Staffa

But we shall defer our correspondent's account of these to future pages, for the purpose of no longer withholding from our readers the more generally and highly interesting discoveries which were made in the lunar world, and for this purpose, too, we shall defer Dr. Grant's elaborate mathematical details of the corrections which Sir John Herschel has made in the best tables of the moon's tropical, sidereal, and synodic revolutions, and of those phenomenon of synergies on which a great part of the established lunar theory depends.

it was about half-past nine o'clock on the night of the tenth the moon having then advanced within four days of her mean libration that the astronomer adjusted his instrument for the inspection of her eastern limb the whole immense power of his telescope was applied and to its focal image about one-half the power of his microscope on removing the screen of the latter the field of view was covered throughout its entire area with a beautifully distinct and even vivid representation of basaltic rock its color was greenish brown and the width of their columns as defined by their instances on the canvas was invariably twenty-eight inches no fracture whatever appeared in the mass first presented but in a few seconds a shelving pile appeared of five or six columns width which showed their figure to be hexagonal and their articulations similar to those of the basaltic formations at staffa this precipitous shelf was profusely covered with a dark red flower precisely similar says dr grant to the papaver prohysis or rose poppy of our sublunary cornfields and this was the first organic production of nature in a foreign world ever revealed to the eyes of men the rapidity of the moon's ascension or rather of the earth's diurnal rotation being nearly equal to five hundred yards in a second would have effectually prevented the inspection or even the discovery of objects so minute as these but for the admirable mechanism which constantly regulates under the guidance of the sextant the required altitude of the lens but its operation was found to be so consummately perfect that the observers could detain the object upon the field of view for any period they might desire the specimen of lunar vegetation however which they had already seen had decided a question of too exciting an interest to induce them to retard its exit it had demonstrated that the moon has an atmosphere constituted similarly to our own and capable of sustaining organized and therefore most probably animal life the basaltic rock continued to pass over the inclined canvas plain through three successive diameters when a verdant declivity of great beauty appeared which occupied two more this was preceded by another mass of nearly the former height at the base of which they were at length delighted to perceive that novelty a lunar forest the trees said dr grant for a period of ten minutes were of one unvaried kind and unlike any i have seen except the largest kind of yews in the english churchyards which they in some respects resemble these were followed by a level green plain which as measured by the painted circle on our canvas of forty-nine feet must have been more than half a mile in breadth and then appeared as fine a forest of firs unequivocal firs as i have ever seen cherished in the bosom of my native mountains wearied with the long continuance of these we greatly reduced the magnifying power of the microscope without eclipsing either of the reflectors and immediately perceived that we had been insensibly descending as it were a mountainous district of highly diversified and romantic character and that we were on the verge of a lake or inland sea but of what relative locality or extent we were not yet too greatly magnified to determine on introducing the feeblest achromatic lens we possessed we found that the water whose boundary we had just discovered answered in general outline to the mare nubium of by which we detected that instead of commencing as we supposed on the eastern longitude of the planet some delay in the elevation of the great lens had thrown us nearly upon the axis of her equator however as she was a free country and we not as yet attached to any particular province or moreover since we could at any moment occupy our intended position we again slid in our magic lenses to survey the shores of the maranubium why ricoli so termed it unless in ridicule of cleodemes i know not for fairer shores never angels coasted on a tour of pleasure a beach of brilliant white sand girt with wild castellated rocks apparently of green marble varied at chasms occurring every two or three hundred feet with grotesque blocks of chalk or gypsum and feathered and festooned at the summit with the clustering foliage of unknown trees moved along the bright wall of our apartment until we were speechless with admiration The water, wherever we obtained a view of it, was nearly as blue as that of the deep oceans, and broke in large white billows upon the strand.

The action of very high tides was quite manifest upon the face of the cliffs for more than a hundred miles, yet diversified as the scenery was during this and much greater distance, we perceived no trace of animal existence, notwithstanding we could command at will a perspective or a foreground view of the whole mr holmes indeed pronounced some white objects of circular form which we saw at some distance in the interior of a cavern to be bona fide specimens of a large cornu but to me they appeared merely large pebbles which had been chafed and rolled there by the tides our chase of animal life was not yet to be rewarded having continued this close inspection nearly two hours during which we passed over a wide tract of country chiefly of a rugged and apparently volcanic character and having seen a few additional varieties of vegetation except some specimens of lichen which grew everywhere in great abundance dr herschel proposed that we should take out all our lenses give a rapid speed to the panorama and search for some of the principal valleys known to astronomers

The hardest part was figuring out where to go.

And one of my favorite pieces of music inspired by the British landscape is Felix Mendelssohn's 1833 concert overture, The Hebrides, which...

according to the Wikipedia page that I will link in the description, was inspired by his 1829 visit to the Scottish island of Staffa.

The Hebrides Overture, also known as Fingal's Cave, is atmospheric and evocative and, at least in my opinion, a little bit mystical.

So let's listen to this performance of the Hebrides Overture, which comes to us from the non-profit MuseOpen via Wikimedia Commons.