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Wild crests as pagod ever deck'd,
Or mosque of Eastern architect.

Nor were these earth-born castles bare,1
Nor lack'd they many a banner fair;
For, from their shiver'd brows displayed,
Far, o'er the unfathomable glade,
All twinkling with the dewdrops sheen,2
The brier-rose fell in streamers green,
And creeping shrubs, of thousand dyes,
Waved in the west-wind's summer sighs.

XII.

Boon nature scatter'd, free and wild,
Each plant or flower, the mountain's child.
Here eglantine embalm'd the air,
Hawthorn and hazel mingled there;
The primrose pale and violet flower,
Found in each cliff a narrow bower;
Fox-glove and night-shade, side by side,
Emblems of punishment and pride,
Group'd their dark hues with every stain
The weather-beaten crags retain.
With bows that quaked at every breath,
Grey birch and aspen wept beneath;
Aloft, the ash and warrior oak

Cast anchor in the rifted rock;

And, higher yet, the pine-tree hung
His shatter'd trunk, and frequent flung,

MS.-Nor were these mighty bulwarks bare. *MS-Bright glistening with the dewdrops sheen.

F

Where seem'd the cliffs to meet on high,
His boughs athwart the narrow'd sky.
Highest of all, where white peaks glanced,
Where glist'ning streamers waved and danced,'
The wanderer's eye could barely view
The summer heaven's delicious blue;
So wondrous wild, the whole might seem
The scenery of a fairy dream.

XIII.

Onward, amid the copse 'gan peep
A narrow inlet, still and deep,
Affording scarce such breadth of brim,2
As served the wild duck's brood to swim.
Lost for a space, through thickets veering,
But broader when again appearing,

Tall rocks and tufted knolls their face
Could on the dark-blue mirror trace;
And farther as the hunter stray'd,
Still broader sweep its channels made.
The shaggy mounds no longer stood,
Emerging from entangled wood,"

1 MS.-His scathed trunk, and frequent flung,
Where seem'd the cliffs to meet on high,
His rugged arms athwart the sky.
Highest of all, where white peaks glanced,

Where twinkling streamers waved and danced.

2 MS.-Affording scarce such breadth of flood, As served to float the wild-duck's brood.

3 MS.-Emerging dry-shod from the wood.

But, wave-encircled, seem'd to float,
Like castle girdled with its moat;
Yet broader floods extending still
Divide them from their parent hill,
Till each, retiring, claims to be
An islet in an inland sea.

XIV.

And now, to issue from the glen,
No pathway meets the wanderer's ken,
Unless he climb, with footing nice,
A far projecting precipice.1

The broom's tough roots his ladder made,
The hazel saplings lent their aid;
And thus an airy point he won,
Where, gleaming with the setting sun,
One burnish'd sheet of living gold,
Loch Katrine lay beneath him roll'd,2
In all her length far winding lay,
With promontory, creek, and bay,
And islands that, empurpled bright,
Floated amid the livelier light,

And mountains, that like giants stand,

To sentinel enchanted land.

Until the present road was made through the romantic pass which I have presumptuously attempted to describe in the preceding stanzas, there was no mode of issuing out of the defile called the Trosachs, excepting by a sort of ladder, composed of the branches and roots of trees.

2 Loch-Ketturin is the Celtic pronunciation. In his Notes to The Fair Maid of Perth, the author has signified his belief that the lake was named after the Catterins, or wild robbers, who haunted its shores.

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Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurl'd,
The fragments of an earlier world;

A wildering forest feather'd o'er

His ruin'd sides and summit hoar,2

1 Benvenue-is literally the little mountain-i.e. as contrasted with Ben

ledi and Benlomond.

2 MS. His ruined sides and fragments hoar,

While on the north to middle air.

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