We are looking west up stream, towards the sun setting behind Corstorphine Hill. Above the waterfall is a distillery with its chimney pointing to the Dean U.F. Church. On the right of the picture are the two towers of the Orphan Hospital.
CHAPTER XI
EDINBURGH TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
Life holds not an hour that is better to live in: the past is a tale that is told,
The future a sun-flecked shadow, alive and asleep, with a blessing in store.
Swinburne.
IN Edinburgh, at whatever other hour of the day the resident or tourist may let his mind dwell in the past, at one o’clock he will always be brought back to the present moment; for at one o’clock the gun goes off at the Castle, and horses and men and women that are gun-shy are greatly startled, and every one pulls out his watch. But, except precisely at one o’clock, it is as impossible to exist in Edinburgh without living in the past as it would be to walk along Princes Street without seeing the Castle. We are a little archaic in Edinburgh. Yet there are other things of the present that you may notice after you have set your watch to Greenwich time by the one-o’clock gun. Princes Street is gay with shop windows under awnings, with the big bow-windows of the Clubs, with many hotels; and now there are bigger and newer hotels to east and to west, at the railway stations. And Princes Street is full of a constant stream of traffic, plying in the wide street between the one broad pavement on the north side and the row of statues along the green sward and the blazing flower-beds in the beautiful gardens opposite: cable cars with noisy bells, motor cars, carriages, bicycles, electric broughams, station lorries, hansom cabs, and the crawling “char-a-bancs,” with their scarlet-coated drivers, picking up passengers for the Forth Bridge or Roslin. But still the north-east wind takes the liberty of blowing from the Forth among all these modern innovations, and whirling an unwary hat or a too-lightly-held newspaper high into the air.
As the wind is unchanged in temper, so are the natural features unchanged in beauty; and the views of the city, “from a’ the airts the wind can blaw,” are pictures to gladden the artist or the poet. There is the “Marmion view” from the south,—the view that Scott loved and Turner painted,—but with a denser massing of suburb than they saw, reaching right up to the furzy knoll where Marmion stood. Here is the Castle in all its majesty, with the Grassmarket and Cowgate huddled picturesquely under its precipices, and the old dark descending spine of the High Street, with St. Giles’s open crown over the roofs, and then all the maze and glitter of a newer world, with its many domes and steeples, and the Forth beyond.
This is from the south; but, seen from the western roads and heights, the city is even more striking. As you drive to the Forth Bridge along the fine old coach road to Queensferry,—the very road along which Jonathan Oldbuck and his companion drove in their journey in The Antiquary—you pass an occasional farm-house with mellow stacks about it and a smoky throat, and you must remember you are “within a mile of Edinburgh toun,” where “Bonny Jockie, blythe and gay, kissed sweet Jenny making hay.” Here, turn your head and you will see the dark mass of Arthur’s Seat lifted up in the air, and upon its western wall the fretted outline of the city and the Castle Rock, seeming not painted but actually engraven like some old hieroglyphic.
To view Edinburgh from the north, you must journey over the Forth Bridge and look across from the Fife coast opposite. From the wooded “haughs” between Aberdour and Burntisland, Edinburgh, seen through a veil of green summer leaves across six miles of rough bright blue, seems painted in air, a scene of magic loveliness not to be excelled in all the idyllic world of romance or dream. In the nearest foreground the little island of Inchcolm with its tiny golden strand and ruined monastery; farther out to sea Inchkeith’s lighthouse ringed with a fringe of foam; and, beyond, a world of heights and hollows: Arthur’s Seat and the rigid uncurved slant of the Salisbury Crags, and the gabled intricacy of the Old Town, stretching from the hollow up to the black mass of rock on which the Castle glooms in mid-air, and then the New Town fantastically domed and steepled in the low foreground, and the white-columned summit of Calton Hill. Down at the water’s edge, between the Forth and this fairy show, are the dusky roofs and docks and shipping of Granton and Leith. Away to the west, the dwindling Forth is spanned by the arches of the monster bridge; and beyond it stretch the woods of Dalmeny and Abercorn. In the far east, where the Forth has widened to the sea, are the outjutting headlands, and on one of them is the curious cone called Berwick Law; while, behind all, for a background, the distant Pentlands slope to the south in softest purple.