"The muse, nae poet ever fand her,
Till by himsel' he learned to wander
Adown some trottin' burn's meander,
An' no think lang:
Oh, sweet to muse, and pensive ponder
A heartfelt sang!"--BURNS.
There are delightful walks in the immediate neighbourhood of Conon-side;
and as the workmen--engaged, as I have said, on day's wages--immediately
ceased working as the hour of six arrived, I had, during the summer
months, from three to four hours to myself every evening, in which to
enjoy them. The great hollow occupied by the waters of the Cromarty
Firth divides into two valleys at its upper end, just where the sea
ceases to flow. There is the valley of the Peffer, and the valley of the
Conon; and a tract of broken hills lies between, formed of the Great
Conglomerate base of the Old Red System. The conglomerate, always a
picturesque deposit, terminates some four or five miles higher up the
valley, in a range of rough precipices, as bold and abrupt, though they
front the interior of the country, as if they formed the terminal
barrier of some exposed sea-coast. A few straggling pines crest their
summits; and the noble woods of Brahan Castle, the ancient seat of the
Earls of Seaforth, sweep downwards from their base to the margin of the
Conon. On our own side of the river, the more immature but fresh and
thickly-clustered woods of Conon House rose along the banks; and I was
delighted to find among them a ruinous chapel and ancient
burying-ground, occupying, in a profoundly solitary corner, a little
green hillock, once an island of the river, but now left dry by the
gradual wear of the channel, and the consequent fall of the water to a
lower level. A few broken walls rose on the highest peak of the
eminence; the slope was occupied by the little mossy hillocks and sorely
lichened tombstones that mark the ancient grave-yard; and among the
tombs immediately beside the ruin there stood a rustic dial, with its
iron gnomon worn to an oxydized film, and green with weather-stains and
moss. And around this little lonely yard sprang the young wood, thick as
a hedge, but just open enough towards the west to admit, in slant lines
along the tombstones and the ruins, the red light of the setting sun.
I greatly enjoyed those evening walks. From Conon-side as a centre, a
radius of six miles commands many objects of interest; Strathpeffer,
with its mineral springs--Castle Leod, with its ancient trees, among the
rest, one of the largest Spanish chestnuts in Scotland--Knockferrel,
with its vitrified fort--the old tower of Fairburn--the old though
somewhat modernized tower of Kinkell--the Brahan policies, with the old
Castle of the Seaforths--the old Castle of Kilcoy--and the Druidic
circles of the moor of Redcastle. In succession I visited them all, with
many a sweet scene besides; but I found that my four hours, when the
visit involved, as it sometimes did, twelve miles' walking, left me
little enough time to examine and enjoy. A half-holiday every week would
be a mighty boon to the working man who has acquired a taste for the
quiet pleasures of intellect, and either cultivates an affection for
natural objects, or, according to the antiquary, "loves to look upon
what is old." My recollections of this rich tract of country, with its
woods, and towers, and noble river, seem as if bathed in the red light
of gorgeous sunsets. Its uneven plain of Old Red Sandstone leans, at a
few miles' distance, against dark Highland hills of schistose gneiss,
that, at the line where they join on to the green Lowlands, are low and
tame, but sweep upwards into an alpine region, where the old
Scandinavian flora of the country--that flora which alone flourished in
the times of its boulder clay--still maintains its place against the
Germanic invaders which cover the lower grounds, as the Celt of old used
to maintain exactly the same ground against the Saxon. And at the top of
a swelling moor, just beneath where the hills rise rugged and black,
stands the pale tall tower of Fairburn, that, seen in the gloamin', as I
have often seen it, seems a ghastly spectre of the past, looking from
out its solitude at the changes of the present. The freebooter, its
founder, had at first built it, for greater security, without a door,
and used to climb into it through the window of an upper story by a
ladder. But now unbroken peace brooded over its shattered ivy-bound
walls, and ploughed fields crept up year by year along the moory slope
on which it stood, until at length all became green, and the dark heath
disappeared. There is a poetic age in the life of most individuals, as
certainly as in the history of most nations; and a very happy age it is.
I had now fully entered on it; and enjoyed in my lonely walks along the
Conon, a happiness ample enough to compensate for many a long hour of
toil, and many a privation. I have quoted, as the motto of this chapter,
an exquisite verse from Burns. There is scarce another stanza in the
wide round of British literature that so faithfully describes the mood
which, regularly as the evening came, and after I had buried myself in
the thick woods, or reached some bosky recess of the river bank, used to
come stealing over me, and in which I have felt my heart and intellect
as thoroughly in keeping with the scene and hour as the still woodland
pool beside me, whose surface reflected in the calm every tree and rock
that rose around it, and every hue of the heavens above. And yet the
mood, though sweet, was also, as the poet expresses it, a pensive one:
it was steeped in the happy melancholy sung so truthfully by an elder
bard, who also must have entered deeply into the feeling.
"When I goe musing all alone,
Thinking of divers things foreknowne--
When I builde castles in the air,
Voide of sorrow and voide of care,
Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet--
Methinks the time runs very fleet;
All my joyes to this are follie;--
None soe sweet as melanchollie.
"When to myself I sit and smile,
With pleasing thoughts the time beguile,
By a brook side or wood soe green,
Unheard, unsought for, or unseen,
A thousand pleasures doe me blesse,
And crowne my soul with happiness
All my joyes to this are follie;--
None soe sweet as melanchollie."
