HEXHAM--THE NORTH TYNE--BORDER-LAND AND ITS SUGGESTIONS--HAWICK--
TEVIOTDALE--BIRTH-PLACE OF LEYDEN--MELROSE AND DRYBURGH ABBEYS--
ABBOTSFORD: SIR WALTER SCOTT; HOMAGE TO HIS GENIUS--THE FERRY AND
THE OAR-GIRL--NEW FARM STEDDINGS--SCENERY OF THE TWEED VALLEY--
EDINBURGH AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS.
On Thursday, Sept. 3rd, I left Newcastle, and proceeded first
westward to the old town of Hexham, with the view of taking a more
central route into Scotland. Here, too, are the ruins of one of the
most ancient of the abbeys. The parish church wears the wrinkles of
as many centuries as the oldest in the land. Indeed, the town is
full of antiquities of different dates and races,--Roman, Scotch,
Saxon, Danish and Norman. They all left the marks of their glaived
hands upon it.
From Hexham I faced northward and followed the North Tyne up through
a very picturesque and romantic valley, thickly wooded and studded
with baronial mansions, parks, castles and residences of gentry,
with comfortable farm-houses looking sunny and cheerful on the green
hill slopes and on the quiet banks of the river. I saw fields of
wheat quite green, looking as if they needed another month's sun to
fit them for harvesting. Lodged in a little village about eight
miles from Hexham. The next day walked on to the little hamlet of
Fallstones, a distance of about twenty miles. As I ascended the
valley, the scene changed rapidly. The river dwindled to a narrow
stream. The hills that walled it in on either side grew higher and
balder, and the clouds lay cold and dank upon their bleak and sullen
brows. The hamlets edged in here and there grew thinner, smaller
and shabbier. The road was barred and gated about once in a mile,
to keep cattle and sheep from wandering; there being no fences nor
hedges running parallel with it. In a word, the premonitory
symptoms of a bare border-land thickened at every turn.
Another day brought me into the midst of a wild region, which might
be called No-man's-land; although most of it belongs to the Duke of
Northumberland. It is all in the solitary grandeur of heather-
haired hills, which tinge, with their purple flush, the huge, black-
winged clouds that alight upon them. Only here and there a
shepherd's cottage is to be seen half way up the heights, or
sheltering itself in a clump of trees in glen or gorge, like a
benighted traveller bivouacking for a night in a desert. Sheep, of
the Cheviot breed mostly, are nearly the sole inhabitants and
industrials of this mountainous waste. They climb to the highest
peaks and bring down the white wealth of their wool to man. It was
pleasant to see them like walking mites, flecking the dark brows of
the mountains. They made a picture; they made a tableau vivant of
the same illustration as Landseer's lamb looking into the grass-
covered cannon's mouth.
This is the Border-land! Here the fiercest antagonisms of hostile
nationalities met in deadly conflict. Fire and blood, rapine and
wrath blackened and reddened and ravaged for centuries across this
bleak territory. Robber-chieftains and knighted free-booters
carried on their guerilla raids backward and forward, under the
counterfeited banner of patriotism. Scotch and English armies led
by kings marched and counter-marched over this sombre boundary.
Never before was there one apparently more insoluble as a barrier
between two peoples. Never before in Christendom was there one that
required a longer space of time to melt. Never before did the
fusing of two nationalities encounter more fierce and prolonged
opposition. Did ever patriotism pour out a swifter and deeper tide
of chivalrous sentiment against merging one in another?--against
uniting two thrones and two peoples in one? Did patriotism ever
fight bloodier battles to prevent such a union, or cling to local
sovereignty with a more desperate hold?
This is the Border-land! Look up the purpled steeps of these
heathered hills. The white lambs are looking, with their soft, meek
eyes, into the grass-choked mouths of the rusty and dismantled
cannon of the war of nationalities between England and Scotland.
