It is in this way that we all become familiar with the Mountains. Far more than we were aware of have we trusted to the strong spirit of delight within us, to prompt and to guide. And in such a country as the Highlands, thus led, we cannot err. Therefore, if your desire be for the summits, set your face thitherwards, and wind a way of your own, still ascending and ascending, along some vast brow, that seems almost a whole day’s journey, and where it is lost from your sight, not to end, but to go sweeping round, with undiminished grandeur, into another region. You are not yet half-way up the mountain, but you care not for the summit now; for you find yourself among a number of green knolls--all of them sprinkled, and some of them crowned, with trees--as large almost as our lowland hills--surrounded close to the brink with the purple heather--and without impairing the majesty of the immense expanse, embuing it with pastoral and sylvan beauty;--and there, lying in a small forest glade of the lady-fern, ambitious no longer of a throne on Benlomond or Bennevis, you dream away the still hours till sunset, yet then have no reason to weep that you have lost a day. But the best way to view the mountains is to trace the Glens. To find out the glens you must often scale the shoulders of mountains; and in such journeys of discovery, you have for ever going on before your eyes glorious transfigurations. Sometimes for a whole day one mighty mass lowers before you unchanged; look at it after the interval of hours, and still the giant is one and the same. It rules the region, subjecting all other altitudes to its sway, though many of them range away to a great distance; and at sunset retains its supremacy, blazing almost like a volcano with fiery clouds. Your line of journey lies, perhaps, some two thousand feet above the level of the sea, and seldom dips down to one thousand; and these are the heights from which all above and all below you look most magnificent, for both regions have their full power over you--the unscaleable cliffs, the unfathomable abysses--and you know not which is the more sublime. The sublimity indeed is one. It is then that you may do well to ascend to the very mountain top. For it may happen to be one of those heavenly days indeed, when the whole Highlands seem to be reposing in the cloudless sky. But we were about to speak of the Glens. And some of them are best entered by such descents as these--perhaps at their very head--where all at once you are in another world, how still, how gloomy, how profound! An hour ago and the eye of the eagle had not wider command of earth, sea, and sky than yours--almost blinded now by the superincumbent precipices that imprison you, and seem to shut you out from life. “Such the grim desolation, where Ben-Hun And Craig-na-Torr, by earthquake shatterings Disjoined with horrid chasms prerupt, enclose What superstition calls the Glen of Ghosts.”