Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803
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Title: Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803
Author: Dorothy Wordsworth
Editor: John Campbell Shairp
Release date: May 19, 2009 [eBook #28880]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28880
Credits: This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF A TOUR MADE IN SCOTLAND A.D. 1803 ***
This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.
RECOLLECTIONS
OF A
TOUR MADE IN SCOTLAND
A.D. 1803
* * * * *
BY DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
* * * * *
Edited by J. C. Shairp
CONTENTS.
DAY PAGE
PREFACE ix
First Week.
1. Left Keswick--Grisdale--Mosedale--Hesket 1
Newmarket--Caldbeck Falls
2. Ross Castle--Carlisle--Hatfield--Longtown 2
3. Solway Moss--Enter Scotland--Springfield--Gretna 3
Green--Annan--Dumfries
4. Burns's Grave 5
Ellisland--Vale of Nith 7
Brownhill 8
Poem to Burns's Sons 10
5. Thornhill--Drumlanrig--River Nith 11
Turnpike House 12
Sportsman 13
Vale of Menock 14
Wanlockhead 15
Leadhills 18
Miners 19
Hopetoun mansion 20
Hostess 20
6. Road to Crawfordjohn 22
Douglas Mill 28
Clyde--Lanerk 31
Boniton Linn 33
Second Week.
7. Falls of the Clyde 35
Cartland Crags 40
Fall of Stonebyres--Trough of the Clyde 43
Hamilton 44
8. Hamilton House 45
Baroncleuch--Bothwell Castle 48
Glasgow 52
9. Bleaching ground (Glasgow Green) 53
Road to Dumbarton 55
10. Rocks and Castle of Dumbarton 58
Vale of Leven 62
Smollett's Monument 63
Loch Achray 64
Luss 67
11. Islands of Loch Lomond 71
Road to Tarbet 75
The Cobbler 78
Tarbet 79
12. Left Tarbet for the Trossachs 81
Rob Roy's Caves 82
Inversneyde Ferryhouse and Waterfall 83
Singular building 84
Loch Ketterine 86
Glengyle 88
Mr. Macfarlane's 89
13. Breakfast at Glengyle 91
Lairds of Glengyle--Rob Roy 92
Burying ground 94
Ferryman's Hut 95
Trossachs 96
Loch Achray 101
Return to Ferryman's Hut 102
Third Week.
14. Left Loch Ketterine 106
Garrison House--Highland Girls 107
Ferryhouse at Inversneyde 108
Poem to the Highland Girl 113
Return to Tarbet 115
15. Coleridge resolves to go home 117
Arrochar--Loch Long 118
Parted with Coleridge 119
Glen Croe--The Cobbler 121
Glen Kinglas--Cairndow 123
16. Road to Inverary 124
Inverary 126
17. Vale of Arey 129
Loch Awe 134
Kilchurn Castle 138
Dalmally 139
18. Loch Awe 141
Taynuilt 143
Bunawe--Loch Etive 144
Tinkers 149
19. Road by Loch Etive downwards 152
Dunstaffnage Castle 153
Loch Crerar 156
Strath of Appin--Portnacroish 158
Islands of Loch Linnhe 159
Morven 160
Lord Tweeddale 161
Strath of Duror 163
Ballachulish 164
20. Road to Glen Coe up Loch Leven 165
Blacksmith's house 166
Glen Coe 172
Whisky hovel 174
King's House 175
Fourth Week.
21. Road to Inveroran 180
Inveroran--Public-house 182
Road to Tyndrum 183
Tyndrum 184
Loch Dochart 185
22. Killin 186
Loch Tay 188
Kenmore 189
23. Lord Breadalbane's grounds 193
Vale of Tay--Aberfeldy--Falls of Moness 194
River Tummel--Vale of Tummel 196
Fascally--Blair 197
24. Duke of Athol's gardens 198
Falls of Bruar--Mountain-road to Loch Tummel 201
Loch Tummel 203
Rivers Tummel and Garry 204
Fascally 205
25. Pass of Killicrankie--Sonnet 207
Fall of Tummel 208
Dunkeld 209
Fall of the Bran 210
26. Duke of Athol's gardens 211
Glen of the Bran--Rumbling Brig 212
Narrow Glen--Poem 213
Crieff 215
27. Strath Erne 215
Lord Melville's house--Loch Erne 216
Strath Eyer--Loch Lubnaig 217
Bruce the Traveller--Pass of Leny--Callander 218
Fifth Week.
28. Road to the Trossachs--Loch Vennachar 219
Loch Achray--Trossachs--Road up Loch Ketterine 220
Poem: 'Stepping Westward' 221
Boatman's hut 222
29. Road to Loch Lomond 223
Ferryhouse at Inversneyde 223
Walk up Loch Lomond 224
Glenfalloch 226
Glengyle 228
Rob Roy's Grave--Poem 229
Boatman's Hut 233
30. Mountain-Road to Loch Voil 235
Poem, 'The Solitary Reaper' 237
Strath Eyer 239
31. Loch Lubnaig 240
Callander--Stirling--Falkirk 241
32. Linlithgow--Road to Edinburgh 242
33. Edinburgh 243
Roslin 245
34. Roslin--Hawthornden 246
Road to Peebles 247
Sixth Week.
35. Peebles--Neidpath Castle--Sonnet 248
Tweed 249
Clovenford 251
Poem on Yarrow 252
36. Melrose--Melrose Abbey 255
37. Dryburgh 257
Jedburgh--Old Woman 260
Poem 262
38. Vale of Jed--Ferniehurst 265
39. Jedburgh--The Assizes 267
Vale of Teviot 268
Hawick 270
40. Vale of Teviot--Branxholm 270
Moss Paul 271
Langholm 272
41. Road to Longtown 272
River Esk--Carlisle 273
42. Arrival at home 274
APPENDIX 277
NOTES 309
ITINERARY 317
POEMS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE JOURNAL
1803.
PAGE
To the Sons of Burns, after visiting the Grave of their 277
Father
At the Grave of Burns, 1803 278
Thoughts suggested the day following, on the Banks of 281
Nith, near the Poet's Residence
To a Highland Girl 113
Address to Kilchurn Castle, upon Loch Awe 285
Sonnet in the Pass of Killicrankie 207
Glen Almain; or the Narrow Glen 213
The Solitary Reaper 237
Stepping Westward 221
Rob Roy's Grave 229
Sonnet composed at Neidpath Castle 248
Yarrow Unvisited 252
The Matron of Jedborough and her Husband 262
Fly, some kind Spirit, fly to Grasmere Vale! 274
The Blind Highland Boy 286
1814.
The Brownie's Cell 298
Cora Linn, in sight of Wallace's Tower 283
Effusion, in the Pleasure-ground on the banks of the Bran, 294
near Dunkeld
Yarrow Visited 301
1831.
Yarrow Re-visited 304
On the Departure of Sir Walter Scott from Abbotsford, for 307
Naples
The Trossachs 308
PREFACE.
