which alone flourished in
the times of its boulder clay--still maintains its place against the
Germanic invaders which cover the lower grounds, as the Celt of old used
to maintain exactly the same ground against the Saxon. And at the top of
a swelling moor, just beneath where the hills rise rugged and black,
stands the pale tall tower of Fairburn, that, seen in the gloamin', as I
have often seen it, seems a ghastly spectre of the past, looking from
out its solitude at the changes of the present. The freebooter, its
founder, had at first built it, for greater security, without a door,
and used to climb into it through the window of an upper story by a
ladder. But now unbroken peace brooded over its shattered ivy-bound
walls, and ploughed fields crept up year by year along the moory slope
on which it stood, until at length all became green, and the dark heath
disappeared. There is a poetic age in the life of most individuals, as
certainly as in the history of most nations; and a very happy age it is.
I had now fully entered on it; and enjoyed in my lonely walks along the
Conon, a happiness ample enough to compensate for many a long hour of
toil, and many a privation. I have quoted, as the motto of this chapter,
an exquisite verse from Burns. There is scarce another stanza in the
wide round of British literature that so faithfully describes the mood
which, regularly as the evening came, and after I had buried myself in
the thick woods, or reached some bosky recess of the river bank, used to
come stealing over me, and in which I have felt my heart and intellect
as thoroughly in keeping with the scene and hour as the still woodland
pool beside me, whose surface reflected in the calm every tree and rock
that rose around it, and every hue of the heavens above. And yet the
mood, though sweet, was also, as the poet expresses it, a pensive one:
it was steeped in the happy melancholy sung so truthfully by an elder
bard, who also must have entered deeply into the feeling.

"When I goe musing all alone,
Thinking of divers things foreknowne--
When I builde castles in the air,
Voide of sorrow and voide of care,
Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet--
Methinks the time runs very fleet;
All my joyes to this are follie;--
None soe sweet as melanchollie.

"When to myself I sit and smile,
With pleasing thoughts the time beguile,
By a brook side or wood soe green,
Unheard, unsought f