No play-castle was ever more
like the reality, and it is a very good hotel, like all that we have had
experience of in the Highlands. After tea we walked out, and visited a
little kirk that stands near the shore of Loch Achray, at a good point of
view for seeing the hills round about.
This morning opened cloudily; but after breakfast I set out alone, and
walked through the pass of the Trosachs, and thence by a path along the
right shore of the lake. It is a very picturesque and beautiful path,
following the windings of the lake,--now along the beach, now over an
impending bank, until it comes opposite to Ellen's Isle, which on this
side looks more worthy to be the island of the poem than as we first saw
it. Its shore is craggy and precipitous, but there was a point where it
seemed possible to land, nor was it too much to fancy that there might be
a rustic habitation among the shrubbery of this rugged spot. It is
foolish to look into these matters too strictly. Scott evidently used as
much freedom with his natural scenery as he did with his historic
incidents; and he could have made nothing of either one or the other if
he had been more scrupulous in his arrangement and adornment of them. In
his description of the Trosachs, he has produced something very
beautiful, and as true as possible, though certainly its beauty has a
little of the scene-painter's gloss on it. Nature is better, no doubt,
but Nature cannot be exactly reproduced on canvas or in print; and the
artist's only resource is to substitute something that may stand instead
of and suggest the truth.
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