Highland heather wholly without similitude. The violet, lily of the
valley, crocus, and wood anemone are, I suppose, claimable partly by the
plains as well as the hills; but the large orange lily and narcissus I
have never seen but on hill pastures, and the exquisite oxalis is
pre-eminently a mountaineer.

To this supremacy in mosses and flowers we have next to add an
inestimable gain in the continual presence and power of water. Neither
in its clearness, its colour, its fantasy of motion, its calmness of
space, depth, and reflection, or its wrath, can water be conceived by a
lowlander, out of sight of sea. A sea wave is far grander than any
torrent--but of the sea and its influences we are not now speaking; and
the sea itself, though it _can_ be clear, is never calm, among our
shores, in the sense that a mountain lake can be calm. The sea seems
only to pause; the mountain lake to sleep, and to dream. Out of sight of
the ocean a lowlander cannot be considered ever to have seen water at
all. The mantling of the pools in the rock shadows, with the golden
flakes of light sinking down through them like falling leaves, the
ringing of the thin currents among the shallows, the flash and the cloud
of the cascade, the earthquake and foam-fire of the cataract, the long
lines of alternate mirror and mist that lull the imagery of the hills
reversed in the blue of morning,--all these things belong to those hills
as their undivided inheritance.

To this supremacy in wave and stream is joined a no less manifest
pre-eminence in the character of trees. It is possible among plains, in
the species of trees which properly belong to them, the poplars of
Amiens, for instance, to obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which, as
I said, is a better help to the study of gracefulness, as such, than any
of the wilder groupings of the hills; so, also, there are certain