country with ordinary undulations:  and it must be obvious, that it is the bays only of large lakes that can present such contrasts of light and shadow as those of smaller dimensions display from every quarter.  A deep contracted valley, with diffused waters, such a valley and plains level and wide as those of Chaldea, are the two extremes in which the beauty of the heavens and their connexion with the earth are most sensibly felt.  Nor do the advantages I have been speaking of imply here an exclusion of the aerial effects of distance.  These are insured by the height of the mountains, and are found, even in the narrowest vales, where they lengthen in perspective, or act (if the expression may be used) as telescopes for the open country.

The subject would bear to be enlarged upon:  but I will conclude this section with a night-scene suggested by the Vale of Keswick.  The Fragment is well known; but it gratifies me to insert it, as the Writer was one of the first who led the way to a worthy admiration of this country.

    Now sunk the sun, now twilight sunk, and night
    Rode in her zenith; not a passing breeze
    Sigh’d to the grove, which in the midnight air
    Stood motionless, and in the peaceful floods
    Inverted hung:  for now the billows slept
    Along the shore, nor heav’d the deep; but spread
    A shining mirror to the moon’s pale orb,
    Which, dim and waning, o’er the shadowy cliffs,
    The solemn woods, and spiry mountain tops,
    Her glimmering faintness threw:  now every eye,
    Oppress’d with toil, was drown’d in deep repose,
    Save that the unseen Shepherd in his watch,
    Propp’d on his crook, stood listening by the fold,
    And gaz’d the starry vault, and pendant moon;
    Nor voice, nor sound, broke on the deep serene;
    But the soft murmur of swift-gushing rills,
    Forth issuing from the mountain’s distant steep,
    (Unheard till now, and now scarce heard) proclaim’d
    All things at rest, and imag’d the still voice
    Of quiet, whispering in the ear of Night.[55]

[55] Dr. Brown, the author of this fragment, was from his infancy brought up in Cumberland, and should have remembered that the practice of folding sheep by night is unknown among these mountains, and that the image of the Shepherd upon the watch is out of its place, and belongs only to countries, with a warmer climate, that are subject to ravages from beasts of prey.  It is pleasing to notice a dawn of imaginative feeling in these verses.  Tickel, a man of no common genius, chose, for the subject of a Poem, Kensington Gardens, in preference to the Banks of the Derwent, within a mile or two of which he was born.  But this was in the reign of Queen Anne, or George the first.  Progress must have been made in the interval; though the traces of it, except in the works of Thomson and Dyer, are not very obvious.

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