“From the Blue Mountains, or Ontario’s Lake,”
amidst the ruins of fallen greatness and fallen learning they had sought
“Some peasant’s homely shed,
Who toils unconscious of the mighty dead.”
Whether with Johnson among “those illustrious ruins,” we look upon Iona
as the instructress of the west, or with Gibbon as the island whence
was “diffused over the northern regions a doubtful ray of science
and superstition,” in either case it is surely a spot where we are
forced to pause, and with pensive mind “revolve the sad vicissitude
of things.” I must not, however, be unjust to Boswell. It was his
enthusiasm which had led them hither. It was he who had longed to
survey Iona. “I,” said Johnson, “though less eager did not oppose him.”
To him then we owe that splendid passage in which the great Englishman
celebrates the power exerted over the mind by the sight of places where
noble deeds were done, and noble lives were lived.
“We were now treading that illustrious Island, which was once
the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans
and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and
the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local
emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would
be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the
power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or
the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the
dignity of thinking beings. Far from me, and from my friends,
be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and
unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom,
bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose
patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or
whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona!”
Boswell surely not without good reason maintains that “had their tour
produced nothing else but this sublime passage the world must have
acknowledged that it was not made in vain.”
[Illustration: RUINS IN IONA.]
[Illustration: CARSAIG ARCHES: MULL.]