Thomson was considerably the earlier. He was born in Roxburghshire in
1700, within hearing of the ripple of the Tweed, within sight of the
Cheviot and Lammermuir Hills, and in a region famous in Border ballad
and song. To the east the uplands of the Cheviot Hills rise as a blue
ridge, high enough to come often within the clouds, to catch the first
snows of autumn, and to keep them unmelted in northern rifts until the
spring. From these long, bare undulating uplands a number of streams
descend northwards into the Tweed, each having its own dale, with its
own ridge of moors on either hand, and its meadows and cornfields along
the bottom. The slope of the ground gives these descending waters such
an impetus as sends them dashing over rocky channels, here and there
cutting a scaur or ravine, murmuring over gravelly bottoms, winding
through flat haughs, and finally finding their way into the Tweed. The
watercourses are thus in themselves full of variety and life, and their
charms are enhanced by the alternation of meadow and field, coppice,
ferny brake and woodland, through which they wander. Nor are occasional
bolder features wanting to enliven these quiet valleys. Here and there
knobs of volcanic material rise along the crests of the ridges into
prominent hills, which are conspicuous landmarks all over the Border
country. Since Thomson's day the plough has no doubt crept further up
the hill sides; more wood has been planted and more ground has been
enclosed. But there is still plenty of bare moor and peat-moss, and
the pastoral character of the district yet remains. The traditions of
Border warfare have grown fainter, but the ruined peel-towers still
stand as picturesque relics of the old wild times. The climate, too,
has not changed. The winter storms still send down the rivers in full
flood, and bury the vales in deep snow; the spring whitens the meadows
and hedgerows with flower and blossom, and the short summer gives way
to an early autumn.
Such was the scenery that inspired the 'sweet poet of the year,'
as Burns called him. Thomson came to London in 1725, when he was
twenty-five years of age, and the following year he published his
_Winter_. The poem, though written at Barnet, took its inspiration
from the Border. The verse was turgid, full of latinisms, and sadly
lacking in the simplicity and directness which the subject required.
Nevertheless these defects could not conceal the genuine poetic
gift of the writer, and the poem immediately became popular, for
notwithstanding its artificial style, it took the reader at once into
the sanctuaries of nature, from which the poetry of the previous
hundred years had been exiled. It awakened a general interest in
features of landscape never before described so fully or so well in
English verse. It painted changes of the sky--tempest, rain-clouds and
snow-storms, and it brought the gloom of a northern winter vividly
before the imagination of dwellers in a more southerly clime.
Thomson told the world how in his youth,
'Nursed by careless solitude he lived
And sang of nature with unceasing joy,'[28]
and how, with 'nature's volume broad displayed,' it was his sole
delight to read therein, happy if it might be his good fortune,
'Catching inspiration thence
Some easy passage, raptured, to translate.'[29]
He had been used in his early years to muse
'On rocks and hills and towers and wandering streams,'[30]
and these now became the subjects of his song. Thomson, like his
greater successor Burns, had from earliest boyhood been familiar with
the burns and waters of his northern home. When he came to England
he found but little entertainment in the landscapes around London,
and longed for 'the living stream, the airy mountain, and the hanging
rock.' He portrays with evident delight the changeful aspect of his
native watercourses in the various seasons of the year. He knew well
the 'deep morass' and 'shaking wilderness,' where many of them 'rise
high among the hills,' and whence they assumed their 'mossy-tinctured'
hue. He traces them as they 'roll o'er their rocky channel' until they
at last lose themselves in 'the ample river' Tweed.[31] He describes
them as they appear at sheep-washing time, and dwells on their delights
for boys as bathing-places. But it is their wilder moods that live most
vividly in his memory, when
'From the hills
O'er rocks and woods, in broad brown cataracts,
A thousand snow-fed torrents shoot at once.'[32]
It is worthy of remark, however, that even though nature is his theme,
the poet writes rather as an interested spectator than as an earnest
votary. He reveals no passion for the landscapes he depicts. He never
appears as if himself a portion of the scene, alive with sympathy
in all the varying moods of nature. His verse has no flashes of
inspiration, such as contact with storm and spate drew from Burns. It
was already, however, a great achievement that Thomson broke through
the conventionalities of the time, and led his countrymen once more to
the green fields, the moors, and the woodlands.
