the pulpit eloquence of Scotland?--Should his life be spared, there can
be no doubt that he will one day or other be Moderator of the General
Assembly, perhaps Professor of Divinity in a College. Be that as it may,
a better Christian never expounded the truths of the gospel, although
some folks pretend to say that he is not evangelical. He is, however,
beloved by the poor--the orphan and the widow; and his ministrations,
powerful in the kirk to a devoutly listening congregation, are so too at
the sick-bed, when only two or three are gathered around it, and when
the dying man feels how a fellow-creature can, by scriptural aids,
strengthen his trust in the mercy of his Maker.
Every year, on the birthday of each of their sons, the old people hold a
festival--in May, in August, and at Christmas. The sailor alone looks
disconsolate as a bachelor, but that reproach will be wiped away before
autumn; and should God grant the cottagers a few more years, some new
faces will yet smile upon the holidays; and there is in their unwithered
hearts warm love enough for all that may join the party. We too--yes,
gentle reader--we too shall be there--as we have often been during the
last ten years--and you yourself will judge, from all you know of us,
whether or no we have a heart to understand and enjoy such rare
felicity.
But let us be off to the mountains, and endeavour to interest our
beloved reader in a Highland Cottage--in any one, taken at hap-hazard,
from a hundred. You have been roaming all day among the mountains, and
perhaps seen no house except at a dwindling distance. Probably you have
wished not to see any house, but a ruined shieling--a deserted hut--or
an unroofed and dilapidated shed for the outlying cattle of some remote
farm. But now the sun has inflamed all the western heaven, and darkness
will soon descend. There is now a muteness more stern and solemn than
during unfaded daylight. List--the faint, far-off, subterranean sound of
the bagpipe! Some old soldier, probably, playing a gathering or a
coronach. The narrow dell widens and widens into a great glen, in which
you just discern the blue gleam of a loch. The martial music is more
distinctly heard--loud, fitful, fierce, like the trampling of men in
battle. Where is the piper? In a cave, or within the Fairies' Knowe? At
the door of a hut. His eyes were extinguished by ophthalmia, and there
he sits, fronting the sunlight, stone-blind. Long silver hair flows down
his broad shoulders, and you perceive that, when he rises, he will rear
up a stately bulk. The music stops, and you hear the bleating of goats.
There they come, prancing down the rocks, and stare upon the stranger.
The old soldier turns himself towards the voice of the Sassenach, and,
with the bold courtesy of the camp, bids him enter the hut. One
minute's view has sufficed to imprint the scene for ever on the
memory--a hut whose turf walls and roof are incorporated with the living
mountain, and seem not the work of man's hand, but the casual
architecture of some convulsion--the tumbling down of fragments from the
mountain-side by raging torrents, or a partial earthquake; for all the
scenery about is torn to pieces--like the scattering of some wide ruin.
The imagination dreams of the earliest days of our race, when men
harboured, like the other creatures, in places provided by nature. But
even here, there are visible traces of cultivation working in the spirit
of a mountainous region--a few glades of the purest verdure opened out
among the tall brackens, with a birch-tree or two dropped just where the
eye of taste could have wished, had the painter planted the sapling,
instead of the winds of heaven having wafted thither the seed--a small
croft of barley, surrounded by a cairn-like wall made up of stones
cleared from the soil, and a patch of potato ground, neat almost as the
garden that shows in a nook its fruit-bushes and a few flowers. All the
blasts that ever blew must be unavailing against the briery rock that
shelters the hut from the airt of storms; and the smoke may rise under
its lee, unwavering on the windiest day. There is sweetness in all the
air, and the glen is noiseless, except with the uncertain murmur of the
now unswollen waterfalls. That is the croak of the raven sitting on his
cliff half-way up Ben-Oura; and hark, the last belling of the red-deer,
as the herd lies down in the mist among the last ridge of heather,
blending with the shrubless stones, rocks, and cliffs that girdle the
upper regions of the vast mountain.
