5-78 Meditations on Mountains. 



and, at another, a vein of jasper presents its more formidable barrier, 

 and sports in the leaping stream all the glow of its brilliant colours. Now 

 you have left the oak and the beech behind ; there is a hazle coppice in 

 the gulley, on one side ; among the rocks, on the other, the weeping birch 

 forces its roots, while its white trunk rises to the height of many feet, and 

 its delicate depending branches fathoms in length, and not thicker than 

 a packthread reach doAvn below the base of the tree, and lave their 

 points in the stream ; and an old pine, from which both greenness and 

 bark have faded away, throws its withered arms between you and the 

 sky. The little rills leap down on every side, as if they were things of 

 life ; and, roaring above ground, or gurgling under, fill the lonely air 

 with melody that is equally mild and delightful. 



A deeper sound now falls upon your ear, and swells and dies according 

 to the power and direction of the gusts of wind, that play whirling in the 

 ravine. A. little farther, and the cascade bursts upon you first springing 

 from ledge to ledge, like a gymnast acquiring velocity then collecting all 

 its power into a narrow collar of the rock, which does not seem a span 

 across and, lastly, dashing into the air in countless thousands of pearls, 

 to the least brilliant and perfect of which there never came a rival from 

 Ormus or India. The beauty is greatly heightened by those trees 

 fresh in their leaves, fantastic in their branches, and more so in their 

 roots, grasping the rock like the talons of eagles which extend in 

 partial curtains between, and live upon the falling crystal which they 

 adorn. As the fantastic clouds sail away, and the sunbeam dances into 

 the cavity, the rising spray sports all the colours of the rainbow with a 

 brilliance that you never beheld in a summer-cloud. All this glory, too, 

 is finely set ; and the chiar' oscura has a perfection for which you might 

 look in vain in Somerset House or Suffolk Street. Those eastern masses 

 of quartz and gniess are washed milk-white by the pelting rains of the 

 south-west; and their upper edge is fringed with gold and purple, by 

 the lichens and trefoils, and the heath and foxglove, which mingle on the 

 top. Westward, the rocks are purpled with shade. The surface of the 

 water where the cascade strikes is altogether beamy light, upon which 

 you cannot look, save perchance a point or two of rock, the blackness 

 of which adds to the brilliance of the other. From this bright centre, 

 little circles and curves of foam come out, expanding in their width, and 

 diminishing in their brightness ; and they fill the cauldron, which Nature 

 has placed there to catch the falling stream, with a mantling mosaic, whose 

 figures are ten thousand in an instant, and which melts off and off, by the 

 softest gradations, into the thick darkness of the caverns at the extreme 

 sides ; from which, however, it contrives now and then to fling a singular 

 ray of dark-coloured light, which startles you even more than the white 

 gleam of the centre. 



All this, when you see it for the first (or the fiftieth) time, is very fine ; 

 but it cannot be given in words : and though the first-rate describer that 

 ever forced the ignorant to suffer a book, should write " about it, goddess, 

 and about it," for a month, one ignorant of the spirit of the scene could 

 not have a much more accurate and adequate feeling of it than the juve- 

 nile suburban, whose ideas of water are limited to the little duck-pond 

 in the half-rood of pleasure-ground, foul with mud, green with lemna, 

 and reeking with vapour, can derive from the cascade of tinfoil, which 

 winds round two rollers, to the sound of a grinder's wheel, and amid the 

 thunder of the gods, in some holiday spectacle at Old Drury or Covent 



