The day was perhaps too sunny and clear for seeing the Standing Stones to the best possible advantage. They could not be better placed than on their flat promontories, surrounded by the broad plain of an extensive lake, in a waste, lonely, treeless country, that presents no bold competing features to divert attention from them as the great central objects of the landscape; but the gray of the morning or an atmosphere of fog and vapour would have associated better with the misty obscurity of their history, their shaggy forms, and their livid tints than the glare of a cloudless sun, that brought out in hard, clear relief their rude outlines, and gave to each its sharp, dark patch of shadow. Gray-coloured objects, when tall and imposing, but of irregular form, are seen always to most advantage in an uncertain light—in fog or frost-rime, or under a scowling sky, or, as Parnell well expresses it, “amid the livid gleams of night.” They appeal, if I may so express myself, to the sentiment of the ghostly and the spectral, and demand at least a partial envelopment of the obscure. Burns, with the true tact of the genuine poet, develops the sentiment almost instinctively in an exquisite stanza in one of his less-known songs. “The Posie,”— “The hawthorn I will pu’, wi’ its locks o’ siller gray, Where, like an aged man, it stands at break o’ day.” Scott, too, in describing these very stones, chooses the early morning as the time in which to exhibit them, when they “stood in the gray light of the dawning, like the phantom forms of antediluvian giants, who, shrouded in the habiliments of the dead, come to revisit, by the pale light, the earth which they had plagued with their oppression, and polluted by their sins, till they brought down upon it the vengeance of the long-suffering heaven.” On another occasion he introduces them as “glimmering, a grayish white, in the rising sun, and projecting far to the westward their long, gigantic shadows.” And Malcolm, in the exercise of a similar faculty with that of Burns and of Scott, surrounds them, in his description, with a somewhat similar atmosphere of partial dimness and obscurity:— “The hoary rocks, of giant size, That o’er the land in circles rise, Of which tradition may not tell. Fit circles for the wizard’s spell, Seen far amidst the scowling storm, Seem each a tall and phantom form, As hurrying vapours o’er them flee, Frowning in grim obscurity, While, like a dread voice from the past, Around them moans the autumnal blast.”