Within the dimness of the hut you hear greetings in the Gaelic tongue,
in a female voice; and when the eye has by-and-by become able to endure
the smoke, it discerns the household--the veteran's ancient dame--a
young man that may be his son, or rather his grandson, but whom you soon
know to be neither, with black matted locks, the keen eye, and the light
limbs of the hunter--a young woman, his wife, suckling a child, and yet
with a girlish look, as if but one year before her silken snood had been
untied--and a lassie of ten years, who had brought home the goats, and
now sits timidly in a nook eyeing the stranger. The low growl of the
huge brindled stag-hound had been hushed by a word on your first
entrance, and the noble animal watches his master's eye, which he obeys
in his freedom throughout all the forest-chase. A napkin is taken out of
an old worm-eaten chest, and spread over a strangely-carved table, that
seems to have belonged once to a place of pride; and the hungry and
thirsty stranger scarcely knows which most to admire, the broad bannocks
of barley-meal and the huge roll of butter, or the giant bottle, whose
mouth exhales the strong savour of conquering Glenlivet. The board is
spread--why not fall to and eat? First be thanks given to the Lord God
Almighty. The blind man holds up his hand and prays in a low chanting
voice, and then breaks bread for the lips of the stranger. On such an
occasion is felt the sanctity of the meal shared by human beings brought
accidentally together--the salt is sacred--and the hearth an altar.
No great travellers are we, yet have we seen something of this habitable
globe. The Highlands of Scotland is but a small region, nor is its
interior by any means so remote as the interior of Africa. Yet 'tis
remote. The life of that very blind veteran might, in better hands than
ours, make an interesting history. In his youth he had been a
shepherd--a herdsman--a hunter--something even of a poet. For thirty
years he had been a soldier--in many climates and many conflicts. Since
first he bloodied his bayonet, how many of his comrades had been buried
in heaps! Flung into trenches dug on the field of battle! How many
famous captains had shone in the blaze of their fame--faded into the
light of common day--died in obscurity, and been utterly forgotten! What
fierce passions must have agitated the frame of that now calm old man!
On what dreadful scenes, when forts and towns were taken by storm, must
those eyes, now withered into nothing, have glared with all the fury of
man's most wrathful soul! Now peace is with him for evermore. Nothing to
speak of the din of battle, but his own pipes wailing or raging among
the hollow of the mountains. In relation to his campaigning career, his
present life is as the life of another state. The pageantry of war has
all rolled off and away for ever; all its actions but phantoms now of a
dimly-remembered dream. He thinks of his former self, as sergeant in the
Black Watch, and almost imagines he beholds another man. In his long,
long blindness, he has created another world to himself out of new
voices--the voices of new generations, and of torrents thundering all
year long round about his hut. Almost all the savage has been tamed
within him, and an awful religion falls deeper and deeper upon him, as
he knows how he is nearing the grave. Often his whole mind is dim, for
he is exceedingly old, and then he sees only fragments of his youthful
life--the last forty years are as if they had never been--and he hears
shouts and huzzas, that half a century ago rent the air with victory. He
can still chant, in a hoarse broken voice, battle-hymns and dirges; and
thus, strangely forgetful and strangely tenacious of the past, linked to
this life by ties that only the mountaineer can know, and yet feeling
himself on the brink of the next, Old Blind Donald Roy, the Giant of the
Hut of the Three Torrents, will not scruple to quaff the "strong
waters," till his mind is awakened--brightened--dimmed--darkened--and
seemingly extinguished--till the sunrise again smites him, as he lies in
a heap among the heather; and then he lifts up, unashamed and
remorseless, that head, which, with its long quiet hairs, a painter
might choose for the image of a saint about to become a martyr.
We leave old Donald asleep, and go with his son-in-law, Lewis of the
light-foot, and Maida the stag-hound, surnamed the Throttler,
"Where the hunter of deer and the warrior trod,
To his hills that encircle the sea."
We have been ascending mountain-range after mountain-range, before
sunrise; and lo! night is gone, and nature rejoices in the day through
all her solitudes. Still as death, yet as life cheerful--and unspeakable
grandeur in the sudden revelation. Where is the wild-deer herd?--where,
ask the keen eyes of Maida, is the forest of antlers!--Lewis of the
light-foot bounds before, with his long gun pointing towards the mists
now gathered up to the summits of Benevis.
