It seemed as though the lowering skies and sweeping storms, which had made the longing people of Scotland almost despair of the pleasure of the royal visit, and which had drenched them, and given them a whole night of impatient delay, when the King was not many furlongs from the Scottish shore, had been intended to heighten by their contrast the splendour and eclât of the royal debarkation. The morning of Thursday, the 15th of August, dawned in all the freshness of spring, and in all the serenity of summer. The rains had given a renovated greenness to the fields, and a thorough ablution to the city; and while the first rays of the morning sun streamed through the curling smoke of fires that were preparing the breakfast of three hundred thousand loyal and delighted people, they painted upon the adjoining country that “clear shining after rain,” which is, perhaps, the fairest and freshest guise in which any land can be viewed. The soft west wind just gave to the expanded Firth as much of a ripple as to shew that it was living water, without curling the angry crest of a single billow. There was a transparency in the air, of which those who are accustomed only to the murky atmosphere of London, or the exhalations of the fat pastures of England, could have no conception. Not only the colour of every pendant in the roads, but the cordage of every ship, and the costume of every one on board, was discernible from the elevated grounds about Edinburgh; and, while standing on the Calton Hill, the royal squadron, with thousands of boats and barges sporting around it, on the one hand,—and the bustling crowd on the other, decked in their various and gaudy attire, flitting past every opening, and filling every street that was visible, composed a panorama of the most spirit-stirring description.
The ancient standard of Scotland was hoisted at Holyrood; the ancient crown and sceptre of Scotland were there ready to be lent to his Majesty,—but, too sacred and too dear to Scotland as the symbols of her old and loved independence, for being given to a king, whom she had come from her utmost bourne, decked herself in her finest apparel, and tuned her heart to its choicest song of joy, to welcome; the royal household of Scotland, more showy in their attire, and more self-important in their bearing, than is usual where kings are subjects of daily exhibition, because the robes and the occupation were new, were proceeding toward the place of their rendezvous by the longest and most circuitous paths that they could find out, anxious to levy their modicum of admiration ere the more transcendent splendour and dignity of the king should draw all eyes towards itself, and leave them as the forgotten tapers of the night, after the glorious orb of day has climbed the east; the Caledonian fair were thronging to the casements, (balconies there were none,) each looking more happy than another, and one could easily perceive that faces, which, during a reasonable lapse of years—either through the fault or the failure of Hymen—had been stiffened by sorrow, and saddened by despair, were that day to be decked in their earliest, their virgin smile,—a smile which, they were not without hopes, might draw other eyes, and charm other hearts, than those of their sovereign; and the maddening burghers and wondering yeomen were trotting about from place to place; and, in their zeal for obtaining the best sight of the king, running some risk of not seeing him at all.
Having seen the muster of the official men—as well those who were to proceed to the pier of Leith to receive his Majesty, as they who were to deliver to him the keys of the city of Edinburgh, and thereupon speak a speech, into which a full year’s eloquence of the whole corporation, with some assistance of the crown lawyers, and a note or two by Sir Walter Scott, was crammed,—having examined the facilities which the people along the line of the procession had given the tenants of a day for gratifying their eyes,—and having felt more joy at heart than I had ever done at a public spectacle, at seeing so vast a multitude so very happy, and so very worthy of happiness,—I set about choosing my own station, in order that I might gaze, and wonder, and be delighted with the rest; and, after very mature deliberation, I resolved that that should be upon the leads of the palace of Holyrood, provided I could get access to the same.
Access was by no means difficult to be obtained, nor was my ascent to the top of the ancient structure without its pleasures. In the first place, I passed through the apartments of the fair queen of Scotland,—the fairest, and all things considered, perhaps, the frailest of royal ladies; and there I found the whole localities of Rizzio’s murder, well preserved both in appearance and in tradition. In the second place, I had the pleasure of seeing upon the leads, dressed in the plain tartan of her adopted clan, the fair Lady Glenorchy, who possesses all the charms of Mary, without any of her faults. I am not sure that I ever saw a finer woman; I am sure that I never saw one in whose expression intellect was more blended with sweetness, or spirit softened and enriched by modesty and grace.
