Hills

“ Before entering the immediate presence of the hills, one should first view them from a distance, seeing them from base to peak--in the glory of the day's beginning, as they watch the world awake; in the majesty of full noon, as they maintain their calm above the turmoil of the day's doing; and in the glory of the sun's departure, as it lights last their crests and peaks. ”

“ The glory that pours down upon these hills, the vales they infold, the wild streams, the craggy mountain spurs, the soft, velvety clearings that turn their dimpled cheeks to be kissed by the sunshine, may all be seen and fully enjoyed from this spot. ”

“ And the hills that were bare are green.
They shower the petals and the bee
On the valleys that laze between.
So it was in the dreaming past,
And life is a shifting maze,
Summer on summer fading fast,
In a mist of yesterdays. ”

“ THE HEART OF THE HILLS I Twin spirals of blue smoke rose on either side of the spur, crept tendril-like up two dark ravines, and clearing the feathery green crests of the trees, drifted lazily on upward until, high above, they melted shyly together and into the haze that veiled the drowsy face of the mountain. ”

“ Ridge after ridge the mountain sloped down from our feet into a vast rich basin ten miles at least in breadth, by thirty, if not more, in length, girdled on every side by mountains--the whole diversified with wood and water, meadow, and pasture-land, and corn-field--studded with small white villages--with more than one bright lakelet glittering like beaten gold in the declining sun, and several isolated hills standing up boldly from the vale! ”

“ The extensive range of country seen from this hill increased in beauty as we ascended the road which ran along the edge of the ravine, fringed with majestic euphorbias; in the distance deep blue mountains, and plains of red sand, then wavy bush-covered hills, and in the valley below us the winding river, and our rear guard, with their long line of waggons slowly advancing. ”

“ The bewildering throng of mountains arranged itself in chains, clusters, or families. Hills drew apart, valleys opened, streams twinkled in the sun, towns and villages clung to the skirts of the mountains or dotted the rich meadows ”

“ I stand on the windy uplands among the hills of Down
With all the world spread out beneath, meadow and sea and town,
And ploughlands on the far-off hills that glow with friendly brown.
And ever across the rolling land to the far horizon line,
Where the blue hills border the misty west, I see the white roads twine,
The rare roads and the fair roads that call this heart of mine.
I see them dip in the valleys and vanish and rise and bend
From shadowy dell to windswept fell, and still to the West they wend,
And over the cold blue ridge at last to the great world's uttermost end. ”

“ We had by this time lifted ourselves high out of the gloomy valleys and had attained to a rarer atmosphere and a clearer world, where the forest lay below like a book that has been read and above it rose the eternal hills lifting their mighty granite shoulders to the sky. ”

“ But let him imagine, if he can, a vast girdle of far-off, misty, blue hills, faintly defined by the horizon; against them to the north and west jut rows of towering but withal gently sloping mountains, purple, black, or darkly blue, just as each drifting cloud shadows them; within these encircling hills and mountains scatter the loveliest landscape features of which the human mind can conceive ”

“ WE have all of us seen hills, or what we call hills, from the monstrous protuberances of the Andes and the Himalaya to such puny pimples as lie about the edges of your fens. Next to a waterfall, the first natural object (according to my own experience) to impress itself on a child's mind is a hill, some spot from which he can enlarge his horizon. Hills, and still more mountains, attract the human imagination and curiosity. ”

“ Green hills, with intersecting valleys, forest trees lifting their tops toward the sky, wide-spreading pasture lands, and, threading its way among them, a little mountain-stream, bright and pure as innocence itself ”

“ In the hills of life there are two trails. One lies along the higher sunlit fields where those who journey see afar, and the light lingers even when the sun is down; and one leads to the lower ground, where those who travel, as they go, look always over their shoulders with eyes of dread, and gloomy shadows gather long before the day is done.
This, my story, is the story of a man who took the trail that leads to the lower ground, and of a woman, and how she found her way to the higher sunlit fields. ”

