THE MOORS.
FLIGHT THIRD—STILL LIFE.
We have been sufficiently slaughterous for a man of our fine sensibilities and moderate desires, Hamish; and as, somehow or other, the scent seems to be beginning not to lie well—yet the air cannot be said to be close and sultry either—we shall let Brown Bess cool herself in both barrels—relinquish, for an hour or so, our seat on Shelty, and, by way of a change, pad the hoof up that smooth ascent, strangely left stoneless—an avenue positively looking as if it were artificial, as it stretches away, with its beautiful green undulations, among the blocks; for though no view-hunter, we are, Hamish, what in fine language is called a devout worshipper of Nature, an enthusiast in the sublime; and if Nature do not show us something worth gazing at when we reach yonder altitudes, she must be a grey deceiver, and we shall never again kneel at her footstool, or sing a hymn in her praise.
The truth is, we have a rending headache, for Bess has been for some hours on the kick, and Surefoot on the jog, and our exertions in the pulpit were severe—action, Hamish, action, action, being, as Demosthenes said some two or three thousand years ago, essential to oratory; and you observed how nimbly we kept changing legs, Hamish, how strenuously brandishing arms, throughout our discourse—saving the cunning pauses, thou simpleton, when, by way of relief to our auditors, we were as gentle as sucking-doves, and folded up our wings as if about to go to roost, whereas we were but meditating a bolder flight—about to soar, Hamish, into the empyrean. Over and above all that, we could not brook Tickler's insolence, who, about the sma' hours, challenged us, you know, quaich for quaich; and though we gave him a fair back-fall, yet we suffered in the tulzie, and there is at this moment a throbbing in our temples that threatens a regular brain-fever. We burn for an air-bath on the mountain-top. Moreover, we are seized with a sudden desire for solitude—to be plain, we are getting sulky; so ascend, Surefoot, Hamish, and be off with the pointers—O'Bronte goes with us—north-west, making a circumbendibus round the Tomhans, where Mhairhe M'Intyre lived seven years with the fairies; and in a couple of hours or so you will find us under the Merlin Crag.
We offer to walk any man of our age in Great Britain. But what is our age? Confound us if we know within a score or two. Yet we cannot get rid of the impression that we are under ninety. However, as we seek no advantage, and give no odds, we challenge the octogenarians of the United Kingdom—fair toe and heel—a twelve-hour match—for love, fame, and a legitimate exchequer bill for a thousand. Why, these calves of ours would look queer, we confess, on the legs of a Leith porter; but even in our prime they were none of your big vulgar calves, but they handled like iron—now more like butter. There is still a spring in our instep; and our knees, sometimes shaky, are to-day knit as Pan's and neat as Apollo's. Poet we may not be, but Pedestrian we are; with Wordsworth we could not walk along imaginative heights, but, if not grievously out of our reckoning; on the turnpike road we could keep pace with Captain Barclay for a short distance—say from Dundee to Aberdeen.
Oh! Gemini! but we are in high spirits. Yes—delights there indeed are, which none but pedestrians know. Much—all depends on the character of the wanderer; he must have known what it is to commune with his own thoughts and feelings, and be satisfied with them even as with the converse of a chosen friend. Not that he must always, in the solitudes that await him, be in a meditative mood, for ideas and emotions will of themselves arise, and he will only have to enjoy the pleasures which his own being spontaneously affords. It would indeed be a hopeless thing, if we were always to be on the stretch for happiness. Intellect, Imagination, and Feeling, all work of their own free-will, and not at the order of any taskmaster. A rill soon becomes a stream—a stream a river—a river a loch—and a loch a sea. So it is with the current within the spirit. It carries us along, without either oar or sail, increasing in depth, breadth, and swiftness, yet all the while the easy work of our own wonderful minds. While we seem only to see or hear, we are thinking and feeling far beyond the mere notices given by the senses; and years afterwards we find that we have been laying up treasures, in our most heedless moments, of imagery, and connecting together trains of thought that arise in startling beauty, almost without cause or any traceable origin. The Pedestrian, too, must not only love his own society, but the society of any other human beings, if blameless and not impure, among whom his lot may for a short season be cast. He must rejoice in all the forms and shows of life, however simple they may be, however humble, however low; and be able to find food for his thoughts beside the ingle of the loneliest hut, where the inmates sit with few words, and will rather be spoken to than speak to the stranger. In such places he will be delighted—perhaps surprised—to find in uncorrupted strength all the primary elements of human character. He will find that his knowledge may be wider than theirs, and better ordered, but that it rests on the same foundation, and comprehends the same matter. There will be no want of sympathies between him and them; and what he knows best, and loves most, will seldom fail to be that also which they listen to with greatest interest, and respecting which there is the closest communion between the minds of stranger and host. He may know the courses of the stars according to the revelation of science—they may have studied them only as simple shepherds, "whose hearts were gladdened" walking on the mountain-top. But they know—as he does—who sowed the stars in heaven, and that their silent courses are all adjusted by the hand of the Most High.
Oh! blessed, thrice blessed years of youth! would we choose to live over again all your forgotten and unforgotten nights and days! Blessed, thrice blessed we call you, although, as we then felt, often darkened almost into insanity by self-sown sorrows springing out of our restless soul. No, we would not again face such troubles, not even for the glorious apparitions that familiarly haunted us in glens and forests, on mountains and on the great sea. But all, or nearly all, that did once so grievously disturb, we can lay in the depths of the past, so that scarcely a ghastly voice is heard, a ghastly face beheld; while all that so charmed of yore, or nearly all, although no longer the daily companions of our life, still survive to be recalled at solemn hours, and with a "beauty still more beauteous" to reinvest the earth, which neither sin nor sorrow can rob of its enchantments. We can still travel with the solitary mountain-stream from its source to the sea, and see new visions at every vista of its winding waters. The waterfall flows not with its own monotonous voice of a day or an hour, but like a choral anthem pealing with the hymns of many years. In the heart of the blind mist on the mountain-ranges we can now sit alone, surrounded by a world of images, over which time holds no power but to consecrate or solemnise. Solitude we can deepen by a single volition, and by a single volition let in upon it the stir and noise of the world and life. Why, therefore, should we complain, or why lament the inevitable loss or change that time brings with it to all that breathe? Beneath the shadow of the tree we can yet repose, and tranquillise our spirit by its rustle, or by the "green light" uncheckered by one stirring leaf. From sunrise to sunset, we can lie below the old mossy tower, till the darkness that shuts out the day, hides not the visions that glide round the ruined battlements. Cheerful as in a city can we traverse the houseless moor; and although not a ship be on the sea, we can set sail on the wings of imagination, and when wearied, sink down on savage or serene isle, and let drop our anchor below the moon and stars.