The deed has been consummated. The valor and patriotism of Wallace
and Bruce could not prevent it. The sheep of English and Scotch
shepherds feed side by side on these mountain heights, in spite of
Stirling and Bannockburn, of Flodden and Falkirk. The Iron Horse,
bearing the blended arms of the two realms on his shield, walks over
those battle-fields by night and day, treading their memories deeper
and deeper in the dust. The lambs are playing in the sun on the
boundary line of the two dominions. Does a Scot of to-day love his
native land less than the Campbell clansman or clan-chief in Bruce's
time? Not a whit. He carries a heartful of its choicest memories
with him into all countries of his sojourning. But there is a
larger sentiment that includes all these filial feelings towards his
motherland, while it draws additional warmth and strength from them.
It is the sentiment of Imperial Nationality; the feeling of a
Briton, that does not extinguish nor absorb, nor compete with, the
Scot in his heart;--the feeling that he is a political constituent
of a mighty nation, whose feet stand upon all the continents of the
earth, while it holds the best islands of the sea in its hands;--the
feeling with which he says _We_ with all the millions of a dominion
on which the sun never sets, and _Our_, when he speaks of its grand
and common histories, its hopes, prospects, progress, power and
aspirations.
There was a Border-land, dark and bloody, between Saxon England and
Celtic Wales. For centuries the red foot-marks of savage conflict
scarred and covered its wild waste. Never before did so small a
people make so stout, and desperate and protracted struggle for
local independence and isolation. Never did one produce a more
strong-hearted and blind-eyed patriotism, or patriotism more poets
to thrill the listeners to their lays with the intoxicating
fanaticism of a national sentiment. On that Border-land the white
lambs now lie in the sun. The Welsh sentiment is as strong as ever
in the Snowdon shepherd, and he may not speak a dozen words of the
English tongue. But the Briton lives in his breast. The feeling of
its great meaning surrounds and illumines the inner circles of his
local attachment. He may never have seen a map of the Globe, and
never have been outside the wall of the Welsh mountains; but he
knows, without geography, who and what Queen Victoria is among the
earth's sovereigns, and the length and breadth of her sceptre's
reach and rule around the world.
There was a Border-land between Britain and Ireland, blackened and
scarred by more burning antagonisms than those that once divided the
larger island. The record of several consecutive centuries is
graven deep in it by the brand and bayonet, and by the more incisive
teeth-marks of hate. The slumbering antipathies of race and
religion even now crop out here and there, over the unfused
boundary, in hissing tongues of flame. The Briton and the Celt are
still struggling for the precedence in the Irishman's breast; but it
is not a war of extermination. His ardent nature is given to
martial memories, and all the battles he boasts of are British
battles, in which he or his father played the hero number one. The
history of independent Ireland is poor and thin; still he holds it
back in his heart, and hesitates to link it with the great annals of
the "Saxon" realm, and thus make of both one grand and glorious
record, present and future. He cannot yet make up his mind to say
_We_ with all the other English-speaking millions of the empire, as
the Scotsman and Welshman have learned and loved to say it. He
cannot as yet say _Our_ with them with such a sentiment of joint-
interest, when the histories, hopes, expansion and capacities of
that empire unroll their vista before him. But the rains and the
dews of a milder century are falling upon this Border-land. The
lava of spent volcanoes that covered it is taking soil and seed of
green vegetation. The white lambs shall yet lie on it in the sun.
What a volume might be filled with the succinctest history of the
Border-lands of Christendom! France was intersected with them for
centuries. Seemingly they were as implacable and obdurate as any
that ever divided the British isle. Local patriotism wrote poetry
and shed blood voluminously to prevent the fusion of these old
landmarks of pigmy nationalities. It took nearly a thousand years
to complete the blending; to make the _we_ and the _our_ of one
great consolidated empire the largest political sentiment of the men
of Normandy, Burgundy or Navarre. Long and fierce, and seemingly
endless was the struggle; but at last, on all those old obstinate
boundaries of hostile principalities, the white lambs lay in the
sun.
