on the following morning
took the steamer for Wick. I brought away with me, if not many rare
specimens or many new geological facts, at least a few pleasing
recollections of an interesting country and a hospitable people. In the
previous chapter I indulged in a brief quotation from Mr. David Vedder,
the sailor-poet of Orkney, and I shall make no apology for availing
myself in the present, of the vigorous, well-turned stanzas in which he
portrays some of those peculiar features by which the land of his
nativity may be best recognized and most characteristically remembered.

TO ORKNEY.

Land of the whirlpool,--torrent,--foam,
Where oceans meet in madd'ning shock;
The beetling cliff,--the shelving holm,--
The dark insidious rock.
Land of the bleak, the treeless moor,--
The sterile mountain, sered and riven,--
The shapeless cairn, the ruined tower,
Scathed by the bolts of heaven,--
The yawning gulf,--the treacherous sand,--
love thee still, MY NATIVE LAND.

Land of the dark, the Runic rhyme,--
The mystic ring,--the cavern hoar,--
The Scandinavian seer, sublime
In legendary lore.
Land of a thousand sea-kings' graves,--
Those tameless spirits of the past,
Fierce as their subject arctic waves,
Or hyperborean blast,--
Though polar billows round thee foam,
I love thee!--thou wert once my home.

With glowing heart and island lyre,
Ah! would some native bard arise
To sing, with all a poet's fire,
Thy stern sublimities,--
The roaring flood,--the rushing stream,--
The promontory wild and bare,--
The pyramid, where sea-birds scream,
Aloft in middle air,--
The Druid temple on the heath,
Old even beyond tradition's birth.

Though I have roamed through verdant glades,
In cloudless climes, 'neath azure skies,
Or plucked from beauteous orient meads,
Flowers of celestial dies,--
Though I have laved in limpid streams,
That murmur over golden sands,
Or basked amid the fulgid beams
That flame o'er fairer lands,
Or stretched me in the sparry grot,--
My country! THOU wert ne'er forgot.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] March 31, 1845.

[2] Professor Nicol of Aberdeen believes the Red Sandstones of the West
Highlands are of Devonian age, and the quartzite and limestone of Lower
Carboniferous.--_See Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,
February 1857._--W.S.

[3] Sir R. Murchison considers these rocks Silurian. See "Quarterly
Journal" of th