And 'tis well we are so spiritual; for the senses are of no use here, and we must draw for amusement on our internal sources. A day-like night we have often seen about midsummer, serenest of all among the Hebrides; but a night-like day, such as this, ne'er before fell on us, and we might as well be in the Heart o' Mid-Lothian. 'Tis a dungeon, and a dark one—and we know not for what crime we have been condemned to solitary confinement. Were it mere mist we should not mind; but the gloom is palpable, and makes resistance to the hand. We did not think clouds capable of such condensation—the blackness may be felt like velvet on a hearse. Would that something would rustle—but no—all is breathlessly still, and not a wind dares whistle. If there be anything visible or audible hereabout, then are we stone-blind and stone-deaf. We have a vision!
See! a great City in a mist! All is not shrouded—at intervals something huge is beheld in the sky—what we know not, tower, temple, spire, dome, or a pile of nameless structures—one after the other fading away, or sinking and settling down into the gloom that grows deeper and deeper like a night. The stream of life seems almost hushed in the blind blank, yet you hear ever and anon, now here, now there, the slow sound of feet moving to their own dull echoes, and lo! the Sun
"Looks through the horizontal misty air,
Shorn of his beams,"
like some great ghost. Ay, he looks! does he not? straight on your face, as if you two were the only beings there—and were held looking at each other in some strange communion. Surely you must sometimes have felt that emotion, when the Luminary seemed no longer luminous, but a dull-red brazen orb, sick unto the death—obscure the Shedder of Light and the Giver of Life lifeless!
The Sea has sent a tide-borne wind to the City, and you almost start in wonder to behold all the heavens clear of clouds (how beautiful was the clearing!) and bending in a mighty blue bow, that brightly overarches all the brightened habitations of men! The spires shoot up into the sky—the domes tranquilly rest there—all the roofs glitter as with diamonds, all the white walls are lustrous, save where, here and there, some loftier range of buildings hangs its steadfast shadow o'er square or street, magnifying the city, by means of separate multitudes of structures, each town-like in itself, and the whole gathered together by the outward eye, and the inward imagination, worthy indeed of the name of Metropolis.
Let us sit down on this bench below the shadow of the Parthenon. The air is now so rarified, that you can see not indistinctly the figure of a man on Arthur's Seat. The Calton, though a city hill, is as green as the Carter towering over the Border-forest. Not many years ago, no stone edifice was on his unviolated verdure—he was a true rural Mount, where the lassies bleached their claes, in a pure atmosphere, aloof from the city smoke almost as the sides and summit of Arthur's Seat. Flocks of sheep might have grazed here, had there been enclosures, and many milch cows. But in their absence a pastoral character was given to the Hill by its green silence, here and there broken by the songs and laughter of those linen-bleaching lassies, and by the arm-in-arm strolling of lovers in the morning light or the evening shade. Here married people used to walk with their children, thinking and feeling themselves to be in the country; and here elderly gentlemen, like ourselves, with gold-headed canes or simple crutches, mused and meditated on the ongoings of the noisy lower world. Such a Hill, so close to a great City, yet undisturbed by it, and imbued at all times with a feeling of sweeter peace, because of the immediate neighbourhood of the din and stir of which its green recess high up in the blue air never partook, seems now, in the mingled dream of imagination and memory, to have been a super-urban Paradise! But a city cannot, ought not to be, controlled in its growth; the natural beauty of this hill has had its day; now it is broken all round with wide walks, along which you might drive chariots abreast; broad flights of stone-stairs lead up along the once elastic brae-turf; and its bosom is laden with towers and temples, monuments and mausoleums. Along one side, where hanging gardens might have been, magnificent as those of the old Babylon, stretches the macadamised Royal Road to London, flanked by one receptacle for the quiet dead, and by another for the unquiet living—a churchyard and a prison dying away in a bridewell. But, making amends for such hideous deformities, with front nobly looking to the cliffs, over a dell of dwellings seen dimly through the smoke-mist, stands, sacred to the Muses, an Edifice that might have pleased the eye of Pericles! Alas, immediately below one that would have turned the brain of Palladio! Modern Athens indeed! Few are the Grecians among thy architects; those who are not Goths are Picts—and the King himself of the Painted People designed Nelson's Monument.
But who can be querulous on such a day? Weigh all its defects, designed and undesigned, and is not Edinburgh yet a noble city? Arthur's Seat! how like a lion! The magnificent range of Salisbury Crags, on which a battery might be built to blow the whole inhabitation to atoms! Our friend here, the Calton, with his mural crown! Our Castle on his Cliff! gloriously hung round with national histories along all his battlements! Do they not embosom him in a style of grandeur worthy, if such it be, of a "City of Palaces?" Call all things by their right names, in heaven and on earth. Palaces they are not—nor are they built of marble; but they are stately houses, framed of stone from Craig-Leith quarry, almost as pale as the Parian; and when the sun looks fitfully through the storm, or as now, serenely through the calm, richer than Parian in the tempestuous or the peaceful light. Never beheld we the city wearing such a majestic metropolitan aspect.
"Ay, proudly fling thy white arms to the sea,
Queen of the unconquer'd North!"
How near the Firth! Gloriously does it supply the want of a river. It is a river, though seeming, and sweeping into, the sea; but a river that man may never bridge; and though still now as the sky, we wish you saw it in its magnificent madness, when brought on the roarings of the stormful tide
"Breaks the long wave that at the Pole began."
Coast-cities alone are Queens. All inland are but Tributaries. Earth's empiry belongs to the Power that sees its shadow in the sea. Two separate Cities, not twins—but one of ancient and one of modern birth—how harmoniously, in spite of form and features characteristically different, do they coalesce into one Capital! This miracle, methinks, is wrought by the Spirit of Nature on the World of Art. Her great features subdue almost into similarity a Whole constructed of such various elements, for it is all felt to be kindred with those guardian cliffs. Those eternal heights hold the Double City together in an amity that breathes over both the same national look—the impression of the same national soul. In the olden time, the city gathered herself almost under the very wing of the Castle; for in her heroic heart she ever heard, unalarmed but watchful, the alarums of war, and that cliff, under heaven, was on earth the rock of her salvation. But now the foundation of that rock, whence yet the tranquil burgher hears the morning and the evening bugle, is beautified by gardens that love its pensive shadow, for it tames the light to flowers by rude feet untrodden, and yielding garlands for the brows of perpetual peace. Thence elegance and grace arose; and while antiquity breathes over that wilderness of antique structures picturesquely huddled along the blue line of sky—as Wilkie once finely said, like the spine of some enormous animal; yet all along this side of that unrivered and mound-divided dell, now shines a new world of radiant dwellings, declaring by their regular but not monotonous magnificence, that the same people, whose "perfervid genius" preserved them by war unhumbled among the nations in days of darkness, have now drawn a strength as invincible from the beautiful arts which have been cultivated by peace in the days of light.
