Here is a hint to prospective tourists. Take to the left when you quit the hall, get down the lane leading to the sea-crags, and walk for two miles in the direction of the rifle-range. It is a glorious and solitary walk—not altogether solitary, for the sea is invariably good company. Don't be so foolish as to keep on your hat: off with it, and let the air-borne sea-spume wet your brow. It is also a good thing to recite Byron's vigorous "Address to the Ocean,"—the odd cows you may pass will not stop their grazing for that. There is no finer air in King Edward's dominions than that which blows in this region, for the hill air meets the sea air that has come all the way from Norway, and the two coalesce to give the rapt pedestrian a mouthful of exhilarating ether. One who is really a poet and not merely a casual sonneteer, should try to get a site for his tent on this particular shore, and retire to compose an epoch-making epic. The mediæval saints knew what they were doing when they retired to little nooks and isles along this coast to pray and meditate undisturbed: it is much easier to feel devout in a fresh atmosphere, than in the squalor of a town.
PAST AND PRESENT SAINTS.
What indeed astonishes the visitor to these northern isles is the immense number of ecclesiastical ruins. The Christian missionaries seem speedily to have translated their enthusiasm into stone and lime. What hymns were chanted and what sermons preached up there in bygone times, passes the wit of man to reckon! It is a far cry from Palestine to the Shetland creeks and voes, but the voice of the lowly Nazarene effectually reached the Celts and Norsemen of these treeless storm-lashed isles.
Many of the smaller islands have the appellation papa, which indicates, as I hinted above, that some monk or hermit, withdrawing from the world to pray and meditate, has bequeathed a whiff of sanctity to headland and skerry.
"The hermit good lives in the wood," says Coleridge, but for the Shetland papa there was no nemorum murmur:—
No sun-illumined leafage met his eye
Raised from perusal of the Holy Word,
No murmur of the woodland zephyr-stirred
Blended with his devotions sped on high,
Only the chiding of the billows nigh.
The clangour of the wheeling ocean-bird,
Or soul-astounding shriek of storm-fiend heard
From the dun cloud-battalions hurrying by,
Greeted his ear: yet piously through all
His life the austere anchorite remained,
On his lone island, buffeted by squall
And sea, and faithful unto death obtained
The promised guerdon that the Lord bestows
Upon the pure in heart, and only those.
It has been asserted by those who have means of knowing, that the days of theological rigidity are past and gone in the Shetlands. Thing unheard of in the Hebrides—the shops are open on Sunday mornings for the sale of Saturday's Scotsman and Herald. In some parts of Scotland you could not hire a trap for a Sunday drive; in others, you might manage, by salving the driver's conscience with a double fare. In Shetland the tariff is the same for the first and the last days of the week. To explain the ecclesiastical differences between the islands of the North and the West would require a philosopher with all Buckle's shrewdness and ingenuity. Buckle accounted for the sombre nature of Scotch theology by dwelling on the awe-inspiring reverberations of thunder among the Highland peaks. The easy-going creed of the Shetlands might perhaps be accounted for by a reference to the happy-go-lucky way in which the sea wanders at will among the confusion of peninsulas, islets, and skerries. Any theory is better than none at all, and geopsychical explanations are fashionable at present.
The pulpit stars twinkle with great lustre in these boreal regions. A country minister, with no preparatory groans, but sharp and trippingly thus began his homily some Sundays ago: "It is now thirty-five years since the Lord sent me to labour in this part of his vineyard, if vineyard I may call it, where no grape was ever seen. On a bright summer morning thirty-five years ago, I turned the corner of the road and came among you. Young women, your mothers were in the fields, busy with the work of the crofts. Your mothers were exceedingly fair to look upon, and I am happy to say, my dear young sisters, that, by the providence of God, the beauty of your mothers has lost nothing by being transmitted to your comely selves. And now for my text, which you will find in Ezekiel, chapter x and verse y."
SOME NOTES ON THE ISLANDS.
A century ago Shetland was almost an unknown land to the Lowlanders of Scotland. When a Shetland minister was deputed to attend the General Assembly, it might take him a year to get there and back. His journey was a very circuitous one: he had to go in a trading vessel to Hamburg, take boat from Hamburg to London, and from London proceed to Leith. To return from Edinburgh, the journey was performed the reverse way. Now that there is a regular service between Aberdeen and Lerwick, and between Leith and several of the Shetland ports, the journey can be performed with comfort and expedition. Tourists flock North in the summer season to admire the scenery, catch the trout, and inhale the health-giving breezes.