Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by William Howitt

Lastly, and on our way back to the entrance-hall, we enter the writing-room of Sir Walter, which is surrounded by book-shelves, and a gallery, by which Scott not only could get at his books, but by which he could get to and from his bedroom, and so be at work when his visitors thought him in bed. He had only to lock his door, and he was safe. Here are his easy leathern chair and desk, at which he used to work, and, in a little closet, is the last suit that he ever wore—a bottle-green coat, plaid waistcoat, of small pattern, gray plaid trowsers, and white hat. Near these hang his walking-stick, and his boots and walking-shoes. Here are, also, his tools, with which he used to prune his trees in the plantations, and his yeoman-cavalry accouterments. On the chimney-piece stands a German light-machine, where he used to get a light, and light his own fire. There is a chair made of the wood of the house at Robroyston, in which William Wallace was betrayed; having a brass plate in the back, stating that it is from this house, where "Wallace was done to death by Traitors." The writing-room is connected with the library, and this little closet had a door issuing into the garden; so that Scott had all his books at immediate command, and could not only work early and late, without any body's knowledge, but, at will, slip away to wood and field, if he pleased, unobserved. In his writing-room, there is a full-length portrait of Rob Roy, and a head of Claverhouse. The writing-room is the only sitting-room facing the south. It ranges with the entrance-hall, and between them lies a little sort of armory, where stand two figures, one presenting a specimen of chain armor, and the other, one of wadded armor—that is, silk stuffed with cotton.

Here, then, is a tolerable account of the interior of Abbotsford. I perceive that Mr. Lockhart, in his recent People's Edition of his Life of Scott, has given an account said to have been furnished by Scott himself to an annual. If it were correct at the time it was written, there must have been a general rearrangement of paintings and other articles. Mr. Lockhart says, he suspects its inaccuracy; but what makes me doubt that Scott drew up the account is, that some of the most ornamental ceilings, which can not have been changed, are stated to be of dark oak, whereas they are of pencil cedar.

I again walked up the mile-long plantation, running along the hillside from the house up the valley, and found it again merely a walk through a plantation—nothing more. It is true that, as you get a good way up, you arrive at some high ground, and can look out up the valley toward Selkirk, and get some views of the Tweed, coming down between its moorland hills, which are very sweet. But the fault of Abbotsford is, that it is not laid out to the advantage that it might be. The ground in front of the house, highly capable of being laid out in beautiful lawn and shrubbery, is cut up with trees that shut out the noblest feature of the scene—the river. One side of the house is elbowed up with square brick garden walls, which ought to be at a distance, and concealed; the other with an unsightly laundry-yard, with its posts and lines. Just down before the house, where the sweet and rich verdure of lawn should be, is set the farmyard; and then comes the long, monotonous wood. This, in some degree, might be altered, and probably sometime will. At present, the fault of the whole estate is stiffness and formality. The plantations of fir have, necessarily, a stiff, formal look; but this, too, will mend with time. They are now felling out the fir timber; and then what is called the hard-wood, that is, the deciduous trees, will in course of time, present a softer and more agreeable look.

I ranged all through these plantations, from the house to the foot of the Eildon hills, down by the Rhymer's glen and Huntly burn. It is amazing what a large stretch of poor land Sir Walter had got together. It is not particularly romantic, except for the fine background of the Eildon hills; but Sir Walter saw the scene with the eyes of poetic tradition. He saw things which had been done there, and sung of; and all was beautiful to him: and in time, when the trees are better grown, and have a more varied aspect, and the plantations are more broken up, it will be beautiful. The views from the higher grounds are so now. Down at the house the trees have so grown and closed up the prospects, that you can scarcely get a single glimpse of the river; but when you ascend the woods, and come to an opening on the hills, you see up and down the valley, far and wide. Near a mount in the plantations, on which an old carved stone is reared, and held upright by iron stays, probably marking the scene of some border skirmish, there are seats of turf, from which you have fine views. You see below Abbotsford, where the Gala water comes sweeping into the Tweed, and where Galashiels lies smoking beyond, all compact, like a busy little town as it is. And in another direction, the towers and town of Melrose are discerned at the foot of the bare but airy Eildon hills; and, still farther, the black summit of the Cowdenknowes.

