The bad weather proved too much for Coleridge, who turned back from the tour here; and his muse seems not to have been inspired by this land of the mountain which he found also a land of the flood. Wordsworth, however, made several attempts to annex Scotland to his native domain. Truth to tell, the lake poet’s harp sounds sometimes out of tune across the Border, as witness his woeful travesty of the “Helen of Kirkconnel” story, and the philosophic considerations which he attributes to Rob Roy over what may have been that bold outlaw’s grave. There is one verse in his “Highland Reaper” which seems a perfect epitome of the future Laureate’s qualities, who, if he “uttered nothing base,” could come too near being commonplace. “Will no one tell me what she sings?” is surely in the flat tone which one irreverent critic describes as a “bleat.” “Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow”—is not this the false gallop of eighteenth-century verse, out of which Wordsworth vainly believed that he had broken his Pegasus? But in such pinchbeck setting, what a pearl of price—
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago!
Thus to him, too, “Caledonia stern and wild” could breathe her secret, while to put life into the raids and combats of long ago was for another bard who plays drum and trumpet in the orchestra of British poetry. I am not going to string vain epithets on the Trossachs, familiar to all readers if only from the pages of their great advertiser. But let me hint to tourists who come duly furnished with the Lady of the Lake, that Black’s Guide to the Trossachs includes an excellent commentary on the poem from what may seem an unpoetical source, the pen of an Astronomer-Royal, Sir G. B. Airey, whose topographical analysis will be found most instructive. These scenes appear somewhat trimmed since an old writer described the Highlands “as a part of the creation left undrest.” The lake edges have been smoothed off, as the “unfathomable glades” of the Trossachs are opened up by a road, below the line of the old pass and the hill tracks by which the Fiery Cross was sped towards Strath-Ire.
For an account of this country as it is in our day, we may refer to a French story by a writer named, of all names, André Laurie, whose native heath ought to be the bonny braes of Maxwelton. This book has the serious purpose of giving a view of English school athletics, and pointing the moral that Frenchmen so trained would be all the fitter for la revanche. The hero, sent to school in England, is, as part of his educational course, taken by the schoolmaster on a shooting excursion in the Highlands.
They put up at the White Heart, one of the principal hotels of Glascow, and the landlord is so interested in their bold enterprise that he personally conducts them on the chasse aux grouses. Nay more, he equips them with a pack of piebald pointers, well trained to retrieve in water, which he had come by in a remarkable manner: a certain Lord Stilton, breakfasting at the hotel, with true British generosity made his host a present of these matchless hounds by way of largesse for an excellent dish of trout—a rare treat, it seems, in this part of the world.