ing a pleasant book; and if the scenery be resolutely level,
insisting upon the declaration of its own flatness in all the detail
of it, as in Holland, or Lincolnshire, or Central Lombardy, it appears
to me like a prison, and I cannot long endure it. But the slightest
rise and fall in the road,--a mossy bank at the side of a crag of
chalk, with brambles at its brow, overhanging it,--a ripple over three
or four stones in the stream by the bridge,--above all, a wild bit of
ferny ground under a fir or two, looking as if, possibly, one might
see a hill if one got to the other side of the trees, will instantly
give me intense delight, because the shadow, or the hope, of the hills
is in them.

And thus, although there are few districts of Northern Europe, however
apparently dull or tame, in which I cannot find pleasure, though the
whole of Northern France (except Champagne), dull as it seems to most
travellers, is to me a perpetual Paradise; and, putting Lincolnshire,
Leicestershire, and one or two such other perfectly flat districts
aside, there is not an English county which I should not find
entertainment in exploring the cross-roads of, foot by foot; yet all
my best enjoyment would be owing to the imagination of the hills,
colouring, with their far-away memories, every lowland stone and herb.
The pleasant French coteau, green in the sunshine, delights me, either
by what real mountain character it has in itself (for in extent and
succession of promontory the flanks of the French valleys have quite
the sublimity of true mountain distances), or by its broken ground
and rugged steps among the vines, and rise of the leafage above,
against the blue sky, as it might rise at Vevay or Como. There is not
a wave of the Seine but is associated in my mind with the first rise
of the sandstones and forest pines of Fontaine-bleau; and with the
hope of the Alps, as one leaves Paris with the horses' heads to the
south-west, the morning sun flashing on the bright waves at Charenton.
If there be _no_ hope or association of this kind, and if I cannot
deceive myself into fancying that perhaps at the next rise of the road
there may be seen the film of a blue hill in the gleam of sky at the
horizon, the landscape, however beautiful, produces in me even a kind
of sickness and pain; and the whole view from Richmond Hill or Windsor
Terrace,--nay, the gardens of Alcinous, with their perpetual
summer,--or of the Hesperides (if they were flat, and not