It is a lovely spot, Grassyvale--"beautiful exceedingly." But its
beauty is of a quiet, unimposing description; the characteristic
feature of the landscape which would strike the eye of a spectator
who surveyed it from the highest neighbouring eminence, is
simply--repose. There are no mountains, properly so called, within a
circuit of many miles--none of those natural pyramids which, in
various parts of our beloved land of mountain and of flood, of battle
and of song, rise in majestic grandeur, like columns of adamant to
support the vault of heaven. The nearest are situated at such a
distance that they appear like clouds, and might readily be mistaken
for such, but for their deathlike stillness, and the everlasting
monotony of their outline. No waterfalls hurl their bolts of liquid
crystal into dark, frowning, wave-worn chasms, which had echoed to
the thunder of their fall since the birth of time. There is no
far-spreading forest--no yawning ravine, with "ebon shades and
low-browed rocks"--no beetling cliff or precipice, "shagged" with
brushwood, as Milton hath it. There is nothing of the grand, the
sublime, the terrible, or the magnificent--there is only quiet; or,
if the terms do not sound dissonant to "ears polite," modest,
unassuming beauty, such as a rainbow, were it perpetually present in
the zenith, might form a characteristic and appropriate symbol of.
Nature has not here wrought her miracles of beauty on a Titanic
scale. What, then, is so attractive about Grassyvale? it will be
asked. We are not sure but we may be as much stultified with this
question, as was the child in Wordsworth's sweet little poem, "We are
seven" (which the reader may turn up at leisure, when the propriety
of the comparison will be seen), and may be forced, after an
unsuccessful attempt to justify ourselves for holding such an
opinion, to maintain, with the same dogmatic obstinacy--it is
beautiful. But the length of our story compels us to exclude a
description of the landscape, which we had prepared.
* * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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