rhaps more than a mile and a quarter from Luss; we did not land there,
but rowed round the end, and landed on that side which looks towards our
favourite cottages, and their own island, which, wherever seen, is still
their own. It rained a little when we landed, and I took my cloak, which
afterwards served us to sit down upon in our road up the hill, when the
day grew much finer, with gleams of sunshine. This island belongs to Sir
James Colquhoun, who has made a convenient road, that winds gently to the
top of it.

We had not climbed far before we were stopped by a sudden burst of
prospect, so singular and beautiful that it was like a flash of images
from another world. We stood with our backs to the hill of the island,
which we were ascending, and which shut out Ben Lomond entirely, and all
the upper part of the lake, and we looked towards the foot of the lake,
scattered over with islands without beginning and without end. The sun
shone, and the distant hills were visible, some through sunny mists,
others in gloom with patches of sunshine; the lake was lost under the low
and distant hills, and the islands lost in the lake, which was all in
motion with travelling fields of light, or dark shadows under rainy
clouds. There are many hills, but no commanding eminence at a distance
to confine the prospect, so that the land seemed endless as the water.

What I had heard of Loch Lomond, or any other place in Great Britain, had
given me no idea of anything like what we beheld: it was an outlandish
scene--we might have believed ourselves in North America. The islands
were of every possible variety of shape and surface--hilly and level,
large and small, bare, rocky, pastoral, or covered with wood.
Immediately under my eyes lay one large flat island, bare and green, so
flat and low that it scarcely appeared to rise above the water, with
straggling peat-stacks and a single hut upon one of its out-shooting
promontories--for it was of a very irregular shape, though perfectly
flat. Another, its next neighbour, and still nearer to us, was covered
over with heath and coppice-wood, the surface undulating, with flat or
sloping banks towards the water, and hollow places, cradle-like valleys,
behind. These two islands, with Inch-ta-vanach, where we were standing,
were intermingled with the water, I might say interbedded and interveined
with it, in a manner that was exquisitely pleasing. There were bays
innumerable, straits or passa