"The hawthorn I will pu', wi' its locks o' siller gray,
Where, like an aged man, it stands at break o' day."
Scott, too, in describing these very stones, chooses the early morning as the time in which to exhibit them, when they "stood in the gray light of the dawning, like the phantom forms of antediluvian giants, who, shrouded in the habiliments of the dead, come to revisit, by the pale light, the earth which they had plagued with their oppression, and polluted by their sins, till they brought down upon it the vengeance of long-suffering heaven." On another occasion, he introduces them as "glimmering, a grayish white, in the rising sun, and projecting far to the westward their long gigantic shadows." And Malcolm, in the exercise of a similar faculty with that of Burns and of Scott, surrounds them, in his description, with a somewhat similar atmosphere of partial dimness and obscurity:—
"The hoary rocks, of giant size,
That o'er the land in circles rise,
Of which tradition may not tell,
Fit circles for the wizard's spell,
Seen far amidst the scowling storm,
Seem each a tall and phantom form,
As hurrying vapors o'er them flee,
Frowning in grim security,
While, like a dread voice from the past,
Around them moans the autumnal blast."
There exist curious analogies between the earlier stages of society and the more immature periods of life,—between the savage and the child; and the huge circle of Stennis seems suggestive of one of these. It is considerably more than four hundred feet in diameter, and the stones which compose it, varying from three to fourteen feet in height, must have been originally from thirty-five to forty in number, though only sixteen now remain erect. A mound and fosse, still distinctly traceable, run round the whole; and there are several mysterious-looking tumuli outside, bulky enough to remind one of the lesser morains of the geologist. But the circle, notwithstanding its imposing magnitude, is but a huge child's house, after all,—one of those circles of stones which children lay down on their village green, and then, in the exercise of that imaginative faculty which distinguishes between the young of the human animal and those of every other creature, convert, by a sort of conventionalism, into a church or dwelling-house, within which they seat themselves, and enact their imitations of their seniors, whether domestic or ecclesiastical. The circle of Stennis was a circle, say the antiquaries, devoted to the sun. The group of stones on the southern promontory of the lake formed but a half-circle, and it was a half-circle dedicated to the moon. To the circular sun the great rude children of an immature age of the world had laid down a circle of stones on the one promontory; to the moon, in her half-orbed state, they had laid down a half-circle on the other; and in propitiating these material deities, to whose standing in the old Scandinavian worship the names of our Sunday and Monday still testify, they employed in their respective inclosures, in the exercise of a wild unregulated fancy, uncouth irrational rites, the extremeness of whose folly was in some measure concealed by the horrid exquisiteness of their cruelty. We are still in the nonage of the species, and see human society sowing its wild oats in a thousand various ways, very absurdly often, and often very wickedly; but matters seem to have been greatly worse when, in an age still more immature, the grimly-bearded, six-feet children of Orkney were laying down their stone-circles on the green. Sir Walter, in the parting scene between Cleveland and Minna Troil, which he describes as having taken place amid the lesser group of stones, refers to an immense slab "lying flat and prostrate in the middle of the others, supported by short pillars, of which some relics are still visible," and which is regarded as the sacrificial stone of the erection. "It is a current belief," says Dr. Hibbert, in an elaborate paper in the "Transactions of the Scottish Antiquaries," that upon this stone a victim of royal birth was immolated. Halfdan the Long-legged, the son of Harold the Fair-haired, in punishment for the aggressions of Orkney, had made an unexpected descent upon its coasts, and acquired possession of the Jarldom. In the autumn succeeding Halfdan was retorted upon, and, after an inglorious contest, betook himself to a place of concealment, from which he was the following morning unlodged, and instantly doomed to the Asæ. Einar, the Jarl of Orkney, with his sword carved the captive's back into the form of an eagle, the spine being longitudinally divided, and the ribs being separated by a transverse cut as far as the loins. He then extracted the lungs, and dedicated them to Odin for a perpetuity of victory, singing a wild song,—'I am revenged for the slaughter of Rognvalld: this have the Nornæ decreed. In my fiording the pillar of the people has fallen. Build up the cairn, ye active youths, for victory is with us. From the stones of the sea-shore will I pay the Long-legged a hard seat.' There is certainly no trace to be detected, in this dark story, of a golden age of the world: the golden age is, I would fain hope, an age yet to come. There at least exists no evidence that it is an age gone by. It will be the full-grown manly age of the world when the race, as such, shall have attained to their years of discretion. They are at present in their froward boyhood, playing at the mischievous games of war, and diplomacy, and stock-gambling, and site-refusing, and it is not quite agreeable for quiet honest people to be living amongst them. But there would be nothing gained by going back to that more infantine state of society in which the Jarl Einar carved into a red eagle the back of Halfdan the Long-legged.
CHAPTER XIV.
