that is miraculous? Thank God! they never can pull down its mountains, and reduce them to the dead level, and quadrangular fields of cultivation; and into their fairy-land recesses there will always be a retreat from the engrossing, engulphing spirit of mercantile calculation.

But I am passing from painting to poetry; and yet, one is so blended with the other that I would ask the shrewdest person living to shew me where they totally separate. Where then, I ask, will they find substitutes for the painter, for our wild and desolate moors? There the very air in its elastic freshness is full of health and inspiration to him. There he draws an indemnity for his constitution from the deadly effects of long and close confinement in cities and painting rooms. There every turf is covered with a rude beauty to his eyes; there every rock and stone is piled in bold and inimitable shapes of savage grandeur by the spirit of nature for him; and the winds, and rains, and vegetative powers of centuries have been busy tinging them with the hues of his admiration. There, amid the sound of falling waters and the roar of coming tempests, he feels all his faculties called into power and life within him, and brings home, season after season, scenes that cover the walls of our city homes with a wild magnificence. Enclose these tracts; hem them in with walls and hedges, and he will no longer visit them. You will no longer find him sitting on some moorland stone, watching the stream which hurries with sea-like sound along its craggy bed; those rocky banks and long lines of trees that overhang it, and mark its course along the desert. He will no longer fix the solitary labourer, or the

passing group, in their own peculiar character, nor paint the lurid gloom of the storm as it comes with a frown and a thunder of rains and winds only known in such shelterless regions. And when you banish him, you banish the poet, and the lovers of poets too. It is on our moors and our mountains that the profoundest spirit of poetry dwells. There is an influence felt there, which has more than half created our Shakspeares, Miltons, Spensers, Wordsworths, Scotts, Coleridges, Shelleys, and other high spirits that have striven to elevate the English mind above the mere ordinary enjoyments of life. And is it true that any one ever felt the full charm of the works of Scott who was not familiar with heaths and mountains? Did any one ever feel all the beauty of the opening of Ivanhoe who had not often lingered in our forests? Has any one a true conception of "As you like it," of " Macbeth," or of "The Midsummer Night's Dream," of "The Fairy Queen," or of many another divine creation of the British Muse, who is not conversant with the free, beautiful, and untamed nature by whose influence they are shaped? It is one of the great offices of the poet to keep alive the love of nature; and it is, again, by a corresponding love of nature that they must be comprehended and relished. The more you reduce our whole island to a uniformity of colour and cultivation, the more effectually you extinguish this great action and reaction, which are health to the spirituality of the public mind.

We are now arrived at a crisis in which we can afford a few forests and moors to lie open; but we cannot afford to have our higher tastes and feeling

We

deprived of their legitimate aliment. Shut us up in towns, or within an eternal continuity of hedges and ditches, and we shall cease to be the high-souled people we are. We shall become the drudges of selfish interests, or the victims of false taste. must have some openness, some freedom, some breathing places left us. As Abernethy said, that the parks of London were its lungs; so our mountains, forests, and moorlands are the lungs of the whole country. It is there that we rush away from counting-houses, factories, steam-engines, railroads, politics, and sectarian factions, and breathe for a season the air of physical and mental vigour; and feel the peace of nature; and drink in from all things around us a new life, a new feeling, full of the benevolent calm which is shed by its Creator over the world. Scott said he must see the heather at least once a year, or he should die. Crabbe mounted his horse in a passion of desire which could no longer be resisted, and rode fifty miles to see the sea; and more or less of this feeling lies in every bosom that is not totally dead to the true objects of life. The failing in health; the over-worn in spirit; the followers of a summer's recreation, all seek our hills and seacoasts, and plains, where the peace or magnificence of nature, or where some celebrated monument of the past is to be found. If any one would know the extent of this delight in such things, or the numbers who indulge in it, let him go, as I have elsewhere said, to any such place in this kingdom, on any day through the summer and autumn. If we had the amount of the numbers who make a summer excursion to the sea-side, or to our moorland and mountain districts, it would be amazing. The parties who swarm along our Derbyshire valleys, and in every nook of ScotG 3

VOL. II.

land, Wales, Ireland, and the Western Isles, are apparently without end.

Now this is a very healthful taste, and one, that with all our trading, manufacturing, and moneygetting habits we cannot too much encourage. We complain of our countrymen seeking pleasure so much abroad, and shall we diminish the objects of popular attraction at home? No, there never was an age in which our forests and moorlands were of half the value they are of to us now. As true utilitarians, we have the strongest motives to keep them open, as we mean to keep alive the fine arts, poetry, the love of antiquity, and the love of nature amongst us; as we would retain and invigorate in us that higher life by which we have climbed to our present national altitude; by which our sages and poets have been nourished, and become the true teachers and inspirers of virtue and nobility to the world; by which we are made to feel our animal life even with a double zest; and are yet, I trust, destined to make the name of England the greatest in the history of the world.

I do not mean to say that no waste lands should be henceforth enclosed. There are plenty, every one knows, that have no particular grace or interest about them. Let them, in the name of all that is reasonable, be hedged and ditched as soon as you please; but as for the village green, the common lying near a town, the forest, and the moorland that has a poetical charm about it, felt and acknowledged by the public-may the axe and the spade that are lifted up against them be shivered to atoms, and a curse, worse than the curse of Kehama, chase all commissioners, landsurveyors, petitioning lawyers, and every species of fencer and divider out of their boundaries for ever and ever.

We have a few herds of the original cattle which once abounded in England and Scotland, still remaining. We have long ago destroyed our wolves, bears, and boars; and it seems almost a miracle that a few of these inhabitants of our ancient forests have been preserved. They form the most interesting objects of those parts of the country where they exist. Every one knows the use Scott has made of them in the Bride of Lammermuir. There was formerly a fine herd of them at Drumlanrig in Scotland. In England they were to be found at Burton-Constable in Yorkshire; Wollaton near Nottingham; Gisburne in Craven; Lime-Hall in Cheshire; Chartley Castle in Staffordshire; and Chillingham Castle in Northumberland. That they were of the true old breed was