aversed by gabion and fascine,
With cannon lowering in the rear
In dark array,--a deadly tier,--
Whose thunder-clouds, with fiery breath,
Sent far around their iron death;
The bursting shell, in fragments flung
Athwart the skies, at midnight sung,
Or, on its airy pathway sent,
Its meteors sweep the firmament.
Thy castle, towering o'er the shore,
Keeled on its rock amidst the roar
Of thousand thunders, for it stood
In circle of a fiery flood;
And crumbling masses fiercely sent
From its high frowning battlement,
Smote by the shot and whistling shell,
With groan and crash in ruin fell.
Through desert streets the mourner passed,
Midst-walls that spectral shadows east,
Like some fair spirit wailing o'er
The failed scenes it loved of yore;
No human voice was heard to bless
That place of waste and loneliness.

I saw at eve the night-bird fly,
And vulture dimly flitting by,
To revel o'er each morsel stolen
From the cold corse, all black and swoln
That on the shattered ramparts lay,
Of him who perished yesterday,--
Of him whose pestilential steam
Rose reeking on the morning beam,--
Whose fearful fragments, nearly gone,
Were blackening from the bleaching bone.

The house-dog bounded o'er each scene
Where cisterns had so lately been:
Away in frantic haste he sprung,
And sought to cool his burning tongue.
He howled, and to his famished cry
The dreary echoes gave reply;
And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim,
Rolled back in sad response to him."

The father was succeeded in his parish by the brother of Malcolm,--a
gentleman to whom, during my stay in Orkney, I took the liberty of
introducing myself in his snug little Free Church manse at the head of
the bay, and in whose possession I found the only portrait of the poet
which exists. It is that of a handsome and interesting looking _young_
man, though taken not many years before his death; for, like the greater
number of his class, he did not live to be an old one, dying under
forty. His brother the clergyman kindly accompanied me to two quarries
in the neighborhood of his new domicil, which I found, like almost all
the dry-stone fences of the district, speckled with scales, occipital
plates, and gill-covers, of Osteolepides and Dipteri, but containing no
entire ichthyolites. He had taken his side in the Church controversy, he
told me, firmly, but quietly; and when the Disruption came, and he found
it necessary to quit