CHAPTER XVIII.
IN WHICH THE NAME OF A GREAT POET IS CRIED OUT IN A SOLITARY PLACE As I once more shouldered my pack and went my way, the character of the country side began to change, and, from a semi-pastoral heathiness and furziness, took on a wildness of aspect, which if indeed melodramatic was melodrama carried to the point of genius.
It was a scene for which the nineteenth century has no worthy use.

It finds ignoble occupation as a gaping-ground for the vacuous tourist,--somewhat as Heine might have imagined Pan carrying the gentleman's luggage from the coach to the hotel.

It suffers teetotal picnic-parties to encamp amid its savage hollows, and it humbly allows itself to be painted by the worst artists.

Like a lion in a menagerie, it is a survival of the extinct chaos entrapped and exhibited amid the smug parks and well-rolled downs of England.
I came upon it by a winding ledge of road, which clung to the bare side of the hill like the battlements of some huge castle.

Some two hundred feet below, a brawling upland stream stood for the moat, and for the enemy there was on the opposite side of the valley a great green company of trees, settled like a cloud slope upon slope, making all haste to cross the river and ascend the heights where I stood.