misty and mountainous a country. It destroys disease and banishes death;
without some such stimulant the people would die of cold. You will see a
fine old Gael, of ninety or a hundred, turn up his little finger to a
caulker with an air of patriarchal solemnity altogether scriptural; his
great-grandchildren eyeing him with the most respectful affection, and
the youngest of them toddling across the floor, to take the quaich from
his huge, withered, and hairy hand, which he lays on the amiable
Joseph's sleek craniology, with a blessing heartier through the
Glenlivet, and with all the earnestness of religion. There is no
disgrace in getting drunk--in the Highlands--not even if you are of the
above standing--for where the people are so poor, such a state is but of
rare occurrence; while it is felt all over the land of sleet and snow,
that a 'drap o' the cretur' is a very necessary of life, and that but
for its 'dew' the mountains would be uninhabitable. At fairs, and
funerals, and marriages, and suchlike merry meetings, sobriety is sent
to look after the sheep; but, except on charitable occasions of that
kind, sobriety stays at home among the peat-reek, and is contented with
crowdy. Who that ever stooped his head beneath a Highland hut would
grudge a few gallons of Glenlivet to its poor but unrepining inmates?
The seldomer they get drunk the better--and it is but seldom they do so;
but let the rich man--the monied moralist, who bewails and begrudges the
Gael a modicum of the liquor of life, remember the doom of a certain
Dives, who, in a certain place that shall now be nameless, cried, but
cried in vain, for a drop of water. Lord bless the Highlanders, say we,
for the most harmless, hospitable, peaceable, brave people that ever
despised breeches, blew pibrochs, took invincible standards, and
believed in the authenticity of Ossian's poems. In that pure and lofty
region ignorance is not, as elsewhere, the mother of vice--penury cannot
repress the noble rage of the mountaineer as "he sings aloud old songs
that are the music of the heart;" while superstition herself has an
elevating influence, and will be suffered, even by religion, to show her
shadowy shape and mutter her wild voice through the gloom that lies on
the heads of the remote glens, and among the thousand caves of echo in
her iron-bound coasts, dashed on for ever--night and day--summer and
winter--by those sleepless seas, who have no sooner laid their heads on
the pillow than up they start with a howl that cleaves the Orcades, and
away off in search of shipwrecks round the corner of Cape Wrath.
In the third place, what shall we say of the poetical influence of
STILLS? What more poetical life can there be than that of the men with
whom we are now quaffing the barley-bree? They live with the moon and
stars. All the night winds are their familiars. If there be such things
as ghosts, and fairies, and apparitions--and that there are, no man who
has travelled much by himself after sunset will deny, except from the
mere love of contradiction--they see them; or when invisible, which they
generally are, hear them--here--there--everywhere--in sky, forest, cave,
or hollow-sounding world immediately beneath their feet. Many poets walk
these wilds; nor do their songs perish. They publish not with Blackwood
or with Murray--but for centuries on centuries, such songs are the
preservers, often the sources, of the oral traditions that go glimmering
and gathering down the stream of years. Native are they to the mountains
as the blooming heather, nor shall they ever cease to invest them with
the light of poetry--in defiance of large farms, Methodist preachers,
and the Caledonian Canal.
People are proud of talking of solitude. It redounds, they opine, to the
honour of their great-mindedness to be thought capable of living, for an
hour or two, by themselves, at a considerable distance from knots or
skeins of their fellow-creatures. Byron, again, thought he showed his
superiority by swearing as solemnly as a man can do in the Spenserian
stanza that
"To sit alone, and muse o'er flood and fell,"
has nothing whatever to do with solitude--and that, if you wish to know
and feel what solitude really is, you must go to Almack's.
"This is to be alone,--this, this is solitude."
His Lordship's opinions were often peculiar--but the passage has been
much admired; therefore we are willing to believe that the Great Desert
is, in point of loneliness, unable to stand a philosophical, much less a
poetical comparison, with a well-frequented Fancy-ball. But is the
statement not borne out by facts? Zoology is on its side--more
especially two of its most interesting branches, Entomology and
Ornithology.
