ures: there was the blank, leaden-coloured
sea, that seemed to mix all around with the blank, leaden-coloured
sky; the moors spread out around me, brown and barren, and studded
with rock and stone; the fogs, as they crept downwards, were lowering
the overtopping screen of hills behind to one dead level. Through the
landscape, otherwise so dingy and sombre, there ran one long line of
somewhat brighter hue: it was a long line of breakers tumbling against
the coast far as the eye could reach, and that seemed interposed as a
sort of selvage between the blank, leaden sea, and the deep,
melancholy russet of the land. Through one of those changes so common
in dreams, the continuous line of surf seemed, as I looked, to alter
its character. It winded no longer round headland and bay, but
stretched out through the centre of the landscape, straight as an
extended cord, and the bright white saddened down to the fainter hue
of decaying vegetation. The entire landscape underwent a change. Under
the gloomy sky of a stormy evening, I could mark on the one hand the
dark blue of the Pentlands, and on the other the lower slopes of
Corstorphine. Arthur's Seat rose dim in the distance behind; and in
front, the pastoral valley of Wester Lothian stretched away mile
beyond mile, with its long rectilinear mound running through the
midst,--from where I stood beside one of the massier viaducts that
rose an hundred feet overhead, till where the huge bulk seemed
diminished to a slender thread on the far edge of the horizon.

It seemed as if years had passed--many years. I had an indistinct
recollection of scenes of terror and of suffering, of the shouts of
maddened multitudes engaged in frightful warfare, of the cries of
famishing women and children, of streets and lanes flooded with blood,
of raging flames enwrapping whole villages in terrible ruin, of the
flashing of arms and the roaring of artillery; but all was dimness and
confusion. The recollection was that of a dream remembered in a dream.
The solemn text was in my mind, 'Voices, and thunders, and lightnings,
and a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth,
so mighty an earthquake and so great;' and I now felt as if the
convulsion was over, and that its ruins lay scattered around me. The
railway, I said, is keeping its Sabbaths. All around was solitary, as
in the wastes of Skye. The long rectilinear mound seemed shaggy with
gorse and thorn, that rose against the sides,