Vast tracts there were in which Nature herself seemed miserable; and if
the heart find no human happiness to repose on, Imagination will fold
her wings, or flee away to other regions, where in her own visionary
world she may soar at will, and at will stoop down to the homes of this
real earth. Assuredly the inhabitants are happier than they then
were--_better off_--and therefore the change, whatever loss it may
comprehend, has been a gain in good. Alas! poverty--penury--want--even
of the necessaries of life--are too often there still rife; but patience
and endurance dwell there, heroic and better far, Christian--nor has
Charity been slow to succour regions remote but not inaccessible,
Charity acting in power delegated by Heaven to our National Councils.
And thus we can think not only without sadness, but with an elevation of
soul inspired by such example of highest virtue in humblest estate, and
in our own sphere exposed to other trials be induced to follow it, set
to us in many "a virtuous household, though exceeding poor." What are
the poetical fancies about "mountain scenery," that ever fluttered on
the leaves of albums, in comparison with any scheme, however prosaic,
that tends in any way to increase human comforts? The best sonnet that
ever was written by a versifier from the South to the Crown of
Benlomond, is not worth the worst pair of worsted stockings trotted in
by a small Celt going with his dad to seek for a lost sheep among the
snow-wreaths round his base. As for eagles, and ravens, and red-deer,
"those magnificent creatures so stately and bright," let them shift for
themselves--and perhaps in spite of all our rhapsodies--the fewer of
them the better; but among geese, and turkeys, and poultry, let
propagation flourish--the fleecy folk baa--and the hairy hordes bellow
on a thousand hills. All the beauty and sublimity on earth--over the
Four Quarters of the World--is not worth a straw if valued against a
good harvest. An average crop is satisfactory; but a crop that soars
high above an average--a golden year of golden ears--sends joy into the
heart of heaven. No prating now of the degeneracy of the potato. We can
sing now with our single voice, like a numerous chorus, of
"Potatoes drest both ways, both roasted and boiled;"
sixty bolls to the acre on a field of our own of twenty acres--mealier
than any meal--Perth reds--to the hue on whose cheeks dull was that on
the face of the Fair Maid of Perth, when she blushed to confess to
Burn-y-win' that hand-over-hip he had struck the iron when it was hot,
and that she was no more the Glover's. O bright are potato blooms!--O
green are potato-shaws!--O yellow are potato-plums! But how oft are
blighted summer hopes and broken summer promises! Spare not the
shaw--heap high the mounds--that damp nor frost may dim a single eye; so
that all winter through poor men may prosper, and spring see settings
of such prolific vigour, that they shall yield a thousandfold--and the
sound of rumbledethumps be heard all over the land.
Let the people eat--let them have food for their bodies, and then they
will have heart to care for their souls; and the good and the wise will
look after their souls with sure and certain hope of elevating them from
their hovels to heaven, while prigs, with their eyes in a fine frenzy
rolling, rail at railroads, and all the other vile inventions of an
utilitarian age to open up and expedite communication between the
Children of the Mist and the Sons and Daughters of the Sunshine, to the
utter annihilation of the sublime Spirit of Solitude. Be under no sort
of alarm for Nature. There is some talk, it is true, of a tunnel through
Cruachan to the Black Mount, but the general impression seems to be that
it will be a _great bore_. A joint-stock company that undertook to
remove Ben-Nevis, is beginning to find unexpected obstructions. Feasible
as we confess it appeared, the idea of draining Loch Lomond has been
relinquished for the easier and more useful scheme of converting the
Clyde from below Stonebyres to above the Bannatyne Fall into a
