From the leads whereon I stood, though I was high above the court of the palace, I was below all the city except that rubbish which was concealed; and never did the mere sight of houses produce such an effect upon me. The ground was so magical, and the buildings so different in form, that the whole seemed as though it had been moulded by the hands of giants, or commanded into existence by the fiat of a god; and, in firmness and colour, it was so like the rocks upon which it rested, and by which it was surrounded, that it looked as though it had lasted from the beginning of time, and would endure to the end. Right in front of me, the high street opened at intervals its deep ravine; upon the summit of a hill, but still, from the great height of the houses, appearing as if that hill had been cleft in twain, to open a way from the palace on which I stood to the castle, which, from its aged rock at the other extremity, looked proudly down as the monarch of the Athens, seated upon a throne which would out-exist those of all the monarchs of the nations. Around this were clustered palace and spire, each upon its terrace, while the spacious bridges, beneath whose arches the distant Pentland hills and the sky were visible, formed an aërial path from the grandeur of one place to the grandeur of another. There was something so novel, so wildly romantic, and so overpowering, in all this, that I retired to the most remote and elevated part of the roof, leaned me against a chimney-stalk, and, forgetting the king, the procession, the people, and myself, was in one of those reveries, in which the senses are too much gratified, and the judgment too much lost for allowing the fancy to sketch, and the memory to notice. “This is incomprehensibly fine!” were the words which I then ejaculated to myself; and now that the presence of the picture is gone, and the recollection such as no mind could retain, I can do nothing more than repeat them.