There are Border-lands now in the south and east of Europe foaming
and seething with the same antagonisms of race and language; and
Christendom is tremulous with their emotion. It is the same old
struggle over again; and yet ninety-nine in a hundred of intelligent
and reading people, with the history of British and French Border-
lands before them, seem to think that a new and strange thing has
happened under the sun. Full that proportion of our English-
speaking race, in both hemispheres, closing the volume of its own
annals, have made up their minds to the belief that these Border-
lands between German and Magyar, Teuton and Latin, Russ and Pole,
bristle with antagonisms the like of which never were subdued, and
never ought to be subdued by human means or motives. To them,
naturally, the half century of this hissing and seething,
insurrection and repression, is longer than the five hundred years
and more it took to fuse into one the nationalities of England and
Wales. What a point of space is a century midway between the ninth
and nineteenth! Few are long-sighted enough in historic vision to
touch that point with a cambric needle. It may seem unfeeling to
say it or think it; still it is as true as the plainest history of
the last millenium. There is a patriotism that looks at the future
through a gimlet hole, and sees in it but a single star. That
patriotism is a natural, and most popular sentiment. It was strong
in the Welshman's breast a thousand years ago, and in the Scotsman's
half that distance back in the past. But it is a patriotism that
has its day and its rule; then both its eyes are opened, and it
looks upon the firmament of the future broadside on, and sees a
constellation where it once saw and half worshipped a solitary star.
Better to be the part of a great WHOLE than the whole of a little
_nothing_.
These continental Border-lands may see the face of their future
history in the mirror of England's annals. They are quaking now
with the impetuous emotions of local nationality. They are
blackened and scarred in the contest for the Welsh and Scotch
independence of centuries agone. But over those boundary wastes the
grass shall yet grow soft, fair and green, and there, too, the white
lambs shall lie in the sun.
My walk lay over the most inhospitable and unpeopled section I ever
saw. Calling at a station on the railway that passes through it, I
was told by the master that the nearest church or chapel was sixteen
miles in one direction, and over twenty in another. It is doubtful
if so large a churchless space could be found in Iowa or even
Kansas. I was glad to reach Hawick, a good, solid town but a little
way inside of the Scottish border, where I spent the sabbath and the
following Monday. This was a rallying and sallying point in the old
Border Wars, and was inundated two or three times by the flux and
reflux of this conflict, having been burnt twice, and put under the
ordeal of other calamities brought upon it when free-booting was
both the business, occupation and pastime of knighted chieftains and
their clansmen. It is now a thrifty, manufacturing town, lying in
the trough of the sea, or of the lofty hills that resemble waves
hardened to earth in their crests. Just opposite the Temperance Inn
in which I had my quarters, was the Tower Hotel, once a palatial
mansion of the Buccleuchs. There the Duchess of Monmouth used to
hold her drawing-rooms in an apartment which many a New England
journeyman mechanic would hardly think ample and comfortable enough
for his parlor. There is a curious conical mound in the town,
called the Moat-hill, which looks like a great, green carbuncle. It
is thought by some to be a Druidical monument, but is quite involved
in a mystery which no one has satisfactorily solved. It is strange
that no persistent and successful effort has been made to let day-
light through it. Some workmen a long time ago undertook to
perforate it, but were frightened away by a thunder-storm, which
they seemed to take as a reproof and threatened punishment for their
profanity. The great business of Hawick is the manufacture of a
woollen fabric called _Tweeds_. It came to this name in a singular
way. The clerk of the factory made out an invoice of the first lot
to a London house under the name of _Twilled_ goods. The London man
read it _Tweeds_, instead of Twilled, and ever since they have gone
by that title. As Sir Walter Scott was at that time making the name
"Tweed" illustrious, the mistake was a very lucrative one to the
manufacturers of the article. Here, too, in this border town
commences the chain of birthplaces of eminent men, who have honored
Scotland with their lives and history. Here was born James Wilson,
once the editor of The Economist, who worked his way up, through
intermediate positions of public honor and trust, to that of Finance
Minister for India, and died at the meridian of his manhood in that
country of dearly-bought distinctions.
On Tuesday, Sept. 8th, I commenced my walk northward from this
threshold town of Scotland. Followed down the Teviot to Denholm,
the birth-place of the celebrated poet and linguist, Dr. John
Leyden, another victim who offered himself a sacrifice to the costly
honors and emoluments of East Indian official life. One great
thought fired his soul in all the perils and privations of that
deadly climate. It was to ascend one niche higher in knowledge of
oriental tongues than Sir William Jones. He labored to this end
with a desperate assiduity that perhaps was never surpassed or even
equalled. He died hugging the conviction that he had attained it.
