t picturesque member of the system,--abrupt
and bold of outline in its hills, and mural in its precipices. And
nowhere does it exhibit a wilder or more characteristic beauty than at
the tall narrow portal of the Auldgrande, where the river,--after
wailing for miles in a pent-up channel, narrow as one of the lanes of
old Edinburgh, and hemmed in by walls quite as perpendicular, and
nearly twice as lofty,--suddenly expands, first into a deep brown pool,
and then into a broad tumbling stream, that, as if permanently affected
in temper by the strict severity of the discipline to which its early
life had been subjected, frets and chafes in all its after course, till
it loses itself in the sea. The banks, ere we reach the opening of the
chasm, have become steep, and wild, and densely wooded; and there stand
out on either hand, giant crags, that plant their iron feet in the
stream; here girdled with belts of rank succulent shrubs, that love the
damp shade and the frequent drizzle of the spray; and there hollow and
bare, with their round pebbles sticking out from the partially
decomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great underground
cemetery of the Parisians. Massy trees, with their green fantastic roots
rising high over the scanty soil, and forming many a labyrinthine recess
for the frog, the toad, and the newt, stretch forth their gnarled arms
athwart the stream. In front of the opening, with but a black deep pool
between, there lies a midway bank of huge stones. Of these, not a few of
the more angular masses still bear, though sorely worn by the torrent,
the mark of the blasting iron, and were evidently tumbled into the chasm
from the fields above. But in the chasm there was no rest for them, and
so the arrowy rush of the water in the confined channel swept them down
till they dropped where they now lie, just where the widening bottom
first served to dissipate the force of the current. And over the sullen
pool in front we may see the stern pillars of the portal rising from
eighty to a hundred feet in height, and scarce twelve feet apart, like
the massive obelisks of some Egyptian temple; while, in gloomy vista
within, projection starts out beyond projection, like column beyond
column in some narrow avenue of approach to Luxor or Carnac. The
precipices are green, with some moss or byssus, that like the miner,
chooses a subterranean habitat,--for here the rays of the sun never
fall; the dead, mossy water beneath, fr