A SUMMER-CLAD HEATH 173 



towers of churches that rise grey. By acclivities, 

 gradual and vast, through pine forests and over 

 heathery hills, past cots and snug farmhouses, the 

 land climbs upward to the granite kings of it, and 

 here, upon this heath, one stone giant stands a 

 sentinel on the southern flank of the Moor stands 

 as he has stood for centuries, welcomes the West 

 wind as he welcomed it before the stone-men built 

 their huts, stretched their alignments across the waste 

 places, buried their mighty dead under the cairns, 

 and folded their flocks from wolf or bear behind the 

 granite. 



Such is the scene from the heath southward, and 

 the misty map of Devon is unrolled to the fringe 

 of the invisible sea ; but a different spectacle lies 

 inland, for there, crest upon crest, the great hills lift 

 themselves ; and not the least impressive among their 

 manifold qualities of gloom and splendour, beauty 

 and austerity, is the circumstance of their shapes. 

 Wonderful is the variety of form in these waves of 

 an unchangeable land-ocean. From Rippon's jagged 

 crown upon the South-west to the hogged back of 

 Cosdon, rounding in the northern boundaries of Dart- 

 moor, many a mile distant, an army of varied and giant 

 shapes is outlined against the horizon, or scattered in 

 the huge dips and hollows of the land beneath it. 



* " Sun and shower, 



And breeze and storm, and, haply, ancient throes 

 Of this our mother earth, have moulded them 



* N. T. Carrington. 