Something beyond this spot, after issuing out of the first mass of plantations, and ascending a narrow lane, I came to a farmhouse. I asked a boy in the yard what the farm was called; and a thrill went through me when he answered—Kaeside. It was the farm of William Laidlaw, the steward and the friend of Sir Walter. We have seen how, in his earlier, joyous days, Sir Walter fell in with Laidlaw, Hogg, and Leyden. The expeditions into Ettrick and Yarrow, in quest of old border ballads, brought Scott into contact with the two former. He found, not only poetry, but actual living poets, among the shepherds and sheep-farmers of the hills. I know nothing more beautiful than the relation of these circumstances in Lockhart's Life of Scott. In Chambers's Edinburgh Journal of July and August, 1845, there is also a very interesting account of Laidlaw, and especially of the coming of Scott and Leyden to Blackhouse farm, in Yarrow, Laidlaw's farm, and of their strolling over all the classic ground of the neighborhood; to St. Mary's Loch, to the thorn of Whitehope, Dryhope Tower, the former abode of "the Flower of Yarrow," Yarrow Church, and the Seven Stones, which mark the graves of the Seven Brothers, slain in "The Douglas Tragedy." How Laidlaw produced the famous ballad of "Auld Maitland," and how Leyden walked about in the highest excitement while Scott read it aloud. Then follows the equally interesting account of the visit of Scott and Laidlaw to Hogg, in Ettrick. These were golden days. Laidlaw and Hogg were relatives, and old friends. Hogg had been shepherd at Blackhouse, with Laidlaw's father. The young men had grown poets, from the inspiration of the scenes they lived among, and their mutual conversation. Then comes the great minstrel of the time, seeking up the scattered and unedited treasures of antiquity, and finds these rustic poets of the hills, and they become friends for life. It is a romance. Laidlaw was of an old and famous, but decayed family. The line had been cursed by a maternal ancestress, and they believed that the curse took effect: they all became lawless men. But Laidlaw went to live at Abbotsford, as the factor or steward of Scott; and in him Scott found one of the most faithful, intelligent, and sympathizing friends, ready either to plant his trees or write down his novels at his dictation, when his evil days came upon him. In our daydreams we imagine such things as these. We lay out estates, and settle on them our friends and faithful adherents, and make about us a paradise of affection, truth, and intellect; but it was the fortune of Scott to do this actually. Here, at his little farm of Kaeside, lived Laidlaw, and after Scott's death went to superintend estates in Rosshire; and his health at length giving way, he retired to the farm of his brother, a sheep-farmer of Contin; and there, in as beautiful scenery as Scotland or almost any country has to show, the true poet of nature, this true-hearted man, breathed his last on the 18th of May, 1845.

Those who wander through the woods of Abbotsford, and find their senses regaled by the rich odor of sweet-brier and woodbines, with shrubs oftener found in gardens, as I did with some degree of surprise, will read with interest the following direction of Scott to Laidlaw, in which he explains the mystery:—"George must stick in a few wild roses, honeysuckles, and sweet-briers, in suitable places, so as to produce the luxuriance we see in the woods which nature plants herself. We injure the effect of our plantings, so far as beauty is concerned, very much by neglecting underwood." In the woods of Abbotsford the memory of Laidlaw will be often recalled by the sight and odor of these fragrant plants.

