II 



Landscape and the Imagination * 



THE more marked features on the surface of the land 

 have from early times awakened the curiosity and 

 stimulated the imagination of men. Mountainous 

 regions with their peaks and crests, where cloud and 

 tempest find a home, their rugged scarps of cliff nd 

 crag, whence landslips sweep down into the valleys, 

 their snows and frosts, their floods and avalanches, 

 their oft-repeated and too frequently disastrous shocks 

 of earthquake, supply the most striking illustrations 

 of this relation of the external world. Yet while it 

 is from these elevated parts of the earth's surface, 

 where the activities of nature seem to beat with a 

 more rapid pulse, that the human imagination has been 

 more especially stimulated, even among the compara- 

 tively featureless lowlands the influence of outer 

 things, though less potent, may be distinctly traced. 

 Wherever, for instance, the monotony of a lowland 

 landscape is broken by an occasional oddly-shaped hill, 

 by a conspicuous grassy mound, by a group of pro- 

 minent boulders, by a cauldron-shaped hollow, or by 

 ^Fortnightly Review, April, 1893. 



