At thy lord's door, in slumbers light and blest,
Maida, beneath this marble Maida, rest:
Light lie the turf upon thy gentle breast.
One of the most endearing traits of Scott was that sympathy and harmony
which always existed between him and the brute creation.
Poor Maida seemed cold and lonely, washed by the rain in the damp grass
plat. How sad, yet how expressive is the scriptural phrase for
indicating death! "He shall return to his house no more, neither shall
his place know him any more." And this is what all our homes are coming
to; our buying, our planting, our building, our marrying and giving in
marriage, our genial firesides and dancing children, are all like so
many figures passing through the magic lantern, to be put out at last in
death.
The grounds, I was told, are full of beautiful paths and seats, favorite
walks and lounges of the poet; but the obdurate pertinacity of the rain
compelled us to choose the very shortest path possible to the carriage.
I picked a leaf of the Portugal laurel, which I send you.
Next we were driven to Dryburgh, or rather to the banks of the Tweed,
where a ferryman, with a small skiff waits to take passengers over.
The Tweed is a clear, rippling river, with a white, pebbly bottom, just
like our New England mountain streams. After we landed we were to walk
to the Abbey. Our feet were damp and cold, and our boatman invited us to
his cottage. I found him and all his family warmly interested in the
fortunes of Uncle Tom and his friends, and for his sake they received me
as a long-expected friend. While I was sitting by the ingleside,--that
is, a coal grate,--warming my feet, I fell into conversation with my
host. He and his family, I noticed, spoke English more than Scotch; he
was an intelligent young man, in appearance and style of mind precisely
what you might expect to meet in a cottage in Maine. He and all the
household, even the old grandmother, had read Uncle Tom's Cabin, and
were perfectly familiar with all its details. He told me that it had
been universally read in the cottages in the vicinity. I judged from his
mode of speaking, that he and his neighbors were in the habit of reading
a great deal. I spoke of going to Dryburgh to see the grave of Scott,
and inquired if his works were much read by the common people. He said
that Scott was not so much a favorite with the people as Burns. I
inquired if he took a newspaper. He said that the newspapers were kept
at so high a price that working men were not able to take them;
sometimes they got sight of them through clubs, or by borrowing. How
different, thought I, from America, where a workingman would as soon
think of going without his bread as without his newspaper!
The cottages of these laboring people, of which there were a whole
village along here, are mostly of stone, thatched with straw. This
thatch sometimes gets almost entirely grown over with green moss. Thus
moss-covered was the roof of the cottage where we stopped, opposite to
Dryburgh grounds.
There was about this time one of those weeping pauses in the showery
sky, and a kind of thinning and edging away of the clouds, which gave
hope that perhaps the sun was going to look out, and give to our
persevering researches the countenance of his presence. This was
particularly desirable, as the old woman, who came out with her keys to
guide us, said she had a cold and a cough: we begged that she would not
trouble herself to go with us at all. The fact is, with all respect to
nice old women, and the worthy race of guides in general, they are not
favorable to poetic meditation. We promised to be very good if she would
let us have the key, and lock up all the gates, and bring it back; but
no, she was faithfulness itself, and so went coughing along through the
dripping and drowned grass to open the gates for us.
This Dryburgh belongs now to the Earl of Buchan, having been bought by
him from a family of the name of Haliburton, ancestral connections of
Scott, who, in his autobiography, seems to lament certain mischances of
fortune which prevented the estate from coming into his own family, and
gave them, he said, nothing but the right of stretching their bones
there. It seems a pity, too, because the possession of this rich, poetic
ruin would have been a mine of wealth to Scott, far transcending the
stateliest of modern houses.
Now, if you do not remember Scott's poem, of the Eve of St. John, you
ought to read it over; for it is, I think, the most spirited of all his
ballads; nothing conceals the transcendent lustre and beauty of these
compositions, but the splendor of his other literary productions. Had he
never written any thing but these, they would have made him a name as a
poet. As it was, I found the fanciful chime of the cadences in this
ballad ringing through my ears. I kept saying to myself--
"The Dryburgh bells do ring,
And the white monks do sing
For Sir Richard of Coldinghame."