On Horseback—A pared Moor—Small Landholders—Absorption of small holdings in England and Scotland—Division of Land favorable to Civil and Religious Rights—Favorable to social Elevation—An inland Parish—The Landsman and Lobster—Wild Flowers of Orkney—Law of Compensation illustrated by the Tobacco Plant—Poverty tends to Productiveness—Illustrated in Ireland—Profusion of Ichthyolites—Orkney a land of Defunct Fishes—Sandwick—A Collection of Coccostean Flags—A Quarry full of Heads of Dipteri—The Bergil, or Striped Wrasse—Its Resemblance to the Dipterus—Poverty of the Flora of the Lower Old Red—No true Coniferous Wood in the Orkney Flagstones—Departure for Hoy—The intelligent Boatman—Story of the Orkney Fisherman.
While yet lingering amid the Standing Stones, I was joined by Mr. Garson, who had obligingly ridden a good many miles to meet me, and now insisted that I should mount and ride in turn, while he walked by my side, that I might be fresh, he said, for the exploratory ramble of the evening. I could have ventured more readily on taking the command of a vessel than of a horse, and with fewer fears of mutiny; but mount I did; and the horse, a discreet animal, finding he was to have matters very much his own way, got upon honor with me, and exerted himself to such purpose that we did not fall greatly more than a hundred yards behind Mr. Garson. We traversed in our journey a long dreary moor, so entirely ruined, like those which I had seen on the previous day, by belonging to everybody in general, as to be no longer of the slightest use to anybody in particular. The soil seems to have been naturally poor; but it must have taken a good deal of spoiling to render it the sterile, verdureless waste it is now; for even where it had been poorest, I found that in the island-like appropriated patches by which it is studded, it at least bears, what it has long ceased to bear elsewhere, a continuous covering of green sward. But if disposed to quarrel with the commons of Orkney, I found in close neighborhood with them that with which I could have no quarrel,—numerous small properties farmed by the proprietors, and forming, in most instances, farms by no means very large. There are parishes in this part of the mainland divided among from sixty to eighty landowners.
A nearly similar state of things seems to have obtained in Scotland about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for the greater part of the previous one. I am acquainted with old churchyards in the north of Scotland that contain the burying-grounds of from six to ten landed proprietors, whose lands are now merged into single properties. And, in reading the biographies of our old covenanting ministers, I have often remarked as curious, and as bearing in the same line, that no inconsiderable proportion of their number were able to retire, in times of persecution, to their own little estates. It was during the disastrous wars of the French Revolution,—wars from the effects of which Great Britain will, I fear, never fully recover,—that the smaller holdings were finally absorbed. About twenty years ere the war began, the lands of England were parcelled out among no fewer than two hundred and fifty thousand families; before the peace of 1815, they had fallen into the hands of thirty-two thousand. In less than half a century, that base of actual proprietorship on which the landed interest of any country must ever find its surest standing, had contracted in England to less than one-seventh its former extent. In Scotland the absorption of the great bulk of the lesser properties seems to have taken place somewhat earlier; but in it also the revolutionary war appears to have given them the final blow; and the more extensive proprietors of the kingdom are assuredly all the less secure in consequence of their extinction. They were the smaller stones in the wall, that gave firmness in the setting to the larger, and jammed them fast within those safe limits determined by the line and plummet, which it is ever perilous to overhang. Very extensive territorial properties, wherever they exist, create almost necessarily—human nature being what it is—a species of despotism more oppressive than even that of great unrepresentative governments. It used to be remarked on the Continent, that there was always less liberty in petty principalities, where the eye of the ruler was ever on his subjects, than under the absolute monarchies.[23] And in a country such as ours, the accumulation of landed property in the hands of comparatively a few individuals has the effect often of bringing the territorial privileges of the great landowner into a state of antagonism with the civil and religious rights of the people, that cannot be other than perilous to the landowner himself. In a district divided, like Orkney, among many owners, a whole country-side could not be shut up against its people by some ungenerous or intolerant proprietor,—greatly at his own risk and to his own hurt,—as in the case of Glen Tilt or the Grampians; nor, when met for purposes of public worship, could the population of a parish be chased from off its bare moors, at his instance, by the constable or the sheriff-officer, to worship God agreeably to their consciences amid the mire of a cross-road, or on the bare sea-beach uncovered by the ebb of the tide. The smaller properties of the country, too, served admirably as stepping-stones, by which the proprietors or their children, when possessed of energy and intellect, could mount to a higher walk of society. Here beside me, for instance, was my friend Mr. Garson, a useful and much-esteemed minister of religion in his native district; while his brother, a medical man of superior parts, was fast rising into extensive practice in the neighboring town. They had been prepared for their respective professions by a classical education; and yet the stepping-stone to positions in society at once so important and so respectable was simply one of the smaller holdings of Orkney, derived to them as the descendants of one of the old Scandinavian Udallers, and which fell short, I was informed, of a hundred a-year.