"Away, ye gay landscapes, ye gardens of roses!
In you let the minions of luxury rove;
Restore me the rocks, where the snow-flake reposes,
Though still they are sacred to freedom and love:
Yet, Caledonia, beloved are thy mountains,
Round their white summits though elements war;
Though cataracts foam 'stead of smooth-flowing fountains,
I sigh for the valley of dark Loch na Garr.
"Ah! there my young footsteps in infancy wandered;
My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid;
On chieftains long perished my memory pondered,
As daily I strode through the pine-covered glade:
I sought not my home till the day's dying glory
Gave place to the rays of the bright polar star;
For fancy was cheered by traditional story,
Disclosed by the natives of dark Loch na Garr."
_Hours of Idleness_, p. 111.
The feeling thus ardent in youth was equally vivid to the last. Only
about two years before his death he wrote thus in The Island:
"He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue
Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue;
Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face,
And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace.
Long have I roved through lands which are not mine,
Adored the Alp, and loved the Apennine;
Revered Parnassus, and beheld the steep
Jove's Ida, and Olympus crown the deep;
But 'twas not all long ages' love, nor all
_Their_ nature held me in their thrilling thrall;
The infant rapture still survived the boy,
And Loch na Garr with Ida looked o'er Troy;
Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount,
And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount."
The city of Aberdeen was the place where the chief part of the earlier
boyhood of Byron was spent. He went thither as an unconscious infant,
and there, in the neighboring Highlands, he continued till in his
eleventh year, when the title fell to him, and he was brought by his
mother to England. Aberdeen is a city which must have been a very
charming abode for a boy of Byron's disposition, ready either to mix in
the throng of lads of his own age in all their plays, contentions, and
enterprises, to shoot a marble, or box out a quarrel, or to stroll away
into the country and enjoy nature and liberty with an equal zest. There
are people who are inclined to think that a great deal of the sublime
tone of some of Byron's poetry, as that of the Childe Harold, of the
sentiment, almost sentimentality of his Hours of Idleness, and many of
his smaller poems throughout his works, was put on by him at will and
for effect. They do not see how these things could proceed from the same
mind as the rodomontade of many of his most familiar letters, or the
slang and wild humor of many parts of Don Juan. How little do such
persons know of the human mind! Did not Tam O'Shanter, and Mary in
Heaven, and the Cotter's Saturday Night, all proceed from the same mind,
and one of the most earnest minds that ever lived? Did not the sublime
scenes of the Iliad, and the battle of the beggars in the Odyssey, and
the trick of Ulysses in the cave of Polypheme, when he called himself
Noman--so that when Polypheme roared out as they put out his eye, and he
told his neighbors who came running to inquire what was the matter, that
Noman hurt him, they replied,
"If no man hurt thee, why dost thou complain?"
and marched away without helping him--did not these proceed from the
same mind? Did not the puns of Hood, and the sober ballad of Eugene
Aram, and the Song of the Shirt, proceed from one and the same mind? Did
not John Gilpin and the loftiest strains of pious poetry proceed from
that of Cowper? Did not Chatterton write equally Sly Dick and the
tragedy of Ella? In fact, we might run through the whole circuit of
poetic and prose literature, and show that the moods of our minds are as
various and changeable as those of external nature. The very gravest,
the most steadfast of us, have our transitions from sad to gay, from
frivolous to the highest tone of the highest purpose, with a rapidity
that seems to belong to the most changeful of us. There is, in fact, no
such chameleon, no such kaleidoscope as the human mind. Light and shadow
pass over us, and communicate their lusters or their glooms. Facts give
us a turn up or down, and the images of our brain present new and ever
new arrangements. But in all this change there is no mere chance, far
less confusion; every movement depends on a fixed principle. Perhaps
there have been few men in whom circumstances--circumstances of physical
organization, of life, and education--cherished and made habitual so
many varied moods as in Lord Byron. Thrown at a very early age into the
bosom of a beautiful and solitary nature, he imbibed a profound and
sincere love of nature and solitude. Sent early to public schools to
battle his way among boys of his own age, and with a personal defect
which often subjected him to raillery, his native spirit made him
bristle up and show fight, as he did afterward with his reviewers.
Raised to rank and wealth, and, spite of his crooked foot, endowed with,
in all other respects, a very fine person, he was led to plunge into the
dissipations of young men of his class, and he thus acquired a tone of
libertinism that ever afterward, under the same circumstances, was sure
to show itself. Led by his quick sense of right and wrong, and by his
shrewd insight into character, to despise priestcraft and political
despotism, and spurred on by the spirit of the time, especially abroad
where he traveled, he imbibed a spirit of skepticism and radicalism as
principles. From these causes, he soon began to exhibit the most
opposite phases of character. In solitude and nature he was religious in
his tone--in society, a scoffer; in solitude he was pensive, and even
sentimental--in society he was convivial, fond of practical jokes,
satirical. He wrote like a radical, and spoke like an aristocrat. In him
Childe Harold and Don Juan, the sublime and the ludicrous, the noble and
the mean, the sarcastic and the tender, the voluptuous and beautifully
spiritual, the pious and the impious, were all embodied. He was all
these by turns, and in all, for the moment, most sincere. Like an
instrument of many strings, each had its peculiar tone, and answered
faithfully to the external impulse. Multifarious as were his moods, you
might in any given circumstances have predicated which of these would
prevail. There would be no sensuality in the face of the Alps, there
would be no sublimity in the city saloon. If he had to speak in the
House of Lords, his speech, by the spirit of antagonism, would assuredly
be radical; did he come into contact with the actual mob, he would case
himself in the hauteur of the aristocrat. With nature, he was ashamed of
men, and his doings and sayings among them; with men, he was ashamed of
nature and poetry. He would laugh at his own flights of sentiment. He
was a many-sided monster, showing now sublime and now grotesque, but
with a feeling in the depths of his soul that he ought to be something
greater than he was or dared to be.
