A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 7 



the present late age of the world. There are no sermons that 

 seem, stranger or more impressive to one who has acquired 

 just a little of the language in which they are preached, than 

 those which, according to the poet, are to be found in stones : 

 a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded 

 pebbles, proves voluble with idea of a kind almost too large 

 for the mind of man to grasp. The eternity that hath passed 

 is an ocean without a further shore, and a finite conception 

 may in vain attempt to span it over. But from the beach, 

 strewed with wrecks, on which we stand to contemplate it, 

 we see far out towards the cloudy horizon many a dim islet 

 and many a pinnacled rock, the sepulchres of successive eras, 

 the monuments of consecutive creations : the entire pro- 

 spect is studded over with these landmarks of a hoar anti- 

 quity, which, measuring out space from space, constitute the 

 vast whole a province of time ; nor can the eye reach to the 

 open shoreless infinitude beyond, in which only God existed : 

 and as in a sea-scene in nature, in which headland stretches 

 dim and blue beyond headland, and islet beyond islet, the 

 distance seems not lessened, but increased, by the crowded 

 objects we borrow a larger, not a smaller idea of the distant 

 eternity, from the vastness of the measured periods that occur 

 between. 



Over the lower bed of conglomerate, which here, as on the 

 east coast, is of great thickness, we find a bed of gray strati- 

 fied clay, containing a few calcareo-argillaceous nodules. The 

 conglomerate cliifs to the north of the village present ap- 

 pearances highly interesting to the geologist. Rising in a long 

 wall within the pleasure-grounds of Dunolly Castle, we find 

 them wooded atop and at the base ; while immediately at 

 their feet there stretches out a grassy lawn, traversed by the 

 road from the village to the castle, which sinks with a gra- 

 dual slope into the existing sea-beach, but which ages ago 

 must have been a sea-beach itsel We see the bases of the 



