[ 576 ] [JUNE, 



MEDITATIONS ON MOUNTAINS. 



OF all the productions of nature, mountains are the finest subjects for 

 contemplation. Any one who takes a common walk, even in the pur- 

 lieus of the metropolis, where the eminences are mere heaps of rubbish, 

 without any one element even of the hill about them but mere elevation, 

 and very little of that, must feel the force of this. Look at London from 

 any street or square, and the shops of fifty tradesmen, or the knockers 

 and porticos of a score of lords, are all that you can see. Look at it 

 from the elevation of St. Paul's, and what is it ? It looks like a great 

 tile, broken into fragments ; and the people like beetles and millepedes, 

 crawling through the fissures. But go to Highgate, or Hampstead, or 

 Herne Hill, and choose the fine pure air of the morning, ere the million 

 of fires send up their smoke ; or a balmy day of the brisk south-west, 

 when the massy atmosphere is driven " east away," to fatten the calves 

 of Essex, and give the true Whitechapel body and flavour to the veal ; 

 and then you see what London is. The choicest painter may paint and 

 paint again ; but one glance at the reality is worth ten years of poring 

 over even his chef-d'oeuvre. 



Down below, you are tied to the individual object and the individual 

 use ; and if you remain there, your mind gradually narrows and nar- 

 rows, until it comes to the small dimensions of the wheel that you are 

 doomed to turn ; you lose the intellectual character the " os sublime," 

 which your Maker intended as your proper badge and characteristic, 

 and become kindred to the wheel. You work that you may eat, and eat 

 that you may work again ; but speculation in you there can be none, 

 and, as a rational being, you can have no enjoyment. 



When you climb up, however, you feel an expansion at every step ; 

 and when the summit is gained, and the " other half" of the world 

 rounds out the beautiful horizon, your mind is over the whole of it in 

 an instant. Admiration, and wonder, and inquiry are all instantly at 

 work ; and, from every point of the compass, there pours in a tide of 

 information and pleasure, more broad, full, and refreshing, than if you 

 were lord of the whole, and mewed up within the four walls of the finest 

 room that ever was fashioned by the hand of man : a carpet in the 

 centre, full twenty miles in diameter, worth a thousand millions of 

 pounds ; a lamp, which causes light and life, at the distance of two thou- 

 sand millions of miles ; and walls and a ceiling, of which even imagina- 

 tion itself cannot guess the dimensions. If there be any truth in the 

 doctrine, that our power of participating in pleasure, and our actual par- 

 ticipation of it, depend upon and are mainly produced by the objects that 

 are about us, then there is nothing of man's making that can please and 

 profit us so much as this. If there be no truth in the doctrine, then 

 burn London, bury all its glories, back to the woods again, and fight 

 for acorns with the hogs. For, assuredly, -the whole labours of society, 

 in all the years and ages of civilization and improvement, have tended 

 to the single point of having something to look at, which we think more 

 splendid than what we had before. It is for this, and for this only, that the 

 labourer toils, and the artist contrives that the miner digs down into 

 the earth, and the mariner bounds over the ocean that the philosopher 

 trims the lamp, and the poet strikes the lyre ; for this that assemblies 

 meet, and debate, and weary themselves with labour; aye, and for this 



