lar. Desire springs from
separation. The spirit seeks to unite itself to the beauty it loves, the
grandeur it admires, the sublimity it almost fears; and all these being
o'er the hills and far away, or on the hills cloud-hidden, why it--the
spirit--makes itself wings--or rather wings grow up of themselves in its
passion, and naturewards it flies like a dove or an eagle. People
looking at us believe us present, but they never were so far mistaken in
their lives; for in the Seamew are we sailing with the tide through the
moonshine on Loch Etive--or hanging o'er that gulf of peril on the bosom
of Skyroura.

We are sitting now in a dusky den--with our eyes shut--but we see the
whole Highlands. Our Highland Mountains are of the best possible
magnitude--ranging between two and four thousand feet high--and then in
what multitudes! The more familiar you become with them, the mightier
they appear--and you feel that it is all sheer folly to seek to dwindle
or dwarf them, by comparing them as they rise before your eyes with your
imagination of Mont Blanc and those eternal glaciers. If you can bring
them under your command, you are indeed a sovereign--and have a noble
set of subjects. In some weather they are of any height you choose to
put them--say thirty thousand feet--in other states of the atmosphere
you think you could walk over their summits and down into the region
beyond in an hour. Try. We have seen Cruachan, during a whole black day,
swollen into such enormous bulk, that Loch Awe looked like but a sullen
river at his base, her woods bushes, and Kilchurn no bigger than a
cottage. The whole visible scene was but he and his shadow. They seemed
to make the day black, rather than the day to make them so--and at
nightfall he took wider and loftier possession of the sky--the clouds
congregated round without hiding his summit, on which seemed to twinkle,
like earth-lighted fires, a few uncertain stars. Rain drives you into a
shieling--and you sit there for an hour or two in eloquent confabulation
with the herdsman, your English against his Gaelic. Out of the door you
creep--and gaze in astonishment on a new world. The mist is slowly
rolling up and away in long lines of clouds, preserving, perhaps, a
beautiful regularity on their ascension and evanescence, and between
them

"Tier above tier, a wooded theatre
Of stateliest view,"

or cliff galleries with strange stone-images sitting up aloft; and yet
your eyes have not