And is the spirit of the inhabitation there worthy of the place inhabited? We are a Scotsman. And the great English Moralist has asked, where may a Scotsman be found who loves not the honour or the glory of his country better than truth? We are that Scotsman—though for our country would we die. Yet dearer too than life is to us the honour—if not the glory of our country; and had we a thousand lives, proudly would we lay them all down in the dust rather than give—or see given—one single stain
"Unto the silver cross, to Scotland dear,"
on which as yet no stain appears save those glorious weather-stains, that have fallen on its folds from the clouds of war and the storms of battle. Sufficient praise to the spirit of our land, that she knows how to love, admire, and rival—not in vain—the spirit of high-hearted and heroic England. Long as we and that other noble Isle
"Set as an emerald in the casing sea,"
in triple union breathe as one,
"Then come against us the whole world in arms,
And we will meet them!"
What is a people without pride? But let them know that its root rests on noble pillars; and in the whole range of strength and stateliness, what pillars are there stronger and statelier than those glorious two—Genius and Liberty? Here valour has fought—here philosophy has meditated—here poetry has sung. Are not our living yet as brave as our dead? All wisdom has not perished with the sages to whom we have built or are building monumental tombs. The muses yet love to breathe the pure mountain-air of Caledon. And have we not amongst us one myriad-minded man, whose name, without offence to that high-priest of nature, or his devoutest worshippers, may flow from our lips even when they utter that of Shakespeare?
The Queen of the North has evaporated—and we again have a glimpse of the Highlands. But where's the Sun? We know not in what airt to look for him, for who knows but it may now be afternoon? It is almost dark enough for evening—and if it be not far on in the day, then we shall have thunder. What saith our repeater? One o'clock. Usually the brightest hour of all the twelve—but anything but bright at this moment. Can there be an eclipse going on—an earthquake at his toilette—or merely a brewing of storm? Let us consult our almanac. No eclipse set down for to-day—the old earthquake dwells in the neighbourhood of Comrie, and has never been known to journey thus far north—besides, he has for some years been bed-ridden; argal, there is about to be a storm. What a fool of a land-tortoise were we to crawl up to the top of a mountain, when we might have taken our choice of half-a-dozen glens with cottages in them every other mile, and a village at the end of each with a comfortable Change-house! And up which of its sides, pray, was it that we crawled? Not this one—for it is as steep as a church—and we never in our life peeped over the brink of an uglier abyss. Ay, Mister Merlin, 'tis wise of you to be flying home into your crevice—put your head below your wing, and do cease that cry.—Croak! croak! croak! Where is the sooty sinner? We hear he is on the wing—but he either sees or smells us, probably both, and the horrid gurgle in his throat is choked by some cloud. Surely that was the sughing of wings! A Bird! alighting within fifty yards of us—and, from his mode of folding his wings—an Eagle! This is too much—within fifty yards of an Eagle on his own mountain-top. Is he blind? Age darkens even an Eagle's eyes—but he is not old, for his plumage is perfect—and we see the glare of his far-keekers as he turns his head over his shoulder and regards his eyrie on the cliff. We would not shoot him for a thousand a-year for life. Not old—how do we know that? Because he is a creature who is young at a hundred—so says Audubon—Swainson—our brother James—and all shepherds. Little suspects he who is lying so near him with his Crutch. Our snuffy suit is of a colour with the storm-stained granite—and if he walk this way he will get a buffet. And he is walking this way—his head up, and his tail down,—not hopping like a filthy raven—but one foot before the other—like a man—like a King. We do not altogether like it—it is rather alarming—he may not be an Eagle after all—but something worse—"Hurra! ye Sky-scraper! Christopher is upon you! take that, and that, and that"—all one tumbling scream, there he goes, Crutch and all, over the edge of the Cliff. Dashed to death—but impossible for us to get the body. Whew! dashed to death indeed! There he wheels, all on fire, round the thunder gloom. Is it electric matter in the atmosphere—or fear and wrath that illumine his wings?
We wish we were safe down. There is no wind here yet—none to speak of; but there is wind enough, to all appearance, in the region towards the west. The main body of the clouds is falling back on the reserve—and observing that movement the right wing deploys; as for the left, it is broken, and its retreat will soon be a flight. Fear is contagious—the whole army has fallen into irremediable disorder—has abandoned its commanding position—and in an hour will be self-driven into the sea. We call that a Panic.
Glory be to the corps that covers the retreat. We see now the cause of that retrograde movement. In the north-west, "far off its coming shone," and "in numbers without number numberless," lo! the adverse Host! Thrown out in front, the beautiful rifle brigade comes fleetly on, extending in open order along the vast plain between the aerial Pine-mountains to yon Fire-cliffs. The enemy marches in masses—the space between the divisions now widening and now narrowing—and as sure as we are alive we hear the sound of trumpets. The routed army has rallied and reappears—and, hark, on the extreme left a cannonade. Never before had the Unholy Alliance a finer park of artillery—and now its fire opens from the great battery in the centre, and the hurly-burly is general far and wide over the whole field of battle.
But these lead drops dancing on our bonnet tell us to take up our crutch and be off—for there it is sticking—by-and-by the waters will be in flood, and we may have to pass a night on the mountain. Down we go.
We do not call this the same side of the mountain we crawled up? There, all was purple except what was green—and we were happy to be a heather-legged body, occasionally skipping like a grasshopper on turf. Here, all rocks save stones. Get out of the way, ye ptarmigans. We hate shingle from the bottom of our —— oh dear! oh dear! but this is painful—sliddering on shingle away down what is anything but an inclined plane—feet foremost—accompanied with rattling debris—at railroad speed—every twenty yards or so dislodging a stone as big as oneself, who instantly joins the procession, and there they go hopping and jumping along with us, some before, some at each side, and, we shudder to think of it, some behind—well somersetted over our head, thou Grey Wackè—but mercy on us, and forgive us our sins, for if this lasts, in another minute we are all at the bottom of that pond of pitch. Take care of yourself, O'Bronte!
Here we are—sitting! How we were brought to assume this rather uneasy posture we do not pretend to say. We confine ourselves to the fact. Sitting beside a Tarn. Our escape appears to have been little less than miraculous, and must have been mainly owing, under Providence, to the Crutch. Who's laughing? 'Tis you, you old Witch, in hood and cloak, crouching on the cliff as if you were warming your hands at the fire. Hold your tongue—and you may sit there to all eternity if you choose—you cloud-ridden hag! No—there will be a blow-up some day—as there evidently has been here before now; but no more Geology—from the tarn, who is a 'tarnation deep 'un, runs a rill, and he offers to be our guide down to the Low Country.
Why, this does not look like the same day. No gloom here, but a green serenity—not so poetical perhaps, but, in a human light, far preferable to a "brown horror." No sulphureous smell—"the air is balm." No sultriness—how cool the circulating medium! In our youth, when we had wings on our feet, and were a feathered Mercury—Cherub we never were nor Cauliflower—by flying, in our weather-wisdom, from glen to glen, we have made one day a whole week—with, at the end, a Sabbath. For all over the really mountaineous region of the Highlands, every glen has its own indescribable kind of day—all vaguely comprehended under the One Day that may happen to be uppermost; and Lowland meteorologists, meeting in the evening after a long absence—having, perhaps, parted that morning—on comparing notes lose their temper, and have been even known to proceed to extremities in defence of facts well established of a most contradictory and irreconcilable nature.
