mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands:
and then, farther north still, to see the earth heave into mighty
masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of
gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering into
irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm,
and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending
tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill
ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into
barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets,
deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And,
having once traversed in thought this gradation of the zoned iris of
the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it,
and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life; the
multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and
sea, or tread the sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and
spotted leopards, glistening serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and
scarlet. Let us contrast their delicacy and brilliancy of colour, and
swiftness of motion, with the frost-cramped strength, and shaggy
covering, and dusky plumage of the northern tribes; contrast the
Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard with the wolf
and bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with the
osprey: and then, submissively acknowledging the great laws by which
the earth and all that it bears are ruled throughout their being. Let
us not condemn, but rejoice in the expression by man of his own rest in
the statutes of the lands that gave him birth. Let us watch him with
reverence as he sets side by side the burning gems, and smooths with
soft sculpture the jasper pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless
sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less reverence
let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he
smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from
among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the
pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an
imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of
ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the
winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them.

There is, I repeat, no degradation, no reproach in this, but all
dignity and honourablene