THE PLEASURES OF RAMBLES. 
225 
district runs a great displacement of the mountain-limestone 
that forms one of the most magnificent faults, as the geologists 
term them, in England : and to this we owe the cliffs of 
Malham, from the foot of which the Aire leaps forth as a 
full-grown river, the scar of Gordale, and the striking and 
picturesque scenery of Craven. Though the limestone hills 
show little heather, they are mostly covered by a fine turf which 
is excellent for walking on, and where we lose the limestone 
capping, and get upon the millstone grit, we may walk over 
heathlands that are truly delightful to traverse, provided you get 
to know their many soft places, and carefully avoid them. In 
the limestone region you find the caves and pots by which it 
is pierced, or you may ramble beside some pleasant stream 
which suddenly vanishes into the bowels of the earth, and 
leaves you to walk over its bed, where stones show clearly that 
in wet seasons a full and potent river rushes powerfully by. 
Where I used to walk by lane and field, I had now to ramble 
by scenes like these, over moorland ; and where, beforetime, a 
walk of ten miles would suffice, I used to ramble thirty miles, 
which I seemed to do, in this bracing air, with equal ease and 
greater delight. Though I regretted the absence of those banks 
“ whereon the wild thyme blows ; 
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,” 
1 found, in other sights and other scenery, an abundant recom- 
pense. Though Ingleborough and Penyghent were very fair 
heights, there were, within my range of walks, no mountains, 
yet the colour of these hills and moorlands, in some of their 
moods, were truly superb ; never elsewhere have I seen such 
an approach to what Wordsworth calls, — 
“ The gleam. 
The light that never was on sea or land, 
The consecration and the poet’s dream.” 
Now and then there would be disclosed scenes of unsurpass- 
able loveliness. On one sweet Whit Monday, walking out of 
broad sunshine, I had to take refuge from a severe snow shower, 
and this I did under a superb overhanging limestone cliff, from 
the very foot of which there gushed forth a full grown and very 
beautiful river. Therefrom I walked to the top of Penyghent, 
while the landscape still retained the slowly diminishing white 
mantle, in which she looked, to my eye, a picture of unforget- 
table beauty. Then, as an equivalent for Shakespeare’s banks 
of thyme and violets, I got by degrees to know how to descend 
into deep recesses, where brooks that sprung from hill-top 
springs had worn out channels, along the very beds of which 
one could ramble, leaping from stone to stone, and looking up 
through a vista of hazel, bramble and willow, wherefrom would 
trickle or drip little streamlets that made the whole a perfect 
paradise of ferns. Save the royal fern — sacred, I thought, to my 
