VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 227 



the landscape, straight as an extended cord, and the bright white 

 saddened down to the fainter hue of decaying vegetation. The entire 

 landscape underwent a change. Under the gloomy sky of a stormy 

 evening, I could mark, on the one hand, the dark-blue of the Pentlands, 

 and on the other, the lower slopes of Corstorphine. Arthur's Seat rose 

 dim in the distance behind ; and in front, the pastoral valley of Wester 

 Lothian stretched away mile beyond mile, with its long rectilinear 

 mound running through the midst, from where I stood beside one of 

 the inassier viaducts that rose an hundred feet overhead, till where the 

 huge bulk seemed diminished to a slender thread on the far edge of 

 the horizon. 



It seemed as if years had passed, many years. I had an indis- 

 tinct recollection of scenes of terror and of suffering, of the shouts of 

 maddened multitudes engaged in frightful warfare, of the cries of 

 famishing women and children, of streets and lanes flooded with, 

 blood, of raging flames enwrapping whole villages in terrible ruin, 

 of the flashing of arms, and the roaring of artillery, but all was dim- 

 ness and confusion. The recollection was that of a dream remembered 

 in a dream. The solemn text was in my mind, ' Voices, and thunders, 

 and lightnings, and a great earthquake, such as was not since men 

 were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake and so great ; ' and I 

 now felt as if the convulsion was over, and that its ruins lay scattered 

 around me. The railway, I said, is keeping its Sabbaths ! All around 

 was solitary, as in the wastes of Skye. The long rectilinear mound 

 seemed shaggy with gorse and thorn, that rose high against the sides, 

 and intertwisted their prickly branches atop. The sloe-thorn, and the 

 furze, and the bramble choked up the rails. The fox rustled in the 

 brake ; and where his track had opened up a way through the fern, I 

 could see the red and corroded bars stretching idly across. There was 

 a viaduct beside me : the flawed and shattered masonry had exchanged 

 its raw hues for a crust of lichens ; one of the taller piers, undermined 

 by the stream, had drawn two of the arches along with it, and lay 

 a-down the watercourse a shapeless mass of ruin, o'ermasted by flags 

 and rushes. A huge ivy that had taken root under a neighbouring 

 pier, threw up its long pendulous shoots over the summit. I ascended 

 to the top. Half buried in furze and sloe-thorn there rested on the 

 rails what had once been a train of carriages ; the engine ahead lay 

 scattered in fragments, the effect of some disastrous explosion ; and 

 damp, and mould, and rottenness, had done their work on the vehicles 

 behind. Some had already fallen to pieces, so that their places could 

 be no longer traced in the thicket that had grown up around them, 

 others stood comparatively entire, but their bleached and shrivelled 

 panels rattled to the wind, and the mushroom and the fungus sprouted 

 from between their joints. The scene bore all too palpably the marks 

 of violence and bloodshed. There was an open space in front, where 

 the shattered fragments of the engine lay scattered ; and here the rails 

 had been torn up by violence, arid there stretched across, breast-high, 

 a rudely piled rampart of stone. A human skeleton lay atop, whitened 