When I remember how my happiness was enhanced by every little bird that
burst out into sudden song among the trees, and then as suddenly became
silent, or by every bright-scaled fish that went darting through the
topaz-coloured depths of the water, or rose for a moment over its calm
surface--how the blue sheets of hyacinths that carpeted the openings in
the wood delighted me, and every golden-tinted cloud that gleamed over
the setting sun, and threw its bright flush on the river, seemed to
inform the heart of a heaven beyond--I marvel, in looking over the
scraps of verse produced at the time, to find how little of the
sentiment in which I so luxuriated, or of the nature which I so enjoyed,
found their way into them. But what Wordsworth well terms "the
accomplishment of verse," given to but few, is as distinct from the
poetic faculty vouchsafed to many, as the ability of relishing exquisite
music is distinct from the power of producing it. Nay, there are cases
in which the "faculty" may be very high, and yet the "accomplishment"
comparatively low, or altogether wanting. I have been told by the late
Dr. Chalmers, whose Astronomical Discourses form one of the finest
philosophical poems in any language, that he never succeeded in
achieving a readable stanza; and Dr. Thomas Brown, whose metaphysics
glow with poetry, might, though he produced whole volumes of verse,
have said nearly the same thing of himself. But, like the Metaphysician,
who would scarce have published his verses unless he had thought them
good ones, my rhymes pleased me at this period, and for some time after,
wonderfully well: they came to be so associated in my mind with the
scenery amid which they were composed, and the mood which it rarely
failed of inducing, that though they neither breathed the mood nor
reflected the scenery, they always suggested both; on the principle, I
suppose, that a pewter spoon, bearing the London stamp, suggested to a
crew of poor weather-beaten sailors in one of the islands of the
Pacific, their far-distant home and its enjoyments. One of the pieces
suggested at this time I shall, however, venture on submitting to the
reader. The few simple thoughts which it embodies arose in the solitary
churchyard among the woods, beside the aged, lichen-incrusted
dial-stone.
ON SEEING A SUN-DIAL IN A CHURCHYARD
Grey dial-stone, I fain would know
What motive placed thee here,
Where darkly opes the frequent grave,
And rests the frequent bier.
Ah! bootless creeps the dusky shade,
Slow o'er thy figured plain:
When mortal life has passed away,
Time counts his hours in vain.
As sweeps the clouds o'er ocean's breast,
When shrieks the wintry wind.
So doubtful thoughts, grey dial-stone,
Come sweeping o'er my mind.
I think of what could place thee here,
Of those beneath thee laid,
And ponder if thou wert not raised
In mockery o'er the dead.
Nay, man, when on life's stage they fret.
May mock his fellow-men!
In sooth, their soberest freaks afford
Rare food for mockery then.
But ah! when passed their brief sojourn--
When Heaven's dread doom is said--
Beats there the human heart could pour
Like mockeries o'er the dead?
The fiend unblest, who still to harm
Directs his felon power,
May ope the book of grace to him
Whose day of grace is o'er;
But never sure could mortal man,
Whate'er his age or clime,
Thus raise in mockery o'er the dead,
The stone that measures time.
Grey dial-stone, I fain would know
What motive placed thee here,
Where sadness heaves the frequent sigh,
And drops the frequent tear.
Like thy carved plain, grey dial-stone,
Grief's weary mourners be:
Dark sorrow metes out time to them--
Dark shade marks time on thee.
I know it now: wert thou not placed
To catch the eye of him
To whom, through glistening tears, earth's gauds
Worthless appear, and dim?
We think of time when time has fled,
The friend our tears deplore;
The God whom pride-swollen hearts deny,
Grief-humbled hearts adore.
Grey stone, o'er thee the lazy night
Passes untold away;
Nor were it thine at noon to teach
If failed the solar ray.
In death's dark night, grey dial-stone,
Cease all the works of men;
In life, if Heaven withhold its aid,
Bootless these works and vain.
Grey dial-stone, while yet thy shade
Points out those hours are mine--
While yet at early morn I rise--
And rest at day's decline--
Would that the SUN that formed thine,
His bright rays beamed on me,
That I, wise for the final day,
Might measure time, like thee!
These were happy evenings--all the more happy from the circumstance that
I was still in heart and appetite a boy, and could relish as much as
ever, when their season came on, the wild raspberries of the Conon
woods--a very abundant fruit in that part of the country--and climb as
lightly as ever, to strip the guean-trees of their wild cherries. When
the river was low, I used to wade into its fords in quest of its pearl
muscles (_Unio Margaritiferus_); and, though not very successful in my
pearl-fishing, it was at least something to see how thickly the
individuals of this greatest of British fresh-water molluscs lay
scattered among the pebbles of the fords, or to mark them creeping
slowly along the bottom--when, in consequence of prolonged droughts, the
current had so moderated that they were in no danger of being swept
away--each on its large white foot, with its valves elevated over its
back, like the carpace of some tall tortoise. I found occasion at this
time to conclude, that the _Unio_ of our river-fords secretes pearls so
much more frequently than the _Unionidae_ and _Anadonta_ of our still
pools and lakes, not from any specific peculiarity in the constitution
of the creature, but from the effects of the habitat which it is its
nature to choose. It receives in the fords and shallows of a rapid river
many a rough blow from sticks and pebbles carried down in times of
flood, and occasionally from the feet of the men and animals that cross
the stream during droughts; and the blows induce the morbid secretions
of which pearls are the result. There seems to exist no inherent cause
why _Anadon Cygnea_, with its beautiful silvery nacre--as bright often,
and always more delicate than that of _Unio Margaritiferus_--should not
be equally productive of pearls; but, secure from violence in its still
pools and lakes, and unexposed to the circumstances that provoke
abnormal secretions, it does not produce a single pearl for every
hundred that are ripened into value and beauty by the exposed
current-tossed _Unionidae_ of our rapid mountain rivers. Would that
hardship and suffering bore always in a creature of a greatly higher
family similar results, and that the hard buffets dealt him by fortune
in the rough stream of life could be transmuted, by some blessed
internal predisposition of his nature, into pearls of great price.
