SCOTTS-LAND
It is possible to enter the Middle Marches from Berwick; in truth, Kelso
lies scarcely farther from Flodden than does Berwick. But Flodden is on
English soil to-day, and memory is content to let it lie there. These
Middle Marches however are so essentially Scottish, the splendour and
the romance, the history and the tragedy, that one would fain keep them
so, and come upon them as did the kings from David I, or even the Celtic
kings before him, who sought refuge from the bleak Scottish north in
this smiling land of dales and haughs, of burns and lochs. Not at any
moment could life become monotonous even in this realm of romance, since
the Border was near, and danger and dispute so imminent, so incessant.
Preferably then one goes from Edinburgh (even though never does one go
from that city, "mine own romantic town," but with regret; not even
finally when one leaves it and knows one will not return till next
time) to Melrose; as Scottish kings of history and story have passed
before. There was James II going to the siege of Roxburgh, and not
returning; there was James IV going to the field of Flodden and not
returning; there was James V going to hunt the deer; there was James VI
going up to London to be king; Mary Queen on that last journey to the
South Countrie; Charles I and Charles II losing and getting a crown;
Charles III--let us defy history and call the Bonnie Prince by his
title--when he went so splendidly after Prestonpans.
[Illustration: JAMES II.]
It is a royal progress, out of Edinburgh into the Middle Marches; past
Dalkeith where James IV rode to meet and marry Margaret of England; past
Borthwick, where Queen Mary spent that strange hot-trod honeymoon with
Bothwell--of all place of emotion this is the most difficult to realize,
and I can but think Mary's heart was broken here, and the heartbreak at
Carberry Hill was but an echo of this; past Lauder, where the nobles of
ignoble James III hung his un-noble favourite from the stone arch of the
bridge; into the level rays of a setting sun--always the setting sun
throws a more revealing light than that of noonday over this Scotland.
_Melrose_
I remember on my first visit to Melrose, of course during my first visit
to Scotland, I scheduled my going so as to arrive there in the evening
of a night when the moon would be at the full. I had seen it shine
gloriously on the front of York, splendidly on the towers of Durham.
What would it not be on fair Melrose, viewed aright?
I hurried northward, entered Edinburgh only to convey my baggage, and
then closing my eyes resolutely to all the glory and the memory that lay
about, I went southward through the early twilight. I could see, would
see, nothing before Melrose.
The gates of the Abbey were, of course, closed. But I did not wish to
enter there until the magic hour should strike. The country round about
was ineffably lovely in the rose light of the vanishing day.
"Where fair Tweed flows round holy Melrose
And Eildon slopes to the plain."
The Abbey was, of course, the center of thought continually, and its
red-gray walls caught the light of day and the coming shadows of night
in a curious effect which no picture can report; time has dealt
wondrously with this stone, leaving the rose for the day, the gray for
the night.
I wandered about, stopping in the empty sloping market-place to look at
the Cross, which is as old as the Abbey; looking at the graveyard which
surrounds the Abbey, where men lie, common men unsung in Scottish
minstrelsy, except as part of the great hosts, men who heard the news
when it was swift and fresh from Bannockburn, and Flodden, and Culloden;
and where men and women still insert their mortality into this
immortality--Elizabeth Clephane who wrote the "Ninety and Nine" lies
there; and out into the country and down by the Tweed toward the Holy
Pool, the Haly Wheel, to wonder if when I came again in the middle
night, I, too, should see the white lady rise in mist from the waters,
this lady of Bemersyde who had loved a monk of Melrose not wisely but
very well, and who drowned herself in this water where the monk in
penance took daily plunges, come summer, come winter. How often this is
the Middle-Age penalty!
Far across the shimmering green meadows and through the fragrant
orchards came the sound of bagpipes--on this my first evening in
Scotland! And whether or not you care for the pipes, there is nothing
like them in a Scottish twilight, a first Scottish twilight, to
reconstruct all the Scotland that has been.
