The poetical works of Sir Walter Scott, with memoir of the author.

326 APPENDIX TO THE
often stopped to admire the ravages which storms must
have made in these recesses, where all human witnesses were driven to places of more shelter and
security. Stones, or rather large masses and fragments of rocks of a composite kind, perfectly different
from the strata of the lake, were scattered upon the
bare rocky beach, in the strangest and most precarious
situations, as if abandoned by the torrents which had
borne them down above. Some lay loose and tottering upon the ledges of the natural rock, with so little
security, that the slightest push moved them, though
their weight might exceed many tons. These detached
rocks, or stones, were chiefly what is called plumpudding stones. The bare rocks, which formed the
shore of the lakes, were a species of granite. The
opposite side of the lake seemed quite pathless and
inaccessible, as a huge mountain, one of the detached
ridges of the Cuillen hills, sinks in a profound and
perpendicular precipice down to the water. On the
left-hand side, which we traversed, rose a higher and
equally inaccessible mountain, the top of which
strongly resembled the shivered crater of an exhausted
volcano. I never saw a spot in which there was less
appearance of vegetation of any kind. The eye
rested on nothing but barren and naked crags, and the
rocks on which we walked by the side of the loch,
were as bare as the pavements of Cheapside. There
are one or two small islets in the loch, which seemed
to bear juniper, or some such low bushy shrub. Upon
the whole, though I have seen many scenes of more
extensive desolation, I never witnessed any in which
it pressed more deeply upon the eye and the heart
than at Loch Corrisken; at the same time that its