If you are a painter, you may have sea-views in abundance. You may choose your own time and place and grouping; early morning if you will, with the white mists rolling in over the shimmering sea, and the clamorous gulls hovering above skerries that are crusted all over with dense clinging masses of sea-weed. Or you may wait till the ascending sun rolls back the curtain of mist, and the sea gleams out before you a wide sheet of burnished gold, spangled with the rocky islets of a storm-swept archipelago. The waves roll in at your feet--long majestic ridges of water, dappled with lines of foam; the wide swell of the Atlantic sweeping in from the far shores of Labrador; while from far inland some tiny streamlet tumbles down to the sea through a natural copsewood of dwarf ash and birch and hazel.
Bold points and headlands stand like brave sentinels far out to sea, sheltering little natural harbours where the fisherman's boat rides in safety. Tiny fiords run inland into deep glens, with here and there a fisherman's hut or a crofter's cottage. Perhaps, however, you may have a fancy for foul weather, when the sky darkens like a pall over the sea, and the storm-fiend rouses himself from his ocean lair, and the tempest-tossed waves scud along in wreaths of foam to break in hoarse thunder upon the shore, or hurl themselves in impotent rage against the face of the steep headland. In Shetland you have grand alternations of calm and storm.
It is perhaps, however, for the student of human nature that Shetland has the greatest attractions. Here he will find a simple, kindly, primitive set of people, of Norwegian descent, but now anglicised in language and usages. They are, however, fond of old legends and stories. Mrs Saxby, the authoress of _Rockbound, a Story of the Shetland Isles_, in a pleasantly told narrative introduces us to this primitive people. We have for the scene of the story an island called Vaalafiel, five miles long, and a little over two in width, with a tiny harbour, and gray old mansion-house set in a strip of scraggy pine-wood. Vaalafiel, Mrs Saxby tells us, 'is coiled upon the sea much in the way a kitten rolls itself together on the hearth-rug--the creature's paws being represented by the narrow belts of land overlapping each other and forming the arms of our voe (fiord), whose crags are very suggestive of claws. Rising abruptly from the shores of this harbour, the island becomes a hill, whose eastern side is a precipice dipping into the German Ocean. The north point terminates in a bold headland, from whence the hill slopes gradually southwards, until it ends in a beautiful stretch of sand, kissed white by the broad waves of the Atlantic. The neighbouring islands cluster north and south, leaving deep narrow channels, where the two great seas keep up a perpetual warfare; and he is a daring sailor who ventures to cross those tideways when their "dark hour" approaches.'