crusting the bare rock with golden | below. Projecting massive buttresses, lichen, or hiding its rawness under a that catch the full blaze of sunlight, cover of richly tinted weather-stains, throw into delicate violet shadow the we none the less perceive the sure signs of constant and inevitable decay; we recognize the working of the same forces that have sculptured the whole landscape, far as well as near; and we feel awed in presence of this revelation of the continuity of law and of the potency even of the unregarded operations of nature when they have had untold ages in which to accomplish their appointed work.

recesses and alcoves into which the
face of chalk has been worn. On the
great ocean highway in front, vessels
of every size and rig sail past on their
outward or homeward voyage. Though
our perch above the precipice is soli-
tary, we yet feel within sight and touch
of the living world. Across the bay we
mark the smoke of distant villages and
towns, and the fields and woodlands
that separate the scattered hamlets.
Just below, at the northern foot of the
ridge, sheltered and concealed among
its woods, lies that home so dear to
lovers of English literature, where

Groves of pine on either hand,
To break the blast of winter, stand,
And further on, the hoary channel
Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand.

I should like now to transport the reader to a wholly different scene, that we may consider together some of the more obvious features in the landscapes of the south coast of England. At the western end of the Isle of Wight, a long ridge of chalk-down, which stretches completely across the island, runs out to sea, and terminates in the well-known white pinnacles of the Nor are memorials of the past wantNeedles. From the highest part of the ing to throw over the scene the priceridge, when the air is clear, the eye less charm of old memory and tradition. ranges southward over a vast expanse The down is roughened here and there of open sea. To the west and north with "the grassy barrows of the hapthe breadth of water is bounded by the pier dead." The steeples and towers blue hills of Dorsetshire, the white of the country churches dotted over the cliffs of Swanage Bay, and then the landscape, mark still, as they have done long, low, brown heights which are for centuries, the heart of each parish crowned with the spires of Bourne- and its quiet graveyard. It is a typmouth and Christchurch. Eastward ically English scene, full of that halwe note how the ridge on which we stand sinks down into the hollow of Freshwater Gap, but rises again on the farther side, and then striking inland for some miles, sweeps round to form the heights of St. Catherine's, nearly eight hundred feet high, whence it descends once more in white cliffs to the

sea.

lowed, historic interest, and of that subdued, unobtrusive beauty, where the lineaments of nature are everywhere more or less concealed by the labors of man, which constitute so chief a source of pleasure in the landscapes of England.

Here, surely, our literary censor may claim that no room can be found for On a summer noon, when a fresh, the foot of science. What can we prewesterly breeze roughens the sea into tend to add to the charm of such scendeepest azure, and keeps a continual ery; or what can we do, if we touch it murmur of plashing waves at the foot at all, but lessen that charm? Again, of the cliffs, few pieces of English coast I accept the challenge, though with perscenery offer more attractions than this. haps somewhat more diffidence; not From the verge of the short green that I think the contribution from scisward of the down, the chalk plunges ence is here less available or less approin a sheer precipice of dazzling white-priate, but because I so fully share in ness, that contrasts well with the min- the feeling that a scene, in itself and gled blue and emerald-green of the sea to the ordinary eye so full of everything VOL. LXXXII. 4254

LIVING AGE.

that can give pleasure, needs no addi- us that beyond the cliffy margin on

tion from any source.

Let me suppose that we are placed upon the extreme western verge of the down, with the Needles in front of us. The chalk that forms these white faces of rock is shown by science to be made up entirely of the mouldered remains of creatures that gathered on the seabottom, ages before the species of animals living at the present day came into existence. Sponges, crinoids, corals, shells, fishes, reptiles, mingled their remains with those of the minuter forms of life that accumulated on the floor of that ancient ocean. And now, hardened into stone, the ooze of that sea-bed has been upraised into land. The "long backs of the bushless downs," which for many successive centuries have remained as we see them, were originally parts of the seabed, and are entirely built up of the vestiges of dead organisms.

