Which is the dreariest, most desolate and dismal of the Highland lochs? We should say Loch Ericht. It lies in a prodigious wilderness with which perhaps no man alive is conversant, and in which you may travel for days without seeing even any symptoms of human life. We speak of the regions comprehended between the Forest of Athole, and Bennevis, the Moor of Rannoch, and Glen Spean. There are many Lochs--and Loch Ericht is their grisly Queen. Herdsmen, shepherds, hunters, fowlers, anglers, traverse its borders, but few have been far in the interior, and we never knew anybody who had crossed it from south to north, from east to west. We have ourselves seen more of it, perhaps than any other Lowlander; and had traversed many of its vast glens and moors before we found our way to the southern solitude of Loch Ericht. We came into the western gloom of Ben Alder from Loch Ouchan, and up and down for hours dismal but not dangerous precipices that opened out into what might almost be called passes--but we have frequently to go back for they were blind--contrived to clamber to the edge of one of the mountains that rose from the water a few miles down the Loch. All was vast, shapeless, savage, black, and wrathfully grim; for it was one of those days that keep frowning and lowering, yet will not thunder; such as one conceives of on the eve of an earthquake. At first the sight was dreadful, but there was no reason for dread; imagination remains not longer than she chooses the slave of her own eyes, and we soon began to enjoy the gloom, and to feel how congenial it was in nature with the character of all those lifeless cliffs. Silence and darkness suit well together in solitude at noonday; and settled on huge objects make them sublime. And they were huge; all ranged together, and stretching away to a great distance, with the pitchy water, still as if frozen, covering their feet.