To go back, however, from his character to himself. Aberdeen presented
to the boy ample food for two of his propensities, those toward the
enjoyment of nature and society. The country round, though not sublime,
is beautiful. The sea is at hand, an ever grand and stirring object. The
Dee comes winding from the mountains of the west through a vale of great
loveliness; the Don, from the north, through scenes perhaps still more
striking. There is an air of antiquity about the town, with its old
churches, colleges, and towers, that is peculiarly pleasing, and the
country has likewise a primitive look that wins at once on the
spectator. To one of us from the south, the approach to it by the sea is
very striking. I do not mean the immediate approach, for this is flat,
but the coast voyage out from Edinburgh. The whole coast is bleak, yet
green, and presenting to the sea bold and time-worn rocks. For a
considerable part of the way they appear to be of red sandstone, and are
therefore scooped out into the boldest caves, hollows, and promontories
imaginable. Here and there are deep, dark caverns, into which the sea
rushes as into its own peculiar dens, and in other places it has cut out
arches and doorways through these rocks where they stand insulated, and
you see the light through them displaying other rocks behind. One of
these is noted for presenting, by effect of light behind it, the
appearance of a lady all in white, standing at the mouth of a cave, and
beckoning with her hand. As you skim along the coasts of Fife, Forfar,
Kincardine, and Aberdeen, these rocks and caverns present ever-new
forms, while all the country above them is green, smiling, and cultured
now, but formerly must have been savage indeed, and giving rise, and no
wonder, to strange superstitions and legends. Bleak little towns ever
and anon stretch along the shore; though green, the country is very bare
of trees. Dundee, Arbroath, Montrose, are good large towns; and there
are the ruins of Arbroath Abbey and Dunnottar Castle, with others of
less note. Dunnottar can not be passed without thinking of Old
Mortality, whom Scott found in the church-yard there restoring the
inscriptions on the grave-stones of the Covenanters; nor can Uri, an
old-fashioned house on the bare uplands above Stonehaven, as the abode
of Barclay, the writer of the celebrated Apology for Quakerism, and in
our day for that of his pedestrian descendant, Captain Barclay. How
singular are the reflections which arise on human life and its
combinations when gazing on such a place as this! What should induce a
man at one time to go forth from a remote scene and solitary old house
like this, to mingle with the ferment of the times--to become an active
apostle of Quakerism, and the expositor of its faith; and another,
nearly two centuries afterward, to march out of the same house down into
England, not for an exhibition of Quakerism, but of pedestrianism; not
of _reasoning_, but of _walking_ powers? Why should that house--just
that house and its family, be destined to produce great Quakers, ending
in great walkers and great brewers? How often in my boyhood had I read
Barclay's Preface to his Apology, dated from "Uri in Scotland, the Place
of my Pilgrimage," and addressed to King Charles II., by "Robert
Barclay, the servant of Jesus Christ, called by God to a dispensation of
the Gospel revealed anew in this our age," &c. And there it stood,
high, bare, and solitary, eliciting the oddest compound ideas of "hops
and heresy," according to the phrase of a clergyman of the time, or,
rather, of Quakerism, London porter, and walking-matches against time!
Beyond this the coast becomes more and more what is called iron-bound,
and the rocks--probably of trap or whinstone--as you advance northward,
stand up in the sea, black and curdled as it were, and worn into caverns
and perpendicular indentures exactly as you see them in Bewick's
wood-cuts. Stepping then on land at Aberdeen, how agreeable is the
change! The city, built all of a gray and lustrous granite, has a look
of cleanness and neatness almost inconceivable. Since the days of
Byron's boyhood great must have been the changes. The main streets are
all evidently new; and on advancing into the great street which
traverses almost the whole length of the city, Union-street, a mile in
length and seventy feet wide, you are struck with a pleasant surprise.
The width and extent, the handsome yet plain buildings of clean granite,
and the fine public buildings visible in different directions, are far
more than you expected in a town so far north.[32] On the river you find
an imposing assemblage of ships; you find the Marischal College now
built in a very graceful style; and a market-house, I suppose in extent,
convenience of arrangement, and supply, inferior to none in the kingdom.
The olden streets, such as were in existence in Byron's time, are much
more like what you would have looked for, of a narrower and more
ordinary character.
About a mile to the north of the new town lies Old Aberdeen. In
advancing toward it you become every moment more aware of its far
greater antiquity. It looks as if it had a fixed attachment to the
past, and had refused to move. There is a quietness, a stationariness
about it. One old house or villa after another stands in its garden or
court as it has done for centuries. The country about has an old Saxon
look. It carried me away into Germany, with its unfenced fields of corn
and potatoes; villages seen in the distance also unfenced, but with a
few trees clustered about them, and the country naked except for its
corn. To the right lay the sea, to the left this open country, and on
before arose, one beyond the other, tower and spire of an antique
character, as of a very ancient city. Presently I came to the
college--King's College--with the royal crown of Scotland surmounting
its tower, in fine and ample dimensions, and its courts and corridors
seen through the ancient gateway. Then, on the other hand, the equally
antique gateway to the park of Mr. Powis Leslie, with its two tall round
towers of most ancient fashion, with galleries and spires surmounted
with crescents. Then, onward, the ancient, massy Cathedral, with its two
stone spires, and tall western window of numerous narrow windowlets, and
ponderous walls running along the road side, with a coping of a yard
high, and stuccoed. Every thing had a heavy, ancient, and German
character. I could have imagined myself in Saxony or Franconia; and, to
augment the illusion, a woman at a cottage door inquiring the time of
day, received the answer "half twa," as near as possible "half two" in
Plat-deutsch. Still further to increase the illusion, the people talked
of the bridge as "she." Truly the repose of centuries, and the fashion
of a far-gone time, so far as relates to our country, lay over the whole
place.
