But far off, westward, there was a broad
red band of sunset, and against this the smoke, the tall stacks, the
violence and the wealth of that cauldron. One could almost hear the
noise. It did arrest one; it was as though someone had painted something
unreal, to be a mystical emblem, and to sum up in one picture all those
million despairs, misfortunes, chances, disciplines, and acquirements
which make up the character of Lancashire men. This vision also many men
have seen and many men shall write of. Very rarely upon the surface of
the earth does the soul take on so immediate and obvious a physical body
as does the soul of that industrial world in the view of which I speak.
And the two other views are, first, that difficult one which one must
pick and choose but which can be obtained from several sites (especially
at the end of Wensleydale), and which is the view of that rich, old, and
agricultural Yorkshire, from which the county draws its traditions and
in which, perhaps, the truest spirit of the county still abides; for
Yorkshire is at heart farmer, and possibly after three generations of a
town, a man from this part of England still looks more lively when he
sees a lively horse put before him for judgment. Second, the view from
Cross Fell, very, very difficult to obtain, for often when one climbs
Cross Fell in sunny weather, one gets up over the Scar under the threat
of cloud, and one only reaches the summit by the time the evening or the
mist has fallen; but if one has the luck to see the view of which I
speak, then one sees all that rugged remaining part of the Northwest
exactly as the Romans saw it, and as it has been for two thousand years,
with the high land of the lakes and the stony nature and the sparseness
of all the stretch about one, and the approach to a foreign land.
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