I stood thus absorbed till about mid-day, at which time the flash and the report of a solitary gun from the royal yacht caught my eye and my ear, and made me start into recollection. Just then, a cloud of the most impenetrable darkness had collected behind, or, as it appeared to me, around the castle, which made the Athens appear as if her magnitude stretched on into the impenetrable gloom of infinitude. But I had no time to pursue the train of feeling to which that would have given rise; for the volleyed cannon--flash upon flash and peal upon peal, and the huzzaing people--shout upon shout and cheer after cheer, made the cliffs and mountains ring around me, and the palace rock under my feet, as though the heavens and the earth had been coming together, and the Athens had been to be dashed to pieces in the maddening of her own joy. The ships in the roads first pealed out the tale, and the blue waters of the Forth were enshrouded in a vesture of silvery smoke. Anon the batteries upon the Calton took up the tidings; and their roar, all powerful as it was, was almost drowned in the voices of the thousands which thronged that romantic hill. In an instant, the same deafening sounds, and the same gleaming fires, burst away from the Craggs on the left; and the cannon and the cry continued to call and to answer to each other from the right hand and from the left, as--
----“Jura answers through her misty shroud, Back to the joyous Alps, which call to her aloud,”
till every atom of the air was reverberating with sound, every cliff and every building returning its echo, the ground reeling to the noise, the fleecy smoke hanging upon the cliffs like the clouds of heaven, or settling down till the Athens put on the appearance of a sea, in which the more elevated buildings and spires seemed islets, and the castle, with her glaring fires, and her astounding volleys, towered like an Etna, burning, blazing, and thundering across the deep. What with the closing of the natural clouds, and the spreading of the artificial ones, the darkness which even at noon-day had settled over the city was awfully sublime; even the mass of the castle, large and lofty though it be, was shrouded in the thick vapour of the sky and of itself, so that all which the eye could discern, was the flashes of artillery contending with the flickering of distant lightning, and all that the ear could hear was the mingled peal and jubilee, in the pauses of which the voice of the distant thunder was too feeble for being heard. The darkness borrowed additional sublimity, if indeed that was possible, from the pure and unclouded light of the sun, which a few straggling beams that occasionally stole their way as far as the slopes of Arthur Seat, told me was sleeping upon the plains of Lothian; and the din of the joy received all the accession of contrast from the stilly silence which reigned in the deserted halls and desolated villages of that busy and blooming land. Amid this darkness and din, the royal barge rowed softly towards the Scottish strand, and the sovereign of these realms was the first to set his foot upon Scottish ground, while the author of these pages occupied the very pinnacle of the Scottish palace. The magistrates of Leith, all tingling and but ill at their ease, stood shaking and speechless to receive him; but their blushes were a good deal spared by those grand monopolists of Caledonian loyalty, the lords president, justice clerk, baron register, and advocate, and that mighty master of the ceremonies, and that mightier memorialist, (who, it was hoped, would cut the thing into everlasting brass,) Sir Walter Scott. But though the monopolizing lords blushed not, they blanched a little, when they found the eyes of the king turning everywhere with the same beaming delight upon the people, whose appearance and whose conduct showed him that Scotland, if not the most polished, was by no means the least polished jewel of his crown; and the baronet, who haply was brought there, chiefly from the eclât which his literary renown would confer upon his less gifted but more official associates, found perchance that the glory of an author, however high in itself, and however rewarded, is but a tiny instrument of Royal joy.