Go to a desert and clap your back against a cliff. Do you think yourself
alone? What a ninny! Your great clumsy splay feet are bruising to death
a batch of beetles. See that spider whom you have widowed, running up
and down your elegant leg, in distraction and despair, bewailing the
loss of a husband who, however savage to the ephemerals, had always
smiled sweetly upon her. Meanwhile your shoulders have crushed a colony
of small red ants settled in a moss city beautifully roofed with
lichens--and that accounts for the sharp tickling behind your ear, which
you keep scratching, no Solomon, in ignorance of the cause of that
effect. Should you sit down--we must beg to draw a veil over your
hurdies, which at the moment extinguish a fearful amount of animal
life--creation may be said to groan under them; and, insect as you are
yourself, you are defrauding millions of insects of their little day.
All the while you are supposing yourself alone! Now, are you not, as we
hinted, a prodigious ninny? But the whole wilderness--as you choose to
call it--is crawling with various life. London with its million and a
half of inhabitants--including of course the suburbs--is, compared with
it, an empty joke. Die--and you will soon be picked to the bones. The
air swarms with sharpers--and an insurrection of radicals will attack
your corpse from the worm-holes of the earth. Corbies, ravens, hawks,
eagles, all the feathered furies of beak and bill, will come flying ere
sunset to anticipate the maggots, and carry your remains--if you will
allow us to call them so--over the whole of Argyllshire in many living
sepulchres. We confess ourselves unable to see the solitude of this--and
begin to agree with Byron, that a man is less crowded at a masquerade.
But the same subject may be illustrated less tragically, and even with
some slight comic effect. A man among mountains is often surrounded on
all sides with mice and moles. What cosy nests do the former construct
at the roots of heather, among tufts of grass in the rushes, and the
moss on the greensward! As for the latter, though you think you know a
mountain from a molehill, you are much mistaken; for what is a mountain,
in many cases, but a collection of molehills--and of fairy
knolls?--which again introduce a new element into the composition, and
show, in still more glaring colours, your absurdity in supposing
yourself to be in solitude. The "Silent People" are around you at every
step. You may not see them--for they are dressed in invisible green; but
they see you, and that unaccountable whispering and buzzing sound one
often hears in what we call the wilderness, what is it, or what can it
be, but the fairies making merry at your expense, pointing out to each
other the extreme silliness of your meditative countenance, and laughing
like to split at your fond conceit of being alone among a multitude of
creatures far wiser than yourself.
But should all this fail to convince you that you are never less alone
than when you think yourself alone, and that a man never knows what it
is to be in the very heart of life till he leaves London, and takes a
walk in Glen-Etive--suppose yourself to have been leaning with your back
against that knoll, dreaming of the far-off race of men, when all at
once the support gives way inwards, and you tumble head over heels in
among a snug coterie of kilted Celts, in the very act of creating
Glenlivet in a great warlock's caldron, seething to the top with the
Spirit of Life!
Such fancies as these, among many others, were with us in the Still. But
a glimmering and a humming and a dizzy bewilderment hangs over that time
and place, finally dying away into oblivion. Here are we sitting in a
glade of a birch-wood in what must be Gleno--some miles from the Still.