This little village was his birthplace. Here he wrote his first
rhymes, and wooed and won the first inspirations of the muse. His
heart, as its last pulses grew weaker and slower, in that far-off
heathen land, took on its child-thoughts again and its child-
memories; and his last words were about this little, rural hamlet
where he was born. A beautiful monument has been erected to his
memory in the centre of the large common around which the village is
built. On each of the four sides of the monument there is a tribute
to his name and worth; one from Sir Walter Scott, and one taken from
his own poems, entitled "Scenes of my Infancy," a touching appeal to
his old friends and neighbors to hold him in kind remembrance.
All this section is as fertile as it can be in the sceneries and
historical associations favorable for inspiring a strong-hearted
love of country, and for the development of the poetry of romantic
patriotism. It was pleasant to emerge from the dark, cold, barren
border-land, from the uncivilized mountains, standing sullen in the
wild, shaggy chevelure of nature, and to walk again between towering
hills dressed in the best toilet of human industry, crowned with
golden wheatfields, and zoned with broad girdles of the greenest
vegetation. It is when these contrasts are suddenly and closely
brought within the same vista that one sees and feels how the
Creator has honored the labor of human hands, and lifted it up into
partnership with His omnipotences in chronicling the consecutive
centuries of the earth in illuminated capitals of this joint
handwriting. It is a grand and impressive sight--one of those dark-
browed hills of the Border-land, bearded to its rock-ridged forehead
with such bush-bristles and haired with matted heather. In nature
it is what a painted Indian squaw in her blanket, eagle feathers and
moccasins, is in the world of humanity. We look upon both with a
species of admiration, as contrasts with objects whose worth is
measured by the comparison. The Empress Eugenie and the Princess of
Wales, and wives and sisters lovelier still to the circles of humble
life, look more beautiful and graceful when the eye turns to them
from a glance at the best-looking squaw of the North American wilds.
And so looked the well-dressed hills on each side of the Teviot,
compared with the uncultured and stunted mountains among which I had
so recently walked.
Ascending from Teviotdale, I passed the Earl of Minto's seat, a
large and modern-looking mansion, surrounded with beautiful grounds
and noble trees, and commanding a grand and picturesque view of
valley and mountain from an excellent point of observation. As soon
as I lost sight of Teviotdale another grand vista of golden and
purpled hills and rich valleys burst upon my sight as suddenly as
theatrical sceneries are shifted on the stage. Dined in a little,
rural, unpoetical village bearing the name of Lilliesleaf. Resuming
my walk, I soon came in sight of the grand valley of the Tweed, a
great basin of natural beauty, holding, as it were, Scotland's
"apples of gold in pictures of silver." Every step commanded some
new feature of interest. Here on the left arose to the still, blue
bosom of the sky the three great Eildon Hills, with their heads
crowned with heather as with an emerald diadem. The sun is low, and
the far-off village in the valley shows dimly between the daylight
and darkness. There is the shadow of a broken edifice, broken but
grand, that arises out of the midst of the low houses. A little
farther on, arches, and the stone vein-work of glassless windows,
and ivy-netted towers come out more distinctly. I recognise them at
the next furlong. They stand thus in pictures hung up in the
parlors of thousands of common homes in America, Australia and
India. They are the ruins of Melrose Abbey. Here is the original
of the picture. I see it at last, as thousands of Americans have
seen it before. In history and association it is to them the
Westminster Abbey of Scotland, but in ruin. It looks natural,
though not at first glance what one expected. The familiar
engraving does not give us the real flesh and blood of the
antiquity, or the complexion of the stone; but it does not
exaggerate the exquisite symmetries and artistic genius of the
structure. These truly inspire one with wonder. They are all that
pen and pencil have described them. The great window, which is the
most salient feature in the common picture, is a magnificent piece
of work in stone, twenty-four feet in height and sixteen in breadth.
It is all in the elm-tree order of architecture. The old monks
belonged to that school, and they wrought out branches, leaves and
leaf-veins, and framed the lacework of their chisels with colored
glass most exquisitely.
Melrose Abbey was the eldest daughter, I believe, of Rievaulx Abbey,
in Yorkshire, which has already been noticed; a year or two older in
its foundation than Fountain Abbey, in Studley Park. The fecundity
with which these ecclesiastical buildings multiplied and replenished
England and Scotland is a marvel, considering the age in which they
were erected and the small population and the poverty of the
country. But something on this aspect of the subject hereafter.
