Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. EDINBURGH. At the close of this season, I went to attend the Moral Philosophy Class in Edinburgh. I came to Edinburgh up the Frith from Stirling on a fine October afternoon, and saw that splendid scene to the greatest advantage. A hoary light suited well that scene of antique grandeur, that magnificent mountain-city— " Stately Edinborough throned on crags." I felt especially, or deemed I felt, "no common glow," when I stood under the shadow of the frowning brows of the Castle, bending over the Grass-market, and I thought of the Covenanters and the " Heart of Mid-Lothian." I reserve for an after-part of this volume a few remarks on Edinburgh, in its manners, morals, and literature; but this is the place to record the boundless enthusiasm with which I then, and still, regard the scenery around it. Haydon's first exclamation when he saw it conveyed very much my impressions, "A Giant's Dream." It seemed as if it had been built to some unearthly music, or after a model suspended in the clouds, and formed by the hands of Air and Sunshine. Stone and rock seemed here moulded in the express image of genius, and nature and art were apparently reconciled. Religion, too, had hung up toward the glowing west the dome of St. George's, as if challenging the whole proud city as her own. I revelled in the glories of the town and its environs ; now standing on Arthur's Seat, and admiring the blue Pentlands, and the far- off hills of Lammermuir; now sitting on Mons Meg, and watching a thunderstorm coming up from Rob Roy's country to deluge the Frith with darkness and with fire ; now leaning over the North Bridge at evening, and looking to the dome of St. George's, relieved against a fading autumn sky and now from Salisbury Crags contemplating, for a long hour, the ruined ...