pitched a Tent--a snow-white Pyramid, gathering to itself all the
sunshine. There lords and ladies, and knights and squires, celebrated
Old May-day, and half the parish flocked to the Festival. The Earl of
Eglintoun, and Sir Michael Shaw Stewart, and old Sir John of Polloc, and
Pollock of that Ilk, and other heads of illustrious houses, with their
wives and daughters, a beautiful show, did not disdain them of low
degree, but kept open table in the moor; and would you believe it,
high-born youths and maidens ministered at the board to cottage lads and
lasses, whose sunburnt faces hardly dared to smile, under awe of that
courtesy--yet whenever they looked up there was happiness in their eyes.
The young ladies were all arrayed in green; and after the feast, they
took bows and arrows in their lily hands, and shot at a target in a
style that would have gladdened the heart of Maid Marian--nay, of Robin
himself;--and one surpassing bright--the Star of Ayr--she held a hawk on
her wrist--a tercel gentle--after the fashion of the olden time; and
ever as she moved her arm you heard the chiming of silver bells. And her
brother--gay and gallant as Sir Tristrem--he blew his tasseled bugle--so
sweet, so pure, so wild the music, that when he ceased to breathe, the
far-off repeated echoes, faint and dim, you thought died away in heaven
like an angel's voice.
Was it not a Paragon of a Parish? But we have not told you one half of
its charms. There was a charm in every nook--and Youth was the master of
the spell. Small magicians were we in size, but we were great in might.
We had but to open our eyes in the morning, and at one look all nature
was beautiful. We have said nothing about the Burns. The chief was the
Yearn--endearingly called the Humbie, from a farm near the Manse, and
belonging to the minister. Its chief source was, we believe, the Brother
Loch. But it whimpled with such an infantine voice from the lucid bay,
which then knew nor sluice nor dam, that for a while it was scarcely
even a rill, and you had to seek for it among the heather. In doing so,
ten to one some brooding birdie fluttered off her nest--but not till
your next step would have crushed them all--or perhaps--but he had no
nest there--a snipe. There it is--betrayed by a line of livelier
verdure. Ere long it sparkled within banks of its own and "braes of
green bracken," and as you footed along, shoals of minnows, and perhaps
a small trout or two, brastled away to the other side of the shallow,
and hid themselves in the shadows. 'Tis a pretty rill now--nor any
longer mute; and you hear it murmur. It has acquired confidence on its
course, and has formed itself into its first pool--a waterfall, three
feet high, with its own tiny rocks, and a single birk--no, it is a
rowan--too young yet to bear berries--else might a child pluck the
highest cluster. Imperceptibly, insensibly, it grows just like life. The
Burn is now in his boyhood; and a bold, bright boy he is--dancing and
singing--nor heeding which way he goes along the wild, any more than
that wee rosy-cheeked, flaxen-headed girl seems to heed, who drops you a
curtsy, and on being asked by you, with your hand on her hair, where she
is going, answers wi' a soft Scottish accent--ah! how sweet--"Owre the
hill to see my Mither." Is that a house? No--a fauld. For this is the
Washing-Pool. Look around you, and you never saw such perfectly white
sheep. They are Cheviots; for the black-faces are on the higher hills to
the north of the moor. We see a few rigs of flax--and "lint is in the
bell"--the steeping whereof will sadly annoy the bit burnie, but poor
people must spin--and as this is not the season, we will think of
nothing that can pollute his limpid waters. Symptoms of husbandry!
Potato-shaws luxuriating on lazy-beds, and a small field with alternate
rigs of oats and barley. Yes, that is a house--"an auld clay
bigging,"--in such Robin Burns was born--in such was rocked the cradle
of Pollok. We think we hear two separate liquid voices--and we are
right--for from the flats beyond Floak, and away towards Kingswells,
comes another yet wilder burnie, and they meet in one at the head of
what you would probably call a meadow, but which we call a holm. There
seems to be more arable land hereabouts than a stranger could have any
idea of; but it is a long time since the ploughshare traced those almost
obliterated furrows on the hill-side; and such cultivation is now wisely
confined, you observe, to the lower lands. We fear the Yearn--for that
is his name now--heretofore he was anonymous--is about to get flat. But
we must not grudge him a slumber or a sleep among the saughs, lulled by
the murmur of millions of humble-bees--we speak within bounds--on their
honied flowerage. We are confusing the seasons, for a few minutes ago we
spoke of "lint being in the bell;" but in imagination's dream how
sweetly do the seasons all slide into one another! After sleep comes
play, and see and hear now how the merry Yearn goes tumbling over rocks,
nor will rest in any one linn, but impatient of each beautiful prison in
which one would think he might lie a willing thrall, hurries on as if he
were racing against time, nor casts a look at the human dwellings now
more frequent near his sides. But he will be stopped by-and-by, whether
he will or no; for there, if we be not much mistaken, there is a mill.
