Externally, the building is quaint and singular enough; tall and gaunt, crested with innumerable little pepper box turrets and conical towers, like an old French chateau.

Besides the tragedy of Macbeth, another story of still more melancholy interest is connected with it, which a pen like that of Hawthorne, might work up with gloomy power.

In 1537 the young and beautiful Lady Glamis of this place was actually tried and executed for witchcraft.  Only think, now! what capabilities in this old castle, with its gloomy pine shades, quaint architecture, and weird associations, with this bit of historic verity to start upon.

Walter Scott says, there is in the castle a secret chamber; the entrance to which, by the law of the family, can be known only to three persons at once—­the lord of the castle, his heir apparent, and any third person whom they might choose to take into their confidence.  See, now, the materials which the past gives to the novelist or poet in these old countries.  These ancient castles are standing romances, made to the author’s hands.  The castle started a talk upon Shakspeare, and how much of the tragedy he made up, and how much he found ready to his hand in tradition and history.  It seems the story is all told in Holingshed’s Chronicles; but his fertile mind has added some of the most thrilling touches, such as the sleep walking of Lady Macbeth.  It always seemed to me that this tragedy had more of the melancholy majesty and power of the Greek than any thing modern.  The striking difference is, that while fate was the radical element of those, free will is not less distinctly the basis of this.  Strangely enough, while it commences with a supernatural oracle, there is not a trace of fatalism in it; but through all, a clear, distinct recognition of moral responsibility, of the power to resist evil, and the guilt of yielding to it.  The theology of Shakspeare is as remarkable as his poetry.  A strong and clear sense of man’s moral responsibility and free agency, and of certain future retribution, runs through all his plays.

I enjoyed this ride to Aberdeen more than any thing we had seen yet, the country is so wild and singular.  In the afternoon we came in sight of the German Ocean.  The free, bracing air from the sea, and the thought that it actually was the German Ocean, and that over the other side was Norway, within a day’s sail of us, gave it a strange, romantic charm.

“Suppose we just run over to Norway,” said one of us; and then came the idea, what we should do if we got over there, seeing none of us understood Norse.

The whole coast along here is wild and rock-bound; occasionally long points jut into the sea; the blue waves sparkle and dash against them in little jets of foam, and the sea birds dive and scream around them.

On one of these points, near the town of Stonehaven, are still seen the ruins of Dunottar Castle, bare and desolate, surrounded on all sides by the restless, moaning waves; a place justly held accursed as the scene of cruelties to the Covenanters, so appalling and brutal as to make the blood boil in the recital, even in this late day.