continually mingled with the other.

Sec. 37. Next, note the _quantity_ in these hills. It is an element on
which I shall have to insist more in speaking of vegetation; but I must
not pass it by, here, since, in fact, it constitutes one of the
essential differences between hills of first-rate magnificence, and
inferior ones. Not that there is want of quantity even in the lower
ranges, but it is a quantity of inferior things, and therefore more
easily represented or suggested. On a Highland hill side are
multitudinous clusters of fern and heather; on an Alpine one,
multitudinous groves of chestnut and pine. The number of the things may
be the same, but the sense of infinity is in the latter case far
greater, because the number is of nobler things. Indeed, so far as mere
magnitude of space occupied on the field of the horizon is the measure
of objects, a bank of earth ten feet high may, if we stoop to the foot
of it, be made to occupy just as much of the sky as that bank of
mountain at Villeneuve; nay, in many respects its little ravines and
escarpments, watched with some help of imagination, may become very
sufficiently representative to us of those of the great mountain; and in
classing all water-worn mountain-ground under the general and humble
term of Banks, I mean to imply this relationship of structure between
the smallest eminences and the highest. But in this matter of
superimposed _quantity_ the distinctions of rank are at once fixed. The
heap of earth bears its few tufts of moss or knots of grass; the
Highland or Cumberland mountain its honeyed heathers or scented ferns;
but the mass of the bank at Martigny or Villeneuve has a vineyard in
every cranny of its rocks, and a chestnut grove on every crest of them.

Sec. 38. This is no poetical exaggeration. Look close into that plate
(+46+). Every little circular stroke in it among the rocks means, not a
clump of copse nor wreath of fern, but a walnut tree, or a Spanish
chestnut, fifty or sixty feet high. Nor are the little curves, thus
significative of trees, laid on at random. They are not indeed counted,
tree by tree, but they are most carefully distributed in the true
proportion and quantity; or if I have erred at all, it was, from mere
fatigue, on the side of sparingness. The minute mounds and furrows
scattered up the side of that great promontory, when they are actually
approached, after three or four hours' climbing, turn into independent
hills with true _pa