position
that he had seen high mountains, but never implying awe or admiration.
Thus Demetrius:

"These things seem _small_ and _indistinguishable_,
_Like far-off mountains, turned into clouds_."

"Taurus snow," and the "frosty Caucasus," are used merely as types of
purity or cold; and though the avalanche is once spoken of as an image
of power, it is with instantly following depreciation:

"Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow
Upon the valleys, whose low vassal seat
The Alps doth spit and void his rheum upon."

Sec. 38. There was only one thing belonging to hills that Shakespere seemed
to feel as noble--the pine tree, and that was because he had seen it in
Warwickshire, clumps of pine occasionally rising on little sandstone
mounds, as at the place of execution of Piers Gaveston, above the
lowland woods. He touches on this tree fondly again and again.

"As rough,
Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud'st wind,
That by his top doth take the mountain pine,
And make him stoop to the vale."

"The strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar."

Where note his observance of the peculiar horizontal roots of the pine,
spurred as it is by them like the claw of a bird, and partly propped, as
the aiguilles by those rock promontories at their bases which I have
always called their spurs, this observance of the pine's strength and
animal-like grasp being the chief reason for his choosing it, above all
other trees, for Ariel's prison. Again:

"You may as well forbid the mountain pines
To wag their high tops, and to make no noise
When they are fretted with the gusts of heaven."

And yet again:

"But when, from under this terrestrial ball,
He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines."

We may judge, by the impression which this single feature of hill
scenery seems to have made on Shakespere's mind, because he had seen it
in his youth, how his whole temper would have been changed if he had
lived in a more sublime country, and how essential it was to his power
of contemplation of mankind that he should be removed from the sterner
influences of nature. For the rest, so far as Shakespere's work has
imperfections of any kind,--the trivialness of many of his adopted
plots, for instance, and the comparative rarity with which he admits the
ideal of an enthusiastic virtue arising out of princi