canal--the chief lock being, in the opinion of the most ingenious
speculators, almost ready-made at Corra Linn. Shall we never be done
with our soliloquy? It may be a little longish, for age is prolix--but
every whit as natural and congenial with circumstances, as Hamlet's "to
be or not to be, that is the question." O beloved Albin! our soul
yearneth towards thee, and we invoke a blessing on thy many thousand
glens. The man who leaves a blessing on any one of thy solitary places,
and gives expression to a good thought in presence of a Christian
brother, is a missionary of the church. What uncomplaining and
unrepining patience in thy solitary huts! What unshrinking endurance of
physical pain and want, that might well shame the Stoic's philosophic
pride! What calm contentment, akin to mirth, in so many lonesome
households, hidden the greatest part of the year in mist and snow! What
peaceful deathbeds, witnessed but by a few, a very few grave but
tearless eyes! Ay, how many martyrdoms for the holy love and religion of
nature, worse to endure than those of old at the stake, because
protracted through years of sore distress, for ever on the very limit of
famine, yet for ever far removed from despair! Such is the people among
whom we seek to drop the books, whose sacred leaves are too often
scattered to the winds, or buried in the dust of Pagan lands. Blessed is
the fount from whose wisely-managed munificence the small house of God
will rise frequent in the wide and sea-divided wilds, with its humble
associate, the heath-roofed school, in which, through the silence of
nature, will be heard the murmuring voices of the children of the poor,
instructed in the knowledge useful for time, and of avail for eternity.
We leave a loose sovereign or two to the Bible Fund; and remounting
Surefoot, while our friend the schoolmaster holds the stirrup tenderly
to our toe, jog down the road which is rather alarmingly like the
channel of a drought-dried torrent, and turning round on the saddle,
send our farewell salutes to the gazing scholars, first, bonnet waved
round our head, and then, that replaced, a kiss flung from our hand.
Hamish, relieved of the roe, which will be taken up (how, you shall
by-and-by hear) on our way back to the Tent, is close at our side, to be
ready should Shelty stumble; O'Bronte as usual bounds in the van; and
Ponto, Piro, and Basta, impatient for the next heather hill, keep close
at our heels through the wood.
We do not admire that shooting-ground which resembles a poultry-yard.
Grouse and barn-door fowls are constructed on opposite principles, the
former being wild, and the latter tame creatures, when in their
respective perfection. Of all dull pastimes, the dullest seems to us
sporting in a preserve; and we believe that we share that feeling with
the Grand Signior. The sign of a lonely wayside inn in the Highlands,
ought not to be the Hen and Chickens. Some shooters, we know, sick of
common sport, love slaughter. From sunrise to sunset of the First Day of
the Moors, they must bag their hundred brace. That can only be done
where pouts prevail, and cheepers keep chiding; and where you have
half-a-dozen attendants to hand you double-barrels _sans_ intermission,
for a round dozen of hours spent in a perpetual fire. Commend us to a
plentiful sprinkling of game; to ground which seems occasionally barren,
and which it needs a fine instructed eye to traverse scientifically, and
thereof to detect the latent riches. Fear and Hope are the Deities whom
Christopher in his Sporting Jacket worships; and were they
unpropitious, the Moors would lose all their witchcraft. We are a dead
shot, but not always, for the forefinger of our right hand is the most
fitful forefinger in all this capricious world. Like all performers in
the Fine Arts, our execution is very uncertain; and though "_toujours
pret_" is the impress on one side of our shield, "_hit and miss_" is
that on the other, and often the more characteristic. A gentleman ought
not to shoot like a gamekeeper, any more than at billiards to play like