Nightfall--and we are once more at the Hut of the Three Torrents. Small
Amy is grown familiar now, and, almost without being asked, sings us the
choicest of her Gaelic airs--a few too of Lowland melody: all merry, yet
all sad--if in smiles begun, ending in a shower--or at least a tender
mist of tears. Heardst thou ever such a syren as this Celtic child? Did
we not always tell you that fairies were indeed realities of the
twilight or moonlight world? And she is their Queen. Hark! what thunders
of applause! The waterfall at the head of the great Corrie thunders
_encore_ with a hundred echoes. But the songs are over, and the small
singer gone to her heather-bed. There is a Highland moon!--The shield of
an unfallen archangel. There are not many stars--but those two--ay, that
One, is sufficient to sustain the glory of the night. Be not alarmed at
that low, wide, solemn, and melancholy sound. Runlets, torrents, rivers,
lochs, and seas--reeds, heather, forests, caves, and cliffs, all are
sound, sounding together a choral anthem.
Gracious heavens! what mistakes people have fallen into when writing
about Solitude! A man leaves a town for a few months, and goes with his
wife and family, and a travelling library, into some solitary glen.
Friends are perpetually visiting him from afar, or the neighbouring
gentry leaving their cards, while his servant-boy rides daily to the
post-village for his letters and newspapers. And call you that solitude?
The whole world is with you, morning, noon, and night. But go by
yourself, without book or friend, and live a month in this hut at the
head of Glenevis. Go at dawn among the cliffs of yonder pine-forest, and
wait there till night hangs her moon-lamp in heaven. Commune with your
own soul, and be still. Let the images of departed years rise,
phantom-like, of their own awful accord from the darkness of your
memory, and pass away into the wood-gloom or the mountain-mist. Will
conscience dread such spectres? Will you quake before them, and bow down
your head on the mossy root of some old oak, and sob in the stern
silence of the haunted place? Thoughts, feelings, passions, spectral
deeds, will come rushing around your lair, as with the sound of the
wings of innumerous birds--ay, many of them, like birds of prey, to gnaw
your very heart. How many duties undischarged! How many opportunities
neglected! How many pleasures devoured! How many sins hugged! How many
wickednesses perpetrated! The desert looks more grim--the heaven
lowers--and the sun, like God's own eye, stares in upon your conscience!
But such is not the solitude of our beautiful young shepherd-girl of the
Hut of the Three Torrents. Her soul is as clear, as calm as the pool
pictured at times by the floating clouds that let fall their shadows
through among the overhanging birch-trees. What harm could she ever do?
What harm could she ever think? She may have wept--for there is sorrow
without sin; may have wept even at her prayers--for there is penitence
free from guilt, and innocence itself often kneels in contrition. Down
the long glen she accompanies the stream to the house of God--sings her
psalms--and returns wearied to her heather-bed. She is, indeed, a
solitary child; the eagle, and the raven, and the red-deer see that she
is so--and echo knows it when from her airy cliff she repeats the happy
creature's song. Her world is within this one glen. In this one glen she
may live all her days--be wooed, won, wedded, buried. Buried--said we?
Oh, why think of burial when gazing on that resplendent head?
Interminable tracts of the shining day await her, the lonely darling of
nature; nor dare Time ever eclipse the lustre of those wild-beaming
eyes! Her beauty shall be immortal, like that of her country's fairies.
So, Flower of the Wilderness, we wave towards thee a joyful--though an
everlasting farewell.
Where are we now? There is not on this round green earth a lovelier Loch
than Achray. About a mile above Loch Vennachar, and as we approach the
Brigg of Turk, we arrive at the summit of an eminence, whence we descry
the sudden and wide prospect of the windings of the river that issues
from Loch Achray--and the Loch itself reposing--sleeping--dreaming on
its pastoral, its sylvan bed. Achray, being interpreted, signifies the
"Level Field," and gives its name to a delightful farm at the west end.
