128 FIRST FORMS OF VEGETATION. 
benumbed with the cold, I have picked it up to 
admire its beauty—a beauty, such is the arrogant 
idea which man entertains of his own importance 
in the world—which seems utterly thrown away 
in a spot where human foot and human eye rarely 
if ever rest. How often among those wildly 
desolate and pathless solitudes, where one may 
wander for whole days without catching a glimpse 
of a single living thing, save perhaps some raven 
on its way to its nest, leaving behind it the blue 
sky without speck or cloud, or a ptarmigan 
scarcely distinguishable from the grey rocks 
around, winging its slow wheeling flight to the 
neighbouring hills, and uttering its soft clucking 
cry ; or when standing on some lofty storm-riven 
summit, cut off from the rest of creation, by the 
howling mists that come writhing up from the 
dark abysses on every side, and as lone as a 
shipwrecked mariner on some desolate island in 
the sea, thousands of miles from any shore; how 
often amid such dreary scenes does a little wild- 
flower, or even lowlier fern or lichen, arrest the 
weary eye by its simple and mute appeal, and 
awaken thoughts and sympathies which are never 
felt, or at least allowed their full sway, amid the 
busy haunts of men. Like the little moss which 
revived the spirits of the lonely and despairing 
Park in the African desert, it carries us back to 
