Whatever may be the want of southern scenery in
stupendousness or sublimity, it is, we are inclined to believe, more
than made up in those thousand quiet and wooing charms of location,
which seem designed expressly for the hamlet and the cottage--the
evening dance--the mid-day repose and rural banquet--and all those
numberless practices of a small and well-intentioned society, which win
the affections into limpid and living currents, touched for ever, here
and there, by the sunshine, and sheltered in their repose by overhanging
leaves and flowers, for ever fertile and for ever fresh. They may not
occasion a feeling of solemn awe, but they enkindle one of admiring
affection; and where the mountain and the bald rock would be productive
of emotions only of strength and sternness, their softer featurings of
brawling brook, bending and variegated shrubbery, wild flower, gadding
vine, and undulating hillock, mould the contemplative spirit into
gentleness and love. The scenery of the South below the mountain
regions, seldom impresses at first, but it grows upon acquaintance; and
in a little while, where once all things looked monotonous and
unattractive, we learn to discover sweet influences that ravish us from
ourselves at every step we take, into worlds and wilds, where all is
fairy-like, wooing, and unchangingly sweet.
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