and make no response.

But is it our intention to sit scribbling here all day? Our fancy lets
our feet enjoy their sinecure, and they stretch themselves out in
indolent longitude beneath the Tent-table, while we are settled in
spirit, a silent thought, on the battlements of our cloud-castle on the
summit of Cruachan. What a prospect! Our cloud-castle rests upon a
foundation of granite precipices; and down along their hundred chasms,
from which the eye recoils, we look on Loch-Etive bearing on its bosom
stationary--so it seems in the sunshine--one snow-white sail! What
brings the creature there--and on what errand may she be voyaging up the
uninhabited sea-arm that stretches away into the uninhabited mountains?
Some poet, perhaps, steers her--sitting at the helm in a dream, and
allowing her to dance her own way, at her own will, up and down the
green glens and hills of the foam-crested waves--a swell rolling in the
beauty of light and music for ever attendant on her, as the Sea-mew--for
so we choose to name her--pursues her voyage--now on water, and now, as
the breezes drop, in the air--elements at times undistinguishable, as
the shadows of the clouds and of the mountains mingle their imagery in
the sea. Oh! that our head, like that of a spider, were all studded with
eyes--that our imagination, sitting in the "palace of the soul" (a noble
expression, borrowed or stolen by Byron from Waller), might see all at
once all the sights from centre to circumference, as if all rallying
around her for her own delight, and oppressing her with the poetry of
nature--a lyrical, an elegiac, an epic, or a tragic strain. Now the
bright blue water-gleams enchain her vision, and are felt to constitute
the vital, the essential spirit of the whole--Loch Awe land-serpent,
large as serpent of the sea, lying asleep in the sun, with his burnished
skin all bedropt with scales of silver and of gold--the lands of Lorn,
mottled and speckled with innumerous lakelets, where fancy sees millions
of water-lilies riding at anchor in bays where the breezes have fallen
asleep--Oban, splendid among the splendours of that now almost
motionless mediterranean, the mountain-loving Linnhe Loch--Jura, Islay,
Colonsay, and nameless other islands, floating far and wide away on--on
to Coll and Tiree, drowned beneath the faint horizon. But now all the
eyes in our spider-head are lost in one blaze of undistinguishable
glory; for the whole Highlands of Scotland are up in