5.

Somewhat too much of mirth and merriment-so up, up to yon floating fleecy cloud, and away to the Fall of Foyers. Here is solitude with a vengeance-stern, grim, dungeon solitude! How ghostlike those white skeleton pines, stripped of their rhind by tempest and lightning, and dead to the din of the raging cauldron! That cataract, if descending on a cathedral, would shatter down the pile into a million of fragments. But it meets the black foundations of the cliff, and flies up to the starless heaven in a storm of spray. We are drenched, as if leaning in a hurricane over the gunwale of a ship, rolling under bare poles through a heavy sea. The very solid globe of earth quakes through her entrails. The eye, reconciled to the darkness, now sees a glimmering and gloomy light-and lo, a bridge of a single arch hung across the chasm, just high enough to let through the triumphant torrent. Has some hillloch burst its barriers? For what a world of waters comes now tumbling into the abyss! Niagara! hast thou a fiercer roar? Listen-and you think there are momentary pauses of the thunder, filled up with goblin groans! All the military music-bands of the army of Britain would here be dumb as mutes-Trumpet, Cymbal, and the Great Drum! There is a desperate temptation in the hubbub to leap into destruction. Water-horses and kelpies, keep stabled in your rock-stalls-for if you issue forth the river will sweep you down, before you have finished one neigh, to Castle Urquhart, and dash you, in a sheet of foam, to the top of her rocking battlements. A pretty place indeed for a lunar rainbow! But the moon has been swept from heaven, and no brightness may tinge the black firmament that midnight builds over the liquid thunder. What a glorious grave for the Last Man! A grave without a resurrection! Oh, Nature! Nature! art thou all in all?

-And is there no God! The astounded spirit shrinks from superstition into atheism-and all creeds are dashed into oblivion by the appalling roar. But a still small voice is heard within my heart-the voice of conscienceand its whispers shall be heard when all the waters of the earth are frozen into nothing, and earth itself shrivelled up like a scroll!

Our Planet has been all the while spinning along round the sun, and on its own axis, to the music of the spheres; and lo! the law of light has been obeyed by the rising morn. Night has carried off the thunder, and the freed spirit wonders, "can that be the Fall of Foyers?" We emerge, like a gay creature of the element, from the chasm, and wing our way up the glen towards the source of the cataract. In a few miles all is silent. A more peaceful place is not among all the mountains. The water-spout that had fallen during night has found its way into Lochness, and the torrent has subsided into a burn. What the trouts did with themselves in the "red jawing speat," we are not naturalist enough to affirm, but we must suppose they have galleries running far into the banks, and corridors cut in the rocks, where they swim about in water without a gurgle, safe as golden and silver fishes in a glass-globe, on the table of my lady's boudoir. Not a fin on their backs has been injured-not a scale struck from their starry sides. There they leap in the sunshine among the burnished clouds of insects, that come floating along on the morning air from bush and bracken, the licheny cliffstones, and the hollow-rhinded woods. How glad the union of hum and murmur! Brattle not away so, ye foolish lambs, for although unkilted, unplaided, and unplumed in any tartan array, we are nathless humán beings. You never beheld any other Two-legs butCelts. Yet think not that Highlanders people the whole earth, any more than they

has been taking her flight over flood and fell, and speaking Gaelic with the Sons of the Mist. Doubtless, the gouty old Don has been soundly belaboured by the laughter of the ice-cream-eating dandies that on the steps of Montgomery's shop most do congregate; but what was their windy suspiration of forced breath, the only satire within the range of their impotence, to one who was with the red deer on the bare mountain, or with the roe in the sylvan glen? But hark, the horn! Ay, the driver recognizes our person, and pulls up before the pillars of the Grecian temple on that truly attic and artificial natural eminence, the Mound. A passing Lord of Session assists us to mount the box (our great-coat having kept that chosen seat for its master,) --all right, and off she goes at a spanking long trot, that, in little better than an hour, will carry us out of the county.

It may seem a very unromantic way of travelling into the ideal lands of the Imagination, on the top of a mail-coach; yet could not even a poet choose a more convenient and characteristic conveyance. Few sorts of wings could waft you with equal swiftness, certainty, and safety, away from those hideous lines of human dwellings called streets. How you exult in the greeting air of the hills, and eye disdainfully with retroverted glance the whole army of smoky chimneys, defiling afar off into one solid square! Behind, a dim, dull, dusky, dirty haze! Before, the true, unpolluted, celestial azure, beautiful as lover's dream of his own virgin's eyes on the morning of her bridal day! The very guard's bugle now speaks music to the echoes; and you bless the name of Adam in that of his son Mac, as his Majesty's most gracious Machine seems to spin self-impelled along the royal road both to Philosophy and Poetry.

