if you could take clear note of the objects
of vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles from where you
stand:--think how agreeably your sight would be entertained, how
pleasantly your thoughts would be diversified, as you walk the Edinburgh
streets! For you might pause, in some business perplexity, in the midst
of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd as he sat
down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or perhaps
some urchin, clambering in a country elm, would put aside the leaves and
show you his flushed and rustic visage; or as a fisher racing seaward,
with the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in the wind,
would fling you a salutation from between Anst'er and the May.

*****

So you sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down from afar upon men's
life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming
thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill.
The sea-surf, the cries of plough-men, the streams and the mill-wheels,
the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain;
from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance;
and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of
a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence, and the business of
town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the
bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to
interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear,
the whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses
pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable
city, ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight
highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways; and you
may be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is
something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the
vein for cheerful labour.

*****

The night, though we were so little past midsummer, was as dark as
January. Intervals of a groping twilight alternated with spells of utter
blackness; and it was impossible to trace the reason of these changes
in the flying horror of the sky. The wind blew the breath out of a man's
nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead like one huge sail;
and when there fell a momentary lull on Aros, we could hear the gusts
dismally sweeping in the distance. Over all the lowlands of the Ros