Here is an angler fishing with the fly. In the glen beyond that range he would have used the minnow—and in the huge hollow behind our friends to the South-east, he might just as well try the bare hook—though it is not universally true that trouts don't rise when there is thunder. Let us see how he throws. What a cable! Flies! Tufts of heather. Hollo, you there; friend, what sport? What sport we say? No answer; are you deaf? Dumb? He flourishes his flail and is mute. Let us try what a whack on the back may elicit. Down he flings it, and staring on us with a pair of most extraordinary eyes, and a beard like a goat, is off like a shot. Alas! we have frightened the wretch out of his few poor wits, and he may kill himself among the rocks. He is indeed an idiot—an innocent. We remember seeing him near this very spot forty years ago—and he was not young then—they often live to extreme old age. No wonder he was terrified—for we are duly sensible of the outre tout ensemble we must have suddenly exhibited in the glimmer that visits those weak red eyes—he is an albino. That whack was rash, to say the least of it—our Crutch was too much for him; but we hear him whining—and moaning—and, good God! there he is on his knees with hands clasped in supplication—"Dinna kill me—dinna kill me—'am silly—'am silly—and folk say 'am auld—auld—auld." The harmless creature is convinced we are not going to kill him—takes from our hand what he calls his fishing-rod and tackle—and laughs like an owl. "Ony meat—ony meat—ony meat?" "Yes, innocent, there is some meat in this wallet, and you and we shall have our dinner." "Ho! ho! ho! ho! a smelled, a smelled! a can say the Lord's Prayer." "What's your name, my man?" "Daft Dooggy the Haveril." "Sit down, Dugald." A sad mystery all this—a drop of water on the brain will do it—so wise physicians say, and we believe it. For all that, the brain is not the soul. He takes the food with a kind of howl—and carries it away to some distance, muttering "a aye eats by mysel!" He is saying grace! And now he is eating like an animal. 'Tis a saying of old, "Their lives are hidden with God!"
This lovely little glen is almost altogether new to us: yet so congenial its quiet to the longings of our heart, that all at once it is familiar to us as if we had sojourned here for days—as if that cottage were our dwelling-place—and we had retired hither to await the close. Were we never here before—in the olden and golden time? Those dips in the summits of the mountain seem to recall from oblivion memories of a morning all the same as this, enjoyed by us with a different joy, almost as if then we were a different being, joy then the very element in which we drew our breath, satisfied now to live in the atmosphere of sadness often thickened with grief. 'Tis thus that there grows a confusion among the past times in the dormitory—call it not the burial-place—overshadowed by sweet or solemn imagery—in the inland regions; nor can we question the recollections as they rise—being ghosts, they are silent—their coming and their going alike a mystery—but sometimes—as now—they are happy hauntings—and age is almost gladdened into illusion of returning youth.
'Tis a lovely little glen as in all the Highlands—yet we know not that a painter would see in it the subject of a picture—for the sprinklings of young trees have been sown capriciously by nature, and there seems no reason why on that hill-side, and not on any other, should survive the remains of an old wood. Among the multitude of knolls a few are eminent with rocks and shrubs, but there is no central assemblage, and the green wilderness wantons in such disorder that you might believe the pools there to be, not belonging as they are to the same running water, but each itself a small separate lakelet fed by its own spring. True, that above its homehills there are mountains—and these are cliffs on which the eagle might not disdain to build—but the range wheels away in its grandeur to face a loftier region, of which we see here but the summits swimming in the distant clouds.
God bless that hut! and have its inmates in His holy keeping! But what Fairy is this coming unawares on us sitting by the side of the most lucid of little wells? Set down thy pitcher, my child, and let us have a look at thy happiness—for though thou mayest wonder at our words, and think us a strange old man, coming and going, once and for ever, to thee and thine a shadow and no more, yet lean thy head towards us that we may lay our hands on it and bless it—and promise, as thou art growing up here, sometimes to think of the voice that spake to thee by the Birk-tree well. Love, fear, and serve God, as the Bible teaches—and whatever happens thee, quake not, but put thy trust in Heaven.
Do not be afraid of him, sweet one! O'Bronte would submit to be flayed alive rather than bite a child: see, he offers you a paw—take it without trembling; nay, he will let thee ride on his back, my pretty dear—won't thou, O'Bronte?—and scamper with thee up and down the knolls like her coal-black charger rejoicing to bear the Fairy Queen. Thou tellest us thy father and mother, sisters and brothers, all are dead; yet with a voice cheerful as well as plaintive. Smile—laugh— sing—as thou wert doing a minute ago—as thou hast done for many a morning—and shalt do for many a morning more on thy way to the well—in the woods—on the braes—in the house,—often all by thyself when the old people are out of doors not far off—or when sometimes they have for a whole day been from home out of the glen. Forget not our words—and no evil can befall thee that may not, weak as thou art, be borne,—and nothing wicked that is allowed to walk the earth will ever be able to hurt a hair on thy head.
My stars! what a lovely little animal! A tame fawn, by all that is wild—kneeling down—to drink—no—no—at his lady's feet. The collie catched it—thou sayest—on the edge of the Auld wood—and by the time its wounds were cured, it seemed to have forgot its mother, and soon learnt to follow thee about to far-off places quite out of sight of this—and to play gamesome tricks like a creature born among human dwellings. What! it dances like a kid—does it—and sometimes you put a garland of wildflowers round its neck—and pursue it like a huntress, as it pretends to be making its escape into the forest?
Look, child, here is a pretty green purse for you, that opens and shuts with a spring—so—and in it there is a gold coin, called a sovereign, and a crooked sixpence. Don't blush—that was a graceful curtsy. Keep the crooked sixpence for good-luck, and you never will want. With the yellow fellow buy a Sunday gown and a pair of Sunday shoes, and what else you like; and now—you two, lead the way—try a race to the door—and old Christopher North will carry the pitcher—balancing it on his head—thus—ha! O'Bronte galloping along as umpire. The Fawn has it, and by a neck has beat Camilla.
We shall lunch ere we go—and lunch well too—for this is a poor man's, not a pauper's hut, and Heaven still grants his prayer—"give us this day our daily bread." Sweeter—richer bannocks of barley-meal never met the mouth of mortal man—nor more delicious butter. "We salt it, sir, for a friend in Glasgow—but now and then we tak a bite of the fresh—do oblige us a', sir, by eatin, and you'll maybe find the mutton-ham no that bad, though I've kent it fatter—and, as you hae a lang walk afore you, excuse me, sir, for being sae bauld as to suggeest a glass o' speerit in your milk. The gudeman is temperate, and he's been sae a' his life—but we keep it for a cordial—and that bottle—to be sure it's a gey big ane—and would thole replenishing—has lasted us sin' Whitsuntide."
