n the
left deflects into a line nearly parallel to the shore, leaving a
comparatively level strip of moory land, rather more than a mile in
breadth, between the steeper acclivities and the beach. A tall naked
house rises between the road and the sea. Two low islands immediately
behind it, only a few acres in extent,--one of them bearing a small ruin
on its apex,--give a little variety to the central point in the prospect
which the naked house forms; but the arm of the sea, bordered, at the
time I passed, by a broad brown selvage of sea-weed, is as tame and flat
as a Dutch lake; the background beyond, a long monotonous ridge, is bare
and treeless; and in front lies the brown moory plain, bordered by the
dull line of hills and darkened by scattered stacks of peat.

The scene is not at all such a one as a poet would, for its own sake,
delight to fancy; and yet, in the recollection of at least one very
pleasing poet, its hills, and islands, and blue arm of the sea, its
brown moory plain, and tall naked house rising in the midst, must have
been surrounded by a sunlit atmosphere of love and desire, bright enough
to impart to even its tamest features a glow of exquisiteness and
beauty. Malcolm the poet was born, and spent his years of boyhood and
early youth, in the tall naked house; and the surrounding landscape is
that to which he refers in his "Tales of Flood and Field," as rising in
imagination before him, bright in the red gleam of the setting sun,
when, on the steep slopes of the Pyrenees, the "silent stars of night
were twinkling high over his head," and the "tents of the soldiery
glimmering pale through the gloom." The tall house is the manse of the
parish of Frith and Stennis; and the poet was the son of the Rev. John
Malcolm, its minister. Here, when yet a mere lad, dreaming, in the quiet
obscurity of an Orkney parish, far removed from the seat of war and the
literary circles, of poetic celebrity and military renown, he addressed
a letter to the Duke of Kent, the father of our Sovereign Lady the
reigning Monarch, expressing an ardent wish to obtain a commission in
the army then engaged in the Peninsula. The letter was such as to excite
the interest of his Royal Highness, who replied to it by return of post,
requesting the writer to proceed forthwith to London; for which he
immediately set out, and was received by the Duke with courtesy and
kindness. He was instructed by him to take ship for Spain, in which he
arrived