Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

176 ST- KILDA.
perfectly wild, which the people contrive to catch and
brinff away ; but how they climbed up to it or how they
descended, it was only for themselves to comprehend.
Though the outline of St. Kilda is never sufficiently
elevated or varied to afford a picturesque object, it is
subject to atmospheric effects which offer endless studies
for the higher and poetical department of landscape.
Fertile as are the other islands of this sea in all the acci-
dents of colour and light that arise from these changes,
they fall far short of this one, where the variations of the
atmosphere are incessant, where they are accompanied by
effects, equally various and changeable, of light and
shadow, of rain and mist and storm, and of clouds in a
thousand new and romantic forms and colours such as
neither poet nor painter ever imagined; the whole pro-
ducing the most splendid and unexpected combinations
with the land and with an ever restless and changing
sea. The cause of these is found in the detached po-
sition of this island. Sufficiently high to arrest the
course of the clouds from the Western Ocean, it is
often involved in mists and showers and blackened by
shadows, even when the rest of the atmosphere is settled
and clear. Hence also it sometimes precipitates them over
all the surrounding sea and sky ; thus, while it produces
the most brilliant and varied effects, offering to the phi-
losopher the most beautiful examples of the power of
land in attracting water from a transparent atmosphere.
The value of accidents of light to landscape are well
known ; and that they are especially incidental to moun-
tainous countries is not less familiar. The forms of the
ground in these cases also, confers on them a power and
variety which they want in flatter countries. In these
misty and remote landscapes moreover, their effect is
greater, while it is more needed, from the comparative