are no such pipes to be smoked as those that follow a good day's
march; the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is
so dry and aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind up the evening
with grog, you will own there was never such grog; at every sip a
jocund tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your
heart. If you read a book--and you will never do so save by fits and
starts--you find the language strangely racy and harmonious; words
take a new meaning; single sentences possess the ear for half an hour
together; and the writer endears himself to you, at every page, by the
nicest coincidence of sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had
written yourself in a dream. To all we have read on such occasions we
look back with special favour. "It was on the 10th of April 1798," says
Hazlitt, with amorous precision, "that I sat down to a volume of the
new _HeloÔse_, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a
cold chicken." I should wish to quote more, for though we are mighty
fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of
that, a volume of Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket-book on
such a journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs; and for _Tristram
Shandy_ I can pledge a fair experience.
If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in life than
to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet
of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then,
if ever, that you taste joviality to the full significance of that
audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean
and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever
you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in
talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if
a hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness
and pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child
or a man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch
provincial humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable
farce, and now grave and beautiful like an old tale.
Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and surly
weather imprisons you by the fire. You may remember how Burns,
numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been
"happy thinking." It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern
girt about on every side by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at
night, by flaming dial-plates. For we are all so busy, and have so
many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn
into solid, habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find
no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the
Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we must sit all night,
beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed world for most of
us, when we find we can pass the hours without discontent, and be
happy thinking. We are in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to
be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive
silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of which these
are but the parts--namely, to live. We fall in love, we drink hard,
we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep. And now
you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have
been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking. To
sit still and contemplate,--to remember the faces of women without
desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be
everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to remain
where and what you are--is not this to know both wisdom and virtue,
and to dwell with happiness? After all, it is not they who carry
flags, but they who look upon it from a private chamber, who have the
fun of the procession. And once you are at that, you are in the very
humour of all social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big
empty words. If you ask yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or
learning, the answer is far to seek; and you go back into that kingdom
of light imaginations, which seem so vain in the eyes of Philistines
perspiring after wealth, and so momentous to those who are stricken
with the disproportions of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic
stars, cannot stop to split differences between two degrees of the
infinitesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a
million of money or a fiddlestick's end.
You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into the
darkness, your body full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned
in the seventh circle of content; when suddenly the mood changes,
the weathercock goes about, and you ask yourself one question more:
whether, for the interval, you have been the wisest philosopher or the
most egregious of donkeys? Human experience is not yet able to reply;
but at least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the
kingdoms of the earth. And whether it was wise or foolish, to-morrow's
travel will carry you, body and mind, into some different parish of the
infinite.
_Robert Louis Stevenson._
Sylvanus Urban discovers a Good Brew
It must be nearly thirty years ago, long before the days of bicycles
and motors, since Sylvanus Urban, then but a boy, passed over it. He
had started from Chepstow on a solitary walking tour, and was soon
caught in a rattling thunderstorm on the Wyndcliff. Tintern Abbey and
Raglan Castle are fresh in his memory to-day. A mile or two out of
Monmouth he came upon some excellent nutty-hearted ale, that George
Borrow would have immortalised. As he pursued his way to Raglan
Castle he pondered on the ale--"this way and that dividing the swift
mind"--until at length, in despair of meeting an equal brew, he turned
back again and had another tankard. Heavens, what days were those! In
his pack he carried the _Essays of Elia_ and read them in an old inn at
Llandovery, where the gracious hostess lighted in his honour tall wax
candles fit to stand before an altar. After leaving Llandovery, he lost
his way among the Caermarthenshire hills, and was in very poor plight
with hunger and fatigue when he reached the white-washed walls of
Tregaron. At Harlech he rested for a couple of days, and then covered
the way to Beddgelert--twenty miles, if he remembers rightly--at a
spanking pace; proceeding in the late afternoon to climb Snowdon, and
arriving at Llanberis an hour or so before midnight. Back to London,
every inch of the way, walked the young Sylvanus. He indulges the hope
that he may yet shoulder his pack again.