which we stand, there once stretched an ampler land that has long disappeared. Far over the English Channel the chalk downs once extended with their undulating summits, their smooth, grassy slopes, their deep cooms and quiet bournes. That vanished land ran southward, until it ended off in a range of white precipices. The rain that fell on its surface gathered into a river that flowed northward through Freshwater Gap into the Solent. Strange to tell, perched on the top of the present cliffs, to the east of Freshwater, lie fragments of the bed of that ancient stream, consisting of gravel and silt which, as the cliffs are undermined by the waves, tumble to the beach and mingle with the gravel of to-day. In these ancient deposits are found teeth of the longextinct mammoths which browsed the herbage on slopes that rose southward, where for many a long age the Atlantic has rolled its restless tides and breakers.

But this is not all. Look at one of those noble faces of rock which shoot up from the restless breakers, and take Musing on these records of a dim, note of the parallel lines of dark flints forgotten past, we once more turn to which, as if traced with a pencil, sweep the last spurs of chalk and the isolated in such graceful curves from base to Needles. There, with eye quickened crest of the cliffs. Alike on buttress to recognize what science has to reveal, and recess, from headland to headland, we trace on every feature of the rocky no matter how irregularly the chalk has foreground, inscribed in characters that been sculptured, these parallel lines cannot be mistaken, the story of that may be followed. A feature so con- process of destruction which has respicuous in the architecture of the preci-duced the Isle of Wight to its present pices could not escape the attention of diminished proportions. The rains, the most casual visitor, but he only frosts, and tempests splinter the chalk vaguely marvels at it, until geology above and the waves gnaw it away tells him that these dark lines mark below. Year by year fresh slices are successive floors of that ancient sea· cut off and strewn in fragments over floors that gathered one over another, the sea-floor by the unwearying surge. as generation after generation of marine The Needles, once part of the down, creatures left their crumbling remains are perceptibly less than they were a upon the bottom. But now they are generation ago. The opposite white bent up and placed on end, like books cliffs and downs of Dorset were at one on the shelves of a library. And thus time continuous with those of the Isle we learn that not only has this ancient of Wight. They, too, by their shatsea-bed been turned into dry land, but tered precipices, tunnelled caverns, and its layers of hardened ooze have been isolated stacks of rock, tell the same tilted up vertically, and that it is the tale of disintegration. And, thus, imworn ends of these upturned layers pressive though the scenery was before, which form the long ridges of the it now acquires a new interest and sigdowns. nificance, when every cliff and pinnacle But science further makes known to becomes eloquent to us of a past so

strange, so remote, and yet so closely linked with our own day by a chain of slow and unbroken causation.

More than twelve hundred years have since passed away, but the memory of that early missionary still lives here among the solitudes which he chose as the scene of his labors. The lake yet bears his name, and his favorite island of retirement, embowered in holly, mountain ash, and honeysuckle, contains his holy well, which, even to this day, is visited for the cure of diseases, while offerings are there made to the saint.

