England is like the margin of a spring-run, near its source,--always
green, always cool, always moist, comparatively free from frost in
winter and from drought in summer. The spring-run to which it owes this
character is the Gulf Stream, which brings out of the pit of the
southern ocean what the fountain brings out of the bowels of the
earth--a uniform temperature, low but constant; a fog in winter, a cloud
in summer. The spirit of gentle, fertilizing summer rain perhaps never
took such tangible and topographical shape before. Cloud-evolved,
cloud-enveloped, cloud-protected, it fills the eye of the American
traveler with a vision of greenness such as he has never before dreamed
of; a greenness born of perpetual May, tender, untarnished, ever
renewed, and as uniform and all-pervading as the rain-drops that fall,
covering mountain, cliff, and vale alike. The softened, rounded, flowing
outlines given to our landscape by a deep fall of snow are given to the
English by this depth of vegetable mould and this all-prevailing verdure
which it supports. Indeed, it is caught upon the shelves and projections
of the rocks as if it fell from the clouds,--a kind of green snow,--and
it clings to their rough or slanting sides like moist flakes. In the
little valleys and chasms it appears to lie deepest. Only the peaks and
broken rocky crests of the highest Scotch and Cumberland mountains are
bare. Adown their treeless sides the moist, fresh greenness fairly
drips. Grass, grass, grass, and evermore grass. Is there another country
under the sun so becushioned, becarpeted, and becurtained with grass?
Even the woods are full of grass, and I have seen them mowing in a
forest. Grass grows upon the rocks, upon the walls, on the tops of the
old castles, on the roofs of the houses, and in winter the hay-seed
sometimes sprouts upon the backs of the sheep. Turf used as capping to a
stone fence thrives and blooms as if upon the ground. There seems to be
a deposit from the atmosphere,--a slow but steady accumulation of a
black, peaty mould upon all exposed surfaces,--that by and by supports
some of the lower or cryptogamous forms of vegetation. These decay and
add to the soil, till thus in time grass and other plants will grow. The
walls of the old castles and cathedrals support a variety of plant life.
On Rochester Castle I saw two or three species of large wild flowers
growing one hundred feet from the ground and tempting the tourist to
perilous reachings and climbings to get them. The very stones seem to
sprout. My companion made a sketch of a striking group of red and white
flowers blooming far up on one of the buttresses of Rochester Cathedral.
The soil will climb to any height. Indeed, there seems to be a kind of
finer soil floating in the air. How else can one account for the general
smut of the human face and hands in this country, and the impossibility
of keeping his own clean? The unwashed hand here quickly leaves its mark
on whatever it touches. A prolonged neglect of soap and water, and I
think one would be presently covered with a fine green mould, like that
upon the boles of the trees in the woods. If the rains were not
occasionally heavy enough to clean them off, I have no doubt that the
roofs of all buildings in England would in a few years be covered with
turf, and that daisies and buttercups would bloom upon them. How quickly
all new buildings take on the prevailing look of age and mellowness! One
needs to have seen the great architectural piles and monuments of
Britain to appreciate Shakespeare's line,--
"That unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish Time."
He must also have seen those Scotch or Cumberland mountains to
appreciate the descriptive force of this other line,--
"The turfy mountains where live the nibbling sheep."
The turfy mountains are the unswept stones that have held and utilized
their ever-increasing capital of dirt. These vast rocky eminences are
stuffed and padded with peat; it is the sooty soil of the housetops and
of the grimy human hand, deepened and accumulated till it nourishes the
finest, sweetest grass.
It was this turfy and grassy character of these mountains--I am tempted
to say their cushionary character--that no reading or picture viewing of
mine had prepared me for. In the cut or on canvas they appeared like
hard and frowning rocks; and here I beheld them as green and succulent
as any meadow-bank in April or May,--vast, elevated sheep-walks and
rabbit-warrens, treeless, shrubless, generally without loose bowlders,
shelving rocks, or sheer precipices; often rounded, feminine, dimpled,
or impressing one as if the rock had been thrust up beneath an immense
stretch of the finest lawn, and had carried the turf with it heavenward,
rending it here and there, but preserving acres of it intact.
