Page:Over fen and wold; (IA overfenwold00hissiala).pdf/345

 *

living map, with its countless fruitful fields, green meadows, many-tinted woods touched with autumnal gold, winding waterways, deep dykes, white roads, and frequent railways, space-diminished into tiny threads, its mansions, villages, towns, and ancient churches. Conspicuous amongst the last was the tall and stately tower of Boston's famous "stump," faintly showing, needle-like, in the dim, dreamy distance, and marking where the blue land met the bluer sea, for from our elevated standpoint the far-off horizon of the land, seen through the wide space of air, looked as though it had all been washed over with a gigantic brush dipped in deepest indigo. It was a wonderful prospect, a vision of vastness, stretching away from mystery to mystery. The eye could not see, nor the mind comprehend it all at once, and where it faded away into a poetic uncertainty the imagination had full play. It is ever in the far-off that the land of romance lies, the land one never reaches, and that is always dim and dreamy—the near at hand is plainly revealed and commonplace! Of course much depends on the eye of the beholder, but the vague and remote to conjure with have a certain charm and undoubted fascination for most minds. It was of such a prospect as this, it might even have been this very one, that Tennyson pictures in verse—

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,

Calm and still light on yon great plain That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, And crowded farms and lessening towers, To mingle with the bounding main.