Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/203

Rh to the view. It exalts every valley, brings high places low, makes rough places smooth, and forms a little world and walls it in with an horizon to fit and grace its own altitude. Far beyond the Severn sloped up the successive ranges of Welsh hills and mountains, as if they were the folds of the same azure cloud, that dipped its upper edge in the sun's nearer glory. Tops and ridges a dozen leagues apart seemed in the distance like the eyebrows and forehead-locks of the same face. The sun was just at the line whence it could pour aslant its best flood adown these crescent slopes into the great valley below, which the meandering Severn jewelled here and there with gold and silver brooches set in emerald. It was a scenery to be drunk in by reverent and thoughtful eyes; to take into the mind and treasure for the reflections of future days; to put with landscapes that live most vividly in memory. The view embraced something more than landscapes, however varied and beautiful. The blue lines of the Snowdonian range were a long way from the top of the nearest hill on the other side of the Severn, but the one looked to the eye like the foot and the other the crown of the same mountain. But what were these intervening distances compared with the historic intervals spread out before us! Here, but a little way before us, hidden among the green growths of a modern civilization, lies buried the old Roman