Here lie the ashes of Scottish kings, abbots and knights whose names
figured conspicuously in the history of public and private wars
which cover such a space of the country's life as an independent
nation. The Douglas family especially with several of its branches
found a resting-place for their dust within these walls. Built and
rebuilt, burnt and reburnt, mutilated, dismembered, consecrated and
desecrated, make up the history of this celebrated edifice, and that
of its like, from Land's End to John O'Groat's. It is a slight but
a very appreciable mitigation of these destructive acts that it was
ruined _artistically_; just as some enthusiastic castle and abbey-
painter would have suggested.
Although I spent the night at Melrose, it was a dark and cloudy one,
so that I could not see the abbey by moonlight--a view so much
prized and celebrated. The next day I literally walked from morning
till evening among the tombstones of antiquity and monuments of
Scotch history invested with an interest which will never wane. In
the first place, I went down the Tweed a few miles and crossed it in
a ferry-boat to see Dryburgh Abbey. Here, embowered among the trees
in a silver curve of the river, stands this grand monument of one of
the most remarkable ages of the world. Within an hour's walk from
Melrose, and four or five years only after the completion of that
edifice, the foundations of this were laid. It is astonishing. We
will not dwell upon it now, but make a separate chapter on it when I
have seen most of the other ruins of the kind in the kingdom. The
French are given to the habit of festooning the monuments and graves
of their relatives and friends with immortelles. Nature has hung
one of hers to Dryburgh Abbey. It is a yew-tree opposite the door
by which you enter the ruins. The year-rings of its trunk register
all the centuries that the stones of the oldest wall have stood
imbedded one upon the other. The tree is still green, putting forth
its leaf in its season. But there is an immortelle hung to these
dark, crumbling walls that shall outlive the greenest trees now
growing on earth. Here, in a little vaulted chapel, or rather a
deep niche in the wall, lie the remains of Sir Walter Scott, his
wife and the brilliant Lockhart. How many thousands of all lands
where the English language is spoken will come and stand here in
mute and pensive communion before the iron gate of this family tomb
and look through the bars upon this group of simply-lettered stones!
From Dryburgh I walked back to Melrose on the east side of the
Tweed. Lost the footpath, and for two hours clambered up and down
the precipitous cliffs that rise high and abrupt from the river. In
many places the zig-zag path was cut into the rock, hardly a foot in
breadth, overhanging a precipice which a person of weak nerves could
hardly face with composure. At last got out of these dark
fastnesses and ascended a range of lofty hills where I found a good
carriage road. This elevation commanded the most magnificent view
that I ever saw in Scotland, excepting, perhaps, the one from
Stirling Castle only for the feature which the Forth supplies. It
was truly beautiful beyond description, and it would be useless for
me to attempt one.
After dinner in Melrose, I resumed my walk northward and came
suddenly upon Abbotsford. Indeed, I should have missed it, had I
not noticed a wooden gate open on the roadside, with some directions
upon it for those wishing to visit the house. As it stands low down
towards the river, and as all the space above it to the road is
covered with trees and shrubbery, it is entirely hidden from view in
that direction. The descent to the house is rather steep and long.
And here it is!--Abbotsford! It is the photograph of Sir Walter
Scott. It is brim full of him and his histories. No author's pen
ever gave such an individuality to a human home. It is all the
coinage of thoughts that have flooded the hemispheres. Pages of
living literature built up all these lofty walls, bent these arches,
panelled these ceilings, and filled the whole edifice with these
mementoes of the men and ages gone. Every one of these hewn stones
cost a paragraph; that carved and gilded crest, a column's length of
thinking done on paper. It must be true that pure, unaided literary
labor never built before a mansion of this magnitude and filled it
with such treasures of art and history. This will forever make it
and the pictures of it a monument of peculiar interest. I have said
that it is brim full of the author. It is equally full of all he
wrote about; full of the interesting topographs of Scotland's
history, back to the twilight ages; full inside and out, and in the
very garden and stable walls. The studio of an artist was never
fuller of models of human or animal heads, or of counterfeit
duplicates of Nature's handiwork, than Sir Walter's mansion is of
things his pen painted on in the long life of its inspirations. The
very porchway that leads into the house is hung with petrified stag-
horns, doubtless dug up in Scottish bogs, and illustrating a page of
the natural history of the country in some pre-historic century.