I had now to inquire my way to the Brig of Balgounie, a spot which makes
a conspicuous figure in Byron's boyish history. "The Brig of Don," says
he himself, in a note in Don Juan, canto x., p. 309, "near the 'auld
town' of Aberdeen, with its one arch, and its black, deep salmon stream,
is in my memory as yesterday. I still remember, though perhaps I may
misquote, the awful proverb which made me pause to cross it, and yet
lean over it with a childish delight, being an only son, at least by the
mother's side. The saying, as recollected by me, was this, but I have
never heard or seen it since I was nine years of age:
'Brig of Balgounie, wight (strong) is thy wa',
Wi' a wife's ae son on a mare's ae foal,
Down shalt thou fa'.'"
How accurate was his recollection of this old bridge; a proof of the
delight with which he had enjoyed this scenery. We are told that on
holiday afternoons he would get down to the sea-side and find great
amusement there. Here was the sea just below; and it will be seen that
the whole way that he had to come from New Aberdeen was full of a spirit
and an aspect to fall deep into the heart of an embryo poet. There is a
new and direct way now from the city nearer to the sea, and from the new
bridge of Don the view of the old bridge is very picturesque. It is one
tall, gray pointed arch, with cottages about it on both sides on the
high banks of the Don, and mills, with masses of trees. On the low
ground below the bridge at the left-hand end stands a white house, and
little fishermen's huts or sheds scattered here and there. On the other
bank of the river the ground is high and knolly. Clumps of trees seem to
close in upon the bridge, and behind and above them is a little group of
fishermen's houses, called the huts of Balgounie. Below the bridge the
river widens out into a broad expanse, and between high, broomy banks,
comes down to the new bridge, and thence to the sea meadows, where the
white billows are seen chasing each other at its mouth. Above the bridge
the river is dark and deep, and the high banks are overhung with wood.
The valley of the Don above is very picturesque with woods and rocks,
and is enlivened with mills and factories.
The view from the bridge itself down into the river is striking. I
suppose it must be forty or fifty feet from its center to the water,
yet a man living close by told me that he once saw a sailor leap from it
for a wager. The bridge is remarkably strongly built. It is said to have
been built in the time of Bruce, yet it has by no means a very ancient
look, and being of solid granite, is not very likely to fulfill the
prophecy of its fall. Yet Mr. Chambers, in his "Picture of Scotland,"
says this superstition has not always been confined to children, for our
late Earl of Aberdeen, who was an only son, and rode a favorite horse,
which was "a mare's ae foal," always dismounted on approaching this
bridge, and used to have his horse led over at a little distance after
him. The people near do not now seem to partake of it. "Fall!" say they;
"ay, when the rocks on which it is based fall!" It is, in fact, like a
solid piece of rock itself; and is in possession of funds, left in 1605
by Sir Alexander Hay, which, though then only producing five-and-forty
shillings a year, have so accumulated that they are not only amply
sufficient to maintain it in repair, but have built the new brig. At
each end of the bridge you see several large iron rings in the wall.
These, I was told, were to secure ropes or chains to, from which to
suspend scaffolding for the repair of the bridge on the outside. Every
care is thus taken of it. "She is verra rich, is the auld brig," said
the man before mentioned. "She has been verra useful in her time, for
before the new brig was built she was the only means of getting to the
north country--there was no fording the river. And the new brig has been
built wi' her money, ay, every sixpence of it, gran' brig as the new on'
is, with her five granite arches; and the auld brig gives £100 a year to
take care of her too. But she's verra well off in the world yet, for all
that; she has plenty left for herself." Thus do they talk of the auld
brig as if she were a wealthy old lady. If, however, any one should pay
her a visit from New Aberdeen, I would counsel him to go by the old road
for its picturesque effect, but to be careful to inquire the road in Old
Aberdeen down to the brig, for it is particularly obscure. He must ask,
too, for "The Auld Brig o' Don," for the name of the brig of Balgounie
seems known to few of the younger generation.
In New Aberdeen, the admirer of Lord Byron will also naturally seek to
take a glance at the different houses in which he lived as a child with
his mother. These are in Queen-street, one at nearly each end of the
street; one at the house in Broad-street, then occupied by Mr. Leslie,
father of the present surgeon of that name; and one in Virginia-street,
not far from the docks. The visitor will not be surprised to find that
these are but ordinary houses in ordinary streets in general, when he
recollects that Mrs. Byron was then reduced by the matrimonial robbery
of her husband to an income of £123 a year, and that her effects, that
is, the furniture of her lodgings, &c., when sold, on her setting out
with her boy for England, amounted only to £74, 17_s._, 7_d._ In these
houses she was merely a lodger. The best situation which she occupied
was in Mr. Leslie's house in Broad-street, over a shop. All these places
are still well known. The schools to which Byron went in Aberdeen are
also objects of interest. That in Long Acre, kept by a Mr. Bower, whom
he calls _Bodsy_ Bower, a name, he says, given him on account of his
dapperness, was a common day school, where little boys and girls were
sent principally to be out of the way at home. This school has long been
closed. The next school to which he went, and where he continued to go
till he left Aberdeen, was the grammar school. This, of course, remains,
and though it has been considerably enlarged since Byron was there, that
room in which he studied continues exactly as it was at that time. It is
an ordinary school-room, with benches and desks cut deep with hundreds
of names, and hundreds of other names printed and written over them with
ink, and the walls adorned in the like style, as well as with grotesque
figures, drawn with the pens of schoolboys. Amid this multitude of
names, the Rev. Dr. Melville, the present master, assured me that
diligent search had been made to discover that of Byron, but in vain.
