KAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 485 



at least, portions must have been bony. After parting from 

 Mr Watt, I travelled on to Kirkwall, which, after a leisurely 

 journey, I reached late in the evening, and on the following 

 morning took the steamer for Wick. I brought away with 

 me, if not many rare specimens or many new geological facts, 

 at least a few pleasing recollections of an interesting country 

 and a hospitable people. In the previous chapter I indulged 

 in a brief quotation from Mr David Yedder, the sailor-poet 

 of Orkney ; and I shall make no apology for availing my- 

 selfj in the present, of the vigorous, well-turned stanzas in 

 which he portrays some of those peculiar features by which 

 the land of his nativity may be best recognised and most 

 characteristically remembered. 



TO OBKNBT. 



Land of the whirlpool, torrent, foam, 

 Where oceans meet in madd'ning shock ; 

 The beetling cliff, the shelving holm, 



The dark insidious rock. 

 Land of the hleak, the treeless moor, 

 The sterile mountain, sered and riven, 

 The shapeless cairn, the ruined tower, 



Scathed by the bolts of heaven, 

 The yawning gulf, the treacherous sand, 

 I love thee still, MY NATIVE LAND. 



Land of the dark, the Runic rhyme, 

 The mystic ring, the cavern hoar, 

 The Scandinavian seer, sublime 



In legendary lore. 



Land of a thousand sea-kings' graves, 

 Those tameless spirits of the past, 

 Fierce as their subject arctic waves, 



Or hyperborean blast, 

 Though polar billows round thee foam, 

 I love thee ! thou wert once my home. 



With glowing heart and island lyre, 

 Ah ! would some native bard arise, 

 To sing, with all a poet's fire, 

 Thy stem sublimities, 

 The roaring flood, the rushing stream, 

 The promontory wild and bare, 