The multitudes and the individuals came trooping back. At a time of
famine these very fields were filled with huts, four thousand of them,
for always the monks had food, and always they could perform miracles
and obtain food; which they did. That for the early time. And for the
late, the encampment of Leslie's men in these fields before the day when
they slaughtered Montrose's scant band of royalists at Philipshaugh, and
sent that most splendid figure in late Scottish history as a fugitive to
the north, and to the scaffold.
I knew that in the Abbey before the high altar lay the high heart of The
Bruce, which had been carried to Spain and to the Holy Land, by order of
Bruce, since death overtook him before he could make the pilgrimage.
Lord James Douglass did battle on the way against the Moslems in
southern Spain, where "a Douglass! a Douglass!" rang in battle clash
against "Allah, illah, allah," and the Douglass himself was slain. The
heart of The Bruce flung against the infidel, was recovered and sent on
to Jerusalem, and then back to Melrose. The body of Douglass was brought
back to Scotland, to St. Bride's church in Douglass, and his heart also
lies before the high altar of Melrose. "In their death they were not
divided."
There lies also buried Michael Scot
"Buried on St. Michael's night,
When the bell toll'd one and the moon was bright."
On such a night as this, I hoped. And Scot is fit companion for the
twilight. This strange wizard of a strange time was born in Upper
Tweedale, which is the district of Merlin--the older wizard lies buried
in a green mound near Drummelzier. Michael traveled the world over,
Oxford, Paris, Bologna, Palermo, Toledo, and finally, perhaps because
his wizardry had sent him like a wandering Jew from place to place, back
to the Border, his home country, where he came and served the Evil One.
Dante places him in the Purgatory of those who attempt blasphemously to
tear the veil of the future. The thirteenth century was not the time in
which to increase knowledge, whether of this world or the next. Even
to-day perhaps we save a remnant of superstition, and we would not boast
"I could say to thee
The words that cleft the Eildon hills in three."
Very dark against the gathering dark of the night sky rose the Eildon
hills above, cleft in three by the wizardry of Scot. To that height on
the morrow I should climb, for it is there that Sir Walter Scott, a
later wizard, had carried our Washington Irving, just a century ago, and
shown him all this Borderland--which lay about me under the increasing
cover of night.
"I can stand on the Eildon Hill and point out forty-three places famous
in war and verse," Sir Walter said to our Irving. "I have brought you,
like a pilgrim in the Pilgrim's Progress, to the top of the Delectable
Mountains, that I may show you all the goodly regions hereabouts. Yonder
is Lammermuir and Smailholm; and there you have Galashiels and
Torwoodelee and Gala Water; and in that direction you see Teviotdale and
the Braes of Yarrow; and Ettrick stream winding along like a silver
thread to throw itself into the Tweed. It may be pertinacity, but to my
eye, these gray hills and all this wild Border country have beauties
peculiar to themselves. When I have been for some time in the rich
scenery about Edinburgh, which is like an ornamented garden land, I
begin to wish myself back again among my own honest gray hills; and if I
did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die."
On the morrow. But for to-night it was enough to remember that perfect
picture as imagination painted it in Andrew Lang's verse--
"Three crests against the saffron sky,
Beyond the purple plain,
The kind remembered melody
Of Tweed once more again.
"Wan water from the Border hills,
Dear voice from the old years,
Thy distant music lulls and stills,
And moves to quiet tears.
"Like a loved ghost thy fabled flood
Fleets through the dusky land;
Where Scott, come home to die, has stood,
My feet returning, stand.
"A mist of memory broods and floats,
The Border waters flow;
The air is full of ballad notes
Borne out of long ago.
"Old songs that sung themselves to me,
Sweet through a boy's day dream,
While trout below the blossom'd tree
Plashed in the golden stream.
"Twilight, and Tweed, and Eildon Hill,
Fair and too fair you be;
You tell me that the voice is still
That should have welcomed me."
I did not miss the voice, any of the voices. They whispered, they sang,
they crooned, they keened, about me. For this was Melrose, _mael ros_,
so the old Celtic goes, "the naked headland in the wood." And I was
seeing, was hearing, what I have come to see and hear; I, a Scot, if far
removed, if in diluted element, and Scott's from the reading days of
Auld Lang Syne.