There are many of his old schoolfellows still living in the place, and
all seem to recollect him as "a mischievous urchin." It must, however,
be recollected, that Byron was little more than ten years of age when he
left Aberdeen, and that was forty-seven years ago.
The place to which perhaps still more interest will attach, connected
with the poet's boyhood in this part of the country, is Ballater, where
his mother was advised to take him on recovering from the scarlet fever
in 1796. It would appear as if Mrs. Byron, as well as her child, was so
delighted with the summer residence there, as to return thither the two
following summers. These are all the opportunities there could possibly
be, for they left for England in the autumn of 1798, on the death of the
old Lord Byron. They were the summer residences here, however, that
awoke the poetic feeling in him. He was here in the midst of the most
beautiful mountain scenery, and so intensely did it operate upon him,
that through his whole life he looked back to his abode here as the most
delicious period in his memory.
The vale of the Dee, or the Dee-side, as they call it, all the way from
Aberdeen, a distance of forty miles, is fine; beautifully wooded by
places, the hills, as you advance, become more and more striking. You
pass the Castle of Drum, one of the oldest inhabited castles in
Scotland; a seat of the Burnets, of Bishop Burnet's line, finely
situated on the right hand on rising ground, and various other
interesting places. But it is as you approach Ballater that the scenery
becomes most striking. It becomes truly Highland. The hills get lofty,
bare, gray, and freckled. They are, in fact, bare and tempest-tinted
granite, having an air of majestic desolation. Some rise peaked and
splintered, and their sides covered with _debris_, yet, as it were,
bristled with black and sharp-looking pine forests. Some of the hills
run along the side of the Dee, covered with these woods, exactly as the
steep Black Forest Hills are in the neighborhood of Wildbad.
As you approach Ballater the valley expands. You see a breadth of green
meadow, and a neat white village stretching across it, and its church
lifting its spire into the clear air, while the mountains sweep round in
a fine chain of peaked hills, and close it in. All up Dee-side there is
well-cultivated land, but, with the exception of this meadow, on which
Ballater stands, all is now hill, dark forest, and moorland; while
below, on the banks of the winding and rapid Dee, birch woods present
themselves in that peculiar beauty so truly belonging to the Highlands.
On your right first looks out the dark height of Culbleen, mentioned by
Byron in his earlier poems:
"When I see some dark hill point its crest to the sky,
I think of the rocks that o'ershadow Culbleen;"
then "Morven, streaked with snow;" and Loch na Garr lifts himself long
and lofty over the lower chains that close the valley beyond Ballater.
Ballater, though a neat village now, did not exist when Byron was here.
There were a few cottages for the use of visitors, near the other side
of the present bridge, but those who came to drink the waters generally
located themselves in farm-houses as near as they could to "the wells,"
which are two miles down the opposite bank of the Dee. Mrs. Byron chose
her summer residence in one of the most thoroughly-secluded and
out-of-the-world spots which it was possible to find, perhaps, in the
whole island. It lies four miles below Ballater, on the same side of the
river as the spring, that is, two miles beyond "the wells," as they call
them, some chalybeate springs which issue from the hills, and which now
bring many people to Ballater in summer. You proceed to them along the
feet of the hills, and at the feet, also, of a dark pine wood. The river
is below you; above you are these mountain forests, and the way lies
sometimes through the wood. Under beeches which shade the way, there are
benches set at intervals, so that a more charming walk, with the noble
mountain views opposite to you, can not well be conceived. At about two
miles on the road, after passing under stupendous dark cliffs that show
themselves above the craggy and steep forest, you find a couple of rows
of houses, and here are the waters issuing out of pipes into stone
basins. Going still forward, you come out upon the wild moorlands. Above
you, on the right hand, rise the desolate hills; below, on the left,
wanders on the Dee, amid its birch woods; and the valley is one of those
scenes of chaotic beauty, which perhaps the Highlands only show. It is a
sea of heath-clad little hills, sprinkled with the light green
birch-trees, and here and there a dark Scotch fir. It is a fairy land of
purple beauty, such as seems to belong to old romance, and where the
people of old romance might be met without wonder. And through all goes
the sound of the river like a distant ocean. Those who have been in the
Highlands know and recollect such scenes, so carpeted with the crimson
heather, so beautified with the light-hued, fairy birch woods. Still the
way leads on till you come down to the Dee, where it makes a wide and
splendid sweep deep below the bank on which you are, and then you wonder
where can be Bellatrich, the house you seek, for you see no house at
all! In the birch wood, however, you now discern one white cottage, and
that must be it. No! To that cottage I went, and out came a woman with
spectacles on and her Bible open in her hand. I asked if she could tell
me where Bellatrich was, and I expected her to say "Here!" but she
replied, in a low, quiet voice, "I will show you, for it is not easy to
find." And so on we went for another quarter of a mile, when, coming to
a little hidden valley running at right angles from the river up into
the moorlands, she showed me a smoke rising above the trees, and told me
there I should find the house.
And here was the place to which Byron's mother used to _retire_ in the
summer months from Aberdeen with her boy. The valley is divided by a
wild brook hidden among green alders, and its slopes are hung with the
native birch and a few oaks. At the upper end stands a farm-house, but
this is new, and the farmer, to show me the house in which Byron lived,
took me into his farm-yard. The house Mrs. Byron inhabited is now a
barn, or sort of hayloft rather, in his yard. It was exactly one of the
one-storied, long Highland huts, and is now included in the quadrangle
of his farm-yard; but the bed in which Byron used to lie is still there.
