sermon. For we are prone, in other matters than scenery, to seek our
enjoyments at a distance. We would gather that happiness from the
far-off stars which, had we the eyes to see, is all the while lying
at our feet. You go to look at a celebrated scene. People have
returned from it in raptures. You have heard them describe it, you
have read about it, and you naturally expect something very fine
indeed. When you arrive, the chances are that its beauties are
carefully stowed away in a thick mist, or you are drenched to the
skin, or you find the hotel full, and are forced to sleep in an
outhouse, or on the heather beneath the soft burning planets, and go
home with a rheumatism which embitters your existence to your dying
day. Or, if you are lucky enough to find the weather cloudless and
the day warm, you are doomed to cruel disappointment. Is _that_ what
you have heard and read so much about? That pitiful drivelling
cascade! Why, you were led to expect the wavy grace of the Gray
Mare's Tail combined with the flash and thunder of Niagara. That a
mountain forsooth! It isn't so much bigger than Ben Lomond after
all! You feel swindled and taken in. You commend the waterfall to
the fiend. You snap your fingers in the face of the mountain.
"You're a humbug, sir. You're an impostor, sir. I--I'll write to
the _Times_ and expose you, sir." On the other hand, the townsman,
at the close of a useful and busy day, walks out into the country.
The road is pretty; he has never been on it before; he is insensibly
charmed along. He reaches a little village or clachan, its
half-dozen thatched houses set down amid blossoming apple-trees; the
smoke from the chimneys, telling of the preparation of the evening
meal, floating up into the rose of sunset. A labourer is standing at
the door with a child in his arms; the unharnessed horses are
drinking at the trough; the village boys and girls are busy at their
games; two companies, linked arm-in-arm, are alternately advancing
and receding, singing all the while with their sweet shrill voices--
"The Campsie Duke's a riding, a riding, a riding."
[Sidenote: Unexpectedness of pleasure.]
This is no uncommon scene in Scotland, and why does it yield more
pleasure than the celebrated one that you have gone a hundred miles
to see, besides spending no end of money on the way? Simply because
you have approached it with a pure, healthy mind, undebauched by
rumour or praise. It has in it the element of unexpectedness; which,
indeed, is the condition of all delight, for pleasure must surprise
if it is to be worthy of the name. The pleasure that is expected and
looked for never comes, or if it does it is in a shape so changed
that recognition is impossible. Besides, you have found out the
scene, and have thereby a deeper interest in it. This same law
pervades everything. You hear of Coleridge's wonderful conversation,
and in an evil hour make your appearance at Highgate. The
mild-beaming, silvery-haired sage, who conceived listening to be the
whole duty of man, talks for the space of three mortal hours--by you
happily unheard. For, after the first twenty minutes, you are
conscious of a hazy kind of light before your eyes, a soothing sound
is murmuring in your ears, a delicious numbness is creeping over all
your faculties, and by the end of the first half-hour you are snoring
away as comfortably as if you were laid by the side of your lawful
spouse. You are disappointed of course: of the musical wisdom which
has been flowing in plenteous streams around, you have not tasted one
drop; and you never again hear a man praised for power or brilliancy
of conversation without an inward shudder. The next day you take
your place on the coach, and are fortunate enough to secure your
favourite seat beside the driver. Outside of you is a hard-featured
man, wrapt in a huge blue pilot-coat. You have no idea to what class
of society he may belong. It is plain that he is not a gentleman in
the superfine sense of that term. He has a very remarkable gift of
silence. When you have smoked your cigar out, you hazard a remark
about the weather. He responds. You try his mind as an angler tries
a stream, to see if anything will rise. One thing draws on another,
till, after an hour's conversation, which has flown over like a
minute, you find that you have really learned something. [Sidenote:
Pleasure not to be sought at a distance.] The unknown individual in
the pilot-coat, who has strangely come out of space upon you, and as
strangely returns into space again, has looked upon the world, and
has formed his own notions and theories of what goes on there. On
him life has pressed as well as on you; joy at divers times has
lighted up his grim features; sorrow and pain have clouded them.
