re, lying in a small
forest glade of the lady-fern, ambitious no longer of a throne on
Benlomond or Ben-nevis, you dream away the still hours till sunset, yet
then have no reason to weep that you have lost a day.

But the best way to view the mountains is to trace the Glens. To find
out the glens you must often scale the shoulders of mountains, and in
such journeys of discovery, you have for ever going on before your eyes
glorious transfigurations. Sometimes for a whole day one mighty mass
lowers before you unchanged; look at it after the interval of hours, and
still the giant is one and the same. It rules the region, subjecting all
other altitudes to its sway, though many of them range away to a great
distance; and at sunset retains it supremacy, blazing almost like a
volcano with fiery clouds. Your line of journey lies, perhaps, some two
thousand feet above the level of the sea, and seldom dips down to one
thousand; and these are the heights from which all above and all below
you looks most magnificent, for both regions have their full power over
you--the unscaleable cliffs, the unfathomable abysses--and you know not
which is the more sublime. The sublimity indeed is one. It is then that
you may do well to ascend to the very mountain-top. For it may happen to
be one of those heavenly days indeed, when the whole Highlands seem to
be reposing in the cloudless sky.

But we were about to speak of the Glens. And some of them are best
entered by such descents as these--perhaps at their very head--where all
at once you are in another world, how still, how gloomy, how profound!
An hour ago and the eye of the eagle had not wider command of earth,
sea, and sky, than yours--almost blinded now by the superincumbent
precipices that imprison you, and seem to shut you out from life.

"Such the grim desolation, where Ben-Hun
And Craig-na-Torr, by earthquake shatterings
Disjoined with horrid chasms prerupt, enclose
What superstition calls the Glen of Ghosts."

Or you may enter some great glen from the foot, where it widens into
vale or strath--and there are many such--and some into which you can
sail up an arm of the sea. For a while it partakes of the cultivated
beauty of the lowlands, and glen and vale seem almost one and the same;
but gradually it undergoes a strange wild change of character, and in a
few miles that similitude is lost. There is little or no arable ground
here; but the pasture is rich on the unen