It is one of the deal, cupboard sort of beds that are common in Highland
huts. There it stands among his straw. He says many people come to see
the place, and several have tried to buy the bed from him, but that he
should think it quite a shame to sell it.
Imagine, then, Mrs. Byron living here upward of forty years ago, and
Byron a boy of about ten years of age; soon after which he left for
England, to be converted out of a poor Highland boy into a lord. There
was probably another hut or so near, as there is now, but that was all.
The house they lived in was but a hut itself. There was no Ballater
then. That has sprung up under the management of Mr. Farquarson, the
laird of Ballater. There was only the water issuing from the moorland
rocks, and no house at it, but those few huts near Ballater Bridge,
where Lords Panmure and Kennedy, and some of their jovial companions,
notorious up here, used to come and to drink the waters, in order to
remedy their drinking too much whisky. There was no carriage road then.
There was no cultivated meadow. All was moorland, and woods, and wild
mountains. There was a rude road at the margin of the river, but so
stony that no carriage could exist upon it. Nay, this present farmer
says that when he came to live here, within these ten years, there was
no road into this little hidden valley. There was no bridge over the
brook, but they went through amid the great stones, and that without
taking any trouble to put them aside. There was no garden, and there was
no field. Around rose, as they do now, dark moorland mountains, and the
little black-faced sheep, and the black cattle roamed over the boggy,
heathery, and birch-scattered valley, as they do still, except within
the little circle of cultivation that the present tenant has made.
What a place for a civilized woman and her only son! How he got so far
around as he did is to me a miracle. He got up the valley quite to
Braemar, and there was no carriage road thither! There was no turnpike
road from Aberdeen further than to Banchory, half way to Ballater,
forty-six years ago, and that then made, was the first turnpike road in
Aberdeenshire. So a gentleman of Aberdeen assured me. Further, all was a
mere track, in which a horse could go. Yet the boy Byron, with his lame
feet, and very lame he was, according to those who knew him, and plenty
of such remain, rambled all about this wild region. The passion with
which he traversed those scenes is expressed in his poem to Mary Duff,
the equally-beloved object of his boyish heart.
"When I roved a young Highlander on the dark heath,
And climbed thy steep summit, oh Morven! of snow,
To gaze on the torrent that thundered beneath,
Or the mist of the tempest that gathered below;
Untutored by science, a stranger to fear,
And rude as the rocks where my infancy grew,
No feeling, save one, to my bosom was dear,
Need I say, my sweet Mary, 'twas centered in you?
"Yet it could not be love, for I knew not the name--
What passion can dwell in the heart of a child?
But still I perceive an emotion the same
As I felt when a boy in the crag-covered wild.
One image alone on my bosom impressed,
I loved my bleak regions, nor panted for new;
And few were my wants, for my wishes were blessed,
And pure were my thoughts, for my soul was with you.
"I arose with the dawn; with my dog for my guide,
From mountain to mountain I bounded along:
I breasted the billows of Dee's rushing tide,
And heard at a distance the Highlander's song," &c.
That he was intensely happy here, the poetry and memories of his whole
life testify. That he must have strolled far and wide, and, as he says,
with his dog for his guide, is no doubt true; but, lame as he was, it
appears little less than miraculous. "I mind him weel," said a shepherd
still living in the valley near the farm; "he was just such a boy as
yon," pointing to a boy of eleven or twelve, "and used to play about wi'
us here. His feet were _both_ turned in, and he used to lift one over
the other as he walked; and when he ran he would sometimes catch one
against the other, and tumble over neck and heels. We heard that in
England he had got his feet straightened."
How such a boy could get about there, over the rough heath and up the
distant mountains, is strange enough. We do not hear that he had any
pony, and there were only his mother or the maid to accompany him. Mrs.
Byron, by all accounts, was not well-fitted for much walking, far less
climbing up hills; yet it is quite certain that he rambled far and wide,
and, it is most probable, alone. Loch na Garr, Morven, and Culbleen are
the grand features of the mountain scenery, and it is evident that the
wild and beautiful solitudes of the Dee-side, and the mountains around,
had made a deep and indelible impression on his imagination. It is just
the scenery to awake the poet, where the soul and the organization of
the poet exist. The deep solitude; the stern mountains, with all their
changes of storm and sunshine, now blazing and burning out in all the
brightness of a clear sun, now softly beaming beneath the slanting light
of evening, and now black as midnight beneath a gloomy sky, looking
awfully forth from their sable and yet transparent veil of shadow.
These, and the sound of waters, and the mild beauty of the low,
heath-clad hills and soft glens, where the birch hangs its weeping and
fragrant branches over the lovely harebell and the secret nest of the
grouse, were the imagery which surrounded the boy Byron during the
summer months; and the boy "was father to the man," seeking out ever
afterward, from land to land, all that was lovely and sublime in nature.
But he was now called upon to say,
"Adieu, then, ye hills, where my childhood was bred.
Thou sweet flowing Dee, to thy waters adieu!"
and the scene changed to England; solitude to cities; poverty to
fortune; and the nameless obscurity of the juvenile mountain wanderer to
title and unimagined fame.
Before, however, quitting this favorite scene of the early life of
Byron, which he never again visited, I must notice it under the aspect
which it happened to present to me from the particular time of my
arrival. It was on the 18th of August, just one week after the
commencement of the grouse-shooting season, and every inn on the road
was crowded with sportsmen and their servants. Lord Castlereagh, on his
way to his shooting-ground in Braemar, was my next neighbor on the mail
from Aberdeen; and his wide acquaintance with the sports of various
countries, the _capercailzie_ and bear-shooting of the north of Europe,
in particular of Russia, made his descriptions of them, as well as of
the deer-shooting of Braemar--his particular sport--very interesting.
