I have dwelt, in the foregoing chapter, on the sadness of the hills
with the greater insistence that I feared my own excessive love for
them might lead me into too favourable interpretation of their
influences over the human heart; or, at least, that the reader might
accuse me of fond prejudice, in the conclusions to which, finally, I
desire to lead him concerning them. For, to myself, mountains are the
beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the
forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are
wholly bound up; and though I can look with happy admiration at the
lowland flowers, and woods, and open skies, the happiness is tranquil
and cold, like that of examining detached flowers in a conservatory,
or reading a pleasant book; and if the scenery be resolutely level,
insisting upon the declaration of its own flatness in all the detail
of it, as in Holland, or Lincolnshire, or Central Lombardy, it appears
to me like a prison, and I cannot long endure it. But the slightest
rise and fall in the road,--a mossy bank at the side of a crag of
chalk, with brambles at its brow, overhanging it,--a ripple over three
or four stones in the stream by the bridge,--above all, a wild bit of
ferny ground under a fir or two, looking as if, possibly, one might
see a hill if one got to the other side of the trees, will instantly
give me intense delight, because the shadow, or the hope, of the hills
is in them.

And thus, although there are few districts of Northern Europe, however
apparently dull or tame, in which I cannot find pleasure, though the
whole of Northern France (except Champagne), dull as it seems to most
travellers, is to me a perpetual Paradise; and, putting Lincolnshire,
Leicestershire, and one or two such other perfectly flat districts
aside, there is not an English county which I should not find