And should I not within the moonlight see the white lady rise from the
Haly Wheel? And should I not see the moonlight flooding the Abbey,
Melrose Abbey? Out of a remembered yesterday, out of a confident
midnight--surely there was a budding morrow in this midnight--I
remembered the lines--
"If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight;
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild but to flout the ruins gray.
When the broken arches are black in night,
And each shafted oriel glimmers white,
When the cold light's uncertain shower
Streams on the ruined central tower;
When buttress and buttress alternately
Seem framed of ebon and ivory;
When silver edges the imagery,
And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die;
When distant Tweed is heard to rave,
And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave,
Then go--but go alone the while--
Then view St. David's ruined pile;
And, home returning, soothly swear
Was never scene so sad and fair."
The moon did not rise that night.
I walked about the fields, lingered about the Cross in the market,
looked expectantly at the Abbey, until two in the morning.
"It was near the ringing of matin bell,
The night was well nigh done."
The moon did not rise, and neither did the white lady. It was not
because there was a mist, a Scottish mist, over the heavens; they were
clear, the stars were shining, and the pole star held true, Charles'
wain--as Charles should in Bonnie Scotland--held true to the pole. But
it was a late July moon, and those Eildon hills and their circling kin
rose so high against the night sky--daytime they seemed modest
enough--that the moon in this latitude as far north as Sitka did not
circle up the sky. Neither does the sun in winter, so the guardian
explained to me next day.
Fair Melrose is fairest, o' nights, at some later or earlier time of the
year. It was then that I resolved to return in December, on December 27,
when the festival of St. John's is celebrated with torch lights in the
ruins of the Abbey--and Michael Scot comes back to his own! But then I
reflected that the moon is not always full on the Eve of St. John's.
"I cannot come, I must not come,
I dare not come to thee,
On the Eve of St. John's, I must walk alone,
In thy bower I may not be."
I chose, years later, an October moon, in which to see it "aright."
Viewed by day, Melrose is surely fair; fair enough to enchant mortal
vision. It is the loveliest ruin in the land where reform has meant
ruin, and where from Kelso to Elgin, shattered fanes of the faith
proclaim how variable is the mind of man through the generations, and
how hostile when it forsakes.
Melrose is an old foundation. In truth the monastery was established at
old Melrose, two miles farther down the Tweed, and is so lovely, so
dramatic a corner of the Tweed, that Dorothy Woodsworth declared, "we
wished we could have brought the ruins of Melrose to this spot." She
missed the nearby murmur of the river as we do.
This oldest harbour of Christianity was founded in the pagan world by
monks from Iona. Therefore by way of Ireland and not from Rome, blessed
by Saint Columba sixty years before Saint Augustine came to
Canterbury. It was the chief "island" between Iona and Lindisfarne. Very
haughty were these monks of the West. "Rome errs, Alexandria errs, all
the world errs; only the Scots and the Britons are in the right." There
is surely something still left of the old spirit in Scotia, particularly
in spiritual Scotia.
[Illustration: MELROSE ABBEY.]
Near Melrose was born that Cuthbert who is the great saint of the North,
either side the Border, and who lies in the midst of the splendour of
Durham. A shepherd, he watched his sheep on these very hills round about
us, and saw, when abiding in the fields, angels ascending and descending
on golden ladders. Entering Melrose as a novice he became prior in 664,
and later prior at Lindisfarne. When the monks were driven from the Holy
Island by the Danes they carried the body of St. Cuthbert with them for
seven years, and once it rested at Melrose--
"O'er northern mountain, march and moor,
From sea to sea, from shore to shore,
Seven years St. Cuthbert's corpse they bore,
They rested them in fair Melrose;
But though alive he loved it well,
Not there his relics might repose."
When King David came to the making of Scotland, he came into the Middle
Marches, and finding them very lovely--even as you and I--this "sair
sanct to the Croon," as his Scottish royal descendant, James VI saw
him--and James would have fell liked to be a saint, but he could
accomplish neither sinner nor saint, because Darnley crossed Mary in his
veins--David determined to build him fair Abbeys. Of which, Melrose,
"St. David's ruined pile," is the fairest. He brought Cistercians from
Rievaulx in Yorkshire, to supplant the Culdees of Iona, and they builded
them a beautiful stone Melrose to supplant the wooden huts of old
Melrose. It centered a very active monastic life, where pavements were
once smooth and lawns were close-clipped, and cowled monks in long robes
served God, and their Abbot lorded it over lords, even equally with
kings.
