[Professor Wilson's "Remarks on the Scenery of the Highlands" were

first published as a Preface to _Swan's Select Views of the Lakes

of Scotland_, 2d edition, 1836. They were not included originally

in the "Recreations of Christopher North;" but the harmony of their

tone and spirit seemed to recommend them as an appropriate sequel

to that work; and accordingly they are now reprinted as such. The

thanks of the Editor and Publishers of Professor Wilson's writings

are due to the Messrs Fullarton, the proprietors of "Swan's Views,"

for the liberal manner in which they have placed this valuable

article at their disposal.]

* * * * *

In no other country does nature exhibit herself in more various forms of

beauty and sublimity, than in the North of England and the Highlands of

Scotland. This is acknowledged by all who, having studied their

character, and become familiar with the feelings it inspires, have

compared the effects produced on their minds by our own mountainous

regions, with what they have experienced among the scenery of the Alps.

There, indeed, all objects are on so vast a scale, that we are for a

while astonished as we gaze on the gigantic; and all other emotions are

sunk in an overwhelming sense of awe that prostrates the imagination.

But on recovering from its subjection to the prodigious, that faculty

everywhere recognises in those mighty mountains of dark forests,

glittering glaciers, and regions of eternal snow--infinite all--the

power and dominion of the Sublime. True that all these are but

materials for the mind to work on, and that to its creative energy

nature owes much of that grandeur which seems to be inherent in her own

forms; yet surely she in herself is great, and there is a regality

belonging of divine right to such a monarch as Mont Blanc.

Those are the very regions of sublimity, and if brought into immediate

comparison with them in their immense magnitude, the most magnificent

scenery of our own country would no doubt seem to lose its character of

greatness. But such is not the process of the imagination in her

intercourse with Nature. To her sufficient for the day is the good

thereof; and on each new glorious sight being shown to her eyes, she

employs her God-given power to magnify or irradiate what she beholds,

without diminishing or obscuring what she remembers. Thus, to her all

things in nature hold their own due place, and retain for ever their own

due impressions, aggrandised and beautified by mutual reaction in those

visionary worlds, which by a thought she can create, and which as they

arise are all shadowy representations of realities--new compositions in

which the image of the earth we tread is reflected fairer or greater

than any realities, but not therefore less, but more true to the spirit

of nature. It is thus that Poets and Painters at once obey and control

their own inspirations. They visit all the regions of the earth, but to

love, admire, and adore; and the greatest of them all, native to our

soil, from their travel or sojourn in foreign lands, have always brought

home a clearer insight into the character of the scenery of their own, a

profounder affection for it all, and a higher power of imaging its

attributes in colours or in words. In our poetry, more than in any

other, nature sees herself reflected in a magic mirror; and though many

a various show passes processionally along its lustre, displaying the

scenery of "lands and seas, whatever clime the sun's bright circle

warms," among them all there are none more delightful or elevating to

behold, than those which genius, inspired by love, has framed of the

imagery, which in all her pomp and prodigality heaven has been pleased

to shower, through all seasons, on our own beautiful island. It is not

for us to say whether our native Painters, or the "old masters," have

shown the greatest genius in landscape; but if the palm must be yielded

to them whose works have been consecrated by a reverence, as often,

perhaps, superstitious as religious, we do not fear to say that their

superiority is not to be attributed in any degree to the scenery on

which they exercised the art its beauty had inspired. Whatever may be

the associations connected with the subjects of their landscapes--and we

know not why they should be higher or holier than those belonging to

innumerable places in our own land--assuredly in themselves they are not

more interesting or impressive; nay, though none who have shared with us

the spirit of the few imperfect sentences we have now written, will, for

a moment, suppose us capable of instituting an invidious comparison

between our own scenery and that of any other country, why should we

hesitate to assert that our own storm-loving Northern Isle is equally

rich in all kinds of beauty as the sunny South, and richer far in all

kinds of grandeur, whether we regard the forms or colouring of

nature--earth, sea, or air,--

"Or all the dread magnificence of heaven."

What other region in all the world like that of the Lakes in the North

of England! And yet how the true lover of nature, while he carries along

with him its delightful character in his heart, and can so revive any

spot of especial beauty in his imagination, as that it shall seem in an

instant to be again before his very eyes, can deliver himself up, after

the lapse of a day, to the genius of some savage scene in the Highlands

of Scotland, rent and riven by the fury of some wild sea-loch! Not that

the regions do not resemble one another, but surely the prevailing

spirit of the one--not so of the other--is a spirit of joy and of peace.

Her mountains, invested, though they often be, in gloom--and we have

been more than once benighted during day, as a thunder-cloud thickened

the shadows that for ever sleep in the deepest dungeons of

Helvellyn--are yet--so it seems to us--such mountains as in nature ought

to belong to "merry England." They boldly meet the storms, and seen in

storms, you might think they loved the trouble; but pitch your tent

among them, and you will feel that theirs is a grandeur that is

congenial with the sunshine, and that their spirit fully rejoices in the

brightness of light. In clear weather, verdant from base to summit, how

majestic their repose! And as mists slowly withdraw themselves in

thickening folds up along their sides, the revelation made is still of

more and more of the beautiful--arable fields below--then coppice woods

studded with standard trees--enclosed pastures above and among the

woods--broad breasts of close-nibbled herbage here and there adorned by

rich dyed rocks, that do not break the expanse--till the whole veil has

disappeared, and, lo! the long lofty range, with its wavy line, rising

and sinking so softly in the blue serenity perhaps of an almost

cloudless sky. Yet though we have thus characterised the mountains by

what we have always felt to be the pervading spirit of the region,

chasms and ravines, and cliffs and precipices, are there; in some places

you see such assemblages as inspire the fear that quakes at the heart,

when suddenly struck in the solitude with a sense of the sublime; and

though we have called the mountains green--and during Spring and Summer,

in spite of frost or drought, they are green as emerald--yet in Autumn

they are many-coloured, and are girdled with a glow of variegated light,

that at sunset sometimes seems like fire kindled in the woods.

The larger Vales are all serene and cheerful, and among the sylvan

knolls with which their wide levels highly cultivated are interspersed,

cottages, single or in groups, are frequent, of an architecture always

admirably suited to the scenery, because in a style suggested not by

taste or fancy, which so often disfigure nature to produce the

picturesque, but resorted to for sake of the uses and conveniences of

in-door life, to weather-fend it in storms, and in calm to give it the

enjoyment of sunshine. Many of these dwellings are not what are properly

called cottages, but Statesmen's houses, of ample front, with their many

roofs, overshadowed by a stately grove, and inhabited by the same race

for many generations. All alike have their suitable gardens, and the

porches of the poorest are often clustered with roses; for everywhere

among these hills, even in minds the most rude and uncultivated, there

is a natural love of flowers. The villages, though somewhat too much

modernised in those days of improvement, and indeed not a few of them

with hardly any remains now of their original architecture--nothing old

about them but the church tower, perhaps the parsonage--are nevertheless

generally of a pleasing character, and accordant, if not with the great

features of nature, which are unchanged and unchangeable, with the

increased cultivation of the country, and the many villas and

ornamented cottages that have risen and are rising by every lake and

river side. Rivers indeed, properly so called, there are none among

these mountains; but every vale, great and small, has at all times its

pure and undefiled stream or rivulet; every hill has its hundreds of

evanescent rills, almost every one its own perennial torrent flowing

from spring, marsh, or tarn; and the whole region is often alive with

waterfalls, of many of which, in its exquisite loveliness, the scenery

is fit for fairy festivals--and of many, in its horrid gloom, for

gatherings of gnomes revisiting the glimpses of the moon from their

subterraneous prisons. One lake there is which has been called "wooded

Winandermere, the river lake;" and there is another--Ulswater--which you

might imagine to be a river too, and to have come flowing from afar: the

one excelling in isles, and bays, and promontories, serene and gentle

all, and perfectly beautiful; the other, matchless in its majesty of

cliff and mountain, and in its old forests, among whose hoary gloom is

for ever breaking out the green light of young generations, and

perpetual renovation triumphing over perpetual decay. Of the other

lakes--not river-like--the character may be imagined even from that we

have faintly described of the mountains:--almost every vale has its

lake, or a series of lakes--and though some of them have at times a

stern aspect, and have scenes to show almost of desolation, descending

sheer to the water's edge, or overhanging the depth that looks

profounder in the gloom, yet even these, to eyes and hearts familiar

with their spirit, wear a sweet smile which seldom passes away: witness

Wastwater--with its huge single mountains, and hugest of all the

mountains of England, Scawfell, with its terrific precipices--which, in

the accidents of storm, gloom, or mist, has seemed, to the lonely

passer-by, savage in the extreme--a howling or dreary wilderness--but in

its enduring character, is surrounded with all quiet pastoral imagery,

the deep glen in which it is imbedded being, in good truth, the abode of

Sabbath peace. That hugest mountain is indeed the centre from which all

the vales irregularly diverge; the whole circumjacent region may be

traversed in a week; and though no other district of equal extent

contains such variety of the sublime and beautiful, yet the beautiful is

so prevalent, that we feel its presence, even in places where it is

overpowered; and on leaving "The Lakes," our imagination is haunted and

possessed with images, not of dread, but of delight.

We have sometimes been asked, whether the North of England or the

Highlands of Scotland should be visited first; but, simple as the

question seems, it is really one which it is impossible to answer;

though we suspect it would equally puzzle Scotchman or Englishman to

give a sufficient reason for his wishing to see any part of any other

country before he had seen what was best worth seeing in his own. His

own country ought to be, and generally is, dearest to every man. There,

if nothing forbid, he should not only begin his study of nature, but

continue his education in her school, wherever it may happen to be

situated, till he has taken his first degree. We believe that the love

of nature is strong in the hearts of the inhabitants of our Island. And

how wide and profound may that knowledge of nature be, which the loving

heart has acquired, without having studied her anywhere but within the

Four Seas! The impulses that make us desire to widen the circle of our

observation, are all impulses of delight and love; and it would be

strange indeed, did they not move us, first of all, towards whatever is

most beautiful belonging to our own land. Were it otherwise, it would

seem as if the heart were faithless to the home-affections, out of

which, in their strength, spring all others that are good; and it is

essential, we do not doubt, to the full growth of the Love of Country,

that we should all have our earliest imaginative delights associated

with our native soil. Such associations will for ever keep it loveliest

to our eyes; nor is it possible that we can ever as perfectly understand

the character of any other; but we can afterwards transfer and transfuse

our feelings in imagination kindled by our own will; and the beauty,

born before our eyes, among the banks and braes of our childhood, and

then believed to be but there, and nothing like it anywhere else in all

the world, becomes a golden light, "whose home is everywhere," which if

we do not darken it, will shine unshadowed in the dreariest places, till

"the desert blossom like the rose."

For our own parts, before we beheld one of "the beautiful fields of

England," we had walked all Scotland thorough, and had seen many a

secret place, which now, in the confusion of our crowded memory, seem

often to shift their uncertain ground; but still, wherever they

glimmeringly reappear, invested with the same heavenly light in which,

long ago, they took possession of our soul. And now, that we are almost

as familiar with the fair sister-land, and love her almost as well as

Scotland's self, not all the charms in which she is arrayed, and they

are at once graceful and glorious, have ever for a day withdrawn our

deeper dreams from the regions where,

"In life's morning march, when our spirit was young,"

unaccompanied but by our own shadow in the wilderness, we first heard

the belling of the red-deer and the eagle's cry.