But the weather of that wet summer was at this time outrageously rainy,
and from every wayside inn the lugubrious faces of sportsmen were
visible. As we drew up at the village of Banchory, the window was
thronged with livery-servants, and a gentleman at an open upper window,
eyeing anxiously the showery clouds hanging upon the hills, caught sight
of Lord Castlereagh, and called out, in a tone of momentary animation
quickly relapsing into melancholy, "Ha, Cass! are you there? Here I have
been these four days, and nothing but this confounded rain. Not a foot
have I yet been able to set upon the heath. There are six of us."
"Who is that who addresses you so familiarly?"
"Oh! it is Sir John Guest!" Poor Sir John! What a purgatory!
On went the coach. At Ballater again thronged was the door with
livery-servants; the rain was falling in torrents; there were nine
shooting gentlemen in the house, not one of whom could stir out. After
taking luncheon, Lord Castlereagh went with the mail to Braemar, and I,
with expanded umbrella, issued forth to explore the neighborhood as well
as I might, but was speedily driven back again by the deluging rains,
which made every highway an actual river. The next day was Sunday, and
the sun rose with a beauty and warmth which seemed to say, "Gentlemen
sportsmen, you shall at least have fair weather for church." A more
glorious day never was sent down over mountain and moorland; and few are
the scenes on which fine summer weather confers a greater beauty than on
those around Ballater. Along these fine valleys, the country people, all
health and animation, in cordial conversation streamed along to and fro
from church. I climbed the dark moorland hills, where the wild flocks
scudded away at the presence of a stranger, and the grouse rose up in
whole coveys, with a startling whirr and strange cries, and gazed down
into the vales on the most lovely little homesteads, on their crimson
heathery knolls, amid their beautiful little woodlands of birch. Above
arose on every side the solemn and dreary bulks of Loch na Garr, Morven,
and Culbleen. It was a day and a scene among a thousand. Night fell;
morning again--rose Monday morning! Hundreds of anxious sportsmen
throughout the Highlands, and thousands of their anxious attendants,
eager for a chance for the hills--
"And the rain fell as though the world would drown!"
When I looked out of my bed-room window, there were men and boys
standing in front of the inn, casting dreary looks at the ragged and
low-sweeping curtains of clouds that shrouded every hill, and then
longing looks at the windows, if the slightest possible breaks in those
clouds occurred, hoping to be called and engaged as guides and
game-carriers on the hills. Keepers were walking about, and bringing
bags of shot in. Men and boys, already looking wet and dirty, as if they
had tramped with their strong shoes some distance out of the country to
come hither, asked them if they thought it would take up; and they cast
knowing looks at the clouds and shook their heads. But anon! as if in
very desperation, there were dogs let loose, which ran helter-skelter
over the bridge toward the hills, full of eager life for the sport; and
gigs full of gentlemen, three or four together, packed close, in white
hats, or glazed and turned-up wide-awakes, and their shooting-jackets
close buttoned up, with their guns erect at their sides, setting off for
their shooting-grounds. They were determined to be at their stations,
perhaps some ten miles off, and take the chance of a change in the
weather. Good luck to them!
I took my way back again to Aberdeen; and lo! at Banchory the inn door
still crowded with livery-servants, and poor Sir John Guest still seated
at the selfsame window, with long and melancholy face watching the
clouds! Truly the sporting, not less than the Christian life, has its
crosses and its mortifications.
Lord Byron's first journey in England was with his mother, to see his
ancestral abode--his abbey and estate of Newstead. It was a considerable
step from the rooms over the shop at Aberdeen, or the little hut at
Ballatrich, with £123 a year; but yet, for a lord, it was no very
magnificent subject of contemplation. The estate had been dreadfully
denuded of wood, and showed a sandy nakedness of meager land, the rental
of a great part of which would be high at ten shillings an acre. The old
abbey was dilapidated, and menacing in various places to tumble in. The
gardens were a wilderness of neglect:
"Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle;
Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay;
In thy once smiling garden, the hemlock and thistle
Have choked up the rose which late bloomed in the way."
The place was, after a time, let to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, who let ruin
take its course, as the old lord had done. When the old lord died, the
host of crickets which he had fed are said to have taken immediate
flight, issuing forth in such a train that the servants could scarcely
move without treading on them. When Lord Grey's lease was out, he and
his hounds took their flight in like manner; but this was some years
afterward, and for the present Mrs. Byron betook herself to Nottingham,
and placed her son under the care of Mr. Rogers, the principal
schoolmaster there, and under that of a quack, one Lavender, to
straighten his feet. Thence they removed to London, where they resided
in Sloane Terrace, and Byron was sent to Dr. Glennie's school at
Dulwich. Thence he was removed to Harrow, and during the years he spent
there Mrs. Byron went to reside again at Nottingham, and afterward at
Southwell, with occasional visits to Bath and Cheltenham. Harrow and
Cambridge were, of course, for the chief part of the years of his
minority, his proper homes, but the vacations were chiefly spent at
Southwell, with frequent visits to Newstead and Annesley. Before his
minority, however, expired, Lord Grey de Ruthyn had quitted Newstead,
leaving it in a deplorable state of dilapidation, and Lord Byron
incurred great expense in repairing the abbey, much, indeed, beyond the
reach of his resources. His income was small; for the best part of his
ancestral property had been sold by the late lord, especially the
Rochdale estate, which was afterward recovered. The allowance for his
education was all that he could claim from his trustees, and his
mother's small income was eked out by a pension of £300 per annum. The
debts incurred by him for the repairs of Newstead not being legally
recoverable, as they were incurred by a minor, remained for years
unpaid; and the importunities of his creditors were one of the strongest
motives for his early traveling abroad. The failure of his hope of
marrying Miss Chaworth, and adding her estate, which adjoined his own,
to Newstead, was, both in affection and in point of fortune, a severe
blow. His embarrassments finally compelled him to sell Newstead, and to
make a _marriage de convenance_, which, to a person of his peculiar
temperament, habits, and opinions, was certain to result in trouble and
disunion. From these causes his life became unsettled and imbittered,
and scarcely had he reached the period at which his fame ought to have
made his native land the proudest and happiest of all lands to him, when
he abandoned it forever, and
"In the wilds
Of fiery climes he made himself a home,
And his soul drank their sunbeams: he was girt
With strange and dusky aspects: he was not
Himself like what he had been: on the sea
And on the shore he was a wanderer."