a marker, nor with four-in-hand ought he to tool his prads like the
Portsmouth Dragsman. We choose to shoot like a philosopher as we are,
and to preserve the golden mean in murder. We hold, with Aristotle, that
all virtue consists in the middle between the two extremes; and thus we
shoot in a style equidistant from that of the gamekeeper on the one
hand, and that of the bagman on the other, neither killing nor missing
every bird; but, true to the spirit of the Aristotelian doctrine,
leaning with a decided inclination towards the first rather than the
second predicament. If we shoot too well one day, we are pretty sure to
make amends for it by shooting just as much too ill another; and thus,
at the close of the week, we can go to bed with a clear conscience. In
short, we shoot like gentlemen, scholars, poets, philosophers as we are;
and looking at us, you have a sight
"Of him who walks (rides) in glory and in joy,
Following his dog upon the mountain-side,"--
a man evidently not shooting for a wager, and performing a match from
the mean motive of avarice or ambition, but blazing away "at his own
sweet will," and, without seeming to know it, making a great noise in
the world. Such, believe us, is ever the mode in which true genius
displays at once the earnestness and the modesty of its character.--But,
Hamish--Hamish--Hamish--look with both thine eyes on yonder bank--yonder
sunny bank, beneath the shade of that fantastic cliff's superincumbent
shadow--and seest thou not basking there a miraculous amount of the
right sort of feathers? They have packed, Hamish--they have packed,
early as it yet is in the season; and the question is--_What shall we
do?_ We have it. Take up a position--Hamish--about a hundred yards in
the rear--on yonder knoll--with the Colonel's Sweeper. Fire from the
rest--mind, from the rest, Hamishright into the centre of that bed of
plumage, and we shall be ready, with Brown Bess and her sister, to pour
in our quartette upon the remains as they rise--so that not escape shall
one single feather. Let our coming "to the present" be your
signal.--Bang! Whew!--what a flutter! Now take that--and that--and
that--and that! Ha! Hamish--as at the springing of a mine, the whole
company has perished. Count the dead. Twenty-one! Life is short--and by
this compendious style we take Time by the forelock. But where the devil
are the ducks? Oh, yes! with the deer at the Still. Bag, and be
stirring. For the Salmon-pond is murmuring in our ear; and in another
hour we must be at Inveraw. Who said that Cruachan was a steep mountain?
Why, with a gentle, smooth, and easy slope, he dips his footsteps in the
sea-salt waters of Loch Etive's tide, as if to accommodate the old
gentleman who, half-a-century ago, used to beard him in his pride on his
throne of clouds. Heaven bless him!--he is a kind-hearted mountain,
though his forehead be furrowed, and his aspect grim in stormy weather.
A million memories "o' auld lang syne" revive, as almost "smooth-sliding
without a step" Surefoot travels through the sylvan haunts, by us
beloved of yore, when every day was a dream, and every dream filled to
overflowing with poetic visions that swarmed in every bough, on every
bent, on every heather-bell, on every dewdrop, in every mote o' the sun,
in every line of gossamer, all over greenwood and greensward, grey
cliff, purple heath, blue lock, "wine-faced sea,"
"with locks divinely spreading,
Like sullen hyacinths in vernal hue,"
and all over the sky, seeming then a glorious infinitude, where light,
and joy, and beauty had their dwelling in calm and storm alike for
evermore.
Heaven bless thee--with all her sun, moon, and stars! there thou art,
dearest to us of all the lochs of Scotland--and they are all
dear--mountain-crowned, cliff-guarded, isle-zoned, grove-girdled,
wide-winding, and far-stretching, with thy many-bayed banks and braes of
brushwood, fern, broom, and heather, rejoicing in their huts and
shielings, thou glory of Argyllshire, rill-and-river-fed, sea-arm-like,
floating in thy majesty, magnificent Loch Awe!