In those days there was some difficulty, if not a little danger, in

getting in among some of the noblest regions of our Alps. They could not

be traversed without strong personal exertion; and a solitary pedestrian

excursion through the Grampians was seldom achieved without a few

incidents that might almost have been called adventures. It is very

different now; yet the _Genius Loci_, though tamed, is not subdued; and

they who would become acquainted with the heart of the Highlands, will

have need of some endurance still, and must care nothing about the

condition of earth or sky. Formerly, it was not possible to survey more

than a district or division in a single season, except to those

unenviable persons who had no other pursuit but that of amusement, and

waged a weary war with time. The industrious dwellers in cities, who

sought those solitudes, for a while to relieve their hearts from worldly

anxieties, and gratify that love of nature which is inextinguishable in

every bosom that in youth has beat with its noble inspirations, were

contented with a week or two of such intercommunion with the spirit of

the mountains, and thus continued to extend their acquaintance with the

glorious wildernesses, visit after visit, for years. Now the whole

Highlands, western and northern, may be commanded in a month. Not that

any one who knows what they are, will imagine that they can be exhausted

in a lifetime. The man does not live who knows all worth knowing there;

and were they who made the Trigonometrical Survey to be questioned on

their experiences, they would be found ignorant of thousands of sights,

any one of which would be worth a journey for its own sake. But now

steam has bridged the Great Glen, and connected the two seas.

Salt-water lochs the most remote and inaccessible, it has brought within

reach of a summer-day's voyage. In a week a joyous company can gather

all the mainland shores, leaving not one magnificent bay uncircled; and,

having rounded St Kilda and

"the Hebride Isles,

Placed far amid the melancholy main,"

and heard the pealing anthem of waves in the cave-cathedral of Staffa,

may bless the bells of St Mungo's tolling on the first Sabbath.

Thousands and tens of thousands, who, but for those smoking sea-horses,

had never been beyond view of the city spires, have seen sights which,

though passing by almost like dreams, are not like dreams forgotten, but

revive of themselves in memory and imagination; and, when the heart is

weary with the work of the hand, quicken its pulses with a sudden

pleasure that is felt like a renovation of youth.

All through the interior, too, how many hundreds of miles of roads now

intersect regions not long ago deemed impracticable!--firm on the fen,

in safety flung across the chasm--and winding smoothly amidst

shatterings of rocks, round the huge mountain bases, and down the glens

once felt as if interminable, now travelled almost with the speed of the

raven's wing!

In the Highlands now, there is no _Terra Incognita_. But there are many

places yet well worth seeing, which it is not easy for all men to find,

and to which every man must be his own guide. It is somewhat of a

selfish feeling, indeed, but the pride is not a mean one, with which the

solitary pedestrian sits down to contemplate some strange, or wild, or

savage scene, or some view of surpassing sweetness and serenity, so far

removed from the track of men that he can well believe for a time that

his eyes have been the first to behold it, and that for them alone it

has now become a visible revelation. The memory of such places is

sometimes kept as a secret which we would not communicate but to a

congenial friend. They are hallowed by those mysterious "thoughts that,

like phantoms, trackless come and go;" no words can tell another how to

find his way thither; and were we ourselves to seek to return, we should

have to trust to some consciousness mysterious as the instinct of a

bird that carries it through the blind night to the place of its desire.

It is well to have in our mind the conception of a route: but without

being utterly departed from--nay, without ceasing to control us within

certain bounds--it admits of almost any degrees of deviation. We have

known persons apparently travelling for pleasure, who were afraid to

turn a few miles to the right or the left, for fear of subjecting

themselves to the reproach of their own conscience for infirmity of

purpose. They had "chalked out a route," and acted as if they had sworn

a solemn oath to follow it. This is to be a slave among the boundless

dominions of nature, where all are free. As the wind bloweth wherever it

listeth, so move the moods of men's minds, when there is nought to

shackle them, and when the burden of their cares has been dropt, that

for a while they may walk on air, and feel that they too have wings.

"A voice calls on me from the mountain depths,

And it must be obeyed."

The voice was our own--and yet though but a whisper from the heart, it

seemed to come from the front of yon distant precipice--sweet and wild

as an echo.

On rising at dawn in the shieling, why think, much less determine, where

at night we are to lay down our head? Let this be our thought:

"Among the hills a hundred homes have I;

My table in the wilderness is spread;

In these lone spots one honest smile can buy

Plain fare, warm welcome, and a rushy bed."

If we obey any powers external to our own minds, let them be the powers

of Nature--the rains, the winds, the atmosphere, sun moon, and stars. We

must keep a look-out--

"To see the deep fermenting tempest brew'd,

In the grim evening sky;"

that next day we may cross the red rivers by bridges, not by fords; and

if they roll along unbridged, that we may set our face to the mountain,

and wind our way round his shoulder by sheep-tracks, unwet with the

heather, till we behold some great strath, which we had not visited but

for that storm, with its dark blue river streaked with golden

light,--for its source is in a loch among the Eastern Range; and there,

during the silent hours, heather, bracken, and greensward rejoiced in

the trembling dews.

There is no such climate for all kinds of beauty and grandeur, as the

climate of the Highlands. Here and there you meet with an old shepherd

or herdsman, who has beguiled himself into a belief, in spite of many a

night's unforeseen imprisonment in the mists, that he can presage its

changes from fair to foul, and can tell the hour when the

long-threatening thunder will begin to mutter. The weather-wise have

often perished in their plaids. Yet among a thousand uncertain symptoms,

there are a few certain, which the ranger will do well to study, and he

will often exult on the mountain to feel that "knowledge is power." Many

a glorious hour has been won from the tempest by him before whose

instructed eye--beyond the gloom that wide around blackened all the

purple heather--"far off its coming shone." Leagues of continuous

magnificence have gradually unveiled themselves on either side to him,

as he has slowly paced, midway between, along the banks of the River of

Waterfalls; having been assured by the light struggling through the

mist, that it would not be long till there was a break-up of all that

ghastly dreariment, and that the sun would call on him to come forth

from his cave of shelter, and behold in all its pride the Glen

affronting the sea.

Some Tourists--as they call themselves--are provided with map and

compass; and we hope they find them of avail in extremities, though we

fear few such understand their use. No map can tell--except very

vaguely--how the aspect of the localities, looked at on its lines, is

likely to be affected by sun-rise, meridian, or sun-set. Yet, true it

is, that every region has its own happy hours, which the fortunate often

find unawares, and know them at once to be so the moment they lift up

their eyes. At such times, while "our hearts rejoice in Nature's joy,"

we feel the presence of a spirit that brings out the essential character

of the place, be it of beauty or of grandeur. Harmonious as music is

then the composition of colours and of forms. It becomes a perfect

picture in memory, more and more idealised by imagination, every moment

the veil is withdrawn before it; its aerial lineaments never fade; yet

they too, though their being be but in the soul, are mellowed by the

touch, of time--and every glimpse of such a vision, the longer we live,

and the more we suffer, seems suffused with a mournful light, as if seen

through tears.

It would serve no good purpose, supposing we had the power, to analyse

the composition of that scenery, which in the aggregate so moves even

the most sluggish faculties, as to make "the dullest wight a poet." It

rises before the mind in imagination, as it does before the eyes in

nature; and we can no more speak of it than look at it, but--as a whole.

We can indeed fix our mental or our visual gaze on scene after scene to

the exclusion of all beside, and picture it even in words that shall be

more than shadows. But how shall any succession of such pictures,

however clear and complete, give an idea of that picture which

comprehends them all, and infinite as are its manifestations,

nevertheless is imbued with one spirit?

Try to forget that in the Highlands there are any Lochs. Then the sole

power is that of the Mountains. We speak of a sea of mountains; but that

image has never more than momentary possession of us, because, but for a

moment, in nature it has no truth. Tumultuary movements envelope them;

but they themselves are for ever steadfast and for ever still. Their

power is that of an enduring calm no storms can disturb--and is often

felt to be more majestical, the more furious are the storms. As the

tempest-driven clouds are franticly hurrying to and fro, how serene the

summits in the sky! Or if they be hidden, how peaceful the glimpses of

some great mountain's breast! They disregard the hurricane that goes

crashing through their old woods; the cloud-thunder disturbs not them

any more than that of their own cataracts, and the lightnings play for

their pastime. All minds under any excitation, more or less personify

mountains. When much moved, that natural process affects all our

feelings, as the language of passion awakened by such objects vividly

declares; and then we do assuredly conceive of mountains as endued with

life--however dim and vague the conception may be--and feel their

character in their very names. Utterly strip our ideas of them of all

that is attached to them as impersonations, and their power is gone. But

while we are creatures of imagination as well as of reason, will those

monarchs remain invested with the purple and seated on thrones.

In such imaginative moods as these must every one be, far more

frequently than he is conscious of, and in far higher degrees, who, with

a cultivated mind and a heart open to the influences of nature, finds

himself, it matters not whether for the first or the hundredth time, in

the Highlands. We fancy the Neophyte wandering, all by himself, on the

"Longest Day;" rejoicing to think that the light will not fail him, when

at last the sun must go down, for that a starry gloaming will continue

its gentle reign till morn. He thinks but of what he sees, and that

is--the mountains. All memories of any other world but that which

encloses him with its still sublimities, are not excluded merely, but

obliterated: his whole being is there! And now he stands on table-land,

and with his eyes sweeps the horizon, bewildered for a while, for it

seems chaos all. But soon the mighty masses begin arranging themselves

into order; the confusion insensibly subsides as he comprehends more and

more of their magnificent combinations; he discovers centres round which

are associated altitudes towering afar off; and finally, he feels, and

blesses himself on his felicity, that his good genius has placed him on

the very centre of those wondrous assemblages altogether, from which

alone he could command an empire of realities, more glorious far than

was ever empire of dreams.

It is a cloudy, but not a stormy day; the clouds occupy but portions of

the sky,--and are they all in slow motion together, or are they all at

rest? Huge shadows stalking along the earth, tell that there are changes

going on in heaven; but to the upward gaze, all seems hanging there in

the same repose; and with the same soft illumination the sun to continue

shining, a concentration rather than an orb of light. All above is

beautiful, and the clouds themselves are like celestial mountains; but

the eye forsakes them, though it sees them still, and more quietly now

it moves along the pageantry below that endures for ever--till chained

on a sudden by that range of cliffs. 'Tis along them that the giant

shadows are stalking--but now they have passed by--and the long line of

precipice seems to come forward in the light. To look down from the

brink might be terrible--to look up from the base would be sublime--but

fronting the eye thus, horrid though it be, the sight is most beautiful;

for weather-stains, and mosses, and lichens, and flowering

plants--conspicuous most the broom and the heather--and shrubs that,

among their leaves of light, have no need of flowers--and hollies, and

birks, and hazels, and many a slender tree beside with pensile tresses,

besprinkle all the cliffs, that in no gloom could ever lose their

lustre; but now the day though not bright is fair, and brings out the

whole beauty of the precipice--call it the hanging garden of the

wilderness.

The Highlands have been said to be a gloomy region, and worse gloom than

theirs might well be borne, if not unfrequently illumined with such

sights as these; but that is not the character of the mountains, though

the purple light in which, for usual, they are so richly steeped, is

often for a season tamed, or for a short while extinguished, while a

strange night-like day lets fall over them all a something like a

shroud. Such days we have seen--but now in fancy we are with the

pilgrim, and see preparation making for a sun-set. It is drawing towards

evening, and the clouds that have all this time been moving, though we

knew it not, have assuredly settled now, and taken up their rest. The

sun has gone down, and all that unspeakable glory has left the sky.

