n the former case, her presence would not
have had any significance for Hewson, and, in the latter, would have
been overlooked by him save so far as might warrant a future vague
recollection, pre-occupied as his eyes and thoughts were by another.
There is one condition still under which we have as yet had little
opportunity of displaying this quality; but it will be found to be as
fully carried out in the descriptions of nature. In the first of our
extracts the worlds are few, but stand for many.

"Meaely glen, the heart of Lochiel's fair forest,
Where Scotch firs are darkest and amplest, and intermingle
Grandly with rowan and ash;--in Mar you have no ashes;
There the pine is alone or relieved by birch and alder."--p. 22.

In the next mere sound and the names go far towards the entire
effect; but not so far as to induce any negligence in essential
details:

"As, at return of tide, the total weight of ocean,
Drawn by moon and sun from Labrador and Greenland,
Sets in amain in the open space betwixt Mull and Scarfa,
Heaving, swelling, spreading, the might of the mighty Atlantic;
There into cranny and slit of the rocky cavernous bottom
Settles down; and with dimples huge the smooth sea-surface
Eddies, coils, and whirls, and dangerous Corryvreckan."--p. 52.

Two more passages, and they must suffice as examples. Here the
isolation is perfect; but it is the isolation, not of the place and
the actors only; it is, as it were, almost our own in an equal
degree;

"Ourselves too seeming
Not as spectators, accepted into it, immingled, as truly
Part of it as are the kine of the field lying there by the birches."
"There, across the great rocky wharves a wooden bridge goes,
Carrying a path to the forest; below,--three hundred yards, say,--
Lower in level some twenty-five feet, thro' flats of shingle,
Stepping-stones and a cart-track cross in the open valley.
But, in the interval here, the boiling pent-up water
Frees itself by a final descent, attaining a bason
Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury
Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror;
Beautiful there for the color derived from green rocks under;
Beautiful most of all where beads of foam uprising
Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness.
Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch-boughs,
Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and path