So presseth us to take care of number one the gudewife, while the gudeman, busy as ourselves, eyes her with a well-pleased face, but saith nothing, and the bonny wee bit lassie sits on her stool at the wunnock wi' her coggie ready to do any service at a look, and supping little or nothing, out of bashfulness in presence of Christopher North, who she believes is a good, and thinks may, perhaps, be some great man. Our third bannock has had the gooseberry jam laid on it thick by "the gudewife's ain hand,"—and we suspect at that last wide bite we have smeared the corners of our mouth—but it will only be making matters worse to attempt licking it off with our tongue. Pussie! thou hast a cunning look—purring on our knees—and though those glass een o' thine are blinking at the cream on the saucer—with which thou jalousest we intend to let thee wet thy whiskers,—we fear thou mak'st no bones of the poor birdies in the brake, and that many an unlucky leveret has lost its wits at the spring of such a tiger. Cats are queer creatures, and have an instinctive liking to Warlocks.
And these two old people have survived all their children—sons and daughters! They have told us the story of their life—and as calmly as if they had been telling of the trials of some other pair. Perhaps, in our sympathy, though we say but little, they feel a strength that is not always theirs—perhaps it is a relief from silent sorrow to speak to one who is a stranger to them, and yet, as they may think, a brother in affliction—but prayer like thanksgiving assures us that there is in this hut a Christian composure, far beyond the need of our pity, and sent from a region above the stars.
There cannot be a cleaner cottage. Tidiness, it is pleasant to know, has for a good many years past been establishing itself in Scotland among the minor domestic virtues. Once established it will never decay; for it must be felt to brighten, more than could be imagined by our fathers, the whole aspect of life. No need for any other household fairy to sweep this floor. An orderly creature we have seen she is, from all her movements out and in doors—though the guest of but an hour. They have told us that they had known what are called better days—and were once in a thriving way of business in a town. But they were born and bred in the country; and their manners, not rustic but rural, breathe of its serene and simple spirit—at once Lowland and Highland—to us a pleasant union, not without a certain charm of grace.
What loose leaves are those lying on the Bible? A few odd numbers of the Scottish Christian Herald. We shall take care, our friends, that all the Numbers, bound in three large volumes, shall, ere many weeks elapse, be lying for you at the Manse. Let us recite to you, our worthy friends, a small sacred Poem, which we have by heart. Christian, keep your eye on the page, and if we go wrong, do not fear to set us right. Can you say many psalms and hymns? But we need not ask—for
"Piety is sweet to infant minds;"
what they love they remember—for how easy—how happy—to get dear things by heart! Happiest of all—the things held holy on earth as in heaven—because appertaining here to Eternal Life.
TO THE SCOTTISH CHRISTIAN HERALD.
by the rev. duncan grant, a.m., minister of forres.
"Beauteous on our heath-clad mountains,
May our Herald's feet appear;
Sweet, by silver lakes and fountains,
May his voice be to our ear.
Let the tenants of our rocks,
Shepherds watching o'er their flocks,
Village swain and peasant boy,
Thee salute with songs of joy!
Christian Herald! spread the story
Of Redemption's wondrous plan;
'Tis Jehovah's brightest glory,
'Tis His highest gift to man;
Angels on their harps of gold,
Love its glories to unfold;
Heralds who its influence wield,
Make the waste a fruitful field.
To the fount of mercy soaring,
On the wings of faith and love;
And the depths of grace exploring,
By the light shed from above;
Show us whence life's waters flow,
And where trees of blessing grow,
Bearing fruit of heavenly bloom,
Breathing Eden's rich perfume.
Love to God and man expressing,
In thy course of mercy speed;
Lead to springs of joy and blessing,
And with heavenly manna feed
Scotland's children high and low,
Till the Lord they truly know:
As to us our fathers told,
He was known by them of old.
To the young, in season vernal,
Jesus in His grace disclose;
As the tree of life eternal,
'Neath whose shade they may repose,
Shielded from the noontide ray,
And from ev'ning's tribes of prey;
And refresh'd with fruits of love,
And with music from above.
Christian Herald! may the blessing
Of the Highest thee attend,
That, this chiefest boon possessing,
Thou may'st prove thy country's friend
Tend to make our land assume
Something of its former bloom,
When the dews of heaven were seen
Sparkling on its pastures green,
When the voice of warm devotion
To the throne of God arose—
Mighty as the sound of ocean,
Calm as nature in repose;
Sweeter, than when Araby
Perfume breathes from flow'r and tree,
Rising 'bove the shining sphere,
To Jehovah's list'ning ear."
It is time we were going—but we wish to hear how thy voice sounds, Christian, when it reads. So read these same verses, first "into yourself," and then to us. They speak of mercies above your comprehension, and ours, and all men's; for they speak of the infinite goodness and mercy of God—but though thou hast committed in thy short life no sins, or but small, towards thy fellow-creatures—how couldst thou? yet thou knowest we are all sinful in His eyes, and thou knowest on whose merits is the reliance of our hopes of Heaven. Thank you, Christian. Three minutes from two by your house-clock—she gives a clear warning—and three minutes from two by our watch—rather curious this coincidence to such a nicety—we must take up our Crutch and go. Thank thee, bonny wee Christian—in wi' the bannocks intil our pouch—but we fear you must take us for a sad glutton.
"Zickety, dickety, dock,
The mouse ran up the nock;
The nock struck one,
Down the mouse ran,
Zickety, dickety, dock."
Come closer, Christian—and let us put it to thine ear. What a pretty face of wonder at the chime! Good people, you have work to do in the hay-field—let us part—God bless you—Good-by—farewell!
Half an hour since we parted—we cannot help being a little sad—and fear we were not so kind to the old people—not so considerate as we ought to have been—and perhaps, though pleased with us just now, they may say to one another before evening that we were too merry for our years. Nonsense. We were all merry together—daft Uncle among the lave—for the creature came stealing in and sat down on his own stool in the corner; and what's the use of wearing a long face at all times like a Methodist minister? A Methodist minister! Why, John Wesley was facete, and Whitfield humorous, and Rowland Hill witty—though he, we believe, was not a Methody; yet were their hearts fountains of tears—and ours is not a rock—if it be, 'tis the rock of Horeb.
Ha, Hamish! Here we are beneath the Merlin Crag. What sport? Why, five brace is not so much amiss—and they are thumpers. Fifteen brace in all. Ducks and flappers. Seven leash. We are getting on.
"But what are these,
So wither'd and so wild in their attire;
That look not like th' inhabitants o' the earth,
And yet are on't? Live you? or are you aught
That man may question? You seem to understand me,
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips:—you should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so!"
Shakespeare is not familiar, we find, among the natives of Loch-Etive side—else these figures would reply,
"All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glammis!"
But not satisfied with laying their choppy fingers on their skinny lips, they now put them to their plooky noses, having first each dipped fore and thumb in his mull, and gibber Gaelic, to us unintelligible as the quacking of ducks, when a Christian auditor has been prevented from catching its meaning by the gobbling of turkeys.
