“ Have not both the king and prince regent sworn in the most solemn manner to maintain the protestant religion throughout his majesty’s dominions? Nay, more, have they not promised to pass any laws which shall be thought necessary for the further security of it? Are we not protestants who now address you? And is it not by the strength of a protestant army that he must mount the throne? Can any man, or number of men, persuade you, that we, who are your brethren, born in the same island, and who have the same interest, do not love ourselves, our religion, laws and liberties, as well as you do? ”

“ For entering in with awe, that deepens as you advance almost into dread, you behold beyond mountains that carry their cliffs up into the clouds, seamed with chasms, and hollowed out into coves, where night dwells visibly by the side of day; and still the glen seems winding on beneath a purple light, that almost looks like gloom; such vast forms and such prodigious colours, and such utter stillness, become oppressive to your very life, and you wish that some human being were by, to relieve by his mere presence the insupportable weight of such a solitude. ”

“ On one side, where the lake is widest, low-lying they seem and therefore lovelier—undulating with fields and groves, where many a pleasant dwelling is embowered, into lines of hills that gradually soften away into another land. On the other side, sloping back, or overhanging, mounts beautiful in their barrenness, for they are green as emerald; others, scarcely more beautiful, studded with fair trees—some altogether woods. They soon form into mountains—and the mountains become more and more majestical, yet beauty never deserts them, and her spirit continues to tame that of the frowning cliffs. ”

“ Far more than we were aware of have we trusted to the strong spirit of delight within us, to prompt and to guide. And in such a country as the Highlands, thus led, we cannot err. Therefore, if your desire be for the summits, set your face thitherwards, and wind a way of your own, still ascending and ascending, along some vast brow, that seems almost a whole day’s journey, and where it is lost from your sight, not to end, but to go sweeping round, with undiminished grandeur, into another region. You are not yet half-way up the mountain, but you care not for the summit now ”

“ An English forest, meaning thereby any one wide continuous scene of all kinds of old English trees, with glades of pasture, and it may be of heath between, with dells dipping down into the gloom, and hillocks undulating in the light—ravines and chasms too, rills, and rivulets, and a haunted stream, and not without some melancholy old ruins, and here and there a cheerful cottage that feels not the touch of time—such a forest there is not, and hardly can be imagined to be in Scotland. ”

“ We have no such glorious standards to show as her indomitable and everlasting oaks. She is all over sylvan—Scotland but here and there; look on England from any point in any place, and you see she is rich, from almost any point in any place in Scotland, and you feel that comparatively she is poor. Yet our Lowlands have long been beautifying themselves into a resemblance of hers; as for our Highlands, though many changes have been going on there too, and most we believe for good, they are in their great features, and in their spirit unalterable by art, stamped and inspired by enduring Nature. ”

“ Through the very middle of the black moor it flows, yet are its waters clear, for all is not moss, and it seems to wind its way where there is nothing to pollute its purity, or tame its lustre. ’Tis a solitary scene, but still sweet; the mountains are of great magnitude, but they are not precipitous; vast herds of cattle are browsing there, on heights from which fire has cleared the heather, and wide ranges of greensward upon the lofty gloom seem to lie in perpetual light. ”

“ But there are trees there that will force you to look on themselves alone, and they grow before your eyes into the kings of the forest. Straight stand their stems in the sunshine, and you feel that as straight have they stood in the storm. As yet you look not up, for your heart is awed, and you see but the stately columns reddening away into the gloom. But all the while you feel the power of the umbrage aloft, and when thitherwards you lift your eyes, what a roof to such a cathedral! A cone drops at your feet—nor other sound nor other stir—but afar off you think you hear a cataract. ”

“ I cannot now, Sir, be more particular; but take leave to assure your majesty the kingdom is generally disposed to your service, and impatiently wait for your coming; and this success will bring in the rest of the nobility and gentry, having had all their assurance for it, except the notorious rebels. Therefore, Sir, for God’s sake, assist us, though it be with such another detachment as you sent us before, especially of horse and dragoons; and you will crown our beginning with a complete success, and yourself with an entire possession of your ancient hereditary kingdom of Scotland. ”

“ Then there may be something in the air, and more in your own heart, that invests every ordinary object with extraordinary beauty; old images affect you with a new delight; a grandeur grows upon your eyes in the undulations of the simplest hills; and you feel there is sublimity in the common skies. It is thus that all the stores of imagery are insensibly gathered, with which the minds of men are filled, who from youth have communed with Nature. ”

“ But when a contest lies between selfish security or advancement on one side, and generous impulse or deep-rooted conviction on the other; when danger and conscience beckon onward, and prudence alone calls back; let all history declare whether in any age or in any cause, as followers of Knox or of Montrose, as Cameronians or as Jacobites, the men—ay, and the women—of Scotland, have quailed from any degree of sacrifice or suffering! The very fact that Charles came helpless, obtained him the help of many. ”

