I
The first whiff we got of transatlantic nature was the peaty breath of
the peasant chimneys of Ireland while we were yet many miles at sea.
What a homelike, fireside smell it was! it seemed to make something long
forgotten stir within one. One recognizes it as a characteristic Old
World odor, it savors so of the soil and of a ripe and mellow antiquity.
I know no other fuel that yields so agreeable a perfume as peat. Unless
the Irishman in one has dwindled to a very small fraction, he will be
pretty sure to dilate his nostrils and feel some dim awakening of memory
on catching the scent of this ancestral fuel. The fat, unctuous
peat,--the pith and marrow of ages of vegetable growth,--how typical it
is of much that lies there before us in the elder world; of the slow
ripenings and accumulations, of extinct life and forms, decayed
civilizations, of ten thousand growths and achievements of the hand and
soul of man, now reduced to their last modicum of fertilizing mould!
With the breath of the chimney there came presently the chimney swallow,
and dropped much fatigued upon the deck of the steamer. It was a still
more welcome and suggestive token,--the bird of Virgil and of
Theocritus, acquainted with every cottage roof and chimney in Europe,
and with the ruined abbeys and castle walls. Except its lighter-colored
breast, it seemed identical with our barn swallow; its little black cap
appeared pulled down over its eyes in the same manner, and its glossy
steel-blue coat, its forked tail, its infantile feet, and its cheerful
twitter were the same. But its habits are different; for in Europe this
swallow builds in chimneys, and the bird that answers to our chimney
swallow, or swift, builds in crevices in barns and houses.
We did not suspect we had taken aboard our pilot in the little swallow,
yet so it proved: this light navigator always hails from the port of
bright, warm skies; and the next morning we found ourselves sailing
between shores basking in full summer sunshine. Those who, after ten
days of sorrowing and fasting in the desert of the ocean, have sailed up
the Frith of Clyde, and thence up the Clyde to Glasgow, on the morning
of a perfect mid-May day, the sky all sunshine, the earth all verdure,
know what this experience is; and only those can know it. It takes a
good many foul days in Scotland to breed one fair one; but when the
fair day does come, it is worth the price paid for it. The soul and
sentiment of all fair weather is in it; it is the flowering of the
meteorological influences, the rose on this thorn of rain and mist.
These fair days, I was told, may be quite confidently looked for in May;
we were so fortunate as to experience a series of them, and the day we
entered port was such a one as you would select from a hundred.
The traveler is in a mood to be pleased after clearing the Atlantic
gulf; the eye in its exuberance is full of caresses and flattery, and
the deck of a steamer is a rare vantage-ground on any occasion of
sight-seeing; it affords just the isolation and elevation needed. Yet
fully discounting these favorable conditions, the fact remains that
Scotch sunshine is bewitching, and that the scenery of the Clyde is
unequaled by any other approach to Europe. It is Europe, abridged and
assorted and passed before you in the space of a few hours,--the
highlands and lochs and castle-crowned crags on the one hand; and the
lowlands, with their parks and farms, their manor halls and matchless
verdure, on the other. The eye is conservative, and loves a look of
permanence and order, of peace and contentment; and these Scotch shores,
with their stone houses, compact masonry, clean fields, grazing herds,
ivied walls, massive foliage, perfect roads, verdant mountains, etc.,
fill all the conditions. We pause an hour in front of Greenock, and
then, on the crest of the tide, make our way slowly upward. The
landscape closes around us. We can almost hear the cattle ripping off
the lush grass in the fields. One feels as if he could eat grass
himself. It is pastoral paradise. We can see the daisies and buttercups;
and from above a meadow on the right a part of the song of a skylark
reaches my ear. Indeed, not a little of the charm and novelty of this
part of the voyage was the impression it made as of going afield in an
ocean steamer. We had suddenly passed from a wilderness of waters into a
verdurous, sunlit landscape, where scarcely any water was visible. The
Clyde, soon after you leave Greenock, becomes little more than a large,
deep canal, inclosed between meadow banks, and from the deck of the
great steamer only the most charming rural sights and sounds greet you.