There is something in the man; you are sorry when he is dropped on
the road, and say "Good-bye," with more than usual feeling. Why is
all this? The man in the pilot-coat does not talk so eloquently as
S.T.C, but he instructs and pleases you--and just because you went to
hear the celebrated Talker, as you go to see the Irish Giant, or the
Performing Pig, you are disappointed, as you deserved to be. The man
in the pilot-coat has come upon you naturally, unexpectedly. At its
own sweet will "the cloud turned forth its silver lining on the
night." Happiness may best be extracted from the objects surrounding
us. The theory on which our loud tumultuary modern life is
based--that we can go to Pleasure, that if we frequent her haunts we
are sure to find her--is a heresy and a falsehood. She will not be
constrained. She obeys not the call of the selfish or the greedy.
Depend upon it she is as frequently found on homely roads, and
amongst rustic villages and farms, as among the glaciers of Chamouni,
or the rainbows of Niagara.
In one of his earliest rambles, Mr Macdonald follows the river for
some miles above the city. The beauty of the Clyde below Glasgow is
well known to the civilised world. Even the _roué_ of landscape, to
whom the Rhine is weariness and the Alps common-place, has felt his
heart leap within him while gazing on that magnificent estuary. But
it is not only in her maturity that the Clyde is fair. Beauty
attends her from her birth on Rodger Law until she is wedded with
ocean--Bute, and the twin Cumbraes, bridesmaids of the stream; Arran,
groomsman to the main. With Mr Macdonald's book in pocket to be a
companion at intervals--for one requires no guide, having years
before learned every curve and bend of the river--let us start along
its banks towards Carmyle and Kenmure wood. We pass Dalmarnock
Bridge, and leave the city, with its windowed factories and driving
wheels and everlasting canopy of smoke behind. The stream comes
glittering down between green banks, one of which rises high on the
left, so that further vision in that quarter is intercepted. On the
right are villages and farms; afar, the Cathkin Braes, the moving
cloud shadows mottling their sunny slopes; and straight ahead, and
closing the view, the spire of Cambuslang Church, etched on the
pallid azure of the sky. We are but two miles from the city, and
everything is bright and green. The butterfly flutters past; the
dragonfly darts hither and thither. See, he poises himself on his
winnowing wings, about half a yard from one's nose, which he
curiously inspects; that done, off darts the winged tenpenny-nail,
his rings gleaming like steel. There are troops of swallows about.
Watch one. Now he is high in air--now he skims the Clyde. You can
hear his sharp, querulous twitter as he jerks and turns. Nay, it is
said that the kingfisher himself has been seen gleaming along these
sandy banks, illuminating them like a meteor. [Sidenote: Dalbeth
Convent.] At some little distance a white house is pleasantly
situated amongst trees--it is Dalbeth Convent. As we pass, one of
the frequent bells summoning the inmates to devotion is stirring the
sunny Presbyterian air. A little on this side of the convent, a
rapid brook comes rushing to the Clyde, crossed by a rude bridge of
planks, which has been worn by the feet of three generations at the
very least. The brook, which is rather huffy and boisterous in its
way, particularly after rain, had, a few days before, demolished and
broken up said wooden planks, and carried one of them off. Arriving,
we find a woman and boy anxious to cross, yet afraid to venture.
Service is proffered, and, after a little trouble, both are landed in
safety on the farther bank. The woman is plainly, yet neatly
dressed, and may be about forty-five years of age or thereby. The
boy has turned eleven, has long yellow hair hanging down his back,
and looks thin and slender for his years. With them they have
something wrapped up in a canvas cloth, which, to the touch as they
are handed across, seem to be poles of about equal length. For the
slight service the woman returns thanks in a tone which smacks of the
southern English counties. "Good-bye" is given and returned, and we
proceed, puzzling ourselves a good deal as to what kind of people
they are, and what their business may be in these parts, but can come
to no conclusion. However, it does not matter much, for the
ironworks are passed now, and the river banks are beautiful. They
are thickly wooded, and at a turn the river flows straight down upon
you for a mile, with dusty meal-mills on one side, a dilapidated
wheel-house on the other, and stretching from bank to bank a
half-natural, half-artificial shallow horse-shoe fall, over which the
water tumbles in indolent foam--a sight which a man who has no
pressing engagements, and is fond of exercise, may walk fifty miles
to see, and be amply rewarded for his pains. In front is a ferry--a
rope extending across the river by which the boat is propelled--and
lo! a woman in a scarlet cloak on the opposite side hails the
ferryman, and that functionary comes running to his duty. [Sidenote:
Carmyle.] Just within the din of the shallow horse-shoe fall lies the
village of Carmyle, an old, quiet, sleepy place, where nothing has
happened for the last fifty years, and where nothing will happen for
fifty years to come. Ivy has been the busiest thing here; it has
crept up the walls of the houses, and in some instances fairly "put
out the light" of the windows. The thatched roofs are covered with
emerald moss. The plum-tree which blossomed some months ago
blossomed just the same in the spring which witnessed the birth of
the oldest inhabitant. For half a century not one stone has been
placed upon another here--there are only a few more green mounds in
the churchyard. It is the centre of the world. All else is change:
this alone is stable. There is a repose deeper than sleep in this
little, antiquated village--ivy-muffled, emerald-mossed, lullabied
for ever by the fall of waters. The meal-mills, dusty and white as
the clothes of the miller himself, whir industriously; the waters of
the lade come boiling out from beneath the wheel, and reach the Clyde
by a channel dug by the hand of man long ago, but like a work of
nature's now, so covered with furze as it is. Look down through the
clear amber of the current, and you see the "long green gleet of the
slippery stones" in which the silver-bellied eel delights. Woe
betide the luckless village urchin that dares to wade therein. There
is a sudden splash and roar. When he gets out, he is laid with
shrill objurgations across the broad maternal knee, and fright and
wet clothes are avenged by sound whacks from the broad maternal hand.
