All this section is as fertile as it can be in the sceneries and historical associations favorable for inspiring a strong-hearted love of country, and for the development of the poetry of romantic patriotism. It was pleasant to emerge from the dark, cold, barren border-land, from the uncivilized mountains, standing sullen in the wild, shaggy chevelure of nature, and to walk again between towering hills dressed in the best toilet of human industry, crowned with golden wheatfields, and zoned with broad girdles of the greenest vegetation. It is when these contrasts are suddenly and closely brought within the same vista that one sees and feels how the Creator has honored the labor of human hands, and lifted it up into partnership with His omnipotences in chronicling the consecutive centuries of the earth in illuminated capitals of this joint handwriting. It is a grand and impressive sight—one of those dark-browed hills of the Border-land, bearded to its rock-ridged forehead with such bush-bristles and haired with matted heather. In nature it is what a painted Indian squaw in her blanket, eagle feathers and moccasins, is in the world of humanity. We look upon both with a species of admiration, as contrasts with objects whose worth is measured by the comparison. The Empress Eugenie and the Princess of Wales, and wives and sisters lovelier still to the circles of humble life, look more beautiful and graceful when the eye turns to them from a glance at the best-looking squaw of the North American wilds. And so looked the well-dressed hills on each side of the Teviot, compared with the uncultured and stunted mountains among which I had so recently walked.
Ascending from Teviotdale, I passed the Earl of Minto’s seat, a large and modern-looking mansion, surrounded with beautiful grounds and noble trees, and commanding a grand and picturesque view of valley and mountain from an excellent point of observation. As soon as I lost sight of Teviotdale another grand vista of golden and purpled hills and rich valleys burst upon my sight as suddenly as theatrical sceneries are shifted on the stage. Dined in a little, rural, unpoetical village bearing the name of Lilliesleaf. Resuming my walk, I soon came in sight of the grand valley of the Tweed, a great basin of natural beauty, holding, as it were, Scotland’s “apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Every step commanded some new feature of interest. Here on the left arose to the still, blue bosom of the sky the three great Eildon Hills, with their heads crowned with heather as with an emerald diadem. The sun is low, and the far-off village in the valley shows dimly between the daylight and darkness. There is the shadow of a broken edifice, broken but grand, that arises out of the midst of the low houses. A little farther on, arches, and the stone vein-work of glassless windows, and ivy-netted towers come out more distinctly. I recognise them at the next furlong. They stand thus in pictures hung up in the parlors of thousands of common homes in America, Australia and India. They are the ruins of Melrose Abbey. Here is the original of the picture. I see it at last, as thousands of Americans have seen it before. In history and association it is to them the Westminster Abbey of Scotland, but in ruin. It looks natural, though not at first glance what one expected. The familiar engraving does not give us the real flesh and blood of the antiquity, or the complexion of the stone; but it does not exaggerate the exquisite symmetries and artistic genius of the structure. These truly inspire one with wonder. They are all that pen and pencil have described them. The great window, which is the most salient feature in the common picture, is a magnificent piece of work in stone, twenty-four feet in height and sixteen in breadth. It is all in the elm-tree order of architecture. The old monks belonged to that school, and they wrought out branches, leaves and leaf-veins, and framed the lacework of their chisels with colored glass most exquisitely.
Melrose Abbey was the eldest daughter, I believe, of Rievaulx Abbey, in Yorkshire, which has already been noticed; a year or two older in its foundation than Fountain Abbey, in Studley Park. The fecundity with which these ecclesiastical buildings multiplied and replenished England and Scotland is a marvel, considering the age in which they were erected and the small population and the poverty of the country. But something on this aspect of the subject hereafter. Here lie the ashes of Scottish kings, abbots and knights whose names figured conspicuously in the history of public and private wars which cover such a space of the country’s life as an independent nation. The Douglas family especially with several of its branches found a resting-place for their dust within these walls. Built and rebuilt, burnt and reburnt, mutilated, dismembered, consecrated and desecrated, make up the history of this celebrated edifice, and that of its like, from Land’s End to John O’Groat’s. It is a slight but a very appreciable mitigation of these destructive acts that it was ruined artistically; just as some enthusiastic castle and abbey-painter would have suggested.
