e is the
loveliness of innumerable islands, clustered together, bearing
vegetation of all hues and odours!

Whether it were in the air which I breathed, or whether it were caught
from the solemn magnificence of the scenery, the same feeling of
sublimity came over me as when I first saw the land of Norway on my
arrival from England; and, I do not know how to account for the
impression, but during the whole time I remained in Norway, and whenever
I was left alone to wander along its fiords, or over its mountains, I
gave way, as in England, to no extreme sensations of delight or sorrow;
but a consciousness of awe weighed eternally upon my mind, and, released
from the tumultuous passions of joy or dejection, a desire, created as
it were by the visible perception of perfect natural beauty, was ever
present to embody itself with the sights of grandeur that soared and
sank above and below me.

Silently, as if without a breath of wind, the cutter crept up the Gulf,
the beauties of which increased the farther we advanced; the bays--the
vessels glancing among the rocks with their white sails in the sun--the
cultivated patches of land--and the neat wooden farm-houses amid the
desolation of the mountains, were novel and interesting objects. The
great variety of the underwood, and the diversified colours of the
foliage, were beautifully blended with the darker tints of the fir which
grew along the sides, and on the tops, of the high hills; and how well
does their sombre gloom mate with the stern magnificence of the rocks!

On the islands, the birch, the hazel, the alder, and the ash, cast their
shadows over the water, and are there reflected in their minutest
lineaments; nor are their trunks and branches more sharply defined in
the air above, than they are imaged in the watery mirror below, the
transparency of the water in no way yielding to the clearness of the
atmosphere; since, as the abruptly-rising rocks tower proportionally
into the air, their steep, bold sides are plunged perpendicularly into
the sea, and seem to descend till the eye loses them in its green depth.

Here and there the islands are inhabited by peasants; and flocks of
sheep and goats ceased, as the yacht passed them, to browse on the low
herbage which springs beneath the rocky coppice; and before the
cottage-doors half-clad children stood still, and gaped, then called
aloud to fishermen who were hanging out their nets to dry, or setting
them for fish around