In the successive poems which when placed together made the _Seasons_,
published in 1730, Thomson continued to draw on his recollections
of the Scottish Border for the descriptions of landscape that form
so fundamental a part of his theme. It is interesting to note that
even after he had been five years in the south of England, and must
have seen in that time much variety of weather and many different
watercourses, it is still from the north that he draws his sketches.
When, for instance, he tells how in autumn,
'Red from the hills, innumerable streams
Tumultuous roar,'[33]
the colour of his torrents betrays their Scottish origin. He was
thinking of the spates in his native streams which sweep across tracts
of Old Red Sandstone, and come down almost brick-red in hue. There
are no red rocks, and therefore no red brooks in Middlesex and the
surrounding districts.
But before the completion of the _Seasons_ the influence of English
lowland scenery had begun to impress itself on Thomson's imagination.
The softer and ampler landscape of fruitful plains, with its richer
agriculture and fuller population, its farms, villages, and country
houses, filled his mind with a new pleasure. Some trace of this
widened experience may be seen in the additions successively made to
the earlier poems, such as the picture of Hagley Park introduced into
the poem on _Spring_. But it was in his last effusion, _The Castle of
Indolence_, that this English influence gained entire sway, and the
Scottish memories faded into the background. Here we find ourselves
amid the typical landscapes of the south of England--landscapes,
however, so transfused by poetic genius as to acquire an individuality
of their own. We are led into 'a lowly dale fast by a river's side';
we wander through 'sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between';
we see 'glittering streamlets' in a sunny glade'; we skirt a 'sable,
silent, solemn forest'; and pass a 'wood of blackening pines,' which
runs up the hills on either side, and see the famous castle 'close
hid amid embowering trees,' that make a kind of chequered day and
night. The landscape, we are told, 'inspires perfect ease'--a quality
which must now have become indispensable to the 'bard, more fat than
bard beseems.' Thomson, with his adoption of English scenery, had
also polished his style and rid himself of much of his turgidity and
latinism. He had changed his theme, too, and had chosen one more in
consonance with the prevailing vogue. But to the end he had an eye for
the charms of the free open face of nature. For the share he took in
bringing back into our literature the recognition of these charms, he
will ever hold an honourable place in the history of letters.
It was from another and somewhat dissimilar part of the Scottish
lowlands that a far more powerful impulse than that of Thomson was
given by the genius of Burns to the progress of the literary revolution
of the eighteenth century. The landscapes of Ayrshire, where Burns was
born and spent most of his life, though akin in their main aspects
to those of Roxburghshire, present nevertheless certain well-marked
differences in topography which were not without their influence on the
muse that inspired _Tam o' Shanter_ and _Halloween_.
The lowlands familiar to Burns throughout most of his life form a wide
and undulating plain, surrounded on three sides by ranges of upland,
and on the fourth by the open Firth of Clyde. The heights along the
southern side belong to the long and broad chain of uplands which
stretches from Portpatrick to Saint Abb's Head. Rising sometimes to
more than 2,500 feet above the sea, they stretch as a wide pastoral
country, much of which is still covered with 'muirs and mosses many.'
These high grounds catch the clouds and mists from the Atlantic, and
receive such a copious rainfall as to feed many large streams which
cross the lowlands to the sea. The number and size of these streams
form a notable feature in the scenery, and the different geological
formations through which they flow have contributed to give much
variety to their channels. Here they may be seen flowing in a narrow
glen, there opening into a wider strath, or creeping sullenly in a
narrow chasm between precipitous walls of naked stone, or dashing
merrily over rock and boulder beneath overarching trees, or sweeping in
wide curves through open meadows or dense woods, and finally carrying
their burden of mossy water into the blue firth.
These streams, with their endless changes of aspect, their variations
from season to season, their play of sunshine and shadow, their wild
flowers and their birds, had a strong hold on the affections of Robert
Burns. His best inspiration came to him from them. As he tells us
himself:
'The Muse, na Poet ever fand her,
Till by himsel he learn'd to wander
Adown some trottin' burn's meander,
An' no think lang;
O sweet to stray, an' pensive ponder
A heart-felt sang.'[34]
In the poem from which these lines are quoted, after alluding to the
poetic fame of other streams, while those of his own county remained
unsung, the poet declares his resolve to atone for this neglect:
'We'll gar our streams and burnies shine
Up wi' the best.
