We have sometimes been asked, whether the north of England or the Highlands of Scotland should be visited first; but, simple as the question seems, it is really one which it is impossible to answer, though we suspect it would equally puzzle Scotchman or Englishman to give a sufficient reason for his wishing to see any part of any other country, before he had seen what was best worth seeing in his own. His own country ought to be, and generally is, dearest to every man. There, if nothing forbid, he should not only begin his study of nature, but continue his education in her school, wherever it may happen to be situated, till he has taken his first degree. We believe that the love of nature is strong in the hearts of the inhabitants of our island. And how wide and profound may that knowledge of nature be, which the loving heart has acquired, without having studied her anywhere but within the Four Seas! The impulses that make us desire to widen the circle of our observation, are all impulses of delight and love; and it would be strange indeed, did they not move us, first of all, towards whatever is most beautiful belonging to our own land. Were it otherwise, it would seem as if the heart were faithless to the home affections, out of which, in their strength, spring all others that are good; and it is essential, we do not doubt, to the full growth of the love of country, that we should all have our earliest imaginative delights associated with our native soil. Such associations will for ever keep it loveliest to our eyes; nor is it possible that we can ever as perfectly understand the character of any other; but we can afterwards transfer and transfuse our feelings in imagination kindled by our own will; and the beauty, born before our eyes, among the banks and braes of our childhood, and then believed to be but there, and nothing like it anywhere else in all the world, becomes a golden light, “whose home is everywhere,” which if we do not darken it, will shine unshadowed in the dreariest places, till “the desert blossom like the rose.” For our own parts, before we beheld one of “the beautiful fields of England,” we had walked all Scotland thorough, and had seen many a secret place, which now, in the confusion of our crowded memory, seem often to shift their uncertain ground; but still, wherever they glimmeringly re-appear, invested with the same heavenly light in which long ago they took possession of our soul. And now that we are almost as familiar with the fair sister-land, and love her almost as well as Scotland’s self, not all the charms in which she is arrayed--and they are at once graceful and glorious--have ever for a day withdrawn our deeper dreams from the regions where, “In life’s morning march when our spirit was young,” unaccompanied but by our own shadow in the wilderness, we first heard the belling of the red deer and the eagle’s cry.