Leaving the village, we proceed onward. The banks come closer, the
stream is shallower, and whirls in eddy and circle over a rocky bed.
There is a woodland loneliness about the river which is aided by the
solitary angler standing up to his middle in the water, and waiting
patiently for the bite that never comes, or by the water-ousel
flitting from stone to stone. [Sidenote: Kenmuir Bank.] In a quarter
of an hour we reach Kenmuir Bank, which rises some seventy feet or
so, filled with trees, their trunks rising bare for a space, and then
spreading out with branch and foliage into a matted shade, permitting
the passage only of a few flakes of sunlight at noon, resembling, in
the green twilight, a flock of visionary butterflies alighted and
asleep. Within, the wood is jungle; you wade to the knees in
brushwood and bracken. The trunks are clothed with ivy, and snakes
of ivy creep from tree to tree, some green with life, some tarnished
with decay. At the end of the Bank there is a clear well, in which,
your face meeting its shadow, you may quench your thirst. Seated
here, you have the full feeling of solitude. An angler wades out
into mid-channel--a bird darts out of a thicket, and slides away on
noiseless wing--the shallow wash and murmur of the Clyde flows
through a silence as deep as that of an American wilderness--and yet,
by to-morrow, the water which mirrors as it passes the beauty of the
lucken-gowan hanging asleep, will have received the pollutions of a
hundred sewers, and be bobbing up and down among the crowds of
vessels at the Broomielaw. Returning homeward by the top of Kenmuir
Bank, we gaze westward. Out of a world of smoke the stalk of St
Rollox rises like a banner-staff, its vapoury streamer floating on
the wind; and afar, through the gap between the Campsie and
Kilpatrick hills, Benlomond himself, with a streak of snow upon his
shoulder. Could one but linger here for a couple of hours, one would
of a verity behold a sight--the sun setting in yonder lurid,
smoke-ocean. The wreaths of vapour which seem so common-place and
vulgar now, so suggestive of trade and swollen purses and rude
manners, would then become a glory such as never shepherd beheld at
sunrise on his pastoral hills. Beneath a roof of scarlet flame, one
would see the rolling edges of the smoke change into a brassy
brightness, as with intense heat; the dense mass and volume of it
dark as midnight, or glowing with the solemn purple of thunder; while
right in the centre of all, where it has burned a clear way for
itself, the broad fluctuating orb, paining the eye with concentrated
splendours, and sinking gradually down, a black spire cutting his
disk in two. But for this one cannot wait, and the apparition will
be unbeheld but by the rustic stalking across the field in company
with his prodigious shadow, and who, turning his face to the flame,
will conceive it the most ordinary thing in the world. We keep the
upper road on our return, and in a short time are again at Carmyle;
we have no intention of tracing the river bank a second time, and so
turn up the narrow street. But what is to do?
[Sidenote: The acrobat.]
The children are gathered in a circle, and the wives are standing at
the open doors. There is a performance going on. The tambourine is
sounding, and a tiny acrobat, with a fillet round his brow, tights
covered with tinsel lozenges, and flesh-coloured shoes, is striding
about on a pair of stilts, to the no small amazement and delight of
the juveniles. He turns his head, and--why, it's the little boy I
assisted across the brook at Dalbeth three hours ago, and of course
that's the old lady who is thumping and jingling the tambourine, and
gathering in the halfpennies! God bless her jolly old face! who
would have thought of meeting her here? I am recognised, the boy
waves me farewell, the old lady smiles and curtsies, thumps her
tambourine, and rattles the little bells of it with greater vigour
than ever. The road to Glasgow is now comparatively uninteresting.
