ion herself has an
elevating influence, and will be suffered, even by religion, to show her
shadowy shape and mutter her wild voice through the gloom that lies on
the heads of the remote glens, and among the thousand caves of echo in
her iron-bound coasts, dashed on for ever--night and day--summer and
winter--by those sleepless seas, who have no sooner laid their heads on
the pillow than up they start with a howl that cleaves the Orcades, and
away off in search of shipwrecks round the corner of Cape Wrath.

In the third place, what shall we say of the poetical influence of
STILLS? What more poetical life can there be than that of the men with
whom we are now quaffing the barley-bree? They live with the moon and
stars. All the night winds are their familiars. If there be such things
as ghosts, and fairies, and apparitions--and that there are, no man who
has travelled much by himself after sunset will deny, except from the
mere love of contradiction--they see them; or when invisible, which they
generally are, hear them--here--there--everywhere--in sky, forest, cave,
or hollow-sounding world immediately beneath their feet. Many poets walk
these wilds; nor do their songs perish. They publish not with Blackwood
or with Murray--but for centuries on centuries, such songs are the
preservers, often the sources, of the oral traditions that go glimmering
and gathering down the stream of years. Native are they to the mountains
as the blooming heather, nor shall they ever cease to invest them with
the light of poetry--in defiance of large farms, Methodist preachers,
and the Caledonian Canal.

People are proud of talking of solitude. It redounds, they opine, to the
honour of their great-mindedness to be thought capable of living, for an
hour or two, by themselves, at a considerable distance from knots or
skeins of their fellow-creatures. Byron, again, thought he showed his
superiority by swearing as solemnly as a man can do in the Spenserian
stanza that

"To sit alone, and muse o'er flood and fell,"

has nothing whatever to do with solitude--and that, if you wish to know
and feel what solitude really is, you must go to Almack's.

"This is to be alone,--this, this is solitude."

His Lordship's opinions were often peculiar--but the passage has been
much admired; therefore we are willing to believe that the Great Desert
is, in point of loneliness, unable to stand a philosophical, much less a
poetical comparison, with a wel