Those who have long known the poetry of Wordsworth will be no strangers
to the existence of this Journal of his sister, which is now for the
first time published entire. They will have by heart those few wonderful
sentences from it which here and there stand at the head of the Poet's
'Memorials of a Tour in Scotland in 1803.' Especially they will remember
that 'Extract from the Journal of my Companion' which preludes the
'Address to Kilchurn Castle upon Loch Awe,' and they may sometimes have
asked themselves whether the prose of the sister is not as truly poetic
and as memorable as her brother's verse. If they have read the Memoirs
of the Poet published by his nephew the Bishop of Lincoln, they will have
found there fuller extracts from the Journal, which quite maintain the
impression made by the first brief sentences. All true Wordsworthians
then will welcome, I believe, the present publication. They will find in
it not only new and illustrative light on those Scottish poems which they
have so long known, but a faithful commentary on the character of the
poet, his mode of life, and the manner of his poetry. Those who from
close study of Wordsworth's poetry know both the poet and his sister, and
what they were to each other, will need nothing more than the Journal
itself. If it were likely to fall only into their hands, it might be
left without one word of comment or illustration. But as it may reach
some who have never read Wordsworth, and others who having read do not
relish him, for the information of these something more must be said.
The Journal now published does not borrow all its worth from its bearing
on the great poet. It has merit and value of its own, which may commend
it to some who have no heart for Wordsworth's poetry. For the writer of
it was in herself no common woman, and might have secured for herself an
independent reputation, had she not chosen rather that other part, to
forget and merge herself entirely in the work and reputation of her
brother.
* * * * *
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH was the only sister of the poet, a year and a half
younger, having been born on Christmas Day 1771. The five children who
composed the family, four sons and one daughter, lost their mother in
1778, when William was eight, and Dorothy six years old. The father died
five years afterwards, at the close of 1783, and the family home at
Cockermouth was broken up and the children scattered. Before his
father's death, William, in his ninth year, had gone with his elder
brother to school at Hawkshead, by the lake of Esthwaite, and after the
father died Dorothy was brought up by a cousin on her mother's side, Miss
Threlkeld, afterwards Mrs. Rawson, who lived in Halifax. During the
eight years which Wordsworth spent at school, or, at any rate, from the
time of his father's death, he and his sister seem seldom, if ever, to
have met.
The first college vacation in the summer of 1788 brought him back to his
old school in the vale of Esthwaite, and either this or the next of his
undergraduate summers restored him to the society of his sister at
Penrith. This meeting is thus described in the 'Prelude:'--
'In summer, making quest for works of art,
Or scenes renowned for beauty, I explored
That streamlet whose blue current works its way
Between romantic Dovedale's spiry rocks;
Pried into Yorkshire dales, or hidden tracts
Of my own native region, and was blest
Between these sundry wanderings with a joy
Above all joys, that seemed another morn
Risen on mid-noon; blest with the presence, Friend!
Of that sole sister, her who hath been long
Dear to thee also, thy true friend and mine,
Now, after separation desolate
Restored to me--such absence that she seemed
A gift then first bestowed.'
They then together wandered by the banks of Emont, among the woods of
Lowther, and 'climbing the Border Beacon looked wistfully towards the dim
regions of Scotland.' Then and there too Wordsworth first met that young
kinswoman who was his wife to be.
During the following summers the Poet was busy with walking tours in
Switzerland and North Italy, his residence in France, his absorption in
the French Revolution, which kept him some years longer apart from his
sister. During those years Miss Wordsworth lived much with her uncle Dr.
Cookson, who was a canon of Windsor and a favourite with the Court, and
there met with people of more learning and refinement, but not of greater
worth, than those she had left in her northern home.
In the beginning of 1794 Wordsworth, returned from his wanderings, came
to visit his sister at Halifax, his head still in a whirl with
revolutionary fervours. He was wandering about among his friends with no
certain dwelling-place, no fixed plan of life, his practical purposes and
his opinions, political, philosophical, and religious, all alike at sea.
But whatever else might remain unsettled, the bread-and-butter question,
as Coleridge calls it, could not. The thought of orders, for which his
friends intended him, had been abandoned; law he abominated; writing for
the newspaper press seemed the only resource. In this seething state of
mind he sought once more his sister's calming society, and the two
travelled together on foot from Kendal to Grasmere, from Grasmere to
Keswick, 'through the most delightful country that was ever seen.'
Towards the close of this year (1794) Wordsworth would probably have gone
to London to take up the trade of a writer for the newspapers. From this
however he was held back for a time by the duty of nursing his friend
Raisley Calvert, who lay dying at Penrith. Early in 1795 the young man
died, leaving to his friend, the young Poet, a legacy of 900 pounds. The
world did not then hold Wordsworth for a poet, and had received with
coldness his first attempt, 'Descriptive Sketches and an Evening Walk,'
published two years before. But the dying youth had seen further than
the world, and felt convinced that his friend, if he had leisure given
him to put forth his powers, would do something which would make the
world his debtor. With this view he bequeathed him the small sum above
named. And seldom has such a bequest borne ampler fruit. 'Upon the
interest of the 900 pounds, 400 pounds being laid out in annuity, with
200 pounds deducted from the principal, and 100 pounds a legacy to my
sister, and 100 pounds more which "The Lyrical Ballads" have brought me,
my sister and I have contrived to live seven years, nearly eight.' So
wrote Wordsworth in 1805 to his friend Sir George Beaumont. Thus at this
juncture of the Poet's fate, when to onlookers he must have seemed both
outwardly and inwardly well-nigh bankrupt, Raisley Calvert's bequest came
to supply his material needs, and to his inward needs his sister became
the best earthly minister. For his mind was ill at ease. The high hopes
awakened in him by the French Revolution had been dashed, and his spirit,
darkened and depressed, was on the verge of despair. He might have
become such a man as he has pictured in the character of 'The Solitary.'
But a good Providence brought his sister to his side and saved him. She
discerned his real need and divined the remedy. By her cheerful society,
fine tact, and vivid love for nature she turned him, depressed and
bewildered, alike from the abstract speculations and the contemporary
politics in which he had got immersed, and directed his thoughts towards
truth of poetry, and the face of nature, and the healing that for him lay
in these.
'Then it was
That the beloved sister in whose sight
Those days were passed--
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self; for though bedimmed and changed
Much, as it seemed, I was no further changed
Than as a clouded or a waning moon:
She whispered still that brightness would return,
She, in the midst of all, preserved me still
A Poet, made me seek beneath that name,
And that alone, my office upon earth.
By intercourse with her and wanderings together in delightful places of
his native country, he was gradually led back
'To those sweet counsels between head and heart
Whence genuine knowledge grew.'
