452 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



tall and imposing, but of irregular form, are seen always to 

 most advantage in an uncertain light, in fog or frost-rhime, 

 or under a scowling sky, or, as Parnell well expresses it, 

 " amid the livid gleams of night." They appeal, if I may so 

 express myself, to the sentiment of the ghostly and the spec- 

 tral, and demand at least a partial envelopment of the ob- 

 scure. Burns, with the true tact of the genuine poet, de- 

 velops the sentiment almost instinctively in an exquisite 

 stanza in one of his less-known songs, " The Posey,"- 



" The hawthorn I will pu', wt its locks 0' siller gray, 

 Where, like an aged man, it stands at break o' day." 



Scott, too, in describing these very stones, chooses the early 

 morning as the time in which to exhibit them, when they 

 " stood in the gray light of the dawning, like the phantom 

 forms of antediluvian giants, who, shrouded in the habili- 

 ments of the dead, come to revisit, by the pale light, the earth 

 which they had plagued with their oppression, and polluted 

 by their sins, till they brought down upon it the vengeance 

 of long-suffering heaven." On another occasion he introduces 

 them as " glimmering, a grayish white, in the rising sun, arid 

 projecting far to the westward their long gigantic shadows." 

 And Malcolm, in the exercise of a similar faculty with that 

 of Burns aud of Scott, surrounds them, in his description, 

 with a somewhat similar atmosphere of partial dimness and 

 obscurity : 



" The hoary rocks, of giant size, 

 That o'er the land in circles rise, 

 Of which tradition may not tell. 

 Fit circles for the wizard's spell, 

 Seen far amidst ttie scowling storm, 

 Seem each a tall and phantom form, 

 As hurrying vapours o'er them flee, 

 Frowning in grim security , 

 While, like a dread voice from the past, 

 Around them moans the autumnal blast." 



There exist curious analogies between the earlier stages of 



