Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/179

Rh very sky and clouds above are moved to sympathy with her sufferings and shed black tears in token of their emotion. When you have sated the eye with this scene, even without being affected with these sentimental fancies, just go over to Hagley and ascend the citadel hill of the Clent range, and you will see what Nature is where she has the upper-hand, and breathes free from the asthma and rheumatism of the other condition. You see her in all the various dresses she has worn from her birth. On this furzy-breathing hill you see the simple and homely dress she wore when man first found her here two thousand years ago or more; and it is all redolent with the thymy odour that perfumed it then. But from this hill-top see what manner of robes she wears all along down into the deep, quiet valley and up its gentle, undulating slopes that meander to the distant horizon. The fingers of the Creator made the first garment for man, but He left to human hands the clothing of naked Nature; and these are the beautiful garments they have worked for her—dresses how varied of green and gold and of every tint the rainbow's pallet can blend and bring to the adornment! Here she reigns in all her peaceful and summer glory over a vast rural domain—a great picture of living and breathing beauty in an encircling frame of emerald, gilded by undulating lines of golden sky.