The brother and sister, having thus cast in their lots together, settled
at Racedown Lodge in Dorsetshire in the autumn of 1795. They had there a
pleasant house, with a good garden, and around them charming walks and a
delightful country looking out on the distant sea. The place was very
retired, with little or no society, and the post only once a week. But
of employment there was no lack. The brother now settled steadily to
poetic work; the sister engaged in household duties and reading, and then
when work was over, there were endless walks and wanderings. Long years
afterwards Miss Wordsworth spoke of Racedown as the place she looked back
to with most affection. 'It was,' she said, 'the first home I had.'
The poems which Wordsworth there composed were not among his best,--'The
Borderers,' 'Guilt or Sorrow,' and others. He was yet only groping to
find his true subjects and his own proper manner. But there was one
piece there composed which will stand comparison with any tale he ever
wrote. It was 'The Ruined Cottage,' which, under the title of the 'Story
of Margaret,' he afterwards incorporated in the first Book of 'The
Excursion.' It was when they had been nearly two years at Racedown that
they received a guest who was destined to exercise more influence on the
self-contained Wordsworth than any other man ever did. This was S. T.
Coleridge. One can imagine how he would talk, interrupted only by their
mutually reading aloud their respective Tragedies, both of which are now
well-nigh forgotten, and by Wordsworth reading his 'Ruined Cottage,'
which is not forgotten. Miss Wordsworth describes S. T. C., as he then
was, in words that are well known. And he describes her thus, in words
less known,--'She is a woman indeed, in mind I mean, and in heart; for
her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would
think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would
think her pretty, but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. In
every motion her innocent soul out-beams so brightly, that who saw her
would say, "Guilt was a thing impossible with her." Her information
various, her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature, and her
taste a perfect electrometer.'
The result of this meeting of the two poets was that the Wordsworths
shifted their abode from Racedown to Alfoxden, near Nether Stowey, in
Somersetshire, to be near Coleridge. Alfoxden was a large furnished
mansion, which the brother and sister had to themselves. 'We are three
miles from Stowey, the then abode of Coleridge,' writes the sister, 'and
two miles from the sea. Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs,
and valleys, with small brooks running down them, through green meadows,
hardly ever intersected with hedgerows, but scattered over with trees.
The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and
bilberries, or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal. Walks extend for
miles over the hill-tops, the great beauty of which is their wild
simplicity--they are perfectly smooth, without rocks.' It was in this
neighbourhood, as the two poets loitered in the silvan combs or walked
along the smooth Quantock hill-tops, looking seaward, with the 'sole
sister,' the companion of their walks, that they struck each from the
other his finest tones. It was with both of them the heyday of poetic
creation. In these walks it was that Coleridge, with slight hints from
Wordsworth, first chaunted the vision of the Ancient Mariner, and then
alone, 'The rueful woes of Lady Christabel.' This, too, was the birthday
of some of the finest of the Lyrical Ballads, of 'We are seven,' 'Simon
Lee,' 'Expostulation and Reply,' and 'The Tables Turned,' 'It is the
first mild day in March,' and 'I heard a thousand blended notes.'
Coleridge never knew again such a season of poetic creation, and
Wordsworth's tardier, if stronger, nature, received from contact with
Coleridge that quickening impulse which it needed, and which it retained
during all its most creative years.
But if Coleridge, with his occasional intercourse and wonderful talk, did
much for Wordsworth, his sister, by her continual companionship, did far
more. After the great revulsion from the excesses of the French
Revolution, she was with him a continually sanative influence. That
whole period, which ranged from 1795 till his settling at Grasmere at the
opening of the next century, and of which the residence at Racedown and
Alfoxden formed a large part, was the healing time of his spirit. And in
that healing time she was the chief human minister. Somewhere in the
'Prelude' he tells that in early youth there was a too great sternness of
spirit about him, a high but too severe moral ideal by which he judged
men and things, insensible to gentler and humbler influences. He
compares his soul to a high, bare craig, without any crannies in which
flowers may lurk, untouched by the mellowing influences of sun and
shower. His sister came with her softening influence, and sowed in it
the needed flowers, and touched it with mellowing colours:
'She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears,
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears
And love, and thought and joy.'
Elsewhere in the 'Prelude' he describes how at one time his soul had got
too much under the dominion of the eye, so that he kept comparing scene
with scene, instead of enjoying each for itself--craving new forms,
novelties of colour or proportion, and insensible to the spirit of each
place and the affections which each awakens. In contrast with this
temporary mood of his own he turns to one of another temper:--
'I knew a maid,
A young enthusiast who escaped these bonds,
Her eye was not the mistress of her heart,
She welcomed what was given, and craved no more;
Whate'er the scene presented to her view,
That was the best, to that she was attuned
By her benign simplicity of life.
Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field,
Could they have known her, would have loved; methought
Her very presence such a sweetness breathed,
That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills,
And everything she looked on, should have had
An intimation how she bore herself
Towards them and to all creatures. God delights
In such a being; for her common thoughts
Are piety, her life is gratitude.'
But it was not his sister the Poet speaks of here, but of his first
meeting with her who afterwards became his wife.
The results of the residence at Racedown, but especially at Alfoxden,
appeared in the shape of the first volume of the 'Lyrical Ballads,' which
were published in the autumn of 1798 by Mr. Cottle at Bristol. This
small volume opens with Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,' and
is followed by Wordsworth's short but exquisite poems of the Alfoxden
time, and is closed by the well-known lines on Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth
reaches about the highest pitch of his inspiration in this latter poem,
which contains more rememberable lines than any other of his, of equal
length, save perhaps the Immortality Ode. It was the result of a ramble
of four or five days made by him and his sister from Alfoxden in July
1798, and was composed under circumstances 'most pleasant,' he says, 'for
me to remember.' He began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the
Wye, and concluded it as he was entering Bristol in the evening.
Every one will recollect how, after its high reflections he turns at the
close to her, 'his dearest Friend,' 'his dear, dear Friend,' and speaks
of his delight to have her by his side, and of the former pleasures which
he read in 'the shooting lights of her wild eyes,' and then the almost
prophetic words with which he forebodes, too surely, that time when
'solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief should be her portion.'
That September (1798) saw the break-up of the brief, bright companionship
near Nether Stowey. Coleridge went with Wordsworth and his sister to
Germany, but soon parted from them and passed on alone to Gottingen,
there to study German, and lose himself in the labyrinth of German
metaphysics. Wordsworth and Dorothy remained at Goslar, and, making no
acquaintances, spent the winter--said to have been the coldest of the
century--by the German stoves, Wordsworth writing more lyrical poems in
the same vein which had been opened so happily at Alfoxden. There is in
these poems no tincture of their German surroundings; they deal entirely
with those which they had left on English ground. Early in spring they
returned to England, to spend the summer with their friends the
Hutchinsons at Sockburn-upon-Tees. There Dorothy remained, while in
September Wordsworth made with Coleridge the walking tour through the
lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland, which issued in his choice of a
home at Grasmere for himself and his sister.