Evening has come and gone without our knowing that she had been here;

but there is no gloom on any place in the whole of this vast wilderness,

and the mountains, as they wax dimmer and dimmer, look as if they were

surrendering themselves to a repose like sleep. Day had no voice here

audible to human ear--but night is murmuring--and gentle though the

murmur be, it filleth the great void, and we imagine that ever and anon

it awakens echoes. And now it is darker than we thought, for lo! one

soft-burning star! And we see that there are many stars; but not theirs

the light that begins again to reveal object after object as gradually

as they had disappeared; the moon is about to rise--is rising--has

arisen--has taken her place high in heaven; and as the glorious world

again expands around us, faintly tinged, clearly illumined, softly

shadowed, and deeply begloomed, we say within our hearts,

"How beautiful is night!"

There are many such table-lands as the one we have now been imagining,

and it requires but a slight acquaintance with the country to conjecture

rightly where they lie. Independently of the panoramas they display,

they are in themselves always impressive; perhaps a bare level that

shows but bleached bent, and scatterings of stones, with here and there

an unaccountable rock; or hundreds of fairy greensward knolls, fringed

with tiny forests of fern that have almost displaced the heather; or a

wild withered moor or moss intersected with pits dug not by men's hands;

and, strange to see! a huge log lying half exposed, and as if blackened

by fire. High as such places are, on one of them a young gorcock was

stricken down by a hawk close to our feet. Indeed, hawks seem to haunt

such places, and we have rarely crossed one of them, without either

seeing the creature's stealthy flight, or hearing, whether he be alarmed

or preying, his ever-angry cry.

From a few such stations, you get an insight into the configuration of

the whole Western Highlands. By the dip of the mountains, you discover

at a glance all the openings in the panorama around you into other

regions. Follow your fancies fearlessly wherever they may lead; and if

the blue aerial haze that hangs over a pass winding eastward, tempt you

from your line of march due north, forthwith descend in that direction,

and haply an omen will confirm you--an eagle rising on the left, and

sailing away before you into that very spot of sky.

No man, however well read, should travel by book. In books you find

descriptions, and often good ones, of the most celebrated scenes, but

seldom a word about the vast tracts between; and it would seem as if

many Tourists had used their eyes only in those places where they had

been told by common fame there was something greatly to admire. Travel

in the faith, that go where you will, the cravings of your heart will be

satisfied, and you will find it so, if you be a true lover of nature.

You hope to be inspired by her spirit, that you may may read aright her

works. But such inspiration comes not from one object or another,

however great or fair, but from the whole "mighty world of eye and ear,"

and it must be supported continuously, or it perishes. You may see a

thousand sights never before seen by human eye, at every step you take,

wherever be your path; for no steps but yours have ever walked along

that same level; and moreover, never on the same spot twice rested the

same lights or shadows. Then there may be something in the air, and

more in your own heart, that invests every ordinary object with

extraordinary beauty; old images affect you with a new delight; a

grandeur grows upon your eyes in the undulations of the simplest hills;

and you feel there is sublimity in the common skies. It is thus that all

the stores of imagery are insensibly gathered, with which the minds of

men are filled, who from youth have communed with nature. And it is thus

that all those feelings have flowed into their hearts by which that

imagery is sanctified; and these are the Poets.

It is in this way that we become familiar with the mountains. Far more

than we were aware of have we trusted to the strong spirit of delight

within us, to prompt and to guide. And in such a country as the

Highlands, thus led, we cannot err. Therefore, if your desire be for the

summits, set your face thitherwards, and wind a way of your own, still

ascending and ascending, along some vast brow, that seems almost a whole

day's journey, and where it is lost from your sight, not to end, but to

go sweeping round, with undiminished grandeur into another region. You

are not yet half-way up the mountain, but you care not for the summit

now; for you find yourself among a number of green knolls--all of them

sprinkled, and some of them crowned with trees--as large almost as our

lowland hills--surrounded close to the brink with the purple

heather--and without impairing the majesty of the immense expanse,

imbuing it with pastoral and sylvan beauty;--and there, lying in a small

forest glade of the lady-fern, ambitious no longer of a throne on

Benlomond or Ben-nevis, you dream away the still hours till sunset, yet

then have no reason to weep that you have lost a day.

But the best way to view the mountains is to trace the Glens. To find

out the glens you must often scale the shoulders of mountains, and in

such journeys of discovery, you have for ever going on before your eyes

glorious transfigurations. Sometimes for a whole day one mighty mass

lowers before you unchanged; look at it after the interval of hours, and

still the giant is one and the same. It rules the region, subjecting all

other altitudes to its sway, though many of them range away to a great

distance; and at sunset retains it supremacy, blazing almost like a

volcano with fiery clouds. Your line of journey lies, perhaps, some two

thousand feet above the level of the sea, and seldom dips down to one

thousand; and these are the heights from which all above and all below

you looks most magnificent, for both regions have their full power over

you--the unscaleable cliffs, the unfathomable abysses--and you know not

which is the more sublime. The sublimity indeed is one. It is then that

you may do well to ascend to the very mountain-top. For it may happen to

be one of those heavenly days indeed, when the whole Highlands seem to

be reposing in the cloudless sky.

But we were about to speak of the Glens. And some of them are best

entered by such descents as these--perhaps at their very head--where all

at once you are in another world, how still, how gloomy, how profound!

An hour ago and the eye of the eagle had not wider command of earth,

sea, and sky, than yours--almost blinded now by the superincumbent

precipices that imprison you, and seem to shut you out from life.

"Such the grim desolation, where Ben-Hun

And Craig-na-Torr, by earthquake shatterings

Disjoined with horrid chasms prerupt, enclose

What superstition calls the Glen of Ghosts."

Or you may enter some great glen from the foot, where it widens into

vale or strath--and there are many such--and some into which you can

sail up an arm of the sea. For a while it partakes of the cultivated

beauty of the lowlands, and glen and vale seem almost one and the same;

but gradually it undergoes a strange wild change of character, and in a

few miles that similitude is lost. There is little or no arable ground

here; but the pasture is rich on the unenclosed plain--and here and

there are enclosures, near the few houses or huts standing, some of them

in the middle of the glen, quite exposed, on eminences above reach of

the floods--some more happily placed on the edge of the coppices, that

sprinkle the steep sides of the hills, yet barely mountains. But

mountains they soon become; and leaving behind you those few barren

habitations, you see before you a wide black moor. Beautiful hitherto

had been the river, for a river you had inclined to think it, long after

it had narrowed into a stream, with many a waterfall, and in one chasm a

cataract. But the torrent now has a wild mountain cry, and though there

is still beauty on its banks, they are bare of all trees, now swelling

into multitudes of low green knolls among the heather, now composed but

of heather and rocks. Through the very middle of the black moor it

flows, yet are its waters clear, for all is not moss, and it seems to

wind its way where there is nothing to pollute its purity, or tame its

lustre. 'Tis a solitary scene, but still sweet; the mountains are of

great magnitude, but they are not precipitous; vast herds of cattle are

browsing there, on heights from which fire has cleared the heather, and

wide ranges of greensward upon the lofty gloom seem to lie in perpetual

light.

The moor is crossed, and you prepare to scale the mountain in front, for

you imagine the torrent by your side flows from a tarn in yonder cove,

and forms that series of waterfalls. You have been all along well

pleased with the glen, and here at the head, though there is a want of

cliffs of the highest class, you feel nevertheless that it has a

character of grandeur. Looking westward, you are astounded to see them

ranging away on either side of another reach of the glen, terrific in

their height, but in their formation beautiful, for like the walls of

some vast temple they stand, roofed with sky. Yet are they but as a

portal or gateway of the glen. For entering in with awe, that deepens,

as you advance, almost into dread, you behold, beyond, mountains that

carry their cliffs up into the clouds, seamed with chasms, and hollowed

out into coves, where night dwells visibly by the side of day; and still

the glen seems winding on beneath a purple light, that almost looks like

gloom; such vast forms and such prodigious colours, and such utter

stillness, become oppressive to your very life, and you wish that some

human being were by, to relieve, by his mere presence, the insupportable

weight of such a solitude.

But we should never have done were we to attempt to sketch, however

slightly, the character of all the different kinds of glens. Some are

sublime in their prodigious depth and vast extent, and would be felt to

be so, even were the mountains that enclose them of no great majesty;

but these are all of the highest order, and sometimes are seen from

below to the very cairns on their summits. Now we walk along a reach,

between astonishing ranges of cliffs, among large heaps of rocks--not a

tree--scarcely a shrub--no herbage--the very heather blasted--all

lifelessness and desolation. The glen gradually grows less and less

horrid, and though its sides are seamed with clefts and chasms, in the

gloom there are places for the sunshine, and there is felt to be even

beauty in the repose. Descends suddenly on either side a steep slope of

hanging wood, and we find ourselves among verdant mounds, and knolls,

and waterfalls. We come then into what seems of old to have been a

forest. Here and there a stately pine survives, but the rest are all

skeletons; and now the glen widens, and widens, yet ceases not to be

profound, for several high mountains enclose a plain on which armies

might encamp, and castellated clouds hang round the heights of the

glorious amphitheatre, while the sky-roof is clear, and as if in its

centre, the refulgent sun. 'Tis the plain called "The Meeting of the

Glens." From the east and the west, the north and the south, they come

like rivers into the sea.

Other glens there are, as long, but not so profound, nor so grandly

composed; yet they too conduct us nobly in among the mountains, and up

their sides, and on even to their very summits. Such are the glens of

Atholl, in the neighbourhood of Ben-y-gloe. From them the heather is not

wholly banished, and the fire has left a green light without quenching

the purple colour native to the hills. We think that we almost remember

the time when those glens were in many places sprinkled with huts, and

all animated with human life. Now they are solitary; and you may walk

from sunrise till sunset without seeing a single soul. For a hundred

thousand acres have there been changed into a forest, for sake of the

pastime, indeed, which was dear of old to chieftains and kings. Vast

herds of red-deer are there, for they herd in thousands--yet may you

wander for days over the boundless waste, nor once be startled by one

stag bounding by. Yet may a herd, a thousand strong, be drawn up, as in

battle array, on the cliffs above your head. For they will long stand

motionless, at gaze, when danger is in the wind--and then their antlers

to unpractised eyes seem but boughs grotesque, or are invisible; and

when all at once, with one accord, at signal from the stag, whom they

obey, they wheel off towards the Corries, you think it but thunder, and

look up to the clouds. Fortunate if you see such a sight once in your

life. Once only have we seen it; and it was, of a sudden, all by

ourselves,

"Ere yet the hunter's startling horn was heard

Upon the golden hills."

Almost within rifle-shot, the herd occupied a position, high up indeed,

but below several ridges of rocks, running parallel for a long distance,

with slopes between of sward and heather. Standing still, they seemed to

extend about a quarter of a mile, and as with a loud clattering of hoofs

and antlers, they took more open order, the line at least doubled its

length, and the whole mountain-side seemed alive. They might not be

going at full speed, but the pace was equal to that of any charge of

cavalry; and once and again the flight passed before us, till it

overcame the ridges, and then deploying round the shoulder of the

mountain, disappeared, without dust or noise, into the blue light of

another glen.