Comparisons, so far from being odious, are always suggested to our
hearts by the spirit of love. We behold Four Lochs--Loch Awe, before our
bodily eyes, which sometimes sleep--Loch Lomond, Windermere, Killarney,
before those other eyes of ours that are waking ever. The longest is
Loch Awe, which from that bend below Sonnachan to distant Edderline,
looks like a river. But cut off, with the soft scythe or sickle of
fancy, twenty miles of the length of the mottled snake, who never coils
himself up except in misty weather, and who is now lying outstretched in
the sunshine, and the upper part, the head and shoulders, are of
themselves a Loch. Pleasant are his many hills, and magnificent his one
mountain. For you see but Cruachan. He is the master-spirit. Call him
the noblest of Scotland's Kings. His subjects are princes; and
gloriously they range around him, stretching high, wide, and far away,
yet all owing visible allegiance to him, their sole and undisputed
sovereign. The setting and the rising sun do him homage. Peace loves--as
now--to dwell within his shadow; but high among the precipices are the
halls of the storms. Green are the shores as emerald. But the dark
heather with its purple bloom sleeps in sombre shadow over wide regions
of dusk, and there is an austere character in the cliffs. Moors and
mosses intervene between holms and meadows, and those black spots are
stacks of last year's peats--not huts, as you might think; but those
other specks are huts, somewhat browner--few roofed with straw, almost
all with heather--though the better houses are slated--nor is there in
the world to be found slate of a more beautiful pale-green colour than
in the quarries of Ballahulish. The scene is vast and wild; yet so much
beauty is interfused, that at such an hour as this its character is
almost that of loveliness; the rude and rugged is felt to be rural, and
no more; and the eye, gliding from the cottage gardens on its banks to
the islands on the bosom of the Loch, loses sight of the mighty masses
heaved up to the heavens, while the heart forgets that they are there,
in its sweet repose. The dim-seen ruins of castle or religious house,
secluded from all the stir that disturbed the shore, carries back our
dreams to the olden time, and we awake from our reveries of "sorrows
suffered long ago," to enjoy the apparent happiness of the living world.
Loch Lomond is a sea! Along its shores might you voyage in your swift
schooner, with shifting breezes, all a summer's day, nor at sunset, when
you dropped anchor, have seen half the beautiful wonders. It is
many-isled; and some of them are in themselves little worlds, with woods
and hills. Houses are seen looking out from among old trees, and
children playing on the greensward that slopes safely into deep water,
where in rushy havens are drawn up the boats of fishermen, or of
woodcutters who go to their work on the mainland. You might live all
your life on one of those islands, and yet be no hermit. Hundreds of
small bays indent the shores, and some of a majestic character take a
fine bold sweep with their towering groves, enclosing the mansion of a
Colquhoun or a Campbell at enmity no more, or the turreted castle of the
rich alien, who there finds himself as much at home as in his hereditary
hall, Sassenach and Gael now living in gentle friendship. What a
prospect from the Point of Firkin! The Loch in its whole length and
breadth--the magnificent expanse unbroken, though bedropped, with
unnumbered isles--and the shores diversified with jutting cape and
far-shooting peninsula, enclosing sweet separate seclusions, each in
itself a loch. Ships might be sailing here, the largest ships of war;
and there is anchorage for fleets. But the clear course of the lovely
Leven is rock-crossed and intercepted with gravelly shallows, and guards
Loch Lomond from the white-winged roamers that from all seas come
crowding into the Firth of Clyde, and carry their streaming flags above
the woods of Ardgowan. And there stands Ben. What cares he for all the
multitude of other lochs his gaze commands--what cares he even for the
salt-sea foam tumbling far away off into the ocean? All-sufficient for
his love is his own loch at his feet. How serenely looks down the Giant!
Is there not something very sweet in his sunny smile? Yet were you to
see him frown--as we have seen him--your heart would sink; and what
would become of you--if all alone by your own single self, wandering
over the wide moor that glooms in utter houselessness between his
corries and Glenfalloch--what if you were to hear the strange mutterings
we have heard, as if moaning from an earthquake among quagmires, till
you felt that the sound came from the sky, and all at once from the
heart of night that had strangled day burst a shattering peal that
might waken the dead--for Benlomond was in wrath, and vented it in
thunder?