At the close of the year Wordsworth and his sister set off and walked,
driven forward by the cold, frosty winds blowing from behind, from
Wensleydale over Sedbergh's naked heights and the high range that divides
the Yorkshire dales from the lake country. On the shortest day of the
year (St. Thomas's Day) they reached the small two-story cottage at the
Townend of Grasmere, which, for the next eight years, was to be the
poet's home, immortalised by the work he did in it. That cottage has
behind it a small orchard-plot or garden ground shelving upwards toward
the woody mountains above, and in front it looks across the peaceful lake
with its one green island, to the steeps of Silver-how on the farther
side. Westward it looks on Helm Craig, and up the long folds of Easedale
towards the range that divides Easedale from Borrowdale. In this cottage
they two lived on their income of a hundred pounds a year, Dorothy doing
all the household work, for they had then, it has been said, no servant.
Besides this, she had time to write out all his poems--for Wordsworth
himself could never bear the strain of transcribing--to read aloud to him
of an afternoon or evening--at one such reading by her of Milton's
Sonnets it was that his soul took fire and rolled off his first
sonnets--and to accompany him on his endless walks. Nor these alone--her
eye and imagination fed him, not only with subjects for his poetry, but
even with images and thoughts. What we are told of the poem of the
'Beggars' might be said of I know not how many more. 'The sister's eye
was ever on the watch to provide for the poet's pen.' He had a most
observant eye, and she also for him; and his poems are sometimes little
more than poetic versions of her descriptions of the objects which she
had seen; and which he treated as seen by himself. Look at the poem on
the 'Daffodils' and compare with it these words taken from the sister's
Journal. 'When we were in the woods below Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few
daffodils close by the water-side. As we went along there were more and
yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw there were a
long belt of them along the shore. I never saw daffodils so beautiful.
They grew among the mossy stones about them. Some rested their heads on
the stones, as on a pillow; the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced, and
seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, they looked so gay and
glancing.' It may also be noted that the Poet's future wife contributed
to this poem these two best lines--
'They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude.'
Or take another description from Miss Wordsworth's Journal of a
birch-tree, 'the lady of the woods,' which her brother has not
versified:--'As we were going along we were stopped at once, at the
distance, perhaps, of fifty yards from our favourite birch-tree: it was
yielding to the gust of the wind, with all its tender twigs; the sun
shone upon it, and it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower.
It was a tree in shape, with stem and branches, but it was like a spirit
of water.'
The life which the Poet and his sister lived during the eight years at
the Townend of Grasmere stands out with a marked individuality which it
is delightful ever so often to recur to. It was as unlike the lives of
most literary or other men, as the most original of his poems are unlike
the ordinary run of even good poetry. Their outward life was exactly
like that of the dalesmen or 'statesmen'--for so the native yeomen
proprietors are called--with whom they lived on the most friendly
footing, and among whom they found their chief society. Outwardly their
life was so, but inwardly it was cheered by imaginative visitings to
which these were strangers. Sheltered as they then were from the
agitations of the world, the severe frugality of the life they led
ministered in more than one way to feed that poetry which introduced a
new element into English thought. It kept the mind cool, and the eye
clear, to feel once more that kinship between the outward world and the
soul of man, to perceive that impassioned expression in the countenance
of all nature, which, if felt by primeval men, ages of cultivation have
long forgotten. It also made them wise to practise the same frugality in
emotional enjoyment which they exercised in household economy. It has
been well noted {0a} that this is one of Wordsworth's chief
characteristics. It is the temptation of the poetic temperament to be
prodigal of passion, to demand a life always strung to the highest pitch
of emotional excitement, to be never content unless when passing from
fervour to fervour. No life can long endure this strain. This is
specially seen in such poets as Byron and Shelley, who speedily fell from
the heights of passion to the depths of languor and despondency. The
same quick using up of the power of enjoyment produces the too common
product of the _blase_ man and the cynic. Wordsworth early perceived
that all, even the richest, natures have but a very limited capacity of
uninterrupted enjoyment, and that nothing is easier than to exhaust this
capacity. Hence he set himself to husband it, to draw upon it sparingly,
to employ it only on the purest, most natural, and most enduring objects,
and not to speedily dismiss or throw them by and demand more, but to
detain them till they had yielded him their utmost. From this in part it
came that the commonest sights of earth and sky--a fine spring day, a
sunset, even a chance traveller met on a moor, any ordinary sorrow of
man's life--yielded to him an amount of imaginative interest
inconceivable to more mundane spirits. The simple healthiness and strict
frugality of his household life suited well, and must have greatly
assisted, that wholesome frugality of emotion which he exercised.
During those seven or eight Grasmere years, the spring of poetry which
burst forth at Alfoxden, and produced the first volume of 'Lyrical
Ballads,' flowed steadily on and found expression in other poems of like
quality and spirit,--'Hartleap Well,' 'The Brothers,' 'Michael,' which,
with others of the same order, written in Germany, appeared in the second
volume of 'Lyrical Ballads.' And after these two volumes had gone forth,
Grasmere still gave more of the same high order,--'The Daffodils,' 'The
Leech-Gatherer,' and above all the 'Ode on Immortality.' It was too the
conclusion of the 'Prelude,' and the beginning of the 'Excursion.' So
that it may be said that those Grasmere years, from 1800 to 1807, mark
the period when Wordsworth's genius was in its zenith. During all this
time, sister Dorothy was by his side, ministering to him, equally in body
and in mind--doing the part of household servant, and not less that of
prompter and inspirer of his highest songs.
But this life of theirs, retired and uneventful as it seems, was not
without its own incidents. Such was the homecoming of their younger
sailor-brother John, who, in the first year of their residence at
Grasmere--
'Under their cottage roof, had gladly come
From the wild sea a cherished visitant.'
He was, what his brother calls him, 'a silent poet,' and had the heart
and sense to feel the sterling quality of his brother's poems, and to
foretell with perfect confidence their ultimate acceptance, at the time
when the critic wits who ruled the hour treated them with contempt. The
two brothers were congenial spirits, and William's poetry has many
affecting allusions to his brother John, whose intention it was, when his
last voyage was over, to settle in 'Grasmere's happy vale,' and to devote
the surplus of his fortune to his brother's use. On his last voyage he
sailed as captain of the 'Earl of Abergavenny' East-Indiaman, at the
opening of February 1805; and on the 5th of that month, the ill-fated
ship struck on the Shambles of the Bill of Portland, and the captain and
most of the crew went down with her. To the brother and sister this
became a permanent household sorrow. But in time they found comfort in
that thought with which the Poet closes a remarkable letter on his
brother's loss,--'So good must be better; so high must be destined to be
higher.'
Another lesser incident was a short tour to the Continent, in which, as
the brother and sister crossed Westminster Bridge, outside the Dover
coach, both witnessed that sunrise which remains fixed for ever in the
famous sonnet. Another incident, and more important, was Wordsworth's
marriage in October 1802, when he brought home his young wife, Mary
Hutchinson, his sister's long-time friend, to their cottage at Townend.
