332 WILD FLOWERS OF 



should be swept off too far. It seemed an awful 

 moment, and it really was so : for all was uncertainty. 

 The continued fog robed the heaving waters in uniform 

 gloom, as now they rose up with the coming tide, 

 wildly screaming in our ears upon half sunken rocks, 

 while still we seemed progressing into a dark and horrid 

 vacuity, where some hideous form might in a moment 

 stand revealed, to bar our passage ; like the ^Enseas of 

 YIEGIL, in his progress to the infernal regions 



" Unseen, unheard, we took our destin'd way 

 Through horrid realms, waste, silent, far from day." 



At last, when hope deemed dying in the socket, our 

 boat as suddenly emerged from the stratum of fog 

 about us, as it had suddenly entered it, and to our 

 extreme joy, the cliffs of Ramsay frowned still ahead 

 of us, though we had drifted far to the north, and just 

 escaped doubling the island among the black rocks of 

 the Bishop and his Clerks ; who, some old quaint 

 writer has remarked, " preach stormy doctrine," To 

 run no further risk I ordered land to be made forth- 

 with, and when I once again extended my feet on 

 terra firma, I never felt more pleasing sensations, or 

 " kissed the consecrated earth" with such devoted 

 fervour. Here, as a memento of my visit, I gathered 

 the rare and elegant Fern Asplenium Lanceolatum, 

 which grows in a crevice of the rocks a little south of 

 the only house on the island, and mounted Ramsay's 

 most precipitous cliff, the OEGAN rent, as if by light- 

 ning, into clefts, peaks, and pinnacles ; stained by 

 lichens of a thousand years' growth, in broad patches 

 of white and orange, and bearded with dense masses 

 of green and grey TTsnece and Ramalince. Fearfully 

 low, the sea boils at the foot of the precipice ; and 



