IN - THE SHETLANDS 319 
us, ideas which are in opposition to this view, with- 
out suggesting, by association, the more popular and 
disseminated one, which we instantly lay hold of for 
our relief. If A can see no bright side to the thing 
he has witnessed, and can extract no comforting re- 
flections out of it, yet B, C, D, etc., who have not 
witnessed it, can, and to the general alphabet, as 
against some exceptional letters of it, we immedi- 
ately turn, and, enrolling ourselves amongst “ /es 
gros bataillons,” feel that we are “in tune with the 
infinite,’ and of course that the infinite is in tune. 
But when, alone and amidst gloomy and _ stern 
scenery, we see a disagreeable little piece of this in- 
finite, suggesting the whole, in actual manufacture 
before us, it is wonderful how little of music we find, 
either in it or ourselves. All seems “ jangled, out of 
tune and harsh”; but for the “ sweet bells,” where are 
they ? and were they ever there? We hear them not, 
even as a something behind, an undersong of hope. 
No, for there are no faces about us now, no comfort- 
able looks and smiles, no good dinner or snug little 
circle round the fireside; no volumes of the poets 
either, and not a line of them, not one “ smooth com- 
fort false,” comes to assist us. Man and his dis- 
tortions are gone, and we have only nature—hard, 
stern, cold, uncompromising, truth-telling nature— 
before us. We look one way, and there are the huge 
cliffs and the iron rocks: another, and there is the 
great, wide, desolate sea: upwards, and there is the 
cold, grey sky—stern and cheerless as either. Nothing 