But the wheel is at rest--the sluice on the lade is down--with the lade
he has nothing more to do than to fill it; and with undiminished volume
he wends round the miller's garden--you see Dusty Jacket is a
florist--and now is hidden in a dell; but a dell without any rocks. 'Tis
but some hundred yards across from bank to brae--and as you angle along
on either side, the sheep and lambs are bleating high overhead; for
though, the braes are steep, they are all intersected with sheep-walks,
and ever and anon among the broom and the brackens are little platforms
of close-nibbled greensward, yet not bare--and nowhere else is the
pasturage more succulent--nor do the young creatures not care to taste
the primroses, though were they to live entirely upon them, they could
not keep down the profusion--so thickly studded in places are the
constellations--among sprinklings of single stars. Here the
hill-blackbird builds--and here you know why Scotland is called the
lintie's land. What bird lilts like the lintwhite? The lark alone. But
here there are no larks--a little further down and you will hear one
ascending or descending over almost every field of grass or of the
tender braird. Down the dell before you, flitting from stone to stone,
on short flight seeks the water-pyet--seemingly a witless creature with
its bonnie white breast--to wile you away from the crevice, even within
the waterfall, that holds its young--or with a cock of her tail she dips
and disappears. There is grace in the glancing sandpiper--nor, though
somewhat fantastical, is the water-wagtail inelegant--either belle or
beau--an outlandish bird that makes himself at home wherever he goes,
and, vain as he looks, is contented if but one admire him in a solitary
place--though it is true that we have seen them in half-dozens on the
midden in front of the cottage door. The blue slip of sky overhead has
been gradually widening, and the dell is done. Is that snow? A
bleachfield. Lasses can bleach their own linen on the green near the
pool, "atween twa flowery braes," as Allan has so sweetly sung, in his
truly Scottish pastoral "The Gentle Shepherd." But even they could not
well do without bleachfields on a larger scale, else dingy would be
their smocks and their wedding-sheets. Therefore there is beauty in a
bleachfield, and in none more than in Bell's-Meadows. But where is the
Burn? They have stolen him out of his bed, and, alas! nothing but
stones! Gather up your flies, and away down to yonder grove. There he is
like one risen from the dead; and how joyful his resurrection! All the
way from this down to the Brigg o' Humbie the angling is admirable, and
the burn has become a stream. You wade now through longer
grass--sometimes even up to the knees; and half-forgetting pastoral
life, you ejaculate "Speed the plough!" Whitewashed houses--but still
thatched--look down on you from among trees, that shelter them in
front; while behind is an encampment of stacks, and on each side a line
of offices, so that they are snug in every wind that blows. The Auld
Brigg is gone, which is a pity; for though the turn was perilous sharp,
time had so coloured it that in a sunny shower we have mistaken it for a
rainbow. That's Humbie House, God bless it! and though we cannot here
with our bodily sense see the Manse, with our spiritual eye we can see
it anywhere. Ay! there is the cock on the Kirk-spire! The wind we see
has shifted to the south; and ere we reach the Cart, we shall have to
stuff our pockets. The Cart!--ay, the river Cart--not that on which
pretty Paisley stands, but the Black Cart, beloved by us chiefly for
sake of Cath-Cart Castle, which, when a collegian at Glasgow, we visited
every Play-Friday, and deepened the ivy on its walls with our first
sombre dreams. The scenery of the Yearn becomes even sylvan now; and
though still sweet its murmurs to our ear, they no longer sink into our
hearts. So let it mingle with the Cart, and the Cart with the Clyde, and
the Clyde widen away in all his majesty, till the river becomes a firth,
and the firth the sea;--but we shut our eyes, and relapse into the
vision that showed us the solitary region dearest to our imagination and
our hearts, and opening them on completion of the charm that works
within the spirit when no daylight is there, rejoice to find ourselves
again sole-sitting on the Green-Brae above the Brother Loch.
Such is an off-hand picture of Our Parish--pray give us one of yours,
that both may gain by comparison. But is ours a true picture? True as
Holy Writ--false as any fiction in an Arabian tale. How is this?
Perception, memory, imagination, are all moods--states of mind. But
mind, as we said before, is one substance, and matter another; and mind
never deals with matter without metamorphosing it like a mythologist.
Thus truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, become all one and the
same; for they are so essentially blended, that we defy you to show what
is biblical--what apocryphal--and what pure romance. How we transpose
and dislocate while we limn in aerial colours! Where tree never grew we
drop it down centuries old--or we tear out the gnarled oak by the roots,
and steep what was once his shadow in sunshine--hills sink at a touch,
or at a beck mountains rise; yet amidst all those fluctuations the
spirit of the place remains the same; for in that spirit has imagination
all along been working, and boon nature smiles on her son as he
imitates her creations--but "hers are heavenly, his an empty dream."
Where lies Our Parish, and what is its name? Seek, and you will find it
either in Renfrewshire, or in Utopia, or in the Moon. As for its name,
men call it the Mearns. M'Culloch, the great Glasgow painter--and in
Scotland he has no superior--will perhaps accompany you to what once was
the Moor. All the Four Lochs, we understand, are there still; but the
Little Loch transmogrified into an auxiliar appurtenance to some cursed
Wark--the Brother Loch much exhausted by daily drains upon him by we
know not what wretch--the White Loch _larched_--and the Black Loch of a
ghastly blue, cruelly cultivated all close round the brim. From his moor
"The parting genius is with sighing sent;"
but sometimes, on blear-eyed days, he is seen disconsolately sitting in
some yet mossy spot among the ruins of his ancient reign. That painter
has studied the aspect of the Old Forlorn, and has shown it more than
once on bits of canvass not a foot long; and such pictures will survive
after the Ghost of the Genius has bade farewell to the ruined solitudes
he had haunted ever since the flood, or been laid beneath the yet
unprofaned Green-Brae, above the Brother Loch, whence we devoutly trust
he will re-issue, though ages may have to elapse, to see all his
quagmires in their primeval glory, and all his hags more hideously
beautiful, as they yawn back again into their former selves, frowning
over the burial in their bottoms of all the harvests that had dared to
ripen above their heads.
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| Transcriber's note: |
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| Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed. |
| Table of Contents: Corrected 336 to 335 |
| Page 127: Corrected word order problem |
| Page 132: Changed "this to happen her" to "this to happen to her" |
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