We'll sing auld Coila's plains an' fells,
Her moors red-brown wi' heather-bells,
Her banks an' braes, her dens an' dells.'
Amply did he fulfil his promise. There is not a river, hardly even
a tributary, within his reach, that has not been made famous in his
lyrics. In the first bloom of opening manhood it was the Ayr and the
Doon that gave him inspiration, and when broken in health and spirits,
and with an early grave opening before him, it was by the banks of the
Nith that his last poetic impulse arose.
In his relation to Nature there was this great difference between
Burns and his literary contemporaries and immediate predecessors,
that whereas even the best of them wrote rather as pleased spectators
of the country, with all its infinite variety of form and colour, of
life and sound, of calm and storm, he sang as one into whose very
inmost heart the power of these things had entered. For the first
time in English literature the burning ardour of a passionate soul
went out in tumultuous joy towards Nature. The hills and woods, the
streams and dells were to Burns not merely enjoyable scenes to be
visited and described. They became part of his very being. In their
changeful aspects he found the counterpart of his own variable moods;
they ministered to his joys, they soothed his sorrows. They yielded
him a companionship that never palled, a sympathy that never failed.
They kindled his poetic ardour, and became themselves the subjects of
his song. He loved them with all the overpowering intensity of his
affectionate nature, and his feelings found vent in an exuberance of
appreciation which had never before been heard in verse.
Among the natural objects which exerted this potent sway over the
poetry of Burns, the streams of Ayrshire and Nithsdale ever held a
foremost place. Their banks were his favourite haunt for reverie. They
were familiar to him under every change of sky and season, from firth
to fell. Each feature in their seaward course was noted by his quick
eye, and treasured in his loving memory. Their union of ruggedness and
verdure, of sombre woods and open haughs, of dark cliff and bright
meadow, of brawling current and stealthy flow, furnished that variety
which captivated his fancy, and found such fitting transposition
to his verse. His descriptions and allusions, however, are never
laboured and prominent; they are dashed off with the careless ease of
a master-artist, whose main theme is the portrayal of human feeling.
Even when the banks and braes have been the immediate source of his
inspiration, Burns quickly passes from them into the world of emotion
to which he makes them subservient.
So numerous and descriptive are his allusions to them that a luminous
account of the characteristics of the Carrick brooks and rivers might
easily be compiled from Burns' poems. At one moment we find him
appealing to them for sympathy in his grief:
'Ye hazelly shaws and briery dens,
Ye burnies, wimplin' down your glens
Wi' toddlin' din,
Or foaming, strang, wi' hasty stens,
Frae linn to linn.'[35]
The same appeal forms the burden of his song on the _Banks and braes o'
bonnie Doon_. He leads us where
'In gowany glens the burnie strays,
Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes,
Wi' hawthorns gray.'[36]
He pictures the stream after a rain-storm, when
'Tumbling brown, the burn comes down
And roars frae bank to brae;'[37]
or when the breath of the Atlantic has swept over the wintry hills and
the
'Burns wi' snawy wreeths up-choked
Wild-eddying swirl,
Or through the mining outlet bocked
Down-headlong hurl.'[38]
But nowhere does his delight in these features of his native landscape
find more exuberant expression than in his _Halloween_, when he
interrupts his narrative of Leezie's misadventure to give a graphic
picture of one of his brooks in the calm moonlight of an autumn evening.
'Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,
As thro' the glen it wimpl't;
Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays
Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't;
'Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays,
Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle;
Whyles cookit underneath the braes,
Below the spreading hazel
Unseen that night.'
Born near the river Ayr, and having spent his boyhood and youth in
its valley, Burns had ever a special affection for that stream, along
whose banks he had composed some of his finest poems. When his enforced
emigration to America was settled, and his trunk on its way to the
ship, he wrote a parting song in the burden of which the banks of Ayr
are made to stand for his native country as a whole:
'The bursting tears my heart declare,
Farewell, the bonnie banks of Ayr.'[39]
When the respite came, and he found himself famous and in Edinburgh,
the Address which he wrote to the Scottish capital contrasted his
reception there with what had gone before, and again his heart was by
his beloved river:
'From marking wildly-scattered flowers,
As on the banks of Ayr I stray'd,
And singing, lone, the ling'ring hours,
I shelter in thy honour'd shade.'