_The Dream_, vol. x., p. 249.
Of Newstead and Annesley I have given a particular account in The Rural
Life of England. To these I must refer, and have only to add that, in
the hands of Lord Byron's old schoolfellow, Colonel Wildman, Newstead is
restored and maintained as all lovers of English genius would wish it to
be, and is ever open to their survey. Since that account, too, the old
hall of Annesley has undergone a renovation, and that scene of
melancholy, desertion, and decay there described, exists now only in the
volume which recorded it. In the present paper Southwell and Harrow will
chiefly demand our attention.
Southwell, during the period of his Harrow school-life, became a most
favorite resort of his. His mother had settled down there. Body and mind
were now in progress of expansion toward manhood. His relish for
society, his love of fame, and his love of poetry, were every day more
and more developing themselves. But his world yet was only the school
world. He was shy in general society. Here, however, he formed a group
of friends of superior taste and education, in whose quiet little circle
he became speedily at home, and for a time into this circle he seemed to
throw himself, with all his heart and youthful enthusiasm. The Pigotts,
the Beechers, the Leacrofts, &c., were his friends. Here he used to
spend his summer vacations; here, it seems, he spent nearly the whole of
one year. His dogs, his horses, firing at marks, swimming, and private
theatricals, were his amusements, and for a time Southwell was his
world. The Pigotts were his great friends, and there he went in and out,
spent his evenings or spent his days, to his great contentment. A wider
and a gayer world had not yet opened upon him, and for a season
Southwell and his friends there were every thing to him. Of course, in
this little circle he was the great hero; it is not often that a little
Cathedral town can catch a live lord; nothing could be done without him;
every flattering attention awaited him; and for a time he was not too
conversant with the great world for the little one of Southwell to be
spoiled to him. Hence he made occasional visits to Newstead and
Annesley, with whose heiress he had fallen deeply in love. Here he began
to cultivate more sedulously the composition of poetry, in which he was
warmly encouraged by his most intimate friends, the Pigotts and Mr.
Beecher, all persons of very refined taste, and here, eventually, he put
his first volume to press, with Ridge, a printer at Newark. It was from
Southwell that he made an excursion to Scarborough with his young friend
Mr., since Dr. Pigott, and was much smitten with a fair Quakeress, to
whom he addressed the verses published in his Hours of Idleness. But he
had not been long at Cambridge, and seen something too of London, before
the charm of Southwell had vanished, and we find him protesting that he
hated Southwell. "Oh! Southwell, Southwell, how I rejoice to have left
thee, and how I curse the heavy hours I dragged along, for so many
months, among the Mohawks who inhabit your kraals!" During the time that
he spent there, his hours certainly did not drag very heavily. It was
only on looking back from a gay scene that they appeared so to him. No
one who now visits that quiet village will be surprised that a scene so
still, though so naturally pleasant, could not long hold a spirit of so
restless a caste. For, by his own experience,
"Quiet to quick spirits is a hell."
Most of his old friends have long left the place. Dr. Pigott, to
practice at Nottingham; others are dead. Miss Pigott still lives in the
house which her society and music made so agreeable to him. Mr. Beecher
too still lives, and has not lived without setting the stamp of his mind
on the age. To him we are, in fact, indebted for the New Poor Law. Long
before the old act was rescinded, he resolved to test its powers, and he
proved that if exerted they were equal to the utmost necessity of the
country. He and his friend, the Rev. Mr. Lowe, of Bingham, enforced
these powers in their respective parishes, where the poor's rates had
grown to an equality with the rental, and the spirit of pauperism showed
itself in its worst shape, that of the demoralized indolence and
insolence of the young and able-bodied laborers. These gentlemen began
by adopting the plan of refusing any relief to such except in the shape
of labor. They insisted on all such as they pleased coming into the
house, and there carried out the plan of separating husbands, wives, and
children. The uproar that this produced was terrible. The people
threatened to destroy the authors of this scheme, and demolish their
property. Soldiers were obliged to be called in at Bingham, and finally
the magistrates triumphed. The paupers were reduced to obedience, and
the parish rates fell to a nominal sum. These facts and results were
published by Mr. Beecher in a pamphlet, which, falling into Lord
Brougham's hands, became the seed of the New Poor Law. The merits of
that law do not claim discussion here; it was only necessary to point
out this great fact of the life of that early friend of Lord Byron,
whose influence was so great with him as to induce him to commit his
first volume to the flames.
In the summer of 1845 I paid a visit to Southwell. The day, for a
wonder, was fine, for a more rainy or cold June never passed. The little
town looked very pleasant in its quietness. Every one knows how a
Cathedral town does look; all asleep in the sunshine, if sunshine there
be. A few shops, that seem to be expecting customers sometimes; a large
inn, that must, too, have visitors sometimes, or it could not exist. A
number of pleasant villas in their pleasant gardens, full of roses, and
green plots not shaven quite so close as in greater and smarter places,
amid a great deal of greenness every where in gardens, crofts, and
meadows. The old minster standing aloft in venerable and profoundly
silent majesty, in its ample green burial-ground.
