Ireland. The rain here comes down heartily, and
is frequently succeeded by clear, bright weather,
when every brook is vocal, and every torrent sonorous;
brooks and torrents, which are never muddy, even in
the heaviest floods, except, after a drought, they
happen to be defiled for a short time by waters that
have swept along dusty roads, or have broken out into
ploughed fields. Days of unsettled weather, with
partial showers, are very frequent; but the showers,
darkening, or brightning, as they fly from hill to
hill, are not less grateful to the eye than finely
interwoven passages of gay and sad music are touching
to the ear. Vapours exhaling from the lakes and
meadows after sun-rise, in a hot season, or, in moist
weather, brooding upon the heights, or descending
towards the valleys with inaudible motion, give a
visionary character to every thing around them; and
are in themselves so beautiful, as to dispose us to
enter into the feelings of those simple nations (such
as the Laplanders of this day) by whom they are taken
for guardian deities of the mountains; or to sympathise
with others, who have fancied these delicate apparitions
to be the spirits of their departed ancestors.
Akin to these are fleecy clouds resting upon the hill-tops;
they are not easily managed in picture, with their
accompaniments of blue sky; but how glorious are they
in Nature! how pregnant with imagination for the poet!
and the height of the Cumbrian mountains is sufficient
to exhibit daily and hourly instances of those mysterious
attachments. Such clouds, cleaving to their stations,
or lifting up suddenly their glittering heads from
behind rocky barriers, or hurrying out of sight with
speed of the sharpest sledge—will often
tempt an inhabitant to congratulate himself on belonging
to a country of mists and clouds and storms, and make
him think of the blank sky of Egypt, and of the cerulean
vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a sad
spectacle. The atmosphere, however, as in every
country subject to much rain, is frequently unfavourable
to landscape, especially when keen winds succeed the
rain which are apt to produce coldness, spottiness,
and an unmeaning or repulsive detail in the distance;—a
sunless frost, under a canopy of leaden and shapeless
clouds, is, as far as it allows things to be seen,
equally disagreeable.
It has been said that in human life there are moments worth ages. In a more subdued tone of sympathy may we affirm, that in the climate of England there are, for the lover of Nature, days which are worth whole months,—I might say—even years. One of these favoured days sometimes occurs in spring-time, when that soft air is breathing over the blossoms and new-born verdure, which inspired Buchanan with his beautiful Ode to the first of May; the air, which, in the luxuriance of his fancy, he likens to that of the golden age,—to that which gives motion to the funereal cypresses on the banks of Lethe;—to the air which is to salute beatified spirits when