At such a time and in such a scene the past speaks vividly to us, if there be human associations of a by-gone time And now, as a last illustration, let me linked with the place. Here, in this conduct the reader in imagination to remote Highland valley, we are led the far north-west of Scotland and place backward in imagination through genhim on the craggy slopes above the erations of strife and rapine, clan warupper end of Loch Maree as the sun, fare and private revenge, bravery and after a day of autumnal storm, is de- treachery, superstition and ignorance, scending towards the distant Hebrides, far away to that early time when, in in a glory of crimson, green, and gold. the seventh century, Maelrubha, the Hardly anywhere within the compass red priest from Ireland, preached to of our islands can a landscape be beheld the savage Picts, and first brought this so varied in form and color, so abound-region within the ken of civilized men. ing in all that is noblest and fairest in mountain scenery. To the right rises the huge mass of Slioch, catching on his terraced shoulders the full glow of sunset, and wreathing his summit with folds of delicate, rose-colored cloud. To the left, above the purple shadows that are now gathering round their base, tower the white crags and crests of Ben Eay, rising clear and sharp against the western sky. Down the centre, between these two giant buttresses, lies Loch Maree - the noblest sheet of water in the Scottish Highlands - now ablaze with the light of the siuking sun. Headland behind headland, and islet after islet rise as bars of deep violet out of that sea of gold. Yonder a group of pines, relics of the old Caledonian forest, stand boldly above the rocky knolls. Around us the naked rock undulates in endless bosses, dotted with boulders or half buried in the deep heather that flames out with yet richer crimson in the ruddy light filling all the valley. Overhead, the banded cliffs of Craig Roy, draped with waterfalls and wet with the rains of the earlier part of the day, glow in the varying tints of sunset. We hear the scream of the eagles that still nest in these inaccessible crags; the hoarse outcry of the heron comes up from the lake; the whirr of the blackcock re-echoes down the hillside. It might seem as if we were here out of sight and hearing of man, save that now and then the low of cattle, driven home to their stalls, falls faintly on the ear from the distant hamlet, which is fading into the gathering twilight of the glen.

66

It is just this little touch of the "still, sad music of humanity which is needed to crown the interest and dignity of our Highland landscape. "What more, then, can we need or desire ?" our literary critic may once more demand ; you may go on to elaborate the details of the scene, for every part of the picture abounds in the most exquisite detail, beyond the power of pen or almost of pencil adequately to portray. But what can science do here, except to mar what already is perfect, or to confuse by contributing what is entirely irrelevant?"

Again I feel the force of the objection, and all the more because to combat it as I should wish to do, would involve me in geological details which would here be wholly out of place. Let me say, briefly and decidedly, that after many years of experience in every variety of landscape in this country, I know nowhere a scene which has its true inner meaning as a source of impressiveness more strikingly revealed, or which has its ordinary interest more vividly intensified by the light which geological history throws upon it.

The most cursory traveller, even as | were buried beneath its quietly gatherhe drives rapidly along this valley, can ing sand and shingle. That primeval hardly fail to observe that three dis- land-surface, slowly settling down, came tinct rocks enter into the composition at last to lie under several thousand of the landscape, each differing from feet of such sediment. Long subsethe others in form, color, and relativequently, after the sand, hardened into position, and each contributing its own sandstone and the gravel, consolidated characteristic features to the scenery. into conglomerate, had been partially First of all a series of curiously hum- raised out of water, came the time mocky eminences of dark grey rock when the white rock of Ben Eay and mounts from the edge of the lake up the Craig Roy gathered as fine white sand sides of Slioch, forming a kind of rude on the sea-bottom. Some beds of this and rugged platform on which that compacted sand are filled with millions mountain stands. Next comes a pile of of the burrows of sea-worms that lived brownish-red sandstone, which in par- in it, and higher up come bands of limeallel and almost horizontal bars, like so stone crowded here and there with trimany courses of cyclopean masonry, lobites, shells, corals, sponges, and other forms the upper and main mass of the organisms belonging to an age anterior height. And lastly, there is the bedded to that of even the very oldest fossilwhite rock which, hanging upon the iferous rocks of most of the rest of flanks of the red sandstone, towers in Britain. These sheets of marine sedthe cliffs of Craig Roy on the one side iment point to a period when there of the valley and builds up almost the were no hills in north-west Scotland, whole of Ben Eay on the other side. for the primeval heights still lay deeply The differences and contrasts between buried, and a shoreless sea spread far these three kinds of material are so and wide over the region. marked, and have obviously played so At length after a vast interval of time essential a part in producing the special came an epoch of gigantic terrestrial peculiarities of the rocky landscape, | disturbance, when north-western Euthat even our literary censor himself rope, from the North Cape to the south could hardly, in spite of himself, fail to note them and might venture to ask a question about them.

To answer his question as it might best be answered would be most briefly and vividly done by a true poet. I can only pretend to present the mere facts, but even such a presentation in the dryest and baldest way cannot conceal their inherent marvellous interest.