We question, if there be in the Highlands any one glen comparable with

Borrowdale in Cumberland. But there are several that approach it, in

that combination of beauty and grandeur, which perhaps no other scene

equals in all the world. The "Gorge" of that Dale exhibits the finest

imaginable assemblage of rocks and rocky hills, all wildly wooded;

beyond them, yet before we have entered into the Dale, the Pass widens,

with noble cliffs on one side, and on the other a sylvan stream, not

without its abysses; and we see before us some lovely hills, on which--

"The smiling power of cultivation lies,"

yet leaves, with lines defined by the steeps that defy the ploughshare,

copses and groves; and thus we are brought into the Dale itself, and

soon have a vision of the whole--green and golden fields--for though

most are in pasture, almost all seem arable--sprinkled with fine single

trees--and lying in flats and levels, or swelling into mounds and

knolls, and all diversified with every kind of woods; single cottages,

with their out-buildings, standing everywhere they should stand, and

coloured like the rocks from which in some lights they are hardly to be

distinguished--strong-roofed and undilapidated, though many of them very

old; villages, apart from one another a mile--and there are three--yet

on their sites, distant and different in much though they be, all

associated together by the same spirit of beauty that pervades all the

Dale. Half way up, and in some places more, the enclosing hills and even

mountains are sylvan indeed, and though there be a few inoffensive

aliens, they are all adorned with their native trees. The mountains are

not so high as in our Highlands, but they are very majestic; and the

Passes over into Langdale, and Wastdalehead, and Buttermere, are

magnificent, and show precipices in which the Golden Eagle himself might

rejoice.

No--there is no glen in all the Highlands comparable with Borrowdale.

Yet we know of some that are felt to be kindred places, and their beauty

though less, almost as much affects us, because though contending, as it

were, with the darker spirit of the mountain, it is not overcome, but

prevails; and their beauty will increase with years. For while the rocks

continue to frown aloft for ever, and the cliffs to range along the

corries, unbroken by trees, which there the tempest will not suffer to

rise, the woods and groves below, preserved from the axe, for sake of

their needful shelter, shall become statelier, till the birch equal the

pine; reclaimed from the waste, shall many a fresh field recline among

the heather, tempering the gloom; and houses arise where now there are

but huts, and every house have its garden:--such changes are now going

on, and we have been glad to observe their progress, even though

sometimes they had removed, or were removing, objects dear from old

associations, and which, had it been possible, but it was not, we should

have loved to see preserved.

And one word on those sweet pastoral seclusions into which one often

drops unexpectedly, it may be at the close of day, and finds a night's

lodging in the only hut. Yet they lie, sometimes, embosomed in their own

green hills, among the most rugged mountains, and even among the wildest

moors. They have no features by which you can describe them; it is their

serenity that charms you, and their cheerful peace; perhaps it is wrong

to call them glens, and they are but dells. Yet one thinks of a dell as

deep, however small it may be; but these are not deep, for the hills

slope down gently upon them, and leave room perhaps between for a little

shallow loch. Often they have not any visible water at all, only a few

springs and rivulets, and you wonder to see them so very green; there is

no herbage like theirs; and to such spots of old, and sometimes yet,

the kine are led in summer, and there the lonely family live in their

shieling till the harvest moon.

We have all along used the same word, and called the places we have

spoken of--glens. A fine observer--the Editor of Gilpin's Forest

Scenery--has said: "The gradation from extreme width downwards should be

thus arranged,--strath, vale, dale, valley, glen, dell, ravine, chasm.

In the strath, vale, and dale, we may expect to find the large,

majestic, gently flowing river, or even the deeper or smaller lake. In

the glen, if the river be large, it flows more rapidly, and with greater

variety. In the dell the stream is smaller. In the ravine, we find the

mountain torrent and the waterfall. In the chasm, we find the roaring

cataract, or the rill, bursting from its haunted fountain. The chasm

discharges its small tribute into the ravine, while the ravine is

tributary to the dell, and thence to the glen; and the glen to the

dale."

These distinctions are admirably expressed, and perfectly true to

nature; yet we doubt if it would be possible to preserve them in

describing a country, and assuredly they are very often indeed confused

by common use in the naming of places. We have said nothing about

Straths--nor shall we try to describe one--but suggest to your own

imagination--as specimens--Strath-Spey, Strath-Tay, Strath-Earn. The

dominion claimed by each of those rivers, within the mountain ranges

that environ their courses, is a strath; and three noble straths they

are, from source to sea.

And now we are brought to speak of the Highland Rivers, Streams, and

Torrents; but we shall let them rush or flow, murmur or thunder in your

own ears, for you cannot fail to imagine what the waters must be in a

land of such glens and such mountains. The chief rivers possess all the

attributes essential to greatness--width--depth--clearness--rapidity--in

one word power. And some of them have long courses--rising in the

central heights, and winding round many a huge projection, against which

in flood we have seen them dashing like the sea. Highland droughts are

not of long duration; the supplies are seldom withheld at once by all

the tributaries; and one wild night among the mountains converts a calm

into a commotion--the many-murmuring voice into one roar. In flood they

are terrible to look at; and every whirlpool seems a place of torment.

Winds can make a mighty noise in swinging woods, but there is something

to our ears more appalling in that of the fall of waters. Let them be

united--and add thunder from the clouds--and we have heard in the

Highlands all three in one--and the auditor need not care that he has

never stood by Niagara. But when "though not o'erflowing full," a

Highland river is in perfection; far better do we love to see and hear

him rejoicing than raging; his attributes appear more his own in calm

and majestic manifestations, and as he glides or rolls on, without any

disturbance, we behold in him an image at once of power and peace.

Of rivers--comparatively speaking--of the second and third order--the

Highlands are full--and on some of them the sylvan scenery is beyond

compare. No need there to go hunting the waterfalls. Hundreds of

them--some tiny indeed, but others tall--are for ever dinning in the

woods; yet, at a distance from the cataract, how sweet and quiet is the

sound! It hinders you not from listening to the cushat's voice; clear

amidst the mellow murmur comes the bleating from the mountain; and all

other sound ceases, as you hearken in the sky to the bark of the

eagle--rare indeed anywhere, but sometimes to be heard as you thread the

"glimmer or the gloom" of the umbrage overhanging the Garry or the

Tummel--for he used to build in the cliffs of Ben-Brackie, and if he has

shifted his eyrie, a few minutes' waftage will bear him to Cairn-Gower.

In speaking of the glens, we but alluded to the rivers or streams, and

some of them, indeed, even the great ones, have but rivulets; while in

the greatest, the waters often flow on without a single tree, shadowed

but by rocks and clouds. Wade them, and you find they are larger than

they seem to be; for looked at along the bottom of those profound

hollows, they are but mere slips of sinuous light in the sunshine, and

in the gloom you see them not at all. We do not remember any very

impressive glen, without a stream, that would not suffer some diminution

of its power by our fancying it to have one; we may not be aware, at the

time, that the conformation of the glen prevents its having any

water-flow, but if we feel its character aright, that want is among the

causes of our feeling; just as there are some scenes of which the beauty

would not be so touching were there a single tree.

Thousands and tens of thousands there are of nameless perennial

torrents, and "in number without number numberless" those that seldom

live a week--perhaps not a day. Up among the loftiest regions you hear

nothing, even when they are all allow; yet, there is music in the sight,

and the thought of the "general dance and minstrelsy" enlivens the air,

where no insect hums. As on your descent you come within hearing of the

"liquid lapses," your heart leaps within you, so merrily do they sing;

the first torrent-rill you meet with you take for your guide, and it

leads you perhaps into some fairy dell, where it wantons awhile in

waterfalls, and then gliding along a little dale of its own with "banks

o' green bracken," finishes its short course in a stream--one of many

that meet and mingle before the current takes the name of river, which

in a mile or less becomes a small woodland lake. There are many such of

rememberable beauty; living lakes indeed, for they are but pausings of

expanded rivers, which again soon pursue their way, and the water-lilies

have ever a gentle motion there as if touched by a tide.

It used, not very long ago, to be pretty generally believed by our

southern brethren, that there were few trees in the Lowlands of

Scotland, and none at all in the Highlands. They had an obscure notion

that trees either could not or would not grow in such a soil and

climate--cold and bleak enough at times and places, heaven knows--yet

not altogether unproductive of diverse stately plants. They know better

now; nor were we ever angry with their ignorance, which was nothing more

than what was to be expected in persons living perpetually at home so

far remote. They rejoice now to visit, and sojourn, and travel here

among us, foreigners and a foreign land no more; and we rejoice to see

and receive them not as strangers, but friends, and are proud to know

they are well pleased to behold our habitation. They do us and our

country justice now, and we have sometimes thought even more than

justice; for they are lost in admiration of our cities--above all, of

Edinburgh--and speak with such raptures of our scenery, that they would

appear to prefer it even to their own. They are charmed with our bare

green hills, with our shaggy brown mountains they are astonished, our

lochs are their delight, our woods their wonder, and they hold up their

hands and clap them at our cliffs. This is generous, for we are not

blind to the fact of England being the most beautiful land on all the

earth. What are our woods to hers! To hers, what are our single trees!

We have no such glorious standards to show as her indomitable and

everlasting oaks. She is all over sylvan--Scotland but here and there;

look on England from any point in any place, and you see she is rich,

from almost any point in any place in Scotland, and you feel that

comparatively she is poor. Yet our Lowlands have long been beautifying

themselves into a resemblance of hers; as for our Highlands, though many

changes have been going on there too, and most we believe for good, they

are in their great features, and in their spirit unalterable by art,

stamped and inspired by enduring Nature.

We have spoken, slightly, of the sylvan scenery of the Highlands. In

Perthshire, especially, it is of rare and extraordinary beauty, and we

are always glad to hear of Englishmen travelling up the Tay and the

Earn. We desire that eyes familiar with all that is umbrageous should

receive their first impressions of our Scottish trees at Duneira and

Dunkeld. Nor will those impressions be weakened as they proceed towards

Blair Atholl. In that famous Pass, they will feel the power possessed by

the sweet wild monotony of the universal birch woods--broken but by grey

crags in every shape--grotesque, fantastical, majestic, magnificent, and

sublime--on the many-ridged mountains, that are loth to lose the green

light of their beloved forests, retain it as long as they can, and on

the masses of living lustre seem to look down with pride from their

skies.

An English forest, meaning thereby any one wide continuous scene of all

kinds of old English trees, with glades of pasture, and it may be of

heath between, with dells dipping down into the gloom, and hillocks

undulating in the light--ravines and chasms too, rills, and rivulets,

and a haunted stream, and not without some melancholy old ruins, and

here and there a cheerful cottage that feels not the touch of time--such

a forest there is not, and hardly can be imagined to be in Scotland. But

in the Highlands, there once were, and are still other forests of quite

a different character, and of equal grandeur. In his "Forest Scenery,"

Gilpin shows that he understood it well; all the knowledge, which as a

stranger, almost of necessity he wanted, Lauder has supplied in his

annotations; and the book should now be in the hands of every one who

cares about the woods. "The English Forest," says Gilpin, "is commonly

composed of woodland views, interspersed with extensive heaths and

lawns. Its trees are oak and beech, whose lively green corresponds

better than the gloomy pine with the nature of the scene, which seldom

assumes the dignity of a mountain one, but generally exhibits a cheerful

landscape. It aspires, indeed, to grandeur; but its grandeur does not

depend, like that of the Scottish forest, on the sublimity of the

objects, but on the vastness of the whole--the extent of its woods and

the wideness of its plains. In its inhabitants also the English forest

differs from the Scottish; instead of the stag and the roebuck, it is

frequented by cattle and fallow-deer, and exchanges the scream of the

eagle and the falcon for the crowing of pheasants, and the melody of the

nightingale. The Scottish forest, no doubt, is the sublimer scene, and

speaks to the imagination in a loftier language than the English forest

can reach. The latter, indeed, often rouses the imagination, but seldom

in so great a degree, being generally content with captivating the eye.

The scenery, too, of the Scottish forest is better calculated to last

through ages than that of the English. The woods of both are almost

destroyed. But while the English forest hath lost all its beauty with

its oaks, and becomes only a desolate waste, the rocks and the

mountains, the lakes and the torrents of the Scottish forest make it

still an interesting scene."

