The fond, daft dreamer Hope
Ne'er dream'd o' happier days than mine,
Or joys o' ampler scope."—Henrison's Sang.
I used, as I have said, to have occasional visitors when working in the churchyard. My minister has stood beside me for hours together, discussing every sort of subject, from the misdeeds of the Moderate divines—whom he liked all the worse for being brethren of his own cloth—to the views of Isaac Taylor on the corruptions of Christianity or the possibilities of the future state. Strangers, too, occasionally came the way, desirous of being introduced to the natural curiosities of the district, more especially to its geology; and I remember first meeting in the churchyard, in this way, the late Sir Thomas Dick Lauder; and of having the opportunity afforded me of questioning, mallet in hand, the present distinguished Professor of Humanity in the Edinburgh University,[15] respecting the nature of the cohesive agent in the non-calcareous sandstone which I was engaged in hewing. I had sometimes a different, but not less interesting, class of visitors. The town had its small but very choice circle of accomplished intellectual ladies, who, earlier in the century, would have been perhaps described as members of the blue-stocking sisterhood; but the advancing intelligence of the age had rendered the phrase obsolete; and they simply took their place as well-informed, sensible women, whose acquaintance with the best authors was regarded as in no degree disqualifying them from their proper duties as wives or daughters. And my circle of acquaintance included the entire class. I used to meet them at delightful tea-parties, and sometimes borrowed a day from my work to conduct them through the picturesque burn of Eathie, or the wild scenes of Cromarty Hill, or to introduce them to the fossiliferous deposits of the Lias or the Old Red Sandstone. And not unfrequently their evening walks used to terminate where I wrought, in the old chapel of St. Regulus, or in the parish burying-ground, beside a sweet wooded dell known as the "Ladies' Walk;" and my labours for the day closed in what I always very much relished—a conversation on the last good book, or on some new organism, recently disinterred, of the Secondary or Palæozoic period.
I had been hewing, about this time, in the upper part of my uncle's garden, and had just closed my work for the evening, when I was visited by one of my lady friends, accompanied by a stranger lady, who had come to see a curious old dial-stone which I had dug out of the earth long before, when a boy, and which had originally belonged to the ancient Castle-garden of Cromarty. I was standing with them beside the dial, which I had placed in my uncle's garden, and remarking, that as it exhibited in its structure no little mathematical skill, it had probably been cut under the eye of the eccentric but accomplished Sir Thomas Urquhart; when a third lady, greatly younger than the others, and whom I had never seen before, came hurriedly tripping down the garden-walk, and, addressing the other two apparently quite in a flurry—"O, come, come away," she said, "I have been seeking you ever so long." "Is this you, L——?" was the staid reply: "Why, what now?—you have run yourself out of breath." The young lady was, I saw, very pretty; and though in her nineteenth year at the time, her light and somewhat petite figure, and the waxen clearness of her complexion, which resembled rather that of a fair child than of a grown woman, made her look from three to four years younger. And as if in some degree still a child, her two lady friends seemed to regard her. She stayed with them scarce a minute ere she tripped off again; nor did I observe that she favoured me with a single glance. But what else could be expected by an ungainly, dust-besprinkled mechanic in his shirt sleeves, and with a leathern apron before him? Nor did the mechanic expect aught else; and when informed long after, by one whose testimony was conclusive on the point, that he had been pointed out to the young lady by some such distinguished name as "the Cromarty Poet," and that she had come up to her friends somewhat in a flurry, simply that she might have a nearer look of him, he received the intelligence somewhat with surprise. All the first interviews in all the novels I ever read are of a more romantic and less homely cast than the special interview just related; but I know not a more curious one.