This is she whom he has sung in the lines--'She was a phantom of
delight;' of whom he said in plain prose, 'She has a sweetness all but
angelic, simplicity the most entire, womanly self-respect and purity of
heart speaking through all her looks, acts, and movements.' The advent
of Mrs. Wordsworth brought no change to Dorothy. She still continued to
fill to her brother and his wife the same place which she had filled when
her brother was alone, sharing in all the household duties and family
interests, and still accompanying him in his rambles when Mrs. Wordsworth
was detained at home. The year after the marriage, that is, in the
fourth year of the Grasmere residence, after the first son was born, the
brother and sister, accompanied by Coleridge, set out on that tour the
Journal of which is here published. Portions of it have already appeared
in the 'Memoirs' of Wordsworth, but it is now for the first time given in
full, just as it came from the pen of Miss Wordsworth seventy years ago.
As I shall have to speak of it again, I may now pass on and note the few
facts that still remain to be told in illustration of the writer's
character.
In the years which followed the tour in Scotland, other children were
added to Wordsworth's family, till the small cottage at the Townend could
no longer accommodate the household. The second child was the poet's
only daughter, whom after his sister he called Dorothy, generally known
as Dora, for, as he tells Lady Beaumont, he could not find it in his
heart to call her by another name. This second Dora occupies in
Wordsworth's later poetry the same place which the first Dorothy held in
his earlier. Aunt Dorothy's love, as it expanded to take in each
newcomer, did not lose any of its intensity towards her brother. While
the uneasiness which the act of writing had always occasioned him was not
diminished, weakness of eyesight increased. Then she had to write for
him, she read to him, she walked with him as of old, besides sharing in
all household cares. In November 1806, Wordsworth removed with his
family to Coleorton, in Leicestershire, to spend the winter there in a
house of Sir George Beaumont's; 'Our own cottage,' he writes, 'being far
too small for our family to winter in, though we manage well enough in it
during the summer.' In the spring of 1807, Wordsworth and his wife
visited London. Dorothy, who was left with the children, wrote the poem
called 'The Mother's Return,' as a welcome to Mrs. Wordsworth when she
came back. This with two other poems, written by her for the children,
one on 'The Wind,' the other called 'The Cottager to her Infant,'
afterwards appeared in an edition of her brother's poems.
This seems the proper place to give the account of Miss Wordsworth, as
she appeared to De Quincey, when in 1807 he first made the acquaintance
of Wordsworth, just before the Poet and his family quitted their old home
in the cottage at Grasmere Townend. After speaking of Mrs. Wordsworth,
he continues:--
'Immediately behind her moved a lady, shorter, slighter, and perhaps, in
all other respects, as different from her in personal characteristics as
could have been wished for the most effective contrast. "Her face was of
Egyptian brown;" rarely, in a woman of English birth, had I seen a more
determinate gipsy tan. Her eyes were not soft as Mrs. Wordsworth's, nor
were they fierce or bold; but they were wild and startling, and hurried
in their motion. Her manner was warm, and even ardent; her sensibility
seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned
intellect apparently burned within her, which--being alternately pushed
forward into a conspicuous expression by the irresistible instincts of
her temperament, and then immediately checked in obedience to the decorum
of her sex and age and her maidenly condition--gave to her whole
demeanour, and to her conversation, an air of embarrassment, and even of
self-conflict, that was almost distressing to witness. Even her very
utterance and enunciation often suffered in point of clearness and
steadiness, from the agitation of her excessive organic sensibility. At
times the self-counteraction and self-baffling of her feelings caused her
even to stammer. But the greatest deductions from Miss Wordsworth's
attractions, and from the exceeding interest which surrounded her, in
right of her character, of her history, and of the relation which she
fulfilled towards her brother, were the glancing quickness of her
motions, and other circumstances in her deportment (such as her stooping
attitude when walking), which gave an ungraceful character to her
appearance when out of doors . . . .
'Her knowledge of literature was irregular and thoroughly unsystematic.
She was content to be ignorant of many things; but what she knew, and had
really mastered, lay where it could not be disturbed--in the temple of
her own most fervid heart.'
It may not be amiss here to add from the same gossipy but graphic pen, a
description of the Townend home, and of the way of life there, which has
often before been quoted:--
'A little semi-vestibule between two doors prefaced the entrance into
what might be considered the principal room of the cottage. It was an
oblong square, not above eight and a half feet high, sixteen feet long,
and twelve broad, very prettily wainscoted from the floor to the ceiling
with dark polished oak, slightly embellished with carving. One window
there was--a perfect and unpretending cottage window--with little diamond
panes, embowered at almost every season of the year with roses, and, in
the summer and autumn, with a profusion of jasmine and other fragrant
shrubs. From the exuberant luxuriance of the vegetation around it, this
window, though tolerably large, did not furnish a very powerful light to
one who entered from the open air . . . . I was ushered up a little
flight of stairs, fourteen in all, to a little drawing-room, or whatever
the reader chooses to call it. Wordsworth himself has described the
fireplace of this room as his
"Half kitchen, and half parlour fire."
It was not fully seven feet six inches high, and in other respects pretty
nearly of the same dimensions as the rustic hall below. There was,
however, in a small recess, a library of perhaps three hundred volumes,
which seemed to consecrate this room as the poet's study and
composing-room, and such occasionally it was.
'About four o'clock it might be when we arrived. At that hour in
November the daylight soon declined, and in an hour and a half we were
all collected about the tea-table.
'This with the Wordsworths, under the simple rustic system of habits
which they cherished then and for twenty years after, was the most
delightful meal of the day, just as dinner is in great cities, and for
the same reason, because it was prolonged into a meal of leisure and
conversation. That night I found myself, about eleven at night, in a
pretty bedroom, about fourteen feet by twelve. Much I feared that this
might turn out the best room in the house; and it illustrates the
hospitality of my new friends to mention that it was . . . .
'Next morning Miss Wordsworth I found making breakfast in the little
sitting-room. No one was there, no glittering breakfast service; a
kettle boiled upon the fire; and everything was in harmony with these
unpretending arrangements.
'I rarely had seen so humble a _menage_; and, contrasting the dignity of
the man with this honourable poverty, and this courageous avowal of it,
his utter absence of all effort to disguise the simple truth of the case,
I felt my admiration increased.
'Throughout the day, which was rainy, the same style of modest
hospitality prevailed. Wordsworth and his sister, myself being of the
party, walked out in spite of the rain, and made the circuit of the two
lakes, Grasmere and its dependency Rydal, a walk of about six miles.