It formed one of my standing enjoyments at this time to bathe, as the
sun was sinking behind the woods, in the deeper pools of the Conon--a
pleasure which, like all the more exciting pleasures of youth, bordered
on terror. Like that of the poet, when he "wantoned with the breakers,"
and the "freshening sea made them a terror," "'twas a pleasing fear."
But it was not current nor freshening eddy that rendered it such: I had
acquired, long before, a complete mastery over all my motions in the
water, and, setting out from the shores of the Bay of Cromarty, have
swam round vessels in the roadstead, when, among the many boys of a
seaport town, not more than one or two would venture to accompany me;
but the poetic age is ever a credulous one, as certainly in individuals
as in nations: the old fears of the supernatural may be modified and
etherealized, but they continue to influence it; and at this period the
Conon still took its place among the haunted streams of Scotland. There
was not a river in the Highlands that used, ere the erection of the
stately bridge in our neighbourhood, to sport more wantonly with human
life--an evidence, the ethnographer might perhaps say, of its purely
Celtic origin; and as Superstition has her figures as certainly as
Poesy, the perils of a wild mountain-born stream, flowing between
thinly-inhabited banks, were personified in the beliefs of the people by
a frightful goblin, that took a malignant delight in luring into its
pools, or overpowering in its fords, the benighted traveller. Its
goblin, the "water-wraith," used to appear as a tall woman dressed in
green, but distinguished chiefly by her withered, meagre countenance,
ever distorted by a malignant scowl. I knew all the various
fords--always dangerous ones--where of old she used to start, it was
said, out of the river, before the terrified traveller, to point at him,
as in derision, with her skinny finger, or to beckon him invitingly on;
and I was shown the very tree to which a poor Highlander had clung,
when, in crossing the river by night, he was seized by the goblin, and
from which, despite of his utmost exertions, though assisted by a young
lad, his companion, he was dragged into the middle of the current,
where he perished. And when, in swimming at sunset over some dark pool,
where the eye failed to mark or the foot to sound the distant bottom,
the twig of some sunken bush or tree has struck against me as I passed,
I have felt, with sudden start, as if touched by the cold, bloodless
fingers of the goblin.
The old chapel among the woods formed the scene, says tradition, of an
incident similar to that which Sir Walter Scott relates in his "Heart of
Mid-Lothian," when borrowing, as the motto of the chapter in which he
describes the preparations for the execution of Porteous, from an author
rarely quoted--the Kelpie. "The hour's come," so runs the extract, "but
not the man;"--nearly the same words which the same author employs in
his "Guy Mannering," in the cave scene between Meg Merrilies and Dirk
Hatteraick. "There is a tradition," he adds in the accompanying note,
"that while a little stream was swollen into a torrent by recent
showers, the discontented voice of the water-spirit was heard to
pronounce these words. At the same moment, a man urged on by his fate,
or, in Scottish language, _fey_, arrived at a gallop, and prepared to
cross the water. No remonstrance from the bystanders was of power to
stop him: he plunged into the stream, and perished." So far Sir Walter.
The Ross-shire story is fuller, and somewhat different in its details.
On a field in the near neighbourhood of the chapel, now laid out into
the gardens of Conon House, there was a party of Highlanders engaged in
an autumnal day at noon, some two or three centuries ago, in cutting
down their corn, when the boding voice of the wraith was heard rising
from the Conon beneath--"The hour's come, but not the man." Immediately
after, a courier on horseback was seen spurring down the hill in hot
haste, making directly for what is known as a "fause ford," that lies
across the stream just opposite the old building, in the form of a
rippling bar, which, indicating apparently, though very falsely, little
depth of water, is flanked by a deep black pool above and below. The
Highlanders sprang forward to warn him of his danger, and keep him back;
but he was unbelieving and in haste, and rode express, he said, on
business that would brook no delay; and as for the "fause ford," if it
could not be ridden, it could be swam; and, whether by riding or
swimming, he was resolved on getting across. Determined, however, on
saving him in his own despite, the Highlanders forced him from his
horse, and, thrusting him into the little chapel, locked him in; and
then, throwing open the door when the fatal hour had passed, they called
to him that he might now pursue his journey. But there was no reply, and
no one came forth; and on going in they found him lying cold and stiff,
with his face buried in the water of a small stone font. He had fallen,
apparently, in a fit, athwart the wall; and his predestined hour having
come, he was suffocated by the few pints of water in the projecting
font. At this time the stone font of the tradition--a rude trough,
little more than a foot in diameter either way--was still to be seen
among the ruins; and, like the veritable cannon in the Castle of
Udolpho, beside which, according to Annette, the ghost used to take its
stand, it imparted by its solid reality a degree of authenticity to the
story in this part of the country, which, if unfurnished with a "local
habitation," as in Sir Walter's note, it would have wanted. Such was one
of the many stories of the Conon with which I became acquainted at a
time when the beliefs they exemplified were by no means quite dead, and
of which I could think as tolerably serious realities, when, lying a-bed
all alone at midnight, the solitary inmate of a dreary barrack,
listening to the roar of the Conon.
