The tourists travelled subsequently through the Vale of the Nith, and crossing the Frith, reached Brownhill, where they slept.
“I cannot take leave of this country,” says Miss Wordsworth, in her Journal, “without mentioning that we saw the Cumberland mountains within half a mile of Ellisland (Burns’ house) the last view we had of them. Drayton has prettily described the connection which the neighbourhood has with ours, when he makes Skiddaw say—
‘Scurfell from the sky,
That Annandale doth crown, with a most amorous eye,
Salutes me every day, or at my pride looks grim,
Oft threatening me with clouds, as I oft threatening him!’
These lines occurred to William’s memory; and while he and I were talking of Burns, and the prospect he must have had, perhaps from his own door, of Skiddaw and his companions, we indulged ourselves in fancying that we might have been personally known to each other, and he have looked upon those objects with more pleasure for our sakes. We talked of Coleridge’s children and family, then at the foot of Skiddaw, and our own new-born John, a few miles behind it; and the grave of Burns’ son, which we had just seen, by the side of that of his father; and the stories we had heard at Dumfries, respecting the dangers which his surviving children were exposed to, filled us with melancholy concern, which had a kind of connection with ourselves, and with thoughts, some of which were afterwards expressed in the following supposed address to the sons of the ill-fated poet:—
“Ye now are toiling up life’s hill,
’Tis twilight time of good and ill!”
During this Scotch tour the party walked through the vale of the Clyde, visited Glengyle, the scene of some of Rob Roy’s exploits, Loch Lomond, Inverary, Glencoe, Kenmore, and the Duke of Athol’s gardens; resting whilst in this latter place on “the heather seat which Burns was so loth to quit that moonlight evening when he first went to Blair Castle.” Then they went to the Pass of Killicranky, respecting which Wordsworth wrote the following sonnet.
“Six thousand veterans practis’d in war’s game,
Tried men, at Killicranky were arrayed
Against an equal host that wore the plaid,
Shepherds and herdsmen. Like a whirlwind came
The Highlanders; the slaughter spread like flame;
And Garry, thundering down his mountain road,
Was stopped, and could not breathe beneath the load
Of the dead bodies! ’Twas a day of shame
For them whom precept, and the pedantry
Of cold mechanic battle do enslave.
Oh for a single hour of that Dundee,
Who on that day the word of onset gave!
Like conquest might the men of England see!
And their foes find a like inglorious grave.
In the year 1803, when this sonnet was written, an invasion was hourly looked for; and Miss Wordsworth and her brother (for Coleridge had left them, worried by the “evil chance,” and something worse perhaps at Loch Lomond) could not but think with some regret of the times when from the now depopulated Highlands, forty or fifty thousand men might have been poured down for the defence of the country, under such leaders as the Marquis of Montrose, or the brave man who had so distinguished himself upon the ground where they were standing.
The tourists returned by way of Edinburgh, visiting Peebles and Melrose Abbey. Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, was, at the time of their visit to the abbey, travelling as Sheriff of Selkirk to the assizes at Jedburgh. They dined together at the Melrose Inn. Sir Walter was their guide to the abbey, taking them into Mr. Riddel’s gardens and orchard, where they had a sweet view of it through trees, the town being quite excluded. Sir Walter was of course at home in the history and tradition of these noble ruins, and pointed out to his visitors many things which would otherwise have escaped their notice. Beautiful pieces of sculpture in obscure corners, flowers, leaves, and other ornaments, which being cut in the durable pale red stone of which the abbey is built, were quite perfect. What destroyed, however, the effect of the abbey, was the barbarous taste of the good Scotch people who had built an ugly, damp charnel house within the ruins, which they called a church!
Quitting Melrose, they crossed the Teviot by a stone bridge, and visited Jedburgh. It rained all the way, and they arrived at the inn just before the judges were expected out of court to dinner, very wet and cold. There was no private room but the judges’ sitting-room, and they had to get private lodgings in the town. Scott sat with them an hour in the evening, and repeated a part of his “Lay of the Last Minstrel.” Their landlady was a very remarkable woman; and Wordsworth wrote some verses expressive of the feelings with which she inspired him. Here is the burden.