HEATHER BELLS IN SCOTTISH SCENERY. 



Mr. Macmillan also furnishes this delightful de- 

 scription of a sunset on Ben Lawers : "Never shall I 

 forget that sublime spectacle ; it brims with beauty even 

 now in my soul. Between me and the west that glowed 

 with unutterable radiance, rose a perfect chaos of wild, 

 dark mountains, touched here and there with reluctant 

 splendour by the slanting sunbeams. The glowing de- 

 nies were filled with a golden haze, revealing in flash- 

 ing gleams of light the lonely lakes and streams hidden 

 in their bosom; while far over to the north a fierce 

 cataract that rushed down a rocky hillside into a 

 sequestered glen, frozen by the distance into the 

 gentlest of all gentle things, reflected from its snowy 

 waters a perfect tumult of glory. I watched in awe- 

 struck silence the going down of the sun, amid all this 

 pomp, behind the most distant peaks saw the fiery 

 clouds that floated over the spot where he disappeared 

 fade into the cold dead color of autumn leaves, and 

 finally vanish into the mist of even saw the purple 

 mountains darkening into the Alpine twilight, and twi- 

 light glens and streams tremulously glimmering far be- 

 low, clothed with the strangest lights and shadows by 

 the newly risen summer moon." 



In "Gray Days and Gold" we find that charming 

 writer, William Winter, the impressionable and dis- 

 cerning poet-critic of the American theater, thus char- 

 acteristically voicing his awe of these Scottish moun- 

 tains : "Brown with bracken and purple with Heather, 

 * * * still with a stillness that is awful in its piti- 

 less sense of inhumanity and utter isolation. It would 

 be presumption to undertake to describe the solemn 

 austerity, the lofty and lonely magnificence, the bleak, 



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