_Gentleman's Magazine._
Minchmoor
Now that everybody is out of town, and every place in the guide-books
is as well known as Princes Street or Pall-Mall, it is something to
discover a hill everybody has not been to the top of, and which is not
in _Black_. Such a hill is _Minchmoor_, nearly three times as high as
Arthur's Seat, and lying between Tweed and Yarrow.
The best way to ascend it is from Traquair. You go up the wild old
Selkirk road, which passes almost right over the summit, and by which
Montrose and his cavaliers fled from Philiphaugh, where Sir Walter's
mother remembered crossing, when a girl, in a coach-and-six, on her
way to a ball at Peebles, several footmen marching on either side of
the carriage to prop it up or drag it out of the moss _haggs_; and
where, to our amazement, we learned that the Duchess of Buccleuch had
lately driven her ponies. Before this we had passed the grey, old-world
entrance to Traquair House, and looked down its grassy and untrod
avenue to the pallid, forlorn mansion, stricken all o'er with eld, and
noticed the wrought-iron gate embedded in a foot deep and more of
soil, never having opened since the '45. There are the huge Bradwardine
bears on each side--most grotesque supporters--with a superfluity of
ferocity and canine teeth. The whole place, like the family whose it
has been, seems dying out--everything subdued to settled desolation.
The old race, the old religion, the gaunt old house, with its small,
deep, comfortless windows, the decaying trees, the stillness about the
doors, the grass overrunning everything, nature reinstating herself in
her quiet way--all this makes the place look as strange and pitiful
among its fellows in the vale as would the Earl who built it three
hundred years ago if we met him tottering along our way in the faded
dress of his youth; but it looks the Earl's house still, and has a
dignity of its own.
We soon found the Minchmoor road, and took at once to the hill, the
ascent being, as often is with other ascents in this world, steepest at
first. Nothing could be more beautiful than the view as we ascended,
and got a look of the "eye-sweet" Tweed hills, and their "silver
stream." It was one of the five or six good days of this summer--in
early morning, "soft" and doubtful; but the mists drawing up, and now
the noble, tawny hills were dappled with gleams and shadows--
"Sunbeams upon distant hills gliding apace"--
the best sort of day for mountain scenery--that ripple of light and
shadow brings out the forms and the depths of the hills far better than
a cloudless sky; and the horizon is generally wider.
Before us and far away was the round flat head of Minchmoor, with a
dark, rich bloom on it from the thick, short heather--the hills around
being green. Near the top, on the Tweed side, its waters trotting away
cheerily to the glen at Bold, is the famous _Cheese Well_--always full,
never overflowing. Here every traveler--Duchess, shepherd, or houseless
_mugger_--stops, rests, and is thankful; doubtless so did Montrose,
poor fellow, and his young nobles and their jaded steeds, on their
scurry from Lesly and his Dragoons. It is called the Cheese Well from
those who rest there dropping in bits of their provisions, as votive
offerings to the fairies whose especial haunt this mountain was. After
our rest and drink, we left the road and made for the top. When there
we were well rewarded. The great round-backed, kindly, solemn hills of
Tweed, Yarrow, and Ettrick lay all about like sleeping mastiffs--too
plain to be grand, too ample and beautiful to be commonplace.
There, to the north-east, is the place--_Williamhope_ ridge--where Sir
Walter Scott bade farewell to his heroic friend Mungo Park. They had
come up from _Ashestiel_, where Scott then lived, and where _Marmion_
was written and its delightful epistles inspired--where he passed the
happiest part of his life--leaving it, as Hogg said, "for gude an' a'";
for his fatal "dreams about his cottage" were now begun. He was to have
"a hundred acres, two spare bed-rooms, with dressing rooms, each of
which will on a pinch have a couch-bed." We all know what the dream,
and the cottage, and the hundred acres came to--the ugly Abbotsford;
the over-burdened, shattered brain driven wild, and the end, death, and
madness. Well, it was on the ridge that the two friends--each romantic,
but in such different ways--parted never to meet again. There is the
ditch Park's horse stumbled over and all but fell. "I am afraid, Mungo,
that's a bad omen," said the Sheriff; to which he answered, with a
bright smile on his handsome, fearless face--"_Freits_ (omens) follow
those who look to them." With this expression, he struck the spurs into
his horse, and Scott never saw him again. He had not long been married
to a lovely and much-loved woman, and had been speaking to Scott about
his new African scheme, and how he meant to tell his family he had some
business in Edinburgh--send them his blessing, and be off--alas! never
to return! Scott used to say, when speaking of this parting, "I stood
and looked back, but he did not." A more memorable place for two such
men to part in would not easily be found.
