Dorothy Wordsworth, for one, rather belittles Loch Katrine as an “Ulswater dismantled of its grandeur and cropped of its lesser beauties,” though she compliments the upper part as “very pleasing, resembling Thirlmere below Armboth.” But no critic can carp at the fame of Loch Lomond as the most beautiful lake in Scotland; and one author who, as a native of the Lennox, is not indeed unprejudiced, Smollett to wit, gives it the palm over all the lakes he has seen in Italy or Switzerland. Dr. Chalmers wondered if there would not be a Loch Lomond in heaven.
“A little Mediterranean” is the style given by a seventeenth-century English tourist, Franck, to what Scott boldly pronounces “one of the most surprising, beautiful, and sublime spectacles in nature,” its narrow upper fiord “lost among dusky and retreating mountains,” at the foot opening into an archipelago of wooded islands, threaded by steamboats, while up the western shore runs one of the best cycling roads in the kingdom, past memorials of Stuarts and Buchanans, Colquhouns and wild Macfarlanes. On the other side are caves associated with the adventures of Rob Roy, and spots sung by Wordsworth. And all this wonderland is overshadowed by Ben Lomond, its ascent easily made on foot or pony-back by a traveller not bound to do this whole round in one day. But let him beware of getting lost in the mist and having to spend all night on the mountain, as was the lot of that New England Sibyl, Margaret Fuller. Also he should not imitate a facetious friend of mine who left his card in the cairn at the top, and two or three days later received it enclosed in this note: “Mr. Ben Lomond presents his compliments to Mr. —— and begs to say that not only does his position prevent him from returning visits, but he has no desire for Mr. ——’s further acquaintance.”
At the foot of Loch Lomond we regain the rails that will carry us to Edinburgh, to Glasgow, to Stirling, or to the western Highlands. The first stage is down the Vale of Leven to Dumbarton, arx inexpugnabilis of old Scotland, its name Dunbritton recording the older days when it was the stronghold of a Cumbrian kingdom. Here the literary genius loci is that not very ethereal shade Tobias Smollett, who, born on the banks of Leven, has nothing to say of the Trossachs, but looked back on the scene of Roderick Random’s pranks as an eighteenth-century Arcadia, that could move him to a rare strain of sentiment in his “Ode to Leven Water.”
Devolving from thy parent lake,
A charming maze thy waters make,
By bowers of birch, and groves of pine,
And hedges flower’d with eglantine.
Still on thy banks, so gaily green,
May numerous herds and flocks be seen,
And lasses chanting o’er the pail,
And shepherds piping in the dale,
And ancient faith that knows no guile,
And industry embrown’d with toil,
And hearts resolved, and hands prepared,
The blessings they enjoy to guard.