Besides the long evenings, we had an hour to breakfast, and another to
dinner. Much of the breakfast hour was spent in cooking our food; but as
a bit of oaten cake and a draught of milk usually served us for the
mid-day meal, the greater part of the hour assigned to _it_ was
available for purposes of rest or amusement. And when the day was fine,
I used to spend it by the side of a mossy stream, within a few minutes'
walk of the work-shed, or in a neighbouring planting, beside a little
irregular lochan, fringed round with flags and rushes. The mossy stream,
black in its deeper pools, as if it were a rivulet of tar, contained a
good many trout, which had acquired a hue nearly as deep as its own, and
formed the very negroes of their race. They were usually of small
size--for the stream itself was small; and, though little countries
sometimes produce great men, little streams rarely produce great fish.
But on one occasion, towards the close of autumn, when a party of the
younger workmen set themselves, in a frolic, to sweep it with torch and
spear, they succeeded in capturing, in a dark alder-o'ershaded pool, a
monstrous individual, nearly three feet in length, and proportionally
bulky, with a snout bent over the lower jaw at its symphysis, like the
beak of a hawk, and as deeply tinged (though with more of brown in its
complexion) as the blackest coal-fish I ever saw. It must have been a
bull-trout, a visitor from the neighbouring river; but we all concluded
at the time, from the extreme dinginess of its coat, that it had lived
for years in its dark pool, a hermit apart from its fellows. I am not
now, however, altogether certain that the inference was a sound one.
Some fishes, like some men, have a wonderful ability of assuming the
colours that best suit their interests for the time. I have been unable
to determine whether the trout be one of these conformists; but it used
to strike me at this period as at least curious, that the fishes in even
the lower reaches of the dark little rivulet should differ so entirely
in hue from those of the greatly clearer Conon, into which its peaty
waters fall, and whose scaly denizens are of silvery brightness. No fish
seems to possess a more complete power over its dingy coat than a very
abundant one in the estuary of the Conon--the common flounder. Standing
on the bank, I have startled these creatures from off the patch of
bottom on which they lay--visible to only a very sharp eye--by pitching
a very small pebble right over them. Was the patch a pale one--for a
minute or so they carried its pale colour along with them into some
darker tract, where they remained distinctly visible from the contrast,
until, gradually acquiring the deeper hue, they again became
inconspicuous. But if startled back to the same pale patch from which
they had set out, I have then seen them visible for a minute or so, from
their over-dark tint, until, gradually losing it in turn, they paled
down, as at first, to the colour of the lighter ground. An old
Highlander, whose suit of tartan conformed to the general hue of the
heather, was invisible at a little distance, when traversing a moor, but
came full into view in crossing a green field or meadow: the suit given
by nature to the flounder, tinted apparently on the same principle of
concealment, exhibits a degree of adaptation to its varying
circumstances, which the tartan wanted. And it is certainly curious
enough to find, in one of our commonest fishes, a property which used to
be regarded as one of the standing marvels of the zoology of those
remote countries of which the chameleon is a native.
The pond in the piece of planting, though as unsightly a little patch of
water as might be, was, I found, a greatly richer study than the dark
rivulet. Mean and small as it was--not larger in area inside its fringe
of rushes than a fashionable drawing-room--its natural history would
have formed an interesting volume; and many a half-hour have I spent
beside it in the heat of the day, watching its numerous
inhabitants--insect, reptilian, and vermiferous. There were
two--apparently _three_--different species of libellula that used to
come and deposit their eggs in it--one of the two, that large kind of
dragon-fly (_Eshna grandis_), scarce smaller than one's
middle-finger--which is so beautifully coloured black and yellow, as if
adorned by the same taste one sees displayed in the chariots and
liveries of the fashionable world. The other fly was a greatly more
slender and smaller species or genus, rather _Agrion_; and it seemed
two, not one, from the circumstance, that about one-half the individuals
were beautifully variegated black and sky-blue, the other half black and
bright crimson. But the peculiarity was merely a sexual one: as if in
illustration of those fine analogies with which all nature is charged,
the sexes put on the _complementary_ colours, and are mutually
fascinating, not by resembling, but by _corresponding_ to, each other. I
learned in time to distinguish the disagreeable-looking larvae of these
flies, both larger and smaller, with their six hairy legs, and their
grotesque formidable vizors, and found that they were the very pirates
of the water, as the splendid insects into which they were ultimately
developed were the very tyrants of the lower air. It was strange to see
the beautiful winged creature that sprang out of the pupa into which the
repulsive-looking pirate had been transformed, launch forth into its new
element, changed in everything save its nature, but still unchanged in
that, and rendering itself as formidable to the moth and the butterfly
as it had been before to the newt and the tadpole. There is, I daresay,
an analogy here also. It is in the first state of our own species, as
certainly as in that of the dragon-fly, that the character is fixed.
