Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

ST. KILDA. 177
absence of local colour and variety of forms, and from the
frequent difficulty of procuring breadths of light and
shadow in any other manner. If the uniform tints and
outlines of grey precipices or brown mountains require
splendid contrasts to give them interest, so the wider
sweep of hill and dale must be rendered effective by
shadows, not by shade, which it seldom displays with
advantage. It is to the pencil of a Turner alone that St.
Kilda will furnish employment. A dizzy height from
which the eye looks down over jutting crags retiring till
they are lost in air; a boiling sea below, without a boun-
dary; dark cliifs beaten by a foaming surge and lost in
the gloom of involving clouds ; the mixed contest of
rocks, ocean, and sky, these are the subjects which it offers
to him who, seeing- with the poet's eye, knows how to
speak the language of poetry with his pencil.
Of St. Kilda, who has communicated his name to this
island, nothing seems to be ascertained. At least I have
searched the Irish Hagiology for him in vain. In Mar-
tin's time, it appears also to have been known by the
name of Hirt or Hirta ;
a term derived from the parent of
Terra by the same inversion as our own Earth. The ideas
of those to whom St. Kilda was the whole earth, must
have been as expanded as those of the mite whose round
world is a Dutch cheese. It is a remarkable instance of
the zeal or wealth or influence of the early Clergy, that
in a spot like this, three chapels should have existed.
They were extant in Martin's time, and the very obscure
traces of two still remain. The ardour of reformation in
Scotland, as if more anxious to destroy what it abhorred
than to establish what it approved, seems to have left
them without a minister; esteeming the want of religion,
we must presume, preferable to what it pleased to term
idolatry. The fervour of that holy zeal which has also
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