And as I was wandering around in the labyrinth, of old, broken, mossy
arches, I thought--
"There is a nun in Dryburgh bower
Ne'er looks upon the sun;
There is a monk in Melrose tower,
He speaketh word to none.
That nun who ne'er beholds the day,
That monk who speaks to none,
That nun was Smaylhome's lady gay,
That monk the bold Baron."
It seems that there is a vault in this edifice which has had some
superstitious legends attached to it, from having been the residence,
about fifty years ago, of a mysterious lady, who, being under a vow
never to behold the light of the sun, only left her cell at midnight.
This little story, of course, gives just enough superstitious chill to
this beautiful ruin to help the effect of the pointed arches, the
clinging wreaths of ivy, the shadowy pines, and yew trees; in short, if
one had not a guide waiting, who had a bad cold, if one could stroll
here at leisure by twilight or moonlight, one might get up a
considerable deal of the mystic and poetic.
There is a part of the ruin that stands most picturesquely by itself, as
if old Time had intended it for a monument. It is the ruin of that part
of the chapel called St. Mary's Aisle; it stands surrounded by luxuriant
thickets of pine and other trees, a cluster of beautiful Gothic arches
supporting a second tier of smaller and more fanciful ones, one or two
of which have that light touch of the Moorish in their form which gives
such a singular and poetic effect in many of the old Gothic ruins. Out
of these wild arches and windows wave wreaths of ivy, and slender
harebells shake their blue pendants, looking in and out of the lattices
like little capricious fairies. There are fragments of ruins lying on
the ground, and the whole air of the thing is as wild, and dreamlike,
and picturesque as the poet's fanciful heart could have desired.
Underneath these arches he lies beside his wife; around him the
representation of the two things he loved most--the wild bloom and
beauty of nature, and the architectural memorial of by-gone history and
art. Yet there was one thing I felt I would have had otherwise; it
seemed to me that the flat stones of the pavement are a weight too heavy
and too cold to be laid on the breast of a lover of nature and the
beautiful. The green turf, springing with flowers, that lies above a
grave, does not seem, to us so hopeless a barrier between us and what
was warm and loving; the springing grass and daisies there seem, types
and assurances that the mortal beneath shall put on immortality; they
come up to us as kind messages from the peaceful dust, to say that it is
resting in a certain hope of a glorious resurrection.
On the cold flagstones, walled in by iron railings, there were no
daisies and no moss; but I picked many of both from, the green turf
around, which, with some sprigs of ivy from the walls, I send you.
It is strange that we turn away from the grave of this man, who achieved
to himself the most brilliant destiny that ever an author did,--raising
himself by his own unassisted efforts to be the chosen companions of
nobles and princes, obtaining all that heart could desire of riches and
honor,--we turn away and say, Poor Walter Scott! How desolately touching
is the account in Lockhart, of his dim and indistinct agony the day his
wife was brought here to be buried! and the last part of that biography
is the saddest history that I know; it really makes us breathe a long
sigh of relief when we read of the lowering of the coffin into this
vault.
What force does all this give to the passage in his diary in which he
records his estimate of life!--"What is this world? a dream within a
dream. As we grow older, each step is an awakening. The youth awakes, as
he thinks, from childhood; the full-grown man despises the pursuits of
youth as visionary; the old man looks on manhood as a feverish dream.
The grave the last sleep? No; it is the last and final awakening."
It has often been remarked, that there is no particular moral purpose
aimed at by Scott in his writings; he often speaks of it himself in his
last days, in a tone of humility. He represents himself as having been
employed mostly in the comparatively secondary department of giving
innocent amusement. He often expressed, humbly and earnestly, the hope
that he had, at least, done no harm; but I am inclined to think, that
although moral effect was not primarily his object, yet the influence of
his writings and whole existence on earth has been decidedly good.