You are at sea amid verdant parks and fields of clover and grain. You
behold farm occupations--sowing, planting, plowing--as from the middle
of the Atlantic. Playful heifers and skipping lambs take the place of
the leaping dolphins and the basking swordfish. The ship steers her way
amid turnip-fields and broad acres of newly planted potatoes. You are
not surprised that she needs piloting. A little tug with a rope at her
bow pulls her first this way and then that, while one at her stern
nudges her right flank and then her left. Presently we come to the
ship-building yards of the Clyde, where rural, pastoral scenes are
strangely mingled with those of quite another sort. "First a cow and
then an iron ship," as one of the voyagers observed. Here a pasture or a
meadow, or a field of wheat or oats, and close beside it, without an
inch of waste or neutral ground between, rise the skeletons of
innumerable ships, like a forest of slender growths of iron, with the
workmen hammering amid it like so many noisy woodpeckers. It is doubtful
if such a scene can be witnessed anywhere else in the world,--an
enormous mechanical, commercial, and architectural interest, alternating
with the quiet and simplicity of inland farms and home occupations. You
could leap from the deck of a half-finished ocean steamer into a field
of waving wheat or Winchester beans. These vast shipyards appear to be
set down here upon the banks of the Clyde without any interference with
the natural surroundings of the place.
Of the factories and foundries that put this iron in shape you get no
hint; here the ships rise as if they sprouted from the soil, without
waste or litter, but with an incessant din. They stand as thickly as a
row of cattle in stanchions, almost touching each other, and in all
stages of development. Now and then a stall will be vacant, the ship
having just been launched, and others will be standing with flags flying
and timbers greased or soaped, ready to take to the water at the word.
Two such, both large ocean steamers, waited for us to pass. We looked
back, saw the last block or wedge knocked away from one of them, and the
monster ship sauntered down to the water and glided out into the current
in the most gentle, nonchalant way imaginable. I wondered at her slow
pace, and at the grace and composure with which she took to the water;
the problem nicely studied and solved,--just power enough, and not an
ounce to spare. The vessels are launched diagonally up or down stream,
on account of the narrowness of the channel. But to see such a brood of
ships, the largest in the world, hatched upon the banks of such a placid
little river, amid such quiet country scenes, is a novel experience. But
this is Britain,--a little island, with little lakes, little rivers,
quiet, bosky fields, but mighty interests and power that reach round the
world. I was conscious that the same scene at home would have been less
pleasing. It would not have been so compact and tidy. There would not
have been a garden of ships and a garden of turnips side by side;
haymakers and shipbuilders in adjoining fields; milch-cows and iron
steamers seeking the water within sight of each other. We leave wide
margins and ragged edges in this country, and both man and nature sprawl
about at greater lengths than in the Old World.
For the rest I was perhaps least prepared for the utter tranquillity,
and shall I say domesticity, of the mountains. At a distance they appear
to be covered with a tender green mould that one could brush away with
his hand. On nearer approach it is seen to be grass. They look nearly as
rural and pastoral as the fields. Goat Fell is steep and stony, but even
it does not have a wild and barren look. At home, one thinks of a
mountain as either a vast pile of barren, frowning rocks and precipices,
or else a steep acclivity covered with a tangle of primitive forest
timber. But here, the mountains are high, grassy sheep-walks, smooth,
treeless, rounded, and as green as if dipped in a fountain of perpetual
spring. I did not wish my Catskills any different; but I wondered what
would need to be done to them to make them look like these Scotch
highlands. Cut away their forests, rub down all inequalities in their
surfaces, pulverizing their loose bowlders; turf them over, leaving the
rock to show through here and there,--then, with a few large black
patches to represent the heather, and the softening and ameliorating
effect of a mild, humid climate, they might in time come to bear some
resemblance to these shepherd mountains. Then over all the landscape is
that new look,--that mellow, legendary, half-human expression which
nature wears in these ancestral lands, an expression familiar in
pictures and in literature, but which a native of our side of the
Atlantic has never before seen in gross, material objects and open-air
spaces,--the added charm of the sentiment of time and human history, the
ripening and ameliorating influence of long ages of close and loving
occupation of the soil,--naturally a deep, fertile soil under a mild,
very humid climate.
There is an unexpected, an unexplained lure and attraction in the
landscape,--a pensive, reminiscent feeling in the air itself. Nature has
grown mellow under these humid skies, as in our fiercer climate she
grows harsh and severe. One sees at once why this fragrant Old World
has so dominated the affections and the imaginations of our artists and
poets: it is saturated with human qualities; it is unctuous with the
ripeness of ages, the very marrowfat of time.