22 



coupled with ideas of wild sublimity and power. 

 A man holds here a somewhat strange communion 

 with himself; he feels an overwhelming sense of 

 strange joy. His own voice and his own movements 

 seem odd and grotesque. He can scarcely for the 

 moment realise that there are such things in exist- 

 ence as great cities, full of people splendid palaces 

 crowded streets and the everlasting din of 

 coaches and vehicles of all sorts, heard for miles, 

 and which falls upon our ear like the distant noise 

 of the ceaseless ocean. All these things seem like a 

 dream to an angler in the Ettrick forest. All things 

 around and about him are so primeval, solitary, and 

 rudely beautiful, that he can scarcely entertain any- 

 thing like a correct conception of his own position 

 in the world around him. Talk of fish! What are 

 fish to the vivid trains of strange thoughts that rush 

 through the mind in this region of barren and rugged 

 moorland ; and which give to the hopes and fears 

 and emotions of the human soul such a singular 

 phantasmagoric representation ! It is not the laden 

 basket of fine trout, but the singular state our feel- 

 ings are placed in, in traversing these desolate tracts 

 of country, that makes a journey through them ever 

 deeply engraved on the tablet of the memory. 



As a fishing river, it is impossible to say too much 

 for the Ettrick ; every part of it is well filled with 

 trout, with a sprinkling of salmon. It is full thirty 

 miles in extent from its source till it arrives at Sel- 

 kirk. It has likewise several feeders of some extent, 

 and possessing good fishing waters, especially for 



