But the dark has come, and this Edinburgh ramble shall end with the picture that closed its own magnificent day. You are standing on the rocky summit of Arthur's Seat. From that superb mountain peak your gaze takes in the whole capital, together with the country in every direction for many miles around. The evening is uncommonly clear. Only in the west dense masses of black cloud are thickly piled upon each other, through which the sun is sinking, red and sullen with menace of the storm. Elsewhere and overhead the sky is crystal, and of a pale, delicate blue. A cold wind blows briskly from the east and sweeps a million streamers of white smoke in turbulent panic over the darkening roofs of the city, far below. In the north the lovely Lomond Hills are distinctly visible across the dusky level of the Forth, which stretches away toward the ocean, one broad sheet of glimmering steel,—its margin indented with many a graceful bay, and the little islands that adorn it shining like stones of amethyst set in polished flint. A few brown sails are visible, dotting the waters, and far to the east appears the graceful outline of the Isle of May,—which was the shrine of the martyred St. Adrian,—and the lonely, wave-beaten Bass Rock, with its millions of seagulls and solan-geese. Busy Leith and picturesque Newhaven and every little village[263] on the coast is sharply defined in the frosty light. At your feet is St. Leonards, with the tiny cottage of Jeanie Deans. Yonder, in the south, are the gray ruins of Craigmillar Castle, once the favourite summer home of the Queen of Scots, now open to sun and rain, moss-grown and desolate, and swept by every wind that blows. More eastward the eye lingers upon Carberry Hill, where Mary surrendered herself to her nobles, just before the romantic episode of Loch Leven Castle; and far beyond that height the sombre fields, intersected by green hawthorn hedges and many-coloured with the various hues of pasture and harvest, stretch away to the hills of Lammermoor and the valleys of Tweed and Esk. Darker and darker grow the gathering shadows of the gloaming. The lights begin to twinkle in the city streets. The echoes of the rifles die away in the Hunter's Bog. A piper far off is playing the plaintive music of The Blue Bells of Scotland. And as your steps descend the crag, the rising moon, now nearly at the full, shines through the gauzy mist and hangs above the mountain like a shield of gold upon the towered citadel of night.
St. Giles's, from the Lawn Market.
CHAPTER XX
SIR WALTER SCOTT
More than a century has passed since Walter Scott was born—a poet destined to exercise a profound, far-reaching, permanent influence upon the feelings of the human race, and thus to act a conspicuous part in its moral and spiritual development and guidance. To the greatness of his mind, the nobility of his spirit, and the beauty of his life there is abundant testimony in his voluminous and diversified writings, and in his ample and honest biography. Everybody who reads has read something from the pen of Scott, or something commemorative of him, and in every mind to which his name is known it is known as the synonym of great faculties and wonderful achievement. There must have been enormous vitality of spirit, prodigious power of intellect, irresistible charm of personality, and lovable purity of moral nature in the man whom thousands that never saw him living,—men and women of a later age and different countries,—know and remember and love as Sir Walter Scott. Others have written greatly. Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, Cowper, Johnson, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor,—these are only a few of the imperial names that cannot die. But these names live in the world's respect. The name of Scott lives also in its affection. What other name of the past in English literature,—unless it be that of Shakespeare,—arouses such a deep and sweet feeling of affectionate interest, gentle pleasure, gratitude, and reverential love?
