LACHIN Y GAIR.

66

Drawn by C. Stanfield, A.R.A. from a Sketch by the Rev. J. D. Glennie.

Away, ye gay landscapes, ye gardens of roses!
In you let the minions of luxury rove;

Restore me the rocks, where the snow-flake reposes,
Though still they are sacred to freedom and love:
Yet, Caledonia, beloved are thy mountains,

Round their white summits though elements war; Though cataracts foam 'stead of smooth-flowing fountains, I sigh for the valley of dark Loch na Garr.

"Ah! there my young footsteps in infancy wander'd;
My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid;
On chieftains long perish'd my memory ponder'd,
As daily I strode through the pine-cover'd glade :
I sought not my home till the day's dying glory
Gave place to the rays of the bright polar star;
For fancy was cheered by traditional story,

Disclosed by the natives of dark Loch na Garr.

"Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?

Surely the soul of the hero rejoices,

And rides on the wind o'er his own Highland vale.

B

Round Loch na Garr while the stormy mist gathers,
Winter presides in his cold icy car:

Clouds there encircle the forms of my fathers;

They dwell in the tempests of dark Loch na Garr.

"Years have rolled on, Loch na Garr, since I left you,
Years must elapse ere I tread you again:
Nature of verdure and flow'rs has bereft you,
Yet still are you dearer than Albion's plain.
England thy beauties are tame and domestic
To one who has roved on the mountains afar :
Oh for the crags that are wild and majestic!
The steep frowning glories of dark Loch na Garr!"
Hours of Idleness.

-

"In the summer of the year 1796, after an attack of scarlet fever, he was removed by his mother for change of air into the Highlands; and it was either at this time, or in the following year, that they took up their residence in a farm-house in the neighbourhood of Ballater, a favourite summer resort for health and gaiety, about forty miles up the Dee from Aberdeen. Though this house, where they still shew with much pride the bed on which young Byron slept, has become naturally a place of pilgrimage for the worshippers of genius, neither its own appearance, nor that of the small bleak valley in which it stands, is at all worthy of being associated with the memory of a poet. Within a short distance of it, however, all those features of

LACHIN Y GAIR.

wildness and beauty which mark the course of the Dee through the Highlands may be commanded. Here the dark summit of Lachin y Gair stood towering before the eyes of the future bard; and the verses in which, not many years afterwards, he commemorated this sublime object, shew that, young as he was at the time, its frowning glories' were not unnoticed by him." Moore's Life of Lord Byron.

The view here given is from a sketch made by the Rev. J. D. Glennie, from within a short distance of the cottage or farm of Ballatrech, near Ballater, where Lord Byron was taken when a boy; and to such scenes in the Highlands as lay around him, his early inspirations of the grand and the beautiful in nature may be traced. Lachin y Gair, in this view, is the most distant object seen from near Byron's residence. It is one of the highest mountains in Scotland-rising about four thousand feet above the level of the sea, and takes its name from a little lake, or lochan, which lies at the base of some vast precipices of gray granite, which overhang it at an elevation of 1,300 feet. This lake is said, as usual of all such mountain tarns, to be unfathomable; but it is exceedingly deep, and the small stream which flows from it passes a long way concealed under the débris of the mountain; nor submerges even when it reaches the heather and the moss, beneath which the ear alone traces