but overflowing in our memory with all pleasantest images of pastoral contentment and peace.
Loch Etive, between the ferries of Connel and Bunawe, has been seen by almost all who have visited the Highlands—but very imperfectly; to know what it is, you must row or sail up it, for the banks on both sides are often richly wooded, assume many fine forms, and are frequently well embayed, while the expanse of water is sufficiently wide to allow you from its centre to command a view of many of the distant heights. But above Bunawe it is not like the same loch. For a couple of miles it is not wide, and it is so darkened by enormous shadows that it looks even less like a strait than a gulf—huge overhanging rocks on both sides ascending high, and yet felt to belong but to the bases of mountains that sloping far back have their summits among clouds of their own in another region of the sky. Yet are they not all horrid; for nowhere else is there such lofty heather—it seems a wild sort of brushwood; tall trees flourish, single or in groves, chiefly birches, with now and then an oak—and they are in their youth or their prime—and even the prodigious trunks, some of which have been dead for centuries, are not all dead, but shoot from their knotted rind symptoms of life inextinguishable by time and tempest. Out of this gulf we emerge into the Upper Loch, and its amplitude sustains the majesty of the mountains, all of the highest order, and seen from their feet to their crests. Cruachan wears the crown, and reigns over them all—king at once of Loch Etive and of Loch Awe. But Buachaille Etive, though afar off, is still a giant, and in some lights comes forwards, bringing with him the Black Mount and its dependents, so that they all seem to belong to this most magnificent of all Highland lochs. "I know not," says Macculloch, "that Loch Etive could bear an ornament without an infringement on that aspect of solitary vastness which it presents throughout. Nor is there one. The rocks and bays on the shore, which might elsewhere attract attention, are here swallowed up in the enormous dimensions of the surrounding mountains, and the wide and ample expanse of the lake. A solitary house, here fearfully solitary, situated far up in Glen Etive, is only visible when at the upper extremity; and if there be a tree, as there are in a few places on the shore, it is unseen; extinguished as if it were a humble mountain flower, by the universal magnitude around." This is finely felt and expressed; but even on the shores of Loch Etive there is much of the beautiful; Ardmatty smiles with its meadows, and woods, and bay, and sylvan stream; other sunny nooks repose among the grey granite masses; the colouring of the banks and braes is often bright; several houses or huts become visible no long way up the glen; and though that long hollow—half a day's journey—till you reach the wild road between Inveruran and King's House—lies in gloom, yet the hillsides are cheerful, and you delight in the greensward, wide and rock-broken, should you ascend the passes that lead into Glencreran or Glencoe. But to feel the full power of Glen Etive you must walk up it till it ceases to be a glen. When in the middle of the moor, you see far off a solitary dwelling indeed—perhaps the loneliest house in all the Highlands—and the solitude is made profounder, as you pass by, by the voice of a cataract, hidden in an awful chasm, bridged by two or three stems of trees, along which the red-deer might fear to venture—but we have seen them and the deer-hounds glide over it, followed by other fearless feet, when far and wide the Forest of Dalness was echoing to the hunter's horn.
We have now brought our Remarks on the Scenery of the Highlands to a close, and would fain have said a few words on the character and life of the people; but are precluded from even touching on that most interesting subject. It is impossible that the minds of travellers through those wonderful regions, can be so occupied with the contemplation of mere inanimate nature, as not to give many a thought to their inhabitants, now and in the olden time. Indeed, without such thoughts, they would often seem to be but blank and barren wildernesses, in which the heart would languish, and imagination itself recoil; but they cannot long be so looked at, for houseless as are many extensive tracts, and therefore at times felt to be too dreary even for moods that for a while enjoyed the absence of all that might tell of human life, yet symptoms and traces of human life are noticeable to the instructed eye almost everywhere, and in them often lies the spell that charms us, even while we think that we are wholly delivered up to the influence of "dead insensate things." None will visit the Highlands without having some knowledge of their history; and the changes that have long been taking place in the condition of the people will be affectingly recognised wherever they go, in spite even of what might have appeared the insuperable barriers of nature.
"Time and Tide
Have washed away, like weeds upon the sands,
Crowds of the olden life's memorials;
And 'mid the mountains you as well might seek
For the lone site of fancy's filmy dreams.
