Departure from Liverpool.—Travels Second-Class.—Arrival at
Port Rush.—The Giant’s Causeway.—Lost and in Danger.—Dunluce
Castle.—Effect upon the Travellers.—Condition of the
Irish.—Arrival at Dumbarton.—Scaling the Castle Walls.—Walk
to Loch Lomond.—Ascent of Ben Lomond.—Loch Katrine.—Visit to
Stirling.
Bayard and his companions, including the German student, with whom there
had sprung up an intimate friendship, left Liverpool on the same day on
which they arrived there, having found that they would reach Scotland
_via_ the Giant’s Causeway, as soon as they could by waiting for the more
direct line. With an exercise of common-sense, such as characterizes
too few Americans in this day of fashionable travel, they took passage
second-class, finding themselves in no way the worse for the temporary
inconvenience, while their fare was but one-sixth the amount of a
first-class passage. It was not a comfortable night’s voyage on the way
from Liverpool to Port Rush, in the north of Ireland, starting at ten
o’clock in the evening, and arriving at eleven o’clock the next night. It
may be that the cold and wet, the crowd of Irish passengers, the unvaried
diet of bread and cheese, served the purpose of making the shores and
bluffs more attractive, as the mind naturally seeks and usually obtains
some comfort and recreation in the most doleful surroundings. It is
a glorious thing to look upon those basaltic hexagons of the Giant’s
Causeway, under any circumstances. Those enormous natural columns, set
side by side, so close as to make a floor along their tops, so strange,
so unaccountably symmetrical, fill the soul with awe, and half persuade
the least credulous beholder that there were giants in the days of yore,
and that they really did build a thoroughfare of these huge prisms
across to Scotland. Any traveller contemplates those matchless piles
with surprise, and every sojourner is delighted beyond estimation by
the contour and echoes of the vast caverns, into which the ocean rolls
with such enchanting combinations of sound and motion. But to young men
who had seen but little of the world and its natural wonders, and who
had suffered a kind of martyrdom for the sake of visiting them, those
resounding caverns, and those mighty ruins of gigantic natural temples,
must have been inspiring beyond measure. Every traveller recalls with the
most clear and grateful remembrance, the first landscapes of Europe, on
which rest his ocean-weary eyes. To these young men the landscapes were
about their only joy, and they appreciated them accordingly. Bayard seems
to have been very enthusiastic. He scrutinized everything and questioned
everybody. He let nothing pass him unnoticed, although in his books he
left much unmentioned. He clambered into the lofty recesses of the
Causeway, and let himself down into the strange niches. He halloed in
the caves for the thundering echoes; he drank three times at the magical
Giant’s Well. He strayed from the highway that led from Port Rush to
the Causeway, to look into the weird nooks which the sea has carved in
the mutable shore. Dunluce Castle, with its broken walls and ghastly
towers—home of proud Lord Antrim—and home as well of that family’s
terrible banshee, was the first old ruin which Bayard visited. It stands
on the verge of the cragged cliffs, with the sea beating about its base,
and bellowing in the cavern under it. It is located near the highway
which leads from Port Rush to the Causeway. Across the narrow footway,
and into these ruins, Bayard rushed most eagerly. The same old man who
now shows travellers the battlements, and tells to wondering hundreds the
tales of tournament and banqueting-hall, was there then, and rehearsed
the tale to him. The boy is gone. But the old man, whom Bayard mentions
as an old man then, lives on in his dull routine, yet living less in a
half century than Bayard lived in a single year.
All this was fresh and glorious to the youth, and gave him a very
pleasant foretaste of the rich experiences in store for him. But, as
if the fates conspired to chill his intellectual joys with physical
discomforts, a rain came pouring upon them as they returned, the wind
blew in fierce gusts, darkness, deep and black, settled upon the land;
they lost their way, and floundered about in muddy ravines, and barely
escaped destruction as they trod the edges of the precipices above the
wildest of seas. They became separated from each other, and the howling
of winds and waves among the crags was so hideous that they could not for
a long time hear each other’s call, and the worst of fears for each other
were added to their own dismay. But they somehow blundered upon the path
as it emerged from the wild rocks, and together walked the beach to their
hotel, soaking and half frozen. But all those trying experiences fade
when the skin is dry, and the sweet sleep of healthy youth comes with
its comforting oblivion; only the gorgeous landscapes, and the romantic
places, like the memories of boyhood, remain to shape the dreams.
Bayard was shocked by the miserable condition of the Irish peasantry,
and his description of their huts, and their appearance, given in his
letters, shows great sympathy for their distress, and great disgust
at their degraded customs. On his way to Greenock from Port Rush, he
fell in with a company of them, who chanced to take the same steamer,
and he did not enjoy their drunken and beastly songs and riots. But
on his trip from Greenock, up the Clyde to Dumbarton, he had more
acceptable companionship, and in his book he refers, with a most touching
simplicity, to the music of a strolling musician on board the boat, who
played “Hail Columbia” and “Home, Sweet Home.”
Old Scotland! Noble old hills! Charming lakes, and enchanting valleys!
How like the awakened memories of loved faces, they come back to us
when we hear the word “Dumbarton”! What exciting tales of Baliol, of
Wallace, of Bruce, of Queen Mary, of Cromwell, come again as we recall
the sugar-loaf rock, on which the remnant of the old fortress stands!