Witches at the least, and about to prophesy to us some pleasant events, that are to terminate disastrously in after years. Is there no nook of earth perfectly solitary—but must natural or supernatural footsteps haunt the remotest and most central places? But now we shall have our fortunes told in choice Erse, for sure these are the Children of the Mist, and perhaps they will favour us with a running commentary on Ossian. Stout, grim, heather-legged bodies they are, one and all, and luckily we are provided with snuff and tobacco sufficient for the whole crew. Were they even ghosts they will not refuse a sneeshin, and a Highland spirit will look picturesque puffing a cigar!—Hark! we know them and their vocation. These are the Genii of the Mountain-dew; and their hidden enginery, depend on't, is not far off, but buried in the bowels of some brae. See!—a faint mist dissipating itself over the heather! There—at work, shaming the idle waste, and in use and wont to break even the Sabbath-day, is a Still!
Do we look like Excisemen? The Crutch has indeed a suspicious family resemblance to a gauging-rod; and literary characters, like us, may well be mistaken for the Supervisor himself. But the smuggler's eye knows his enemy at a glance, as the fox knows a hound; and the whispering group discern at once that we are of a nobler breed. That one fear dispelled, Highland hospitality bids us welcome, even into the mouth of the malt-kiln, and, with a smack on our loof, the Chief volunteers to initiate us into the grand mysteries of the Worm.
The turf-door is flung outward on its lithe hinges, and already what a gracious smell! In we go, ushered by unbonneted Celts, gentlemen in manners wherever the kilt is worn; for the tartan is the symbol of courtesy, and Mac a good password all the world over between man and man. Lowland eyes are apt to water in the peat-reek, but ere long we shall have another "drappie in our ee," and drink to the Clans in the "uuchristened cretur." What a sad neglect in our education, among all the acquired lingoes extant, to have overlooked the Gaelic! Yet nobody who has ever heard P. R. preach an Erse Sermon, need despair of discoursing in that tongue after an hour's practice; so let us forget, if possible, every word of English, and the language now needed will rise up in its place.
And these figures in men's coats and women's petticoats are females? We are willing to believe it in spite of their beards. One of them absolutely suckling a child! Thank you, my dear sir, but we cannot swallow the contents of that quaich. Yet, let us try.—A little too warm, and rather harsh; but meat and drink to a man of age. That seems to be goat-milk cheese, and the scones are barley; and they and the speerit will wash one another down in an amicable plea, nor quarrel at close quarters. Honey too—heather-honey of this blessed year's produce. Hecate's forefinger mixes it in a quaich with mountain-dew—and that is Atholl-brose?
There cannot be the least doubt in the world that the Hamiltonian system of teaching languages is one of the best ever invented. It will enable any pupil of common-run powers of attention to read any part of the New Testament in Greek in some twenty lessons of an hour each. But what is that to the principle of the Worm? Half a blessed hour has not elapsed since we entered into the door of this hill-house, and we offer twenty to one that we read Ossian ad aperturam libri, in the original Gaelic. We feel as if we could translate the works of Jeremy Bentham into that tongue—ay, even Francis Maximus Macnab's Theory of the Universe. We guarantee ourselves to do both, this identical night before we go to sleep, and if the printers are busy during the intermediate hours, to correct the press in the morning. Why, there are not above five thousand roots—but we are getting a little gizzy—into a state of civilation in the wilderness—and, gentlemen, let us drink—in solemn silence—the "Memory of Fingal."
O St Cecilia! we did not lay our account with a bagpipe! What is the competition of pipers in the Edinburgh Theatre, small as it is, to this damnable drone in an earth-cell, eight feet by six! Yet while the drums of our ears are continuing to split like old parchment title-deeds to lands nowhere existing, and all our animal economy, from finger to toe, is one agonising dirl, Æolus himself sits as proud as Lucifer in Pandemonium; and as the old soldiers keep tending the Worm in the reek as if all were silence, the male-looking females, and especially the he-she with the imp at her breast, nod, and smirk, and smile, and snap their fingers, in a challenge to a straspey—and, by all that is horrible, a red hairy arm is round our neck, and we are half choked with the fumes of whisky-kisses. An hour ago we were dreaming of Malvina! and here she is with a vengeance, while we in the character of Oscar are embraced till almost all the Lowland breath in our body expires.
And this is still-life.
Extraordinary it is, that, go where we will, we are in a wonderfully short time discovered to be Christopher North. A few years ago, the instant we found our feet in a mine in Cornwall, after a descent of about one-third the bored earth's diameter, we were saluted by name by a grim Monops who had not seen the upper regions for years, preferring the interior of the planet; and forthwith "Christopher North," "Christopher North," reverberated along the galleries, while the gnomes came flocking in all directions, with safety-lamps, to catch a glimpse of the famous Editor. On another occasion, we remember, when coasting the south of Ireland in our schooner, falling in with a boat like a cockle-shell, well out of the Bay of Bantry, and of the three half-naked Paddies that were ensnaring the finny race, two smoked us at the helm, and bawled up, "Kitty go bragh!" Were we to go up in a balloon, and by any accident descend in the interior of Africa, we have not the slightest doubt that Sultan Belloo would know us in a jiffy, having heard our person so frequently described by Major Denham and Captain Clapperton. So we are known, it seems, in the Still—by the men of the Worm? Yes—the principal proprietor in the concern is a schoolmaster over about Loch-Earn-Head—a man of no mean literary abilities, and an occasional contributor to the Magazine. He visits The Shop in breeches—but now mounts the kilt—and astonishes us by the versatility of his talents. In one of the most active working bees we recognise a cadie, formerly in Auld Reekie ycleped "The Despatch," now retired to the Braes of Balquhidder, and breathing strongly the spirit of his youth. With that heather-houghed gentleman, fiery-tressed as the God of Day, we were, for the quarter of a century that we held a large grazing farm, in the annual practice of drinking a gill at the Falkirk Tryst; and—wonderful, indeed, to think how old friends meet—we were present at the amputation of the right leg of that timber-toed hero with the bushy whiskers—in the Hospital of Rosetta—having accompanied Sir David Baird's splendid Indian army into Egypt.
Shying, for the present, the question in Political Economy, and viewing the subject in a moral, social, and poetical light, what, pray, is the true influence of The Still? It makes people idle. Idle? What species of idleness is that which consists in being up night and day—traversing moors and mountains in all weathers—constantly contriving the most skilful expedients for misleading the Excise, and which, on some disastrous day, when dragoons suddenly shake the desert—when all is lost except honour—hundreds of gallons of wash (alas! alas! a-day!) wickedly wasted among the heather-roots, and the whole beautiful Apparatus lying battered and spiritless in the sun beneath the accursed blows of the Pagans—returns, after a few weeks set apart to natural grief and indignation, with unabated energy, to the self-same work, even within view of the former ruins, and pouring out a libation of the first amalgamated hotness that deserves the name of speerit, devotes the whole Board of Excise to the Infernal Gods?