Further, I used to experience much interest in watching the progress of
the frog, in its earlier stages from the egg to the fish; then from the
fish to the reptile fish, with its fringed tail, and ventral and
pectoral _limbs_; and, last of all, from the reptile fish to the
complete reptile. I had not yet learned--nor was it anywhere known at
the time--that the history of the individual frog, through these
successive transformations, is a history in small of the animal creation
itself in its earlier stages--that in order of time the egg-like mollusc
had taken precedence of the fish, and the fish of the reptile; and that
an intermediate order of creatures had once abounded, in which, as in
the half-developed frog, the natures of both fish and reptile were
united. But, though unacquainted with this strange analogy, the
transformations were of themselves wonderful enough to fill for a time
my whole mind. I remember being struck one afternoon, after spending my
customary spare half hour beside the pond, and marking the peculiar
style of colouring in the yellow and black libellulidae in the common
wasp, and in a yellow and black species of ichneumon fly, to detect in
some half-dozen gentlemen's carriages that were standing opposite our
work-shed--for the good old knight of Conon House had a dinner-party
that evening--exactly the same style of ornamental colouring. The
greater number of the vehicles were yellow and black--just as these were
the prevailing colours among the wasps and libellulidae; but there was a
slight admixture of other colours among them too: there was at least one
that was black and green, or black and blue, I forget which; and another
black and brown. And so it was among the insects also: the same sort of
taste, both in colour and the arrangements of colour, and even in the
proportions of the various colours, seemed to have regulated the style
of ornament manifested in the carriages of the dinner party, and of the
insect visitors of the pond. Further, I thought I could detect a
considerable degree of resemblance in form between a chariot and an
insect. There was a great _abdominal_ body separated by a narrow isthmus
from a _thoracic_ coach-box, where the directing power was stationed;
while the wheels, poles, springs, and general framework on which the
vehicle rested, corresponded to the wings, limbs, and antennae of the
insect. There was at least sufficient resemblance of form to justify
resemblance of colour; and here _was_ the actual resemblance of colour
which the resemblance of form justified. I remember that, in musing over
the coincidence, I learned to suspect, for the first time, that it might
be no mere coincidence after all; and that the fact embodied in the
remarkable text which informs us that the Creator made man in his own
image, might in reality lie at its foundation as the proper solution.
Man, spurred by his necessities, has discovered for himself mechanical
contrivances, which he has afterwards found anticipated as contrivances
of the Divine Mind, in some organism, animal or vegetable. In the same
way his sense of beauty in form or colour originates some pleasing
combination of lines or tints; and then he discovers that _it_ also has
been anticipated. He gets his chariot tastefully painted black and
yellow, and lo! the wasp that settles on its wheel, or the dragon-fly
that darts over it, he finds painted in exactly the same style. His
neighbour, indulging in a different taste, gets _his_ vehicle painted
black and blue, and lo! some lesser libellula or ichneumon fly comes
whizzing past, to justify his style of ornament also, but at the same
time to show that it, too, had existed ages before.
The evenings gradually closed in as the season waned--at first
abridging, and at length wholly interdicting, my evening walks; and
having no other place to which to retire, save the dark, gousty hay-loft
into which a light was never admitted, I had to seek the shelter of the
barrack, and succeeded usually in finding a seat within at least _sight_
of the fire. The place was greatly over-crowded; and, as in all
over-large companies, it had commonly its four or five groups of
talkers; each group furnished with a topic of its own. The elderly men
spoke about the state of the markets, and speculated, in especial, on
the price of oatmeal; the apprentices talked about lasses; while knots
of intermediate age discussed occasionally both markets and lasses too,
or spoke of old companions, their peculiarities and history, or
expatiated on the adventures of former work seasons, and the characters
of the neighbouring lairds. Politics proper I never heard. During the
whole season a newspaper never once entered the barrack door. At times a
song or story secured the attention of the whole barrack; and there was
in especial one story-teller whose powers of commanding attention were
very great. He was a middle-aged Highlander, not very skilful as a
workman, and but indifferently provided with English; and as there
usually attaches a nickname to persons in the humbler walks that are
marked by any eccentricity of character, he was better known among his
brother workmen as Jock Mo-ghoal, _i.e._ John my Darling, than by his
proper name. Of all Jock Mo-ghoal's stories Jock Mo-ghoal was himself
the hero; and certainly most wonderful was the invention of the man. As
recorded in his narratives, his life was one long epic poem, filled with
strange and startling adventure, and furnished with an extraordinary
machinery of the wild and supernatural; and though all knew that Jock
made imagination supply, in his histories, the place of memory, not even
Ulysses or AEneas--men who, unless very much indebted to their poets,
must have been of a similar turn--could have attracted more notice at
the courts of Alcinuous or Dido, than Jock in the barrack. The workmen
used, on the mornings after big greater narratives, to look one another
full in the face, and ask, with a smile rather incipient than fully
manifest, whether "Jock wasna perfectly wonderfu' last nicht?"