Although I spent the night at Melrose, it was a dark and cloudy one, so that I could not see the abbey by moonlight—a view so much prized and celebrated. The next day I literally walked from morning till evening among the tombstones of antiquity and monuments of Scotch history invested with an interest which will never wane. In the first place, I went down the Tweed a few miles and crossed it in a ferry-boat to see Dryburgh Abbey. Here, embowered among the trees in a silver curve of the river, stands this grand monument of one of the most remarkable ages of the world. Within an hour’s walk from Melrose, and four or five years only after the completion of that edifice, the foundations of this were laid. It is astonishing. We will not dwell upon it now, but make a separate chapter on it when I have seen most of the other ruins of the kind in the kingdom. The French are given to the habit of festooning the monuments and graves of their relatives and friends with immortelles. Nature has hung one of hers to Dryburgh Abbey. It is a yew-tree opposite the door by which you enter the ruins. The year-rings of its trunk register all the centuries that the stones of the oldest wall have stood imbedded one upon the other. The tree is still green, putting forth its leaf in its season. But there is an immortelle hung to these dark, crumbling walls that shall outlive the greenest trees now growing on earth. Here, in a little vaulted chapel, or rather a deep niche in the wall, lie the remains of Sir Walter Scott, his wife and the brilliant Lockhart. How many thousands of all lands where the English language is spoken will come and stand here in mute and pensive communion before the iron gate of this family tomb and look through the bars upon this group of simply-lettered stones!
From Dryburgh I walked back to Melrose on the east side of the Tweed. Lost the footpath, and for two hours clambered up and down the precipitous cliffs that rise high and abrupt from the river. In many places the zig-zag path was cut into the rock, hardly a foot in breadth, overhanging a precipice which a person of weak nerves could hardly face with composure. At last got out of these dark fastnesses and ascended a range of lofty hills where I found a good carriage road. This elevation commanded the most magnificent view that I ever saw in Scotland, excepting, perhaps, the one from Stirling Castle only for the feature which the Forth supplies. It was truly beautiful beyond description, and it would be useless for me to attempt one.
After dinner in Melrose, I resumed my walk northward and came suddenly upon Abbotsford. Indeed, I should have missed it, had I not noticed a wooden gate open on the roadside, with some directions upon it for those wishing to visit the house. As it stands low down towards the river, and as all the space above it to the road is covered with trees and shrubbery, it is entirely hidden from view in that direction. The descent to the house is rather steep and long. And here it is!—Abbotsford! It is the photograph of Sir Walter Scott. It is brim full of him and his histories. No author’s pen ever gave such an individuality to a human home. It is all the coinage of thoughts that have flooded the hemispheres. Pages of living literature built up all these lofty walls, bent these arches, panelled these ceilings, and filled the whole edifice with these mementoes of the men and ages gone. Every one of these hewn stones cost a paragraph; that carved and gilded crest, a column’s length of thinking done on paper. It must be true that pure, unaided literary labor never built before a mansion of this magnitude and filled it with such treasures of art and history. This will forever make it and the pictures of it a monument of peculiar interest. I have said that it is brim full of the author. It is equally full of all he wrote about; full of the interesting topographs of Scotland’s history, back to the twilight ages; full inside and out, and in the very garden and stable walls. The studio of an artist was never fuller of models of human or animal heads, or of counterfeit duplicates of Nature’s handiwork, than Sir Walter’s mansion is of things his pen painted on in the long life of its inspirations. The very porchway that leads into the house is hung with petrified stag-horns, doubtless dug up in Scottish bogs, and illustrating a page of the natural history of the country in some pre-historic century. The halls are panelled with Scotland,—with carvings in oak from the old palace of Dunfermline. Coats of arms of the celebrated Border chieftains are arrayed in line around the walls. The armoury is a miniature arsenal of all arms ever wielded since the time of the Druids. And a history attaches to nearly every one of the weapons. History hangs its webwork everywhere. It is built, high and low, into the face of the outside walls. Quaint, old, carved stones from abbey and castle ruins, arms, devices and inscriptions are all here presented to the eye like the printed page of an open volume. Among the interesting relics are a chair made from the rafters of the house in which Wallace was betrayed, Rob Roy’s pistol, and the key of the old Tolbooth of Edinburgh.
