arrayed, and they
are at once graceful and glorious, have ever for a day withdrawn our
deeper dreams from the regions where,

"In life's morning march, when our spirit was young,"

unaccompanied but by our own shadow in the wilderness, we first heard
the belling of the red-deer and the eagle's cry.

In those days there was some difficulty, if not a little danger, in
getting in among some of the noblest regions of our Alps. They could not
be traversed without strong personal exertion; and a solitary pedestrian
excursion through the Grampians was seldom achieved without a few
incidents that might almost have been called adventures. It is very
different now; yet the _Genius Loci_, though tamed, is not subdued; and
they who would become acquainted with the heart of the Highlands, will
have need of some endurance still, and must care nothing about the
condition of earth or sky. Formerly, it was not possible to survey more
than a district or division in a single season, except to those
unenviable persons who had no other pursuit but that of amusement, and
waged a weary war with time. The industrious dwellers in cities, who
sought those solitudes, for a while to relieve their hearts from worldly
anxieties, and gratify that love of nature which is inextinguishable in
every bosom that in youth has beat with its noble inspirations, were
contented with a week or two of such intercommunion with the spirit of
the mountains, and thus continued to extend their acquaintance with the
glorious wildernesses, visit after visit, for years. Now the whole
Highlands, western and northern, may be commanded in a month. Not that
any one who knows what they are, will imagine that they can be exhausted
in a lifetime. The man does not live who knows all worth knowing there;
and were they who made the Trigonometrical Survey to be questioned on
their experiences, they would be found ignorant of thousands of sights,
any one of which would be worth a journey for its own sake. But now
steam has bridged the Great Glen, and connected the two seas.
Salt-water lochs the most remote and inaccessible, it has brought within
reach of a summer-day's voyage. In a week a joyous company can gather
all the mainland shores, leaving not one magnificent bay uncircled; and,
having rounded St Kilda and

"the Hebride Isles,
Placed far amid the melancholy main,"

and heard the pealing anthem of waves in the cave-cathedral of Staffa,
may