THE DRY LAND.
Sec. 1. Having thus arrived at some apprehension of the true meaning and
noble offices of the clouds, we leave farther inquiry into their aspects
to another time, and follow the fixed arrangement of our subject; first,
to the crests of the mountains. Of these also, having seen in our review
of ancient and modern landscape various strange differences in the way
men looked upon them, it will be well in the outset to ascertain, as far
as may be, the true meaning and office.
The words which marked for us the purpose of the clouds are followed
immediately by those notable ones:--
"And God said, Let the waters which are under the heaven be gathered
together unto one place, and let the dry land appear."
We do not, perhaps, often enough consider the deep significance of this
sentence. We are too apt to receive it as the description of an event
vaster only in its extent, not in its nature, than the compelling the
Red Sea to draw back, that Israel might pass by. We imagine the Deity in
like manner rolling the waves of the greater ocean together on a heap,
and setting bars and doors to them eternally.
But there is a far deeper meaning than this in the solemn words of
Genesis, and in the correspondent verse of the Psalm, "His hands
prepared the dry land." Up to that moment the earth had been _void_, for
it had been _without form_. The command that the waters should be
gathered was the command that the earth should be _sculptured_. The sea
was not driven to his place in suddenly restrained rebellion, but
withdrawn to his place in perfect and patient obedience. The dry land
appeared, not in level sands, forsaken by the surges, which those surges
might again claim for their own; but in range beyond range of swelling
hill and iron rock, for ever to claim kindred with the firmament, and be
companioned by the clouds of heaven.
Sec. 2. What space of time was in reality occupied by the "day" of Genesis,
is not, at present, of any importance for us to consider. By what
furnaces of fire the adamant was melted, and by what wheels of
earthquake it was torn, and by what teeth of glacier and weight of
sea-waves it was engraven and finished into its perfect form, we may
perhaps hereafter endeavor to conjecture; but here, as in few words the
work is summed by the historian, so in few broad thoughts it should be
comprehended by us; and as we read the mighty sentence, "Let the dry
land appear," we should try to follow the finger of God, as it engraved
upon the stone tables of the earth the letters and the law of its
everlasting form; as, gulf by gulf, the channels of the deep were
ploughed; and cape by cape, the lines were traced, with Divine
foreknowledge, of the shores that were to limit the nations; and chain
by chain, the mountain walls were lengthened forth, and their
foundations fastened for ever; and the compass was set upon the face of
the depth, and the fields, and the highest part of the dust of the world
were made; and the right hand of Christ first strewed the snow on
Lebanon, and smoothed the slopes of Calvary.
Sec. 3. It is not, I repeat, always needful, in many respects it is not
possible, to conjecture the manner, or the time, in which this work was
done; but it is deeply necessary for all men to consider the
magnificence of the accomplished purpose, and the depth of the wisdom
and love which are manifested in the ordinances of the hills. For
observe, in order to bring the world into the form which it now bears,
it was not mere _sculpture_ that was needed; the mountains could not
stand for a day unless they were formed of materials altogether
different from those which constitute the lower hills, and the surfaces
of the valleys. A harder substance had to be prepared for every mountain
chain; yet not so hard but that it might be capable of crumbling down
into earth fit to nourish the alpine forest and the alpine flower; not
so hard but that, in the midst of the utmost majesty of its enthroned
strength, there should be seen on it the seal of death, and the writing
of the same sentence that had gone forth against the human frame, "Dust
thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return."[40] And with this
perishable substance the most majestic forms were to be framed that were
consistent with the safety of man; and the peak was to be lifted, and
the cliff rent, as high and as steeply as was possible, in order yet to
permit the shepherd to feed his flocks upon the slope, and the cottage
to nestle beneath their shadow.
Sec. 4. And observe, two distinct ends were to be accomplished in the doing
this. It was, indeed, absolutely necessary that such eminences should be
created, in order to fit the earth in any wise for human habitation; for
without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the
rivers sustained, and the earth must have become for the most part
desert plain, or stagnant marsh. But the feeding of the rivers and the
purifying of the winds are the least of the services appointed to the
hills. To fill the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of God's
working,--to startle its lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of
astonishment,--are their higher missions. They are as a great and noble
architecture; first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and covered also
with mighty sculpture and painted legend. It is impossible to examine in
their connected system the features of even the most ordinary mountain
scenery, without concluding that it has been prepared in order to unite
as far as possible, and in the closest compass, every means of
delighting and sanctifying the heart of man. "As far as _possible_;"
that is, as far as is consistent with the fulfilment of the sentence of
condemnation on the whole earth. Death must be upon the hills; and the
cruelty of the tempests smite them, and the briar and thorn spring up
upon them: but they so smite, as to bring their rocks into the fairest
forms; and so spring, as to make the very desert blossom as the rose.
