The disgorged eels are returned--some of them alive--to their native element--the mud. And the dead heron floats away before small winds and waves into the middle of the tarn. Where is he--the matchless Newfoundlander--_nomine gaudens_ FRO, because white as the froth of the sea? Off with a collie. So--stript with the first intention, we plunge from a rock, and,
"Though in the scowl of heaven, the tarn Grows dark as we are swimming,"
Draco-like, breast-high, we stem the surge, and with the heron floating before us, return to the heather-fringed shore, and give three cheers that startle the echoes, asleep from year's end to year's end, in the Grey-Linn Cairn.
Into the silent twilight of many a wild rock-and-river scene, beautiful and bewildering as the fairy work of sleep, will he find himself brought who knows where to seek the heron in all its solitary haunts. For often when the moors are storm-swept, and his bill would be baffled by the waves of tarn and loch, he sails away from his swinging-tree, and through some open glade dipping down to the secluded stream, alights within the calm chasm, and folds his wings in the breezeless air. The clouds are driving fast aloft in a carry from the sea--but they are all reflected in that pellucid pool--so perfect the cliff-guarded repose. A better day--a better hour--a better minute for fishing could not have been chosen by Mr Heron, who is already swallowing a par. Another--and another--but something falls from the rock into the water; and suspicious, though unalarmed, he leisurely addresses himself to a short flight up the channel--round that tower-like cliff standing strangely by itself, with a crest of self-sown flowering shrubs; and lo! another vista, if possible, just a degree more silent--more secluded--more solitary--beneath the mid-day night of woods! To shoot thee there--would be as impious as to have killed a sacred Ibis stalking in the shade of an Egyptian temple. Yet it is fortunate for thee--folded up there, as thou art, as motionless as thy sitting-stone--that at this moment we have no firearms--for we had heard of a fish-like trout in that very pool, and this--O Heron--is no gun but a rod. Thou believest thyself to be in utter solitude--no sportsman but thyself in the chasm--for the otter, thou knowest, loves not such very rocky rivers; and fish with bitten shoulder seldom lies here--that epicure's tasted prey. Yet within ten yards of thee lies couched thy enemy, who once had a design upon thee, even in the very egg. Our mental soliloquy disturbs not thy watchful sense--for the air stirs not when the soul thinks, or feels, or fancies about man, bird, or beast. We feel, O Heron! that there is not only humanity--but poetry, in our being. Imagination haunts and possesses us in our pastimes, colouring them even with serious, solemn, and sacred light--and thou assuredly hast something priest-like and ancient in thy look--and about thy light-blue plume robes, which the very elements admire and reverence--the waters wetting them not--nor the winds ruffling--and moreover we love thee--Heron--for the sake of that old castle, beside whose gloom thou utteredst thy first feeble cry! A Ruin nameless, traditionless--sole, undisputed property of Oblivion!