The Tree of the Highlands is the Pine. There are Scotch firs, indeed,

well worth looking at, in the Lowlands, and in England, but to learn

their true character you must see them in the glen, among rooks, by the

river-side and on the mountain. "We for our parts," says Lauder very

finely, "confess that when we have seen it towering in full majesty in

the midst of some appropriate Highland scene, and sending its limbs

abroad with all the unrestrained freedom of a hardy mountaineer, as if

it claimed dominion over the savage region round it, we have looked upon

it as a very sublime object. People who have not seen it in its native

climate and soil, and who judge of it from the wretched abortions which

are swaddled and suffocated in English plantations, among dark, heavy,

and eternally wet clays, may well call it a wretched tree; but when its

foot is among its own Highland heather, and when it stands freely in

its native knoll of dry gravel, or thinly covered rock, over which its

roots wander afar in the wildest reticulation, whilst its tall,

furrowed, and often gracefully sweeping red and grey trunk, of enormous

circumference, rears aloft its high umbrageous canopy, then would the

greatest sceptic on this point be compelled to prostrate his mind before

it with a veneration which perhaps was never before excited in him by

any other tree." The colour of the pine has been objected to as

murky--and murky it often is, or seems to be; and so then is the colour

of the heather, and of the river, and of the loch, and of the sky itself

thunder-laden, and murkiest of all are the clouds. But a stream of

sunshine is let loose, and the gloom is confounded with glory; over all

that night-like reign the jocund day goes dancing, and the forest revels

in green or in golden light. Thousands and tens of thousands of pines

are there, and as you gaze upon the whole mighty array, you fear, lest

it might break the spell, to fix your gaze on any one single tree. But

there are trees there that will force you to look on themselves alone,

and they grow before your eyes into the kings of the forest. Straight

stand their stems in the sunshine, and you feel that as straight have

they stood in the storm. As yet you look not up, for your heart is awed,

and you see but the stately columns reddening away into the gloom. But

all the while you feel the power of the umbrage aloft, and when

thitherwards you lift your eyes, what a roof to such a cathedral! A cone

drops at your feet--nor other sound nor other stir--but afar off you

think you hear a cataract. Inaudible your footsteps on the soft yellow

floor, composed of the autumnal sheddings of countless years. Then it is

true that you can indeed hear the beating of your own heart; you fear,

but know not what you fear; and being the only living creature there,

you are impressed with a thought of death. But soon to that severe

silence you are more than reconciled; the solitude, without ceasing to

be sublime, is felt to be solemn and not awful, and ere long, utter as

it is, serene. Seen from afar, the forest was one black mass; but as you

advance, it opens up into spacious glades, beautiful as gardens, with

appropriate trees of gentler tribes, and ground-flowering in the sun.

But there is no murmur of bee--no song of bird. In the air a thin

whisper of insects--intermittent--and wafted quite away by a breath. For

we are now in the very centre of the forest, and even the cushat haunts

not here. Hither the red-deer may come--but not now--for at this season

they love the hill. To such places the stricken stag might steal to lie

down and die.

And thus for hours may you be lost in the forest, nor all the while have

wasted one thought on the outer-world, till with no other warning but an

uncertain glimmer and a strange noise, you all at once issue forth into

the open day, and are standing on the brink of a precipice above a

flood. It comes tumbling down with a succession of falls, in a mile-long

course, right opposite your stance--rocks, cliffs, and trees, all the

way up on either side, majestically retiring back to afford ample

channel, and showing an unobstructed vista, closed up by the purple

mountain, that seems to send forth the river from a cavern in its

breast. 'Tis the Glen of Pines. Nor ash nor oak is suffered to intrude

on their dominion. Since the earthquake first shattered it out, this

great chasm, with all its chasms, has been held by one race of trees. No

other seed could there spring to life; for from the rocks has all soil,

ages ago, been washed and swept by the tempests. But there they stand

with glossy boles, spreading arms, and glittering crest; and those two

by themselves on the summit, known all over Badenoch as "the

Giants"--their "statures reach the sky."

We have been indulging in a dream of old. Before our day the immemorial

gloom of Glenmore had perished, and it ceased to be a forest. But there

bordered on it another region of night or twilight, and in its vast

depths we first felt the sublimity of lonesome fear. Rothiemurchus! The

very word blackens before our eyes with necromantic characters--again we

plunge into its gulfs desirous of what we dread--again, "in pleasure

high and turbulent," we climb the cliffs of Cairngorm.

Would you wish to know what is now the look of Glenmore? One now dead

and gone--a man of wayward temper, but of genius--shall tell you--and

think not the picture exaggerated--for you would not, if you were

_there_. "It is the wreck of the ancient forest which arrests all the

attention, and which renders Glenmore a melancholy, more than a

melancholy, a terrific spectacle. Trees of enormous height, which have

escaped alike the axe and the tempest, are still standing, stripped by

the winds, even of the bark, and, like gigantic skeletons, throwing far

and wide their white and bleached bones to the storms and rains of

heaven; while others, broken by the violence of the gales, lift up their

split and fractured trunks in a thousand shapes of resistance and of

destruction, or still display some knotted and tortuous branches,

stretched out, in sturdy and fantastic forms of defiance, to the

whirlwind and the winter. Noble trunks also, which had long resisted,

but resisted in vain, strew the ground; some lying on the declivity

where they have fallen, others still adhering to the precipice where

they were rooted, many upturned, with their twisted and entangled roots

high in air; while not a few astonish us by the space which they cover,

and by dimensions which we could not otherwise have estimated. It is one

wide image of death, as if the angel of destruction had passed over the

valley. The sight even of a felled tree is painful; still more is that

of the fallen forest, with all its green branches on the ground,

withering, silent, and at rest, where once they glittered in the dew and

the sun, and trembled in the breeze. Yet this is but an image of

vegetable death. It is familiar, and the impression passes away. It is

the naked skeleton bleaching in the winds, the gigantic bones of the

forest still erect, the speaking records of former life, and of strength

still unsubdued, vigorous even in death, which renders Glenmore one

enormous charnel-house."

What happened of old to the aboriginal Forests of Scotland, that long

before these later destructions they had almost all perished, leaving,

to bear witness what they were, such survivors? They were chiefly

destroyed by fire. What power could extinguish chance-kindled

conflagrations, when sailing before the wind? And no doubt fire was set

to clear the country at once of Scotch firs, wolves, wild-boars, and

outlaws. Tradition yet tells of such burnings; and, if we mistake not,

the pines found in the Scottish mosses, the logs and the stocks, all

show that they were destroyed by Vulcan, though Neptune buried them in

the quagmires. Storms no doubt often levelled them by thousands; but had

millions so fallen they had never been missed, and one Element

only--which has been often fearfully commissioned--could achieve the

work. In our own day the axe has indeed done wonders--and sixteen square

miles of the Forest of Rothiemurchus "went to the ground." John of

Ghent, Gilpin tells us, to avenge an inroad, set twenty-four thousand

axes at work in the Caledonian Forest.

Yet Scotland has perhaps sufficient forests at this day. For more has

been planted than cut down; Glenmore will soon be populous as ever with

self-sown pines, and Rothiemurchus may revive; the shades are yet deep

of Loch Arkaig, Glengarry, Glenmoriston, Strathglass, Glen-Strathfarrar,

and Loch-Shiel; deeper still on the Findhorn--and deepest of all on the

Dee, rejoicing in the magnificent pine-woods of Invercauld and Braemar.

We feel that we have spoken feebly of our Highland forests. Some,

perhaps, who have never been off the high-roads, may accuse us of

exaggeration too; but they contain wondrous beauties of which we have

said not a word; and no imagination can conceive what they may be in

another hundred years. But, apparently far apart from the forests,

though still belonging to them, for they hold in fancy by the tenure of

the olden time, how many woods, and groves, and sprinklings of fair

trees, rise up during a day's journey, in almost every region of the

North! And among them all, it may be, scarcely a pine. For the oak, and

the ash, and the elm, are also all native trees; nowhere else does the

rowan flush with more dazzling lustre; in spring, the alder with its

vivid green stands well beside the birk--the yew was not neglected of

yore, though the bow of the Celt was weak to that of the Saxon; and the

holly, in winter emulating the brightness of the pine, flourished, and

still flourishes on many a mountain-side. There is sufficient sylvan

scenery for beauty in a land of mountains. More may be needed for

shelter--but let the young plants and seedlings have time to grow--and

as for the old trees, may they live for ever! Too many millions of

larches are perhaps growing now behind the Tay and the Tilt; yet why

should the hills of Perthshire be thought to be disfigured by what

ennobles the Alps and the Apennines?

Hitherto we have hardly said a word about Lochs, and have been doing our

best to forget them, while imagining scenes that were chiefly

characterised by other great features of Highland Landscape. A country

thus constituted, and with such an aspect, even if we could suppose it

without lochs, would still be a glorious region; but its lochs are

indeed its greatest glory: by them its glens, its mountains, and its

woods, are all illumined, and its rivers made to sing aloud for joy. In

the pure element, overflowing so many spacious vales and glens profound,

the great and stern objects of nature look even more sublime or more

beautiful in their reflected shadows, which appear in that stillness to

belong rather to heaven than earth. Or the evanescence of all that

imagery at a breath may touch us with the thought, that all it

represents, steadfast as seems its endurance, will as utterly pass away.

Such visions, when gazed on in that wondrous depth and purity they are

sometimes seen to assume on a still summer day, always inspire some such

faint feeling as this; and we sigh to think how transitory must be all

things, when the setting sun is seen to sink beneath the mountain, and

all its golden pomp at the same instant to evanish from the lake.

The first that takes possession of the imagination, dreaming of the

Highlands as the region of Lochs, is the Queen of them all, Loch Lomond.

A great poet has said that, "in Scotland, the proportion of diffused

water is often too great, as at the Lake of Geneva, for instance, and in

most of the Scottish lakes. No doubt it sounds magnificent, and flatters

the imagination, to hear at a distance of masses of water, so many

leagues in length and miles in width; and such ample room may be

delightful to the fresh-water sailor, scudding with a lively breeze amid

the rapidly-shifting scenery. But who ever travelled along the banks of

Loch Lomond, variegated as the lower part is by islands, without feeling

that a speedier termination of the long vista of blank water would be

acceptable, and without wishing for an interposition of green meadows,

trees, and cottages, and a sparkling stream to run by his side? In fact,

a notion of grandeur, as connected with magnitude, has seduced persons

of taste into a general mistake upon this subject. It is much more

desirable, for the purposes of pleasure, that lakes should be numerous

and small or middle-sized, than large, not only for communication by

walks and rides, but for variety, and for recurrence of similar

appearances. To illustrate this by one instance: how pleasing is it to

have a ready and frequent opportunity of watching, at the outlet of a

lake, the stream, pushing its way among the rocks, in lively contrast

with the stillness from which it has escaped! and how amusing to compare

its noisy and turbulent motions with the gentle playfulness of the

breezes that may be starting up, or wandering here and there, over the

faintly-rippled surface of the broad water! I may add, as a general

remark, that in lakes of great width the shores cannot be distinctly

seen at the same time, and therefore contribute little to mutual

illustration and ornament; and if the opposite shores are out of sight

of each other, like those of the American and Asiatic lakes, then

unfortunately the traveller is reminded of a nobler object--he has the

blankness of a sea-prospect without the grandeur and accompanying sense

of power."