I was conducted through the rooms opened to visitors by a very gentlemanly-looking man, who might be taken for an author himself, from his intellectual appearance and conversation. The library is the largest of all the apartments—fifty feet by sixty. Nor is it too large for the collection of books it contains, which numbers about 20,000 volumes, many of them very rare and valuable. But the soul-centre of the building to me was the study, opening into the library. There is the small writing-table, and there is the plain armchair in which he sat by it and worked out those creations of fancy which have excited such interest through the world. That square foot over against this chair, where his paper lay, is the focus, the point of incidence and reflection, of thoughts that pencilled outward, like sun-rays, until their illumination reached the antipodes,—thoughts that brought a pleasant shining to the sun-burnt face of the Australian shepherd as he watched his flock at noon from under the shadow of a stunted tree; thoughts which made a cheery fellowship at night for the Hudson Bay hunter, in his snow-buried cabin on the Saskatchiwine. The books of this little inner library were the body-guard of his genius, chosen to be nearest him in the outsallyings of his imagination. Here is a little conversational closet, with a window in it to let in the leaf-sifted light and air—a small recess large enough for a couple of chairs or so, which he called a “Speak-a-bit.” Here is something so near his personality that it almost startles you like a sudden apparition of himself. It is a glass case containing the clothes he last wore on earth,—the large-buttoned, blue coat, the plaid trousers, the broad-brimmed hat, and heavy, thick-soled shoes which he had on when he came in from his last walk to lay himself down and die.
On signing my name in the register, I was affected at a coincidence which conveyed a tribute of respect to the memory of the great author of striking significance, while it recorded the painful catastrophe which has broken over upon the American Republic. It was a sad sight to me to see the profane and suicidal antagonisms which have rent it in twain brought to the shrine of this great memory and graven upon its sacred tablet as it were with the murdering dagger’s point. New and bad initials! The father and patriot Washington would have wept tears of blood to have read them here,—to have read them anywhere, bearing such deplorable meaning. They were U.S.A. and C.S.A., as it were chasing each other up and down the pages of the visitors’ register. Sad, sad was the sight—sadder, in a certain sense, than the smoke-wreaths of the Tuscarora and Alabama ploughing the broad ocean with their keels. U.S.A. and C.S.A.! What initials for Americans to write, with the precious memories of a common history and a common weal still held to their hearts—to write here or anywhere! What a riving and a ruin do those letters record! Still they brought in their severed hands a common homage-gift to the memory of the Writer of Abbotsford. If they represented the dissolution of a great political fabric, in which they once gloried with equal pride, they meant union here—a oneness indissoluble in admiration for a great genius whose memory can no more be localised to a nation than the interest of his works.
American names, both of the North and South, may be found on almost every page of the register. I wrote mine next to that of a gentleman from Worcester, Mass., my old place of residence, who only left an hour before my arrival. Abbotsford and Stratford-upon-Avon are points to which our countrymen converge in their travels in this country; and you will find more of their signatures in the registry of these two haloed homesteads of genius than anywhere else in Europe.
The valley of the Tweed in this section is all an artist would delight in as a surrounding of such histories. The hills are lofty, declining into gorges or dells at different angles with the river, which they wall in precipitously with their wooded sides in many places. They are mostly cultivated to the top, and now in harvest many of them were crowned with stooked sheaves of wheat, each looking in the distance like Nature with her golden curls done up in paper, dressing for the harvest-home of the season. Some of them wore belts and gores of turnip foliage of different nuances of green luxuriance, combining with every conceivable shade and alternation of vegetable coloring. Indeed, as already intimated, the view from the eminence almost overhanging the little sequestered peninsula on which Old Melrose stood twelve centuries ago, is indescribably beautiful, and well worth a long journey to see, disconnected from its historical associations. The Eildon Hills towering up heather-crowned to the height of over 1,300 feet above the level of the sea right out of the sheen of barley fields, as from a sea of silver, form one of the salient features of this glorious landscape. This is an interesting peculiarity of Scotch scenery;—civilization sapping the barbarism of the wilderness; wheat-fields mordant biting in upon peaty moorlands, or climbing to the tops of cold, bald mountains, shearing off their thorny locks of heather and covering them with the well-dressed chevelure of yellow grain. Where the farmer’s horse cannot climb with the plough, or the little sheep cannot graze to advantage, human hands plant the Scotch larch or fir, just as a tenant-gardener would set out cabbage-plants in odd corners of his little holding which he could have no other use for.