The halls are panelled with Scotland,--with carvings in oak from the
old palace of Dunfermline. Coats of arms of the celebrated Border
chieftains are arrayed in line around the walls. The armoury is a
miniature arsenal of all arms ever wielded since the time of the
Druids. And a history attaches to nearly every one of the weapons.
History hangs its webwork everywhere. It is built, high and low,
into the face of the outside walls. Quaint, old, carved stones from
abbey and castle ruins, arms, devices and inscriptions are all here
presented to the eye like the printed page of an open volume. Among
the interesting relics are a chair made from the rafters of the
house in which Wallace was betrayed, Rob Roy's pistol, and the key
of the old Tolbooth of Edinburgh.
I was conducted through the rooms opened to visitors by a very
gentlemanly-looking man, who might be taken for an author himself,
from his intellectual appearance and conversation. The library is
the largest of all the apartments--fifty feet by sixty. Nor is it
too large for the collection of books it contains, which numbers
about 20,000 volumes, many of them very rare and valuable. But the
soul-centre of the building to me was the _study_, opening into the
library. There is the small writing-table, and there is the plain
armchair in which he sat by it and worked out those creations of
fancy which have excited such interest through the world. That
square foot over against this chair, where his paper lay, is the
focus, the point of incidence and reflection, of thoughts that
pencilled outward, like sun-rays, until their illumination reached
the antipodes,--thoughts that brought a pleasant shining to the sun-
burnt face of the Australian shepherd as he watched his flock at
noon from under the shadow of a stunted tree; thoughts which made a
cheery fellowship at night for the Hudson Bay hunter, in his snow-
buried cabin on the Saskatchiwine. The books of this little inner
library were the body-guard of his genius, chosen to be nearest him
in the outsallyings of his imagination. Here is a little
conversational closet, with a window in it to let in the leaf-sifted
light and air--a small recess large enough for a couple of chairs or
so, which he called a "Speak-a-bit." Here is something so near his
personality that it almost startles you like a sudden apparition of
himself. It is a glass case containing the clothes he last wore on
earth,--the large-buttoned, blue coat, the plaid trousers, the
broad-brimmed hat, and heavy, thick-soled shoes which he had on when
he came in from his last walk to lay himself down and die.
On signing my name in the register, I was affected at a coincidence
which conveyed a tribute of respect to the memory of the great
author of striking significance, while it recorded the painful
catastrophe which has broken over upon the American Republic. It
was a sad sight to me to see the profane and suicidal antagonisms
which have rent it in twain brought to the shrine of this great
memory and graven upon its sacred tablet as it were with the
murdering dagger's point. New and bad initials! The father and
patriot Washington would have wept tears of blood to have read them
here,--to have read them anywhere, bearing such deplorable meaning.
They were U.S.A. and C.S.A., as it were chasing each other up and
down the pages of the visitors' register. Sad, sad was the sight--
sadder, in a certain sense, than the smoke-wreaths of the Tuscarora
and Alabama ploughing the broad ocean with their keels. U.S.A. and
C.S.A.! What initials for Americans to write, with the precious
memories of a common history and a common weal still held to their
hearts--to write here or anywhere! What a riving and a ruin do
those letters record! Still they brought in their severed hands a
common homage-gift to the memory of the Writer of Abbotsford. If
they represented the dissolution of a great political fabric, in
which they once gloried with equal pride, they meant union here--a
oneness indissoluble in admiration for a great genius whose memory
can no more be localised to a nation than the interest of his works.
American names, both of the North and South, may be found on almost
every page of the register. I wrote mine next to that of a
gentleman from Worcester, Mass., my old place of residence, who only
left an hour before my arrival. Abbotsford and Stratford-upon-Avon
are points to which our countrymen converge in their travels in this
country; and you will find more of their signatures in the registry
of these two haloed homesteads of genius than anywhere else in
Europe.