'On the third morning after my arrival in Grasmere, I found the whole
family, except the two children, prepared for the expedition across the
mountains. I had heard of no horses, and took it for granted that we
were to walk; however, at the moment of starting, a cart, the common
farmer's cart of the country, made its appearance, and the driver was a
bonny young woman of the vale. Accordingly we were all carted along to
the little town or large village of Ambleside, three and a half miles
distant. Our style of travelling occasioned no astonishment; on the
contrary, we met a smiling salutation wherever we appeared; Miss
Wordsworth being, as I observed, the person most familiarly known of our
party, and the one who took upon herself the whole expenses of the flying
colloquies exchanged with stragglers on the road.'
When the family had to leave this cottage home at Townend, they migrated
to Allan Bank in 1808, and there remained for three years. In the spring
of 1811 they moved to the Parsonage of Grasmere, and thence, in the
spring of 1813, to Rydal Mount, their final abode. Their sojourn in the
Parsonage was saddened by the loss of two children, who died within six
months of each other, and were laid side by side in the churchyard of
Grasmere. The Parsonage looks right across the road on that
burial-place, and the continual sight of this was more than they could
bear. They were glad therefore to withdraw from it, and to exchange the
vale of Grasmere, now filled for them with too mournful recollections,
for the sweet retirement of Rydal.
Through all these changes sister Dorothy went of course with them, and
shared the affliction of the bereaved parents, as she had formerly shared
their happiness. In 1814, the year of the publication of the
'Excursion,' all of which Miss Wordsworth had transcribed, her brother
made another tour in Scotland, and this time Yarrow was not unvisited.
His wife and her sister went with him, but Dorothy, having stayed at home
probably to tend the children, did not form one of the party, a
circumstance which her brother always remembered with regret.
In the summer of 1820, however, she visited the Continent with her
brother and Mrs. Wordsworth, but of this tour no record remains. Another
visit, the last but one, Wordsworth made to Scotland in 1831, accompanied
by his daughter Dora. This time Yarrow was revisited in company with Sir
Walter Scott, just before his last going from Tweedside. Wordsworth has
chronicled his parting with Scott in two affecting poems, which if any
reader does not know by heart, I would recommend him to read them in the
Appendix to this Journal. {0b}
But by the time this expedition was made, Dorothy was an invalid confined
to a sick-room. In the year 1829 she was seized by a severe illness,
which so prostrated her, body and mind, that she never recovered from it.
The unceasing strain of years had at last worn out that buoyant frame and
fervid spirit. She had given herself to one work, and that work was
done. To some it may seem a commonplace one,--to live in and for her
brother, to do by him a sister's duty. With original powers which, had
she chosen to set up on her own account, might have won for her high
literary fame, she was content to forget herself, to merge all her gifts
and all her interests in those of her brother. She thus made him other
and higher than he could have been had he stood alone, and enabled him to
render better service to the world than without her ministry he could
have done. With this she was well content. It is sad to think that when
the world at last knew him for what he was, the great original poet of
this century, she who had helped to make him so was almost past rejoicing
in it. It is said that during those latter years he never spoke of her
without his voice being sensibly softened and saddened. The return of
the day when they two first came to Grasmere was to him a solemn
anniversary. But though so enfeebled, she still lived on, and survived
her brother by nearly five years. Her death took place at Rydal Mount in
January 1855, at the age of eighty-three. And now, beside her brother
and his wife and others of that household, she rests in the green
Grasmere churchyard, with the clear waters of Rotha murmuring by.
To return to the Journal. As we read it, let us bear always in mind that
it was not meant for us, for the world, or 'the general reader,' but to
be listened to by a small family circle, gathered round the winter fire.
We should therefore remember that in reading it we are, as it were,
allowed, after seventy years, to overhear what was not primarily meant
for our ears at all. This will account for a fulness and minuteness of
detail which to unsympathetic persons may perhaps appear tedious. But
the writer was telling her story, not for unsympathetic persons, not for
'general readers,' much less for literary critics, but for 'the household
hearts that were her own,' on whose sympathy she could reckon, even down
to the minutest circumstances of this journey. And so there is no
attempt at fine or sensational writing, as we now call it, no attempt at
that modern artifice which they call word-painting. But there is the
most absolute sincerity, the most perfect fidelity to her own experience,
the most single-minded endeavour to set down precisely the things they
saw and heard and felt, just as they saw and felt and heard them, while
moving on their quiet way. And hence perhaps the observant reader who
submits himself to the spirit that pervades this Journal may find in its
effortless narrative a truthfulness, a tenderness of observation, a
'vivid exactness,' a far-reaching and suggestive insight, for which he
might look in vain in more studied productions.
Another thing to note is the historic value that now attaches to this
Journal. It marks the state of Scotland, and the feeling with which the
most finely gifted Englishmen came to it seventy years since, at a time
before the flood of English interest and 'tourism' had set in across the
Border. The Wordsworths were of course not average English people. They
came with an eye awake and trained for nature, and a heart in sympathy
with nature and with man in a degree not common either in that or in any
other age. They were north-country English too, and between these and
the Lowland Scots there was less difference of fibre and of feeling than
there generally is between Cumbrians and Londoners. All their lives they
had been wont to gaze across the Solway on the dimly-outlined mountains
of the Scottish Border. This alone and their love of scenery and of
wandering were enough, apart from other inducement, to have lured them
northward. But that tide of sentiment, which in our day has culminated
in our annual tourist inundation, was already setting in. It had been
growing ever since 'The Forty-five,' when the sudden descent of the
Highland host on England, arrested only by the disastrous pause at Derby,
had frightened the Londoners from their propriety, and all but scared the
Second George beyond seas. This terror in time subsided, but the
interest in the northern savages still survived, and was further
stimulated when, about fifteen years after, the portent of Macpherson's
Ossian burst on the astonished world of literature. Then about eleven
years later, in 1773, the burly and bigoted English Lexicographer
buttoned his great-coat up to the throat and set out on a Highland
sheltie from Inverness, on that wonderful 'Tour to the Hebrides,' by
which he determined to extinguish for ever Macpherson and his impudent
forgeries. Such a tour seemed at that day as adventurous as would now be
a journey to the heart of Africa, and the stories which Johnson told of
the Hebrideans and their lives let in on his Cockney readers the
impression of a world as strange as any which Livingstone could now
report of. Then, in 1786, came Burns, whose poetry, if it did not reach
the ordinary Englishman of the literary class, at least thrilled the
hearts of English poets. That Wordsworth had felt his power we know,
for, independent as he stood, and little wont to acknowledge his
indebtedness to any, he yet confesses in one place that it was Burns who
first set him on the right track. This series of surprises coming from
beyond the Tweed had drawn the eyes of Englishmen towards Scotland.
Especially two such voices--Ossian speaking from the heart of the
Highlands, Burns concentrating in his song the whole strength and the
weakness also of Lowland character--seemed to call across the Borders on
Wordsworth to come and look on their land. And during all the first days
of that journey the thought of Burns and his untimely end, then so
recent, lay heavy on his heart.
