, and
out of which the steep rocks rise at the edge with as little previous
disturbance, or indication of their forms beneath, as they do from the
margin of a quiet lake. Every delta--and there is one at the head of
every lake in every hill-district--supplies an instance of this. The
rocks at Altorf plunge beneath the plain, which the lake has left, at as
sharp an angle as they do into the lake itself beside the chapel of
Tell. The plain of the Arve, at Sallenche, is terminated so sharply by
the hills to the south-east, that I have seen a man sleeping with his
back supported against the mountain, and his legs stretched on the
plain; the slope which supported his back rising 5000 feet above him,
and the couch of his legs stretched for five miles before him. In
distant effect these champaigns lie like deep, blue, undisturbed water,
while the mighty hills around them burst out from beneath, raging and
tossing like a tumultuous sea. The valleys of Meyringen, Interlachen,
Altorf, Sallenche, St. Jean de Maurienne; the great plain of Lombardy
itself, as seen from Milan or Padua, under the Alps, the Euganeans, and
the Apennines; and the Campo Felice under Vesuvius, are a few, out of
the thousand instances, which must occur at once to the mind of every
traveller.

Sec. 6. Illustrated by Turner's Marengo.

Let the reader now open Rogers's Italy, at the seventeenth page, and
look at the vignette which heads it of the battle of Marengo. It needs
no comment. It cannot but carry with it, after what has been said, the
instant conviction that Turner is as much of a geologist as he is of a
painter. It is a summary of all we have been saying, and a summary so
distinct and clear, that without any such explanation it must have
forced upon the mind the impression of such facts--of the plunging of
the hills underneath the plain--of the perfect level and repose of this
latter laid in their arms, and of the tumultuous action of the emergent
summits.

Sec. 7. General divisions of formation resulting from this arrangement.