Gracious heavens! what mistakes people have fallen into when writing about Solitude! A man leaves a town for a few months, and goes with his wife and family, and a travelling library, into some solitary glen. Friends are perpetually visiting him from afar, or the neighbouring gentry leaving their cards, while his servant-boy rides daily to the post-village for his letters and newspapers. And call you that solitude? The whole world is with you, morning, noon, and night. But go by yourself, without book or friend, and live a month in this hut at the head of Glenevis. Go at dawn among the cliffs of yonder pine-forest, and wait there till night hangs her moon-lamp in heaven. Commune with your own soul, and be still. Let the images of departed years rise, phantom-like, of their own awful accord from the darkness of your memory, and pass away into the wood-gloom or the mountain-mist. Will conscience dread such spectres? Will you quake before them, and bow down your head on the mossy root of some old oak, and sob in the stern silence of the haunted place? Thoughts, feelings, passions, spectral deeds, will come rushing around your lair, as with the sound of the wings of innumerous birds--ay, many of them, like birds of prey, to gnaw your very heart. How many duties undischarged! How many opportunities neglected! How many pleasures devoured! How many sins hugged! How many wickednesses perpetrated! The desert looks more grim--the heaven lowers--and the sun, like God's own eye, stares in upon your conscience! But such is not the solitude of our beautiful young shepherd-girl of the Hut of the Three Torrents. Her soul is as clear, as calm as the pool pictured at times by the floating clouds that let fall their shadows through among the overhanging birch-trees. What harm could she ever do? What harm could she ever think? She may have wept--for there is sorrow without sin; may have wept even at her prayers--for there is penitence free from guilt, and innocence itself often kneels in contrition. Down the long glen she accompanies the stream to the house of God--sings her psalms--and returns wearied to her heather-bed. She is, indeed, a solitary child; the eagle, and the raven, and the red-deer see that she is so--and echo knows it when from her airy cliff she repeats the happy creature's song. Her world is within this one glen. In this one glen she may live all her days--be wooed, won, wedded, buried. Buried--said we? Oh, why think of burial when gazing on that resplendent head? Interminable tracts of the shining day await her, the lonely darling of nature; nor dare Time ever eclipse the lustre of those wild-beaming eyes! Her beauty shall be immortal, like that of her country's fairies. So, Flower of the Wilderness, we wave towards thee a joyful--though an everlasting farewell.