He had several times visited the south of Scotland, as one of a band of
Highland reapers, for employment in his proper profession very often
failed poor Jock; and these journeys formed the grand occasions of his
adventures. One of his narratives commenced, I remember, with a
frightful midnight scene in a solitary churchyard. Jock had lost his way
in the darkness; and, after stumbling among burial-mounds and
tombstones, he had toppled into an open grave, which was of a depth so
profound, that for some time he failed to escape from it, and merely
pulled down upon himself, in his attempts to climb its loose sides,
musty skulls, and great thigh-bones, and pieces of decayed coffins. At
length, however, he did succeed in getting out, just as a party of
unscrupulous resurrectionists were in the act of entering the
burying-ground; and they, naturally enough preferring an undecayed
subject that had the life in it to preserve it fresh, to dead corpses
the worse for the keeping, gave him chase; and it was with the extremest
difficulty that, after scudding over wild moors and through dark woods,
he at length escaped them by derning himself in a fox-earth. The season
of autumnal labour over, he visited Edinburgh on his way north; and was
passing along the High Street, when, seeing a Highland girl on the
opposite side with whom he was intimate, and whom he afterwards married,
he strode across to address her, and a chariot coming whirling along the
street at the time at full speed, he was struck by the pole and knocked
down. The blow had taken him full on the chest; but though the bone
seemed injured, and the integuments became frightfully swollen and
livid, he was able to get up; and, on asking to be shown the way to a
surgeon's shop, his acquaintance the girl brought him to an under-ground
room in one of the narrow lanes off the street, which, save for the
light of a great fire, would have been pitch dark at mid-day, and in
which he found a little wrinkled old woman, as yellow as the smoke that
filled the apartment. "Choose," said the hag, as she looked at the
injured part, "one of two things--a cure slow but sure, or sudden but
imperfect. Or shall I put back the hurt altogether till you get home?"
"That, that," said Jock; "if I were ance home I could bear it well
enouch." The hag began to pass her hand over the injured part, and to
mutter under her breath some potent charm; and as she muttered and
manipulated, the swelling gradually subsided, and the livid tints
blanched, till at length nought remained to tell of the recent accident
save a pale spot in the middle of the breast, surrounded by a
thread-like circle of blue. And now, she said, you are well for three
weeks; but be prepared for the fourth. Jock prosecuted his northward
journey, and encountered the usual amount of adventure by the way. He
was attacked by robbers, but, assistance coming up, he succeeded in
beating them off. He lost his way in a thick mist, but found shelter,
after many hours' wandering far among the hills, in a deserted
shepherd's shielin'. He was nearly buried in a sudden snow-storm that
broke out by night, but, getting into the middle of a cooped-up flock
of sheep, they kept him warm and comfortable amid the vast
drift-wreaths, till the light of morning enabled him to prosecute his
journey. At length he reached home, and was prosecuting his ordinary
avocations, when the third week came to a close; and he was on a lonely
moor at the very hour he had met with the accident on the High Street,
when he suddenly heard the distant rattle of a chariot, though not a
shadow of the vehicle was to be seen; the sounds came bearing down upon
him, heightening as they approached, and, when at the loudest, a violent
blow on the breast prostrated him on the moor. The stroke of the High
Street "had come back," just as the wise woman had said it would, though
with accompaniments that Jock had not anticipated. It was with
difficulty he reached his cottage that evening; and there elapsed fully
six weeks ere he was able to quit it again. Such, in its outlines, was
one of the marvellous narratives of Jock Mo-ghoal. He belonged to a
curious class, known by specimen, in, I suppose, almost every locality,
especially in the more primitive ones--for the smart ridicule common in
the artificial states of society greatly stunt their growth; and in our
literature--as represented by the Bobadils, Young Wildings, Caleb
Balderstons, and Baron Munchausens--they hold a prominent place. The
class is to be found of very general development among the vagabond
tribes. I have listened to wonderful personal narratives that had not a
word of truth in them, "from gipsies brown in summer glades that bask,"
as I took my seat beside their fire, in a wild rock-cave in the
neighbourhood of Rosemarkie, or at a later period in the cave of Marcus;
and in getting into conversation with individuals of the more thoroughly
lapsed classes of our large towns, I have found that a faculty of
extemporary fabrication was almost the only one which I could calculate
on finding among them in a state of vigorous activity. That in some
cases the propensity should be found co-existing with superior calibre
and acquirement, and with even a sense of honour by no means very
obtuse, must be regarded as one of the strange anomalies which so often
surprise and perplex the student of human character. As a misdirected
toe-nail, injured by pressure, sometimes turns round, and, re-entering
the flesh, vexes it into a sore, it would seem as if that noble
inventive faculty to which we owe the parable and the epic poem, were
liable, when constrained by self-love, to similar misdirections; and
certainly, when turned inwards upon its possessor, the moral character
festers or grows callous around it.
There was no one in the barrack with whom I cared much to converse, or
who, in turn, cared much to converse with me; and so I learned, on the
occasions when the company got dull, and broke up into groups, to retire
to the hay-loft where I slept, and pass there whole hours seated on my
chest. The loft was a vast apartment, some fifty or sixty feet in
length, with its naked rafters raised little more than a man's height
over the floor; but in the starlit nights, when the openings in the wall
assumed the character of square patches of darkness-visible stamped upon
utter darkness, it looked quite as well as any other unlighted place
that could not be seen; and in nights brightened by the moon, the pale
beams, which found access at openings and crevices, rendered its wide
area quite picturesque enough for ghosts to walk in. But I never saw
any; and the only sounds I heard were those made by the horses in the
stable below, champing and snorting over their food. They were, I doubt
not, happy enough in their dark stalls, because they were horses, and
had plenty to eat; and I was at times quite happy enough in the dark
loft above, because I was a man, and could think and imagine. It is, I
believe, Addison who remarks, that if all the thoughts which pass
through men's minds were to be made public, the great difference which
seems to exist between the thinking of the wise and of the unwise would
be a good deal reduced; seeing that it is a difference which does not
consist in their not having the same weak thoughts in common, but
merely in the prudence through which the wise suppress their foolish
ones. I still possess notes of the cogitations of these solitary
evenings, ample enough to show that they were extraordinary combinations
of the false and the true; but I at the same time hold them sufficiently
in memory to remember, that I scarce, if at all, distinguished between
what was false and true in them at the time. The literature of almost
every people has a corresponding early stage, in which fresh thinking is
mingled with little conceits, and in which the taste is usually false,
but the feeling true.
