236 



MATURE FOB ITS OWN SAKE 



The " sleep' 

 'ng " valley. 



Vattty 

 nlenoe. 



just as truly suggestive of listlessness, idleness, 

 and sleep. 



These impressions produced by nature's lines 

 are doubtless wholly subjective, yet they seem 

 positive realities to us. A man can no more 

 rest on a mountain-peak than he can sleep 

 standing upright. The perpendicular affects 

 him one way, the horizontal quite another way ; 

 and rhetoric has not erred in speaking of the 

 " restless " mountains, though they are as mo- 

 tionless as the plains ; nor of the " sleeping " 

 valley, though a valley never sleeps or wakes. 

 Perhaps the chief characteristic of the valley is 

 its repose. It is always still, except when set 

 whispering with winds or roaring with storms ; 

 and the deeper, the more shut in it is, the 

 greater seems its hush. Standing above it at 

 mid-day, with light and shadow lying along 

 its sides, the stillness seems like the silence 

 of untenanted space. A rifle-shot or a human 

 voice breaks upon the sensitive air with a sharp 

 crash, and the echoes set flying by it reverber- 

 ate and pass out of the caflon ricocheting from 

 rock to rock with the elasticity of a rubber 

 ball. Quite a different affair, too, is the sound 

 of thunder in a mountain-valley compared with 

 the thunder heard on the plains. The clap and 