Hamish asleep, as usual, whenever he lies down, and all the dogs
yowffing in dreams, and Surefoot standing with his long beard above
ours, almost the same in longitude. We have been more, we suspect, than
half-seas over, and are now lying on the shore of sobriety, almost a
wreck. The truth is, that the new spirit is even more dangerous than the
new light. Both at first dazzle, then obfuscate, and lastly darken into
temporary death. There is, we fear, but one word of one syllable in the
English language that could fully express our late condition. Let our
readers solve the enigma. Oh! those quaichs! By
"What drugs, what spells,
What conjurations, and what mighty magic"
was Christopher overthrown! A strange confusion of sexes, as of men in
petticoats and women in breeches--gowns transmogrified into
jackets--caps into bonnets--and thick naked hairy legs into slim ankles
decent in hose--all somewhere whirling and dancing by, dim and obscure,
to the sound of something groaning and yelling, sometimes
inarticulately, as if it came from something instrumental, and then
mixed up with a wild gibberish, as if shrieking, somehow or other, from
living lips, human and brute--for a dream of yowling dogs is over
all--utterly confounds us as we strive to muster in recollection the few
last hours that have passed tumultuously through our brain--and then a
wide black moor, sometimes covered with day, sometimes with night,
stretches around us, hemmed in on all sides by the tops of mountains
seeming to reel in the sky. Frequent flashes of fire, and a whirring as
of the wings of birds--but sound and sight alike uncertain--break again
upon our dream. Let us not mince the matter--we can afford the
confession--we have been overtaken by liquor--sadly intoxicated--out
with it at once! Frown not, fairest of all sweet--for we lay our
calamity, not to the charge of the Glenlivet circling in countless
quaichs, but at the door of that inveterate enemy to sobriety--the Fresh
Air.
But now we are as sober as a judge. Pity our misfortune--rather than
forgive our sin. We entered that Still in a State of innocence before
the Fall. Where we fell, we know not--in divers ways and sundry
places--between that magic cell on the breast of Benachochie, and this
glade in Gleno. But
"There are worse things in life than a fall among heather."
Surefoot, we suppose, kept himself tolerably sober--and O'Bronte, at
each successive cloit, must have assisted us to remount--for Hamish,
from his style of sleeping, must have been as bad as his master; and,
after all, it is wonderful to think how we got here--over hags and
mosses, and marshes, and quagmires, like those in which "armies whole
have sunk." But the truth is, that never in the whole course of our
lives--and that course has been a strange one--did we ever so often as
once lose our way. Set us down blindfolded on Zahara, and we will beat
the caravan to Timbuctoo. Something or other mysteriously indicative of
the right direction touches the soles of our feet in the shape of the
ground they tread; and even when our souls have gone soaring far away,
or have sunk within us, still have our feet pursued the shortest and the
safest path that leads to the bourne of our pilgrimage. Is not that
strange? But not stranger surely than the flight of the bee, on his
first voyage over the coves of the wilderness to the far-off
heather-bells--or of the dove that is sent by some Jew stock-jobber, to
communicate to Dutchmen the rise or fall of the funds, from London to
Hamburg, from the clear shores of silver Thames to the muddy shallows of
the Zuyder Zee.
THE MOORS.
FLIGHT FOURTH--DOWN RIVER AND UP LOCH.
Let us inspect the state of Brown Bess. Right barrel empty--left
barrel--what is the meaning of this?--crammed to the muzzle! Ay, that
comes of visiting Stills. We have been snapping away at the coveys and
single birds all over the moor, without so much as a pluff, with the
right-hand cock--and then, imagining that we had fired, have kept
loading away at the bore to the left, till, see! the ramrod absolutely
stands upright in the air, with only about three inches hidden in the
hollow! What a narrow--a miraculous escape has the world had of losing
Christopher North! Had he drawn that trigger instead of this, Brown Bess
would have burst to a moral certainty, and blown the old gentleman
piecemeal over the heather. "In the midst of life we are in death!"
Could we but know one in a hundred of the close approachings of the
skeleton, we should lead a life of perpetual shudder. Often and often do
his bony fingers almost clutch our throat, or his foot is put out to
give us a cross-buttock. But a saving arm pulls him back, ere we have
seen so much as his shadow. We believe all this--but the belief that
comes not from something steadfastly present before our eyes, is barren;
and thus it is, since believing is not seeing, that we walk hoodwinked
nearly all our days, and worst of all blindness is that of ingratitude
and forgetfulness of Him whose shield is for ever over us, and whose
mercy shall be with us in the world beyond the grave.
By all that is most beautifully wild in animated nature, a Roe! a Roe!
