Scott, of course, must have known Calton Hill, although Salisbury Crags under Arthur's Seat, with its more feasible promenade, better appealed to him when he was writing the "Waverleys." There is an American who has written of the Hill, a young inland American whom the gods loved to an early death. I remember hearing Arthur Upson talk of days and nights on the Calton, and his sonnet catches the note—
"High and alone I stood on Calton Hill
Above the scene that was so dear to him
Whose exile dreams of it made exile dim.
October wooed the folded valleys till
In mist they blurred, even as our eye upfill
Under a too-sweet memory; spires did swim,
And gables, rust-red, on the gray sea's brim—
But on these heights the air was soft and still,
Yet, not all still; an alien breeze will turn
Here, as from bournes in aromatic seas,
As round old shrines a new-freed soul might yearn
With incense of rich earthly reveries.
Vanish the isles: Mist, exile, searching pain,
But the brave soul is freed, is home again."
CHAPTER V
THE KINGDOM OF FIFE
rom Edinburgh as I looked out on the Forth from every vantage point, I was conscious of the hills of Fife ever backing in the prospect. And I kept repeating to myself the old rhyme of the witches—
"The Thane of Fife had a wife,
Ah, where is she now!"
I determined to set sail and find not the wife, but the kingdom.
It is a continuing splendour, this name—the Kingdom of Fife. Than the thing nothing could be less royal, more democratic. For Fifeshire is given over to farm lands and coal fields and treeless stretches, and the fringe of Fife is made up of fishing villages "a hodden gray plaid wi' a gowden fringe," said a King Jamie. It lies there, separate from Scotland, although very Scottish, between the firths of the Forth and the Tay, with the Ochil hills a barrier on the landside. The separating firths are now connected with Scotland by great bridges, over which the trains pass with reluctance. And the wind is always blowing in Fife, a cold, stern, relentless, Calvinistic wind, off the North Sea. Not by every wind of doctrine but by a disciplining Calvinistic wind is this Kingdom swept into conformity.