Perennially enjoying the blessing of a milder clime, and repaying the
bounty of nature by beauty that bespeaks perpetual gratitude--merry as
May, rich as June, shady as July, lustrous as August, and serene as
September, for in her meet the characteristic charms of every season,
all delightfully mingled by the happy genius of the place commissioned
to pervade the whole from heaven, most lovely yet most majestic, we
breathed the music of thy name, and start in this sterner solitude at
the sweet syllabling of Windermere, Windermere! Translucent thy waters
as diamond without a flaw. Unstained from source to sea are all the
streams soft issuing from their silver springs among those beautiful
mountains. Pure are they all as dew--and purer look the white clouds
within their breast. These are indeed the Fortunate Groves! Happy is
every tree. Blest the "Golden Oak," which seems to shine in lustre of
his own, unborrowed from the sun. Fairer far the flower-tangled grass of
those wood-encircled pastures than any meads of Asphodel. Thou need'st
no isles on thy heavenly bosom, for in the sweet confusion of thy shores
are seen the images of many isles, fragments that one might dream had
been gently loosened from the land, and had floated away into the lake
till they had lost themselves in the fairy wilderness. But though thou
need'st them not, yet hast thou, O Windermere! thine own steadfast and
enduring isles--her called the Beautiful--and islets not far apart that
seem born of her; for theirs the same expression of countenance--that of
celestial calm--and, holiest of the sisterhood, one that still retains
the ruins of an oratory, and bears the name of the Virgin Mother Mild,
to whom prays the mariner when sailing, in the moonlight, along Sicilian
seas.
Killarney! From the village of Cloghereen issued an uncouth figure, who
called himself the "Man of the Mountain;" and pleased with Pan, we
permitted him to blow his horn before us up to the top of Mangerton,
where the Devil, 'tis believed, scooped out the sward beneath the cliffs
into a Punch-bowl. No doubt he did, and the Old Potter wrought with
fire. 'Tis the crater of an extinct volcano. Charles Fox, Weld says, and
Wright doubts, swam the Pool. Why not? 'Tis not so cold as the Polar
Sea. We swam across it--as Mulcocky, were he alive, but he is dead,
could vouch; and felt braced like a drum. What a panorama! Our first
feeling was one of grief that we were not an Irishman. We knew not where
to fix our gaze. Surrounded by the dazzling bewilderment of all that
multitudinous magnificence, the eye, as if afraid to grapple with the
near glory--for such another day never shone from heaven--sought relief
in the remote distance, and slid along the beautiful river Kenmare,
insinuating itself among the recesses of the mountains, till it rested
on the green glimmer of the far-off sea. The grandeur was felt, far off
as it was, of that iron-bound coast. Coming round with an easy sweep, as
the eyes of an eagle may do, when hanging motionless aloft he but turns
his head, our eyes took in all the mighty range of the Reeks, and rested
in awe on Carran Tual. Wild yet gentle was the blue aerial haze over the
glimpses of the Upper Lake, where soft and sweet, in a girdle of rocks,
seemed to be hanging, now in air and now in water--for all was strangely
indistinct in the dim confusion--masses of green light that might be
islands with their lovely trees; but suddenly tipt with fire shone out
the golden pinnacles of the Eagle's Nest; and as again they were tamed
by cloud-shadow, the glow of Purple Mountain for a while enchained our
vision, and then left it free to feast on the forests of Glena, till,
wandering at the capricious will of fancy, it floated in delight over
the woods of Mucruss, and long lost among the trembling imagery of the
water, found lasting repose on the steadfast beauty of the sylvan isle
of Inisfallen.