Besides those intellectual (is that the term?) pleasures, there were other things which rendered my locality the best of any: First, it commanded a larger and better view of the procession; and, secondly, though Edinburgh looks romantic from my situation, there is none where it becomes so perfect a fairy tale. While I paced along the leads of the palace, and I had ample time to do it, I was more and more rivetted, both in motion and in gaze, by the wonderful scene. Eastward was the expanse of blue water, widening and having no boundary in the extreme horizon, and confined every where else between the soft, green, lovely, and productive shores of Lothian and Fife. Along the whole visible portion of the waters, no ship was going forth upon her voyage, but many were cruizing towards the port of Leith by the combined powers of every thing that enables man to make his way upon the deep. Northward rose the Calton Hill, ornamented with one of the best and one of the worst specimens of modern architecture, having a park of artillery and a picquet of horsemen upon its summit, and its sides groaning under the weight of a multitude which no man could count. Sufficiently elevated at one place for throwing its more elevated objects against the sky, and rapid enough in its slope for bringing out at whole length the masses of people who occupied it, the Calton did not conceal either the royal squadron in Leith roads, or the majestic summits of the remote Grampians,—from which every cloud and every trace of mist had been brushed away, when I first ascended, while the strong and peculiar refraction that the atmosphere in such cases exerts, gave to them only half their distance and double their height, as if the mountains themselves had raised them from the beds of their primeval residence, and come near, to behold the splendour which the Athens had put on, and the glory with which she hoped to be blessed. Towards the south, Salisbury Craggs and Arthur’s Seat raised their summits to the mid heaven, and threw their broad shadows over the valley, into which the beams of light which poured in at the openings of the majestic wall of rock, seamed the blue shadow as the lapis lazuli is seamed by gold. The view this way was to me peculiarly sublime, not only from the great contrast that it formed with every thing around, and indeed every thing that one could conceive to exist in the vicinity of a city, but because of its own peculiar and inherent sublimity, and the wild accompaniments with which it had been decorated for the occasion. The crags rose rugged and perpendicular, with their profile dark as night, while standards, and tents, and batteries, and armed men on foot and on horseback, hung over the wild and airy steep. A flood of mellow light which came in from behind gave them the lineaments of giants, and a glory of colouring far exceeding any thing that limner ever tinted. Then rose the more sublime height of Arthur’s Seat, thrown back by the vapour which the sun was exhaling from the dew in the dell between, and having its summit haloed with a glory of radiant prismatic colours, through which the solitary stranger or flitting picquet seemed beings of another world. And, as the sun-beams came and went upon burnished helm or brazen cuirass, the whole seemed spotted with gold, or inlaid with costly stones. At my feet was the court of the palace, in which the royal standard was guarded by a fine body of highlanders, and the palace-gates kept by a goodly array of the Edinburgh archery, who, though they seemed not to be the least important part of the spectacle in their own eyes, were yet intent upon procuring for their favoured fair those situations from which they would best view the glories of the archers and of the king.
Before me, the Athens herself clustered her buildings, and shot up her towers, her spires, and her castles, with a witchery of effect, which can be equalled by the view of no other British city, and surpassed by that of the Athens from no other point. When one, for instance, ascends the top of St. Paul’s, one wonders at the business and bustle that is around; but the eye is tired with the interminable lines of dull brick, and the dingy clusters of puny steeples, and smoking chimney-stalks; while the sound, and the rushing, and the artificial origin of the whole, make one melancholy with the idea that it will not last. One should never look down upon a city: the sight is always dingy, and the view always produces melancholy.
From the leads whereon I stood, though I was high above the court of the palace, I was below all the city except that rubbish which was concealed; and never did the mere sight of houses produce such an effect upon me. The ground was so magical, and the buildings so different in form, that the whole seemed as though it had been moulded by the hands of giants, or commanded into existence by the fiat of a god; and, in firmness and colour, it was so like the rocks upon which it rested, and by which it was surrounded, that it looked as though it had lasted from the beginning of time, and would endure to the end. Right in front of me, the high street opened at intervals its deep ravine; upon the summit of a hill, but still, from the great height of the houses, appearing as if that hill had been cleft in twain, to open a way from the palace on which I stood to the castle, which, from its aged rock at the other extremity, looked proudly down as the monarch of the Athens, seated upon a throne which would out-exist those of all the monarchs of the nations. Around this were clustered palace and spire, each upon its terrace, while the spacious bridges, beneath whose arches the distant Pentland hills and the sky were visible, formed an aërial path from the grandeur of one place to the grandeur of another.
There was something so novel, so wildly romantic, and so overpowering, in all this, that I retired to the most remote and elevated part of the roof, leaned me against a chimney-stalk, and, forgetting the king, the procession, the people, and myself, was in one of those reveries, in which the senses are too much gratified, and the judgment too much lost for allowing the fancy to sketch, and the memory to notice. “This is incomprehensibly fine!” were the words which I then ejaculated to myself; and now that the presence of the picture is gone, and the recollection such as no mind could retain, I can do nothing more than repeat them.
I stood thus absorbed till about mid-day, at which time the flash and the report of a solitary gun from the royal yacht caught my eye and my ear, and made me start into recollection. Just then, a cloud of the most impenetrable darkness had collected behind, or, as it appeared to me, around the castle, which made the Athens appear as if her magnitude stretched on into the impenetrable gloom of infinitude. But I had no time to pursue the train of feeling to which that would have given rise; for the volleyed cannon—flash upon flash and peal upon peal, and the huzzaing people—shout upon shout and cheer after cheer, made the cliffs and mountains ring around me, and the palace rock under my feet, as though the heavens and the earth had been coming together, and the Athens had been to be dashed to pieces in the maddening of her own joy. The ships in the roads first pealed out the tale, and the blue waters of the Forth were enshrouded in a vesture of silvery smoke. Anon the batteries upon the Calton took up the tidings; and their roar, all powerful as it was, was almost drowned in the voices of the thousands which thronged that romantic hill. In an instant, the same deafening sounds, and the same gleaming fires, burst away from the Craggs on the left; and the cannon and the cry continued to call and to answer to each other from the right hand and from the left, as—
——“Jura answers through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, which call to her aloud,”