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‘Confest: and so farewell to unpaintable Lynmouth! Farewell to the charming contrast of civilized English landscape-gardening, with its villas, and its exotics, and its evergreens, thus strangely and yet harmoniously confronted with the chaos of the rocks and mountain- streams. Those grounds of Sir William H—‘s are a double paradise, the wild Eden of the Past side by side with the cultivated Eden of the Future. How its alternations of Art and Savagery at once startle and relieve the sense, as you pass suddenly out of wildernesses of piled boulders, and torrent-shattered trees, and the roar of fern- fringed waterfalls, into “trim walks, and fragrant alleys green; and the door of a summer-house transports you at a step from Richmond to the Alps. Happy he who “possesses,” as the world calls it, and happier still he whose taste could organize, that fairy bower.’

So he, magniloquently, as was his wont; and yet his declamations always flowed with such a graceful ease,–a simple, smiling earnestness,–an unpractised melody of voice, that what would have been rant from other lips, from his showed only as the healthy enthusiasm of the passionate, all-seeing, all-loving artist.

‘Look yonder, again,’ said he, gazing up at the huge boulder-strewn hill-side above us. ‘One wonders at that sight, whether the fable of the giants be not true after all,–and that “Vale of Rocks,” hanging five hundred feet in air, with all its crag-castles, and tottering battlements, and colossal crumbling idols, and great blocks, which hang sloping, caught in act to fall, be not some enormous Cyclopean temple left half-disinterred: or is it a fragment of old Chaos, left unorganized?–or, perhaps, the waste heap of the world, where, after the rest of England had been made, some angel put up a notice for his fellows, “Dry rubbish shot here”?’

‘Not so, unscientific! It is the grandfather of hills,–a fossil bone of some old continent, which stood here ages before England was. And the great earth-angel, who grinds up mountains into paint, as you do bits of ochre, for his “Continental Sketches,” found in it the materials for a whole dark ground-tone of coal-measures, and a few hundred miles of warm high-lights, which we call New Red Sandstone.’

What a sea-wall they are, those Exmoor hills! Sheer upward from the sea a thousand feet rise the downs; and as we slide and stagger lazily along before the dying breeze, through the deep water which never leaves the cliff, the eye ranges, almost dizzy, up some five hundred feet of rock, dappled with every hue; from the intense dark of the tide-line, through the warm green and brown rock-shadows, out of which the horizontal cracks of the strata loom black, and the breeding gulls show like lingering snow-flakes; up to the middle cliff, where delicate grey fades into pink, pink into red, red into glowing purple; up to where the purple is streaked with glossy ivy wreaths, and black-green yews; up to where all the choir of colours vanishes abruptly on the mid-hill, to give place to one yellowish- grey sheet of upward down, sweeping aloft smooth and unbroken, except by a lonely stone, or knot of clambering sheep, and stopped by one great rounded waving line, sharp-cut against the brilliant blue. The sheep hang like white daisies upon the steep; and a solitary falcon rides, a speck in air, yet far below the crest of that tall hill. Now he sinks to the cliff edge, and hangs quivering, supported, like a kite, by the pressure of his breast and long curved wings, against the breeze.

There he hangs, the peregrine–a true ‘falcon gentle,’ ‘sharp- notched, long-taloned, crooked-winged,’ whose uncles and cousins, ages since, have struck at duck and pheasant, and sat upon the wrists of kings. And now he is full proud of any mouse or cliff-lark; like an old Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans, he lingers round ‘the hunting-field of his fathers.’ So all things end.