Towers have decay'd and moulder'd from the cliffs,
Or their green age, or grey, has help'd to build
New dwellings sending up their household smoke
From treeless places once inhabited
But by the secret sylvans. On the moors
The pillar-stone, reared to perpetuate
The fame of some great battle, or the power
Of storied necromancer in the wild,
Among the wide change on the heather-bloom
By power more wondrous wrought than his, its name
Has lost, or fallen itself has disappear'd;
No broken fragment suffer'd to impede
The glancing ploughshare. All the ancient woods
Are thinn'd and let in floods of daylight now,
Then dark and dern as when the Druids lived.
Narrow'd is now the red-deer's forest reign;
The royal race of eagles is extinct.
But other changes than on moor and cliff
Have tamed the aspect of the wilderness;
The simple system of primeval life,
Simple but stately, hath been broken down;
The clans are scatter'd, and the chieftain's power
Is dead, or dying—but a name—though yet
It sometimes stirs the desert; to the winds
The tall plumes wave no more—the tartan green
With fiery streaks among the heather-bells
Now glows unfrequent; and the echoes mourn
The silence of the music that of old
Kept war-thoughts stern amid the calm of peace.
Yet to far battle plains still Morven sends
Her heroes, and still glittering in the sun,
Or blood-dimm'd, her dread line of bayonets
Marches with loud shouts straight to victory.
A soften'd radiance now floats o'er her glens;
No rare sight now upon her sea-arm lochs
The sail oft-veering up the solitude;
And from afar the noise of life is brought
Within the thunders of her cataracts.
These will flow on for ever; and the crests,
Gold-tipt by rising and by setting suns,
Of her old mountains inaccessible
Glance down their scorn for ever on the toils
That load with harvests now the humbler hills,
Now shorn of all their heather bloom, and green
Or yellow as the gleam of lowland fields.
And bold hearts in broad bosoms still are there,
Living and dying peacefully; the huts
Abodes are still of high-soul'd poverty;
And underneath their lintels beauty stoops
Her silken-snooded head, when singing goes
The maiden to her father at his work
Among the woods, or joins the scanty line
Of barley-reapers on their narrow ridge,
In some small field among the pastoral braes.
Still fragments dim of ancient poetry
In melancholy music down the glens
Go floating; and from shieling roof'd with boughs,
And turf-wall'd, high up in some lonely place
Where flocks of sheep are nibbling the sweet grass
Of mid-summer, and browsing on the plants
On the cliff mosses a few goats are seen
Among their kids, you hear sweet melodies
Attuned to some traditionary tale,
By young wife sitting all alone, aware
From shadow on the mountain horologe
Of the glad hour that brings her husband home
Before the gloaming, from the far-off moor
Where the black cattle feed; there all alone
She sits and sings, except that on her knees
Sleeps the sweet offspring of their faithful loves."
We love the people too well to praise them—we have had too heartfelt experience of their virtues. In castle, hall, house, manse, hut, hovel, shieling—on mountain and moor, we have known, without having to study their character. It manifests itself in their manners, and in their whole frame of life. They are now, as they ever were, affectionate, faithful, and fearless; and far more delightful surely it is to see such qualities in all their pristine strength—for civilisation has not weakened, nor ever will weaken them—without that alloy of fierceness and ferocity which was inseparable from them in the turbulence of feudal times. They are now indeed a peaceful people; severe as are the hardships of their condition, they are, in the main, contented with it; and nothing short of necessity can dissever them from their dear mountains. We devoutly trust that there need be no more forced emigration—that henceforth it will be free—at the option of the adventurous—and that all who will, when the day cometh, may be gathered to their fathers in the land that gave them birth. Much remains to be done not only to relieve but enlighten; yet Christian benevolence has not been forgetful of their wants; schools and churches are arising in remote places; and that they are in good truth a religious as well as a moral people is proved by the passionate earnestness with which, in their worst destitution, they embrace every offer of instruction in the knowledge that leads to everlasting life. The blessing of Heaven will lie on all such missions as these; and the time will come when we shall be able to contemplate, without any pain, the condition of a race who, to use the noble language of one, though often scornful and sarcastic overmuch, yet at heart their friend, "almost in an hour subsided into peace and virtue, retaining their places, their possessions, their chiefs, their songs, their traditions, their superstitions and peculiar usages—even that language and those recollections which still separate them from the rest of the nation. They retained even their pride, and they retained their contempt of those who imposed that order on them, and still they settled into a state of obedience to that government, of which the world produces no other instance! It is a splendid moral phenomenon, and reflects a lustre on the Highland character, whether of the chiefs or the people, which extinguishes all past faults, and which atones for what little remains to be amended. A peculiar political situation was the cause of their faults; and that which swept away the cause, has rendered the effects a tale of other times."