7^ INVERNESS. 303 



blight and hopeless despondency that rested on the 

 features ! There was sadness in the beautiful eye and 

 on the expansive forehead, a sadness which the voice 

 of friendship or of fame, or the bright rays of genius, 

 vainly strove to dissipate ; and the meek firmness of the 

 lips was a firmness which seemed to contend with agony. 

 I could almost cry as I contemplated it.' 



* Grey Cairn, half-past three o'clock. 



' Here, my own Lydia, have I sitten down to write 

 you after a rather smart walk of about eleven miles ; 

 and my first thought is of you. Have you ever visited 

 the grey cairn, or surveyed the bleak barren moor that 

 spreads around it ? It towers high and shapeless 

 around me, grey with the moss and lichens of forgotten 

 ages, a mound striding across the stream of centuries, 

 to connect the past with the present, a voucher to 

 attest the truth of events long forgotten, a memorial 

 carved over by the fingers of fancy with a wild imagin- 

 ative poetry. How very poetical savage life appears 

 when viewed through the dim vista of time ! The 

 savages of the present day we regard as a squalid, lazy, 

 cruel race of animals, disgusting mixtures of the wolf, 

 the fox, and the hog, who live and love and fight, not 

 with the wisdom, gallantry, courage of men, but with 

 the craft, the brutality, the ferocity of wild beasts. 

 Not such the sentiment when we look through the 

 clouded avenue of the past on the deeds and habits of 

 our painted ancestors. The poetical haze of the atmo- 

 sphere magnifies the size of the figures, smooths down 

 their various hardnesses of outlines, and softens and im- 

 proves their colours. On the wild moor before me have 

 some of them fought and died in some nameless but 

 hard-contested and bloody conflict nameless now, 