“ Yet are they not all horrid; for nowhere else is there such lofty heather—it seems a wild sort of brushwood; tall trees flourish, single or in groves, chiefly birches, with now and then an oak—and they are in their youth or their prime—and even the prodigious trunks, some of which have been dead for centuries, are not all dead, but shoot from their knotted rhind symptoms of life inextinguishable by time and tempest. Out of this gulf we emerge into the Upper Loch, and its amplitude sustains the majesty of the mountains, all of the highest order, and seen from their feet to their crests. ”

“ It does not, indeed, require much, in some situations, to give a very touching beauty to water. A few trees, a few knolls, a few tufted rocks, will do it, where all around and above is stern or sterile; and how strong may be the gentle charm, if the torrent that feeds the little loch chance to flow into it from a lucid pool formed by a waterfall, and to flow out of it in a rivulet that enlivens the dark heather with a vale of verdure over which a stag might bound—and more especially if there be two or three huts in which it is perceived there is human life! ”

“ Or the evanescence of all that imagery at a breath may touch us with the thought that all it represents, steadfast as seems its endurance, will as utterly pass away. Such visions, when gazed on in that wondrous depth and purity they are sometimes seen to assume, on a still summer day, always inspire some such faint feeling as this; and we sigh to think how transitory must be all things, when the setting sun is seen to sink beneath the mountain, and all its golden pomp at the same instant to evanish from the lake. ”

“ And yet how the true lover of nature, while he carries along with him its delightful character in his heart, and can so revive any spot of especial beauty in his imagination, as that it shall seem in an instant to be again before his very eyes, can deliver himself up, after the lapse of a day, to the genius of some savage scene in the Highlands of Scotland, rent and riven by the fury of some wild sea-loch! ”

“ Thousands and tens of thousands, who but for those smoking sea-horses, had never been beyond view of the city spires, have seen sights which, though passing by almost like dreams, are not like dreams forgotten, but revive of themselves in memory and imagination; and, when the heart is weary with the work of the hand, quicken its pulses with a sudden pleasure that is felt like a renovation of youth. ”

“ There is no such climate for all kinds of beauty and grandeur as the climate of the Highlands. Here and there you meet with an old shepherd or herdsman, who has beguiled himself into a belief, in spite of many a night’s unforeseen imprisonment in the mists, that he can presage its changes from fair to foul, and can tell the hour when the long-threatening thunder will begin to mutter. The weather-wise have often perished in their plaids. ”

“ In its inhabitants also the English forest differs from the Scottish; instead of the stag and the roebuck, it is frequented by cattle and fallow-deer, and exchanges the scream of the eagle and the falcon for the crowing of pheasants and the melody of the nightingale. The Scottish forest, no doubt, is the sublimer scene, and speaks to the imagination in a loftier language than the English forest can reach. ”

“ Witness Wastwater, with its huge single mountains, and hugest of all the mountains of England, Scawfell, with its terrific precipices—which, in the accidents of storm, gloom, or mist, has seemed, to the lonely passer-by, savage in the extreme—a howling or dreary wilderness—but in its enduring character, is surrounded with all quiet pastoral imagery, the deep glen in which it is embedded being, in good truth, the abode of Sabbath peace. ”

“ Such are the glens of Athole, in the neighbourhood of Ben-y-gloe. From them the heather is not wholly banished, and the fire has left a green light without quenching the purple colour native to the hills. We think that we almost remember the time when those glens were in many places sprinkled with huts, and all animated with human life. Now they are solitary; and you may walk from sunrise till sunset without seeing a single soul. For a hundred thousand acres have there been changed into a forest, for sake of the pastime, indeed, which was dear of old to chieftains and kings. ”

“ Prodigious precipices, belonging to several different mountains, for between mass and mass there is blue sky, suddenly arise, forming themselves more and more regularly into circular order, as we near; and now we have sight of the whole magnificence; yet vast as it is, we know not yet how vast; it grows as we gaze, till in a while we feel that sublimer it may not be; and then so quiet in all its terrific grandeur we feel too that it is beautiful, and think of the Maker. ”

“ Now we walk along a reach, between astonishing ranges of cliffs, among large heaps of rocks—not a tree—scarcely a shrub—no herbage—the very heather blasted—all lifelessness and desolation. The glen gradually grows less and less horrid, and though its sides are seamed with clefts and chasms, in the gloom there are places for the sunshine, and there is felt to be even beauty in the repose. Descends suddenly on either side a steep slope of hanging wood, and we find ourselves among verdant mounds, [xxii] and knolls, and waterfalls. We come then into what seems of old to have been a forest. ”

“ To look down from the brink might be terrible—to look up from the base would be sublime—but fronting the eye thus, horrid though it be, the sight is most beautiful;—for weather-stains, and mosses, and lichens, and flowering-plants—conspicuous most the broom and the heather—and shrubs that, among their leaves of light, have no need of flowers—and hollies, and birks, and hazels, and many a slender tree besides with pensile tresses, besprinkle all the cliffs, that in no gloom could ever lose their lustre ”

