oots of the old trees, and the bases of
the shaggy rocks. As if glad to escape from its savage birthplace, the
small rivulet now gives utterance to a song; and sliding down shelving
rocks, so low in their mossy verdure as hardly to deserve that name,
glides along the almost level lawns, here and there disclosing a little
hermit flower. No danger now of its being imbibed wholly by the thirsty
earth; for it has a channel and banks of its own--and there is a
waterfall! Thenceforwards the rivulet never loses its merry voice--and
in an hour it is a torrent. What beautiful symptoms now of its approach
to the edge of the Forest! Wandering lights and whispering airs are here
visitants--and there the blue eye of a wild violet looking up from the
ground! The glades are more frequent--more frequent open spaces cleared
by the woodman's axe--and the antique Oak-Tree all alone by itself,
itself a grove. The torrent may be called noble now; and that deep blue
atmosphere--or say rather, that glimmer of purple air--lies over the
Strath in which a great River rolls along to the Sea.

Nothing in all nature more beautiful than the boundary of a great
Highland Forest. Masses of rocks thrown together in magnificent
confusion, many of them lichened and weather-stained with colours
gorgeous as the eyed plumage of the peacock, the lustre of the rainbow,
or the barred and clouded glories of setting suns--some towering aloft
with trees sown in the crevices by bird or breeze, and checkering the
blue sky--others bare, black, abrupt, grim as volcanoes, and shattered
as if by the lightning-stroke. Yet interspersed, places of perfect
peace--circles among the tall heather, or taller lady-fern, smoothed
into velvet, it is there easy to believe, by Fairies' feet--rocks where
the undisturbed linnet hangs her nest among the blooming briers, all
floating with dew-draperies of honeysuckle alive with bees--glades green
as emerald, where lie the lambs in tempered sunshine, or haply a lovely
doe reposes with her fawn; and further down, where the fields half
belong to the mountain and half to the strath, the smoke of hidden
huts--a log-bridge flung across the torrent--a hanging-garden, and a
little broomy knoll, with a few laughing children at play, almost as
wild-looking as the wanderers of the woods!

Turn your eyes, if you can, from that lovely wilderness, and behold down
along a mile-broad Strath, fed by a thousand torrents, floweth the
noblest of Scotia's