50 LOVE OF COUNTRY. 



sandy plain, fleet as the whirlwind, carrying his 

 handful of dates for his day's repast, and marching 

 twenty miles to the palm-encircled pool, at which 

 he is to quench his thirst, would not give up the joy 

 of the wilderness for the fattest plains and the most 

 gorgeous cities. He has known nature, and seen 

 the working of nature's God in the desert, and be- 

 yond that, or higher than that, the very excess and 

 perfection of man's working cannot give him pleasure. 

 And who are they, whose ancestry in their pres- 

 ent localities stretches backward till its fading 

 memorials out-measure not only all that has been 

 written, but all that has been erected in brick or in 

 marble, or in the aged granite itself the primeval 

 father of mountain and of rock I Are they the in- 

 habitants of fertile plains, spreading wide their pro- 

 ductive bosoms to the sun, rich in flocks and herds, 

 thronged with villages, and joyous with cities and 

 palaces ] I trow not. They are the men of the 

 mountains ; and if there is love of country upon 

 earth, you will find it where there is only a moun- 

 tain pine, a mountain goat, and a mountaineer, as 

 fast rooted and as firm footed on the rock as either. 

 Ask of the mountains of your own country ; and 

 Snowdon shall answer to Ben-Nevis, and Wharnside 

 shall respond to gray Cairngorm, " We have known 

 our people for a thousand years, and each year of 

 the thousand they have loved us the more. Our 

 summits are bleak, but they point to heaven ; they 

 are hoary with eld, but the hope of immortality 

 breathes around them." Glance your eye over Asia, 

 and you shall find, that while conquest and change 

 of race have swept the plains of Euphrates and 

 Ganges like floods, and the level steppes of Siberia 

 like the north wind, Caucasus and Himmalaya have 

 retained their people, and their tuneful cliffs echo 

 the same language as they did in the days of the 

 patriarchs. And who, too, had footing on the Alps 

 before the Swiss, or on the Pyrenees before the 