“ Hills and rocks, waving with the forests of oak and chestnut, bordered the road and, as their leaves rustled to the wind and twinkled in the sun, gave to the depth of solitude a sort of life and vivacity. ”

“ Shone the great sun on the wide earth at last.
I stood upon the upland slope and cast
My eye upon a broad and beauteous scene,
Where the vast plain lay girt by mountains vast,
And hills o'er hills lifted their heads of green,
With pleasant vales scooped out and villages between. ”

“ Next as she sits on the brow of the hill and gazes over the lowland the breezes blow her hair about her face and her mind passes to the wonderful air that as wind shakes the trees, ripples the water, whirls the mills and sings through the trees on the tops of the hills. ”

“ When we came on the brow of the hills flanking the approaches to the Valley River it was already night. The outlines of the far-off mountains were blending into one huge shadow. It was now the wall of the world, with no path for a human foot. The hills were a purple haze, the trees along their crests making fantastic pictures against the sky. Beyond the land of living men, it seemed, an owl hooted, and a belated dove called and called like a moaning spirit wandering in some lost tarn of the Styx. ”

“ Nothing ever can have been more beautiful than those groups of mighty hills as we saw them then, with the gray rocks, the green slopes, the white snow-patches and crests, all to be seen at one glance, and the mists and fleecy clouds tumbling, rolling, hovering about their summits, filling their lofty valleys, and coming down far towards the lower world, making the skyey aspects so intimate with the earthly ones, that we hardly knew whether we were sojourning in the material or spiritual world. ”

“ The high valleys lying between the mountain ranges that extend across it like huge dikes are of surpassing loveliness. Romantic woodlands, dells, lakes, canyons, murmuring brooks, rushing rivers, far vistas, plains, mountains, and hills delight the soul. ”

“ To see these grand old hills even at a distance and gaze up into their enchanted glens and valleys, is something worth journeying six thousand miles to behold. Beautiful under the midday sun, still more lovely when sunset sheds its rainbow hues over them and over the sea ”

“ Accustomed to the contour of downs and tors, or to the valleys and long slopes that introduce a range, we come to some wider horizon and see, far off, a further line of hills. To hills all the mind is attuned: a moderate ecstasy. The clouds are above the hills, lying level in the empty sky; men and their ploughs have visited, it seems, all the land about us; till, suddenly, faint but hard, a cloud less varied, a greyer portion of the infinite sky itself, is seen to be permanent above the world. ”

“ We are apt to be deceived by the formal grandeur of mountains, by the massed colours and contours of upbuilded heights, whether lying solitarily like vast sleeping saurians, or gathered in harmonious, if tumultuous, disarray. There is a beauty that is uniquely of the hills. ”

“ Before me were long and wide plains, meadows of grass, smoothly-sloping hills, and a range of mountains beyond, which, parting in one particular spot, formed, as it were, a natural gateway, that might almost lead, in fancy, to some fairy land beyond. ”

“ The life of the hill people was simple and beautiful—children playing about their small, grass thatched, white plastered homes, men hoeing corn, women picking wild coffee, and always the simple songs of the hills were on their lips. ”

“ The open valley, the half-shorn hills, the paths, the flocks, the buildings, the woods in their second growth, even the waters in the different images they reflect on their bosom, the very race of men who come and go, all are different from what they were ”

“ The lowly hills about us are but the last surges of a billowy sea of ridges stretching hundreds of miles to the southward, where they rise to a much more commanding elevation, and attain to the dignity of mountains. ”

“ Scripture and history likewise hint to us of great hills far away, once brilliant in the one true sunshine which comes from God, now shrouded in the mist of ages, or literally turned away beyond our horizon by the revolution of our planet: and of lesser hills, too, once bright and green and fair, giving pasture to lonely flocks, sending down fertilizing streams into now forgotten valleys ”

“ Stately, snow-crowned giants of the lordly hills, fir-fringed up to timber line, stand motherlike, or bishoplike, crozier-cragged, shepherding the verdant uplands and the velvety valleys whose billowy meadows bend beneath the highland zephyrs or fall before the scythe of the prospering farmer. ”