The argument of idleness has not a leg to stand on, and falls at once to the ground.—But the Still makes men dishonest. We grant that there is a certain degree of dishonesty in cheating the Excise; and we shall allow yourself to fix it, who give as fine a caulker from the sma' still as any moral writer on Honesty with whom we have the pleasure occasionally to take a family dinner. But the poor fellows either grow or purchase their own malt. They do not steal it; and many is the silent benediction that we have breathed over a bit patch of barley, far up on its stony soil among the hills, bethinking us that it would yield up its precious spirit unexcised! Neither do they charge for it any very extravagant price—for what is twelve, fourteen, twenty shillings a-gallon for such drink divine as is now steaming before us in that celestial caldron?
Having thus got rid of the charge of idleness and dishonesty, nothing more needs to be said on the Moral Influence of the Still; and we come now, in the second place, to consider it in a Social Light. The biggest bigot will not dare to deny, that without whisky the Highlands of Scotland would be uninhabitable. And if all the population were gone, or extinct, where then would be your social life? Smugglers are seldom drunkards; neither are they men of boisterous manners or savage dispositions. In general, they are grave, sedate, peaceable characters, not unlike elders of the Kirk. Even Excisemen admit them, except on rare occasions when human patience is exhausted, to be merciful. Four pleasanter men do not now exist in the bosom of the earth, than the friends with whom we are now on the hobnob. Stolen waters are sweet—a profound and beautiful reflection—and no doubt originally made by some peripatetic philosopher at a Still. The very soul of the strong drink evaporates with the touch of the gauger's wand. An evil day would it indeed be for Scotland, that should witness the extinguishment of all her free and unlicensed mountain stills! The charm of Highland hospitality would be wan and withered, and the doch-an-dorras, instead of a blessing, would sound like a ban.
We have said that smugglers are never drunkards, not forgetting that general rules are proved by exceptions; nay, we go farther, and declare that the Highlanders are the soberest people in Europe. Whisky is to them a cordial, a medicine, a life-preserver. Chief of the umbrella and wraprascal! were you ever in the Highlands? We shall produce a single day from any of the fifty-two weeks of the year that will out-argue you on the present subject, in half an hour. What sound is that? The rushing of rain from heaven, and the sudden outcry of a thousand waterfalls. Look through a chink in the bothy, and far as you can see for the mists, the heath-covered desert is steaming like the smoke of a smouldering fire. Winds biting as winter come sweeping on their invisible chariots armed with scythes, down every glen, and scatter far and wide over the mountains the spray of the raging lochs. Now you have a taste of the summer cold, more dangerous far than that of Yule, for it often strikes "aitches" into the unprepared bones, and congeals the blood of the shelterless shepherd on the hill. But one glorious gurgle of the speerit down the throat of a storm-stayed man! and bold as a rainbow he faces the reappearing sun, and feels assured (though there he may be mistaken) of dying at a good old age.
Then think, oh think, how miserably poor are most of those men who have fought our battles, and so often reddened their bayonets in defence of our liberties and our laws! Would you grudge them a little whisky? And depend upon it, a little is the most, taking one day of the year with another, that they imbibe. You figure to yourself two hundred thousand Highlanders, taking snuff, and chewing tobacco, and drinking whisky, all year long. Why, one pound of snuff, two of tobacco, and two gallons of whisky, would be beyond the mark of the yearly allowance of every grown-up man! Thousands never taste such luxuries at all—meal and water, potatoes and salt, their only food. The animal food, sir, and the fermented liquors of various kinds, Foreign and British, which to our certain knowledge you have swallowed within the last twelve months, would have sufficed for fifty families in our abstemious region of mist and snow. We have known you drink a bottle of champagne, a bottle of port, and two bottles of claret, frequently at a sitting, equal, in prime cost, to three gallons of the best Glenlivet! And You (who, by the way, are an English clergyman, a circumstance we had entirely forgotten, and have published a Discourse against Drunkenness, dedicated to a Bishop) pour forth the Lamentations of Jeremiah over the sinful multitude of Small Stills! Hypocrisy! hypocrisy! where shalt thou hide thy many-coloured sides?
Whisky is found by experience to be, on the whole, a blessing in so misty and mountainous a country. It destroys disease and banishes death; without some such stimulant the people would die of cold. You will see a fine old Gael, of ninety or a hundred, turn up his little finger to a caulker with an air of patriarchal solemnity altogether scriptural; his great-grandchildren eyeing him with the most respectful affection, and the youngest of them toddling across the floor, to take the quaich from his huge, withered, and hairy hand, which he lays on the amiable Joseph's sleek craniology, with a blessing heartier through the Glenlivet, and with all the earnestness of religion. There is no disgrace in getting drunk—in the Highlands—not even if you are of the above standing—for where the people are so poor, such a state is but of rare occurrence; while it is felt all over the land of sleet and snow, that a 'drap o' the cretur' is a very necessary of life, and that but for its 'dew' the mountains would be uninhabitable. At fairs, and funerals, and marriages, and suchlike merry meetings, sobriety is sent to look after the sheep; but, except on charitable occasions of that kind, sobriety stays at home among the peat-reek, and is contented with crowdy. Who that ever stooped his head beneath a Highland hut would grudge a few gallons of Glenlivet to its poor but unrepining inmates? The seldomer they get drunk the better—and it is but seldom they do so; but let the rich man—the monied moralist, who bewails and begrudges the Gael a modicum of the liquor of life, remember the doom of a certain Dives, who, in a certain place that shall now be nameless, cried, but cried in vain, for a drop of water. Lord bless the Highlanders, say we, for the most harmless, hospitable, peaceable, brave people that ever despised breeches, blew pibrochs, took invincible standards, and believed in the authenticity of Ossian's poems. In that pure and lofty region ignorance is not, as elsewhere, the mother of vice—penury cannot repress the noble rage of the mountaineer as "he sings aloud old songs that are the music of the heart;" while superstition herself has an elevating influence, and will be suffered, even by religion, to show her shadowy shape and mutter her wild voice through the gloom that lies on the heads of the remote glens, and among the thousand caves of echo in her iron-bound coasts, dashed on for ever—night and day—summer and winter—by those sleepless seas, who have no sooner laid their heads on the pillow than up they start with a howl that cleaves the Orcades, and away off in search of shipwrecks round the corner of Cape Wrath.
In the third place, what shall we say of the poetical influence of Stills? What more poetical life can there be than that of the men with whom we are now quaffing the barley-bree? They live with the moon and stars. All the night winds are their familiars. If there be such things as ghosts, and fairies, and apparitions—and that there are, no man who has travelled much by himself after sunset will deny, except from the mere love of contradiction—they see them; or when invisible, which they generally are, hear them—here—there—everywhere—in sky, forest, cave, or hollow-sounding world immediately beneath their feet. Many poets walk these wilds; nor do their songs perish. They publish not with Blackwood or with Murray—but for centuries on centuries, such songs are the preservers, often the sources, of the oral traditions that go glimmering and gathering down the stream of years. Native are they to the mountains as the blooming heather, nor shall they ever cease to invest them with the light of poetry—in defiance of large farms, Methodist preachers, and the Caledonian Canal.