We shall not be suspected of an inclination to dissent, on light

grounds, from any sentiments of Wordsworth. But finely felt and

expressed as all this is, we do not hesitate to say that it is not

applicable to Loch Lomond. Far be it from us to criticise this passage

sentence by sentence; for we have quoted it not in a captious, but a

reverent spirit, as we have ever done with the works of this illustrious

man. He has studied nature more widely and profoundly than we have; but

it is out of our power to look on Loch Lomond without a feeling of

perfection. The "diffusion of water" is indeed great; but in what a

world it floats! At first sight of it, how our soul expands! The sudden

revelation of such majestic beauty, wide as it is and extending afar,

inspires us with a power of comprehending it all. Sea-like indeed it

is--a Mediterranean Sea--enclosed with lofty hills and as lofty

mountains--and these indeed are the Fortunate Isles! We shall not dwell

on the feeling which all must have experienced on the first sight of

such a vision--the feeling of a lovely and a mighty calm; it is manifest

that the spacious "diffusion of water" more than conspires with the

other components of such a scene to produce the feeling; that to it

belongs the spell that makes our spirit serene, still, and bright, as

its own. Nor when such feeling ceases so entirely to possess, and so

deeply to affect us, does the softened and subdued charm of the scene

before us depend less on the expanse of the "diffusion of water." The

islands, that before had lain we knew not how--or we had only felt that

they were all most lovely--begin to show themselves in the order of

their relation to one another and to the shores. The eye rests on the

largest, and with them the lesser combine; or we look at one or two of

the least, away by themselves, or remote from all a tufted rock; and

many as they are, they break not the breadth of the liquid plain, for

it is ample as the sky. They show its amplitude, as masses and

sprinklings of clouds, and single clouds, show the amplitude of the

cerulean vault. And then the long promontories--stretching out from

opposite mainlands, and enclosing bays that in themselves are

lakes--they too magnify the empire of water; for long as they are, they

seem so only as our eye attends them with their cliffs and woods from

the retiring shores, and far distant are their shadows from the central

light. Then what shores! On one side, where the lake is widest,

low-lying they seem, and therefore lovelier--undulating with fields and

groves, where many a pleasant dwelling is embowered, into lines of hills

that gradually soften away into another land. On the other side, sloping

back, or overhanging, mounts beautiful in their bareness, for they are

green as emerald; others, scarcely more beautiful, studded with fair

trees--some altogether woods. They soon form into mountains--and the

mountains become more and more majestical, yet beauty never deserts

them, and her spirit continues to tame that of the frowning cliffs. Far

off as they are, Benlomond and Benvorlich are seen to be giants;

magnificent is their retinue, but they two are supreme, each in his own

dominion; and clear as the day is here, they are diadem'd with clouds.

It cannot be that the "proportion of diffused water is here too great;"

and is it then true that no one "ever travelled along the banks of Loch

Lomond, variegated as the lower part is by islands, without feeling that

a speedier termination to the long vista of blank water would be

acceptable, and without wishing for an interposition of green meadows,

trees, and cottages, and a sparkling stream to run by his side?" We have

travelled along them in all weathers and never felt such a wish. For

there they all are--all but the "sparkling stream to run by our side,"

and we see not how that well could be in nature. "Streams that sparkle

as they run," cross our path on their own; and brighter never issued

from the woods. Along the margin of the water, as far as Luss--ay, and

much farther--the variations of the foreground are incessant; "had it no

other beauties," it has been truly said, "but those of its shores, it

would still be an object of prime attraction; whether from the

bright-green meadows sprinkled with luxuriant ash-trees, that sometimes

skirt its margin, or its white pebbled shores on which its gentle

billows murmur, like a miniature ocean, or its bold rocky promontories

rising from the dark water, rich in wildflowers and ferns, and tangled

with wild roses and honeysuckles, or its retired bays where the waves

dash, reflecting, like a mirror, the trees which hang over them, an

inverted landscape." The islands are for ever arranging themselves into

new forms, every one more and more beautiful; at least so they seem to

be, perpetually occurring, yet always unexpected, and there is a

pleasure even in such a series of slight surprises that enhances the

delight of admiration. And alongside, or behind us, all the while, are

the sylvan mountains, "laden with beauty;" and ever and anon open glens

widen down upon us from chasms; or forest-glades lead our hearts away

into the inner gloom--perhaps our feet; and there, in a field that looks

not as if it had been cleared by his own hands, but left clear by

nature, a woodsman's hut.

Half-way between Luss and Tarbet the water narrows, but it is still

wide; the new road, we believe, winds round the point of Firkin, the old

road boldly scaled the height, as all old roads loved to do; ascend it,

and bid the many-isled vision, in all its greatest glory, farewell.

Thence upwards prevails the spirit of the mountains. The lake is felt to

belong to them--to be subjected to their will--and that is capricious;

for sometimes they suddenly blacken it when at its brightest, and

sometimes when its gloom is like that of the grave, as if at their

biding, all is light. We cannot help attributing the "skyey influences"

which occasion such wonderful effects on the water, to prodigious

mountains; for we cannot look on them without feeling that they reign

over the solitude they compose; the lights and shadows flung by the sun

and the clouds imagination assuredly regards as put forth by the vast

objects which they colour; and we are inclined to think some such belief

is essential in the profound awe, often amounting to dread, with which

we are inspired by the presences of mere material forms. But be this as

it may, the upper portion of Loch Lomond is felt by all to be most

sublime. Near the head, all the manifold impressions of the beautiful

which for hours our mind had been receiving, begin to fade; if some

gloomy change has taken place in the air, there is a total obliteration,

and the mighty scene before us is felt to possess not the hour merely,

but the day. Yet should sunshine come, and abide a while, beauty will

glimpse upon us even here, for green pastures will smile vividly high up

among the rocks; the sylvan spirit is serene the moment it is touched

with light, and here there is not only many a fair tree by the

water-side, but yon old oak-wood will look joyful on the mountain, and

the gloom become glimmer in the profound abyss.

Wordsworth says that "it must be more desirable, for the purposes of

pleasure, that lakes should be numerous, and small or middle-sized, than

large, not only for communication by walks and rides, but for variety,

and for recurrence of similar appearances." The Highlands have them of

all sizes--and that surely is best. But here is one which, it has been

truly said, is not only "incomparable in its beauty as in its

dimensions, exceeding all others in variety as it does in extent and

splendour, but unites in itself every style of scenery which is found in

the other lakes of the Highlands." He who has studied, and understood,

and felt all Loch Lomond, will be prepared at once to enjoy any other

fine lake he looks on; nor will he admire nor love it the less, though

its chief character should consist in what forms but one part of that of

the Wonder in which all kinds of beauty and sublimity are combined.

We feel that it would be idle, and worse than idle, to describe any

number of the Highland lochs, for so many of the finest have been seen

by so many eyes that few persons probably will ever read these pages to

whom such descriptions would be, at the best, more than shadowings of

scenery that their own imaginations can more vividly re-create. There

are other reasons for not saying a single word about some of the most

beautiful; for genius has pictured and peopled them and the surrounding

regions in colours that will never fade. Besides, in the volumes to

which these "Remarks" are a preface--contributed with pleasure, somewhat

impaired indeed by the consciousness of their many defects and

imperfections--views of them all are submitted to the eye; and it is not

to be thought that we could by words add to the effect of the works of

such artists. These objections do not apply to what we have written

respecting the character of the Scenery of the Highlands, apart, as far

as that may be, from their lochs; and it may have in some measure

illustrated them also, if it has at all truly characterised the

mountains, the glens, the rivers, the forests, and the woods.

We may be allowed, however, to say, that there cannot be a greater

mistake than to think, as many, we believe, do who have only heard of

the Highland Lochs, that, with the exception of those famous for their

beauty as well as their grandeur, beauty is not only not the quality by

which they are distinguished, but that it is rarely found in them at

all. There are few, possessing any very marked character, in which

beauty is not either an ingredient or an accompaniment; and there are

many "beautiful exceedingly," which, lying out of the way even of

somewhat adventurous travellers, or very remote, are known, if even by

that, only by name. It does not, indeed, require much, in some

situations, to give a very touching beauty to water. A few trees, a few

knolls, a few tufted rocks, will do it, where all around and above is

stern or sterile; and how strong may be the gentle charm, if the torrent

that feeds the little loch chance to flow into it from a lucid pool

formed by a waterfall, and to flow out of it in a rivulet that enlivens

the dark heather with a vale of verdure over which a stag might

bound--and more especially if there be two or three huts in which it is

perceived there is human life! We believe we slightly touched before on

such scenes; but any little repetition will be excused for the sake of a

very picturesque passage, which we have much pleasure in quoting from

the very valuable "Guide to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland," by

the brothers Anderson. We well remember walking into the scene here so

well painted, many long years ago, and have indeed, somewhere or other,

described it. The Fall of Foyers is the most magnificent cataract, out

of all sight and hearing, in Britain. The din is quite loud enough in

ordinary weather--and it is only in ordinary weather that you can

approach the place from which you have a full view of all its grandeur.

When the Fall is in flood--to say nothing of being drenched to the

skin--you are so blinded by the sharp spray-smoke, and so deafened by

the dashing and clashing, and tumbling and rumbling thunder, that your

condition is far from enviable, as you cling, "lonely lover of nature,"

to a shelf by no means eminent for safety, above the horrid gulf. Nor in

former times was there any likelihood of your being comforted by the

accommodations of the General's Hut. In ordinary Highland

weather--meaning thereby weather neither very wet nor very dry--it is

worth walking a thousand miles for one hour to behold the Fall of

Foyers. The spacious cavity is enclosed by "complicated cliffs and

perpendicular precipices" of immense height, and though for a while it

wears to the eye a savage aspect, yet beauty fears not to dwell even

there, and the horror is softened by what appears to be masses of tall

shrubs, or single shrubs almost like trees. And they are trees, which on

the level plain would look even stately; but as they ascend ledge above

ledge the walls of that awful chasm, it takes the eye time to see them

as they really are, while on our first discernment of their character,

serenely standing among the tumult, they are felt on such sites to be

sublime.

"Between the Falls and the Strath of Stratherrik," says the Book we were

about to quote, "a space of three or four miles, the river Foyers flows

through a series of low rocky hills clothed with birch. They present

various quiet glades and open spaces, where little patches of cultivated

ground are encircled by wooded hillocks, whose surface is pleasingly

diversified by nodding trees, bare rocks, empurpled heath, and bracken

bearing herbage." It was the excessive loveliness of some of the scenery

there that suggested to us the thought of going to look what kind of a

stream the Foyers was above the Fall. We went, and in the quiet of a

summer evening, found it

"Was even the gentlest of all gentle things."

But here is the promised description of it. "Before pursuing our way

westward, we would wish to direct the traveller's attention to a

sequestered spot of peculiar beauty on the river Foyers. This is a

secluded vale, called Killean, which, besides its natural

attractions--and these are many--is distinguished as one of the few

places where the old practice of resorting to the 'shieling' for summer

grazing of cattle is still observed. It is encompassed on all sides by

steep mountains; but at the north end there is a small lake, about a

mile and a half in length, and from one-third to half a mile in breadth.