“ Trees of enormous height, which have escaped alike the axe and the tempest, are still standing, stripped by the winds even of the bark, and like gigantic skeletons, throwing far and wide their white and bleached bones to the storms and rains of heaven; while others, broken by the violence of the gales, lift up their split and fractured trunks in a thousand shapes of resistance and of destruction, or still display some knotted and tortuous branches, stretched out, in sturdy and fantastic forms of defiance, to the whirlwind and the winter. ”

“ It becomes a perfect picture in memory, more and more idealised by imagination, every moment the veil is withdrawn before it; its aërial lineaments never fade; yet they too, though their being be but in the soul, are mellowed by the touch of time—and every glimpse of such a vision, the longer we live, and the more we suffer, seems suffused with a mournful light, as if seen through tears. ”

“ So soon as we heard of the afflicting news of the death of her late majesty, Queen Anne, it did exceedingly comfort us, that, after so good and great a queen, who had the hearts and consulted the true happiness of all her people, we were to be governed by his sacred majesty, King George, a prince so brightly adorned with all royal virtues, that Britain, under his royal administration, shall still be flourishing at home, and able to hold the balance in the affairs of Europe. ”

“ Just as the sun was rising above the horizon, Sir Andrew Agnew’s men appeared, and their ears were instantly saluted by the noise of the bagpipes, when the pipers commenced playing one of their most noisy pibrochs. The party behind the wall then drew their swords, and, as they had been previously ordered by Lord George, kept brandishing them above their heads. This ruse succeeded completely, and Sir Andrew, alarmed by the noise and the spectacle before him, at which he took only a short glance, ordered his men to the right about, and retired into the castle. ”

“ All above is beautiful, and the clouds themselves are like celestial mountains; but the eye forsakes them, though it sees them still, and more quietly now it moves along the pageantry below that endures for ever—till chained on a sudden by that range of cliffs. ’Tis along them that the giant shadows are stalking—but now they have passed by—and the long line of precipice seems to come forward in the light. ”

“ Noble trunks also, which had long resisted, but resisted in vain, strew the ground; some lying on the declivity where they have fallen, others still adhering to the precipice where they were rooted, many upturned, with their twisted and entangled roots high in air; while not a few astonish us by the space which they cover, and by dimensions which we could not otherwise have estimated. It is one wide image of death, as if the angel of destruction had passed over the valley. ”

“ There is nothing so remarkable in the political history of any country as the succession of the Highland chiefs, and the long and uninterrupted sway which they held over their followers. The authority which a chief exercised among his clan was truly paternal, and he might, with great justice, have been called the father of his people. We cannot account for that warm attachment and the incorruptible and unshaken fidelity which the clans uniformly displayed towards their chiefs, on any other ground, than the kind and conciliatory system which they must have adopted towards their people ”

“ In that famous Pass they will feel the power possessed by the sweet wild monotony of the universal birch woods—broken but by grey crags in every shape—grotesque, fantastical, majestic, magnificent, and sublime—on the many-ridged mountains, that are loth to lose the green light of their beloved forests, retain it as long as they can, and on the masses of living lustre seem to look down with pride from their skies. ”

“ We have now arrived at an era in our history, when the line of demarcation between the inhabitants of the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland begins to appear, and when, by the influx of a Gothic race into the former, the language of that part of North Britain is completely revolutionized, when a new dynasty or race of sovereigns ascends the throne, and when a great change takes places in the laws and constitution of the kingdom. ”

“ These words were no sooner uttered, than Montrose’s men rushed forward at a quick pace and fell upon the enemy, sword in hand. The Covenanters were paralyzed by the suddenness and impetuosity of the attack, and, turning their backs, fled in the utmost trepidation and confusion, towards Aberdeen. The slaughter was tremendous, as the victors spared no man. The road leading from the field of battle to Aberdeen was strewed with the dead and the dying; the streets of Aberdeen were covered with the bodies, and stained with the blood of its inhabitants. ”

“ But here the sources of the Dee seem to lie in a region as happy as it is high; for the bases of the mountains are all such as the soul has chosen to make sublime—the colouring of the mountains all such as the soul has chosen to make beautiful; and the whole region, thus imbued with a power to inspire elevation and delight, is felt to be indeed one of the very noblest in nature. ”

“ From a few such stations, you get an insight [xx] into the configuration of the whole Western Highlands. By the dip of the mountains, you discover at a glance all the openings in the panorama around you into other regions. Follow your fancies fearlessly wherever they may lead; and if the blue aërial haze that hangs over a pass winding eastward, tempt you from your line of march due north, forthwith descend in that direction, and haply an omen will confirm you—an eagle rising on the left, and sailing away before you into that very spot of sky.
No man, however well read, should travel by book. ”