A valley that opens wherever I look

One night, when I was a boy, I dreamed of a very beautiful landscape. At that time I had never seen under the sky anything to compare with it for beauty; a matter of small consequence, however, when three fields, a pond, a flowering hedge, and a group of trees were enough to make a Garden of Paradise any day. But I had seen pictures. Turner engravings, and the like, and no doubt it was these that imagination took in hand when it showed me more loveliness in a single view than earth can offer to the eye's embrace. But that seems too much to say — exaggerate, ungrateful; and in truth the magic was rather in the vision than the view. It was a scene in which all that is most beautiful in the valley-landscape of this land came together in an immensity of range. A valley of no great depth as measured by its extent, but one that might have been proportioned to the whole western sky as viewed from a hill at sundown. Its breadth was the breadth of two Wensleydales, two Swaledales, and three vales of Festiniog and valleys of the Wye; with the loveliness of all of them in terraced rock, hanging woods, deep meadows, and winding waters. And as you looked down the valley, an unending succession of distances. This was the wonder of the scene; and here it was that the Genius of Dreams, the omnipotent Imagination which I sing, gave to my vision a magic which I do not suppose was ever conceived of by waking thought. Distance rose upon distance, each in its own boundary, so to speak, as the eye travelled on from one to the other. As I gazed down the valley from where I stood, the general view melted in the long, gently-streaming gradations of perspective that may be seen on any clear day in any open landscape; but there was this difference. When I looked onward to some mile-away spot, half lost in soft obscurity, the haze immediately began to lift, light entered into the obscure, and this was now my foreground, with a foreground's clearness and particularity. As a natural consequence, the distance beyond took a new aspect of gradation. The bridge which a moment ago, when I began to look fixedly at it to make it out, lay far down the river, was now at my feet. I could see the wagon slanting down from the crown of it, and watch the cattle in the fields that sloped to the stream on either side. But no sooner was attention withdrawn from this spot than I insensibly fell back to my first standpoint. The newly-opened scene closed; and in a moment the bridge and all about it were again in the dim poetic distance of a master more masterly than Claude: and so it was to every point in the landscape. Going forth to any part with curiosity, my vision carried within itself the same light. Though the place seemed miles away, every detail opened to view when it was looked upon intently, and then was lost again in the general beauty of the scene.