And lastly, when the shadows were beginning to gather around him at
Ellisland, his thoughts would go back to the same scene. In one of his
latest and most pathetic songs we find once more a reminiscence of his
associations with the river of his youth:
'Ayr gurgling kiss'd his pebbled shore
O'erhung with wild woods, thick'ning green;
The fragrant birch, and hawthorn hoar,
Twin'd am'rous round the raptur'd scene.
The flowers sprang wanton to be prest,
The birds sang love on every spray,
Till too, too soon, the glowing west,
Proclaim'd the speed of winged day.'[40]
When Burns moved from Ayrshire to Nithsdale, he found at his new
home another valley and another river that could minister to his
inspiration. The Nith took the place of the Ayr. But it could not
wholly fill that place, for its landscape is less ample, the hills
come closer down upon the valley, while the river, in its lower
course, curves from side to side in a wide alluvial plain, without the
variety that marks the lower part of the Ayr. We seem to recognise the
influence of these differences in the allusions in the songs.
The landscapes of Burns are marked by some curious limitations. Though
he was born within sight of the picturesque mountain group of Arran, it
does not come within his poetic outlook.[41] Though the 'craggy ocean
pyramid' of the Clyde rose so stupendously from the firth in front of
him, he makes no use of it further than to tell how 'Meg was deaf as
Ailsa Craig.' Its distant grandeur does not seem to have struck his
imagination. Indeed, if we examine his treatment of scenery, we may
observe that it is the nearer detail that appeals to him. His pictures
are exquisite foregrounds with seldom any distinct distance. But
perhaps more remarkable still is the small place which the sea takes in
the poetry of Burns. We must bear in mind that he was born and spent
his boyhood within sight and hearing of the open Firth of Clyde. The
dash of the breakers along the sandy beach behind his father's 'clay
biggin' must have been one of the most familiar sounds to his young
ears. Yet the allusions to the sea in his poems betray little trace of
this association. They are in large measure introduced to mark the wide
distance between separated friends.
It must be remembered, however, that his life, after he began to
write, was passed inland, where the wide firth could only be seen from
the rising ground at a distance of several miles. Yet Burns has left
testimony that his imagination had not been insensible to the life and
movement of the ocean. One of the most effective touches in his picture
of the night scene in the _Brigs of Ayr_ is given in the reference to
the neighbouring sea--
'The tide-swollen Firth, wi' sullen-sounding roar,
Through the still night dashed hoarse along the shore';
and when his native Muse gives him her benediction she tells how she
had watched his passionate love of Nature:
'I saw thee seek the sounding shore,
Delighted with the dashing roar;
Or when the North his fleecy store
Drove thro' the sky;
I saw grim Nature's visage hoar
Strike thy young eye.'[42]
II. The UPLANDS of the British Isles consist of undulating plains or
plateaux which lie from 1000 to more than 2000 feet above the sea.
Seen from a distance, they look like ranges of hill or mountain, but
without that variety of peak and crest which a true mountain outline
would present. Though they may rise steeply out of the lower grounds,
we have only to climb to their summit to find ourselves at the edge of
a wide rolling platform, which may stretch for leagues without ever
rising into any sharp prominence, or departing from the same monotony
of moorland. Yet if we attempt to cross this seemingly continuous
tableland, we find our progress barred by many valleys which, deep sunk
beneath the general level, divide the plateau into separate blocks or
ridges.
The surface of these uplands is for the most part treeless and even
bushless. Where not covered with peat-moss, it is clothed with bent
or with heather, kept short and green by periodical burning in the
springtime. Herds of cattle and flocks of sheep wander over the
pastures, but, save the stone fences, there is little other visible
trace of human occupation. It is in the little hollows that lead down
into the main valleys, and in these valleys themselves, that trees
make their appearance, first in scattered saplings of birch, alder
or mountain-ash, and then in thicker copsewoods or in artificial
plantations of fir and larch. In these sheltered depressions, the farms
and villages of the region have been planted, and cultivation has
been slowly pushed upward on the slopes of the fells. Thus the larger
part of the area of the uplands is uninhabited, the population being
restricted to the more or less sheltered 'hopes,' hollows, dales, and
valleys.
