f beings long since departed from every gayer
and softer scene, but which still rise uncalled to the imagination in
those by-corners of nature which seem dedicated, like this cavern, to
the wild, the desolate, and the solitary.

There is a little rocky bay a few hundred yards to the west, which has
been known for ages, to all the seafaring men of the place, as the Cova
Green. It is such a place as we are sometimes made acquainted with in
the narratives of disastrous shipwrecks. First, there is a broad
semicircular strip of beach, with a wilderness of insulated piles of
rock in front; and so steep and continuous is the wall of precipices
which rises behind, that, though we may see directly over head the
grassy slopes of the hill, with here and there a few straggling firs, no
human foot ever gained the nearer edge. The bay of the Cova Green is a
prison to which the sea presents the only outlet; and the numerous caves
which open along its sides, like the arches of an amphitheatre, seem but
its darker cells. It is, in truth, a wild impressive place, full of
beauty and terror, and with none of the squalidness of the mere dungeon
about it. There is a puny littleness in our brick and lime receptacles
of misery and languor which speaks as audibly of the feebleness of man,
as of his crimes or his inhumanity; but here all is great and
magnificent--and there is much, too, that is pleasing. Many of the
higher cliffs, which rise beyond the influence of the spray, are
tapestried with ivy; we may see the heron watching on the ledges beside
her bundle of withered twigs, or the blue hawk darting from her cell;
there is life on every side of us--life in even the wild tumbling of the
waves, and in the stream of pure water which, rushing from the higher
edge of the precipice in a long white cord, gradually untwists itself by
the way, and spatters ceaselessly among the stones over the entrance of
one of the caves. Nor does the scene want its old story to strengthen
its hold on the imagination.

I am wretchedly uncertain in my dates, but it must have been some time
late in the reign of Queen Anne, that a fishing yawl, after vainly
labouring for hours to enter the bay of Cromarty, during a strong gale
from the west, was forced, at nightfall, to relinquish the attempt, and
take shelter in the Cova Green. The crew consisted of but two
persons--an old fisherman and his son. Both had been thoroughly drenched
by the spray, and chilled by the pier