The Bass Rock. By Delta . I. ’Twas Summer, and a more enlivening sun Never drank up the gelid morning dews, Or lighted, with its glow, the July flowers, Than that on which our boat left Canta Bay, And through the freshening tide, with eager prow, Bore onward to thy base, horrific Bass ! II. ’Mid clouds of sea-fowl, whose unceasing screams Uncouth, fill’d all the empty heavens with sound, Forward we row’d : at times the solan’s wing,— As if to shew its majesty of strength,— Brush’d near us with a roughly winnowing noise ; And now aloft, a lessening speck, was seen, Over the cloudlets, ’mid engulfing blue. Around us and around the plovers wheel’d, Wedgelike, at intervals their inner plumes Glancing like silver in the sunny ray ; The parrot dived beside us ; and the snipe, With shrilly scream, wing’d past us in alarm,— Until thy sole and narrow landing-place We reach’d ; and, grappling with the naked crags, Wound to a smoother ledge our sheer ascent. III. Never was transit so electrical ! An hour ago,—and by thy traceried walls We drove, Newbyth, beneath the o’erhanging boughs Of forests old, wherein the stock-doye plain’d, And lay our path ’mid bright and bloomy fields, Where woke the lyric lark her fitful song, And linnets, from each brake, responsively Piped to each other, till the scented groves Of Tyningham seem’d melody’s abode— Every thing breathed of life ; the hillside farms Bask’d in the sunshine, with their yellow cones Of gather’d grain ; the ploughboy, with his team, Stalk’d past us whistling ; and from cottage roofs, Bluely ascended to the soft blue sky The spiral smoke, which spake domestic love, In household duties cheerfully perform’d :— And now, as if communion were cut off Utterly with mankind and his concerns,— Amid the bleak and barren solitude Of that precipitous and sea-girt isle, We found ourselves—the waves their orison Howl’d to the winds, which from the breezy North, Over the German Ocean came, as ’twere To moan in anger through the rifted caves, Whose echoes gave a desolate response ! IV. Far in the twilight of primeval time, This must have been a place (thus to myself I thought) where Aboriginal men pour’d forth Their erring worship to the elements ; Ere yet the Druid, in the sullen night Of old oak-forests, tinged his altar stone With blood of brotherhood :—it must be so— So awful doth the spirit of their powers— The desolating winds and trampling waves— Here, in this solitude, impress the mind ; Yet human hearts have beat in this abode, And captive eyes, for many a joyless month, Have marked the sun, that rose o’er eastward May, Expire in glory o’er the summits dun Of the far Grampians, in the golden west ; And still some ruins, motleyed with the weeds That love the salt-breeze,—tell of prisons grim, Where, in an age as rude, through less remote, The fearless champions of our faith reform’d, Shut up, and severed from the land they loved,— Breathed out their prayers,—that day-spring from on high Should visit us,—to God’s sole listening ear ! V. All glorious was the prospect from thy peak, Thou thunder-cloven Island of the main ! Landward Tantallon lay, with ruin’d walls Majestic,—like a giant in old age, Smote by the black’ning lightning-flash, and left A prostrate corse, upon the sounding shore. Remoter, mingling with the blue of heaven, Pale Cheviot told, where, stretching by his feet, Bloom’d the fair valleys of Northumberland :— Seaward, the Forth, a glowing green expanse, Studded with many a white, majestic sail, Winded its serpent form—the Ochills rich Down gazing in its mirror ;—while, beyond, The Grampians rear’d their bare untrodden scalps.— Fife shew’d her range of scattery coast towns white, From western Culross to the dwindling point Of famed and far St Andrews—all beyond Was Ocean’s billowy and unbounded waste, Sole-broken by thy verdant islet, May, Whose fitful light, amid impending gloom, From danger warns the pesos mariner ; And one black speck—a distant sail—which told, Where mingled with its line the horizon dim. VI. Who were thy visitants, lone Isle, since man Shrank from thy sea-flower solitudes, and left His blackening ruins ’mid thy barren rocks ?— Up came the cormorant, with dusky wing, From northern Orkney, an adventurous flight, Floating far o’er us in the liquid blue ; While many a hundred fathom in the abyss Below, where lash’d the foaming surge unheard, Dwindled by distance, flocks of mighty fowl Floated like feathery specks upon the wave. The rower with his boat-hook struck the mast,— And, lo ! the myriad wings, that like a sheet Of snow o’erspread the crannies, all were up ! Thousands on, thousands, an inumerous throng, Darkening the noontide with their winnowing plumes, A cloud of animation !—the wide air Resounding with their mingling cries uncouth. VII. Words-cannot tell the sense of loneliness, Which then and there, cloudlike, across my soul, Fell, as our weary steps clomb that ascent.— Amid encompassing mountains I have stood, At twilight, when alone the little stars, Brightening amid the wilderness of blue, Proclaim’d a world not God-forsaken quite :— I have walk’d, at midnight, on the hollow shore, In darkness, when the trampling of the waves,— The demon-featured clouds,—and howling gales,— Seem’d like returning chaos ; all the fierce, Terrific elements in league with night ; Earth crouching underneath their tyrannous sway ; And the lone sea-bird screaming from his rock !— And I have mused in churchyards old and rude, And long forsaken, even by the dead, Beneath the waning moon, whose mournful ray Shew’d but the grey hawk sleeping on his stone :— But never, in its moods of phantasy, Had to itself my spirit shaped a scene Of sequestration more profound than thine, Grim throne of solitude, stupendous Bass !— Oft in the populous city, ’mid the stir And strife of hurrying thousands, to thy cliffs Precipitous and wild—the solan’s home— Wander my reveries ; and thoughts of thee,— (While scarcely stirs the ivy round the porch,)— Oft make the hush of midnight more profound.