Moreover, one is tired and jaded. The whole man, body and soul, like sweet bells jangled, out of tune, and harsh, is fagged with work, eaten up of impatience, and haunted with visions of vacation. One "babbles o' green fields," like a very Falstaff; and the poor tired ears hum with sea-music like a couple of sea-shells. At last it comes, the 1st of August, and then--like an arrow from a Tartar's bow, like a bird from its cage, like a lover to his mistress--one is off; and before the wild scarlets of sunset die on the northern sea, one is in the silence of the hills, those eternal sun-dials that tell the hours to the shepherd, and in one's nostrils is the smell of peat-reek, and in one's throat the flavour of usquebaugh. Then come long floating summer days, so silent the wilderness, that one can hear one's heart beat; then come long silent nights, the waves heard upon the shore, although _that_ is a mile away, in which one snatches the "fearful joy" of a ghost story, told by shepherd or fisher, who believes in it as in his own existence. Then one beholds sunset, not through the smoked glass of towns, but gloriously through the clearness of enkindled air. Then one makes acquaintance with sunrise, which to the dweller in a city, who conforms to the usual proprieties, is about the rarest of this world's sights. [Sidenote: Idleness in the North.] Mr De Quincey maintains, in one of his essays, that dinner--dinner about seven in the evening, for which one dresses, which creeps on with multitudinous courses and _entrées_, which, so far from being a gross satisfaction of appetite, is a feast noble, graceful, adorned with the presence and smile of beauty, and which, from the very stateliness of its progress, gives opportunities for conversation and the encounter of polished minds--saves over-wrought London from insanity. This is no mere humorous exaggeration, but a very truth; and what dinner is to the day the Highlands are to the year. Away in the north, amid its green or stony silences, jaded hand and brain find repose--repose, the depth and intensity of which the idler can never know. In that blessed idleness you become in a strange way acquainted with yourself; for in the world you are too constantly occupied to spend much time in your own company. You live abroad all day, as it were, and only come home to sleep. Away in the north you have nothing else to do, and cannot quite help yourself; and conscience, who has kept open a watchful eye, although her lips have been sealed these many months, gets disagreeably communicative, and tells her mind pretty freely about certain little shabby selfishnesses and unmanly violences of temper, which you had quietly consigned--like a document which you were for ever done with--to the waste-basket of forgetfulness. And the quiet, the silence, the rest, is not only good for the soul, it is good for the body too. You flourish like a flower in the open air; the hurried pulse beats a