O! happy pastor of a peaceful flock! Thou hast long gone to thy reward! One--two--three--four successors hast thou had in that manse--(now it too has been taken down and the plough gone over it)--and they all did their duty; yet still is thy memory fragrant in the glen; for deeds like thine "smell sweet, and blossom in the dust!" Under heaven, we owed our life to thy care of us in a brain fever. Sometimes thy face would grow grave, never angry, at our sallies--follies--call them what you will, but not sins. And methinks we hear the mild old man somewhat mournfully saying, "Mad boy! out of gladness often cometh grief--out of mirth misery; but our prayers, when thou leavest us, shall be, that never, never may such be thy fate!" Were those prayers heard in heaven and granted on earth? We ask our heart in awe, but its depths are silent, and make no response. But is it our intention to sit scribbling here all day? Our fancy lets our feet enjoy their sinecure, and they stretch themselves out in indolent longitude beneath the Tent-table, while we are settled in spirit, a silent thought, on the battlements of our cloud-castle on the summit of Cruachan. What a prospect! Our cloud-castle rests upon a foundation of granite precipices; and down along their hundred chasms, from which the eye recoils, we look on Loch-Etive bearing on its bosom stationary--so it seems in the sunshine--one snow-white sail! What brings the creature there--and on what errand may she be voyaging up the uninhabited sea-arm that stretches away into the uninhabited mountains? Some poet, perhaps, steers her--sitting at the helm in a dream, and allowing her to dance her own way, at her own will, up and down the green glens and hills of the foam-crested waves--a swell rolling in the beauty of light and music for ever attendant on her, as the Sea-mew--for so we choose to name her--pursues her voyage--now on water, and now, as the breezes drop, in the air--elements at times undistinguishable, as the shadows of the clouds and of the mountains mingle their imagery in the sea. Oh! that our head, like that of a spider, were all studded with eyes--that our imagination, sitting in the "palace of the soul" (a noble expression, borrowed or stolen by Byron from Waller), might see all at once all the sights from centre to circumference, as if all rallying around her for her own delight, and oppressing her with the poetry of nature--a lyrical, an elegiac, an epic, or a tragic strain. Now the bright blue water-gleams enchain her vision, and are felt to constitute the vital, the essential spirit of the whole--Loch Awe land-serpent, large as serpent of the sea, lying asleep in the sun, with his burnished skin all bedropt with scales of silver and of gold--the lands of Lorn, mottled and speckled with innumerous lakelets, where fancy sees millions of water-lilies riding at anchor in bays where the breezes have fallen asleep--Oban, splendid among the splendours of that now almost