ear," Hamlet, "Othello,"
"Macbeth?"--"PARADISE LOST."

INCH-CRUIN.

Oh! for the plumes and pinions of the poised Eagle, that we might now
hang over Loch Lomond and all her isles! From what point of the compass
would we come on our rushing vans? Up from Leven-banks, or down from
Glenfalloch, or over the hill of Luss, or down to Rowardennan; and then
up and away, as the chance currents in the sky might lead, with the
Glory of Scotland, blue, bright, and breaking into foam, thousands on
thousands of feet below, with every Island distinct in the peculiar
beauty of its own youthful or ancient woods? For remember, that with the
eagle's wing we must also have the eagle's eye; and all the while our
own soul to look with such lens and such iris, and with its own endless
visions to invest the pinnacles of all the far-down ruins of church or
castle, encompassed with the umbrage of undying oaks.

We should as soon think of penning a critique on "Milton's Paradise
Lost" as on Loch Lomond. People there are in the world, doubtless, who
think them both too long; but to our minds, neither the one nor the
other exceeds the due measure by a leaf or a league. Toil may, if it so
pleaseth you, think it, in a mist, a Mediterranean Sea. For then you
behold many miles of tumbling waves, with no land beyond; and were a
ship to rise up in full sail, she would seem voyaging on to some distant
shore. Or you may look on it as a great arm only of the ocean, stretched
out into the mountainous mainland. Or say, rather, some river of the
first order, that shows to the sun Islands never ceasing to adorn his
course for a thousand leagues, in another day, about to be lost in the
dominion of the sea. Or rather look on it as it is, as Loch Lomond, the
Loch of a hundred Isles--of shores laden with all kinds of beauty,
throughout the infinite succession of bays and harbours--huts and
houses sprinkled over the sides of its green hills, that ever and anon
send up a wider smoke from villages clustering round the church-tower
beneath the wooded rocks--halls half-hidden in groves, for centuries the
residence of families proud of their Gaelic blood--forest that, however
wide be the fall beneath the axe when their hour is come, yet, far as
the eye can reach, go circling round the mountain's base, inhabited by
the roe and the red-deer;--but we have got into a sentence that
threatens to be without end--a dim, dreary, sentence, in the middle of
which the very