Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

306
FLANNAN ISLANDS.
thirty-fifth was not a discovery reserved for themselves.
I will not say that the gulls, the auks, the gannets,and the
cormorants, of Ailsa and the Flannan isles, will compete
for the palm of music with Haydn's Chaos, or with the
solemn and wild strain of extraordinary and superhuman
harmonies with which the Ghost first addresses Don
Giovanni : but the educated musician who shall chuse to
attend to these marine symphonies, will find that modern
inventions have unwittingly been only following nature,
and may thence borrow valuable hints for his own art.
I wish that I had been a musician, I would have out-
done Tartini, and the gulls of the (Ebudae should have
been my teachers, instead of King Mahound.
The accompaniments of time and place, the solitude
and the scenery, added not a little to the strange and im-
pressive effect of this extraordinary concert. The blue
canopy of heaven, along which the gold and crimson
clouds of evening were now beginning to stream from the
westward, and the wide expanse of the green sea on
which the last rays of the sun just began to throw a faint
gleam of red, formed a concert-room somewhat different
from the Philharmonic furnace, hot with mortality and
gas, and breathing suffocation and pestilence. Here, a
gentle and sweet breeze waved the long grass that hung
over the edges of the cliffs; and the gentle roll of the
heaving billow rising against the rocks as they turned their
gilded masses to the setting sun, murmured as it subsided
in a narrow line of silvery foam at their feet.
Two saints seem to contest for the honour of giving
their name to the Flannan islands. Flannan was Bishop
of Killaloe in 639, and he is canonized in the Irish Calen-
dar. But St. Flann was the sou of Maol-duine, Abbot of
lona, who died in 890; and who is to decide. Martin
tells us that, on Eilan-more, there were then remaining