or in those whom God's hand hid from them in the clefts of
the rocks.

Sec. 13. And, in fact, much of the apparently harmful influence of hills on
the religion of the world is nothing else than their general gift of
exciting the poetical and inventive faculties, in peculiarly solemn
tones of mind. Their terror leads into devotional casts of thought;
their beauty and wildness prompt the invention at the same time; and
where the mind is not gifted with stern reasoning powers, or protected
by purity of teaching, it is sure to mingle the invention with its
creed, and the vision with its prayer. Strictly speaking, we ought to
consider the superstitions of the hills, universally, as a form of
poetry; regretting only that men have not yet learned how to distinguish
poetry from well-founded faith.

And if we do this, and enable ourselves thus to review, without carping
or sneering, the shapes of solemn imagination which have arisen among
the inhabitants of Europe, we shall find, on the one hand, the mountains
of Greece and Italy forming all the loveliest dreams, first of the
Pagan, then of the Christian mythology; on the other, those of
Scandinavia to be the first sources of whatever mental (as well as
military) power was brought by the Normans into Southern Europe.
Normandy itself is to all intents and purposes a hill country; composed,
over large extents, of granite and basalt, often rugged and covered with
heather on the summits, and traversed by beautiful and singular dells,
at once soft and secluded, fruitful and wild. We have thus one branch of
the Northern religious imagination rising among the Scandinavian fiords,
tempered in France by various encounters with elements of Arabian,
Italian, Provencal, or other Southern poetry, and then reacting upon
Southern England; while other forms of the same rude religious
imagination, resting like clouds upon the mountains of Scotland and
Wales, met and mingled with the Norman Christianity, retaining even to
the latest times some dark color of superstition, but giving all its
poetical and military pathos to Scottish poetry, and a peculiar
sternness and wildness of tone to the Reformed faith, in its
manifestations among the Scottish hills.

Sec. 14. It is on less disputable ground that I may claim the reader's
gratitude to the mountains, as having been the centres not only of
imaginative energy, but of purity both in doctrine and practice. The
enthusiasm of the persecuted Covenan