On "that happy, rural seat of various view," could we lie all day long;
and as all the beauty tends towards the west, each afternoon hour
deepens and also brightens it into mellower splendour. Not to keep
constantly seeing the lovely Loch is indeed impossible--yet its still
waters soothe the soul, without holding it away from the woods and
cliffs, that, forming of themselves a perfect picture, are yet all
united with the mountainous region of the setting sun. Many long years
have elapsed--at our time of life ten are many--since we passed one
delightful evening in the hospitable house that stands near the wooden
bridge over the Teith, just wheeling into Loch Achray. What a wilderness
of wooded rocks, containing a thousand little mossy glens, each large
enough for a fairy's kingdom! Between and Loch Katrine is the Place of
Roes--nor need the angler try to penetrate the underwood; for every
shallow, every linn, every pool is overshaded by its own canopy, and the
living fly and moth alone ever dip their wings in the checkered waters.
Safe there are all the little singing-birds from hawk or gled--and it is
indeed an Aviary in the wild. Pine-groves stand here and there amid the
natural woods--and among their tall gloom the cushat sits crooning in
beloved solitude, rarely startled by human footstep, and bearing at his
own pleasure through the forest the sound of his flapping wings.
But let us rise from the greensward, and before we pace along the sweet
shores of Loch Achray, for its nearest murmur is yet more than a mile
off, turn away up from the Brigg of Turk into Glenfinlas. A strong
mountain-torrent, in which a painter, even with the soul of Salvator
Rosa, might find studies inexhaustible for years, tumbles on the left of
a ravine, in which a small band of warriors might stop the march of a
numerous host. With what a loud voice it brawls through the silence,
freshening the hazels, the birches, and the oaks, that in that perpetual
spray need not the dew's refreshment. But the savage scene softens as
you advance, and you come out of that sylvan prison into a plain of
meadows and cornfields, alive with the peaceful dwellings of industrious
men. Here the bases of the mountains, and even their sides high up, are
without heather--a rich sward, with here and there a deep bed of
brackens, and a little sheep-sheltering grove. Skeletons of old trees of
prodigious size lie covered with mosses and wildflowers, or stand with
their barkless trunks and white limbs unmoved when the tempest blows.
Glenfinlas was anciently a deer-forest of the Kings of Scotland; but
hunter's horn no more awakens the echoes of Benledi.
A more beautiful vale never inspired pastoral poet in Arcadia, nor did
Sicilian shepherds of old ever pipe to each other for prize of oaten
reed, in a lovelier nook than where yonder cottage stands, shaded, but
scarcely sheltered, by a few birch-trees. It is in truth not a
cottage--but a very SHIELING, part of the knoll adhering to the side of
the mountain. Not another dwelling--even as small as itself--within a
mile in any direction. Those goats, that seem to walk where there is no
footing along the side of the cliff, go of themselves to be milked at
evening to a house beyond the hill, without any barking dog to set them
home. There are many footpaths, but all of sheep, except one leading
through the coppice-wood to the distant kirk. The angler seldom disturbs
those shallows, and the heron has them to himself, watching often with
motionless neck all day long. Yet the Shieling is inhabited, and has
been so by the same person for a good many years. You might look at it
for hours, and yet see no one so much as moving to the door. But a
little smoke hovers over it--very faint if it be smoke at all--and
nothing else tells that within is life.
It is inhabited by a widow, who once was the happiest of wives, and
lived far down the glen, where it is richly cultivated, in a house astir
with many children. It so happened, that in the course of nature,
without any extraordinary bereavements, she outlived all the household,
except one, on whom fell the saddest affliction that can befall a human
being--the utter loss of reason. For some years after the death of her
husband, and all her other children, this son was her support; and there
was no occasion to pity them in their poverty, where all were poor. Her
natural cheerfulness never forsook her; and although fallen back in the
world, and obliged in her age to live without many comforts she once had
known, yet all the past gradually was softened into peace, and the widow
and her son were in that shieling as happy as any family in the parish.
He worked at all kinds of work without, and she sat spinning from
morning to night within--a constant occupation, soothing to one before
whose mind past times might otherwise have come too often, and that
creates contentment by its undisturbed sameness and invisible
progression. If not always at meals, the widow saw her son for an hour
or two every night, and throughout the whole Sabbath-day. They slept,
too, under one roof; and she liked the stormy weather when the rains
were on--for then he found some ingenious employment within the
shieling, or cheered her with some book lent by a friend, or with the
lively or plaintive music of his native hills. Sometimes, in her
gratitude, she said that she was happier now than when she had so many
other causes to be so; and when occasionally an acquaintance dropt in
upon her, her face gave a welcome that spoke more than resignation; nor
was she averse to partake the sociality of the other huts, and sat
sedate among youthful merriment, when summer or winter festival came
round, and poverty rejoiced in the riches of content and innocence.
