"Ayr, gurgling, kissed his pebbled shore,
O'erhung with wild woods thick'ning green;
The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar
Twined, amorous, round the raptured scene;
The flowers sprang wanton to be prest,
The birds sang love on every spray--
Till, too, too soon, the glowing west
Proclaimed the speed of winged day."
_To Mary in Heaven_.
We were early on the road together; the day, though somewhat gloomy, was
mild and pleasant, and we walked slowly onward, neither of us in the
least disposed to hasten our parting by hastening our journey. We had
discussed fifty different topics, and were prepared to enter on fifty
more, when we reached the ancient burgh of Ayr, where our roads
separated.
"I have taken an immense liking to you, Mr. Lindsay," said my
companion, as he seated himself on the parapet of the old bridge,
"and have just bethought me of a scheme through which I may enjoy your
company for at least one night more. The Ayr is a lovely river, and you
tell me you have never explored it. We shall explore it together this
evening for about ten miles, when we shall find ourselves at the
farm-house of Lochlea. You may depend on a hearty welcome from my
father, whom, by the way, I wish much to introduce to you, as a man
worth your knowing; and, as I have set my heart on the scheme, you
are surely too good-natured to disappoint me." Little risk of that, I
thought; I had, in fact, become thoroughly enamoured of the warm-hearted
benevolence and fascinating conversation of my companion, and acquiesced
with the best good-will in the world.
We had threaded the course of the river for several miles. It runs
through a wild pastoral valley, roughened by thickets of copse-wood, and
bounded on either hand by a line of swelling, moory hills, with here and
there a few irregular patches of corn, and here and there some little
nest-like cottage peeping out from among the wood. The clouds, which
during the morning had obscured the entire face of the heavens, were
breaking up their array, and the sun was looking down, in twenty
different places, through the openings, checkering the landscape with a
fantastic, though lovely carpeting of light and shadow. Before us there
rose a thick wood, on a jutting promontory, that looked blue and dark in
the shade, as if it wore mourning; while the sunlit stream beyond shone
through the trunks and branches, like a river of fire. At length the
clouds seemed to have melted in the blue--for there was not a breath of
wind to speed them away--and the sun, now hastening to the west, shone
in unbroken effulgence over the wide extent of the dell, lighting up
stream and wood, and field and cottage, in one continuous blaze of
glory. We had walked on in silence for the last half hour; but I could
sometimes hear my companion muttering as he went; and when, in passing
through a thicket of hawthorn and honeysuckle, we started from its perch
a linnet that had been filling the air with its melody, I could hear him
exclaim, in a subdued tone of voice, "Bonny, bonny birdie! why hasten
frae me?--I wadna skaith a feather o' yer wing." He turned round to me,
and I could see that his eyes were swimming in moisture.
"Can he be other," he said, "than a good and benevolent God, who gives
us moments like these to enjoy? Oh, my friend, without these sabbaths of
the soul, that come to refresh and invigorate it, it would dry up within
us! How exquisite," he continued, "how entire the sympathy which exists
between all that is good and fair in external nature, and all of good
and fair that dwells in our own! And, oh, how the heart expands and
lightens! The world is as a grave to it--a closely-covered grave--and
it shrinks, and deadens, and contracts all its holier and more joyous
feelings under the cold, earth-like pressure. But, amid the grand and
lovely of nature--amid these forms and colours of richest beauty--there
is a disinterment, a resurrection of sentiment; the pressure of our
earthly part seems removed, and those _senses of the mind_, if I may
so speak, which serve to connect our spirits with the invisible world
around us, recover their proper tone, and perform their proper office."
"_Senses of the mind_," I said, repeating the phrase; "the idea is new
to me; but I think I catch your meaning."
"Yes; there are--there must be such," he continued, with growing
enthusiasm; "man is essentially a religious creature--a looker beyond
the grave, from the very constitution of his mind; and the sceptic who
denies it is untrue not merely to the Being who has made and who
preserves him, but to the entire scope and bent of his own nature
besides. Wherever man is--whether he be a wanderer of the wild forest
or still wilder desert, a dweller in some lone isle of the sea, or
the tutored and full-minded denizen of some blessed land like our
own--wherever man is, there is religion--hopes that look forward and
upward--the belief in an unending existence, and a land of separate
souls."
