This is Loch Aven. How different the whole regions round from that enclosing Loch Ericht! There, vast wildernesses of more than melancholy moors--huge hollows hating their own gloom that keep them herbless--disconsolate glens left far away by themselves, without any sign of life--cliffs that frown back the sunshine--and mountains, as if they were all dead, insensible to the heavens. Is this all mere imagination--or the truth? We deceive ourselves in what we call a desert. For we have so associated our own being with the appearances of outward things, that we attribute to them, with an uninquiring faith, the very feelings and the very thoughts, of which we have chosen to make them emblems. But here the sources of the Dee seem to lie in a region as happy as it is high; for the bases of the mountains are all such as the soul has chosen to make sublime--the colouring of the mountains all such as the soul has chosen to make beautiful; and the whole region, thus imbued with a power to inspire elevation and delight, is felt to be indeed one of the very noblest in nature. We have now nearly reached the limits assigned to our _Remarks on the Character of the Scenery of the Highlands_; and we feel that the sketches we have drawn of its component qualities--occasionally filled up with some details--must be very imperfect indeed, without comprehending some parts of the coast, and some of the sea-arms that stretch into the interior. But even had our limits allowed, we do not think we could have ventured on such an attempt; for though we have sailed along most of the western shores, and through some of its sounds, and into many of its bays, and up not a few of its reaches, yet they contain such an endless variety of all the fairest and greatest objects of nature, that we feel it would be far beyond our powers to give anything like an adequate idea of the beauty and the grandeur that for ever kept unfolding themselves around our summer voyagings in calm or storm. Who can say that he knows a thousandth part of the wonders of “the marine” between the Mull of Cantire and Cape Wrath? He may have gathered many an extensive shore--threaded many a mazy multitude of isles--sailed up many a spacious bay--and cast anchor at the head of many a haven land-locked so as no more to seem to belong to the sea--yet other voyagers shall speak to him of innumerable sights which he has never witnessed; and they who are most conversant with those coasts, best know how much they have left and must leave for ever unexplored.