Those bright youths must have feasted on the associations connected with
Dumbarton. As they peered from Wallace’s tower, handled Wallace’s sword,
and gazed over the wide landscape, with the sites of battle-fields,
castles, palaces, the home of Bruce, the cottage of Wallace, the
beautiful valleys of the Clyde and Leven, the majestic Ben Lomond,
and the crests of the Highlands, they grew in intellectual stature,
and breathed a moral atmosphere as pure as the air that encircled the
flagstaff at the summit. There is no education like the actual contact
with the scenes connected with heroic self-sacrifice, to train young
men for patriots and poets. No discipline is more necessary to the
development of a broad and virtuous manhood among any class of young men,
than studious travel in foreign countries. To young Bayard, lacking other
culture than the few years at the district school, the few months at the
academy, and the studious perusal of histories and poems, this experience
was of vast importance. Its beneficial effects were seen throughout his
life, and frequently show themselves in his editorials, poems, novels,
and narratives.
At Dumbarton, Bayard had his first narrow escape, and he said that when
he reached the ground, after daring to scale, for flowers, the precipice
up which Wallace climbed with his followers for glory and fatherland, he
was in such a tremor of terror, in view of his having so narrowly escaped
death, that he could scarcely speak. The unusual strength of a little
tuft of wild grass, growing in a crevice of the cliff, had saved him from
being dashed to pieces. It must have given him a very vivid impression of
the daring feats of those old Scotch warriors, who not only faced these
perpendicular walls, but fearlessly encountered the foes at the top.
From Dumbarton, Bayard and his friends walked through the valley of the
River Leven to Loch Lomond. All his letters and contributions to the
newspapers speak of this walk as one of the most enjoyable of all his
rambles. In his “Views Afoot,” with which every reader is or should
be familiar, he mentions it as a glorious walk. The pastoral beauty
of the fields, the clearness of the stream, the ivy-grown towers, the
dense forests, the early home of Smollett, whose dashing pen astonished
the kingdom in 1748, the summer parks of Scottish noblemen, the mild,
soothing August sunshine, were a combination rarely found, and when found
as rarely appreciated.
These young travellers had been diligent readers, and, when the steamer
hurried them over the lake, the appearance of Ben Lomond and Ben
Voirlich, of “Bull’s Rock,” and Rob Roy’s Cave, of Inversnaid and Glen
Falloch, called up the shades of the Campbells, Macgregors, Malcolms,
Rothesays, Macfarlanes, Macphersons; making each beach and rock along
Loch Lomond a feature of romantic interest.
With youthful enthusiasm, Bayard clambered to the rugged top of Ben
Lomond, having waded through deep morass and thorny thicket, to reach it,
and, from that lookout, gazed around on the peaks of lesser mountains,
down upon the sweet Lomond lake, away to the oceans on either side of
Scotland, discerning the smoke over Glasgow, the dark plains of Ayr, and,
but for a mist, the embattled towers of Stirling and Edinburgh. After a
short stop, he descended with his old companions, and a new one (he was
constantly finding new friends), along the slippery, stony slopes; and,
after a dinner of oatmeal cakes and milk at a cottage near the base,
trudged and waded on through that wild tract of woodland and swamp to
Loch Katrine. There was the home of poetry. The great forests, through
which the Clan-Alpine horns had echoed, the dense forest, through which
the scarfs and bows did gleam in the old days of the Highland clans,
had disappeared. The blossoming heather and bare rocks made a sorry
substitute. But to Bayard, whose life was set to poetry, who had so often
studied and declaimed of Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu, and who had often
dreamed of the Ellen’s Isle, and the gathering clans, as Walter Scott
described them, it must have been an enchanted spot. One may recite and
analyze for half a century that poem, and may flatter himself that he has
detected all its beauty, and understands all its historic references; but
one hour on Loch Katrine is worth more than all that. There the reader
_lives_ the poem, and it is a part of his being ever more. Bayard felt
compensated there for all the sufferings, by sea and by land, which he
had experienced. He gazed fondly upon the glassy, land-locked water; he
studied closely the features, manners, and songs of the Highland boatmen,
those descendants of the old clans; he sketched, with the keenest
interest, Ben Ann, Ben Venue, the gate of the Trosachs, and the curved
lines of the sandy shore, and he awoke the echoes at the Goblin’s Gave
and Beal-nam-bo. Rich experiences! In such does the youth develop fast
into a cultured manhood.
From Loch Katrine, the party walked by way of Loch Vennachar, Coilantogle
Ford, and Ben Ledi, to Doune,—the home of royalty during the sixteenth
century, and whose old castle is still a majestic ruin. Thence through
the plains to Stirling Castle, crowned and battle-honored, and looking
down on the valleys of the Forth and Allan Water, and out upon the
bloody fields of Bannockburn and Sheriff-muir. Having inspected the
dungeons and halls of the castle, looked with horror upon the spot where
royalty murdered a friend, and threw the body to the dogs; and after
contemplating the grave of the girlish martyrs, they hastily took the
shortest route to Glasgow, and thence to the home of Burns, where a
great celebration, or memorial gathering, was to be held, to honor the
memory of the “rustic bard,” on the banks of his own “Bonnie Doon.”