Descending into a valley beyond Kaeside, I came to the forester's lodge, on the edge of a little solitary loch. Was this cottage formerly the abode of another worthy—Tom Purdie, whom Scott has, on his grave-stone in Melrose abbey-yard, styled "Wood-forester of Abbotsford?"—a double epithet which may be accounted for by foresters being often nowadays keepers of forests where there is no wood, as in Ettrick, etc. Whether this was Tom Purdie's abode or not, however, I found it inhabited by a very obliging and intelligent fellow, as porter there. The little loch here I understood him to be called Abbotsford Loch, in contradiction to Cauldshiels Loch, which is still further up the hills. This Cauldshiels Loch was a favorite resort of Scott's at first. It had its traditions, and he had a boat upon it; but finding that it did not belong to his estate, as he supposed, by one of his purchases, he would never go upon it again, though requested to use it at his pleasure by the proprietor. By the direction of the forester, I now steered my way onward from wood to wood, toward the Eildon hills, in quest of the glen of Thomas the Rhymer. The evening was now drawing on, and there was a deep solitude and solemnity over the dark pine woods through which I passed. The trees which Scott had planted were now in active process of being thinned out, and piles of them lay here and there by the cart tracks through the woods, and heaps of the peeled bark of the larch for sale. I thought with what pleasure would Scott have now surveyed these operations, and the beginning of the marketable profit of the woods of his own planting. But that day was passed. I went on over fields embosomed in the black forest, where the grazing herds gazed wildly at me, as if a stranger were not often seen there; crossed the deep glen, where the little stream roared on, lost in the thick growth of now lofty trees; and then passed onward down the Rhymer's glen to Huntly burn: every step bearing fresh evidence of the vanished romance of Abbotsford. How long was it since Miss Edgeworth sat by the little water-fall in the Rhymer's glen, and gave her name to the stone on which she was seated? The house at Huntly burn, which Scott had purchased to locate his old friend Sir Adam Fergusson near him, was now the house of the wood-factor; and piles of timber, and sawn boards on all sides, marked its present use. Lockhart was gone from the lovely cottage just by at Chiefswood. And Scott himself, after his glory and his troubles, slept soundly at Dryburgh. The darkness that had now closed thickly on my way, seemed to my excited imagination to have fallen on the world. What a day of broad hearts and broad intellects was that which had just passed! How the spirit of power, and of creative beauty, had been poured abroad among men, and especially in our own country, as with a measureless opening of the divine hand; and how rapidly and extensively had then the favored ministers of this intellectual diffusion been withdrawn from the darkened earth! Scott, and almost all his family who had rejoiced with him—Abbotsford was an empty abode—the very woods had yielded up their faithful spirits—Laidlaw and Purdie were in the earth—Hogg, the shepherd-poet, had disappeared from the hills. And of the great lights from England, how many were put out!—Crabbe, Southey, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Campbell, Mrs. Hemans, Miss Landon, Hood, and Lamb, many of them bidding farewell to earth amid clouds and melancholy, intense as was the contrasting brightness of their noonday fame. "Sic transit gloria mundi." The thought passed through me—but a second followed it, saying, "Not so—they only by whom the glory is created travel onward in the track of their eternal destiny.

'Won is the glory, and the grief is past.'"

The next morning I took my way to Dryburgh, the closing scene of the present paper. Dryburgh Abbey lies on the Tweed, about four miles from Melrose. You turn off—when you have left the Eildon hills on your right, and have seen on your left, in the course of the river, the Cowdenknowes, Bemerside, and other classic spots—down a steep and woody lane, and suddenly come out at a wide bend of the river, where, on your side, the gravel brought down by the floods spreads a considerable strand, and the lofty banks all round on the other are finely wooded. Few are the rivers which can show more beautiful scenery in their course than the Tweed. But what strikes you strangely are the ruins of a chain bridge, which some time ago was carried away by the wind. There stand aloft the tall white frames of wood to which the bridge was attached at each end, like great skeletons; and the two main chains stretch across, and fragments of others dangle in the air—iron rags of ruin. It has a most desolate and singular look. This, I suppose, was put up by the late whimsical Earl of Buchan, to whom Dryburgh belonged, as now, to his nephew. At the opposite end of the bridge peeps out of the trees the top of a little temple. It is a temple of the Muses, where the nine sisters are represented consecrating Thomson the poet. Aloft, at some distance in a wood, you descry a gigantic figure of stone; and this, on inquiry, you find to be William Wallace, who, I believe, was never here, any more than Thomson. It was intended for Burns, but as the block was got out of the quarry on the opposite side of the river, close to where you land from the ferry-boat, the fantastic old fellow took it into his head that, as it was so large a block, it should be Wallace.

As you ascend a lane from the ferry to go to the abbey, you find a few cottages, and a great gate, built in the style of an old castle gateway, with round stone pillars with lantern summits, and the cross displayed on each—a sort of poor parody on the gateway at Abbotsford. This castle gateway is the entrance, however, to no castle, but to a large orchard, and over the gate is inscribed—"Hoc Pomarium sua manus satum Parentibus suis optimis sac: D. S. Buchaniæ Comes." That is, "This orchard, sown by his own hands, the Earl of Buchan dedicates to his best of parents." The whole is worthy of the man. If there be any sense in it, the orchard was sown by this silly old lord, not the trees; and these were merely sown by him, and not planted. And why dedicate an orchard to his deceased parents? Were they so excessively fond of apples? Why not satisfy himself with some rational monument? But then he must have been rational himself; and it must be recollected that this was the man who, when Scott was once very ill, forced himself into the house in order to get at the invalid, and arrange with him, in his last moments, the honors of a great heraldic funeral procession; the same man that Scott afterward congratulated himself was dead first, lest he should have made some foolish extravagance of the sort over his remains.