Above these, hills moulded on a grander scale
heave up their broad shoulders to the sunlight, which is reflected in
pale but tender hues of blue or violet or rose from their bare rock
masses, or the slopes hardly less bare, which are swept by great
winds, and browsed yet closer by climbing mountain sheep. At this and
the other point the bosses of the hills are lighted with the sparkle
of gorse-thickets, or dusky with heather not yet kindled into bloom.
Lower down there are belts of woodland, fencing off the pastures which
strew the lowest terraces of the mountains from the barren wastes
above them, and these pastures are brightly flecked with patches of
white-walled homesteads down to the brown edge of the marsh. And so,
ridge after ridge, the hills enclose the scene in a half-circle, of
which this breezy headland, our "specular mount," is an extreme horn.
But what the eye reposes on at last is the broad floor of marsh-land
between mountain and sea. A broad smooth floor, which would be vacant
and dull enough had not Nature taken thought to drape its formlessness
the more lovingly and richly.
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