and the sea itself, though it _can_ be clear, is never calm, among our
shores, in the sense that a mountain lake can be calm. The sea seems
only to pause; the mountain lake to sleep, and to dream. Out of sight
of the ocean a lowlander cannot be considered ever to have seen water
at all. The mantling of the pools in the rock shadows, with the golden
flakes of light sinking down through them like falling leaves, the
ringing of the thin currents among the shallows, the flash and the
cloud of the cascade, the earthquake and foam-fire of the cataract,
the long lines of alternate mirror and mist that lull the imagery of
the hills reversed in the blue of morning,--all these things belong to
those hills as their undivided inheritance.

To this supremacy in wave and stream is joined a no less manifest
pre-eminence in the character of trees. It is possible among plains,
in the species of trees which properly belong to them, the poplars of
Amiens, for instance, to obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which,
as I said, is a better help to the study of gracefulness, as such,
than any of the wilder groupings of the hills; so, also, there are
certain conditions of symmetrical luxuriance developed in the park and
avenue, rarely rivalled in their way among mountains; and yet the
mountain superiority in foliage is, on the whole, nearly as complete
as it is in water: for exactly as there are some expressions in the
broad reaches of a navigable lowland river, such as the Loire or
Thames, not, in their way, to be matched among the rock rivers, and
yet for all that a lowlander cannot be said to have truly seen the
element of water at all; so even in the richest parks and avenues he
cannot be said to have truly seen trees. For the resources of trees
are not developed until they have difficulty to contend with; neither
their tenderness of brotherly love and harmony, till they are forced
to choose their ways of various life where there is contracted room