Again, it were well, as we read, to remember the time when this Diary was
written. It was before Scott was known as an original poet, before he
had given anything to the world save 'The Border Minstrelsy.' We are
accustomed to credit Scott with whatever enchantment invests Scotland in
the eyes of the English, and of foreigners. And doubtless a large
portion of it is due to him, but perhaps not quite so much as we are apt
to fancy. We commonly suppose that it was he who first discovered the
Trossachs and Loch Katrine, and revealed them to the world in 'The Lady
of the Lake.' Yet they must have had some earlier renown, enough to make
Wordsworth, travelling two years before the appearance even of Scott's
'Lay,' turn aside to go in search of them.
To Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge this was the first time they had set
foot on Scottish ground. Wordsworth himself seems to have crossed the
Border two years before this, though of that journey there is no record
remaining. As they set forth from Keswick on that August morning one can
well believe that
'Their exterior semblance did belie
Their soul's immensity.'
None of the three paid much regard to the outward man. Coleridge,
perhaps, in soiled nankeen trousers, and with the blue and brass in which
he used to appear in Unitarian pulpits, buttoned round his growing
corpulency; Wordsworth in a suit of russet, not to say dingy, brown, with
a broad flapping straw hat to protect his weak eyesight. And as for Miss
Wordsworth, we may well believe that in her dress she thought more of use
than of ornament. These three, mounted on their outlandish Irish car,
with a horse, now gibbing and backing over a bank, now reduced to a walk,
with one of the poets leading him by the head, must have cut but a sorry
figure, and wakened many a smile and gibe in passers-by. As they wound
their way up Nithsdale, one can well imagine how some Border lord or
laird, riding, or driving past in smart equipage, would look on them
askance, taking them for what Burns calls a 'wheen gangrel bodies,' or
for a set of Dominie Sampsons from the other side the Border, or for some
offshoot of the 'Auld Licht' Seceders. Poor Coleridge, ill at ease, and
in the dumps all the way, stretched asleep on the car cushions, while the
other two were admiring the scenery, could not have added to their
hilarity. And it must have been a relief to Wordsworth and his sister,
though the Journal hints it not, when he left them at Loch Lomond. But
however grotesque their appearance may have been, they bore within them
that which made their journey rich in delight to themselves, not to say
to others. They were then both in their prime, Wordsworth and his sister
being just past thirty. They had the observant eye and the feeling heart
which money cannot buy. No doubt to them, accustomed to the cleanness
and comfort of the farms and cottages of Westmoreland, those 'homes of
ancient peace,' with their warm stone porches and their shelter of
household sycamores, the dirt and discomfort of the inns and of the
humbler abodes they entered must have been repulsive enough. Even the
gentlemen's seats had to them an air of neglect and desolation, and the
new plantations of larch and fir with which they had then begun to be
surrounded, gave an impression of rawness, barrenness, and lack of
geniality. Nor less in large towns, as in Glasgow, were they struck by
the dulness and dreariness in the aspect and demeanour of the dim 'common
populations.' They saw and felt these things as keenly as any could do.
But, unlike ordinary travellers, they were not scared or disgusted by
them. They did not think that the first appearance was all. They felt
and saw that there was more behind. With lively interest they note the
healthy young women travelling barefoot, though well dressed, the
children without shoes or stockings, the barefoot boys, some with their
caps wreathed with wild-flowers, others who could read Virgil or Homer.
They pass, as friends, beneath the humble cottage roofs, look with
sympathy on the countenances of the inmates, partake, when bidden, of
their homely fare, enter feelingly into their pathetic human histories.
They came there not to criticise, but to know and feel.
Again, their intense love for their Westmoreland dales and meres did not
send them to look on those of Scotland with a sense of rivalry, but of
brotherhood. They were altogether free from that vulgar habit of
comparing scene with scene which so poisons the eye to all true
perception of natural beauty,--as though the one great end were to
graduate all the various scenes of nature in the list of a competitive
examination. Hence whatever new they met with, they were ready to
welcome and enjoy. They could appreciate the long, bare, houseless,
treeless glens, not less than the well-wooded lakes. And yet Miss
Wordsworth's home-heartedness makes her long for some touches of home and
human habitation to break the long bleak solitudes she passed through.
The absolute desolation of the Moor of Rannoch, so stirring to some, was
evidently too much for her.
'The loneliness
Loaded her heart, the desert tired her eye.'
Again, throughout the Journal we see how to her eye man and nature
interact on each other. That deep feeling, so strong in her brother's
poetry, of the interest that man gives to nature, and still more the
dignity that nature gives to man, is not less strongly felt by her. It
is man seen against a great background of nature and solitude that most
stirs her imagination. The woman sitting sole by the margin of Daer
Water, or the old man alone in the corn-field, or the boy solitary on the
Moor of Crawfordjohn--these in her prose are pictures quite akin and
equal to many a one that occurs in her brother's verse. This sense of
man with 'grandeur circumfused,' 'the sanctity of nature given to man,'
is as primary in her as in her brother. I cannot believe that she merely
learnt it from him. It must have been innate in both, derived by both
from one original source.
One is struck throughout by the absence of all effort at fine or
imaginative writing. But this only makes more effective those natural
gleams that come unbidden. After the dulness of Glasgow and the Vale of
Leven comes that wakening up to very ecstasy among the islands of Loch
Lomond,--that new world, magical, enchanting. And then that plunge into
the heart of the Highlands, when they find themselves by the shores of
Loch Katrine, alone with the native people there,--the smell of the
peat-reek within, and the scent of the bog-myrtle without; those 'gentle
ardours' that awake, as they move along Lochawe-side and look into the
cove of Cruachan, or catch that Appin glen by Loch Linnhe, at the bright
sunset hour, enlivened by the haymaking people; or that new rapture they
drink in at the first glimpse, from Loch Etive shores, of the blue
Atlantic Isles. And then what a fitting close to such a tour was that
meeting with Walter Scott; the two great poets of their time, both in the
morning of their power, and both still unknown, joining hands of
friendship which was to last for life!
But I have said more than enough. Those who care for the things which
the Wordsworths cared for will find in this quiet narrative much to their
mind. And they will find from it some new light shed on those delightful
poems, memorial of that tour, which remain as an undying track of glory
illuminating the path these two trod. These poems are printed in the
Appendix, that those who know them well may read them once again, and
that those who do not know them, except by Guide-book extracts, may turn
to them, after reading the Journal, and try whether they cannot find in
them something which they never found elsewhere.
* * * * *
There is one entry, the last in the Journal, made as late as 1832, which
alludes to a fact which, but for this note, might have been left without
comment. {0c} Throughout the whole tour no distinction seems to have
been made between Saturday and Sunday. One would have thought that, if
nothing else, sympathy at least, which they did not lack, would have led
Wordsworth and his sister to turn aside and share the Sabbath worship of
the native people. Even the tired jade might have put in his claim for
his Sabbath rest; not to mention the scandal which the sight of Sunday
travellers in lonely parts of Scotland must then have caused, and the
name they must many a time have earned for themselves, of
'Sabbath-breakers.' This last entry of 1832, however, marks a change,
which, if it came to Dorothy, came not less decidedly to her brother.