We know not, at this moment, any other class of lieges so thoroughly amiable as mail-coach guards. What bold, yet civil eyes! How expressive the puffed-up cheek, when blowing a long line of carters into deflection! How elegant the attitude, when, strap-supported, he leans from behind over the polished roof, and joins in your conversation in front, with a brace of Bagmen! With what activity he descends to fix the drag! and how like a winged Mercury he re-ascends, when

the tits are at full gallop along the flat! See with what an air he flings kisses to every maiden that comes smiling to the cottage-door, at the due transit of the locomotive horologe! You would think he had wooed and won them all beneath the dewy milkwhite thorn; yet these fleeting moments of bliss are all he has ever enjoyed, all he ever can enjoy-for, by the late regulations, you know mails go at the rate of nine knots an hour, stoppages included, so all such little love-affairs are innocent as in the days of gold, and before the invention of paper-money. The most bashful maiden, knowing that she is perfectly safe, flings towards the dickey her lavish return-kisses, and is seen squandering them, as if she had forgot that some should be kept for real use and sudden demand, on one, who at the next turn of the road is found faithless to the "love he has left behind him," and like another Joannes Secundus, bestowing his "Basia" on a new mistress a work that thus steadily runs through a greater number of real editions, than any of the late most important" ones of our worthy friend Mr Colburn.

If the day be a fine one-and the Bagmen facetious-it matters not much to us through what kind of a country we are trundled along-pastoral or agricultural-dank or drainednaked, woody, or with only here and there a single tree. It is the country-that is enough-the bosom of old mother earth, from which we grashoppers sprung. What although mile upon mile of moor and moss lie before and around us, like a silent and sullen sea? Yet to our ears it is neither silent nor sullen. Like Fine-ear himself, in the tale, we hear the very grass growing-the very ground-bees buzzing among their first-formed combs in their cozy nests-the ants repairing the interior of their templethe mole mining his way to the surface of the greensward, preceded by the alarmed worms-the tad-poles jerking in the ditch-waters, here as clear as any springs-the footsteps of the unseen lapwing on the lea-the rustle of the little leverets, close by their mother's side, hidden among the brackens! But we might go on thus for a whole sheet

so, suffice it to say, that during the occasional silence of the politico-economical Bagmen ceasing to dissert on

free trade, the whole resources of natural history are at our disposal, and we commune almost unconsciously with the reviving spirit of animated and inanimated nature.

Gentle reader! are you fond of roaming about the country by yourself, at some considerable distance from your domicile? We say at some considerable distance from your domicile; for to be familiarly known by all the men, women, and children you foregather with, is tiresome in the extreme, both to yourself and them, and almost disgusting. In such excursions, however made, on foot, filly, or fly, how pleasantly every object affects you, as you creep or canter by, without the smallest necessity for that painful process-ratiocination! The senses are indeed most admirable contrivances; and we cannot be sufficiently thankful for "the harvests of a quiet eye" or ear, reaped at her leisure by the Imagination! There is a cottage-you cannot help seeing its wreathing smoke, neither can you help descending the chimney, and plumping down into the midst of four laughing country girls, devouring soup or sowens. Only look at the gudewife-twelve feet in circumference, more or less, and a face that baffles all competition. After romping a moment-for it is all you can spare with one of the four who has taken your fancy you know not how-perhaps by the stedfast gaze of her large hazel eyes swimming in de-, licious lustre instead of taking your departure up the chimney, you evanish, generally, after the fashion of a Brownie and find yourself once more sitting cheek by jowl, in medio tutissimus, of your two Bagmen.

There again, that wreath of smoke attracts your eye, wavering over a small coppice-wood, and betraying an unseen dwelling. Dove-like you wing your way thither wards, and behold an aged couple sitting opposite to each other by the ingle, each in a highbacked arm-chair; while a small maiden is sewing in silence on her stool, exactly midway between, and never lifting her eyes from her pleasant taskwork. Is she servant or grandchild, or both together? An indescribable likeness on her pretty small-featured infantine face, tells you that she is of the same humble line as the old people. But why so silent? She is listening to the story of Joseph sold by

his brethren into captivity. The Bible is on the old man's knees, and his spectacled eyes are fixed on the page, almost needlessly, for verse after verse rises of itself before his memory. The chapter is finished, and the child,wiping away a tear, lays by the kerchief she had been hemming, and trips away to the garden for dinner herbs, and with a pitcher to the well. The open daylight awakens a song in her gladdened heart, at the very moment the lark is leaving earth for sky; and flinging back her auburn ringlets, the joyful orphan watches the lessening bird, and all the while unconsciously accompanies with her own sweet pipe the ascending song. But back to your own two Bag

men.