It is a great thing to have a mind of such power and such influence,
whose recognitions of right and wrong, of virtue and vice, were, in most
cases, so clear and determined. He never enlists our sympathies in favor
of vice, by drawing those seductive pictures, in which it comes so near
the shape and form of virtue that the mind is puzzled as to the boundary
line. He never makes young ladies feel that they would like to marry
corsairs, pirates, or sentimental villains of any description. The most
objectionable thing, perhaps, about his influence, is its sympathy with
the war spirit. A person Christianly educated can hardly read some of
his descriptions in the Lady of the Lake and Marmion without an emotion
of disgust, like what is excited by the same things in Homer; and as the
world comes more and more under the influence of Christ, it will recede
more and more from this kind of literature.
Scott has been censured as being wilfully unjust to the Covenanters and
Puritans. I think he meant really to deal fairly by them, and that what
_he_ called fairness might seem rank injustice to those brought up to
venerate them, as we have been. I suppose that in Old Mortality it was
Scott's honest intention to balance the two parties about fairly, by
putting on the Covenant side his good, steady, well-behaved hero, Mr.
Morton, who is just as much of a Puritan as the Puritans would have been
had they taken Sir Walter Scott's advice; that is to say, a very nice,
sensible, moral man, who takes the Puritan side because he thinks it the
_right_ side, but contemplates all the devotional enthusiasm and
religious ecstasies of his associates from a merely artistic and
pictorial point of view. The trouble was, when he got his model Puritan
done, nobody ever knew what he was meant for; and then all the young
ladies voted steady Henry Morton a bore, and went to falling in love
with his Cavalier rival, Lord Evandale, and people talked as if it was a
preconcerted arrangement of Scott, to surprise the female heart, and
carry it over to the royalist side.
The fact was, in describing Evandale he made a living, effective
character, because he was describing something he had full sympathy
with, and put his whole life into; but Henry Morton is a laborious
arrangement of starch and pasteboard to produce one of those
supposititious, just-right men, who are always the stupidest of mortals
after they are made. As to why Scott did not describe such a character
as the martyr Duke of Argyle, or Hampden, or Sir Harry Vane, where high
birth, and noble breeding, and chivalrous sentiment were all united with
intense devotional fervor, the answer is, that he could not do it; he
had not that in him wherewith to do it; a man cannot create that of
which he has not first had the elements in himself; and devotional
enthusiasm is a thing which Scott never felt. Nevertheless, I believe
that he was perfectly sincere in saying that he would, "if necessary,
die a martyr for Christianity." He had calm, firm principle to any
extent, but it never was kindled into fervor. He was of too calm and
happy a temperament to sound the deepest recesses of souls torn up from
their depths by mighty conflicts and sorrows. There are souls like the
"alabaster vase of ointment, very precious," which shed no perfume of
devotion because a great sorrow has never broken them. Could Scott have
been given back to the world again after the heavy discipline of life
had passed over him, he would have spoken otherwise of many things. What
he vainly struggled to say to Lockhart on his death bed would have been
a new revelation, of his soul to the world, could he have lived to
unfold it in literature. But so it is: when we have learned to live,
life's purpose is answered, and we die!
This is the sum and substance of some conversations held while rambling
among these scenes, going in and out of arches, climbing into nooks and
through loopholes, picking moss and ivy, and occasionally retreating
under the shadow of some arch, while the skies were indulging in a
sudden burst of emotion. The poor woman who acted as our guide,
ensconcing herself in a dry corner, stood like a literal Patience on a
monument, waiting for us to be through; we were sorry for her, but as it
was our first and last chance, and she would stay there, we could not
help it.
Near by the abbey is a square, modern mansion, belonging to the Earl of
Buchan, at present untenanted. There were some black, solemn yew trees
there, old enough to have told us a deal of history had they been
inclined to speak; as it was, they could only drizzle.
As we were walking through the yard, a bird broke out into a clear,
sweet song.
"What bird is that?" said I.
"I think it is the mavis," said the guide. This brought up,--
"The mavis wild, wie mony a note,
Sings drowsy day to rest."