But it stood on the highway between Dunfermline and London, between
English and Scottish ambitions. And it fell before them. Edward I spared
it because the Abbots gave him fealty. But Edward II, less royal in
power and in taste, destroyed it. The Bruce rebuilded it again, greater
splendour rising out of complete ruin. When Richard II came to Scotland
he caused the Abbey to be pillaged and burned. And when Hertford came
for Henry VIII, after the Thirty Nine Articles had annulled respect for
buildings under the protection of Rome, the final ruin came to St.
David's church-palace. Yet, late as 1810, church service, reformed, of
course, was held in a roofed-over part of the Abbey ruin. To-day it is
under the protection of the Dukes of Buccleuch. And, we remember as we
stand here, while the beams of lightsome day gild the ruin, the mottoes
of the great family of the Border, _Luna Cornua Reparabit_, which being
interpreted is, "There'll be moonlight again." Then to light the raids,
the reiving that refilled the larder. But to-morrow for scenic effect.
Examined in this daylight, the beauty of Melrose surely loses very
little. It is one of the most exquisite ruins in the United Kingdom,
perhaps second to Tintern, but why compare? It is of finest Gothic, out
of France, not out of England. In its general aspect it is nobly
magnificent--
"The darken'd roof rose high aloof
On pillars, lofty, light and small;
The keystone that locked each ribbed aisle
Was a fleur de lys or a quatre feuille,
The corbels were carved grotesque and grim;
And the pillars with clustered shafts so trim,
With base and with capital flourish'd around
Seem'd bundles of lances which garlands had bound."
And, as a chief detail which yields not to Tintern or any other, is the
east window over the high altar, through which the moon and sun shines
on those buried hearts--
"The moon on the east oriel shone
Through slender shafts of shapely stone,
By foliaged tracery combined.
Thou would'st have thought some fairy'd hand
'Twixt poplars straight the osier wand
In many a freakish knot had twined,
Then framed a spell when the work was done,
And changed the willow wreaths to stone.
The silver light, so pale and faint,
Showed many a prophet and many a saint,
Whose image on the glass was dyed,
Full in the midst his cross of red
Triumphant Michael brandish'd,
And trampled on the Apostate's pride;
The moonbeams kissed the holy pane,
And threw on the pavement a bloody stain."
_Abbotsford_
If "Scott restored Scotland," he built the "keep" which centers all the
Scott-land of the Border side.
Two miles above Melrose, a charming walk leads to Abbotsford; redeemed
out of a swamp into at least the most memory-filled mansion of all the
land. Scott, like the monks, could not leave the silver wash of the
Tweed; and, more loving than those who dwelt at Melrose and Dryburgh, he
placed his Abbot's House where the rippling sound was within a stone's
throw.
The Tweed is such a storied stream that as you walk along, sometimes
across sheep-cropped meadows, sometimes under the fragant rustling bough
and athwart the shifting shadows of oak, ash, and thorn--Puck of Pook's
hill must have known the Border country in its most embroidered
days--you cannot tell whether or not the deep quiet river is the noblest
you have seen, or the storied hills about are less than the Delectable
mountains.
The name "Tweed" suggests romance--unless instead of having read your
Scott you have come to its consciousness through the homespun, alas,
to-day too often the factory-spun woolens, which are made throughout all
Scotland, but still in greatest length on Tweedside.
Dorothy Wordsworth, winsome marrow, who loved the country even better
than William, I trow--only why remark it when he himself recognized how
his vision was quickened through her companionship?--has spoke the word
Tweed--"a name which has been sweet in my ears almost as far back as I
can remember anything."
The river comes from high in the Cheviot hills, where East and West
Marches merge and where--
"Annan, Tweed, and Clyde
Rise a' out o' ae hillside."
And down to the sea it runs, its short hundred miles of story--
"All through the stretch of the stream,
To the lap of Berwick Bay."
