Jura, when, after passing through many glades and along a
stony path, I found a kind of gate between two high rocks, and emerged
somewhat suddenly upon a wide down studded with old trees and also
many stunted yews, and this sank down to a noble valley which lay all
before me.
The open down or prairie on which I stood I afterwards found to be
called the 'Pasturage of Common Right', a very fine name; and, as a
gallery will command a great hall, so this field like a platform
commanded the wide and fading valley below.
It was a very glad surprise to see this sight suddenly unrolled as I
stood on the crest of the down. The Jura had hitherto been either
lonely, or somewhat awful, or naked and rocky, but here was a true
vale in which one could imagine a spirit of its own; there were corn
lands and no rocks. The mountains on either side did not rise so high
as three thousand feet. Though of limestone they were rounded in form,
and the slanting sun of the late afternoon (all the storm had left the
sky) took them full and warm. The valley remaining wide and fruitful
went on out eastward till the hills became mixed up with brume and
distance. As I did not know its name I called it after the village
immediately below me for which I was making; and I still remember it
as the Valley of Glovelier, and it lies between the third and fourth
ridges of the Jura.
Before leaving the field I drew what I saw but I was much too tired by
the double and prodigious climb of the past hours to draw definitely
or clearly. Such as it is, there it is. Then I went down over the
smooth field.
There is something that distinguishes the rugged from the gracious in
landscape, and in our Europe this something corresponds to the use and
presence of men, especially in mountainous places. For men's habits
and civilization fill the valleys and wash up the base of the hills,
making, as it were, a tide mark. Into this zone I had already passed.
The turf was trodden fine, and was set firm as it can only become by
thousands of years of pasturing. The moisture that oozed out of the
earth was not the random bog of the high places but a human spring,
caught in a stone trough. Attention had been given to the trees.
Below me stood a wall, which, though rough, was not the haphazard
thing men pile up in the last recesses of the hills, but formed of
chosen stones, and these bound together with mortar. On my right was
a deep little dale with children playing in it - and this' I afterwards
learned was called a 'combe':
