Change of scenery

“ Everything was in the whirlpool of change, and that little room to-night, with its smoke, furious conversation, aimless wandering of dim figures moving in and out of the haze, formed a very good symbol of the larger world outside. ”

“ A vision of change upon change, and still the same monotony of bells and wheels, and horses’ feet, and no rest. Of town and country, postyards, horses, drivers, hill and valley, light and darkness, road and pavement, height and hollow, wet weather and dry, and still the same monotony of bells and wheels, and horses’ feet, and no rest. ”

“ And so on, down through the general changes wrought on the face of a land by modern conditions of life, we might watch the evolution of new features of the landscape. But we turn to the other kind of change, which is more noticeable at first sight, and is more directly due to the action of man. ”

“ The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote. When I first woke from that trance, my former life appeared as yesterday, but now, since I have learned to know my new surroundings, and to realize the prodigious changes that have transformed the world, I no longer find it hard, but very easy, to realize that I have slept a century. ”

“ Day after day, there is no change. Nature, which elsewhere makes a shifting kaleidescope with clouds, and sunshine, and pure azure, has here the curse of sameness upon her, and wearies with her monotony. ”

“ None perhaps, save those who have habitually watched through the night, worked at a trade or a profession, or sat in attendance on the sick, will understand exactly what I am trying to write about, and yet the effects of this atmospheric change must have been felt some time or other by all men and all women to whose fate it has fallen ever to keep a solitary vigil, or to walk alone at night either through London or the country, or beside the desolate sea-shore. ”

“ So when, as now, a chance combination of circumstances brings them leisure to look about them, the forest and the world of out-of-doors comes to them with a freshness impossible for the city dweller to realise. ”

“ The introduction of the light into private dwellings, places of amusement, and other buildings, of course worked a marvellous change in our social life and all its conditions, but it appealed most of all to those who like myself had for so many years sat in a species of outer darkness and made it almost seem as if the past had been but a dream. ”

“ This sudden change of weather, from stormy gloom to welcome sunshine, has produced a corresponding effect on the visitors of this watering-place, who engage themselves in every species of amusement that ingenuity can contrive, or experience has invented. ”

“ What atmospheric effects, what changing lights, all beautiful, invest the outer landscape with magic, even where the scenery is tame. How rarely is it unpleasing to the eye. And it is the same when we turn our eyes inwards, and contemplate the landscape of our own selves, what glories of light flood all, what richness of foliage clothes all, how picturesque are the inequalities! ”

“ The change that falls upon the dreary region, and on the whole mountain, as its red light fades, and the night comes on—and the unutterable solemnity and dreariness that reign around, who that has witnessed it, can ever forget! ”

“ Nothing is more striking in these regions than the completeness of the change from day to night. It is not alone the rapidity with which darkness succeeds,—and in this our delicious twilight is ever to be regretted ”

“ If your eyes had been traveling over the glare of deserts or plunging into the gloom of tangled forests for several years, you would think people and all this glitter and life and motion a very delightful change. ”

“ The sudden change from the soft, low, and comparatively tame, to the bold, stern, and high, serves admirably to show how much the character of a landscape may depend on the formation which composes it. ”

“ The houses stand like scenery before the grey clouds; the people move as though in a film: in the evening they move no differently from the way they moved in the morning. All things are more ponderous. ”

“ The scenery amid which the youth now strayed was such as arrays itself in the imagination when we read the beautiful old myths, and fancy a brighter sky, a softer turf, a more picturesque arrangement of venerable trees, than we find in the rude and untrained landscapes of the Western world. ”

“ The gradual change by which road and mountain, rock and cliff, mellow into the hues of sunset, and grow grey in the gloaming, deepening the shadows, and by degrees losing all outline in the dimness around, prepares us for the gloom of night. We feel it like the tranquil current of years marking some happy life, where childhood and youth and manhood and age succeed in measured time. ”

“ He, no less than the artist and the poet, delights to gaze at that enchanting scenery which, day by day, is displayed in infinite beauty overhead; that scenery which is not wholly withheld even from observers whose lives may be passed amid the busy haunts of men, that scenery which is so often displayed on fine days at all seasons. We are alluding to those clouds which add the charm of infinite variety to the sky above us. ”

“ When a piece of scenery so beautiful, yet so varied,—so exciting by its intricacy, and yet so sublime,—is lighted up by the tints of morning or of evening, and displays all that variety of shadowy depth, exchanged with partial brilliancy, which gives character even to the tamest of landscapes, the effect approaches near to enchantment. ”

“ Nature seemed restless and instinct with change; there were those signs in the atmosphere which leave the most experienced in doubt, whether the morning may rise in storm or sunshine. And in this particular period, the skiey influences seem to tincture the animal life with their own mysterious and wayward spirit of change. ”

“ Wherever round this restless world we range, Nothing seems constant saving constant change. Like some magician waving mystic wand, Improvement metamorphoses the land, Grubs up, pulls down, then plants and builds anew, Till scenes once loved are banished from our view. ”

“ Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that has four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony. Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its culminating graces—and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train. ”

