hand of man has never interfered, and the only part in general which
never feels the drought of summer, 'the trees planted by the
waterside whose leaf shall not wither.'

Pleasant are those hidden waterways: but yet are they the more
pleasant because the hand of man has not interfered with them?

It is a question, and one which the older one grows the less one is
inclined to answer in the affirmative. The older one grows, the more
there grows on one the sense of waste and incompleteness in all
scenery where man has not fulfilled the commission of Eden, 'to dress
it and to keep it;' and with that, a sense of loneliness which makes
one long for home, and cultivation, and the speech of fellow men.

Surely the influence of mountain scenery is exaggerated now-a-days.
In spite of the reverend name of Wordsworth (whose poetry, be it
remembered, too often wants that element of hardihood and manliness
which is supposed to be the birthright of mountaineers), one cannot
help, as a lowlander, hoping that there is a little truth in the
threnodes of a certain peevish friend who literally hates a mountain,
and justifies his hatred in this fashion:-

'I do hate mountains. I would not live among them for ten thousand a
year. If they look like paradise for three months in the summer,
they are a veritable inferno for the other nine; and I should like to
condemn my mountain-worshipping friends to pass a whole year under
the shadow of Snowdon, with that great black head of his shutting out
the sunlight, staring down into their garden, overlooking all they do
in the most impertinent way, sneezing and spitting at them with rain,
hail, snow, and bitter freezing blasts, even in the hottest sunshine.