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.