You cannot choose but see a nestlike Hut, embowered in birches, on the braeside, and stooping your head you cross the threshold. Not a mouse stirring! You look into a little backroom, with a window that shows but the blue sky, and there, sound asleep, beside her silent wheel, with her innocent face leaning on her shoulder, hands clasped on her lap, and her white unstockinged ankles dazzling the mud-floor-there sits the Gentle Shepherdess, unconscious of a hundred kisses on forehead, lips, and bo som. Oh! that you could read the creature's dream, written as it is in characters of light on that cloudless forehead! See, an old ballad has fallen from her hand-doubtless a tale of love. Ay, and although breathed, a hundred years ago, from the heart of a homely swain, who perhaps married a plain coarse lass, and became father of ever so many yelping imps of hungry children-a very clodhopper, who could not write his own name, and as for conversation, was never known to finish a sentence-a vulgar wretch, who shaved once a-week, and ate a furlot of meal every fortnight-and who played the fiddle occasionally, when the regular Apollo was drunk or dead, at fairs and kirns-ay, although framed by such a poet, yet tender and true to nature, and overflowing with the sad delight of his inspired soul. Contributor to all the Magazines but one! Author of various pieces in prose and verse! Inditer of Petrarchan sonnets and Sapphic songs! that terræ filius, who has gone back to the dust without his fame, was dearer than ever thou wilt be to all the heaven

ly Nine. They purified the clown's soul from all gross and earthly passions, and with their own breath fanned the spark of genius, that slumbered there, into a flame. Then flowed the sweet murmuring words-then came the pensive pauses-and then the bursts from the beating and burn ing heart. Nature knew it was Poetry-and she gave it to Time and Tradition to scatter over a thousand glens. How, pray ye, do you account for the caprice of genius, thus glorifying the low-born, low-bred peasant -and why should low birth, and low breeding, in cottage, hut, or shieling, be thus made beautiful by the light of undying song? But the solitary maiden awakes and takes you for a robber-so up again, my dear sir, up again to your Bagmen.

In short, you keep repeating the same process, with variations, all the stage, and by the time you arrive at the inn, you have made yourself thoroughly acquainted with all the real or imaginary domestic economy and private histories of all the families in three successive parishes, from the sexton to Sir John Haveril-himself of that Ilk.

In like manner you become enlightened, whether you will or no, by merely keeping your eyes open in your head, on the state of agriculture. Stone walls, where no stone walls should be, or tumbling down in rickels and gaps; open gates, with broken bars that would not turn a tinkler's cuddy; wide weedy ditches, full of frogs and foliage; burweeds thick-set in every pasture field, as a congregation at a tent-preaching; thistles six feet to the grenadiers, and five feet eight inches to the light-infantry, and Matthew Brambles, through whom many a sheep has become a prey to the ravens, are seen by your eyes in spite of your teeth, and your mind passes judgment for you on the stupidity or laziness of the tenant, who, you see, is behind with his rent, and has orders to quit at Mayday. Or, hedgerows here and there, with a princely elm or oak, all clean as those round a garden, and easily-shifted hurdles dividing the smiling fields into temporary enclosures-and padlocked gates defying the cunning of stray horses, or the carelessness of wandering lovers-and compost heaps, on which may the hind's spring-spade not disturb the

Or, if you are like us, not only a politician and a philosopher, but also a painter and a poet, why, what hinders you all the while the mail is at nine knots, to leap down into yonder glen, on whose brink, three hundred feet high of chasmed cliffs frowns, or rather say smiles, so green is the ivy on one rounded corner, and so red the wall-flower on the sharp edges of the other, and so bright the sunshine over all the revivified walls-a Castle so old that tradition has forsaken its donjon-keep, nor could Jonathan Oldbuck himself tell the tale of the spurs and dagger dug up along with the great yellow bones!-sketch the old Castle and bring away, if not in your paper-book, in your astounded spirit, that grim, black, groaning abyss, into which sullenly descends the waterfall! Tumble in there, my boy, head over heels, and thenceforth you will be invisible as the merit of the last damned tragedy. But you shan't be hissed-unless in your descent, reverberating the slimy rock walls, you enrage a nest of owls-or irritate a surly old bat, taking a cool nap beneath the portico of his cavern. It is a gross mistake to dream that the river in flood will drive your mangled corse down to the lowlying lands, where being picked up, it may be conveyed to the Modern Athens for Christian burial. We tell you, for the second time, your corse will never be seen on this side of eternity-for at the bottom of that huge rock, that rises like a steeple from the channel to the Castle's foundation, time and the torrent have scooped out a catacomb, from which there is no