ou feel thyself to be into the heart
of a Highland forest, that knows no bounds but those of the uncertain
sky.

Away from our remembrance fades the noisy world of men into a silent
glimmer--and now it is all no more than a mere faint thought.
On--on--on! through briery brake--matted thicket--grassy
glade--On--on--on! further into the Forest! What a confusion of huge
stones, rocks, knolls, all tumbled together into a chaos--not without
its stern and sterile beauty! Still are there, above, blue glimpses of
the sky--deep though the umbrage be, and wide-flung the arms of the
oaks, and of pines in their native wilderness gigantic as oaks, and
extending as broad a shadow. Now the firmament has vanished--and all is
twilight. Immense stems, "in number without number
numberless,"--bewildering eye and soul--all
still--silent--steadfast--and so would they be in a storm. For what
storm--let it rage aloft as it might, till the surface of the forest
toss and roar like the sea--could force its path through these many
million trunks? The thunder-stone might split that giant there--how
vast! how magnificent!--but the brother by his side would not tremble;
and the sound--in the awful width of the silence--what more would it be
than that of the woodpecker alarming the insects of one particular tree!

Poor wretch that we are!--to us the uncompanioned silence of the
solitude hath become terrible. More dreadful is it than the silence of
the tomb; for there, often arise responses to the unuttered soliloquies
of the pensive heart. But this is as the silence, not of Time, but of
Eternity. No burial heaps--no mounds--no cairns! It is not as if man had
perished here, and been forgotten; but as if this were a world in which
there had been neither living nor dying. Too utter is the solitariness
even for the ghosts of dead! For they are thought to haunt the
burial-places of what once was their bodies--the chamber where the
spirit breathed its final farewell--the spot of its transitory love and
delight, or of its sin and sorrow--to gaze with troubled tenderness on
the eyes that once they worshipped--with cold ear to drink the music of
the voices long ago adored; and in all their permitted visitations, to
express, if but by the beckoning of the shadow of a hand, some
unextinguishable longing after the converse of the upper world, even
within the gates of the grave.

A change comes over us. Deep and still as is the solitude, we are
relieved of our