580 Meditations on Mountains. 



steps for a little, and clamber up as you best may, by the outlet of that 

 jet which comes from among the hazles. Should you be fatigued, and 

 can bear a shower-bath of Nature's making, you may strip and stand 

 nnder the jet ; and (trust me) you will neither repent nor lose time ;. 

 for there is a bracing power in water, pure from the rock, which you 

 never can find in thnt which has had to be filtered from the fecula of fat 

 fields and frowzy cities ; and, for the few minutes that you spend here, 

 your feet will feel all the lighter, and your lungs labour all the less, as 

 you bound over the moss and heather, of which you will probably meet 

 with not a little ere your object be accomplished. In supplement, in 

 case you should be among those mountains where there is a " dew" not 

 distilled by the atmosphere, you will not be the worse though you bathe 

 your inner man with a little of that ; but, for your own sake, let it be in 

 small quantity, without any admixture ; and the instant that you have 

 taken it, qiiafTyour fill of the stream ; it is the internal union of the 

 dew and the water which gives you the living fire more of it than if 

 you respired half the dull atmosphere of a street. Taken in this situa- 

 tion, and taken thus, it hurts neither your head nor your health, but 

 makes your whole body glow with renovation ; and as you climb, and 

 clutch, and jump, and gain the top of the bank, you feel as if you had 

 left your mortal part behind, and, by an elevation of some thousand feet, 

 become an ethereal existence. 



You may now turn and look back upon the river and the plain ; from 

 where the former issues out of the great pass in the mountains west- 

 ward, through all its windings, till it be lost in the green bay with the 

 white ripple, which appears a daiseyed meadow, stretching interminably 

 mto the east, between yon two bold headlands, with their beacon lights 

 and flags. You mark the weir across which the flood dashes in an 

 oblique line, and you fancy you hear the roaring of its anger at the inter- 

 ruption ; but it is only the rush of the cascade, which is now concealed 

 by the hazle coppice in the dell, and the stunted but fragrant birches, 

 on the laank. At the point where the stolen water is given back to the 

 river, stands the mill the emblem of activity and of bread, an object, 

 by which, in any place, and more especially in a place like this, if you 

 be not interested, you had better stick to your wheel, in the cellar or 

 saloon, as it may be : eat, drink, and die. There, where the river takes 

 a bend toward the south, round the margin of a gently rising ground, 

 the trees are of more ancient growth, and, at intervals, of darker foliage,, 

 than the rest : that little grey speck, between the dark and rugged 

 ones, is the corner of the church spire, and they are the old yews over 

 the sepulchres of countless generations, all of whom have stood where 

 you now stand, when all around, save the few dots and scratches that 

 man has made upon the surface, was just as you see it. The history of 

 man, even back to yon grassy mounds and yon upright stones, the epoch 

 and the use of which man has clean forgotten, is but a line or two of the 

 last page of that volume of time which nature here opens gratuitously 

 for your instruction and delight. 



Though the action of the stream upon that rock be incessant, it has 

 not, within the memory of man, or even the record of the place, worn 

 one foot of the rock over which it now falls. Then who shall number 

 the years that it has been occupied in scooping out that ravine, which (as 

 you must have observed in your progress), is on both sides mostly com- 

 posed of rock, and of rock, too, which, though not quite so hard as the gra- 