But her trials, great as they had been, were not yet over; for this her
only son was laid prostrate by fever--and, when it left his body, he
survived hopelessly stricken in mind. His eyes, so clear and
intelligent, were now fixed in idiocy, or rolled about unobservant of
all objects living or dead. To him all weather seemed the same, and if
suffered, he would have lain down like a creature void of understanding,
in rain or on snow, nor been able to find his way back for many paces
from the hut. As all thought and feeling had left him, so had speech,
all but a moaning as of pain or woe, which none but a mother could bear
to hear without shuddering--but she heard it during night as well as
day, and only sometimes lifted up her eyes as in prayer to God. An offer
was made to send him to a place where the afflicted were taken care of;
but she beseeched charity for the first time for such alms as would
enable her, along with the earnings of her wheel, to keep her son in the
shieling; and the means were given her from many quarters to do so
decently, and with all the comforts that other eyes observed, but of
which the poor object himself was insensible and unconscious.
Henceforth, it may almost be said, she never more saw the sun, nor heard
the torrents roar. She went not to the kirk, but kept her Sabbath where
the paralytic lay--and there she sung the lonely psalm, and said the
lonely prayer, unheard in Heaven as many repining spirits would have
thought--but it was not so; for in two years there came a meaning to his
eyes, and he found a few words of imperfect speech, among which was that
of "Mother." Oh! how her heart burned within her, to know that her face
was at last recognised! To feel that her kiss was returned, and to see
the first tear that trickled from eyes that long had ceased to weep! Day
after day, the darkness that covered his brain grew less and less
deep--to her that bewilderment gave the blessedness of hope; for her son
now knew that he had an immortal soul, and in the evening joined faintly
and feebly and erringly in prayer. For weeks afterwards he remembered
only events and scenes long past and distant--and believed that his
father, and all his brothers and sisters, were yet alive. He called upon
them by their names to come and kiss him--on them, who had all long been
buried in the dust. But his soul struggled itself into reason and
remembrance--and he at last said, "Mother! did some accident befall me
yesterday at my work down the glen?--I feel weak, and about to die!" The
shadows of death were indeed around him; but he lived to be told much of
what had happened--and rendered up a perfectly unclouded spirit into the
mercy of his Saviour. His mother felt that all her prayers had been
granted in that one boon--and, when the coffin was borne away from the
shieling, she remained in it with a friend, assured that in this world
there could for her be no more grief. And there in that same shieling,
now that years have gone by, she still lingers, visited as often as she
wishes by her poor neighbours--for to the poor sorrow is a sacred
thing--who, by turns, send one of their daughters to stay with her, and
cheer a life that cannot be long, but that, end when it may, will be
laid down without one impious misgiving, and in the humility of a
Christian's faith.
The scene shifts of itself, and we are at the head of Glenetive. Who
among all the Highland maidens that danced on the greenswards among the
blooming heather on the mountains of Glenetive--who so fair as Flora,
the only daughter of the King's Forester, and grandchild to the Bard
famous for his songs of Fairies in the Hill of Peace, and the
Mermaid-Queen in her Palace of Emerald floating far down beneath the
foam-waves of the sea? And who, among all the Highland youth that went
abroad to the bloody wars from the base of Benevis, to compare with
Ranald of the Red-Cliff, whose sires had been soldiers for centuries, in
the days of the dagger and Lochaber axe--stately in his strength amid
the battle as the oak in a storm, but gentle in peace as the birch-tree,
that whispers with all its leaves to the slightest summer-breath? If
their love was great when often fed at the light of each other's eyes,
what was it when Ranald was far off among the sands of Egypt, and Flora
left an orphan to pine away in her native glen? Beneath the shadow of
the Pyramids he dreamt of Dalness and the deer forest, that was the
dwelling of his love--and she, as she stood by the murmurs of that
sea-loch, longed for the wings of the osprey, that she might flee away
to the war-tents beyond the ocean, and be at rest!