The remainder of the bottom of the glen is a perfectly level tract, of

the same width with the lake, and about two miles and a half in length,

covered with the richest herbage, and traversed by a small meandering

river flowing through it into the lake. The surface of this flat is

bedecked with the little huts or bothies which afford temporary

accommodation to the herdsmen and others in charge of the cattle. This

portion of the glen is bordered on the west by continuous hills rising

abruptly in a uniformly steep acclivity, and passing above into a

perpendicular range of precipices, the whole covered with a scanty

verdure sprouted with heath. At a bend of the lake near its middle,

where it inclines from a northernly course towards the west, a

magnificent rounded precipice, which, like the continuous ranges, may be

about 1200 feet in height, rises immediately out of the water; and a few

narrow and inclined verdant stripes alone preserve it from exhibiting a

perfectly mural character. To this noble rock succeeds, along the rest

of the lake, a beautiful, lofty, and nearly vertical hill-side, clothed

with birch, intermingled with hanging mossy banks, shaded over with the

deeper-tinted bracken. The eastern side of the plain, and the adjoining

portion of the lake, are lined by mountains corresponding in height with

those opposed to them; but their lower extremities are, to a

considerable extent, strewed with broken fragments of rock, to which

succeeds an uninterrupted zone of birch and alder, which is again

overtopped in its turn by naked cliffs. An elevated terrace occupies the

remainder of this side of the lake; above the wooded face of which is

seen a sloping expanse of mingled heath and herbage. About half a mile

from the south end, Mr Fraser of Lovat, the proprietor, has erected a

shooting-lodge; viewed from which, or from either end, or from the top

of the platform on the north-east side of the lake, fancy could scarcely

picture a more attractive and fairy landscape than is unfolded by this

sequestered vale, to which Dr Johnson's description of the 'Happy

Valley' not inaptly applies. The milch cows, to the number of several

hundreds, are generally kept here from the beginning of June to the

middle of August, when they are replaced by the yeld cattle. The river

sweeps to the northward from Loch Killean through richly birch-clad

hills, which rise in swelling slopes from its banks. A large tarn which

immediately joins it from the east is crossed at its mouth by a rustic

bridge, from which a single footpath conducts across the brow of the

hill to Whitebridge, a small public-house or inn, four miles distant."

There is a loch of a very different character from Killean, almost as

little known (one view of it is given in the book), equal to anything in

the Highlands, only two miles distant from Loch Lochy, in the Great

Glen--Loch Arkaig. We first visited it many years since, having been

induced to do so by a passage in John Stoddart's "Remarks on the Local

Scenery and Manners of Scotland;" and it was then a very noble oak and

pine forest loch. The axe went to work and kept steadily at it; and a

great change was wrought; but it is still a grand scene, with a larger

infusion of beauty than it possessed of old. The scenery of the valley

separating it from Loch Lochy is very similar to that of the Trossachs;

through it there are two approaches to the loch, and the _Mile-Dubh_, or

the Dark Mile, according to our feeling, is more impressive than any

part of the approach to Loch Katrine. The woods and rocks are very

solemn, and yet very sweet; for though many old pines and oaks and ashes

are there, and the wall of rocks is immense, young trees prevail now on

many places, as well along the heights as among the knolls and hillocks

below, where alders and hawthorns are thick; almost everywhere the young

are intermingled with the old, and look cheerful under their protection,

without danger of being chilled by their shade. The loch, more or less

sylvan from end to end, shows on its nearer shores some magnificent

remains of the ancient forest, and makes a noble sweep like some great

river. There may be more, but we remember but one island--not large, but

wooded as it should be--the burying-place of the family of Lochiel. What

rest! It is a long journey from Loch Lochy to Kinloch Arkaig--and by the

silent waters we walked or sat all a summer's day. There was nothing

like a road that we observed, but the shores are easily travelled, and

there it is you may be almost sure of seeing some red-deer. They are no

better worth looking at from a window than Fallow--no offence to Fallow,

who are fine creatures; indeed, we had rather not see them so at all;

but on the shores or steeps of Loch Arkaig, with hardly a human

habitation within many, many miles, and these few rather known than seen

to be there, the huts of Highlanders contented to cultivate here and

there some spot that seems cultivatable, but probably is found not to

be so after some laborious years--there they are at home; and you, if

young, looking on them, feel at home too, and go bounding, like one of

themselves, over what, did you choose, were an evitable steep. Roe, too,

frequent the copses, but to be seen they must be started; grouse spring

up before you oftener than you might expect in a deer forest; but, to be

sure, it is a rough and shaggy one, though lovelier lines of verdure

never lay in the sunshine than we think we see now lying for miles along

the margin of that loch. The numerous mountains towards the head of the

loch are very lofty, and glens diverge in grand style into opposite and

distant regions. Glen Dessary, with its beautiful pastures, opens on the

loch, and leads to Loch Nevish on the coast of Knoidart--Glen Pæan to

Oben-a-Cave on Loch Morer, Glen Canagorie into Glenfinnan and Loch

Shiel; and Glen Kingie to Glengarry and Loch Quoich. There is a choice!

We chose Glen Kingie, and after a long climb found a torrent that took

us down to Glengarry before sunset. It is a loch little known, and in

grandeur not equal to Loch Arkaig; but at the close of such a day's

journey, the mind, elevated by the long contemplation of the great

objects of nature, cannot fail to feel aright, whatever it may be, the

spirit of the scene, that seems to usher in the grateful hour of rest.

It is surpassing fair--and having lain all night long on its gentle

banks, sleeping or waking we know not, we have never remembered it since

but as the Land of Dreams.

Which is the dreariest, most desolate, and dismal of the Highland Lochs?

We should say Loch Ericht. It lies in a prodigious wilderness, with

which perhaps no man alive is conversant, and in which you may travel

for days without seeing even any symptoms of human life. We speak of the

regions comprehended between the Forest of Atholl and Ben-nevis, the

Moor of Rannoch and Glen Spean. There are many lochs--and Loch Ericht is

their griesly Queen. Herdsmen, shepherds, hunters, fowlers, anglers,

traverse its borders, but few have been far in the interior, and we

never knew anybody who had crossed it from south to north, from east to

west. We have ourselves seen more of it, perhaps, than any other

Lowlander; and had traversed many of its vast glens and moors, before we

found our way to the southern solitude of Loch Ericht. We came into the

western gloom of Ben Auler from Loch Ouchan, and up and down for hours

dismal but not dangerous precipices that opened out into what might

almost be called passes--but we had frequently to go back, for they were

blind--contrived to clamber to the edge of one of the mountains that

rose from the water a few miles down the loch. All was vast, shapeless,

savage, black, and wrathfully grim; for it was one of those days that

keep frowning and lowering, yet will not thunder; such as one conceives

of on the eve of an earthquake. At first the sight was dreadful, but

there was no reason for dread; imagination remains not longer than she

chooses the slave of her own eyes, and we soon began to enjoy the gloom,

and to feel how congenial it was in nature with the character of all

those lifeless cliffs. Silence and darkness suit well together in

solitude at noonday, and settled on huge objects make them sublime. And

they were huge; all ranged together, and stretching away to a great

distance, with the pitchy water, still as if frozen, covering their

feet.

Loch Ericht is many miles long--nearly twenty; but there is a loch among

the Grampians not more than two miles round, if so much, which is

sublimer far--Loch Aven. You come upon the sight of it at once, a short

way down from the summit of Cairngorm, and then it is some two thousand

feet below you, itself being as many above the level of the sea. But to

come upon it so as to feel best its transcendent grandeur, you should

approach it up Glenaven--and from as far down as Inch-Rouran, which is

about half-way between Loch Aven and Tomantoul. Between Inch-Rouran and

Tomantoul the glen is wild, but it is inhabited; above that house there

is but one other; and for about a dozen miles--we have heard it called

far more--there is utter solitude. But never was there a solitude at

once so wild, so solemn, so serene, so sweet! The glen is narrow; but on

one side there are openings into several wider glens, that show you

mighty coves as you pass on; on the other side the mountains are without

a break, and the only variation with them is from smooth to shaggy, from

dark to bright; but their prevailing character is that of pastoral or of

forest peace. The mountains that show the coves belong to the bases of

Ben-Aven and Ben-y-buird. The heads of those giants are not seen--but it

sublimes the long glen to know that it belongs to their dominion, and

that it is leading us on to an elevation that ere long will be on a

level with the roots of their topmost cliffs. The Aven is so clear--on

account of the nature of its channel--that you see the fishes hanging in

every pool; and 'tis not possible to imagine how beautiful in such

transparencies are the reflections of its green ferny banks. For miles

they are composed of knolls, seldom interspersed with rocks, and there

cease to be any trees. But ever and anon we walk for a while on a level

floor, and the voice of the stream is mute. Hitherto sheep have been

noticed on the hill, but not many, and red and black cattle grazing on

the lower pastures; but they disappear, and we find ourselves all at

once in a desert. So it is felt to be, coming so suddenly with its black

heather on that greenest grass; but 'tis such a desert as the red-deer

love. We are now high up on the breast of the mountain, which appears to

be Cairngorm; but such heights are deceptive, and it is not till we

again see the bed of the Aven that we are assured we are still in the

glen. Prodigious precipices, belonging to several different mountains,

for between mass and mass there is blue sky, suddenly arise, forming

themselves more and more regularly into circular order, as we near; and

now we have sight of the whole magnificence; yet vast as it is, we know

not yet how vast; it grows as we gaze, till in a while we feel that

sublimer it may not be; and then so quiet in all its horrid grandeur we

feel too that it is beautiful, and think of the Maker.

This is Loch Aven. How different the whole region round from that

enclosing Loch Ericht! There, vast wildernesses of more than melancholy

moors--huge hollows hating their own gloom that keeps them

herbless--disconsolate glens left far away by themselves, without any

sign of life--cliffs that frown back the sunshine--and mountains, as if

they were all dead, insensible to the heavens. Is this all mere

imagination--or the truth? We deceive ourselves in what we call a

desert. For we have so associated our own being with the appearances of

outward things, that we attribute to them, with an uninquiring faith,

the very feelings and the very thoughts, of which we have chosen to make

them emblems. But here the sources of the Dee seem to lie in a region as

happy as it is high; for the bases of the mountains are all such as the

soul has chosen to make sublime--the colouring of the mountains all

such, as the soul has chosen to make beautiful; and the whole region,

thus imbued with a power to inspire elevation and delight, is felt to be

indeed one of the very noblest in nature.

We have now nearly reached the limits assigned to our "Remarks on the

Character of the Scenery of the Highlands;" and we feel that the

sketches we have drawn of its component qualities--occasionally filled

up with some details--must be very imperfect indeed without

comprehending some parts of the coast, and some of the sea-arms that

stretch into the interior. But even had our limits allowed, we do not

think we could have ventured on such an attempt; for though we have

sailed along most of the western shores, and through some of its sounds,

and into many of its bays, and up not a few of its reaches, yet they

contain such an endless variety of all the fairest and greatest objects

of nature, that we feel it would be far beyond our powers to give

anything like an adequate idea of the beauty and the grandeur that for

ever kept unfolding themselves around our summer voyagings in calm or

storm. Who can say that he knows a thousandth part of the wonders of

"the marine" between the Mull of Cantire and Cape Wrath? He may have

gathered many an extensive shore--threaded many a mazy multitude of

isles--sailed up many a spacious bay--and cast anchor at the head of

many a haven land-locked so as no more to seem to belong to the sea--yet

other voyagers shall speak to him of innumerable sights which he has

never witnessed; and they who are most conversant with those coasts,

best know how much they have left and must leave for ever unexplored.

Look now only at the Linnhe Loch--how it gladdens Argyll! Without it and

the Sound of Mull how sad would be the shadows of Morvern! Eclipsed the

splendours of Lorn! Ascend one of the heights of Appin, and as the waves

roll in light, you will see how the mountains are beautified by the sea.

There is a majestic rolling onwards there that belongs to no

land-loch--only to the world of waves. There is no nobler image of

ordered power than the tide, whether in flow or in ebb; and on all now

it is felt to be beneficent, coming and going daily, to enrich and

adorn. Or in fancy will you embark, and let the Amethyst bound away "at

her own sweet will," accordant with yours, till she reach the distant

and long-desired loch.