Let me present my young readers, from my notes, with the variously
compounded cogitations of one of these quiet evenings. What formed so
long ago one of my exercises may now form one of theirs, if they but set
themselves to separate the solid from the unsolid thinking contained in
my abstract.
MUSINGS.
"I stood last summer on the summit of Tor-Achilty [a pyramidal hill
about six miles from Conon side], and occupied, when there, the
centre of a wide circle, about fifty miles in diameter. I can still
call up its rough-edged sea of hills, with the clear blue firmament
arching over, and the slant rays of the setting sun gleaming
athwart. Yes, over that circular field, fifty miles across, the
firmament closed all around at the horizon, as a watch-glass closes
round the dial-plate of the watch. Sky and earth seemed
co-extensive; and yet how incalculably vast their difference of
area! Thousands of systems seemed but commensurate, to the eye,
with a small district of earth fifty miles each way. But capacious
as the human imagination has been deemed, can it conceive of an
area of wider field? Mine cannot. My mind cannot take in more at a
glance, if I may so speak, than is taken in by the eye. I cannot
conceive of a wider area than that which the sight commands from
the summit of a lofty eminence. I can pass in imagination through
many such areas. I can add field to field _ad infinitum_; and thus
conceive of infinite space, by conceiving of a space which can be
infinitely added to; but all of space that I can take in at one
process, is an area commensurate with that embraced at a glance by
the eye. How, then, have I my conception of the earth as a
whole--of the solar system as a whole--nay, of many systems as a
whole? Just as I have my conceptions of a school-globe or of an
Orrery--by diminution. It is through the diminution induced by
distance that the sidereal heavens only co-extend, as seen from the
top of Tor-Achilty, with a portion of the counties of Ross and
Inverness. The apparent area is the same, but the colouring is
different. Our ideas of greatness, then, are much less dependent on
actual area than on what painters term aerial perspective. The
dimness of distance, and the diminution of parts, are essential to
right conceptions of great magnitude.
"Of the various figures presented to me here, I seize strong hold
of but one. I brood over the picture of the solar system conjured
up. I conceive of the satellites as light shallops that continually
sail round heavier vessels, and consider how much more of space
they must traverse than the orbs to which they are attached. The
entire system is presented to me as an Orrery of the apparent size
of the area of landscape seen from the hill-top; but dimness and
darkness prevent the diminution from communicating that appearance
of littleness to the whole which would attach to it, were it, like
an actual Orrery, sharply defined and clear. As the picture rises
before me, the entire system seems to possess, what I suspect it
wants, its atmosphere like that of the earth, which reflects the
light of the sun in the different degrees of excessive
brightness--noon-tide splendour, the fainter shades of evening, and
grey twilight obscurity. This veil of light is thickest towards the
centre of the system; for when the glance rests on its edges, the
suns of other systems may be seen peeping through. I see Mercury
sparkling to the sun, with its oceans of molten glass, and its
fountains of liquid gold. I see the ice-mountains of Saturn, hoar
through the twilight. I behold the earth rolling upon itself, from
darkness to light, and from light to darkness. I see the clouds of
winter settling over one part of it, with the nether mantle of snow
shining through them; I see in another a brown, dusky waste of sand
lighted up by the glow of summer. One ocean appears smooth as a
mirror--another is black with tempest. I see the pyramid of shade
which each of the planets casts from its darkened side into the
space behind; and I perceive the stars twinkling through each
opening, as through the angular doors of a pavilion.
"Such is the scene seen at right angles with the plane in which the
planets move; but what would be its aspect if I saw it in the line
of the plane? What would be its appearance if I saw it edgewise?
There arises in my mind one of those uncertainties which so
frequently convince me that I am ignorant. I cannot complete my
picture, for I do not know whether all the planets move in one
plane. How determine the point? A ray of light breaks in. Huzza! I
have found it. If the courses of the planets as seen in the heavens
form parallel lines, then must they all move in one plane; and
_vice versa_. But hold! That would be as seen from the sun--if the
planets _could_ be seen from the sun. The earth is but one of their
own number, and from it the point of view must be disadvantageous.
The diurnal motion must perplex. But no. The apparent motion of
the heavens need not disturb the observation. Let the course of the
planets through the fixed stars, be marked, and though, from the
peculiarity of the point of observation, their motion may at one
time seem more rapid, and at another more slow, yet, if their plane
be, as a workman would say, _out of twist_, their lines will seem
parallel. Still in some doubt, however: I long for a glance at an
Orrery, to determine the point; and then I remember that Ferguson,
an untaught man like myself, had made more Orreries than any one
else, and that mechanical contrivances of the kind were the natural
recourse of a man unskilled in the higher geometry. But it would be
better to be a mathematician than skilful in contriving Orreries. A
man of the Newtonian cast of mind, and accomplished in the
Newtonian learning, could solve the problem where I sat, without an
Orrery.
