the mountains sink into low swellings; long rectilinear ridges run
out towards the distant sea, and terminate in bluff, precipitous
headlands. The valleys, soft and pastoral, widen into plains, or
incline in long-drawn slopes of gentlest declivity. The streams,
hitherto so headlong and broken, linger beside their banks, and then
widen into friths and estuaries. The deep soil is covered by a thick
mantle of vegetation--by forest trees of largest growth, and rich
fields of corn; and the solitude of the mountains has given place to
a busy population. He has left behind him the primary regions, and
entered on one of the secondary districts.
And these less rugged formations have also their respective
styles--marred and obliterated often by the Plutonic agency, which
imparts to them in some instances its own character, and in some
an intermediate one, but in general distinctly marked, and easily
recognized. The Chalk presents its long inland lines of apparent
coast, that send out their rounded headlands, cape beyond cape,
into the wooded or corn-covered plains below. Here and there, there
juts up at the base of the escarpement a white, obelisk-like stack;
here and there, there opens into the interior a narrow, grassy bay,
in which noble beeches have cast anchor. There are valleys without
streams; and the landscape a-top is a scene of arid and uneven
downs, that seem to rise and fall like the sea after a storm. We
pass on to the Oolite: the slopes are more gentle, the lines of
rising ground less continuous, and less coast-like; the valleys have
their rivulets, and the undulating surface is covered by a richer
vegetation. We enter on a district of New Red Sandstone. Deep,
narrow ravines intersect elevated platforms. There are lines of
low precipices, so perpendicular and so red, that they seem as if
walled over with new brick; and here and there, amid the speckled
and mouldering sandstones, that gather no covering of lichen, there
stands up a huge, altar-like mass of lime, mossy and gray, as if it
represented a remoter antiquity than the rocks around it. The Coal
Measures present often the appearance of vast lakes frozen over
during a high wind, partially broken afterwards by a sudden thaw,
and then frozen again. Their shores stand up around them in the form
of ridges and mountain chains of the older rocks; and their surfaces
are grooved into flat valleys and long lines of elevation. Take, as
an instance, the scenery about Edinburgh. The Ochil Hills and the
Grampians form the distant shores of the seeming lake or basin on
the one side, the range of the Lammermuirs and the Pentland group on
the other; the space between is ridged and furrowed in long lines,
that run in nearly the same direction from north-east to south-west,
as if, when the binding frost w r as first setting in, the wind had
blown from off the northern or southern shore.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account