Where we are standing is the spot Scott speaks of when writing to
Joanna Baillie about her new tragedies--"Were it possible for me to
hasten the treat I expect in such a composition with you, I would
promise to read the volume _at the silence of noonday upon the top of
Minchmoor_. The hour is allowed, by those skilful in demonology, _to be
as full of witching_ as midnight itself; and I assure you I have felt
really oppressed with a sort of fearful loneliness when looking around
the naked towering ridges of desolate barrenness, which is all the eye
takes in from the top of such a mountain, the patches of cultivation
being hidden in the little glens, or only appearing to make one feel
how feeble and ineffectual man has been to contend with the genius of
the soil. It is in such a scene that the unknown and gifted author of
_Albania_ places the superstition which consists in hearing the noise
of a chase, the baying of the hounds, the throttling sobs of the deer,
the wild hollos of the huntsmen, and the 'hoof thick beating on the
hollow hill.' I have often repeated his verses with some sensations
of awe, in this place." The lines--and they are noble, and must have
sounded wonderful with his voice and look--are as follows. Can no one
tell us anything more of their author?--
"There oft is heard, at midnight, or at noon,
Beginning faint, but rising still more loud,
And nearer, voice of hunters, and of hounds;
And horns, hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen!
Forthwith the hubbub multiplies; the gale
Labours with wilder shrieks, and rifer din
Of hot pursuit; the broken cry of deer
Mangled by throttling dogs; the shouts of men,
And hoofs thick beating on the hollow hill.
Sudden the grazing heifer in the vale
Starts at the noise, and both the herdman's ears
Tingle with inward dread--aghast he eyes
The mountain's height, and all the ridges round,
Yet not one trace of living wight discerns,
Nor knows, o'erawed and trembling as he stands,
To what or whom he owes his idle fear--
To ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend;
But wonders, and no end of wondering finds."
We listened for the hunt, but could only hear the wind sobbing from the
blind "_Hopes_."[3]
The view from the top reaches from the huge _Harestane
Broadlaw_--nearly as high as Ben Lomond--whose top is as flat as a
table, and would make a race-course of two miles, and where the clouds
are still brooding, to the _Cheviot_; and from the _Maiden Paps_ in
Liddesdale, and that wild huddle of hills at _Moss Paul_, to _Dunse
Law_, and the weird _Lammermoors_. There is _Ruberslaw_, always surly
and dark. The _Dunion_, beyond which lies Jedburgh. There are the
_Eildons_, with their triple heights; and you can get a glimpse of the
upper woods of Abbotsford, and the top of the hill above Cauldshiels
Loch, that very spot where the "wondrous potentate,"--when suffering
from languor and pain, and beginning to break down under his prodigious
fertility,--composed those touching lines:--
"The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill
In Ettrick's vale is sinking sweet;
The westland wind is hushed and still;
The lake lies sleeping at my feet.
Yet not the landscape to mine eye
Bears those bright hues that once it bore,
Though evening, with her richest dye,
Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore.
With listless look along the plain
I see Tweed's silver current glide,
And coldly mark the holy fane
Of Melrose rise in ruined pride.
The quiet lake, and balmy air,
The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree,
Are they still such as once they were,
Or is the dreary change in me?
Alas! the warped and broken board,
How can it bear the painter's dye!
The harp of strained and tuneless chord,
How to the minstrel's skill reply!
To aching eyes each landscape lowers,
To feverish pulse each gale blows chill;
And Araby or Eden's bowers
Were barren as this moorland hill."
