sweet its murmurs to our ear, they no longer sink into our
hearts. So let it mingle with the Cart, and the Cart with the Clyde, and
the Clyde widen away in all his majesty, till the river becomes a firth,
and the firth the sea;--but we shut our eyes, and relapse into the
vision that showed us the solitary region dearest to our imagination and
our hearts, and opening them on completion of the charm that works
within the spirit when no daylight is there, rejoice to find ourselves
again sole-sitting on the Green-Brae above the Brother Loch.

Such is an off-hand picture of Our Parish--pray give us one of yours,
that both may gain by comparison. But is ours a true picture? True as
Holy Writ--false as any fiction in an Arabian tale. How is this?
Perception, memory, imagination, are all moods--states of mind. But
mind, as we said before, is one substance, and matter another; and mind
never deals with matter without metamorphosing it like a mythologist.
Thus truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, become all one and the
same; for they are so essentially blended, that we defy you to show what
is biblical--what apocryphal--and what pure romance. How we transpose
and dislocate while we limn in aerial colours! Where tree never grew we
drop it down centuries old--or we tear out the gnarled oak by the roots,
and steep what was once his shadow in sunshine--hills sink at a touch,
or at a beck mountains rise; yet amidst all those fluctuations the
spirit of the place remains the same; for in that spirit has imagination
all along been working, and boon nature smiles on her son as he
imitates her creations--but "hers are heavenly, his an empty dream."

Where lies Our Parish, and what is its name? Seek, and you will find it
either in Renfrewshire, or in Utopia, or in the Moon. As for its name,
men call it the Mearns. M'Culloch, the great Glasgow painter--and in
Scotland he has no superior--will perhaps accompany you to what once was
the Moor. All the Four Lochs, we understand, are there still; but the
Little Loch transmogrified into an auxiliar appurtenance to some cursed
Wark--the Brother Loch much exhausted by daily drains upon him by we
know not what wretch--the White Loch _larched_--and the Black Loch of a
ghastly blue, cruelly cultivated all close round the brim. From his moor

"The parting genius is with sighing sent;"

but sometimes, on blear-eyed days, he is seen disconsolately sitting in
some yet mossy spot among the ruins