The valley of the Tweed in this section is all an artist would
delight in as a surrounding of such histories. The hills are lofty,
declining into gorges or dells at different angles with the river,
which they wall in precipitously with their wooded sides in many
places. They are mostly cultivated to the top, and now in harvest
many of them were crowned with stooked sheaves of wheat, each
looking in the distance like Nature with her golden curls done up in
paper, dressing for the harvest-home of the season. Some of them
wore belts and gores of turnip foliage of different nuances of green
luxuriance, combining with every conceivable shade and alternation
of vegetable coloring. Indeed, as already intimated, the view from
the eminence almost overhanging the little sequestered peninsula on
which Old Melrose stood twelve centuries ago, is indescribably
beautiful, and well worth a long journey to see, disconnected from
its historical associations. The Eildon Hills towering up heather-
crowned to the height of over 1,300 feet above the level of the sea
right out of the sheen of barley fields, as from a sea of silver,
form one of the salient features of this glorious landscape. This
is an interesting peculiarity of Scotch scenery;--civilization
sapping the barbarism of the wilderness; wheat-fields mordant biting
in upon peaty moorlands, or climbing to the tops of cold, bald
mountains, shearing off their thorny locks of heather and covering
them with the well-dressed chevelure of yellow grain. Where the
farmer's horse cannot climb with the plough, or the little sheep
cannot graze to advantage, human hands plant the Scotch larch or
fir, just as a tenant-gardener would set out cabbage-plants in odd
corners of his little holding which he could have no other use for.
Abbotsferry is just above Abbotsford, and is crossed in a small row-
boat. The river here is of considerable width and quite rapid. The
boat was kept on the other side; so I hallooed to a man engaged in
thatching a rick of oats to come and ferry me over. Without
descending from the ladder, he called to some one in the cottage,
when, to my surprise, a well-dressed young woman, in rather flowing
dress, red jacket, and with her hair tastefully done up in a net a-
la-mode, made her appearance. Descending to the river, she folded
up her gown, and, settling herself to the oars, "pushed her light
shallop from the shore" with the grace of The Lady of the Lake. In
a few minutes she ran the prow upon the pebbled beach at my feet,
and I took my seat at the other end of the boat. She did it all so
naturally, and without any other flush upon her pleasant face than
that of the exercise of rowing, that I felt quite easy myself and
checked the expression of regret I was on the point of uttering for
putting her to such service. A few questions convinced me it was
her regular employment, especially when her father was busy. I
could not help asking her if she had ever read "The Lady of the
Lake," but found that neither that romance nor any other had ever
invested her river experience with any sensibility except of a
cheerful duty. She was going to do the whole for a penny, her usual
charge, but I declined to take back any change for the piece of
silver I gave to her, intimating that I regarded it cheap at that to
be rowed over a river by such hands.
Almost opposite to Abbotsford I passed one of the best farming
establishments I had seen in Scotland. I was particularly struck
with a feature which will hereafter distinguish the steddings or
farm buildings in Great Britain. Steam has already accomplished
many changes, and among others one that could hardly have been
anticipated when it was first applied to common uses. It has
virtually turned the threshing-floor out of doors. Grain growing
has become completely out-of-door work, from seeding to sending to
market. The day of building two-story barns for storing and
threshing wheat, barley and oats is over, I am persuaded, in this
country. A quadrangle of slate-roofed cow-sheds, for housing horses
and cattle, will displace the old-fashioned barns, each with its
rood of roof. This I saw on crossing the Tweed was quite new, and
may serve as a model of the housing that will come into vogue
rapidly. One familiar with New England in the "old meeting-house"
time would call this establishment a hollow square of horse-sheds,
without a break or crevice at the angles.
I reached Galashiels about 5 p.m., and stopped an hour for tea.
This is a vigorous and thrifty town, that makes a profitable and
useful business of the manufacture of tweeds, tartans and shawls.
It is situated on the banks of the Gala, a little, rapid, shallow
river that joins the Tweed about a mile below. After tea I resumed
my walk, but owing to the confused direction of the landlady, took
the wrong side of the river, and diverged westward toward Peebles.
