trips to the lakes
and hills of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and North Wales; and to
recognise--as he will do if he have intellect as well as fancy--how
beautiful and how curious an object is a common slate.

Beautiful, not only for the compactness and delicacy of its texture,
and for the regularity and smoothness of its surface, but still more
for its colour. Whether merely warm grey, as when dry, or bright
purple, as when wet, the colour of the English slate well justifies
Mr. Ruskin's saying, that wherever there is a brick wall and a slate
roof there need be no want of rich colour in an English landscape.
But most beautiful is the hue of slate, when, shining wet in the
sunshine after a summer shower, its blue is brought out in rich
contrast by golden spots of circular lichen, whose spores, I presume,
have travelled with it off its native mountains. Then, indeed, it
reminds the voyager of a sight which it almost rivals in brilliancy--
of the sapphire of the deep ocean, brought out into blazing intensity
by the contrast of the golden patches of floating gulf-weed beneath
the tropic sun.

Beautiful, I say, is the slate; and curious likewise, nay, venerable;
a most ancient and elaborate work of God, which has lasted long
enough, and endured enough likewise, to bring out in it whatsoever
latent capabilities of strength and usefulness might lie hid in it;
which has literally been--as far as such words can apply to a thing
inanimate--

Heated hot with burning fears,
And bathed in baths of hissing tears,
And battered by the strokes of doom
To shape and use.

And yet it was at first naught but an ugly lump of soft and shapeless
ooze.

Therefore, the slates to me are as a parable, on which I will not
enlarge, but will leave each reader to interpret it for himself. I
shall confine myself now to proofs that slate is hardened mud, and to
hints as to how it assumed its present form.

That slate may have been once mud, is made probable by the simple
fact that it can be turned into mud again. If you grind tip slate,
and then analyse it, you will find its mineral constituents to be
exactly those of a fine, rich, and tenacious clay. The slate
districts (at least in Snowdon) carry such a rich clay on them,
wherever it is not masked by the ruins of other rocks. At
Ilfracombe, in North Devon, the passage from slate below to clay
above, may be clearly seen. Wherever the top of the slate b