REVIEWS — THE STORY OF A BOULDER. 501 



the beautiful ruins that reflect their shadow in Linlithgow Loch. 

 The passage altogether constitutes a good example of ihe general 

 style and subject-treatment of this class of geological writings : 



Some time ago I chanced to visit the remains of what had once been a royal 

 residence, and still looked majestic even in decay. It gave a saddened pleasure to 

 thread its winding stairs, and pass dreamily from chambei' to hall, and chapel to 

 closet ; to stand in its gloomy kitchens, with their huge fireplaces, whose black- 

 ened sides told of many a roaring fagot that had ruddied merry faces in days long, 

 gone by ; to creep stealthily into the sombre dungeons, so dank, earthy, and cold, 

 and then winding cautiously back, to emerge into the light of the summer sim. 

 The silent quadrangle had its encircling walls pierced with many a window, some 

 of which had once been richly carved ; but their mullions were now sorely wasted, 

 while others, with broken lintels and shattered walls above, seemed only waiting 

 for another storm io hurl them among the roofless chambers below. In the centre 

 of the courtyard stood a ruined fountain. It had been grotesquely ornamented 

 with heads of lions and griffins, and was said to have once run red with wine. 

 But it was silent enough now ; the hand of time, and a still surer enemy, the hand 

 of man, had done their worst upon it; its groined arches and foliaged buttresses 

 were broken and gone, and now its shattered beauty stood in meet harmony with 

 the desolation that reigned around. I employed myself for a while in looking 

 over the fragments, marking now the head of some fierce hippogryph, anon the 

 limbs of some mimic knight clad in armour of proof, and ere long I stumbled on a 

 delicately sculptured Jleur-de-lis, that might have surmounted the toilet- window of 

 some fair one of old. Turning it over, I found its unhewn side exhibited a still 

 more delicately sculptured stigmaria. The incident was certainly simple enough 

 perhaps even trifling. And yet, occurring in a spot that seemed consecrated to 

 reverie, it awoke a train of pleasant reflection. How wide the interval of time 

 which was bridged across in that sculptured stone ! Its one side carried the mind 

 back but a few generations, the other hurried the fancy away over ages and cycles 

 far into the dim shadows of a past eternity. The one told of a land of flowers, 

 musical with the hum of the bee and the chantings of birds, and gladdened by 

 the presence of man ; the other told of a land luxuriant, indeed, in strange forms 

 of vegetation — huge club-mosses, tall ealamites, and waving ferns — yet buried in 

 a silence that was only broken fitfully by the breeze as it shook the spiky catkins 

 or the giant fronds of the foresit. The fieur-de-lis recalled memories of France— 

 the sunny land of France— which stood out so brightly in the dreams of our school 

 days ; the stigmaria conjured up visions of a land that was never gazed on by 

 human eye, but rolled its rich champaign during the long ages of the Carbonife- 

 rous era, and sometimes rises up dimly in the dreams of our maturer years. 

 Between these two epochs how many centuries, how many cycles must have slowly 

 rolled away I T)iq fleur-de-lis was carved but yesterday ; the stigmaria flourished 

 when the earth was young, and had seen scarcely a third part of its known history. 



The extracts: given above, shew that our author possesses a cultiva- 

 ted taste, combined with descriptive powers of no ordinary kind. 