As you walk along Tweedside, you feel its enchantment, you feel the
sorrow of the thousands who through the centuries have exiled themselves
from its banks, because of war, or because of poverty, or because of
love--
"Therefore I maun wander abroad,
And lay my banes far frae the Tweed."
But now, you are returned, you are on your way to Abbotsford, there are
the Eildons, across the river you get a glimpse of the Catrail, that
sunken way that runs along the boundary for one-half its length, and may
have been a fosse, or may have been a concealed road of the Romans or
what not. Scott once leaped his horse across it, nearly lost his life,
and did lose his confidence in his horsemanship.
[Illustration: _Abbotsford_]
"And all through the summer morning
I felt it a joy indeed
To whisper again and again to myself,
This is the voice of the Tweed."
It is not possible to approach Abbotsford, as it should be approached,
from the riverside, the view with which one is familiar, the view the
pictures carry. Or, it can be done if one would forego the walk, take it
in the opposite direction, and come hither by rail from Galashiels--that
noisy modern factory town, once the housing place for Melrose pilgrims,
which to-day speaks nothing of the romance of Gala water, and surely not
these factory folk "can match the lads o' Gala Water." It is a short
journey, and railway journeys are to be avoided in this land of
by-paths. But there, across the water, looking as the pictures have it,
and as Scott would have it, rises Abbotsford, turreted and towered,
engardened and exclusive.
It stands on low level ground, for it is redeemed out of a duckpond, out
of Clarty hole. Sir Walter wished to possess the Border, or as much of
it as might be, so he made this first purchase of a hundred acres in
1811. As he wrote to James Ballantyne--
"I have resolved to purchase a piece of ground sufficient for a cottage
and a few fields. There are two pieces, either of which would suit me,
but both would make a very desirable property indeed, and could be had
for between 7,000 and 8,000 pounds, or either separate for about half
that sum. I have serious thoughts of one or both."
He began with one, and fourteen years later, when the estate had
extended to a thousand acres, to the inclusion of many fields,
sheep-cropped and story-haunted, he entered in his diary--
"Abbotsford is all I can make it, so I am resolved on no more building,
and no purchases of land till times are more safe."
By that time the people of the countryside called him "the Duke," he had
at least been knighted, and was, in truth, the Chief of the Border; a
royal ambition which I doubt not he cherished from those first days when
he read Percy under a platanus.
He paid fabulous prices for romantic spots, and I think would have
bought the entire Border if the times had become safer, in those scant
seven years that were left to him. Even Scott could be mistaken, for he
bought what he believed was Huntlie Bank, where True Thomas had his love
affair with the fair ladye--
"True Thomas lay on Huntlie Bank;
A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e;
And there he saw a ladye bright
Come riding down by the Eildon tree.
"Her skirt was o' the grass-green silk,
Her mantle o' the velvet fyne;
At ilka tett o' her horse's mane
Hung fifty siller bells and nine."
And now the experts tell us that it is not Huntlie Bank at all, but that
is in an entirely different direction, over toward Ercildoune and the
Rhymer's Tower.
There is a satisfaction in this to those of us who believe in fairies
and in Scott. For fairies have no sense of place or of time. And of
course if they knew that Scott wished them to have lived at his Huntlie
Bank, they straightway would have managed to have lived there. Always,
as you go through this land of romance, or any romance land, and wise
dull folk dispute, you can console yourself that Scott also was
mistaken(?).
The castle began with a small cottage, not this great pile of gray stone
we can see from the railway carriage across the Tweed, into which we
make our humble way through a wicket gate, a restrained walk, and a
basement doorway. "My dreams about my cottage go on," he wrote to
Joanna Baillie, as we all dream of building cottages into castles. "My
present intention is to have only two spare bedrooms," but "I cannot
relinquish my Border principles of accommodating all the cousins and
duniwastles, who will rather sleep on chairs, and on the floor, and in
the hay-loft, than be absent when folks are gathered together."
So we content ourselves with being duniwastles, whatever that may be,
and are confident that Sir Walter if he were alive would give us the
freedom of the castle.
