LANDSCAPE EFFECTS 8i 



effect of his designs, to a degree seldom found in nature, by consistency 

 of scale and perfection of organization all tending to the same emotional 

 result. And here again the effect of sublimity or grandeur is increased 

 if the buildings evidently express some great idea or emotion, religious 

 or other, which makes them thereby the more a part of the great forces 

 of the universe. 



If the perception of the littleness of man in comparison with the Desolation 

 might of natural forces gives us in a particular case a feeling of help- 

 lessness we may call the effect awe, or in an extreme case even terror, 

 or if we are describing the landscape we may call it stern, or menacing, 

 or perhaps terrible, according to the degree of the emotion which it 

 arouses. These effects are likely to be partly the direct result of dark- 

 ness, perhaps also of cold, and of violent wind, but they are also and 

 in larger part the result less directly of the difficulty and danger or toil 

 which the observer perceives that the place would offer to any one who 

 endeavored to travel through it or remain for long in it. Where the 

 effect of unpleasantness and difficulty comes from the exposure and 

 barrenness of the country, we are likely to call it desolation.* (See 

 Plate II.) 



The melancholy landscape has very closely the type of effect which Melancholy 

 we have discussed earlier in this chapter and have called, for lack of 



* "We need not go so far as the Arctic regions to feel effects of dreariness in all 

 their power. Our own island has regions of miserable desolation, of which perhaps the 

 worst that I have seen is the great moor of Rannoch. There is an excellent descrip- 

 tion of it in Macculloch, hardly to be surpassed for the skill with which it conveys the 

 depressing aspect of such scenery : — 



" 'Pray imagine the moor of Rannoch; for who can describe it? A great level 

 (I hope the word will pardon this abuse of it) a thousand feet above the sea, sixteen or 

 twenty miles long and nearly as much wide, bounded by mountains so distant as 

 scarcely to form an apprehensible boundary ; open, silent, solitary ; an ocean of black- 

 ness and bogs, a world before chaos ; not so good as chaos, since its elements are only 

 rocks and bogs, with a few pools of water, bogs of the Styx and waters of Cocytus, with 

 one great, long, sinuous, flat, dreary, black Acheron-like lake. Loch Lydoch, near 

 which arose three fire-trees just enough to remind me of the vacuity of all the rest. 

 Not a sheep nor a cow ; even the crow shunned it and wheeled his croaking flight far 

 off to better regions. If there was a blade of grass anywhere it was concealed by the 

 dark stems of the black, muddy sedges and by the yellow, melancholy rush of the 

 bogs.'" P. G. Hamerton, Landscape, 1885, p. 117. (See References.) 