But now for the black mass of rapid waters that, murmuring from loch to
river, rush roaring through that rainbow-arch, and bathe the green woods
in freshening spray-mist through a loveliest landscape, that steals
along with its meadow-sprinkling trees close to the very shore of Loch
Etive, binding the two lochs together with a sylvan band--her whose
calmer spirit never knows the ebb or flow of tide, and her who
fluctuates even when the skies are still with the swelling and subsiding
tumult duly sent up into and recalled down from the silence of her
inland solitude. And now for one pool in that river, called by eminence
the Salmon Pool, whose gravelly depths are sometimes paved with the blue
backs of the silver-scaled shiners, all strong as sunbeams, for a while
reposing there, till the river shall blacken in its glee to the floods
falling in Glen-Scrae and Glenorchy, and then will they shoot through
the cataract--for 'tis all one fall between the lochs--passionate of the
sweet fresh waters in which the Abbey-Isle reflects her one ruined
tower, or Kilchurn, at all times dim or dark in the shadow of Cruachan,
see his grim turrets, momentarily less grim, imaged in the tremblings of
the casual sunshine. Sometimes they lie like stones, nor, unless you
stir them up with a long pole, will they stir in the gleam, more than if
they were shadows breathed from trees when all winds are dead. But at
other times, they are on feed; and then no sooner does the fly drop on
the water in its blue and yellow gaudiness (and oh! but the brown
mallard wing is bloody--bloody!) than some snout sucks it in--some snout
of some swine-necked shoulder-bender; and instantly--as by dexterously
dropping your elbow you give him the butt, and strike the barb through
his tongue--down the long reach of the river vista'd along that straight
oak-avenue--but with clear space of greensward between wood and
water--shoots the giant steel-stung in his fear, bounding blue-white
into the air, and then down into the liquid element with a plunge as of
a man, or rather a horse, till your heart leaps to your mouth, or, as
the Greeks we believe used to say, to your nose, and you are seen
galloping along the banks, by spectators in search of the picturesque,
and ignorant of angling, supposed in the act of making your escape, with
an incomprehensible weapon in both hands, from some rural madhouse.
Eh? eh? not in our hat--not in our waistcoat--not in our jacket--not in
our breeches! By the ghost of Autolycus some pickpocket, while we were
moralising, has abstracted our Lascelles! We may as well tie a stone to
each of our feet, and sink away from all sense of misery in the Salmon
Pool. Oh! that it had been our purse! Who cares for a dozen dirty
sovereigns and a score of nasty notes? And what's the use of them to us
now, or indeed at any time? And what's the use of this identical rod?
Hang it, if a little thing would not make us break it! A multiplying
reel, indeed! The invention of a fool. The Tent sees not us again; this
afternoon we shall return to Edinburgh. Don't talk to us of flies at the
next village. There are no flies at the village--there is no village. O
Beelzebub! O Satan! was ever man tempted as we are tempted? See--see a
Fish--a fine Fish--an enormous Fish--leaping to insult us! Give us our
gun that we may shoot him--no--no, dang guns--and dang this great clumsy
rod! There--let it lie there for the first person that passes--for we
swear never to angle more. As for the Awe, we never liked it--and wonder
what infatuation brought us here. We shall be made to pay for this
yet--whew! there was a twinge--that big toe of ours we'll warrant is as
red as fire, and we bitterly confess that we deserve the gout. Och! och!
och!
But hark! whoop and hollo, and is that too the music of the hunter's
horn? Reverberating among the woods a well-known voice salutes our ear;
and there! bounds Hamish over the rocks like a chamois taking his
pastime. Holding up our LASCELLES! he places it with a few respectful
words--hoping we have not missed it--and standing aloof--leaves us to
our own reflections and our flies. Nor do those amount to remorse--nor
these to more than a few dozens. Samson's strength having been
restored--we speak of our rod, mind ye, not of ourselves--we lift up our
downcast eyes, and steal somewhat ashamed a furtive glance at the trees
and stones that must have overheard and overseen all our behaviour. We
leave those who have been in anything like the same predicament to
confess--not publicly--there is no occasion for that--nor on their
knees--but to their own consciences, if they have any, their grief and
their joy, their guilt, and, we hope, their gratitude. Transported
though they were beyond all bounds, we forgive them; for even those
great masters of wisdom, the Stoics, were not infallible, nor were they
always able to sustain, at their utmost strength, in practice the
principles of their philosophy.