Shall we slay him where he stands, or let him vanish in silent glidings
in among his native woods? What a fool for asking ourselves such a
question! Slay him where he stands to be sure--for many pleasant seasons
hath he led in his leafy lairs, a life of leisure, delight, and love,
and the hour is come when he must sink down on his knees in a sudden
and unpainful death--fair sylvan dreamer! We have drawn that
multitudinous shot--and both barrels of Brown Bess now are loaded with
ball--for Hamish is yet lying with his head on the rifle. Whiz! whiz!
one is through lungs, and another through neck--and seemingly rather to
sleep than die (so various are the many modes of expiration!)
"In quietness he lays him down
Gently, as a weary wave
Sinks, when the summer breeze has died,
Against an anchor'd vessel's side."
Ay--Hamish--you may start to your feet--and see realised the vision of
your sleep. What a set of distracted dogs! But O'Bronte first catches
sight of the quarry--and clearing, with grasshopper spangs, the patches
of stunted coppice, stops stock-still beside the roe in the glade, as if
admiring and wondering at the beauty of the fair spotted creature! Yes,
dogs have a sense of the beautiful. Else how can you account for their
loving so to lie down at the feet and lick the hands of the virgin whose
eyes are mild, and forehead meek, and hair of placid sunshine, rather
than act the same part towards ugly women, who, coarser and coarser in
each successive widow-hood, when at their fourth husband are beyond
expression hideous, and felt to be so by the whole canine tribe? Spenser
must have seen some dog like O'Bronte lying at the feet and licking the
hand of some virgin--sweet reader, like thyself--else never had he
painted the posture of that Lion who guarded through Fairyland
"Heavenly Una and her milk-white lamb."
A divine line of Wordsworth's, which we shall never cease quoting on to
the last of our inditings, even to our dying day!
But where, Hamish, are all the flappers, the mawsies, and the mallards?
What! You have left them--hare, grouse, bag, and all, at the Still! We
remember it now--and all the distillers are to-night to be at our Tent,
bringing with them feathers, fur, and hide--ducks, pussy, and deer. But
take the roe on your stalwart shoulders, Hamish, and bear it down to the
sylvan dwelling at the mouth of Gleno. Surefoot has a sufficient burden
in us--for we are waxing more corpulent every day--and ere long shall be
a Silenus.
Ay, travel all the world over, and a human dwelling lovelier in its
wildness shall you nowhere find, than the one that hides itself in the
depth of its own beauty, beneath the last of the green knolls
besprinkling Gleno, dropt down there in presence of the peacefulest bay
of all Loch-Etive, in whose cloud-softened bosom it sees itself
reflected among the congenial imagery of the skies. And, hark! a murmur
as of swarming bees! 'Tis a Gaelic school--set down in this loneliest of
all places, by that religious wisdom that rests not till the seeds of
saving knowledge shall be sown over all the wilds. That greyhaired
minister of God, whom all Scotland venerates, hath been here from the
great city on one of his holy pilgrimages. And, lo! at his bidding, and
that of his coadjutors in the heavenly work, a Schoolhouse has risen
with its blue roof--the pure diamond-sparkling slates of
Ballahulish--beneath a tuft of breeze-breaking trees. But whence come
they--the little scholars--who are all murmuring there? We said that the
shores of Loch-Etive were desolate. So seem they to the eye of
Imagination, that loves to gather up a hundred scenes into one, and to
breathe over the whole the lonesome spirit of one vast wilderness. But
Imagination was a liar ever--a romancer and a dealer in dreams. Hers are
the realms of fiction,
"A boundless contiguity of shade!"
But the land of truth is ever the haunt of the heart--there her eye
reposes or expatiates, and what sweet, humble, and lowly visions arise
before it, in a light that fadeth not away, but abideth for ever!
Cottages, huts, shielings, she sees hidden--few and far between
indeed--but all filled with Christian life--among the hollows of the
hills--and up, all the way up the great glens--and by the shores of the
loneliest lochs--and sprinkled, not so rarely, among the woods that
enclose little fields and meadows of their own--all the way down--more
and more animated--till children are seen gathering before their doors
the shells of the contiguous sea.