There, too, is _Minto Hill_, as modest and shapely and smooth as
Clytie's shoulders, and _Earlston Black Hill_, with Cowdenknowes at its
foot; and there, standing stark and upright as a warder, is the stout
old _Smailholme Tower_, seen and seeing all around. It is quite curious
how unmistakable and important it looks at what must be twenty and more
miles. It is now ninety years since that "lonely infant," who has sung
its awful joys, was found in a thunderstorm, as we all know, lying on
the soft grass at the foot of the grey old Strength, clapping his hands
at each flash, and shouting, "Bonny! bonny!"
We now descended into Yarrow, and forgathered with a shepherd who was
taking his lambs over to the great Melrose fair. He was a fine specimen
of a border herd--young, tall, sagacious, self-contained, and free in
speech and air. We got his heart by praising his dog _Jed_, a very
fine collie, black and comely, gentle and keen--"Ay, she's a fell yin;
she can do a' but speak." On asking him if the sheep dogs needed much
teaching--"Whyles ay and whyles no; her kind (Jed's) needs nane. She
sooks't in wi' her mither's milk." On asking him if the dogs were ever
sold, he said--"Never, but at an orra time. Naebody wad sell a gude
dowg, and naebody wad buy an ill ane." He told us with great feeling,
of the death of one of his best dogs by poison. It was plainly still
a grief to him. "What was he poisoned with?" "Strychnia," he said, as
decidedly as might Dr Christison. "How do you know?" "I opened him,
puir fallow, and got him analeezed!"
Now we are on Birkindale Brae, and are looking down on the same scene
as did
"James Boyd (the Earle of Arran, his brother was he),"
when he crossed Minchmoor on his way to deliver James the Fifth's
message to
"Yon outlaw Murray,
Surely whaur bauldly bideth he."
"Down Birkindale Brae when that he cam
He saw the feir Foreste wi' his ee."
How James Boyd fared, and what the outlaw said, and what James and his
nobles said and did, and how the outlaw at last made peace with his
King, and rose up "Sheriffe of Ettricke Foreste," and how the bold
ruffian boasted,
"Fair Philiphaugh is mine by right,
And Lewinshope still mine shall be;
Newark, Foulshiels, and Tinnies baith
My bow and arrow purchased me.
And I have native steads to me
The Newark Lee o' Hangingshaw.
I have many steads in the Forest schaw,
But them by name I dinna knaw."
And how King James snubbed
"The kene Laird of Buckscleuth,
A stalwart man and stern was he."
When the Laird hinted that,
"For a king to gang an outlaw till
Is beneath his state and dignitie.
The man that wins yon forest intill
He lives by reif and felony."
"Then out and spak the nobil King,
And round him cast a wilie ee.
'Now haud thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott,
Nor speak o' reif or felonie--
_For, had every honest man his awin kye,_
_A richt puir clan thy name wud be_!'"
(by-the-bye, why did Professor Aytoun leave out this excellent hit in
his edition?)--all this and much more may you see if you take up _The
Border Minstrelsy_, and read "The Song of the Outlaw Murray," with the
incomparable notes of Scott. But we are now well down the hill. There
to the left, in the hollow, is _Permanscore_, where the King and the
outlaw met:--
"Bid him mete me at Permanscore,
And bring four in his companie;
Five Erles sall cum wi' mysel',
Gude reason I sud honoured be."
And there goes our Shepherd with his long swinging stride. As different
from his dark, wily companion, the Badenoch drover, as was Harry
Wakefield from Robin Oig; or as the big, sunny Cheviot is from the
lowering Ruberslaw; and there is _Jed_ trotting meekly behind him--may
she escape strychnia, and, dying at the fireside among the children, be
laid like
"Paddy Tims--whose soul at aise is--
With the point of his nose
And the tips of his toes
Turn'd up to the roots of the daisies"--
_unanaleezed_, save by the slow cunning of the grave. And may her
master get the top price for his lambs!
Do you see to the left that little plantation on the brow of Foulshiels
Hill, with the sunlight lying on its upper corner? If you were there
you might find among the brackens and foxglove a little headstone with
"I. T." rudely carved on it. That is _Tibbie Tamson's grave_, known and
feared all the country round.