In any event, if we feel somewhat robbed of any familiar intercourse, we
can remember that Ruskin called this "perhaps the most incongruous pile
that gentlemanly modernism ever designed." This may content the
over-sensitive who are prevented ever hearing the ripple of the Tweed
through the windows.
Scott was a zealous relic hunter, and if you like relics, if you can
better conjure up persons through a sort of transubstantiation of
personality that comes by looking on what the great have possessed,
there can be few private collections more compelling than this of
Abbotsford.
[Illustration: THE STUDY, ABBOTSFORD.]
In the library are such significant hints for reconstruction as the
blotting book wherewith Napoleon cleared his record, the crucifix on
which Queen Mary prayed, the quaigh of her great great and last
grandson, the tumbler from which Bobbie Burns drank--one of them--the
purse into which Rob Roy thrust his plunder, the pocket book of Flora
MacDonald, which held nothing I fear from the generosity of the Bonnie
Prince.
In the armoury are Scott's own gun, Rob Roy's gun, dirk and skene dhu,
the sword of Montrose, given to that last of the great Cavaliers by his
last king, Charles I, the pistol of Claverhouse, the pistol of Napoleon,
a hunting flask of James III; and here are the keys of Loch Leven
castle, dropped in the lake by Mary Queen's boatman; and the keys of the
Edinburgh Tolbooth turned on so many brave men, yes, and fair women, in
the old dividing days, of Jacobite and Covenanter.
The library of Scott, twenty thousand volumes, still lines the shelves,
and one takes particular interest in this place, and its little stairway
whereby ascent is made to the balcony, also book-lined, and escape
through a little doorway. When Scott first came to the cottage of
Abbotsford he wrote, furiously, in a little window embrasure with only a
curtain between him and the domestic world. Here he had not only a
library, but a study, where still stands the desk at which the
Waverleys were written, and the well-worn desk chair.
After he had returned from Italy, whither he went in search of health
and did not find it, he felt, one day, a return of the old desire to
write, the ruling passion. He was wheeled to the desk, he took the
pen,--nothing came. He sank back and burst into tears. As Lockhart
reports it--"It was like Napoleon resigning his empire. The scepter had
departed from Judah; Scott was to write no more."
Scott has always seemed like a contemporary. Not because of his novels;
I fear the Waverleys begin to read a little stilted to the young
generation, and there are none left to lament with Lowell that he had
read all of Scott and now he could never read him all over again for the
first time. It is rather because Scott the man is so immortal that he
seems like a man still living; or at least like one who died but
yesterday. Into the dining-room where we cannot go--and perhaps now that
we think it over it is as well--he was carried in order that out of it
he might look his last on "twilight and Tweed and Eildon hill." And
there he died, even so long ago as September, 1832.
"It was a beautiful day," that day we seem almost to remember as we
stand here in the vivid after glow, "so warm that every window was wide
open, and so peacefully still that the sound of all others most
delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed, was distinctly
audible."
_Dryburgh_
Five days after they carried him to rest in the Abbey--rival certainly
in this instance of The Abbey of England, where is stored so much
precious personal dust. The time had become thrawn; dark skies hung over
the Cheviots and the Eildon, and over the haughs of Ettrick and Yarrow;
the silver Tweed ran leaden, and moaned in its going; there was a
keening in the wind.
The road from Abbotsford past Melrose to Dryburgh is--perhaps--the
loveliest walk in the United Kingdom; unless it be the road from
Coventry past Kenilworth to Stratford. It was by this very way that
there passed the funeral train of Scott, the chief carriage drawn by
Scott's own horses. Thousands and thousands of pilgrims have followed
that funeral train; one goes to Holy Trinity in Stratford, to the
Invalides in Paris, but one walks to Dryburgh through the beautiful
Tweedside which is all a shrine to Sir Walter.
The road runs away from the river to the little village of Darnick, with
its ivy-shrouded tower, across the meadows to the bridge across the
river, with the ringing of bells in the ear. For it was ordered on that
September day of 1832, by the Provost, "that the church bell shall toll
from the time the funeral procession reaches Melrose Bridge till it
passes the village of Newstead."
