before; I remember the dark stain on the floor of the dark room in
which one of her lovers was slain; I can see the gray towers of
Warwick rising above the green trees and reflected in the still water;
and, entering the keep of the castle, I behold myself again trying on
the ponderous helmet of the gigantic Guy, and climbing into his
monstrous porridge-pot. But vain would be the attempt to marshal
before my mind's eye the glorious pageantry of the Trosachs, though,
at the time of its actual revelation, it certainly seemed to make a
far more vivid impression. The delight and exhilaration which such
magnificence inspired are easily summoned back, but not the incarnate
features of them. Wild nature takes us out of ourselves and refreshes
us; but she does not reveal her secret to us, or ally herself with
anything in us less deep than the abstract soul--which also is beyond
our reach.

I am not sure that my father did not like the seaside sojourns as well
as anything else, apart from the historical connections; for the
spirits of many seafaring forefathers murmured in his heart. But he
did not so much care for the soft, yielding, brown sands on which the
sea-waves broke. The coasts to which he had been used in his youth
were either rocky or firm as a macadamized road. Nor was he beguiled
into forgetting the tedium of walking over them, as his companion was,
by the fascination of the shells and sea curiosities to be picked up
on them. Many a mile have I trotted along beside him or behind him,
gathering these treasures, while he strode forward, abstracted, with
his gaze fixed towards the long ridge of the horizon. The sands at
Rhyl, near which Milton's friend was said to have been lost, were like
a rolling prairie; at low tide the white fringe of the surf could
scarcely be descried at their outermost verge, yet within a few
hours it would come tumbling back, flowing in between the higher