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Untitled Article
remember it ! but it is a feeling which I cannot recreate : it was like that fulness of the joy of innocence , in which , a kirtled child , my little pepper pod of a heart swelled , and my eyes flooded , at the distant ringing of church bells as it leaps over the haze of a sunny morning . I saw Madeira thrice afterwards , but never with the same heart .
The eye paused , fascinated , as it rose upwards from the town and took in the white dwellings , fairy temples , elfin cottages , and sprite cells , that sat upon the mountain side ; so small , so elegant , so airy , did they all appear ; the builders must have been workmen from a world of spirits ; they were the houses of Lilliput . It was the hugeness of the mountain which , to my unaccustomed
sense , gave to the buildings those diminutive and fairy like proportions : they were the very things I had fashioned in my dreams , my waking dreams , and seen in prints ; the very things themselves , which I had erected of cards and paper ; and the trees , too , belonged to Oberon ' s own forest ; and the shrubs were of Titania ' s garden . The * e , upon a turning ridge in the hill , one
stood out against the light , and yet preserved its Lilliputianism ; another , nestled in a hollow , was the little snug retreat of some six inch sage , shut out from the world . And every where the green , gliding off into brown and deeper shades or brighter hues , told spring , summer , and autumn had their home there , together and for ever . Craving still , and feeding still unsated , the gaze
was called to a hundred points of beauty and fascination in a moment , and revelled bewilderedly on all ; till , taking in the whole of the grandeur , and magnificence , and fairiness , of the (uptowcring and outlaid bulk of the mountain , the soul said , This is sublime / ' One mighty shoulder and arm extending
away to the north , green and varied at its junction with the body , became dim , blue , and dark in the distance which it gra&ped into . The huge broad foot , spreading like the roots of a monarch among the oaks of the Titans , was firmly planted down , down , a thousand fathoms down in the rocky bottom of the Atlantic ; and tho 3 Q dark black rifts , too , which score the mountain ' s front from
summit to base ; they are the ravines which are digged by the rushing torrents when the collected clouds , striking against the mount aim ' s high crown , burst open , and throw down their thundering cataracts , tearing up earth and rocks in their course , and leaving their dry channels to blacken in the sun and wind when the rains subside . This , reader , is the result of inquiry into
the cause : but imagination , on first beholding the effect , flies back thousands and thousands of years , and regards them as the result and record of some mighty demon stru gg le with the operations and architecture of nature , who , strong in his fierce malignity , sought to deface and destroy the wonder and loveliness of her handy work , and having fixed his burning and enormous hands on the fabric in the intent to tear it to fragments , left these
Untitled Article
Autobiography of Ptl . Verjuice . 37
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1834, page 37, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2629/page/37/
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