“I daresay you have seen a graduated scale,” said my companion, “exhibiting the various powers of the different musical instruments, and observed how some of limited scope cross only a few of the divisions, and how others stretch nearly from side to side. ’Tis but a poor truism, perhaps, to say that similar differences in scope and power obtain among men—that there are minds who could not join in the concert of to-night—who could see neither beauty nor grandeur amid these wild cliffs and caverns, or in that glorious expanse of sea and sky; and that, on the other hand, there are minds so finely modulated—minds that sweep so broadly across the scale of nature, that there is no object, however minute, no breath of feeling, however faint, but that it awakens their sweet vibrations—the snow-flake falling in the stream, the daisy of the field, the conies of the rock, the hysop of the wall. Now, the vast and various frame of nature is adapted not to the lesser, but to the larger mind. It spreads on and around us in all its rich and magnificent variety, and finds the full portraiture of its Proteus-like beauty in the mirror of genius alone. Evident, however, as this may seem, we find a sort of levelling principle in the inferior order of minds, and which, in fact, constitutes one of their grand characteristics—a principle that would fain abridge the scale to their own narrow capabilities—that would cut down the vastness of nature to suit the littleness of their own conceptions and desires, and convert it into one tame, uniform, médiocre good, which would be good but to themselves alone, and ultimately not even that.”
“I think I can now understand you,” I said; “you describe a sort of swinish wisdom that would convert the world into one vast sty. For my own part, I have travelled far enough to know the value of a blue hill, and would not willingly lose so much as one of these landmarks of our mother land, by which kindly hearts in distant countries love to remember it.”
“I daresay we are getting fanciful,” rejoined my companion; “but certainly, in man’s schemes of improvement, both physical and moral, there is commonly a littleness and want of adaptation to the general good that almost always defeats his aims. He sees and understands but a minute portion—it is always some partial good he would introduce; and thus he but destroys the just proportions of a nicely-regulated system of things by exaggerating one of the parts. I passed of late through a richly-cultivated district of country, in which the agricultural improver had done his utmost. Never were there finer fields, more convenient steadings, crops of richer promise, a better regulated system of production. Corn and cattle had mightily improved; but what had man, the lord of the soil, become? Is not the body better than food, and life than raiment? If that decline for which all other things exist, it surely matters little that all these other things prosper. And here, though the corn, the cattle, the fields, the steadings had improved, man had sunk. There were but two classes in the district: a few cold-hearted speculators, who united what is worst in the character of the landed proprietor and the merchant—these were your gentleman farmers; and a class of degraded helots, little superior to the cattle they tended—these were your farm servants. And for two such extreme classes—necessary result of such a state of things—had this unfortunate, though highly-eulogized district, parted with a moral, intelligent, high-minded peasantry—the true boast and true riches of their country.”
“I have, I think, observed something like what you describe,” I said.
“I give,” he replied, “but one instance of a thousand. But mark how the sun’s lower disk has just reached the line of the horizon, and how the long level rule of light stretches to the very innermost recess of the cave! It darkens as the orb sinks. And see how the gauze-like shadows creep on from the sea, film after film!—and now they have reached the ivy that mantles round the castle of The Bruce. Are you acquainted with Barbour?”
“Well,” I said; “a spirited, fine old fellow, who loved his country and did much for it. I could once repeat all his chosen passages. Do you remember how he describes King Robert’s rencounter with the English knight?”
My companion sat up erect, and, clenching his fist, began repeating the passage, with a power and animation that seemed to double its inherent energy and force.
“Glorious old Barbour!” ejaculated he, when he had finished the description; “many a heart has beat all the higher when the bale-fires were blazing, through the tutorage of thy noble verses! Blind Harry, too—what has not his country owed to him!”
“Ah, they have long since been banished from our popular literature,” I said; “and yet Blind Harry’s ‘Wallace,’ as Hailes tells us, was at one time the very Bible of the Scotch. But love of country seems to be getting old-fashioned among us, and we have become philosophic enough to set up for citizens of the world.”
“All cold pretence,” rejoined my companion; “an effect of that small wisdom we have just been decrying. Cosmopolitism, as we are accustomed to define it, can be no virtue of the present age, nor yet of the next, nor perhaps for centuries to come. Even when it shall have attained to its best, and when it may be most safely indulged in, it is according to the nature of man, that, instead of running counter to the love of country, it should exist as but a wider diffusion of the feeling, and form, as it were, a wider circle round it. It is absurdity itself to oppose the love of our country to that of our race.”