“ Hills in the distant view may seem to lie near each other; one may seem to rise just back of another, and to the eye they may seem to constitute parts of the same mountain, and yet between them there may be deep and fertile vales, smiling villages, running streams, beautiful gardens and waterfalls, which the eye cannot take in, and the extent of which it may be wholly impossible to conjecture ”

“ And of these emotions the strongest, perhaps, is that which most of those who travel to-day go seeking; the enchantment of mountains; the air by which we know them for something utterly different from high hills. ”

“ The wide and level fields outspread before her native home, and the few bare hills which skirted here and there the distant outline, were but little calculated to inspire those enchanting, but unreal dreams, which seem insensibly to arise amid the mountain scenery so wildly beautiful and picturesque in many parts of our western world. ”

“ The long line of distant mountains that first appears on the horizon gradually opens up, peak rises beyond peak, the nearer hills become detached, valleys are revealed, and soon white houses may be discerned dotting the dark grey slopes. ”

“ The hills have drawn together until they almost meet, but they are no longer hills—they are stupendous, unscaleable precipices of rock, three hundred feet high. Grim and forbidding—black rather than grey—they offer no hospitality to the foot of man ”

“ Up in the hills it is a pleasant world—you pass through many different zones of vegetation very rapidly—at one moment all is laurel and heath—you cross a well-marked line and all is tilling—then you are out among dead bracken on an open hill-top that might be English. ”

“ And, looking far ahead, both could see strong young men hurrying up from the laggard Blue-grass into the lagging hills and strong young men hurrying down from them, and could hear the heart of the hills beating as one with the heart of the Bluegrass, and both beating as one with the heart of the world. ”

“ Methinks I see the sunset light flooding the river valley, the western hills stretching to the horizon, overhung with trees gorgeous and glowing with the tints of autumn,—a mighty flower-garden, blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, Frost; ”

“ All at once a hundred houses, high up among the hills, seem on fire. The setting sun has smitten them, and the snow-tracts are illuminated by harmless conflagrations. Their windows are all lighted up by a lurid splendour, in its strong suddenness sublime. But look, look we beseech you, at the sun—the sunset—the sunset region—and all that kindred and corresponding heaven, effulgent where a minute ago lay in its cold glitter the blue bosom of the lake. ”

“ The mountain peak, the rounded hill, the wide plain which lies where hills and mountains once stood, tell clearly of the great results which slow processes will reach when given long time in which to do their work. ”

“ The hills rise into the dignity of mountains, and are entirely barren, save in the immediate vicinity of a little valley or two which smiles between them, when their rough granite sides are clothed with partial underwood; these valleys have a verdant and cultivated effect, from being well wooded, and also from the unusual practice of inclosing the fields with hedges. ”

“ Almost every where else the prospect is bounded by beautiful hills, here and there aspiring to the character of mountains, whose sides vary constantly in tint as they rangingly receive the rays of the rising or the setting sun. ”

“ Owing to their unscreened position and their height, these trees may be clearly distinguished for miles, whether from the lake, the hills, or the roads about the country—a land-mark overtopping the humble church-spires, and every object raised by man within the bounds of the valley. ”

“ Hills are insensibly crumbling into the valleys, valleys are silently eroded, and crags that ever since the birth of man have been the landmarks of the race, are yet slowly but surely melting away. It matters not where the hill or plain may lie, the highest mountains of the tropics and the frozen soil of the poles, yield each in its measure and degree to the influence of the general law. ”

“ The most familiar sheet of water viewed from a new hill-top, yields a novel and unexpected pleasure. When we have travelled a few miles, we do not recognize the profiles even of the hills which overlook our native village, and perhaps no man is quite familiar with the horizon as seen from the hill nearest to his house, and can recall its outline distinctly when in the valley. We do not commonly know, beyond a short distance, which way the hills range which take in our houses and farms in their sweep. ”