"Loch-Sunart! who, when tides and tempests roar,

Comes in among these mountains from the main,

'Twixt wooded Ardnamurchan's rocky cape

And Ardmore's shingly beach of hissing spray;

And while his thunders bid the sound of Mull

Be dumb, sweeps onwards past a hundred bays

Hill-shelter'd from the wrath that foams along

The mad mid-channel,--All as quiet they

As little separate worlds of summer dreams,--

And by storm-loving birds attended up

The mountain-hollow, white in their career

As are the breaking billows, spurns the Isles

Of craggy Carnich, and green Oronsay

Drench'd in that sea-horn shower o'er tree-tops driven,

And ivied stones of what was once a tower,

Now hardly known from rocks--and gathering might

In the long reach between Dungallan caves

And point of Arderinis ever fair

With her Elysian groves, bursts through that strait

Into another ampler inland sea;

Till lo! subdued by some sweet influence,--

And potent is she, though so meek the Eve,--

Down sinketh wearied the old Ocean

Insensibly into a solemn calm,--

And all along that ancient burial-ground

(Its kirk is gone), that seemeth now to lend

Its own eternal quiet to the waves,

Restless no more, into a perfect peace

Lulling and lull'd at last, while drop the airs

Away as they were dead, the first-risen star

Beholds that lovely Archipelago,

All shadow'd there as in a spiritual world,

Where time's mutations shall come never more!"

These lines describe but one of innumerable lochs that owe their

greatest charm to the sea. It is indeed one of those on which nature has

lavished all her infinite varieties of loveliness; but Loch Leven is

scarcely less fair, and perhaps grander; and there is matchless

magnificence above Loch Etive. All round about Ballahulish and Inverco

the scenery of Loch Leven is the sweetest ever seen overshadowed by

such mountains; the deeper their gloom, the brighter its lustre; in all

weathers it wears a cheerful smile; and often while tip among the rocks

the tall trees are tossing in the storm, the heart of the woods beneath

is calm, and the vivid fields they shelter look as if they still enjoyed

the sun. Nor closes the beauty there, but even animates the entrance

into that dreadful glen--Glencoe. All the way up its river, Loch Leven

would be fair, were it only for her hanging woods. But though the glen

narrows, it still continues broad, and there are green plains between

her waters and the mountains, on which stately trees stand single, and

there is ample room for groves. The returning tide tells us, should we

forget it, that this is no inland loch, for it hurries away back to the

sea, not turbulent, but fast as a river in flood. The river Leven is one

of the finest in the Highlands, and there is no other such series of

waterfalls, all seen at once, one above the other, along an immense

vista; and all the way up to the furthest there are noble assemblages of

rocks--nowhere any want of wood--and in places, trees that seem to have

belonged to some old forest. Beyond, the opening in the sky seems to

lead into another region, and it does so; for we have gone that way,

past some small lochs, across a wide wilderness, with mountains on all

sides, and descended on Loch Treag,

"A loch whom there are none to praise,

And very few to love,"

but overflowing in our memory with all pleasantest images of pastoral

contentment and peace.

Loch Etive, between the ferries of Connel and Bunawe, has been seen by

almost all who have visited the Highlands--but very imperfectly; to know

what it is, you must row or sail up it, for the banks on both sides are

often richly wooded, assume many fine forms, and are frequently well

embayed, while the expanse of water is sufficiently wide to allow you

from its centre to command a view of many of the distant heights. But

above Bunawe it is not like the same loch. For a couple of miles it is

not wide, and it is so darkened by enormous shadows that it looks even

less like a strait than a gulf--huge overhanging rocks on both sides

ascending high, and yet felt to belong but to the bases of mountains

that sloping far back have their summits among clouds of their own in

another region of the sky. Yet are they not all horrid; for nowhere else

is there such lofty heather--it seems a wild sort of brushwood; tall

trees flourish, single or in groves, chiefly birches, with now and then

an oak--and they are in their youth or their prime--and even the

prodigious trunks, some of which have been dead for centuries, are not

all dead, but shoot from their knotted rind symptoms of life

inextinguishable by time and tempest. Out of this gulf we emerge into

the Upper Loch, and its amplitude sustains the majesty of the mountains,

all of the highest order, and seen from their feet to their crests.

Cruachan wears the crown, and reigns over them all--king at once of Loch

Etive and of Loch Awe. But Buachaille Etive, though afar off, is still a

giant, and in some lights comes forwards, bringing with him the Black

Mount and its dependents, so that they all seem to belong to this most

magnificent of all Highland lochs. "I know not," says Macculloch, "that

Loch Etive could bear an ornament without an infringement on that aspect

of solitary vastness which it presents throughout. Nor is there one. The

rocks and bays on the shore, which might elsewhere attract attention,

are here swallowed up in the enormous dimensions of the surrounding

mountains, and the wide and ample expanse of the lake. A solitary house,

here fearfully solitary, situated far up in Glen Etive, is only visible

when at the upper extremity; and if there be a tree, as there are in a

few places on the shore, it is unseen; extinguished as if it were a

humble mountain flower, by the universal magnitude around." This is

finely felt and expressed; but even on the shores of Loch Etive there is

much of the beautiful; Ardmatty smiles with its meadows, and woods, and

bay, and sylvan stream; other sunny nooks repose among the grey granite

masses; the colouring of the banks and braes is often bright; several

houses or huts become visible no long way up the glen; and though that

long hollow--half a day's journey--till you reach the wild road between

Inveruran and King's House--lies in gloom, yet the hillsides are

cheerful, and you delight in the greensward, wide and rock-broken,

should you ascend the passes that lead into Glencreran or Glencoe. But

to feel the full power of Glen Etive you must walk up it till it ceases

to be a glen. When in the middle of the moor, you see far off a

solitary dwelling indeed--perhaps the loneliest house in all the

Highlands--and the solitude is made profounder, as you pass by, by the

voice of a cataract, hidden in an awful chasm, bridged by two or three

stems of trees, along which the red-deer might fear to venture--but we

have seen them and the deer-hounds glide over it, followed by other

fearless feet, when far and wide the Forest of Dalness was echoing to

the hunter's horn.

We have now brought our Remarks on the Scenery of the Highlands to a

close, and would fain have said a few words on the character and life of

the people; but are precluded from even touching on that most

interesting subject. It is impossible that the minds of travellers

through those wonderful regions, can be so occupied with the

contemplation of mere inanimate nature, as not to give many a thought to

their inhabitants, now and in the olden time. Indeed, without such

thoughts, they would often seem to be but blank and barren wildernesses,

in which the heart would languish, and imagination itself recoil; but

they cannot long be so looked at, for houseless as are many extensive

tracts, and therefore at times felt to be too dreary even for moods that

for a while enjoyed the absence of all that might tell of human life,

yet symptoms and traces of human life are noticeable to the instructed

eye almost everywhere, and in them often lies the spell that charms us,

even while we think that we are wholly delivered up to the influence of

"dead insensate things." None will visit the Highlands without having

some knowledge of their history; and the changes that have long been

taking place in the condition of the people will be affectingly

recognised wherever they go, in spite even of what might have appeared

the insuperable barriers of nature.

"Time and Tide

Have washed away, like weeds upon the sands,

Crowds of the olden life's memorials;

And 'mid the mountains you as well might seek

For the lone site of fancy's filmy dreams.

Towers have decay'd and moulder'd from the cliffs,

Or their green age, or grey, has help'd to build

New dwellings sending up their household smoke

From treeless places once inhabited

But by the secret sylvans. On the moors

The pillar-stone, reared to perpetuate

The fame of some great battle, or the power

Of storied necromancer in the wild,

Among the wide change on the heather-bloom

By power more wondrous wrought than his, its name

Has lost, or fallen itself has disappear'd;

No broken fragment suffer'd to impede

The glancing ploughshare. All the ancient woods

Are thinn'd and let in floods of daylight now,

Then dark and dern as when the Druids lived.

Narrow'd is now the red-deer's forest reign;

The royal race of eagles is extinct.

But other changes than on moor and cliff

Have tamed the aspect of the wilderness;

The simple system of primeval life,

Simple but stately, hath been broken down;

The clans are scatter'd, and the chieftain's power

Is dead, or dying--but a name--though yet

It sometimes stirs the desert; to the winds

The tall plumes wave no more--the tartan green

With fiery streaks among the heather-bells

Now glows unfrequent; and the echoes mourn

The silence of the music that of old

Kept war-thoughts stern amid the calm of peace.

Yet to far battle plains still Morven sends

Her heroes, and still glittering in the sun,

Or blood-dimm'd, her dread line of bayonets

Marches with loud shouts straight to victory.

A soften'd radiance now floats o'er her glens;

No rare sight now upon her sea-arm lochs

The sail oft-veering up the solitude;

And from afar the noise of life is brought

Within the thunders of her cataracts.

These will flow on for ever; and the crests,

Gold-tipt by rising and by setting suns,

Of her old mountains inaccessible

Glance down their scorn for ever on the toils

That load with harvests now the humbler hills,

Now shorn of all their heather bloom, and green

Or yellow as the gleam of lowland fields.

And bold hearts in broad bosoms still are there,

Living and dying peacefully; the huts

Abodes are still of high-soul'd poverty;

And underneath their lintels beauty stoops

Her silken-snooded head, when singing goes

The maiden to her father at his work

Among the woods, or joins the scanty line

Of barley-reapers on their narrow ridge,

In some small field among the pastoral braes.

Still fragments dim of ancient poetry

In melancholy music down the glens

Go floating; and from shieling roof'd with boughs,

And turf-wall'd, high up in some lonely place

Where flocks of sheep are nibbling the sweet grass

Of mid-summer, and browsing on the plants

On the cliff mosses a few goats are seen

Among their kids, you hear sweet melodies

Attuned to some traditionary tale,

By young wife sitting all alone, aware

From shadow on the mountain horologe

Of the glad hour that brings her husband home

Before the gloaming, from the far-off moor

Where the black cattle feed; there all alone

She sits and sings, except that on her knees

Sleeps the sweet offspring of their faithful loves."

We love the people too well to praise them--we have had too heartfelt

experience of their virtues. In castle, hall, house, manse, hut, hovel,

shieling--on mountain and moor, we have known, without having to study

their character. It manifests itself in their manners, and in their

whole frame of life. They are now, as they ever were, affectionate,

faithful, and fearless; and far more delightful surely it is to see such

qualities in all their pristine strength--for civilisation has not

weakened, nor ever will weaken them--without that alloy of fierceness

and ferocity which was inseparable from them in the turbulence of feudal

times. They are now indeed a peaceful people; severe as are the

hardships of their condition, they are, in the main, contented with it;

and nothing short of necessity can dissever them from their dear

mountains. We devoutly trust that there need be no more forced

emigration--that henceforth it will be free--at the option of the

adventurous--and that all who will, when the day cometh, may be gathered

to their fathers in the land that gave them birth. Much remains to be

done not only to relieve but enlighten; yet Christian benevolence has

not been forgetful of their wants; schools and churches are arising in

remote places; and that they are in good truth a religious as well as a

moral people is proved by the passionate earnestness with which, in

their worst destitution, they embrace every offer of instruction in the

knowledge that leads to everlasting life. The blessing of Heaven will

lie on all such missions as these; and the time will come when we shall

be able to contemplate, without any pain, the condition of a race who,

to use the noble language of one, though often scornful and sarcastic

overmuch, yet at heart their friend, "almost in an hour subsided into

peace and virtue, retaining their places, their possessions, their

chiefs, their songs, their traditions, their superstitions and peculiar

usages--even that language and those recollections which still separate

them from the rest of the nation. They retained even their pride, and

they retained their contempt of those who imposed that order on them,

and still they settled into a state of obedience to that government, of

which the world produces no other instance! It is a splendid moral

phenomenon, and reflects a lustre on the Highland character, whether of

the chiefs or the people, which extinguishes all past faults, and which

atones for what little remains to be amended. A peculiar political

situation was the cause of their faults; and that which swept away the

cause, has rendered the effects a tale of other times."

END OF VOL. II.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.