2 SCOTLAND ILLUSTRATED. 



unfold those interesting sources from which poetry has drawn many of her 

 wildest themes, and history some of her noblest achievements. 



With the bold chain of the Grampians swelling in lofty gradation before us ; the 

 dark lakes gleaming in the distance ; and the Forth rolling its fantastic meanders 

 at our feet ; herds in the valley, and flocks on the hill ; immemorial forests, 

 casting their broad shadow along the mountain sides; and crumbling rocks, that 

 could once arrest an army in its march all proclaim that sacred frontier from 

 which the Roman legions recoiled like " waves from the rock," and where 

 Freedom looked proudly down from her hills, as from an impregnable citadel. 

 But whatever the lavish hand of nature may have bestowed on these native 

 bulwarks whether she has enriched them with precious ore, girdled them with 

 forests, or rendered them subservient to pasture or the plough their great charm 

 and patriotic boast is, that they are peopled by a race who never yielded to a 

 foreign yoke, nor pledged their fealty to a stranger. If they have suffered 

 the calamities of war, these calamities have been the results of internal division, 

 never of conquest. The first altars raised to Liberty were in the glens and 

 mountains before us ; and there so long as the name continues to influence 

 the human conduct and warm the heart these altars will be found. Like the 

 Swiss cantons, the Highland clans, wherever united, have been invincible ; 

 but between the two people there is this distinction : the latter never 

 " surrendered " their liberty; the former " recovered " it when lost. The Swiss 

 expelled their oppressors, but not till after they had been enslaved; but the 

 Celts, by repulsing them at the frontier, preserved their independence from 

 pollution, and thus vindicated their pretensions as an unconquered people. 



But, without following up the parallel to the extent to which it might be 

 carried, we return to the more express objects in view, and prosecute our 

 journev to the Trosachs those haunted localities which the poetry and romance 

 of our own times have invested with peculiar charms. 



" For there on every wild and wondrous scene, 

 The Wizard's many-coloured touch hath been." 



Continuing to ascend the valley of the Forth, the road passes the mansion 

 of Craig Forth, crosses the river about two miles above Stirling, at the 

 Bridge of Drip, and then winds for several miles through a tract of country 

 which, within the last sixty years, the labour and ingenuity of man have 

 converted from a dreary waste into a fertile garden. The Moss of Kincardine, 

 the original name of this subdued waste, has undergone a thorough metamor- 

 phosis a healthy population have displaced the heath-fowl and the bittern ; 



