THE LAND OF HEARTS DESIRE.
MY friend " Vitruvius " is to be counted happy in many particulars, but in none more than in the possession of the most beautiful view in these islands. To begin with, his is a mountain view. Enchanting are prospects over river valleys where a broad stream flows past green pastures or golden corn-lands, bridled hero by a noble bridge and there guarded by some grey Castle, Court, or Hall, bordered hero by bulrushes and there by velvet lawns that slope to the water's edge in peaceful pomp. Full of health and ease of mind is the sweep of the green downland or of wooded hills, whose foot are firm set in an English champaign. Happy are wide fields, threaded by winding brooks, with farms and cottages and a church spire deep embowered in congregated elms and oaks. Glorious is the sun shining on the level fields of ocean, on wet sands, and on black and glossy rocks. But to the soul that has once been sanctified by the touch of the mountains no prospect can ever be wholly satisfactory which does not show the true mountains—not more hills or downland, but highlands, where the blue shadows mark the valleys, where the rocks push back in austere repulse the endearments of the grass and flowers, whore the water leaps with its careless prowess from crag to crag, where the clouds sulk in solemn gloom or cluster in white crowds to break and part, where the necromancer of the mist draws his wayward and mysterious veils, here letting through a peak and there allowing a glimpse of bare shoulder or golden crown. Clearest and most characteristic mark of all are those high platforms on the mountain-side where first comes the dawn and where the sunset lingers still unspent. But why labour a definition ? He who has once heard the call of the mountains, who feels the mountain nostalgia and who loves them without asking why, will never be in any doubt as to what hills deserve the name of mountains. If and when they are real mountains, it is pretty enough to call them hills. It is not a question of mere height. It is not a question of geology. It is not one of snow-line or tree-line. It is mainly one of form. The mountain wants wild open wastes for the play of wind and water, places which avert their ken not merely from half but from the whole of human fate—places whore nothing matters but the roar of the waterfall, the drift of the clouds, the hardness of the rocks, the pathlossness of the grass. More especially are we in those islands beholden to North Wales for the true mountain forms. They cover only a narrow plot on the map. They have no perpetual snow. Yet who has failed to hail as mountains Snowdon and his fellows, Cnecht and Moehryn, Moel Thue and Moel Hebog, the twin peaks above the Roman Steps, or the magio amphitheatre of precipice that enshrouds the most exquisite of the tarns of Coder Idris—a lake divine whose name must be " writ in water " lest the spell be broken ? And now think of the happy fortune of " Vitruvius." The groat ones of the hills are his home friends and come trooping into his very garden. From the terrace of his grey Phis, old and mysterious as its hills and as its owner's race, your eyes see Snowdon, disposed in range beyond range of violet shadow. Chivalrous Cnocht honours him by bowing a lordly head at the end of tho vista from his orangery.—We have heard whispers from Versailles and Hampton, from Wren and Lo Notre oven, in this narrow glen.—Moelwyn lends his ample and friendly breadth of shoulder to fill a gap in this glorious pageant of mountain and of flood. Mod Hebog is the back-cloth of the scone. It is too tiny for such language ? A thousand times " No." A miniature may be as grandiose, as full of nobility and amplitude in style and feeling, as an acre-largo canvas of " furious Tintoret." Sydney Smith thought himself vastly clever when he made his famous comment on the Turner water-colour. Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont were exclaiming with delight : " What grandeur I What breadth ! " " Yes," said the common-souse wit, " about a quarter of an inch." Yet it was the poet and the painter, not the laughing philosopher, who went thence justified. Turner could put the range of the Alps on a vignette the size of a crown-piece. " Vitruvius's " view could not be improved if his mountains were raised to Andean heights. Groat and small, they are mountains, and salute the sea as equal with themselves.
