remark, that in lakes of great width, the shores cannot be distinctly seen at the same time; and therefore contribute little to mutual illustration and ornament; and if the opposite shores are out of sight of each other, like those of the American and Asiatic lakes, then unfortunately the traveller is reminded of a nobler object; he has the blankness of a sea prospect without the grandeur and accompanying sense of power.” We shall not be suspected of an inclination to dissent, on light grounds, from any sentiments of Wordsworth. But finely felt and expressed as all this is, we do not hesitate to say that it is not applicable to Loch Lomond. Far be it from us to criticise this passage sentence by sentence; for we have quoted it not in a captious, but in a reverent spirit, as we have ever done with the works of this illustrious man. He has studied nature more widely and profoundly than we have; but it is out of our power to look on Loch Lomond without a feeling of perfection. The “diffusion of water” is indeed great; but in what a world it floats! At first sight of it, how our soul expands! The sudden revelation of such majestic beauty, wide as it is and extending afar, inspires us with a power of comprehending it all. Sea-like, indeed, it is--a Mediterranean Sea--enclosed with lofty hills and as lofty mountains--and these, indeed, are the Fortunate Isles! We shall not dwell on the feeling which all must have experienced on the first sight of such a vision--the feeling of a lovely and a mighty calm; it is manifest that the spacious “diffusion of water” more than conspires with the other components of such a scene to produce the feeling; that to it belongs the spell that makes our spirit serene, still, and bright as its own. Nor when such feeling ceases so entirely to possess, and so deeply to affect us, does the softened and subdued charm of the scene before us depend less on the expanse of the “diffusion of water.” The islands, that before had lain we knew not how--or we had only felt that they were all most lovely--begin to show themselves in the order of their relation to one another and to the shores. The eye rests on the largest, and with them the lesser combine; or we look at one or two of the least, away by themselves, or remote from all a tufted rock; and many as they are, they break not the breadth of the liquid plain, for it is ample as the sky. They show its amplitude; as masses and sprinklings of clouds, and single clouds, show the amplitude of the cerulean vault. And then the long promontories--stretching out from opposite mainlands, and enclosing bays that in themselves are lakes--they too magnify the empire of water; for long as they are, they seem so only as our eye attends them with their cliffs and woods from the retiring shores, and far distant are their shadows from the central light. Then what shores! On one side, where the lake is widest, low-lying they seem and therefore lovelier--undulating