Even among our own hills of Scotland and Cumberland, though often too
barren to be perfectly beautiful, and always too low to be perfectly
sublime, it is strange how many deep sources of delight are gathered
into the compass of their glens and vales; and how, down to the most
secret cluster of their far-away flowers, and the idlest leap of their
straying streamlets, the whole heart of Nature seems thirsting to give,
and still to give, shedding forth her everlasting beneficence with a
profusion so patient, so passionate, that our utmost observance and
thankfulness are but, at last, neglect of her nobleness, and apathy to
her love. But among the true mountains of the greater orders the Divine
purpose of appeal at once to all the faculties of the human spirit
becomes still more manifest. Inferior hills ordinarily interrupt, in
some degree, the richness of the valleys at their feet; the grey downs
of Southern England, and treeless coteaux of Central France, and grey
swells of Scottish moor, whatever peculiar charm they may possess in
themselves, are at least destitute of those which belong to the woods
and fields of the lowlands. But the great mountains _lift_ the lowlands
_on their sides_. Let the reader imagine, first, the appearance of the
most varied plain of some richly cultivated country; let him imagine it
dark with graceful woods, and soft with deepest pastures; let him fill
the space of it, to the utmost horizon, with innumerable and changeful
incidents of scenery and life; leading pleasant streamlets through its
meadows, strewing clusters of cottages beside their banks, tracing sweet
footpaths through its avenues, and animating its fields with happy
flocks, and slow wandering spots of cattle; and when he has wearied
himself with endless imagining, and left no space without some
loveliness of its own, let him conceive all this great plain, with its
infinite treasures of natural beauty and happy human life, gathered up
in God's hands from one edge of the horizon to the other like a woven
garment; and shaken into deep, falling folds, as the robes droop from a
king's shoulders; all its bright rivers leaping into cataracts along the
hollows of its fall, and all its forests rearing themselves aslant
against its slopes, as a rider rears himself back when his horse
plunges; and all its villages nestling themselves into the new windings
of its glens; and all its pastures thrown into steep waves of
greensward, dashed with dew along the edges of their folds, and sweeping
down into endless slopes, with a cloud here and there lying quietly,
half on the grass, half in the air; and he will have as yet, in all this
lifted world, only the foundation of one of the great Alps. And whatever
is lovely in the lowland scenery becomes lovelier in this change: the
trees which grew heavily and stiffly from the level line of plain
assume strange curves of strength and grace as they bend themselves
against the mountain side; they breathe more freely, and toss their
branches more carelessly as each climbs higher, looking to the clear
light above the topmost leaves of its brother tree: the flowers which on
the arable plain fell before the plough, now find out for themselves
unapproachable places, where year by year they gather into happier
fellowship, and fear no evil; and the streams which in the level land
crept in dark eddies by unwholesome banks, now move in showers of
silver, and are clothed with rainbows, and bring health and life
wherever the glance of their waves can reach.
Sec. 5. And although this beauty seems at first, in its wildness,
inconsistent with the service of man, it is, in fact, more necessary to
his happy existence than all the level and easily subdued land which he
rejoices to possess. It seems almost an insult to the reader's
intelligence to ask him to dwell (as if they could be doubted) on the
_uses_ of the hills; and yet so little, until lately, have those uses
been understood, that, in the seventeenth century, one of the most
enlightened of the religious men of his day (Fleming), himself a native
of a mountain country, casting about for some reason to explain to
himself the existence of mountains, and prove their harmony with the
general perfectness of the providential government of creation, can
light upon this reason only, "They are inhabited by the beasts."
First use of mountains. To give motion to water.
