outh? Is it
so sad a thing indeed to be alone? or to have one's motions
circumscribed within the narrowest imaginable limits? Nonsense all!

Then, gentle reader, were you ever in a Highland shieling? Often since
you read our Recreations. It is built of turf, and is literally alive;
for the beautiful heather is blooming, wildflowers and walls and roof
are one sound of bees. The industrious little creatures must have come
several long miles for their balmy spoil. There is but one human
creature in that shieling, but he is not at all solitary. He no more
wearies of that lonesome place than do the sunbeams or the shadows. To
himself alone he chants his old Gaelic songs, or frames wild ditties of
his own to the raven or red-deer. Months thus pass on; and he descends
again to the lower country. Perhaps he goes to the
wars--fights--bleeds--and returns to Badenoch or Lochaber; and once
more, blending in his imagination the battles of his own regiment, in
Egypt, Spain, or Flanders, with the deeds done of yore by Ossian sung,
sits contented by the door of the same shieling, restored and
beautified, in which he had dreamt away the summers of his youth.

What has become--we wonder--of Dartmoor Prison? During that long war its
huge and hideous bulk was filled with Frenchmen--ay,

"Men of all climes--attach'd to none--were there;"

--a desperate race--robbers and reavers, and ruffians and rapers, and
pirates and murderers--mingled with the heroes who, fired by freedom,
had fought for the land of lilies, with its vine-vales and "hills of
sweet myrtle"--doomed to die in captivity, immured in that doleful
mansion on the sullen moor. There thousands pined and wore away and
wasted--and when not another groan remained within the bones of their
breasts, they gave up the ghost. Young heroes prematurely old in baffled
passions--life's best and strongest passions, that scorned to go to
sleep but in the sleep of death. These died in their golden prime. With
them went down into unpitied and unhonoured graves--for pity and honour
dwell not in houses so haunted--veterans in their iron age--some
self-smitten with ghastly wounds that let life finally bubble out of
sinewy neck or shaggy bosom--or the poison-bowl convulsed their giant
limbs unto unquivering rest. Yet there you saw a wild strange tumult of
troubled happiness--which, as you looked into its heart, was
transfigured into misery. There volatile spirits fluttered in their
cage, like