I was carried away by the enthusiasm of my companion, and felt, for the
time, as if my mind had become the mirror of his. There seems to obtain
among men a species of moral gravitation, analogous, in its principles,
to that which regulates and controls the movements of the planetary
system. The larger and more ponderous any body, the greater its
attractive force, and the more overpowering its influence over the
lesser bodies which surround it. The earth we inhabit carries the moon
along with it in its course, and is itself subject to the immensely more
powerful influence of the sun. And it is thus with character. It is a
law of our nature, as certainly as of the system we inhabit, that the
inferior should yield to the superior, and the lesser owe its guidance
to the greater. I had hitherto wandered on through life almost
unconscious of the existence of this law, or, if occasionally rendered
half aware of it, it was only through a feeling that some secret
influence was operating favourably in my behalf on the common minds
around me. I now felt, however, for the first time, that I had come in
contact with a mind immeasurably more powerful than my own; my thoughts
seemed to cast themselves into the very mould--my sentiments to modulate
themselves by the very tone of his. And yet he was but a russet-clad
peasant--my junior by at least eight years--who was returning from
school to assist his father, an humble tacksman, in the labours of
the approaching harvest. But the law of circumstance, so arbitrary in
ruling the destinies of common men, exerts but a feeble control over
the children of genius. The prophet went forth commissioned by Heaven to
anoint a king over Israel, and the choice fell on a shepherd boy who was
tending his father's flocks in the field.
We had reached a lovely bend of the stream. There was a semicircular
inflection in the steep bank, which waved over us, from base to summit,
with hawthorn and hazle; and while one half looked blue and dark in the
shade, the other was lighted up with gorgeous and fiery splendour by the
sun, now fast sinking in the west. The effect seemed magical. A little
grassy platform that stretched between the hanging wood and the stream,
was whitened over with clothes, that looked like snow-wreathes in the
hollow; and a young and beautiful girl watched beside them.
"Mary Campbell!" exclaimed my companion, and in a moment he was at her
side, and had grasped both her hands in his. "How fortunate, how very
fortunate I am!" he said; "I could not have so much as hoped to have
seen you to-night, and yet here you are! This, Mr. Lindsay, is a loved
friend of mine, whom I have known and valued for years; ever, indeed,
since we herded our sheep together under the cover of one plaid. Dearest
Mary, I have had sad forebodings regarding you for the whole last month
I was in Kirkoswald, and yet, after all my foolish fears, here you are,
ruddier and bonnier than ever."
She was, in truth, a beautiful, sylph-like young woman--one whom I would
have looked at with complacency in any circumstances; for who that
admires the fair and the lovely in nature--whether it be the wide-spread
beauty of sky and earth, or beauty in its minuter modifications, as we
see it in the flowers that spring up at our feet, or the butterfly that
flutters over them--who, I say, that admires the fair and lovely in
nature, can be indifferent to the fairest and loveliest of all her
productions? As the mistress, however, of by far the strongest-minded
man I ever knew, there was more of scrutiny in my glance than usual, and
I felt a deeper interest in her than mere beauty could have awakened.
She was, perhaps, rather below than above the middle size; but formed in
such admirable proportion, that it seemed out of place to think of size
in reference to her at all. Who, in looking at the _Venus de Medicis_,
asks whether she be tall or short? The bust and neck were so exquisitely
moulded, that they reminded me of Burke's fanciful remark, viz., that
our ideas of beauty originate in our love of the sex, and that we
deem every object beautiful which is described by soft-waving lines,
resembling those of the female neck and bosom. Her feet and arms, which
were both bare, had a statue-like symmetry and marble-like whiteness;
but it was on her expressive and lovely countenance, now lighted up by
the glow of joyous feeling, that nature seemed to have exhausted her
utmost skill. There was a fascinating mixture in the expression of
superior intelligence and child-like simplicity; a soft, modest light
dwelt in the blue eye; and in the entire contour and general form of the
features, there was a nearer approach to that union of the straight and
the rounded, which is found in its perfection in only the Grecian face,
than is at all common in our northern latitudes, among the descendants
of either the Celt or the Saxon. I felt, however, as I gazed, that when
lovers meet, the presence of a third person, however much the friend of
either, must always be less than agreeable.
