on to the grass, and amidst the most painful apprehensions, lamented my supposed death. Being completely recovered, I was now conducted, by my guide, to the smaller Fall of Foyers, which is situated about half a mile from the other, up the same stream. This cataract is surrounded by very wild and romantic scenery, falls upwards of an hundred feet, and is rendered more interestingly pic turesque by the ornaments of a very ancient bridge, which is thrown over a chasm in the rocks, immediately over the Fall. The mind of the feeling spectator is filled by sensations of awe, and not a little of uneasiness, when he stands upon this frail building, and bending over, eyes the immense profundity of the chasm under him, together with the impetuous force and loud uproar of the cataract which shake the bridge. Although this Fall is extremely grand, and the surrounding objects remarkably picturesque, yet its vast inferiority to the other, in all the great requisites of sublime, or beautiful scenery, compel the spectator to the wish that it was seen before it. The woods, water, rocks, and mountains, which are disposed in beautiful or magnificent groups, every where arrest the eye, and fix its attention. I derived a degree of exquisite and undefinable pleasure, from a contemplation of the scenery in the neighbourhood of the Falls of Foyers, which memory still dwells upon with delight, and whose yet strongly marked lineaments contribute towards my hap piness, when I turn my eye inwards, and look back upon the days of my innocence, my inexperience, and my youth, when I wandered in the ways of men, with the steps of a stranger, and felt an ardent desire to join with my fellow-creatures in the bonds of amity and eternal fidelity. Then, indeed, I considered the sensations my mind experienced from an intercourse with Nature's most sublime or beautiful works, as a very far inferior species of delight, from that which I expected to derive from the society of an enlightened body of my fellow-creatures, whom I had imagined to have herded together for the express purposes of rendering the condition of man more worthy of his exalted nature, than when immured in his native wilderness, deed was my anguish, when in after-life I found my dreams of joy to vanish from my grasp, and melt into thinnest air. But to return. I amused myself with making sketches of the scenery, until the fall of twilight compelled me to bid a lasting adieu to the mag nificent prospects before me, and I returned. with my guide to the Hut. F "Confess'd from yonder slow-extinguish'd clouds, "All ether soft'ning, sober evening takes "Her wonted station in the middle air; First this "A thousand shadows at her beck. In circle following circle, gathers round "To close the face of things. A fresher gale "Begins to wave the wood, and stir the stream, "Sweeping, with shadowy gusts, the fields of corn; "While the quail clamours for his running mate. "Wide o'er the thirsty lawn, as swells the breeze, "A whitening shower of vegetable down "Amusive floats. The kind impartial care "Of Nature nought disdains: thoughtful to feed "Her lowest sons, and clothe the coming year. "From field to field the feather'd seed she wings. "His folded flock secure, the shepherd home "Hies, merry-hearted; and by turns relieves The ruddy milk-maid of her brimming pail : "The beauty whom perhaps his witless heart, "Unknowing what the joy-mixt anguish means, "Sincerely loves, by that best language shewn "Of cordial glances, and obliging deeds. "Onward they pass, o'er many a panting height, "And valley sunk and unfrequented; where "At fall of eve the fairy people throng, "In various game, and revelry, to pass "The summer-night, as village-stories tell." |