"From the thing contemplated, I pass to the consideration of the
mind that contemplates. Oh! that wonderful Newton, respecting whom
the Frenchman inquired whether he ate and slept like other men! I
consider how one mind excels another; nay, how one man excels a
thousand; and, by way of illustration, I bethink me of the mode of
valuing diamonds. A single diamond that weighs fifty carats is
deemed more valuable than two thousand diamonds, each of which only
weighs one. My illustration refers exclusively to the native
powers; but may it not, I ask, bear also on the acquisition of
knowledge? Every new idea added to the stock already collected is a
carat added to the diamond; for it is not only valuable in itself,
but it also increases the value of all the others, by giving to
each of them a new link of association.
"The thought links itself on to another, mayhap less sound:--Do not
the minds of men of exalted genius, such as Homer, Milton,
Shakspere, seem to partake of some of the qualities of infinitude?
Add a great many bricks together, and they form a pyramid as huge
as the peak of Teneriffe. Add all the common minds together that
the world ever produced, and the mind of a Shakspere towers over
the whole, in all the grandeur of unapproachable infinity. That
which is infinite admits of neither increase nor diminution. Is it
not so with genius of a certain altitude? Homer, Milton, Shakspere,
were perhaps men of equal powers. Homer was, it is said, a beggar;
Shakspere an illiterate wool-comber; Milton skilled in all human
learning. But they have all risen to an equal height. Learning has
added nothing to the _illimitable_ genius of the one; nor has the
want of it detracted from the _infinite_ powers of the others. But
it is time that I go and prepare supper."
I visited the policies of Conon House a full quarter of a century after
this time--walked round the kiln, once our barrack--scaled the outside
stone-stair of the hay-loft, to stand for half a minute on the spot
where I used to spend whole hours seated on my chest, so long before;
and then enjoyed a quiet stroll among the woods of the Conon. The river
was big in flood: it was exactly such a river Conon as I had lost sight
of in the winter of 1821, and eddied past dark and heavy, sweeping over
bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on islet and mound
seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide; here and there an elastic
branch bent to the current, and rose and bent again; and now a tuft of
withered heath came floating down, and now a soiled wreath of foam. How
vividly the past rose up before me!--boyish day-dreams, forgotten for
twenty years--the fossils of an early formation of mind, produced at a
period when the atmosphere of feeling was warmer than now, and the
immaturities of the mental kingdom grew rank and large, like the ancient
_cryptogamia_, and bore no specific resemblance to the productions of a
riper time. The season I had passed in the neighbourhood so long
before--the first I had anywhere spent among strangers--belonged to an
age when home is not a country, nor a province even, but simply a little
spot of earth, inhabited by friends and relatives; and the verses, long
forgotten, in which my joy had found vent when on the eve of returning
to that home, came chiming as freshly into my memory as if scarce a
month had passed since I had composed them beside the Conon. Here they
are, with all the green juvenility of the home-sickness still about
them--a true petrifaction of an extinct feeling:--
TO THE CONON.
Conon, fair flowed thy mountain stream,
Through blossom'd heath and ripening field.
When, shrunk by summer's fervid beam,
Thy peaceful waves I first beheld.
Calmly they swept thy winding shore.
When harvest's mirthful feast was nigh--
When, breeze-borne, with thy hoarser roar
Came mingling sweet the reapers' cry.
But now I mark thy angry wave
Rush headlong to the stormy sea;
Wildly the blasts of winter rave,
Sad rustling through the leafless tree
Loose on its spray the alder leaf
Hangs wavering, trembling, sear and brow
And dark thy eddies whirl beneath,
And white thy foam comes floating down.
Thy banks with withered shrubs are spread;
Thy fields confess stern winter's reign;
And gleams yon thorn with berries red,
Like banner on a ravaged plain.
Hark! ceaseless groans the leafless wood;
Hark! ceaseless roars thy stream below
Ben-Vaichard's peaks are dark with cloud
Ben-Weavis' crest is white with snow.
And yet, though red thy stream comes down
Though bleak th' encircling hills appear--
Though field be bare, and forest brown,
And winter rule the waning year--
Unmoved I see each charm decay,
Unmourn'd the sweets of autumn die;
And fading flower and leafless spray
Court all in vain the thoughtful sigh.
Not that dull grief delights to see
Vex'd Nature wear a kindred gloom;
Not that she smiled in vain to me,
When gaily prank'd in summer's bloom
Nay, much I loved, at even-tide,
Through Brahan's lonely woods to stray.
To mark thy peaceful billows glide,
And watch the sun's declining ray.
But yet, though roll'd thy billows fair
As e'er roll'd those of classic stream--
Though green thy woods, now dark and bare,
Bask'd beauteous in the western beam;
To mark a scene that childhood loved,
The anxious eye was turned in vain;
Nor could I find the friend approved,
That shared my joy or soothed my pain.
Now winter reigns: these hills no more
Shall sternly bound my anxious view
Soon, bent my course to Croma's shore,
Shall I yon winding path pursue.
Fairer than _here_ gay summer's glow
To me _there_ wintry storms shall seem
Then blow, ye bitter breezes, blow,
And lash the Conon's mountain stream.