People are proud of talking of solitude. It redounds, they opine, to the honour of their great-mindedness to be thought capable of living, for an hour or two, by themselves, at a considerable distance from knots or skeins of their fellow-creatures. Byron, again, thought he showed his superiority by swearing as solemnly as a man can do in the Spenserian stanza that
"To sit alone, and muse o'er flood and fell,"
has nothing whatever to do with solitude—and that, if you wish to know and feel what solitude really is, you must go to Almack's.
"This is to be alone,—this, this is solitude."
His Lordship's opinions were often peculiar—but the passage has been much admired; therefore we are willing to believe that the Great Desert is, in point of loneliness, unable to stand a philosophical, much less a poetical comparison, with a well-frequented Fancy-ball. But is the statement not borne out by facts? Zoology is on its side—more especially two of its most interesting branches, Entomology and Ornithology.
Go to a desert and clap your back against a cliff. Do you think yourself alone? What a ninny! Your great clumsy splay feet are bruising to death a batch of beetles. See that spider whom you have widowed, running up and down your elegant leg, in distraction and despair, bewailing the loss of a husband who, however savage to the ephemerals, had always smiled sweetly upon her. Meanwhile your shoulders have crushed a colony of small red ants settled in a moss city beautifully roofed with lichens—and that accounts for the sharp tickling behind your ear, which you keep scratching, no Solomon, in ignorance of the cause of that effect. Should you sit down—we must beg to draw a veil over your hurdies, which at the moment extinguish a fearful amount of animal life—creation may be said to groan under them; and, insect as you are yourself, you are defrauding millions of insects of their little day. All the while you are supposing yourself alone! Now, are you not, as we hinted, a prodigious ninny? But the whole wilderness—as you choose to call it—is crawling with various life. London with its million and a half of inhabitants—including of course the suburbs—is, compared with it, an empty joke. Die—and you will soon be picked to the bones. The air swarms with sharpers—and an insurrection of radicals will attack your corpse from the worm-holes of the earth. Corbies, ravens, hawks, eagles, all the feathered furies of beak and bill, will come flying ere sunset to anticipate the maggots, and carry your remains—if you will allow us to call them so—over the whole of Argyllshire in many living sepulchres. We confess ourselves unable to see the solitude of this—and begin to agree with Byron, that a man is less crowded at a masquerade.
But the same subject may be illustrated less tragically, and even with some slight comic effect. A man among mountains is often surrounded on all sides with mice and moles. What cosy nests do the former construct at the roots of heather, among tufts of grass in the rushes, and the moss on the greensward! As for the latter, though you think you know a mountain from a molehill, you are much mistaken; for what is a mountain, in many cases, but a collection of molehills—and of fairy knolls?—which again introduce a new element into the composition, and show, in still more glaring colours, your absurdity in supposing yourself to be in solitude. The "Silent People" are around you at every step. You may not see them—for they are dressed in invisible green; but they see you, and that unaccountable whispering and buzzing sound one often hears in what we call the wilderness, what is it, or what can it be, but the fairies making merry at your expense, pointing out to each other the extreme silliness of your meditative countenance, and laughing like to split at your fond conceit of being alone among a multitude of creatures far wiser than yourself.
But should all this fail to convince you that you are never less alone than when you think yourself alone, and that a man never knows what it is to be in the very heart of life till he leaves London, and takes a walk in Glen-Etive—suppose yourself to have been leaning with your back against that knoll, dreaming of the far-off race of men, when all at once the support gives way inwards, and you tumble head over heels in among a snug coterie of kilted Celts, in the very act of creating Glenlivet in a great warlock's caldron, seething to the top with the Spirit of Life!
Such fancies as these, among many others, were with us in the Still. But a glimmering and a humming and a dizzy bewilderment hangs over that time and place, finally dying away into oblivion. Here are we sitting in a glade of a birch-wood in what must be Gleno—some miles from the Still. Hamish asleep, as usual, whenever he lies down, and all the dogs yowffing in dreams, and Surefoot standing with his long beard above ours, almost the same in longitude. We have been more, we suspect, than half-seas over, and are now lying on the shore of sobriety, almost a wreck. The truth is, that the new spirit is even more dangerous than the new light. Both at first dazzle, then obfuscate, and lastly darken into temporary death. There is, we fear, but one word of one syllable in the English language that could fully express our late condition. Let our readers solve the enigma. Oh! those quaichs! By
"What drugs, what spells,
What conjurations, and what mighty magic"
was Christopher overthrown! A strange confusion of sexes, as of men in petticoats and women in breeches—gowns transmogrified into jackets—caps into bonnets—and thick naked hairy legs into slim ankles decent in hose—all somewhere whirling and dancing by, dim and obscure, to the sound of something groaning and yelling, sometimes inarticulately, as if it came from something instrumental, and then mixed up with a wild gibberish, as if shrieking, somehow or other, from living lips, human and brute—for a dream of yowling dogs is over all—utterly confounds us as we strive to muster in recollection the few last hours that have passed tumultuously through our brain—and then a wide black moor, sometimes covered with day, sometimes with night, stretches around us, hemmed in on all sides by the tops of mountains seeming to reel in the sky. Frequent flashes of fire, and a whirring as of the wings of birds—but sound and sight alike uncertain—break again upon our dream. Let us not mince the matter—we can afford the confession—we have been overtaken by liquor—sadly intoxicated—out with it at once! Frown not, fairest of all sweet—for we lay our calamity, not to the charge of the Glenlivet circling in countless quaichs, but at the door of that inveterate enemy to sobriety—the Fresh Air.
But now we are as sober as a judge. Pity our misfortune—rather than forgive our sin. We entered that Still in a State of innocence before the Fall. Where we fell, we know not—in divers ways and sundry places—between that magic cell on the breast of Benachochie, and this glade in Gleno. But
"There are worse things in life than a fall among heather."
Surefoot, we suppose, kept himself tolerably sober—and O'Bronte, at each successive cloit, must have assisted us to remount—for Hamish, from his style of sleeping, must have been as bad as his master; and, after all, it is wonderful to think how we got here—over hags and mosses, and marshes, and quagmires, like those in which "armies whole have sunk." But the truth is, that never in the whole course of our lives—and that course has been a strange one—did we ever so often as once lose our way. Set us down blindfolded on Zahara, and we will beat the caravan to Timbuctoo. Something or other mysteriously indicative of the right direction touches the soles of our feet in the shape of the ground they tread; and even when our souls have gone soaring far away, or have sunk within us, still have our feet pursued the shortest and the safest path that leads to the bourne of our pilgrimage. Is not that strange? But not stranger surely than the flight of the bee, on his first voyage over the coves of the wilderness to the far-off heather-bells—or of the dove that is sent by some Jew stock-jobber, to communicate to Dutchmen the rise or fall of the funds, from London to Hamburg, from the clear shores of silver Thames to the muddy shallows of the Zuyder Zee.