It is not so much a
landscape as the fragments of many landscapes, samples in little of
the things that Nature does elsewhere on a grand scale. The effect on
a stranger is at first alluring, captivating, like the caprices of a
beautiful woman; then it becomes disconcerting, maddening, fatiguing;
and a great longing seizes him for vast level spaces, for sameness,
for the infinity where he may lose himself and rest. Then one day he
climbs to the top of Harcombe or Muttersmoor and finds the immensity
he longed for. As far as his sight can reach, the shoulders of the
hills and the prone backs of the long ridges are all of one height;
the combes and valleys are mere rifts and dents in a great moor that
has no boundary but the sky. The country has revealed its august,
eternal soul. He is no longer distracted by its many moods; he loves
it the more for them, as a man loves the mutable ways of the woman
whose soul he knows.
Rickman stood upon a vantage ground, looking over the valley and the
bay. To him it was as if the soul of this land, like the soul of Lucia
Harden, had put on a veil. The hillside beneath him dropped steeply to
the valley and the town. Down there, alone and apart from Harmouth,
divided from the last white Regency villa by half a mile of
meadow-land, stood Court House; and as he looked at it he became more
acutely conscious of his misery. He sat down among the furze and
heather and bracken; he could think of nothing better than to sit
there and stare into the face of Nature, not like a poet whom love
makes lyrical, but like a quite ordinary person whom it makes dumb.
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