Yet the tourist’s time, especially when in company, is not usually his own, and for me, though often, later, at the abbey, the opportunity never came of visiting “fair Melrose aright,” by seeing its fascinations under lunar rays, or in
“the cold light’s uncertain shower.”
On the morning of July 11, we had our first view from the railway. The ruins loomed dark and grand. Approaching on foot the pile, closely surrounded as it was by houses and Mammonites and populated chiefly by rooks, the first view was not as overpowering as if I had come unexpectedly to it under the silver light of the moon. Yet, on lingering in the aisles within the ruined nave and walking up and down amid the broken marbles, imagination easily pictured again that spectacular worship, so enjoyed in the Middle Ages and beloved by many still, which makes so powerful and multitudinous an appeal to the senses and emotions.
The west front and a large portion of the north half of the nave and aisle of the abbey have perished, but the two transepts, the chancel and the choir, the two western piers of the tower, and the sculptured roof of the east end are here yet to enthral. I thought of the processions aloft, of the monks, up and down through the interior clerestory passage, which runs all around the church. Again, in the chambers of fancy, the choir sang, the stone rood screen reflected torch and candlelight, and the lamp of the churchman shed its rays, while the “toil drops” of the knight William, “fell from his brows like rain,” as “he moved the massy stone at length.”
A minute examination of the carving of windows, aisles, cloister, capitals, bosses, and door-heads well repays one’s sympathetic scrutiny, for no design is repeated. What loving care was that of mediæval craftsmen, who took pride in their work, loving it more than money! Proofs of this are still visible here. Such beauty and artistic triumphs open a window into the life of the Middle Ages. From the south of Europe, the travelling guilds of architects and masons, and of men expert with the chisel, must have come hither to put their magic touch upon the stone of this edifice, which was so often built, destroyed, and built again. “A penny a day and a little bag of meal” was the daily dole of wages to each craftsman. One may still trace here the monogram of the master workman.
Under the high altar in this Scottish abbey, the heart of Robert the Bruce was buried. Intensely dramatic is the double incident of its being carried toward Palestine by its valorous custodian, who, in battle with the Saracens, hurled the casket containing it at the foe, with the cry, “Forward, heart of Bruce, and Douglas shall follow thee.”
In the chancel are famous tombs of men whose glory the poet has celebrated. Here, traditionally, at least, is the sepulchre of Michael Scott, visited, according to Sir Walter’s lay, by the monk accompanying William of Deloraine. With torch in hand and feet unshod, the holy man led the knight.
It was “in havoc of feudal war,” when the widowed Lady, mistress of Branksome Hall, was called upon to decide whether her daughter Margaret should be her “foeman’s bride.” “Amid the armed train” she called to her side William of Deloraine and bade him visit the wizard’s tomb on St. Michael’s night and get from his dead hand, “the bead, scroll, or be it book,” to decide as to the marriage.
Now for Scott’s home! On the bank of Scotland’s most famous river, the Tweed, two miles above Melrose, was a small farm called Clarty Hole, which the great novelist bought in 1811. Changing the name to Abbotsford, he built a small villa, which is now the western wing of the present edifice. As he prospered, he made additions in the varied styles of his country’s architecture in different epochs. The result is a large and irregularly built mansion, which the “Wizard of the North” occupied twenty-one years. It has been called “a romance in stone and lime.” Knowing that the Tweed had been for centuries beaded like a rosary with monasteries and that monks had often crossed at the ford near by, Sir Walter coined the new name and gave it to the structure in which so much of his wonderful work was done for the delight of generations. Curiously enough, in America, while many places have been named after persons and events suggested by Scott’s fiction, only one town, and that in Wisconsin, bears this name of Abbotsford.
With a jolly party of Americans, we entered the house, thinking of Wolfert’s Roost at Tarrytown, New York, and its occupant Washington Irving, who had been a warm friend of Sir Walter. It was he who gave him, among other ideas, the original of Rebecca, a Jewish maiden of Philadelphia, whose idealization appears, in Scott’s beautiful story of “Ivanhoe,” as the daughter of Isaac of York. Memory also recalls that Scott wrote poetry that is yet sung in Christian worship, for in Rebecca’s mouth he puts the lyric,—