This type of scenery presents many local varieties, according to the
geological structure of the ground. Where the rocks have been but
little disturbed, the sides of the valleys display a succession of
parallel bars of stone with intervening grassy slopes, such as may be
seen among the moors of the East Riding, or in the dales of the Pennine
Chain. Where, on the other hand, the rocks have been much compressed
and pushed over each other by powerful movements of the terrestrial
crust, their erosion has given rise to no regular topography, but they
decay into rounded forms covered with heath and herbage, or breaking
here and there into rocky scarps, as in Wales and southern Scotland.
Of the British uplands, the only district that claims notice here in
connection with our literature is that of the wide Border country
of England and Scotland. It stretches through the moorlands of
Northumberland and Cumberland into the range of the Cheviots on the
one hand, and on the other into the great tract of high ground, which
extends through the Lammermuir and other groups of fells from the
North Sea to the Solway Firth. For many centuries this region has been
pre-eminently pastoral. The natural forest, which in old times clothed
much of its surface, has almost wholly disappeared before modern
agriculture, and the plough has in successive generations crept higher
up the slopes from the meadows of the dales. But there can be little
doubt that though roads and railways have done much to open up these
solitudes, the natural features remain essentially unchanged.
It was among these uplands that the Border ballads had their birth. We
may therefore pause for a few moments to inquire what trace may still
be discernible of the influence of the landscape upon the tales of war
and love, of feud and raid and rescue, which have made that Border-land
famous in our literature.
At the outset it is desirable to realise the all-important character of
the valleys in the human history of the uplands. From time immemorial,
these strips of more sheltered and cultivable ground, lying much below
the general level of the moorlands, have been to a large extent cut
off from each other by high tracts of fell and peat-moss. Each of them
took its name from the stream which, rising far up among the moors, and
gathering tributary rivulets from glens on either side, winds down the
strip of haugh along the valley-bottom. For generations past the people
have looked on their native stream with an affectionate regard.[43] It
has been the bond of union that has linked the natives of each dale in
one family or brotherhood. The valley itself may vary its scenery as
it passes across different parts of the upland, here narrowing into
a glen, there widening into a strath; its slopes may change their
aspect, now clothed in bent or purple heather, now waving with bracken
or birken copsewood, now striped with fields of tillage, but the clear
river that dashes merrily onward through these diversities of scene
unites them all into one continuous dale.
The isolation imposed on the separate communities by this topography
of the ground inured them to habits of self-dependence. It gave them
a coherence that served them in good stead for attack or defence in
the old days of Border forays. Each stream not only gave its name to
the whole valley which it traversed, but to the human population that
dwelt by its banks. It was called a 'Water,' such as Leader Water,
Allan Water, Jed Water, and many more, and this word 'water' came to
be synonymous with the able-bodied inhabitants of the dale. When, for
instance, old Buccleuch gave his orders for the ride to rescue Jamie
Telfer's cattle, carried off by English thieves, he bade his men
'Gar warn the water, braid and wide,
Gar warn it sune and hastilie.'
The marauding propensities of one of these communities would sometimes
be condensed into the name of their valley, as where Dick o' the Cow
complains that
'Liddesdale's been i' my house last night,
And they hae taen my three kye frae me.'
The ballads are so full of human incident as to leave little room even
for a background of landscape, but some of the features of the scenery
are here and there graphically indicated by a line or even a word. 'The
bent sae brown' of the higher ground gives place to 'heathery hill and
birken shaw,' with here and there a 'bush of broom' or 'buss o' ling'
where the dun deer couches in the glade. We are led to where
'The hills are high on ilka side
An' the bought i' the lirk o' the hill.'
We are made to see that the 'morning sun is on the dew,' to feel 'the
cauler breeze frae off the fells,' and to note here and there 'the
gryming of a new-fa'n snaw.' When the king led his army through Caddon
ford, in pursuit of the outlaw Murray, and came in sight of Ettrick
forest, the ballad tells how
'They saw the darke Forest them before,
They thought it awsome for to see.'