him, who did not find in it, if they had really
anything good in them, moral or intellectual, a side that suited
themselves; and I had been long struck by that union which his
intellect exhibited of a comprehensive philosophy with a true poetic
faculty, very exquisite in quality, though dissociated from what
Wordsworth terms the "accomplishment of verse." I had not a little
pleasure in contemplating him on this occasion as the _poet_ Chalmers.
The day was calm and clear; but there was a considerable swell rolling
in from the German Ocean, on which our little vessel rose and fell, and
which sent the surf high against the rocks. The sunshine played amid the
broken crags a-top, and amid the foliage of an overhanging wood; or
caught, half-way down, some projecting tuft of ivy; but the faces of the
steeper precipices were brown in the shade; and where the wave roared in
deep caves beneath, all was dark and chill. There were several members
of the party who attempted engaging the Doctor in conversation; but he
was in no conversational mood. It would seem as if the words addressed
to his ear failed at first to catch his attention, and that, with a
painful courtesy, he had to gather up their meaning from the remaining
echoes, and to reply to them doubtfully and monosyllabically, at the
least possible expense of mind. His face wore, meanwhile, an air of
dreamy enjoyment. He was busy, evidently, among the crags and bosky
hollows, and would have enjoyed himself more had he been alone. In the
middle of one noble precipice, that reared its tall pine-crested brow
more than a hundred yards overhead, there was a bush-covered shelf of
considerable size, but wholly inaccessible; for the rock dropped sheer
into it from above, and then sank perpendicularly from its outer edge to
the beach below; and the insulated shelf, in its green unapproachable
solitude, had evidently caught his eye. _It_ was the scene, I
said--taking the direction of his eye as the antecedent for the
_it_,--it was the scene, says tradition, of a sad tragedy during the
times of the persecution of Charles. A renegade chaplain, rather weak
than wicked, threw himself, in a state of wild despair, over the
precipice above; and his body, intercepted in its fall by that shelf,
lay unburied among the bushes for years after, until it had bleached
into a dry and whitened skeleton. Even as late as the last age, the
shelf continued to retain the name of the "Chaplain's Lair." I foun