In Scotland I ascended Ben Venue, not one of the highest or ruggedest of
the Scotch mountains, but a fair sample of them, and my foot was seldom
off the grass or bog, often sinking into them as into a saturated
sponge. Where I expected a dry course, I found a wet one. The thick,
springy turf was oozing with water. Instead of being balked by
precipices, I was hindered by swamps. Where a tangle of brush or a chaos
of bowlders should have detained me, I was picking my way as through a
wet meadow-bottom tilted up at an angle of forty-five degrees. My feet
became soaked when my shins should have been bruised. Occasionally, a
large deposit of peat in some favored place had given way beneath the
strain of much water, and left a black chasm a few yards wide and a yard
or more deep. Cold spring-runs were abundant, wild flowers few, grass
universal. A loping hare started up before me; a pair of ringed ousels
took a hasty glance at me from behind a rock; sheep and lambs, the
latter white and conspicuous beside their dingy and all but invisible
dams, were scattered here and there; the wheat-ear uncovered its white
rump as it flitted from rock to rock, and the mountain pipit displayed
its larklike tail. No sound of wind in the trees; there were no trees,
no seared branches and trunks that so enhance and set off the wildness
of our mountain-tops. On the summit the wind whistled around the
outcropping rocks and hummed among the heather, but the great mountain
did not purr or roar like one covered with forests.
I lingered for an hour or more, and gazed upon the stretch of mountain
and vale about me. The summit of Ben Lomond, eight or ten miles to the
west, rose a few hundred feet above me. On four peaks I could see snow
or miniature glaciers. Only four or five houses, mostly humble shepherd
dwellings, were visible in that wide circuit. The sun shone out at
intervals; the driving clouds floated low, their keels scraping the
rocks of some of the higher summits. The atmosphere was filled with a
curious white film, like water tinged with milk, an effect only produced
at home by a fine mist. "A certain tameness in the view, after all," I
recorded in my note-book on the spot, "perhaps because of the trim and
grassy character of the mountain; not solemn and impressive; no sense of
age or power. The rock crops out everywhere, but it can hardly look you
in the face; it is crumbling and insignificant; shows no frowning
walls, no tremendous cleavage; nothing overhanging and precipitous; no
wrath and revel of the elder gods."
Even in rugged Scotland nature is scarcely wilder than a mountain sheep,
certainly a good way short of the ferity of the moose and caribou. There
is everywhere marked repose and moderation in the scenery, a kind of
aboriginal Scotch canniness and propriety that gives one a new
sensation. On and about Ben Nevis there is barrenness, cragginess, and
desolation; but the characteristic feature of wild Scotch scenery is the
moor, lifted up into mountains, covering low, broad hills, or stretching
away in undulating plains, black, silent, melancholy, it may be, but
never savage or especially wild. "The vast and yet not savage solitude,"
Carlyle says, referring to these moorlands. The soil is black and peaty,
often boggy; the heather short and uniform as prairie grass; a
shepherd's cottage or a sportsman's "box" stuck here and there amid the
hills. The highland cattle are shaggy and picturesque, but the moors and
mountains are close cropped and uniform. The solitude is not that of a
forest full of still forms and dim vistas, but of wide, open, sombre
spaces. Nature did not look alien or unfriendly to me; there must be
barrenness or some savage threatening feature in the landscape to
produce this impression; but the heather and whin are like a permanent
shadow, and one longs to see the trees stand up and wave their branches.
The torrents leaping down off the mountains are very welcome to both
eye and ear. And the lakes--nothing can be prettier than Loch Lomond and
Loch Katrine, though one wishes for some of the superfluous rocks of the
New World to give their beauty a granite setting.