.

All this may be very fine, but cannot be said to help us far on with our
Prologue. Let us try it again. Old men, we remarked, ought to be
thankful to Heaven for their dim memories. Never do we feel that more
profoundly than when dreaming about the Highlands. All is confusion.
Nothing distinctly do we remember--not even the names of lochs and
mountains. Where is Ben Cru--Cru--Cru--what's-his-name?
Ay--ay--Cruachan. At this blessed moment we see his cloud-capped
head--but we have clean forgotten the silver sound of the name of the
county he encumbers. Ross-shire? Nay, that won't do--he never was at
Tain. We are assured by Dr Reid's, Dr Beattie's, and Dugald Stewart's
great Instinctive First Principle Belief, that oftener than once, or ten
times either, have we been in a day-long hollow among precipices dear to
eagles, called Glen-Etive. But where begins or where ends that "severe
sojourn" is now to us a mystery--though we hear the sound of the sea and
the dashing of cataracts. Yet though all is thus dim in our memory,
would you believe it that nothing is utterly lost? No, not even the
thoughts that soared like eagles vanishing in the light--or that dived
like ravens into the gloom. They all reappear--those from the
Empyrean--these from Hades--reminding us of the good or the evil borne
in other days, within the spiritual regions of our boundless being. The
world of eye and ear is not in reality narrowed because it glimmers;
ever and anon as years advance, a light direct from heaven dissipates
the gloom, and bright and glorious as of yore the landscape laughs to
the sea, the sea to heaven, and heaven back again to the gazing spirit
that leaps forward to the hailing light with something of the same
divine passion that gave wings to our youth.

All this may be still finer, yet cannot be said, any more than the
preceding paragraph, much to help us on with our Prologue. To come then,
if possible, to the point at once--We are happy that our dim memory and
our dim imagination restore and revive in our mind none but the
characteristic features of the scenery of the Highlands, unmixed with
baser matter, and all floating magnificently through a spiritual haze,
so that the whole region is now more than ever idealised; and in spite
of all his present, past, and future prosiness--Christopher North, soon
as in thought his feet touch the heather, becomes a poet.

It has long been well known to the whole world that we are a sad
egot