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page 31
of England and 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 brightening, 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 everything
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 they are in
nature! how pregnant with imagination for the poet! and the
height of the Cumbrian mountains is sufficient to exhibit
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