CLEAR WATERS 



which they are customarily dealt with, recognises no 

 qualifications and none of those limitations which are 

 so painfully obvious. If you have inspected a large 

 photograph of Banff, for instance, or of Field, you will 

 not be surprised at anything when you get there. It 

 will be exactly what you expected. Every fissure in 

 every topmost crag you see in the photograph you will 

 see all day long in the original with equal clarity, 

 unless it is bad weather. The miles of sombre ever- 

 green require no effort of imagination, and there 

 they are, unchanging, monotonous, all day long and 

 through every month, spring, summer, autumn, and 

 winter, when the crags above take on their coat of 

 snow. And in the clear lakes below you see them in 

 photographic reflection all over again, the crags, the 

 evergreens and the straight poles, so faithfully and 

 so intimately that guide-books, railroad pamphlets, 

 immigration lecturers, and other crude authorities go 

 into transports at the spectacle, and not only that 

 but perhaps really believe there can be nothing so 

 beautiful in the whole world. 



But conceive a photograph of Patterdale giving an 

 American, let us say, any idea of what it is really like. 

 The ever-shifting lights upon the mountains, the 

 radiancy of the many-tinted mantle that covers them, 

 exposing just so much of cliff and crag as to give these 

 value and ensure the dignity of the picture. The 

 emerald turf, the tawny moor grass, the orange-hued 

 bilberry, sheeny bracken, golden gorse, and in its 

 season the purple flare of heather, with a score of other 

 pigments, laid so delicately over a mountain-side 

 that not a curve of its graceful folds, not a crag, nor 

 270 



