Above Lessudden the Tweed winds round and at the foot of the beautiful ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, softly mourning for him who lies within that sound "the dearest of all to his ear," Sir Walter Scott. The great Magician lies, with Lockhart at his feet, within the ruined walls, in the place which, as he wrote to his bride that was to be, he had already chosen for his rest. The lady replied with spirit that she would not endure any such sepulchral reflections.
[Original]
This is one of the most sacred places, and most beautiful places in broad Scotland.
Approaching Dryburgh, not from the riverside but from the road, we come by such a path through a beautiful wood as that in which proud Maisie was "walking so early," when "bold Robin on the bush singing so rarely," spaed her fortune. The path leads to a place of such unexpected beauty as the ruinous palace where the Sleeping Beauty slumbered through the ages. The beauty is that of Dryburgh itself, delicately fair in her secular decay; fallen from glory, indeed, but still the last home of that peace which dwelt in this much harried Borderland in the days of the first White Friars, and of good St. David the king. They were Englishmen out of Northumberland, teachers of good farming and of other good works. What remains of their dwellings is of the age when the round Norman arch blended with the pointed Gothic, as in the eastern end of the Cathedral of St. Andrews. Thrice the English harmed it, in the days of Bruce (1322) during a malicious and futile attack by Edward II; again, under Robert II, when Richard II played the Vandal; and, lastly, during the wasting of the Border in 1544, which was the eighth Henry's rough wooing for his son, of the babe Mary Stuart. The grounds, the property of a member of the House of Scott's eccentric Earl of Buchan, are kept in charming order. The Earl was the only begetter of a huge statue of Sir William Wallace, who used Ettrick Forest now and again in his guerilla warfare, and from the Forest drew his archers, tall men whom n death the English of Edward I admired on the lost field of Falkirk.
The said Earl of Buchan rather amused than consoled Scott, during a severe illness, by promising to attend to his burial in the place so dear to him, which, till the ruin of his paternal grandmother, had belonged to the Haliburtons, also n old days the lords of Dirleton castle. Readers of Lockhart remember the great Border gathering at the funeral of the latest minstrel, and how his horses, which drew the hearse, paused where they had been wont to rest, at a spot where it had been Sir Walter's habit to stop to admire the landscape. His chief, the young Duke of Buccleuch, was prevented by important business from being an attendant. You would never guess what the business was! No man knows but I only; and if Scott could have known, I doubt whether he would have drawn his shaggy brows into a frown, or laughed; for the business was——but I must not reveal so ancient a secret!
Moving up the river on the left bank, we reach that ancient House concerning which Thomas of Ercildoune's prophecy is still unbroken.
"Betide, Betide, whate'er betide,
There shall aye be a Haig in Bemersyde."