Only a few evenings after, I met the same young lady, in circumstances of which the writer of a tale might have made a little more. I was sauntering, just as the sun was sinking, along one of my favourite walks on the Hill—a tree-skirted glade—now looking out through the openings on the ever fresh beauties of the Cromarty Firth, with its promontories, and bays, and long lines of winding shore, and anon marking how redly the slant light fell through intersticial gaps on pale lichened trunks and huge boughs, in the deeper recesses of the wood—when I found myself unexpectedly in the presence of the young lady of the previous evening. She was sauntering through the wood as leisurely as myself—now and then dipping into a rather bulky volume which she carried, that had not in the least the look of a novel, and which, as I subsequently ascertained, was an elaborate essay on Causation. We, of course, passed each other on our several ways without sign of recognition. Quickening her pace, however, she was soon out of sight; and I just thought, on one or two occasions afterwards, of the apparition that had been presented as she passed, as much in keeping with the adjuncts—the picturesque forest and the gorgeous sunset. It would not be easy, I thought, were the large book but away, to furnish a very lovely scene with a more suitable figure. Shortly after, I began to meet the young lady at the charming tea-parties of the place. Her father, a worthy man, who, from unfortunate speculations in business, had met with severe losses, was at this time several years dead; and his widow had come to reside in Cromarty, on a somewhat limited income, derived from property of her own. Liberally assisted, however, by relations in England, she had been enabled to send her daughter to Edinburgh, where the young lady received all the advantages which a first-rate education could confer. By some lucky chance, she was there boarded, with a few other ladies, in early womanhood, in the family of Mr. George Thomson, the well-known correspondent of Burns; and passed under his roof some of her happiest years. Mr. Thomson—himself an enthusiast in art—strove to inoculate the youthful inmates of his house with the same fervour, and to develop whatever seeds of taste or genius might be found in them; and, characterized till the close of a life extended far beyond the ordinary term, by the fine chivalrous manners of the thorough gentleman of the old school, his influence over his young friends was very great, and his endeavours, in at least some of the instances, very successful. And in none, perhaps, was he more so than in the case of the young lady of my narrative. From Edinburgh she went to reside with the friends in England to whose kindness she had been so largely indebted; and with them she might have permanently remained, to enjoy the advantages of superior position. She was at an age, however, which rarely occupies itself in adjusting the balance of temporal advantage; and her only brother having been admitted, through the interest of her friends, as a pupil into Christ's Hospital, she preferred returning to her widowed mother, left solitary in consequence, though with the prospect of being obliged to add to her resources by taking a few of the children of the town as day-pupils.
Her claim to take her place in the intellectual circle of the burgh was soon recognised. I found that, misled by the extreme youthfulness of her appearance, and a marked juvenility of manner, I had greatly mistaken the young lady. That she should be accomplished in the ordinary sense of the term—that she should draw, play, and sing well—would be what I should have expected; but I was not prepared to find that, mere girl as she seemed, she should have a decided turn, not for the lighter, but for the severer walks of literature, and should have already acquired the ability of giving expression to her thoughts in a style formed on the best English models, and not in the least like that of a young lady. The original shyness wore away, and we became great friends. I was nearly ten years her senior, and had read a great many more books than she; and, finding me a sort of dictionary of fact, ready of access, and with explanatory notes attached, that became long or short just as she pleased to draw them out by her queries, she had, in the course of her amateur studies, frequent occasion to consult me. There were, she saw, several ladies of her acquaintance, who used occasionally to converse with me in the churchyard; but in order to make assurance doubly sure respecting the perfect propriety of such a proceeding on her part, she took the laudable precaution of stating the case to her mother's landlord, a thoroughly sensible man, one of the magistrates of the burgh, and an elder of the kirk; and he at once certified that there was no lady of the place who might not converse, without remark, as often and as long as she pleased with me. And so, fully justified, both by the example of her friends—all very judicious women, some of them only a few years older than herself—and by the deliberate judgment of a very sensible man, the magistrate and elder—my young lady friend learned to visit me in the churchyard, just like the other ladies; and, latterly at least, considerably oftener than any of them. We used to converse on all manner of subjects connected with the belles-lettres and the philosophy of mind, with, so far as I can at present remember, only one marked exception. On that mysterious affection which sometimes springs up between persons of the opposite sexes when thrown much together—though occasionally discussed by the metaphysicians, and much sung by the poets—we by no chance ever touched. Love formed the one solitary subject which, from some curious contingency, invariably escaped us.
And yet, latterly at least, I had begun to think about it a good deal. Nature had not fashioned me one of the sort of people who fall in love at first sight. I had even made up my mind to live a bachelor life, without being very much impressed by the magnitude of the sacrifice; but I daresay it did mean something, that in my solitary walks for the preceding fourteen or fifteen years, a female companion often walked in fancy by my side, with whom I exchanged many a thought, and gave expression to many a feeling, and to whom I pointed out many a beauty in the landscape, and communicated many a curious fact, and whose understanding was as vigorous as her taste was faultless and her feelings exquisite. One of the English essayists—the elder Moore—has drawn a very perfect personage of this airy character (not, however, of the softer, but of the masculine sex), under the name of the "maid's husband;" and described him as one of the most formidable rivals that the ordinary lover of flesh and blood can possibly encounter. My day-dream lady—a person that may be termed with equal propriety the "bachelor's wife,"—has not been so distinctly recognised; but she occupies a large place in our literature, as the mistress of all the poets who ever wrote on love without actually experiencing it, from the days of Cowley down to those of Henry Kirke White; and her presence serves always to intimate a heart capable of occupation, but still unoccupied. I find the bachelor's wife delicately drawn in one the posthumous poems of poor Alexander Bethune, as a "fair being"—the frequent subject of his day-dreams—
"Whose soft voice
Should be the sweetest music to his ear,