NATURE IN ENGLAND. 27 



emn and impressive ; no sense of age or power. The 

 rock crops out everywhere, but it can hardly look you 

 in the face ; it is crumbling and insignificant ; shows 

 no frowning walls, no tremendous cleavage; nothing 

 overhanging and precipitous ; no wrath and revel of 

 the elder gods." 



Even in rugged Scotland, nature is scarcely wilder 

 than a mountain sheep, certainly a good way short of 

 the ferity of the moose and caribou. There is every- 

 where marked repose and moderation in the scenery, 

 a kind of aboriginal Scotch canniness and propriety 

 that gives one a new sensation. On and about Ben 

 Nevis there is barrenness, cragginess, and desolation ; 

 but the characteristic feature of wild Scotch scenery 

 is the moor, lifted up into mountains, covering low, 

 broad hills, or stretching away in undulating plains, 

 black, silent, melancholy, it may be, but never savage 

 or especially wild. " The vast and yet not savage 

 solitude," Carlyle says, referring to these moorlands. 

 The soil is black and peaty, often boggy ; the heather 

 short and uniform as prairie grass ; a shepherd's cot- 

 tage or a sportsman's "box" stuck here and there 

 amid tho hills. The highland cattle are shaggy and 

 picturesque, but the moors and mountains are close 

 cropped and uniform. The solitude is not that of a 

 forest full of still forms and dim vistas, but of wide, 

 open, sombre spaces. Nature did not look alien or 

 unfriendly to me ; there must be barrenness or some 

 savage threatening feature in the landscape to pro- 

 duce this impression j but the heather and whin are 



