158 LOCUSTS AND WILD HONEY 



" ' And jocund day 

 Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.' 



Or in this : — 



" ' Full many a glorious morning have I seen 

 Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye.' 



There is savage, perennial beauty there, the quality 

 that Wordsworth and nearly all the modern poets 

 lack." 



"But Wordsworth is the poet of the mountains," 

 said I, "and of lonely peaks. True, he does not 

 express the power and aboriginal grace there is in 

 them, nor toy with them and pluck them up by the 

 hair of their heads, as Shakespeare does. There is 

 something in Peakamoose yonder, as we see it from 

 this point, cutting the blue vault with its dark, 

 serrated edge, not in the bard of Grasmere; but he 

 expresses the feeling of loneliness and insignificance 

 that the cultivated man has in the presence of moun- 

 tains, and the burden of solemn emotion they give 

 rise to. Then there is something much more wild 

 and merciless, much more remote from human inter- 

 ests and ends, in our long, high, wooded ranges than 

 is expressed by the peaks and scarred groups of the 

 lake country of Britain. These mountains we be- 

 hold and cross are not picturesque, — they are wild 

 and inhuman as the sea. In them you are in a 

 maze, in a weltering world of woods; you can see 

 neither the earth nor the sky, but a confusion of the 

 growth and decay of centuries, and must traverse 

 them by your compass or your science of woodcraft, 

 — a rift through the trees giving one a glimpse of 