"Mr. Burns," I said, "there is a beautiful eminence a few hundred yards
to the right, from which I am desirous to overlook the windings of the
stream. Do permit me to leave you for a short half hour, when I shall
return; or, lest I weary you by my stay, 'twere better, perhaps, you
should join me there." My companion greeted the proposal with a
good-humoured smile of intelligence; and, plunging into the wood, I
left him with his Mary. The sun had just set as he joined me.
"Have you ever been in love, Mr. Lindsay?" he said.
"No, never seriously," I replied. "I am, perhaps, not naturally of the
coolest temperament imaginable; but the same fortune that has improved
my mind in some little degree, and given me high notions of the sex, has
hitherto thrown me among only its less superior specimens. I am now in
my eight-and-twentieth year, and I have not yet met with a woman whom I
could love."
"Then you are yet a stranger," he rejoined, "to the greatest happiness
of which our nature is capable. I have enjoyed more heartfelt pleasure
in the company of the young woman I have just left, than from every
other source that has been opened to me from my childhood till now.
Love, my friend, is the fulfilling of the whole law."
"Mary Campbell, did you not call her?" I said. "She is, I think, the
loveliest creature I have ever seen; and I am much mistaken in the
expression of her beauty, if her mind be not as lovely as her person."
"It is, it is," he exclaimed--"the intelligence of an angel with the
simplicity of a child. Oh, the delight of being thoroughly trusted,
thoroughly beloved by one of the loveliest, best, purest-minded of all
God's good creatures! To feel that heart beating against my own, and to
know that it beats for me only! Never have I passed an evening with my
Mary without returning to the world a better, gentler, wiser man. Love,
my friend, is the fulfilling of the whole law. What are we without
it?--poor, vile, selfish animals; our very virtues themselves, so
exclusively virtues on our own behalf as to be well nigh as hateful as
our vices. Nothing so opens and improves the heart, nothing so widens
the grasp of the affections, nothing half so effectually brings us out
of our crust of self, as a happy, well-regulated love for a pure-minded,
affectionate-hearted woman!"
"There is another kind of love, of which we sailors see somewhat," I
said, "which is not so easily associated with good."
"Love!" he replied--"no, Mr. Lindsay, that is not the name. Kind
associates with kind in all nature; and love--humanizing,
heart-softening love--cannot be the companion of whatever is low, mean,
worthless, degrading--the associate of ruthless dishonour, cunning,
treachery, and violent death. Even independent of its amount of evil
as a crime, or the evils still greater than itself which necessarily
accompany it, there is nothing that so petrifies the feeling as illicit
connection."
"Do you seriously think so?" I asked.
"Yes, and I see clearly how it should be so. Neither sex is complete of
itself--each was made for the other, that, like the two halves of a
hinge, they may become an entire whole when united. Only think of the
scriptural phrase, _one flesh_--it is of itself a system of philosophy.
Refinement and tenderness are of the woman, strength and dignity of
the man. Only observe the effects of a thorough separation, whether
originating in accident or caprice. You will find the stronger sex lost
in the rudenesses of partial barbarism; the gentler wrapt up in some
pitiful round of trivial and unmeaning occupation--dry-nursing puppies,
or making pincushions for posterity. But how much more pitiful are the
effects when they meet amiss--when the humanizing friend and companion
of the man is converted into the light degraded toy of an idle hour;
the object of a sordid appetite that lives but for a moment, and then
expires in loathing and disgust! The better feelings are iced over at
their source, chilled by the freezing and deadening contact--where
there is nothing to inspire confidence or solicit esteem; and, if these
pass not through the first, the inner circle--that circle within which
the social affections are formed, and from whence they emanate--how can
they possibly flow through the circles which lie beyond? But here, Mr.
Lindsay, is the farm of Lochlea, and yonder brown cottage, beside the
three elms, is the dwelling of my parents."