I had made three miles or more in this direction before I found out
my mistake, so was obliged to return to Galashiels, where I
concluded to spend the night, after another involuntary excursion
more unsatisfactory than my walk around Sheffield, inasmuch as I had
to travel over the same road twice for the whole distance. Thus the
three mistakes thus far made have cost me twenty miles of extra
footing. The next morning I set out in good season, determined to
reach Edinburgh, if possible, by night.
Followed the Gala Water, as it is called here, just as if it were a
placid lake or land-locked bay, though it is a tortuous and swift-
running stream. The scenery was still picturesque, in some places
very grand and romantic. There was one great amphitheatre just
before reaching the village of Stow which was peculiarly
interesting. It was a great bowl full of earth's glory up to the
very rim. The circular wall was embossed with the best patterns and
colors of vegetation. The hills of every tournure showed each in a
fir setting, looking, with their sloping fields of grain, like
inverted goblets of gold vined with emerald leafwork. In the valley
a reaping machine was at work with its peculiar chatter and clatter,
and men and women were following in its wake, gathering up and
binding the grain as it fell and clearing the way for the next
round. Up and down these hills frequently runs a stripe of Scotch
firs or larches a few rods wide; here and there they resemble those
geometrical figures often seen in gardens and pleasure grounds. The
sun peeping out of the clouds, and flooding these features with a
sudden, transient river of light, gives them a glow and glory that
would delight the artist. After a long walk through such scenery, I
reached, late in the evening, Auld Reekie, a favorite home-name
which the modern Athenians love to give to Edinburgh. Being anxious
to push on and complete my journey as soon as practicable, I only
remained in the celebrated Scotch metropolis one night, taking staff
early next morning, and holding northward towards the Highlands.
Edinburgh has made its mark upon the world and its place among the
great centres of the world's civilization. On the whole, no city in
Great Britain, or in Christendom, has ever attained to such well-
developed, I will not say angular, but salient individuality. This
is deep-featured and ineffaceable. It is, not was. Edinburgh has
reared great men prolifically and supplied the world with them, and
kept always a good number back for itself to give a shaping to
others the world needed. Its prestige is great in the production of
such intellects. But it keeps up with the times. It is faithful to
its antecedents, and appreciates them at their full value and
obligation. It does not lie a-bed until noon because it has got its
name up for educating brilliant minds. Its grand old University
holds its own among the wranglers of learning. Its High School is
proportionately as high as ever, notwithstanding the rapid growth of
others of the same purpose. Its pulpit boasts of its old mind-power
and moral stature. Its Theology stands iron-cabled, grand and solid
as an iceberg in the sea of modern speculation, unsoftened under the
patter of the heterodox sentimentalities of human philanthropy. It
is growing more and more a City of Palaces. And the palaces are all
built for housing the poorest of the poor, the weakest of the weak
and the vilest of the vile. These hospitals are the Holyroods of
Edinburgh II. They honor it with a renown better than the royal
palace of the latter name ever won.
I said Edinburgh the Second. That is correct. There are two towns,
the Old and the New; the last about half a century's age. But the
oldest will be the youngest fifty years hence. The hand of a
"higher civilization," with its spirit-level, pick, plane and
trowel, is upon it with the grip of a Samson. That hand will tone
down its great distinctive individualities and give it the modern
_uniformity_ of design, face and feature. All these tall houses,
built skyward layer upon layer or flat upon flat, until they show
half a dozen stories on one street, and twice that number on the
other, are doomed, and they will be done for, one by one in its
turn. They probably came in with Queen Mary, and they will go out
under the blue-eyed Alexandra. They will be supplanted by the most
improved architecture of modern taste and utilitarianism. Edinburgh
will be Anglicised and put in the fashionable costume of a
progressive age; in the same swallow-tailed coat, figured vest and
stovepipe hat worn by London, Liverpool and Manchester. It will not
be allowed to wear tweed pantaloons except for one circumstance;--
that it is now building its best houses of stone instead of brick.
But there are physical features that will always distinguish
Edinburgh from all other cities of the world and which no
architectural changes can ever obliterate or deface. There are
Arthur's Seat, Salisbury Crags, the Calton Hill, and the Castle
Height, and there they will stand forever--the grandest surroundings
and garniture of Nature ever given to any capital or centre of the
earth's populations.