Heather and Snow by George MacDonald — Read

The region was like a waste place in the troubled land of dreams -- a / spot so waste that the dreamer struggles to rouse himself from his / dream, finding it too dreary to dream on. I have heard it likened to / 'the ill place, wi' the fire oot; ' but it did not so impress me when / first, after long desire, I saw it. There was nothing to suggest the / silence of once roaring flame, no half-molten rocks, no huge, / honey-combed scoriae, no depths within depths glooming mystery and / ancient horror. It was the more desolate that it moved no active sense / of dismay. What I saw was a wide stretch of damp-looking level, mostly / of undetermined or of low-toned colour, with here and there a black / spot, or, on the margin, the brighter green of a patch of some growing / crop. Flat and wide, the eye found it difficult to rest upon it and not / sweep hurriedly from border to border for lack of self-asserted object / on which to alight. It looked low, but indeed lay high; the bases of / the hills surrounding it were far above the sea. These hills, at this / season a ring of dull-brown high-heaved hummocks, appeared to make of / it a huge circular basin, miles in diameter, over the rim of which / peered the tops and peaks of mountains more distant. Up the side of the / Horn, which was the loftiest in the ring, ran a stone wall, in the / language of the country a dry-stane-dyke, of considerable size, / climbing to the very top -- an ugly thing which the eye could not avoid. / There was nothing but the grouse to have rendered it worth the / proprietor's while to erect such a boundary to his neighbour's / property, plentiful as were the stones ready for that poorest use of / stones -- division.

The farms that border the hollow, running each a little way up the side / of the basin, are, some of them at least, as well cultivated as any in / Scotland, but Winter claims there the paramountcy, and yields to Summer / so few of his rights that the place must look forbidding, if not / repulsive, to such as do not live in it. To love it, I think one must / have been born there. In the summer, it is true, it has the character / of _bracing_, but can be such, I imagine, only to those who are pretty / well braced already; the delicate of certain sorts, I think it must / soon brace with the bands of death.