SEPTEMBEB. 415 



or poetical eye. It was now redolent of colorific 

 splendour, from the masses of bright golden furze and 

 purple heath about it, which thus adorned a ruin of 

 nature's own making. The glen between the heights 

 was filled with stones of all sizes, as if a broken mass 

 of rolling debris had been suddenly arrested in its 

 course; and above on either side rocks still threatened 

 to fall, or stood upreared against the sky seemingly 

 with purpose to do so the covering of mother earth 

 so scanty that her bare ribs were every where evident. 

 On the very summit of the hill towered several masses 

 large as logan-stones, and suggestive of Druidical 

 rites, whether Druids had ever been really here or 

 not. I mounted as high as I could go I thought I 

 had reached the very top, but another vast protube- 

 rance appeared beyond a high stone wall, and tired 

 expectation stopped to breathe. All around me the 

 mountain pavement was veined with white quartz 

 the fire and the furnace of volcanic action was appa- 

 rent, but there had been a pause in its convulsive 

 throes, or rather they had ended in death, slowly 

 extinguished. I looked up the course of the estuary 

 to its head among masses of mountains rising behind 

 each other in grand array, still coloured, heathy, rocky, 

 dull green, but all involved in the solemn shadows 

 of evening ; and above them a host of dark broken 

 clouds just received the last faint copper-coloured 

 hues of the setting sun, whicji gave them a lurid 

 threatening meteor-like aspect. Turning towards the 

 whitish placid sea, it lay in its extensity calm as a 

 vast lake, the sky clear above it, bounded by the dis- 

 tant mountains of Pembroke, and the long line of 

 Caernarvonshire heights from Bardsey Isle to the 



