ople will be affectingly
recognised wherever they go, in spite even of what might have appeared
the insuperable barriers of nature.

"Time and Tide
Have washed away, like weeds upon the sands,
Crowds of the olden life's memorials;
And 'mid the mountains you as well might seek
For the lone site of fancy's filmy dreams.
Towers have decay'd and moulder'd from the cliffs,
Or their green age, or grey, has help'd to build
New dwellings sending up their household smoke
From treeless places once inhabited
But by the secret sylvans. On the moors
The pillar-stone, reared to perpetuate
The fame of some great battle, or the power
Of storied necromancer in the wild,
Among the wide change on the heather-bloom
By power more wondrous wrought than his, its name
Has lost, or fallen itself has disappear'd;
No broken fragment suffer'd to impede
The glancing ploughshare. All the ancient woods
Are thinn'd and let in floods of daylight now,
Then dark and dern as when the Druids lived.
Narrow'd is now the red-deer's forest reign;
The royal race of eagles is extinct.
But other changes than on moor and cliff
Have tamed the aspect of the wilderness;
The simple system of primeval life,
Simple but stately, hath been broken down;
The clans are scatter'd, and the chieftain's power
Is dead, or dying--but a name--though yet
It sometimes stirs the desert; to the winds
The tall plumes wave no more--the tartan green
With fiery streaks among the heather-bells
Now glows unfrequent; and the echoes mourn
The silence of the music that of old
Kept war-thoughts stern amid the calm of peace.
Yet to far battle plains still Morven sends
Her heroes, and still glittering in the sun,
Or blood-dimm'd, her dread line of bayonets
Marches with loud shouts straight to victory.
A soften'd radiance now floats o'er her glens;
No rare sight now upon her sea-arm lochs
The sail oft-veering up the solitude;
And from afar the noise of life is brought
Within the thunders of her cataracts.
These will flow on for ever; and the crests,
Gold-tipt by rising and by setting suns,
Of her old mountains inaccessible
Glance down their scorn for ever on the toils
That load with harvests now the humbler hills,
Now shorn of all their heather bloom, and green