The trees wear a dingy colour; you pass farm-houses, with sooty
stacks standing in the yard. 'Tis a coaly, dusty district, which has
characteristics worth noting. For, as the twilight falls dewily on
far-off lea and mountain, folding up daisy and buttercup, putting the
linnet to sleep beside his nest of young in the bunch of broom, here
the circle of the horizon becomes like red-hot steel; the furnaces of
the Clyde iron-works lift up their mighty towers of flame, throwing
"Large and angry lustres o'er the sky,
And shifting lights across the long dark roads;"
and so, through chase of light and shade, through glimmer of glare
and gloom, we find our way back to Glasgow--its low hum breaking into
separate and recognisable sounds, its nebulous brightness into
far-stretching street-lamps, as we draw near.
[Sidenote: Paisley.]
The tourist who travels by train from Glasgow to Greenock must pass
the town of Paisley. If he glances out of the carriage window he
will see beneath him a third-rate Scotch town, through which flows
the foulest and shallowest of rivers.
The principal building in the town, and the one which first attracts
the eye of a stranger, is the jail; then follow the church spires in
their order of merit. Unfortunately the train passes not through
Paisley, but over it; and from his "coign of vantage" the tourist
beholds much that is invisible to the passenger in the streets. All
the back-greens, piggeries, filthy courts, and unmentionable
abominations of the place, are revealed to him for a moment as the
express flashes darkly across the railway bridge. For the seeing of
Scotch towns a bird's-eye view is plainly the worst point of view.
In all likelihood the tourist, as he passes, will consider Paisley
the ugliest town he has ever beheld, and feel inwardly grateful that
his lot has not been cast therein. But in this the tourist may be
very much mistaken. Paisley is a remarkable place--one of the most
remarkable in Scotland. Just as Comrie is the abode of earthquakes,
Paisley is the abode of poetic inspiration. There is no accounting
for the tastes of the celestials. Queen Titania fell in love with
Bottom when he wore the ass's head; and Paisley, ugly as it is, is
the favourite seat of the Muses. There Apollo sits at the loom and
earns eighteen shillings per week. At this moment, and the same
might have been said of any moment since the century came in, there
is perhaps a greater number of poets living and breathing in this
little town than in the whole of England. Whether this may arise
from the poverty of the place, on the principle that the sweetness of
the nightingale's song is connected in some subtle way with the thorn
against which she leans her breast, it may be useless to inquire.
Proceed from what cause it may, Paisley has been for the last fifty
years or more an aviary of singing birds. To said aviary I had once
the honour to be introduced. Some years ago, when dwelling in the
outskirts of the town, I received a billet intimating that the L.C.A.
would meet on the evening of the 26th Jan. 18--, in honour of the
memory of the immortal Robert Burns, and requesting my attendance.
N.B.--Supper and drink, 1s. 6d. Being a good deal puzzled by the
mystic characters, I made inquiries, and discovered that L.C.A.
represented the "Literary and Convivial Association," which met every
Saturday evening for the cultivation of the minds of its members--a
soil which for years had been liberally irrigated with toddy--with
correspondent effects. To this cheap feast of the gods on the sacred
evening in question I directed my steps, and beheld the assembled
poets. [Sidenote: The poets.] There could scarcely have been fewer
than eighty present. Strange! Each of these conceited himself of
finer clay than ordinary mortals; each of these had composed verses,
some few had even published small volumes or pamphlets of verse by
subscription, and drank the anticipated profits; each of these had
his circle of admirers and flatterers, his small public and shred of
reputation; each of these envied and hated his neighbour; and not
unfrequently two bards would quarrel in their cups as to which of
them was possessor of the larger amount of fame. At that time the
erection of a monument to Thom of Inverury had been talked about,
_apropos_ of which one of the bards remarked, "Ou ay, jist like them.
