"The blackbird sang, the skies were clear and clean,
We bowled along a road that curved its spine
Superbly sinuous and serpentine
Thro' silent symphonies of summer green,
Sudden the Forth came on us—sad of mien,
No cloud to colour it, no breeze to line;
A sheet of dark dull glass, without a sign
Of life or death, two beams of sand between,
Water and sky merged blank in mist together,
The Fort loomed spectral, and the Guardship's spars
Traced vague, black shadows on the shimmery glaze:
We felt the dim, strange years, the gray, strange weather,
The still, strange land, unvexed of sun or stars,
Where Lancelot rides clanking thro' the haze."
To every one comes this sense of strange years and a strange land, even at Queensferry, even to Henley.
The inn, where we have all put up in imagination, with Scott, and again with Stevenson, lies under the bridge, as though it would escape the quick curious gaze from these iron girders so high above what Scott ever dreamed or Davy Balfour. And then, the train creeps out over this modern audacity, this very ugly iron spanning of the river. Fortunately we are upon it and cannot see its practical, monstrous being, "that monster of utility," as Lord Rosebery called it. He should know its phrase, since it is ever present in the view from his Dalmeny Park, lying east of the Bridge and south of the Forth.
This is precisely where Queen Margaret was ferried to and fro a thousand years ago. The monks who had charge of the ferry took from the toll every fourth and every fortieth penny—a delightful bit of geometric finance. Who could calculate and who would dispute the calculation, of fourth and fortieth?
Dunfermline
"The King sits in Dunfermline toun
Drinking the blude-red wine."
Because of such lines as these I would cross far seas, merely to have been, if far lonely destructive centuries after, in the very place of their being.
For Dunfermline is surely a very kingly name for a king's town, and "blude-red" wine is of such a difference from mere red, or blood-red wine. What wonder that Alexander III, of whom it is written, went to his death over at Kinghorn in such a tragic way!
But the king who forever sits in Dunfermline is that Malcolm of the eleventh century who brings hither something more than legend yet something as thrilling, as "authentic" as legend. Malcolm is the son of Duncan, in Shakespeare's play, and in history.