sublime than the trampling of the feet of horses, or the sound of the wheels of chariots, to the heath-covered mountains of Scotland, we bid thee hail!

In all our wanderings through the Highlands, towards night we have always found ourselves at home. What though no human dwelling was at hand? We cared not-for we could find a bed-room among the casual inclinations of rocks, and of all curtains the wild-brier forms itself into the most gracefully-festooned draperies, letting in green light alone from the intercepted stars. Many a cave we know of-cool by day, and warm by night-how they happen to be so, we cannot tellwhere no man but ourselves ever slept, or ever will sleep; and sometimes, on startling a doe at evening in a thicket, we have lain down in her lair, and in our slumbers heard the rain pattering on the roofing birktree, but felt not one drop on our face, till at dawning we struck a shower of diamonds from the fragrant tresses. But to-night we shall not need to sleep among the sylvans; for our Tail has pitched our Tent on the Moor-and is now sweeping the mountain with telescope for sight of our descending feet. Hark! signal-gun and bagpipe hail our advent, and the Pyramid brightens in its joy, independent of the sunlight, that has left but one streak in the sky.

THE MOORS.

FLIGHT FIRST.-GLEN-ETIVE.

YES! all we have to do is to let 'down their lids-to will what our eyes shall see and, lo! there it is—a creation! Day dawns, and for our delight in soft illumination from the dim obscure floats slowly up a visionary loch-island after island evolving itself into settled stateliness above its trembling shadow, till, from the overpowering beauty of the wide confusion of woods and waters, we seek relief, but find none, in gazing on the sky; for the east is in all the glory of sunrise, and the heads and the names of the mountains are uncertain among the gorgeous colouring of the clouds. Would that we were a painter! Oh! how we should dash on the day and interlace it with night! That chasm should be filled with enduring gloom, thicker and thicker, nor the sun himself suffered to assuage the sullen spirit, now lowering and threatening there, as if portentous of earth

VOL. II.

D

quake. Danger and fear should be made to hang together for ever on those cliffs, and halfway up the precipice be fixed the restless cloud ascending from the abyss, so that in imagination you could not choose but hear the cataract. The Shadows should seem to be stalking away like evil spirits before angels of light-for at our bidding the Splendours should prevail against them, deploying from the gates of Heaven beneath the banners of morn. Yet the whole picture should be harmonious as a hymn-as a hymn at once sublime and sweetserene and solemn-nor should it not be felt as even cheerful-and sometimes as if there were about to be merriment in Nature's heart-for the multitude of the isles should rejoice-and the new-woke waters look as if they were waiting for the breezes to enliven them into waves, and wearied of rest to be longing for the motion already beginning to rustle by fits along the silvan shores. Perhaps a deer or two-but we have opened a corner of the fringed curtains of our eyes the idea is gone-and Turner or Thomson must transfer from our paper to his canvass the imperfect outline-for it is no more-and make us a present of the finished picture.

Strange that with all our love of nature, and of art, we never were a Painter. True that in boyhood we were no contemptible hand at a Lion or a Tiger-and sketches by us of such cats springing or preparing to spring in keelavine, dashed off some fifty or sixty years ago, might well make Edwin Landseer stare. Even yet we are a sort of Salvator Rosa at a savage

scene, and our black-lead pencil heaps up confused shatterings of rocks, and flings a mountainous region into convulsions, as if an earthquake heaved, in a way that is no canny, making people shudder as if something had gone wrong with this planet of ours, and creation were falling back into chaos. But we love scenes of beautiful repose too profoundly ever to dream of "transferring them to canvass." Such employment would be felt by us to be desecration-though we look with delight on the work when done by others—the picture without the process-the product of genius without thought of its mortal instruments. We work in words, and words are, in good truth, images, feelings, thoughts; and of these the outer world, as well as the inner is composed, let materialists say what they will. Prose is poetry-we have proved that to the satisfaction of all mankind. Look! we beseech you-how a little Loch seems to rise up with its tall heronry-a central isleand all its silvan braes, till it lies almost on a level with the floor of our Cave, from which in three minutes we could hobble on our crutch down the inclining greensward to the Bay of Waterlilies, and in that canoe be afloat among the Swans. All birches-not any other kind of tree-except a few pines, on whose tops the large nests repose and here and there a still bird standing as if asleep. What a place for Roes!

The great masters, were their eyes to fall on our idle words, might haply smile-not contemptuously-on our ignorance of art-but graciously on our knowledge of nature. All we have to do, then, is to learn the theory

and practice of art and assuredly we should forthwith set about doing so, had we any reasonable prospect of living long enough to open an exhibition of pictures from our own easel. As it is, we must be contented with that Gallery, richer than the Louvre, which our imagination has furnished with masterpieces beyond all price or purchase-many of them touched with her own golden finger, the rest the work of high but not superior hands. Imagination, who limns in air, has none of those difficulties to contend with that always beset, and often baffle, artists in oils or waters. At a breath she can modify, alter, obliterate, or restore; at a breath she can colour vacuity with rainbow hues-crown the cliff with its castle-swing the drawbridge over the gulf profoundthrough a night of woods roll the river along on its moonlit reach-by fragmentary cinctures of mist and cloud, so girdle one mountain that it has the power of a hundred-giant rising above giant, far and wide, as if the mighty multitude, in magnificent and triumphant disorder, were indeed scaling heaven.

To speak more prosaically, every true and accepted lover of nature regards her with a painter's as well as a poet's eye. He breaks not down any scene rudely, and with "many an oft-repeated stroke;" but unconsciously and insensibly he transfigures into Wholes, and all day long, from morn till dewy eve, he is preceded, as he walks along, by landscapes retiring in their perfection, one and all of them the birth of his own inspired spirit. All non-essentials do of themselves drop off and disappear-all the characteristics of the scenery range them