This poor outcast was a Selkirk woman, who, under the stress of
spiritual despair--that sense of perdition, which, as in Cowper's case,
often haunts and overmasters the deepest and gentlest natures, making
them think themselves
"Damn'd below Judas, more abhorred than he was,"--
committed suicide; and being, with the gloomy, cruel superstition of
the time, looked on by her neighbours as accursed of God, she was
hurried into a rough white deal coffin, and carted out of the town, the
people stoning it all the way till it crossed the Ettrick. Here, on
this wild hillside, it found its rest, being buried where three lairds'
lands meet. May we trust that the light of God's reconciled countenance
has for all these long years been resting on that once forlorn soul, as
His blessed sunshine now lies on her moorland grave! For "the mountains
shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not
depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed,
saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee."
Now, we see down into the Yarrow--there is the famous stream twinkling
in the sun. What stream and valley was ever so be-sung! You wonder at
first why this has been, but the longer you look the less you wonder.
There is a charm about it--it is not easy to say what. The huge sunny
hills in which it is embosomed give it a look at once gentle and
serious. They are great, and their gentleness makes them greater.
Wordsworth has the right words, "pastoral melancholy"; and besides, the
region is "not uninformed with phantasy and looks that threaten the
profane"--the Flowers of Yarrow, the Douglas Tragedy, the Dowie Dens,
Wordsworth's Yarrow Unvisited, Visited, and Re-Visited, and, above all,
the glamour of Sir Walter, and Park's fatal and heroic story. Where can
you find eight more exquisite lines anywhere than Logan's, which we all
know by heart:--
"His mother from the window looked,
With all the longing of a mother;
His little sister, weeping, walked
The greenwood path to meet her brother.
They sought him east, they sought him west,
They sought him all the forest thorough--
They only saw the cloud of night,
They only heard the roar of Yarrow."
And there is _Newark Tower_ among the rich woods; and _Harehead_,
that cosiest, loveliest, and hospitablest of nests. Methinks I hear
certain young voices among the hazels; out they come on the little
haugh by the side of the deep, swirling stream, _fabulosus_ as was
ever Hydaspes. There they go "running races in their mirth," and is
not that--_an me ludit amabilis insania?_--the voice of _ma pauvre
petite--animosa infans_--the wilful, rich-eyed, delicious Eppie?
"Oh blessed vision, happy child,
Thou art so exquisitely wild!"
And there is _Black Andro and Glowr owr'em_ and _Foulshiels_, where
Park was born and bred; and there is the deep pool in the Yarrow where
Scott found him plunging one stone after another into the water, and
watching anxiously the bubbles as they rose to the surface. "This,"
said Scott to him, "appears but an idle amusement for one who has seen
so much adventure." "Not so idle, perhaps, as you suppose," answered
Mungo, "this was the way I used to ascertain the depth of a river in
Africa." He was then meditating his second journey, but had said so to
no one.
We go down by _Broadmeadows_, now held by that Yair "Hoppringle"--who
so well governed Scinde--and into the grounds of Bowhill, and passing
_Philiphaugh_, see where stout David Lesly crossed in the mist at
daybreak with his heavy dragoons, many of them old soldiers of
Gustavus, and routed the gallant Graeme; and there is _Slainmens Lee_,
where the royalists lie; and there is _Carterhaugh_, the scene of the
strange wild story of _Tamlane_ and Lady Janet, when
"She prinked hersell and prinned hersell
By the ae light of the moon,
And she's awa' to Carterhaugh
To speak wi' young Tamlane."
Noel Paton might paint that night, when
"'Twixt the hours of twelve and yin
A north wind _tore the bent_";
when "fair Janet" in her green mantle
"---- heard strange elritch sounds
Upon the wind that went."
And straightway
"About the dead hour o' the night
She heard the bridles ring;
Their oaten pipes blew wondrous shrill,
The hemlock small blew clear;
And louder notes from hemlock large
And bog reed, struck the ear,"