The minster at Southwell is much finer than I had supposed. It has three
square towers; two at the west end, and one, I think, near the east. It
is Saxon; has fine, zigzag archway doors at the west, and also at the
north and south porches. In the north porch, each side is lined with
those crossed arches, which form pointed arches, and are supposed to
have first discovered them to the builders. The outer walls have also
zigzag bands. The windows have been inserted, many of them, since the
minster was built. Some are early English; some of the Perpendicular
Order; but there are also round-headed ones, and round-headed blank
arches on the walls of the tower. All is in perfect taste, according to
the time in which the work was done, and is kept in excellent
preservation. The inside is particularly neat, and the reading-desk is a
brass eagle, which, having been found at the bottom of the lake at
Newstead, where it is supposed to have been thrown at the dissolution of
the abbey by the monks, would be an object on which Lord Byron would
look with great interest. It contained writings connected with the
estate, which the angry monks might wish to destroy.
We looked into the ruins of the old palace adjoining the minster yard,
where Cardinal Wolsey was entertained on his last journey to York, and
found ourselves in a lovely garden, the walls of which were the gray and
irregular ruins of this ancient fabric, and the house running along one
side of it, evidently, though old, built partly up out of its material.
Every one knows how charming such an old house looks. Its low range, its
irregular windows, its front partly overhung with roses, jasmines, and
figs; the open porch, and the peeps of goodly pictures, or rather the
frames of the pictures, rich curtains, and furniture--the attributes of
wealth; and the greensward of the court garden filling with its velvet
the area between the old and rugged walls.
Under the obliging guidance of Dr. Calvert, I went round to see the
people with whom Byron used to associate; unfortunately, Miss Pigott was
in London. We had a glimpse of her entrance-hall, and that was all. The
house is one of those old-fashioned, rather darkish houses, that one
sees in such places, and in the hall were heaps of busts, apparently
phrenological specimens, and so on.
We went then to the house where Byron's mother lived. It is at the
opposite end of the town, or village. It is called Burgage Manor, and
stands on the top of a sloping green, called Burgage Green, very
pleasantly, and at the back looking over a pleasant stretch of country
toward Farnsfield. The house is a good, large, and pleasant house, but
has, it seems, been considerably enlarged since Mrs. Byron lived in it;
in fact, another half built to it in front. Unluckily, the lady who now
inhabits it was absent too, so that we could learn nothing particular
about it. It was undergoing painting, and we entered it, and walked
about the lower rooms, which are just good, pleasant, modern rooms. The
hall has a number of middling portraits, apparently belonging to the
lady's family. A Mary Childers; several ladies of the name of Mace, a
Rev. Jackson, without a Mr., a John, or Thomas to his name; just
thus--Rev. Jackson, a sandy-haired, schoolmaster-looking man, leaning on
his elbow, and apparently trying to look very full of calculation. One
picture was very funny. It was that of a little girl of about five or
six years old, in an old-fashioned dress, and her hair dressed in a very
wiggish fashion, and apparently powdered. She occupied the center of the
picture, and stood facing you, and on each hand a white rabbit was
partly rearing up and looking at her, and under the three figures stood
their names--MARY MACE, MARY BURTON, and MARY BEECHER. No doubt there
was some story connected with them. I suppose Mary Mace and Mary Beecher
were play-fellows of the little girl, and that she had called her two
white rabbits after them.
Near this house, but on the opposite side of the green, or, rather, of
this corner of the green, is the house of Major Leacroft. This is the
house where Byron used to join in private theatricals. The family which
he was acquainted with is gone; the proprietor dead; and this Major
Leacroft is another sort of man, a wealthy recluse, and collector of
pictures.
In going from one place to another, we went round by the Greet, the
stream in which Byron used to bathe, and where he dived for a lady's
thimble, which he took from her work-box and threw in. The Greet is a
mere brook, and for the most part so shallow that a man would much
sooner crack his skull in it than dive very deep, unless it were above
the mill, where the water is dammed up, or just below the mill-wheel by
the bridge, but that is too public, being in the high road. Such is
Southwell, in Nottinghamshire, which will always be livingly associated
with one of the happiest periods of the life of Lord Byron.
Harrow being so near the metropolis, will naturally draw many visitors,
as another of the happiest scenes of Byron's youthful life. Here he
represents himself to have been eminently happy, and always looked back
to this period of his youth with particular affection. The school-room
where he studied, the tomb where he used to sit in the church-yard, and
the spot where his natural daughter, Allegra, is buried, will always
excite a lively interest. This tomb is still called by the boys at
Harrow, "Byron's tomb," and its identity is very accurately fixed by
himself in a letter to Mr. Murray, when giving direction for the
interment of his daughter. "There is a spot in the churchyard, near the
footpath, on the brow of the hill looking toward Windsor, and a tomb
under a large tree, bearing the name of Peachie or Peachy, where I used
to sit for hours and hours when a boy. This was my favorite spot; but as
I wish to erect a tablet to her memory, the body had better be deposited
in the church. Near the door, on the left hand as you enter, there is a
monument, with a tablet containing these words:
'When Sorrow weeps o'er Virtue's sacred dust,
Our tears become us, and our grief is just:
Such were the tears she shed, who grateful pays
This last sad tribute of her love and praise.'
I recollect them after seventeen years, not from any thing remarkable in
them, but because from my seat in the gallery I had generally my eyes
toward that monument. As near as convenient I could wish Allegra to be
buried, and on the wall a marble tablet placed, with these words:
In Memory of
Allegra,
Daughter of G. G. Lord Byron,
Who died at Bagna Cavallo,
In Italy, April 20th, 1822,
aged five years and three months.
'I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.'