Sec. 6. It may not, therefore, even at this day, be altogether profitless
or unnecessary to review briefly the nature of the three great offices
which mountain ranges are appointed to fulfil, in order to preserve the
health and increase the happiness of mankind. Their first use is of
course to give motion to water. Every fountain and river, from the
inch-deep streamlet that crosses the village lane in trembling
clearness, to the massy and silent march of the everlasting multitude of
waters in Amazon or Ganges, owe their play, and purity, and power, to
the ordained elevations of the earth. Gentle or steep, extended or
abrupt, some determined slope of the earth's surface is of course
necessary, before any wave can so much as overtake one sedge in its
pilgrimage; and how seldom do we enough consider, as we walk beside the
margins of our pleasant brooks, how beautiful and wonderful is that
ordinance, of which every blade of grass that waves in their clear water
is a perpetual sign; that the dew and rain fallen on the face of the
earth shall find no resting-place; shall find, on the contrary, fixed
channels traced for them, from the ravines of the central crests down
which they roar in sudden ranks of foam, to the dark hollows beneath the
banks of lowland pasture, round which they must circle slowly among the
stems and beneath the leaves of the lilies; paths prepared for them, by
which, at some appointed rate of journey, they must evermore descend,
sometimes slow and sometimes swift, but never pausing; the daily portion
of the earth they have to glide over marked for them at each successive
sunrise, the place which has known them knowing them no more, and the
gateways of guarding mountains opened for them in cleft and chasm, none
letting them in their pilgrimage; and, from far off, the great heart of
the sea calling them to itself! Deep calleth unto deep. I know not which
of the two is the more wonderful,--that calm, gradated, invisible slope
of the champaign land, which gives motion to the stream; or that passage
cloven for it through the ranks of hill, which, necessary for the health
of the land immediately around them, would yet, unless so supernaturally
divided, have fatally intercepted the flow of the waters from far-off
countries. When did the great spirit of the river first knock at those
adamantine gates? When did the porter open to it, and cast his keys away
for ever, lapped in whirling sand? I am not satisfied--no one should be
satisfied--with that vague answer,--the river cut its way. Not so. The
river _found_ its way. I do not see that rivers, in their own strength,
can do much in cutting their way; they are nearly as apt to choke their
channels up, as to carve them out. Only give a river some little sudden
power in a valley, and see how it will use it. Cut itself a bed? Not so,
by any means, but fill up its bed, and look for another, in a wild,
dissatisfied, inconsistent manner. Any way, rather than the old one,
will better please it; and even if it is banked up and forced to keep to
the old one, it will not deepen, but do all it can to raise it, and leap
out of it. And although, wherever water has a steep fail, it will
swiftly cut itself a bed deep into the rock or ground, it will not, when
the rock is hard, cut a wider channel than it actually needs; so that
if the existing river beds, through ranges of mountain, had in reality
been cut by the streams, they would be found, wherever the rocks are
hard, only in the form of narrow and profound ravines,--like the
well-known channel of the Niagara, below the fall; not in that of
extended valleys. And the actual work of true mountain rivers, though
often much greater in proportion to their body of water than that of the
Niagara, is quite insignificant when compared with the area and depth of
the valleys through which they flow; so that, although in many cases it
appears that those larger valleys have been excavated at earlier periods
by more powerful streams, or by the existing stream in a more powerful
condition, still the great fact remains always equally plain, and
equally admirable, that, whatever the nature and duration of the
agencies employed, the earth was so shaped at first as to direct the
currents of its rivers in the manner most healthy and convenient for
man. The valley of the Rhone may, though it is not likely, have been in
great part excavated in early time by torrents a thousand times larger
than the Rhone; but it could not have been excavated at all, unless the
mountains had been thrown at first into two chains, between which the
torrents were set to work in a given direction. And it is easy to
conceive how, under any less beneficent dispositions of their masses of
hill, the continents of the earth might either have been covered with
enormous lakes, as parts of North America actually are covered; or have
become wildernesses of pestiferous marsh; or lifeless plains, upon which
the water would have dried as it fell, leaving them for great part of
the year desert. Such districts do exist, and exist in vastness: the
_whole_ earth is not prepared for the habitation of man; only certain
small portions are prepared for him,--the houses, as it were, of the
human race, from which they are to look abroad upon the rest of the
world, not to wonder or complain that it is not all house, but to be
grateful for the kindness of the admirable building, in the house
itself, as compared with the rest. It would be as absurd to think it an
evil that all the world is not fit for us to inhabit, as to think it an
evil that the globe is no larger than it is. As much as we shall ever
need is evidently assigned to us for our dwelling-place; the rest,
covered with rolling waves or drifting sands, fretted with ice or
crested with fire, is set before us for contemplation in an
uninhabitable magnificence; and that part which we are enabled to
inhabit owes its fitness for human life chiefly to its mountain ranges,
which, throwing the superfluous rain off as it falls, collect it in
streams or lakes, and guide it into given places, and in given
directions; so that men can build their cities in the midst of fields
which they know will be always fertile, and establish the lines of their
commerce upon streams which will not fail.
Sec. 7. Nor is this giving of motion to water to be considered as confined
only to the surface of the earth. A no less important function of the
hills is in directing the flow of the fountains and springs, from
subterranean reservoirs. There is no miraculous springing up of water
out of the ground at our feet; but every fountain and well is supplied
from a reservoir among the hills, so placed as to involve some slight
fall or pressure, enough to secure the constant flowing of the stream.
And the incalculable blessing of the power given to us in most valleys,
of reaching by excavation some point whence the water will rise to the
surface of the ground in perennial flow, is entirely owing to the
concave disposition of the beds of clay or rock raised from beneath the
bosom of the valley into ranks of enclosing hills.
Second use. To give motion to air.
