“For thou upon a hundred streams, By tales of love and sorrow. Of faithful love, undaunted truth, Hast shed the power of Yarrow.” In some men, not wanting in imagination, the only aspect in which scenery interests them is when it is linked to history. This is conspicuously seen in Lord Macaulay. Of him his biographer writes:—“The leading features of a tract of country impressed themselves rapidly and indelibly on his observation; all its associations and traditions swept at once across his memory; and every line of good poetry which its fame or its beauty had inspired rose almost involuntarily to his lips. But compared with the wealth of phrase on which he could draw at will when engaged on the description of human passions, catastrophes, and intrigues, his stock of epithets applicable to mountains, seas, and clouds was singularly scanty, and he had no ambition to enlarge it. When he had recorded the fact, that the leaves were green, the sky blue, and the plain rich, and the hills clothed with wood, he had said all he had to say, and there was an end of it.”—That is, Macaulay’s imagination was confined to human and historic things, and was irresponsive to the direct touch of Nature. But it is not only by such localized history or romance as Scott has given, that this human coloring passes into the impassive earth. There is another more subtle way in which it works, and it is this:—Wherever men have been upon the earth, even when they have done no memorable deeds, and left no history behind them, they have lived and they have died, they have joyed and they have sorrowed; and the sense that men have been there and disappeared leaves a pathos on the face of many a now unpeopled solitude. Those will know what I mean who ever have wandered alone through moors or glens in the Highlands, where once the old clansmen had their homes, but in whence they have long departed. Have they not felt, as they gazed on these wildernesses, where perhaps not even a weathered gable now tells of man, that the outlines of Nature’s lineaments were touched with pensiveness indescribable by the atmosphere of foregone humanities that overspread them? Such are the feelings that are awakened as, far up in the lap of the highest Bens, you come on the green spots where the former Celtic people had their summer shielings. In Wordsworth’s “Tour in Scotland”[9] it is noticed feelingly, as we might expect:—