w to love,"

but overflowing in our memory with all pleasantest images of pastoral
contentment and peace.

Loch Etive, between the ferries of Connel and Bunawe, has been seen by
almost all who have visited the Highlands--but very imperfectly; to know
what it is, you must row or sail up it, for the banks on both sides are
often richly wooded, assume many fine forms, and are frequently well
embayed, while the expanse of water is sufficiently wide to allow you
from its centre to command a view of many of the distant heights. But
above Bunawe it is not like the same loch. For a couple of miles it is
not wide, and it is so darkened by enormous shadows that it looks even
less like a strait than a gulf--huge overhanging rocks on both sides
ascending high, and yet felt to belong but to the bases of mountains
that sloping far back have their summits among clouds of their own in
another region of the sky. Yet are they not all horrid; for nowhere else
is there such lofty heather--it seems a wild sort of brushwood; tall
trees flourish, single or in groves, chiefly birches, with now and then
an oak--and they are in their youth or their prime--and even the
prodigious trunks, some of which have been dead for centuries, are not
all dead, but shoot from their knotted rind symptoms of life
inextinguishable by time and tempest. Out of this gulf we emerge into
the Upper Loch, and its amplitude sustains the majesty of the mountains,
all of the highest order, and seen from their feet to their crests.
Cruachan wears the crown, and reigns over them all--king at once of Loch
Etive and of Loch Awe. But Buachaille Etive, though afar off, is still a
giant, and in some lights comes forwards, bringing with him the Black
Mount and its dependents, so that they all seem to belong to this most
magnificent of all Highland lochs. "I know not," says Macculloch, "that
Loch Etive could bear an ornament without an infringement on that aspect
of solitary vastness which it presents throughout. Nor is there one. The
rocks and bays on the shore, which might elsewhere attract attention,
are here swallowed up in the enormous dimensions of the surrounding
mountains, and the wide and ample expanse of the lake. A solitary house,
here fearfully solitary, situated far up in Glen Etive, is only visible
when at the upper extremity; and if there be a tree, as there are in a
few places on the shore, it is unseen; extinguished as if it were a
humble mountain flower, by the