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The river Mersey takes its sources for it is formed by the union of several smaller streams in the ranges of high limestone hills east of Liverpool, in North Derbyshire. These hills are an extension of the Pennine range that makes the backbone of England, and in Derbyshire they rise to a height of nearly two thousand feet, giving most picturesque scenery.

But as the scholar grows older and more able to travel, so does the Pennine Range recede from his vision, until it becomes almost as remote as those crater-strewn mountains in the Moon which have a name so similar. This elusiveness on the part of a natural feature so essentially static as a mountain range is attributable to the total disregard of the name of this particular chain of hills.

Mark Pattison, born in 1813, passed his youthful days at the rectory of Hauxwell, a village in Wensleydale, on the edge of the great uplands that stretch northwards towards Richmond and Barnard Castle, and form an outwork of the Pennine range and the backbone of northern England.

The river Ribble, which flows into the Irish Sea through a wide estuary, drains the western slopes of the Pennine Hills, which divide Lancashire from Yorkshire. Up in the north-western portion of Lancashire, near the bases of these hills, is a moist region known as the parish of Mitton, where, as the poet tells us, "The Hodder, the Calder, Ribble, and rain All meet together in Mitton domain."

Except when wrapped in snow, the high moors of the Pennine range present for eight months of the year a harmony of sober colours, in which the grey of the rocks, the bleached purple of the heather blossom and the faded yellows and browns of bent and bracken overpower the patches of green herbage.

The great Pennine Fault of England is 130 miles long, and others extend for much greater distances. The surfaces on both sides of a fault are often smooth and highly polished by the movement which has taken place in the strata. They then show the phenomenon known as slicken-sides.

In the same way as the term 'Cumbrian Hills' is exchanged for the popular 'Lake District, so is a large section of the Pennine Range paradoxically known as the 'Yorkshire Dales. It is because the hills are so big that the valleys are deep and it is owing to the great watersheds that these long and narrow dales are beautified by some of the most copious and picturesque rivers in England.

The former comprised Provençe, Dauphiné, the Lyonese, Franche-comté, Bresse, Bugey, and a part of Savoy; the latter comprised the countries between Mount Jura and the Pennine Alps, or the part of Switzerland between the Reus, the Valais, and the rest of Savoy. Such was the geographical state of Germany at the close of the Carlovingian Dynasty. State of Literature in the time of Charlemagne.

The journeyings by rough trackways through "desert" and swamp and forest, through the bleak moorlands of the Pennine Hills, or the thickets and fens that choked the lower grounds, proved indeed a sore trial for the temper of his courtiers; and bitter were the complaints of the hardships that fell to the lot of the disorderly train that swept after the king, the army of secretaries and lawyers, the mail-clad knights and barons followed by their retainers, the archbishop and his household, bishops and abbots and judges and suitors, with the "actors, singers, dicers, confectioners, huxters, gamblers, buffoons, barbers, who diligently followed the court."

Stretching out a hand he filled it full of silky grass and thyme, sniffing at it in delight. "How strange," he thought, "that I can still enjoy these things. But I shall till I die." Below him, as he sat, lay the greater part of his estate stretching east and west; bounded on the west by some of the high moors leading up to the Pennine range, lost on the east in a blue and wooded distance.