In speaking of the glens, we but alluded to the rivers or streams,
and some of them, indeed, even the great ones, have but rivulets;
while in the greatest, the waters often flow on without a single
tree, shadowed but by rocks and clouds. Wade them, and you find they
are larger than they seem to be; for looked at along the bottom of
those profound hollows, they are but mere slips of sinuous light
in the sunshine, and in the gloom you see them not at all. We do
not remember any very impressive glen, without a stream, that would
not suffer some diminution of its power by our fancying it to have
one; we may not be aware, at the time, that the conformation of the
glen prevents its having any waterflow, if but we feel its character
aright, that want is among the causes of our feeling; just as there
are some scenes of which the beauty would not be so touching were
there a single tree.
Thousands and tens of thousands there are of nameless perennial
torrents, and “in number without number numberless” those that seldom
live a week--perhaps not a day. Up among the loftiest regions you
hear nothing, even when they are all aflow; yet, there is music in
the sight, and the thought of the “general dance and minstrelsy”
enlivens the air, where no insect hums. As on your descent you come
within hearing of the “liquid lapses,” your heart leaps within you,
so merrily do they sing; the first torrent-rill you meet with you
take for your guide, and it leads you perhaps into some fairy dell,
where it wantons awhile in waterfalls, and then, gliding along a
little dale of its own with “banks of green bracken,” finishes its
short course in a stream--one of many that meet and mingle before
the current takes the name of river, which in a mile or less becomes
a small woodland lake. There are many such of rememberable beauty;
living lakes indeed, for they are but pausings of expanded rivers,
which again soon pursue their way, and the water-lilies have ever a
gentle motion there as if touched by a tide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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