The Chiltern Hills and the South Downs are built up of the same
material, have had their peculiarities of shape and form carved by the
same artificers--rain and frost, sun and wind; their flowers are the
same, and to outward seeming their sons and daughters are the same in
the way that all hill folk are alike and yet all differ in some subtle
way from the dweller in the plains.
Be this so or not our Downs are to us delectable mountains, and let the
reader who scoffs at the noun remember that size is no criterion of
either beauty or sublimity. That Sussex lover and greatest of literary
naturalists, Gilbert White, in perhaps his most frequently quoted
passage so characterizes the "majestic chain"; to his contemporaries
such a description was not out of place; our great grandfathers were
appalled when brought from the calm tranquillity of the southern slopes
to the stern dark melancholy of the mountains of Cumberland and
Westmoreland. The diary descriptions of those timid travellers of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are full of such
adjectives as "terrible," "frightful," "awful." One unlucky
individual's nerves caused him to stigmatize as "ghastly and
disgusting" one of the finest scenes in the Lake District, probably
unsurpassed in Europe for its perfectly balanced beauty of form and
splendour of colouring.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25