I do not suppose the people of this countryside, who look at modern
pilgrims so sympathetically, so understandingly, have ever had time to
forget; the stream of pilgrims has been so uninterrupted for nearly a
century. Through the market-place of Melrose it passed, the sloping
stony square, where people of the village pass and repass on their
little village errands. And it did not stop at the Abbey.
The day was thickening into dusk then; it is ripening into sunset glory
to-day. And the Abbey looks very lovely, and very lonely. And one
wonders if Michael Scot did not call to Walter Scott to come and join
the quiet there, and if the dust that once was the heart of Bruce did
not stir a little as the recreator of Scotland was carried by.
To the village of Newstead you move on; with the sound of immemorial
bells falling on the ear, and pass through the little winding
street--and wonder if the early Roman name of Trimontium, triple
mountains, triple Eildon, was its first call name out of far antiquity
as Scott believed.
Then the road ascends between hedgerows, and begins to follow the Tweed
closely--and perhaps you meet pilgrims on Leaderfoot bridge who have
come the wrong way. There is a steep climb to the heights of Bemersyde,
where on the crest all Melrose Glen lies beautifully storied before you.
And here you pause--as did those horses of Scott's, believing their
master would fain take one last look at his favourite view.
There is no lovelier landscape in the world, or in Scotland. The blue
line of the Cheviots bars back the world, the Dunion, the Ruberslaw, the
Eildon rise, and in the great bend of the river with richly wooded braes
about is the site of Old Melrose. Small wonder he paused to take
farewell of all the country he had loved so well.
The road leads on past Bemersyde village with woodlands on either side,
and to the east, near a little loch, stands Sandyknowe Tower.
Near the tower lies the remnant of the village of Smailholm, where Scott
was sent out of Edinburgh when only three years old. It is in truth his
birthplace, for without the clear air of the Border he would have
followed the other Scott children; and without the romance of the Border
he might have been merely a barrister.
Sandyknowe is brave in spite of its ruin, for it is built of the very
stone of the eternal hills, and has become part of the hills. From its
balcony, sixty feet high, a beautiful Scottish panorama may be glimpsed,
and here Scott brought Turner to make his sketch of the Border. And
here, because a kinsman agreed to save Sandyknowe Tower from the
mortality that comes even to stone if Scott would write a ballad and
make it immortal, is laid the scene of "Eve of St. John's"--with these
last haunting intangible lines--
"There is a nun in Dryburgh bower
Ne'er looks upon the sun;
There is a monk in Melrose tower
He speaketh a word to none."
Then, back to the Tweed, where the river sweeps out in a great circle,
and leaves a peninsula for Dryburgh. The gray walls of the ruin lift
above the thick green of the trees; yew and oak and sycamore close in
the fane. Druid and Culdee and Roman have built shrines in this
lovely spot, but to-day pilgrimage is made chiefly because in the quiet
sheltered ruined St. Mary's aisle sleeps Sir Walter. It would make
one-half in love with death to think of being buried in so sweet a
place.
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S AISLE AND TOMB OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, DRYBURGH
ABBEY].
Dryburgh is also one of St. David's foundations, in the "sacred grove of
oaks," the Darach Bruach of the worship that is older than Augustus or
Columba. These were white monks that David brought up from Alnwick where
his queen had been a Northumbrian princess, and their white cloaks must
have seemed, among these old old oaks, but the white robes of the Druids
come back again.
It is a well-kept place, vines covering over the crumbling gray stone,
kept by the Lords of Buchan. And, perhaps too orderly, too fanciful, too
"improved"; one likes better the acknowledged ruin of Melrose, and one
would prefer that Sir Walter were there with his kin, instead of here
with his kindred. But this is a sweet place, a historic place, begun by
Hugh de Moreville, who was a slayer of Thomas à Becket, and was
Constable of Scotland. His tomb is marked by a double circle on the
floor of the Chapter House, and there is nothing of the Chapter House;
it is open to beating rain and scorching sun--fit retribution for his
most foul deed.
It is not this remembrance you carry away, but that of St. Mary's aisle,
in
"Dryburgh where with chiming Tweed
The lintwhites sing in chorus."