One might think that Nature would consider that she had done enough for " Vitruvius " in giving him the best front prospect in the British Isles. But, says " Vitruvia "—now that strange figment of official documents, " wife of officer on active service "—there are some people for whom you cannot do too much. In any case, Nature's bounty to " Vitruvius " did not stop at the front-door. Go out at the back entrance, turn through a wicket-gate between two manorial pillars of grey- green slate, up a little rising path, past a dry cascade, through-s tiny plantation, down a gentle slope on the other side, and you are transported into an entirely new world—one which has, apparently, no connexion with the great panorama of mountains just catalogued. Yet in its own way it is as distinguished, as fascinating, as dramatic as the great view of Snowdon seated first among his peers. How shall I describe what lies at " the back of beyond " at " Vitruvius's " back-door ? Imagine en inspired impresario who wants to mount an opera with a mediaeval story embellished with scones of chivalry—a Tourney or a Court of Love, held on a noble mead, bright with the coloured pavilions of the Sovereign and his Court, with a grassy mound from which the Queen of Beauty can look down upon the lists, and with three or four green valleys or avenues of approach, down which the knights can come, riding two by two, their coats of mail glistening, their pennons .streaming from their lances, their squires behind, and their pages, bright as butterflies, in gales, azure, argent, vent, and sable, at their sides, hand on rein. If he know the House among the Hills, the impresario would have no trouble. He would simply say " Go to the home of Vitruvius ' and ask them to show you the Tourney ground. That is your second set." In truth, art could add nothing to the scene. Everything is there ready waiting except the men, the horses, and the tents. Imagine a vast and shallow bowl of the most perfect green grass of about twenty-nine acres, with the sides of the bowl not too steep, but steep enough
to give good standing in gradation for the crowd, and marking well the barriers of the ground. Beyond these slopes lie groves of oak not too thickly grouped. On one side great grey rock. push through the turf, which is thick and green like a high Alpine pasture, and form natural buttresses for a green mount jutting out into the Tourney field—fit place whence to look down upon the passage of arms. Just opposite is the chief valley and avenue of approach—a broad stream of emerald green flanked by more groves of mountain oak, small but of good form and figure, with here and there a grey rock, placed as it were to mark the bounds. As the valley retreats it turns, and its course is lost to view. It tantalizes while it enchants. So with the lesser green valleys to the right and left of the rocky mount of the Queen of Beauty. It really is almost too perfect, too sophisti- cated, too theatrical, and yet all the time a simple Welsh pasture.
Yes, but that is it. It is Welsh. It is endowed with that natural magic of the Colt which makes all the world a mirage, if not a miracle.
" Vitruvius's " front view and back view are his by right of birth, and still more by right of appreciation. He has taken seisin of the beauty and glory of the prospect, as the knight of old by the delivery of a clod of earth cut from the glebe—the primitive symbol of extreme possession. -Moreover, he has cut the bench-mark of his own mind and wit upon the hem, as it were, of the hills—cut it in his fountains and ponds, his orangery and his pillars, his gates, his steps, and his balustrades. He has raised the column. He has bent the arch. He has swelled the terrace. He has sunk the grotto. And the mountains have lent him a kindly approval. But beyond his gates and his sign- manual, " Vitruvius " is free of all the hill-country of North Wales —of all that the tourist sees and of much that he has not eyes to see. He can walk that noble path which winds up Snowdon by the old copper mines, where the water of the torrent lies in the rock basin like liquid emeralds, and the precipices wear a nobler, austerer beauty. Again, if he and the sylvan huntress at his side choose the happy hour when the tourist is at lunch, he can tread the popular but none the less delightful path that rounds the shoulder of the mountain from the Llanberis Pass. Those things the tourist sees. What for the most part he passes by without seeing is the enchanted country which lies between the sea and the Roman Steps. To follow up the stream that hurries from the little Lake of Cwm Buchan to the tidal lagoon Mocros is to find oneself in a land of high romance—a land of dashing waters, flowery meads, arching groves, grey-green rooks, moss-grown -stones, elusive paths, and whispering rivulets that talk between the atones as they run. It is a land of classic fable—the land from which the painters of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the schools of Poussin and Claude, must surely have taken their inspiration. Here is a perpetual suggestion of Arcadia and the Thracian highlands. One would not be surprised to see a shepherdess come from behind one of the huge erratic blocks that stud the meadows. Rather one is surprised that he is no: there, with a demi-divinity beside her. In truth, the country is like a series of landscape backgrounds in an illustrated edition of Lemprilre's Dictionary. Here is the pool in which Narcissus caught sight of his own face ; there the field where Hyacinthus played quoits, with a peep of a mountain behind, a stream on one side, and a sheep-cote in the middle distance. Tho Dryads look with half-averted faces from this clump of oaks ; the Nereids from the tumbling, splashing water; the Oreads fleck with flying feet that sloping lawn.
But for the time, though only for the time, we must close the record of the beauties that make up for " Vitravius " and for the heart that beats with his the Land of Heart's Desire. These enchantments must not hold us too deep, even in memory, when there is man's and woman's work to do. While the master of the wastes, woods, and waters and of the grey PUB and its green fields is at the wars, what right have others to drink from his cup ? We wrong the Land of Heart's Desire if we let it lead us from the sterner thoughts of duty. When a happier day has dawned, when the right has triumphed, and when " Vitruviu.s " is once more among us, it will be time to speak of the sylvan gods, of Faunus and the Nymphs. Till then, farewell to them, but may it be a short and not a long adieu! Iarrorus. If arch 1st (St. David's Day).
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