Those grey bosses of rock that rise out of Loch Maree and form the base and outworks of Slioch are portions of the very oldest known land-surface of Europe, as incalculably more ancient than the rest of the Highlands, as the Highlands in turn are more ancient than the Alps or the Apennines. Their heights and hollows existed before the red sandstones were laid down. To this day, you can walk along the shore-line of the vanished lake or sea in which these sandstones accumulated, and can mark how hill after hill, and valley after valley, sank under its waters, and

of Ireland, was convulsed; when the solid crust of the earth was folded, crumpled, and fractured, until its shattered rocks, crushed and kneaded together, acquired the crystalline characters which they now display. In the course of these tremendous displacements (to which there is no parallel in the later geological history of this country) huge slices of the earth's crust, inany hundreds of feet thick and many miles long, were wrenched asunder and pushed bodily westwards, sometimes for a distance of ten miles. By this means portions of the oldest rocks of the region were torn off and planted on the top of the youngest. The whole country thus broken up underwent many subsequent mutations and was finally left to be gradually worn down by the various agents that have carved the surface of the land into its present shape.

Our three groups of rock, so distinctly marked out in the landscape, thus re

But we have lingered by the side of this northern lake, with its noble curtain of mountains, and the sun meanwhile has sunk in a glory of flame be

;

cord three successive and early chapters | of his genius, may transmute into purin the long history by which the topog- est poetic gold. raphy of the Scottish Highlands has been brought into its existing form. Knowing what is their story, we find that every crag and scar acquires a new meaning and interest. Past and pres-neath the faint outline of the Hebrides ent are once more brought into such close and vivid union that while we gaze at the landscape as it stands now, its features seem to melt away into visions of what it has once been. We can in imagination clothe it with its ancient pine forests through which the early Celtic colonists hunted the urus, the wild boar, the wolf, the brown bear, and the reindeer. We can fill up the valley with the stately glacier which once stretched along its hollow and went out to sea. We can dimly conceive the passage of the long ages of persistent decay by which mountain and glen, corry and cliff were carved into the forms which now so delight our eye.

In a memorable and often-quoted passage, Johnson wrote, "To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavored, and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings."1 If this be a just judgment, surely we may further maintain that whatever heightens our interest in the landscapes around us, whatever quickens the imagination by presenting new views of what has long been familiar, whatever deepens our reverence by teaching us to recognize the proofs of that long, orderly progress through which the land has been fashioned for our use, not only raises us in the dignity of thinking beings but stimulates the emotional side of our nature and furnishes abundant material for the exercise of the literary and artistic faculties. Science even in her noblest inspirations, is never poetry, but she offers thoughts of man and nature which the poet, in the alembic

1 Tour in the Hebrides, p. 346.

the last flush of crimson has faded from the sky and the twilight is deepening into night adown the valley. In leaving the scene, if I have succeeded in showing how we have it in our own power to quicken the influence of scenery on the imagination, we may I trust take with us the full conviction that there is no landscape so fair which may not be endued with fresh interest if the light of scientific discovery be allowed to fall upon it. Bearing this light with us in our wanderings, whether at home or abroad, we are gifted, as it were, with an added sense and an increased power of gathering some of the pur st enjoyment which the face of nature can yield.

ARCHIBALD GEIKIE.

From Longman's Magazine.
EILY.

I.

"WHY won't the ice harden ?" said Russell. "I want some skating. I'm sick of this beastly hole. If I'd only a little more tin I'd run away-to London, to the pantomimes."

"I'll tell you a story," said Eily; "I see such wonderful people in the coals!"

"You can't tell anything new. But cut away. Ah! it's rather jolly here, with my head on your lap. But hold hard a moment - when's that creature coming?"

"Mira? Some time this afternoon, the note said."

"Botheration! I wish she were a boy! Now begin, Eily."

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Stephen, you look so cold! There's plenty of room by the fire," said Eily wistfully.

"No, thank you," returned a hard young voice. "I mean to break myself of that eternal roasting.".