e
clearing!) and bending in a mighty blue bow, that brightly overarches
all the brightened habitations of men! The spires shoot up into the
sky--the domes tranquilly rest there--all the roofs glitter as with
diamonds, all the white walls are lustrous, save where, here and there,
some loftier range of buildings hangs its steadfast shadow o'er square
or street, magnifying the city, by means of separate multitudes of
structures, each town-like in itself, and the whole gathered together by
the outward eye, and the inward imagination, worthy indeed of the name
of Metropolis.

Let us sit down on this bench below the shadow of the Parthenon. The air
is now so rarified, that you can see not indistinctly the figure of a
man on Arthur's Seat. The Calton, though a city hill, is as green as the
Carter towering over the Border-forest. Not many years ago, no stone
edifice was on his unviolated verdure--he was a true rural Mount, where
the lassies bleached their claes, in a pure atmosphere, aloof from the
city smoke almost as the sides and summit of Arthur's Seat. Flocks of
sheep might have grazed here, had there been enclosures, and many milch
cows. But in their absence a pastoral character was given to the Hill by
its green silence, here and there broken by the songs and laughter of
those linen-bleaching lassies, and by the arm-in-arm strolling of lovers
in the morning light or the evening shade. Here married people used to
walk with their children, thinking and feeling themselves to be in the
country; and here elderly gentlemen, like ourselves, with gold-headed
canes or simple crutches, mused and meditated on the ongoings of the
noisy lower world. Such a Hill, so close to a great City, yet
undisturbed by it, and imbued at all times with a feeling of sweeter
peace, because of the immediate neighbourhood of the din and stir of
which its green recess high up in the blue air never partook, seems now,
in the mingled dream of imagination and memory, to have been a
super-urban Paradise! But a city cannot, ought not to be, controlled in
its growth; the natural beauty of this hill has had its day; now it is
broken all round with wide walks, along which you might drive chariots
abreast; broad flights of stone-stairs lead up along the once elastic
brae-turf; and its bosom is laden with towers and temples, monuments and
mausoleums. Along one side, where hanging gardens might have been,
magnificent as those of the old Babylon, stretches the mac