2. HARMONIES OF COLOUR AND SOUND.

I HAVE often been struck, when wandering over the moors, with the wonderful harmonies of the various objects. The birds and beasts that inhabit the scene are clothed with fur or plumage of a brown russet hue, to harmonize them with the colour of the heathy wastes, and thus to facilitate their escape from their enemies. Nor is this harmony confined to the form and hue of the living creatures-it is also strikingly displayed in their peculiar cries. All the voices of the moorland are indescribably plaintive-suggestive of melancholy musings and memories. No one can hear them, even on the sunniest day, without a nameless thrill of sadness; and, when multiplied by the echoes through the mist or the storm, they seem like cries of distress or wailings of woe from another world. In them the very spirit of the solitude seems to find expression. None of our familiar song birds ever wander

to the moorland. It is tenanted by a different tribe, and the line of demarcation between them is sharply defined. In the valley and the plain the thrush and the chaffinch fill the air with their music; but, as you climb the mountain-barrier of the horizon, you are greeted on the frontier by the wild cries of the plovers, which hover around you in ceaseless gyrations, following your steps far beyond their marshy domains. These are the outposts-the sentinels of the wild; and jealously do they perform their office. No stranger appears in sight, or sets a foot within their territories, without eliciting the warning cry. Well might the Covenanters curse them, for many a grey head, laid low in blood by the persecuting dragoons, would have escaped, securely hidden among the green rushes and peat-bogs, but for their importunate revelation of the secret. Beyond the haunts of this bird stretches a wide illimitable circle of silence, in which only a shrill, solitary cry now and then is heard, rippling the stillness like a stone cast into the bosom of a stream, and leaving it, when the wave of sound has subsided, deeper than before. And how absolute is that silence! It seems to breathe to become tangible. The solitude is like that of mid-ocean-not a human being in sight, not a trace or a recollection of man visible in all the horizon; from break of day to eventide no sound in the air but the sigh of the breeze round the lonely heights, the muffled murmur of some stream flashing through the heather, or the long, lazy lapse of a ripple on the beach of some nameless tarn.

HERE, if anywhere, you can be lulled on the lap of a placid antiquity. These great northern moors are immeasurably old. The gneissic rock that underlies them is one of the oldest in the records of geology—the lowest floor of the most ancient sea, in whose water its particles were first precipitated, to be afterwards indurated by chemical action, or mechanical pressure, into their present compact mass. Here was, probably, the first dry land that appeared above the surface of the ocean. Long before the Alps upreared their snowy peaks from the deep, and while an unbroken sea tossed its billows over the spots where the Andes and Himalayas now tower to heaven, these moors lay stretched out beneath the disconsolate skies, as islands reposing

on a shoreless ocean; not clothed, as at present, with brown heather and spongy moss, but presenting an aspect of still drearier desolation. They were all that in the earliest geologic epochs represented the beauty and power of Great Britain-the first instalment of that mighty empire which Britannia gained from the deep. Here, where Nature is all in all, and man is nothing, you expect to find permanence. Time seems to have sailed over these moors with folded wing, leaving no more trace of his flight than the passage of the shadow over the dial-stone. And yet, calm and stedfast as the scene may appear, it has passed through many a stormy cataclysm, it has witnessed many a startling transition. On rock and mound the careful observer will find those strange hieroglyphics in which Nature's own hand has chronicled the eventful history of her youth. Here, where the sheep are quietly nibbling the green sward, the sea once broke in foam on the shore; there, on that elevated knoll-if the surface were fully exposed-veins of granite thrust up by some violent internal convulsion might be seen reticulating the gneiss as with a gigantic network, showing the mighty levers employed by nature in piling up her Cyclopean masonry. Yonder the rocks are smoothed and polished, or else marked with grooves. and scratches, telling of glaciers that passed over them, and suggesting to the imagination the picture of that strange era in the past history of our country, when from Snowdon and the Yorkshire moors to Ronaldsay and Cape Wrath eternal winter reigned with sternest

rigour, and the Arctic bear hunted the narwhal amid the icebergs and icefloes that drifted past the coasts of Sussex and Hampshire. Yonder granite boulders that strew the hill-side, differing in mineral character from the prevailing formation of the region, and which, according to the Ossian mythology, fell from the leaky creel of a giant Finn striding over the heights one day to take vengeance with this rude but effective ammunition against an offending neighbour, the geologist tells us were transported to this place from a granitic district twenty miles distant on the back of a slow-moving glacier. And the elevated conical mounds, or moraines, which you meet with here and there, are accumulations of mud and gravel, marking in enduring characters the terminations of those vanished ice-streams. Turning from the distant silent ages of the geologist to the early lisping ages of our own race, we find numerous traces of these also chronicled on the moors. The labour of the peasant often discloses, deeply embedded in the moss, large trunks of birch, alder, and fir, masses of foliage, cones, and nuts, in a perfect state of preservation, the fossils of the peat-bog. These, like the kindred relics of the coal-fields, tell us a tale of luxuriant forests clothing, like dark thunder-clouds, desolate tracts where not a single tree is now to be seen, and scarcely a juniper-bush can grow. Through the underwood of these primæval forests the wild boar roamed, and the shaggy bison bellowed, and the long dismal howl of the wolf made the silence of midnight hideous, ages before the fanfare of the Roman trumpets