NATURE IN ENGLAND 7 



else a steep acclivity covered with a tangle of primi- 

 tive forest timber. But here, the mountains are 

 high, grassy sheep-walks, smooth, treeless, rounded, 

 and as green as if dipped in a fountain of perpetual 

 spring. I did not wish my Catskills any different; 

 but I 'wondered what would need to be done to 

 them to make them look like these Scotch high- 

 lands. Cut away their forests, rub down all in- 

 equalities in their surfaces, pulverizing their loose 

 bowlders; turf them over, leaving the rock to show 

 through here and there, — then, with a few large 

 black patches to represent the heather, and the soft- 

 ening and ameliorating effect of a mild, humid cli- 

 mate, they might in time come to bear some resem- 

 blance to these shepherd mountains. Then over 

 all the landscape is that new look, — that mellow, 

 legendary, half-human expression which nature 

 wears in these ancestral lands, an expression famil- 

 iar in pictures and in literature, but which a native 

 of our side of the Atlantic has never before seen in 

 gross, material objects and open-air spaces, — the 

 added charm of the sentiment of time and human 

 history, the ripening and ameliorating influence of 

 long ages of close and loving occupation of the soil, 

 — naturally a deep, fertile soil under a mild, very 

 humid climate. 



There is an unexpected, an unexplained lure and 

 attraction in the landscape, — a pensive, reminiscent 

 feeling in the air itself. Nature has grown mellow 

 under these humid skies, as in our fiercer climate 

 she grows harsh and severe. One sees at once why 