Sec. 8. The second great use of mountains is to maintain a constant change
in the currents and nature of the _air_. Such change would, of course,
have been partly caused by differences in soils and vegetation, even if
the earth had been level; but to a far less extent than it is now by the
chains of hills, which exposing on one side their masses of rock to the
full heat of the sun (increased by the angle at which the rays strike on
the slope), and on the other casting a soft shadow for leagues over the
plains at their feet, divide the earth not only into districts, but into
climates, and cause perpetual currents of air to traverse their passes,
and ascend or descend their ravines, altering both the temperature and
nature of the air as it passes, in a thousand different ways; moistening
it with the spray of their waterfalls, sucking it down and beating it
hither and thither in the pools of their torrents, closing it within
clefts and caves, where the sunbeams never reach, till it is as cold as
November mists, then sending it forth again to breathe softly across the
slopes of velvet fields, or to be scorched among sunburnt shales and
grassless crags; then drawing it back in moaning swirls through clefts
of ice, and up into dewy wreaths above the snow-fields; then piercing it
with strange electric darts and flashes of mountain fire, and tossing it
high in fantastic storm-cloud, as the dried grass is tossed by the
mower, only suffering it to depart at last, when chastened and pure, to
refresh the faded air of the far-off plains.
Third use. To give change to the ground.
Sec. 9. The third great use of mountains is to cause perpetual change in
the _soils_ of the earth. Without such provisions the ground under
cultivation would in a series of years become exhausted and require to
be upturned laboriously by the hand of man. But the elevations of the
earth's surface provide for it a perpetual renovation. The higher
mountains suffer their summits to be broken into fragments and to be
cast down in sheets of massy rock, full, as we shall see presently, of
every substance necessary for the nourishment of plants: these fallen
fragments are again broken by frost, and ground by torrents, into
various conditions of sand and clay--materials which are distributed
perpetually by the streams farther and farther from the mountain's base.
Every shower which swells the rivulets enables their waters to carry
certain portions of earth into new positions, and exposes new banks of
ground to be mined in their turn. That turbid foaming of the angry
water,--that tearing down of bank and rock along the flanks of its
fury,--are no disturbances of the kind course of nature; they are
beneficent operations of laws necessary to the existence of man and to
the beauty of the earth. The process is continued more gently, but not
less effectively, over all the surface of the lower undulating country;
and each filtering thread of summer rain which trickles through the
short turf of the uplands is bearing its own appointed burden of earth
to be thrown down on some new natural garden in the dingles below.
And it is not, in reality, a degrading, but a true, large, and ennobling
view of the mountain ranges of the world, if we compare them to heaps of
fertile and fresh earth, laid up by a prudent gardener beside his garden
beds, whence, at intervals, he casts on them some scattering of new and
virgin ground. That which we so often lament as convulsion or
destruction is nothing else than the momentary shaking of the dust from
the spade. The winter floods, which inflict a temporary devastation,
bear with them the elements of succeeding fertility; the fruitful field
is covered with sand and shingle in momentary judgment, but in enduring
mercy; and the great river, which chokes its mouth with marsh, and
tosses terror along its shore, is but scattering the seeds of the
harvests of futurity, and preparing the seats of unborn generations.
Sec. 10. I have not spoken of the local and peculiar utilities of
mountains: I do not count the benefit of the supply of summer streams
from the moors of the higher ranges,--of the various medicinal plants
which are nested among their rocks,--of the delicate pasturage which
they furnish for cattle,[41]--of the forests in which they bear timber
for shipping,--the stones they supply for building, or the ores of metal
which they collect into spots open to discovery, and easy for working.
All these benefits are of a secondary or a limited nature. But the three
great functions which I have just described,--those of giving motion and
change to water, air, and earth,--are indispensable to human existence;
they are operations to be regarded with as full a depth of gratitude as
the laws which bid the tree bear fruit, or the seed multiply itself in
the earth. And thus those desolate and threatening ranges of dark
mountain, which, in nearly all ages of the world, men have looked upon
with aversion or with terror, and shrunk back from as if they were
haunted by perpetual images of death, are, in reality, sources of life
and happiness far fuller and more beneficent than all the bright
fruitfulness of the plain. The valleys only feed; the mountains feed,
and guard, and strengthen us. We take our idea of fearfulness and
sublimity alternately from the mountains and the sea; but we associate
them unjustly. The sea wave, with all its beneficence, is yet devouring
and terrible; but the silent wave of the blue mountain is lifted towards
heaven in a stillness of perpetual mercy; and the one surge,
unfathomable in its darkness, the other, unshaken in its faithfulness,
for ever bear the seal of their appointed symbol:
"Thy _righteousness_ is like the great mountains:
Thy _judgments_ are a great deep."
FOOTNOTES
[40] "Surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is
removed out of his place. The waters wear the stones: thou washest
away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou
destroyest the hope of man."--_Job_, xiv. 18, 19.
[41] The _highest_ pasturages (at least so say the Savoyards) being
always the best and richest.