rest, and even the cushat haunts
not here. Hither the red-deer may come--but not now--for at this season
they love the hill. To such places the stricken stag might steal to lie
down and die.

And thus for hours may you be lost in the forest, nor all the while have
wasted one thought on the outer-world, till with no other warning but an
uncertain glimmer and a strange noise, you all at once issue forth into
the open day, and are standing on the brink of a precipice above a
flood. It comes tumbling down with a succession of falls, in a mile-long
course, right opposite your stance--rocks, cliffs, and trees, all the
way up on either side, majestically retiring back to afford ample
channel, and showing an unobstructed vista, closed up by the purple
mountain, that seems to send forth the river from a cavern in its
breast. 'Tis the Glen of Pines. Nor ash nor oak is suffered to intrude
on their dominion. Since the earthquake first shattered it out, this
great chasm, with all its chasms, has been held by one race of trees. No
other seed could there spring to life; for from the rocks has all soil,
ages ago, been washed and swept by the tempests. But there they stand
with glossy boles, spreading arms, and glittering crest; and those two
by themselves on the summit, known all over Badenoch as "the
Giants"--their "statures reach the sky."

We have been indulging in a dream of old. Before our day the immemorial
gloom of Glenmore had perished, and it ceased to be a forest. But there
bordered on it another region of night or twilight, and in its vast
depths we first felt the sublimity of lonesome fear. Rothiemurchus! The
very word blackens before our eyes with necromantic characters--again we
plunge into its gulfs desirous of what we dread--again, "in pleasure
high and turbulent," we climb the cliffs of Cairngorm.

Would you wish to know what is now the look of Glenmore? One now dead
and gone--a man of wayward temper, but of genius--shall tell you--and
think not the picture exaggerated--for you would not, if you were
_there_. "It is the wreck of the ancient forest which arrests all the
attention, and which renders Glenmore a melancholy, more than a
melancholy, a terrific spectacle. Trees of enormous height, which have
escaped alike the axe and the tempest, are still standing, stripped by
the winds, even of the bark, and, like gigantic skeletons, throwing far
and wide their white and bleached bones to the storms and rains of
heaven;