EDINBURGH FROM ARTHUR'S SEAT

EDINBURGH FROM ARTHUR'S SEAT

SIR WALTER SCOTT, in his introduction to the Chronicles of the Canongate, thus depicts the view from Arthur's Seat:—"A nobler contrast there can hardly exist than that of the huge city, dark with the smoke of ages, and groaning with the various sounds of active industry or idle revel, and the lofty and craggy hill, silent and solitary as the grave; one exhibiting the full tide of existence, pressing and precipitating itself forward with the force of an inundation; the other resembling some time-worn anchorite, whose life passes as silent and unobserved as the slender rill which escapes unheard, and scarce seen from the fountain of his patron-saint. The city resembles the busy temple, where the modern Gomus and Mammon held their court, and thousands sacrifice ease, independence, and virtue itself, at their shrine; the misty and lonely moun-tain seems as a throne to the majestic but terrible genius of feudal times, where the same divinities dispensed coronets and domains to those who had heads to devise, and

arms to execute bold enterprises."

Elsewhere Scott describes the scene as follows:

" The wandering eye could o'er it go,

And mark the distant city glow

With gloomy splendour red:

For on the smoke-wreaths huge and slow,

That round her sable turrets flow,

The morning beams were shed,

And tinged them with a lustre proud

Like that which streaks a thunder-cloud,

Such dusky grandeur clothed the height

Where the huge Castle holds its state,

And all the steep slope down,

Whose ridgy back heaves to the sky,

Piled deep and massy, close and high,

Mine own romantic town!

But northward far, with purer blaze

On Ochil mountains fell the rays,

And as each heathy top they kissed

It gleamed a purple amethyst.

Yonder the shore of Fife you saw;

Here Preston-Bay and Berwick-Law;

And broad between them rolled

The gallant Firth the eye might note,

Whose islands on its bosom float

Like emeralds in chased gold."