The mountain lands have that which no low- Summer 

 land has. But in that company we shall not Clouds, 

 find what the illimitable level lands will afford, 

 what inhabits the wilderness, what is the 

 revelation of the desert, what is the lovely 

 magic of the horizons of the sea. By the 

 sombre reaches of the Solway, in the fen- 

 lands of East Anglia, in the immensity of 

 the great bog which cinctures Ireland, in the 

 illimitable lowland from Flanders to the last 

 brine-whitened Frisian meadows, I have seen 

 a quality of aerial beauty that I have not in 

 like loveliness elsewhere found. Who that 

 in mid-ocean has long watched the revelation 

 of distance and the phantasmagoria of cloud 

 during serene days, or from island shores 

 looked across limitless waters till the far 

 blue line seemed lifted to the purple-shadowed 

 bases of leaning palaces, can think of an excel- 

 ling loveliness ? Who that has seen the four- 

 fold azure, in east and west, in north and 

 south, over the desert, and watched the secret 

 veils of a single pavilion of rose-flusht cumulus 

 slowly be undone, till the vision is become a 

 phantom, and the phantom is become a dream, 

 and the dream is become a whiteness and still- 

 ness deep -sinking into fathomless blue, can 

 forget that the impassive beauty of the 

 wilderness is more searching and compelling 



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