Excerpt from Scotland, Vol. 2: Illustrated in a Series of Views Taken Expressly for This Work

With the bold chain of the Grampians swelling in lofty gradation before us; the dark lakes gleaming in the distance; and the Forth rolling its fantastic meanders at our feet; herds in the valley, and flocks on the hill; immemorial forests, casting their broad shadow along the mountain sides; and crumbling rocks, that could once arrest an army in its march - all proclaim that sacred frontier from which the Roman legions recoiled like "waves from the rock," and where Freedom looked proudly down from her hills, as from an impregnable citadel. But whatever the lavish hand of nature may have bestowed on these native bulwarks - whether she has enriched them with precious ore, girdled them with forests, or rendered them subservient to pasture or the plough - their great charm and patriotic boast is, that they are peopled by a race who never yielded to a foreign yoke, nor pledged their fealty to a stranger. If they have suffered the calamities of war, these calamities have been the results of internal division, never of conquest. The first altars raised to Liberty were in the glens and mountains before us; and there - so long as the name continues to influence the human conduct and warm the heart - these altars will be found. Like the Swiss cantons, the Highland clans, wherever united, have been invincible; but between the two people there is this distinction: - the latter never "surrendered" their liberty; the former "recovered" it when lost. The Swiss expelled their oppressors, but not till after they had been enslaved; but the Celts, by repulsing them at the frontier, preserved their independence from pollution, and thus vindicated their pretensions as an unconquered people.

But, without following up the parallel to the extent to which it might be carried, we return to the more express objects in view, and prosecute our journey to the Trosachs - those haunted localities which the poetry and romance of our own times have invested with peculiar charms.

"For there - on every wild and wondrous scene,

The Wizard's many-coloured touch hath been."

Continuing to ascend the valley of the Forth, the road passes the mansion of Craig Forth, crosses the river about two miles above Stirling, at the Bridge of Drip, and then winds for several miles through a tract of country which, within the last sixty years, the labour and ingenuity of man have converted from a dreary waste into a fertile garden.

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