Green-Mountain freeman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1844-1884, 1858-04-29
The Highlands of Scotland.

The Highlands of Scotland
1t is not easy for an Englishman, who can
pass in day from his club in St James street
to his shoot-box among the Champions, and who
finds in his shooting box all the comforts and
luxuries of his club, to believe that in the times
of his grandfathers, St. James street had as
little connection with the Champions as with
the Andes-ln the south of our island scarcely
anything was known about the Celtic part of
Scotland, and what was known excited no feel
ing but contempt and loathing. The crags and
the glens, the woods and the waters, were, in
deed, the same that now swarm every autumn
with admiring gazers and sketchers. The Tro-
sachs wound, as now, between gigantic walls of
rock tapestried with broom and wild rose. Foy-
ers come down headlong through the brentwood
with the same leap and the same roar with
which he still rushes to Loeb Ness and in de-
fiance to the sun of June, the snow scalp of
Ben Cruechan rose as it still rises, over the will
lowy islets of Loeb Awe. Yet none of thes
sights had power, till recent period, to attract
a single poet or painter from more opulent and
more tranquil regions Indeed, law and policy,
trade and industry, have done far more than
people of romantic dispositions will readily ad-
NIT to develop in our midst sense of the Wild
er beauties of nature. traveller must BIO
freed fom all apprehension of being murdered
or starved before he can be charmed by the bold
outlines and rich tint of the hills. He is not
likely to be thrown into ecstacies by the alb
ruptness of precpice from which he is in i'm
inent danger of falling two thousand feet per-
pendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent
which suddenly whlrls. away his baggage, and
forces him to run for life; by the gloomy grand
eur of place where he finds corpse which
marauders have just stripped and mangled or
by the screams of those eagles whose next meal
may probably be on his own eyes. About the
year 1880, Capt. Burt, one of the first English
men who caught glimpse of the spots which
now allure our tourists from every part of the
civilized world, wrote an account of his wander
ings. He was evidently man of quick, an
observant and a cultivated mind, and would
doubtless, had he lived in our age, have looked
with mingled awe and delight on the mountains
Of Iverness shire But writingwith the feeling
which was universal in his age, he pronounced
those mountains monstrous excrescences. Their
deformity, he said was such, that the most
sterile plains seemed lovely by comparison Fine
weather, he complained, only made bad worse,
for the clearer the day the more disagreeably
did those misshapen masses of gloomy brown
and dirty purple affect the eye what contrast,
he exclaimed, between these horrible prospects
and the beauties of Richmond -hill-Some per-
sons may think that Burt was man of vulgar
and prosaical mind but they will scarcely yen-
ture to pass similar Judgment on Oliver Gold
smith. Goldsmith was one of the verv few
Saxons who, more than century ago, ventured
to explore the Highlands. He was disgusted
the hideous wilderness, and declared that he
greatly preferred the charming country round
leydon, the vast expanse of verdant meadow
and the villas with their statues and grottoes
trim flower beds, and recktiinear avenues.
Yet it is difficult to believe that the author of
tho &C Traveller and the deserted Village"
was naturally inferior in taste and sensibilty
to the thousands of clerks and milliners who
are now thrown into rapture by the sight of
Loeb Katrine and Loch Lomond His feelingr
may be easily explained. 1t was not till roads
had been cut out of the rocks, till bridges had
been flung over the courses of the rivulets, till
inns had succeeded the dens of robbers, till there
was as little danger of being slain OF plundered
in the widest defile of Badenoch or Lochaber as
in Cornhill, that strangers could be enchanted
by the blue dimples of the lakes and by the
rainbows which overhung the waterfalls, and
could derive a solemn pleasure even from the
clouds and tempests which lowered on the
mountain tops.--Macauley