They'll bigg us monuments whan we're deid: I wush they'd gie us
something whan we're leevin'." In that room, amid that motley
company, one could see the great literary world unconsciously
burlesqued and travestied, shadowed forth there the emptiness and
noise of it, the blatant vanity of many of its members. The eighty
poets presented food for meditation. Well, it is from this town that
I propose taking a walk, for behind Paisley lie Gleniffer Braes, the
scene of Tannahill's songs. One can think of Burns apart from
Ayrshire, of Wordsworth apart from Cumberland, but hardly of
Tannahill apart from the Braes of Gleniffer. The district, too, is
of but little extent; in a walk of three hours you can see every spot
mentioned by the poet. You visit his birthplace in the little
straggling street, where the sound of the shuttle is continually
heard. You pass up to the green hills where he delighted to wander,
and whose charms he has celebrated; and you return by the canal
where, when the spirit "finely touched to fine issues," was
disordered and unstrung, he sought repose. Birth, life, and death
lie side by side. The matter of the moral is closely packed. The
whole tragedy sleeps in the compass of an epigram.
[Sidenote: Stanley Castle.]
Leaving the rambling suburbs of Paisley, you pass into a rough and
undulating country with masses of gray crag interspersed with whinny
knolls, where, in the evenings, the linnet sings; with narrow sandy
roads wandering through it hither and thither, passing now a clump of
gloomy firs, now a house where some wealthy townsman resides, now a
pleasant corn-field. A pretty bit of country enough, with larks
singing above it from dawn to sunset, and where, in the gloaming, the
wanderer not unfrequently can mark the limping hare. A little
further on are the ruins of Stanley Castle. This castle, in the days
of the poet, before the wildness of the country had been tamed by the
plough, must have lent a singular charm to the landscape. It stands
at the base of the hills which rise above it with belt of wood, rocky
chasm, white streak of waterfall--higher up into heath and silence,
silence deep as the heaven that overhangs it; where nothing moves
save the vast cloud-shadows, where nothing is heard save the cry of
the moorland bird. Tannahill was familiar with the castle in its
every aspect--when sunset burned on the walls, when the moon steeped
it in silver and silence, and when it rose up before him shadowy and
vast through the marshy mists. He had his loom to attend during the
day, and he knew the place best in its evening aspect. Twilight,
with its quietude and stillness, seemed to have peculiar charms for
his sensitive nature, and many of his happiest lines are descriptive
of its phenomena. But the glory is in a great measure departed from
Stanley Tower; the place has been turned into a reservoir by the
Water Company, and the ruin is frequently surrounded by water. This
intrusion of water has spoiled the scene. The tower is hoary and
broken, the lake looks a thing of yesterday, and there are traces of
quite recent masonry about. The lake's shallow extent, its glitter
and brightness, are impertinences. Only during times of severe
frost, when its surface is iced over, when the sun is sinking in the
purple vapours like a globe of red-hot iron--when the skaters are
skimming about like swallows, and the curlers are boisterous--for the
game has been long and severe--and the decisive stone is roaring up
the rink--only in such circumstances does the landscape regain some
kind of keeping and homogeneousness. There is no season like winter
for improving a country; he tones it down to one colour; he breathes
over its waters, and in the course of a single night they become
gleaming floors, on which youth may disport itself. He powders his
black forest-boughs with the pearlin's of his frosts; and the
fissures which spring tries in vain to hide with her flowers, and
autumn with fallen leaves, he fills up at once with a snow-wreath.
But we must be getting forward, up that winding road, progress marked
by gray crag, tuft of heather, bunch of mountain violets, the country
beneath stretching out farther and farther. Lo! a strip of emerald
steals down the gray of the hill, and there, by the way-side, is an
ample well, with the "netted sunbeam" dancing in it. Those who know
Tannahill's "Gloomy Winter's noo awa" must admire its curious
felicity of touch and colour. Turn round, you are in the very scene
of the song. [Sidenote: Gleniffer.] In front is "Gleniffer's dewy
dell," to the east "Glenkelloch's sunny brae," afar the woods of
Newton, over which at this moment laverocks fan the "snaw-white
cluds;" below, the "burnie" leaps in sparkle and foam over many a
rocky shelf, till its course is lost in that gorge of gloomy firs,
and you can only hear the music of its joy. Which is the fairer--the
landscape before your eyes, or the landscape sleeping in the light of
song? You cannot tell, for they are at once different and the same.
The touch of the poet was loving and true. His genius was like the
light of early spring, clear from speck or stain of vapour, but with
tremulousness and uncertainty in it; happy, but with grief lying
quite close to its happiness; smiling, although the tears are hardly
dry upon the cheeks that in a moment may be wet again.
[Sidenote: Tannahill.]