28 A DREARY PLAIN. 



set he lives upon the stilts, never touching the ground. Sometimes 

 he drives his flock home at eventide ; sometimes he bivouacs sub jove 

 frigido, under the cold heaven of night. Unbuckling his stilts, and 

 producing his flint and steel, he soon kindles a cheery fire of fir- 

 branches, and gathering his sheepskins round him, composes himself 

 to sleep ; his only annoyances being the musquitoes, and his fears of 

 the evil tricks of wizard or witch, who may perad venture catch a 

 glimpse of him in the moonlight, as they ride past on their besom to 

 some unholy gathering or demon-dance. 



An English traveller has sketched in vivid colours the landscape 

 of the Landes. Over all its gloom and barrenness, he remarks, over 

 all its " blasted heaths," its monotonous pine-woods, its sudden 

 morasses, its glaring sand-heaps, prevails a strong sense of loneliness, 

 a grandeur and intensity of desolation, which invests the scene with 

 a sad, solemn poetry peculiar to itself. Emerging from the black- 

 shadows of the forest, the pilgrim treads a plain, " flat as a billiard- 

 table," apparently boundless as the ocean, clad in one unvaried, 

 unbi'oken garb of dusky heath. Sometimes stripes and ridges, or 

 great ragged patches of sand, glisten in the fervid sunshine ; some- 

 times belts of scraggy young fir trees appear rising from the horizon 

 on the right, and sinking into it again on the left. Occasionally a 

 brighter shade of green, with jungles of willows and water weeds, 

 giant rushes, and " clustered marish mosses," will tell of the " black- 

 ened waters " beneath 



" Hard by a poplar shook alway. 



All silver-green with gnarled bark ; 



For leagues no other tree doth mark 



The level waste, the rounding gray." * 



The dwellings which stud this dreary, yet not wholly unpoetic 

 landscape, are generally mere isolated huts, separated oftentimes by 

 many miles. Round them spreads a miserable field or two, planted 

 with such crops as might be expected on a poor soil and from 

 deficient cultivation. The cottages are mouldering heaps of sod and 

 * Tennyson, Poems: "Mariana." 



