THE HIGHLAND CHASE.
THE VISION OF MARIOTDALE.[[1]]
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BY H. HASTINGS WELD.
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I.—THE SURPRISE.
My charge was in a beautifully romantic and fertile spot, the natural features of which would seem sufficient teachers of the power and the goodness of God, if, indeed, nature were, as some insist, a sufficient teacher without revelation. I soon found myself, upon here taking up my residence, almost the only man who thought it worth his while to study and admire the beauties which nature, with a lavish hand, had scattered over the scene. It was a valley, enclosed on all sides with hills, whose ascents, crowned with verdure, exhibited every variety of tint and shade of green; for the trees of our country display, more than any other, those varying colors and gentle yet distinctly marked contrasts which the painter envies, but strives in vain to transfer to his canvas. There were only two breaks in the surrounding amphitheatre. One was where a mountain stream came tumbling and babbling into the valley; the other where, in a more subdued and quiet current, it found egress. The sinuous path of this little river, or “run,” across the dale, was marked by a growth of beautiful trees, among which the straight-leaved willow, with its silver foliage shivering in the light, was most frequent and conspicuous; other trees which delight in water diversified the long, green defile; and a little boat, which belonged to one of my parishioners, offered me frequent twilight pastime. Some labor, to which, though unused at first, I soon became accustomed, was required to force the boat upstream; but the highest “boatable” point once reached, I had only to turn the shallop’s head and guide it down, letting my little barque slowly float, and conducting it clear of the shallows and obstructions. Delightful were the views which the turns in the stream were continually opening; the overhanging trees, forming a green roof above, were reflected below; and while I seemed thus suspended between answering skies and trees, over my head and beneath my feet, to look in either direction of the stream seemed like peering into a mysterious fairy grot.
One evening as I paused, looking delighted upon the scene of enchantment, a new feature was, as if by magic, added to the picture. A little girl—a child of surpassing loveliness—slipped out from among the bushes, and, skipping from stone to stone, stood on a high rock, near the middle of the current—the beau ideal of such a sprite as one might fancy inhabiting the spot. Her loose tresses floated on the evening breeze, and her scanty drapery—it was mid-summer—as the wind pressed it against her form, exhibited a delicacy and grace of contour which that artist would become immortal who could copy. She did not at first perceive me; and when the flash of my oar startled her, I almost expected she would prove herself a vision, by vanishing into the sky above in a cloud, or dissolving in a foam-wreath in the water which rippled among the rocks behind her.