“ We expose our mind to the landscape (as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the moment only during which the effect endures; and we are away before the effect can change. Hence we shall have in our memories a long scroll of continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with the prevailing sentiment of the season, the weather, and the landscape, and certain to be 113 unified more and more, as time goes on, by the unconscious processes of thought. ”

“ Nevertheless we ask, standing without the gates of the sleeping city of winter, "Who of ye within the city are stepping forth unto the new adventure?" Strange powers are to them; the mysterious spells of the earth, the renewal of inspiration at the life source, the essence of new summer colours, the idea of new summer shapes. ”

“ The scenery is wild and savage and primeval, being the stock of which beautiful landscapes are made, rather than the culture that gentler airs and more temperate winds bring upon the face of the earth nearer the sea and the equator. ”

“ To reveal ordinary people just as they really are,--sometimes in terrific excitement, sometimes in humdrum routine,--this was his aim. Natural scenery is occasionally introduced, like the mountains in The Cossacks, to show how the spectacle affects the mind of the person who is looking at it. ”

“ If, therefore, the scenery and climate call forth moods in a whole people definite enough to influence the art, this will be due, I think, to some especially gifted individual having, at one time or another, brought home those moods to them. ”

“ As I look back into the past I see a vast exultant dust of house-breaking and removal rise up into the clear air that followed the hour of the green vapours, I live again in the Year of Tents, the Year of Scaffolding, and like the triumph of a new theme in a piece of music--the great cities of our new days arise. ”

“ Natural historians, architects, painters, and poets ought to come hither for new knowledge and new inspiration. Air and light, the vegetation above ground, and the caverns below it, are full of life and beauty! ”

“ Of course, if this kind of study were regarded as merely a form of dissipation, a little spree as it were, to vary the dull monotony of landscape routine, it might have its good points. Change is a great tonic; and it does no harm occasionally to shoot arrows at the stars even if you know that they will not carry. ”

“ The scenery of these featureless plains is ordinarily depressing when once the novelty of being adrift on a sea of grass has passed away. There is nothing that can be termed scenery except that which once a year for a brief period the sky affords when clouds of extraordinary grandeur darken the air. ”

“ Your hard-featured men, like mountains in scenery, preserve the same appearance unchanged by years. It is your genial fellow, with mobile features, that suffers so terribly from age. The plough of Time leaves deep furrows in the arable soil of such faces. As in those frescos which depend altogether on color, the devastations of years are awfully felt ”

“ Much pulling down will be witnessed before the building up can be seen. But the essential factor after all is the new atmosphere, the new spirit, the new life-urge from beneath which has forced its way to the surface. ”

“ I let myself be diverted by the spectacle of the daybreak, by the appearance of the sun, climbing like a flame up the sky, by the coming of the countrymen to their tasks, stretching themselves out on the ground or straightening themselves up to interrogate space, shielding their eyes with the hand, by the flight of birds who rose at the passing of the train, by the farms that filed past us, humming with activity like bee-hives. ”

“ You can watch, too, how chips of straw, corks, bits of wood, and other loose objects lying in the street are borne away, very much as the trunks of trees are carried by the river. Even in a town, therefore, you can see how changes in the sky lead to changes on the earth. ”

“ Then, as darkness slowly falls over the landscape, the electric lights of the city flash forth beneath you like visions in fairy land. The whole scene, with its variations and transformations, is one that will long linger in memory. ”

“ A day when the very air, steaming up from the earth, seems to palpitate with the heat. A day when Society has left its cool and pleasant country-house, and finds itself baked and burnt up in town, condemned to ovens of operas, and fiery furnaces of levees and drawing-rooms. ”

“ If you should start from your home to-night and travel northward, after a while you would find everything steadily changing: the atmosphere growing colder, living creatures beginning to be left behind, those that remain beginning to look white, the voices of the earth beginning to die out: color fading, song failing. As you journeyed on always you would be travelling toward the silent, the white, the dead. ”

“ That a constant, but almost imperceptible change is hourly taking place in the earth's surface, appears to be established; and independent of the extraordinary bouleversements, which have at intervals convulsed our globe, this gradual revolution has produced, and will produce again, a total alteration in the face of nature. ”

“ The weather, for all that experience, mixes intimately with the fulness of my impression; speaking not least, for instance, of the way “the state of the streets” and the assault of the turbid air seemed all one with the look, the tramp, the whole quality and allure, the consummate monotonous commonness, of the pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass—with the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights. ”

“ I declare, that when I have been for weeks roaming amongst forests and mountain wastes, I feel, on coming into a city, a sense of its life, activity, and social condition which was before become comparatively dim. ”

“ In a vision across the [125] centuries, with time foreshortened, even material things take upon themselves the quality of motion: and the cities may be seen rising and falling, in growth, in triumph, and decay, like the fire that flares and in a moment fades. ”

“ The scene, in short, has about it that solemn impressive repose which irresistibly arrests the fancy, and sets it to dress up into fantastic shapes the massive clouds that float in the western sky, to picture grim forms amid the misty shadows of the valley, or to dwell half dreaming upon the memories of the past, that come crowding through the mind in quick succession. ”

“ The atmosphere is weighed down by toiling days and anxious nights. The crowd jostle on; they reck not of each other;—the careworn are always the careless. The great current of life flows through those restless streets, turbulent and unresting. ”