Look and listen far and wide through a sunshiny day, over a rich wooded
region, with hedgerows, single trees, groves, and forests, and yet haply
not one bird is to be seen or heard--neither plumage nor song. Yet many
a bright lyrist is there, all mute till the harbinger-hour of sunset,
when all earth, air, and heaven, shall be ringing with one song. Almost
even so is it with this mountain-wilderness. Small bright-haired,
bright-eyed, bright-faced children, come stealing out in the morning
from many hidden huts, each solitary in its own site, the sole dwelling
on its own brae or its own dell. Singing go they one and all, alone or
in small bands, trippingly along the wide moors; meeting into pleasant
parties at cross-paths or at fords, till one stated hour sees them all
gathered together, as now in the small Schoolhouse of Gleno, and the
echo of the happy hum of the simple scholars is heard soft among the
cliffs. But all at once the hum now ceases, and there is a hurry out of
doors, and an exulting cry; for the shadow of Hamish, with the roe on
his shoulders, has passed the small lead-latticed window, and the
Schoolroom has emptied itself on the green, which is now brightening
with the young blossoms of life. "A roe--a roe--a roe!"--is still the
chorus of their song; and the Schoolmaster himself, though educated at
college for the kirk, has not lost the least particle of his passion for
the chase, and with kindling eyes assists Hamish in laying down his
burden, and gazes on the spots with a hunter's joy. We leave you to
imagine his delight and his surprise when, at first hardly trusting his
optics, he beholds CHRISTOPHER ON SUREFOOT, and then, patting the shelty
on the shoulder, bows affectionately and respectfully to the Old Man,
and while our hands grasp, takes a pleasure in repeating over and over
again that celebrated surname--North--North--North.
After a brief and bright hour of glee and merriment, mingled with grave
talk, nor marred by the sweet undisturbance of all those elves maddening
on the Green around the Roe, we express a wish that the scholars may all
again be gathered together in the Schoolroom, to undergo an examination
by the Christian Philosopher of Buchanan Lodge. 'Tis in all things
gentle, in nothing severe. All slates are instantly covered with
numerals, and 'tis pleasant to see their skill in finest fractions, and
in the wonder-working golden rule of three. And now the rustling of
their manuals is like that of rainy breezes among the summer leaves. No
fears are here that the Book of God will lose its sanctity by becoming
too familiar to eye, lip, and hand. Like the sunlight in the sky, the
light that shines there is for ever dear--and unlike any sunlight in
any skies, never is it clouded, permanently bright, and undimmed before
pious eyes by one single shadow. We ought, perhaps, to be ashamed, but
we are not so--we are happy that not an urchin is there who is not fully
better acquainted with the events and incidents recorded in the Old and
New Testaments than ourselves; and think not that all these could have
been so faithfully committed to memory without the perpetual operation
of the heart. Words are forgotten unless they are embalmed in spirit;
and the air of the world, blow afterwards rudely as it may, shall never
shrivel up one syllable that has been steeped into their souls by the
spirit of the Gospel--felt by these almost infant disciples of Christ to
be the very breath of God.
It has turned out one of the sweetest and serenest afternoons that ever
breathed a hush over the face and bosom of August woods. Can we find it
in our mind to think, in our heart to feel, in our hand to write, that
Scotland is now even more beautiful than in our youth! No--not in our
heart to feel--but in our eyes to see--for they tell us it is the truth.
The people have cared for the land which the Lord their God hath given
them, and have made the wilderness to blossom like the rose. The same
Arts that have raised their condition have brightened their habitation;
Agriculture, by fertilising the loveliness of the low-lying vales, has
sublimed the sterility of the stupendous mountain heights--and the
thundrous tides, flowing up the lochs, bring power to the cornfields and
pastures created on hill-sides once horrid with rocks. The whole country
laughs with a more vivid verdure--more pure the flow of her streams and
rivers--for many a fen and marsh has been made dry, and the rainbow
pictures itself on clearer cataracts.