This change has been often remarked on, and has been stigmatised by 'the
enlightened ones' as 'the reaction.' They say that the earlier
nature-worship, which they call Pantheistic, speaks the true and genuine
man; the later and more consciously Christian mood they regard as the
product, not of deepened experience, but of timidity, or at least as the
sign of decreasing insight. It is not so that I would interpret it.
Wordsworth and his sister, with their rare gift of soul and eye, saw
further into nature, and felt it more profoundly than common men can, and
had no doubt found there something which the gross world dreams not of.
They recovered thence a higher teaching, which men for ages had lost.
They learnt to think of God as being actually very near to them in all
they saw and heard; not as the mechanical Artificer, who makes a world
and then dwells aloof from it, but as
'The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves.'
In nature, which to most eyes is but a dull lifeless mass, impelled by
dead mechanic movements, their finer spirits were aware of a breathing
life, a living Presence, distinct, yet not alien from, their own spirits,
and thence they drank life, and strength, and joy. And not in nature
alone, but from their own hearts, from the deep places of their moral
nature, and from their minglings with their fellow-men, they could
oftentimes overhear
'The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.'
And through this they learned to feel for themselves, and not
conventionally, the upholding presence of One on whom the soul's 'dark
foundations rest.' Likely enough, in the prime of their strength they
may have imagined that these teachings coming from nature and from man
were in themselves enough.
But when sorrow and bereavement came, and with them the deepened sense of
sin and of utter need, they learned that in nature alone was nothing
which in the end they could abide by. They had been true to the lights
they had, and they were led on to higher. They were led to go beyond
nature and man for their ultimate support, and to overhear from that
higher region another, diviner 'tone, into which all the strains of this
world's music are ultimately to be resolved.' The Poet, nor less his
sister, came at length to feel, what philosophers find so hard to
believe,--that The Being whom he had long known as near him in the
solitudes of nature, as close to the beatings of his own heart, was He
who had so loved him as to die for him. True it is that this later and
more distinctly Christian experience is but faintly reflected in
Wordsworth's poetry compared with the earlier naturalistic mood. But
this is explained by the fact that before the later experience became
prominent, the early fervour of poetic creation had already passed. Not
the less for this, however, was the poet's later conviction a riper, more
advanced wisdom--not a retrogression.
J. C. SHAIRP.
CUILALUINN, _June_ 1874.
FIRST WEEK.
William and I parted from Mary on Sunday afternoon, August 14th, 1803;
and William, Coleridge, and I left Keswick on Monday morning, the 15th,
at twenty minutes after eleven o'clock. The day was very hot; we walked
up the hills, and along all the rough road, which made our walking half
the day's journey. Travelled under the foot of Carrock, a mountain
covered with stones on the lower part; above, it is very rocky, but sheep
pasture there; we saw several where there seemed to be no grass to tempt
them. Passed the foot of Grisdale and Mosedale, both pastoral valleys,
narrow, and soon terminating in the mountains--green, with scattered
trees and houses, and each a beautiful stream. At Grisdale our horse
backed upon a steep bank where the road was not fenced, just above a
pretty mill at the foot of the valley; and we had a second threatening of
a disaster in crossing a narrow bridge between the two dales; but this
was not the fault of either man or horse. Slept at Mr. Younghusband's
public-house, Hesket Newmarket. In the evening walked to Caldbeck Falls,
a delicious spot in which to breathe out a summer's day--limestone rocks,
hanging trees, pools, and waterbreaks--caves and caldrons which have been
honoured with fairy names, and no doubt continue in the fancy of the
neighbourhood to resound with fairy revels.
* * * * *
_Tuesday_, _August_ 16_th_.--Passed Rose Castle upon the Caldew, an
ancient building of red stone with sloping gardens, an ivied gateway,
velvet lawns, old garden walls, trim flower-borders with stately and
luxuriant flowers. We walked up to the house and stood some minutes
watching the swallows that flew about restlessly, and flung their shadows
upon the sunbright walls of the old building; the shadows glanced and
twinkled, interchanged and crossed each other, expanded and shrunk up,
appeared and disappeared every instant; as I observed to William and
Coleridge, seeming more like living things than the birds themselves.
Dined at Carlisle; the town in a bustle with the assizes; so many strange
faces known in former times and recognised, that it half seemed as if I
ought to know them all, and, together with the noise, the fine ladies,
etc., they put me into confusion. This day Hatfield was condemned {2} I
stood at the door of the gaoler's house, where he was; William entered
the house, and Coleridge saw him; I fell into conversation with a debtor,
who told me in a dry way that he was 'far over-learned,' and another man
observed to William that we might learn from Hatfield's fate 'not to
meddle with pen and ink.' We gave a shilling to my companion, whom we
found out to be a friend of the family, a fellow-sailor with my brother
John {3} 'in Captain Wordsworth's ship.' Walked upon the city walls,
which are broken down in places and crumbling away, and most disgusting
from filth. The city and neighbourhood of Carlisle disappointed me; the
banks of the river quite flat, and, though the holms are rich, there is
not much beauty in the vale from the want of trees--at least to the eye
of a person coming from England, and, I scarcely know how, but to me the
holms had not a natural look; there was something townish in their
appearance, a dulness in their strong deep green. To Longtown--not very
interesting, except from the long views over the flat country; the road
rough, chiefly newly mended. Reached Longtown after sunset, a town of
brick houses belonging chiefly to the Graham family. Being in the form
of a cross and not long, it had been better called Crosstown. There are
several shops, and it is not a very small place; but I could not meet
with a silver thimble, and bought a halfpenny brass one. Slept at the
Graham's Arms, a large inn. Here, as everywhere else, the people seemed
utterly insensible of the enormity of Hatfield's offences; the ostler
told William that he was quite a gentleman, paid every one genteelly,
etc. etc. He and 'Mary' had walked together to Gretna Green; a heavy
rain came on when they were there; a returned chaise happened to pass,
and the driver would have taken them up; but 'Mr. Hope's' carriage was to
be sent for; he did not choose to accept the chaise-driver's offer.
* * * * *
_Wednesday_, _August_ 17_th_.--Left Longtown after breakfast. About
half-a-mile from the town a guide-post and two roads, to Edinburgh and
Glasgow; we took the left-hand road, to Glasgow. Here saw a specimen of
the luxuriance of the heath-plant, as it grows in Scotland; it was in the
enclosed plantations--perhaps sheltered by them. These plantations
appeared to be not well grown for their age; the trees were stunted.
Afterwards the road, treeless, over a peat-moss common--the Solway Moss;
here and there an earth-built hut with its peat stack, a scanty growing
willow hedge round the kailgarth, perhaps the cow pasturing near,--a
little lass watching it,--the dreary waste cheered by the endless singing
of larks.
We enter Scotland by crossing the river Sark; on the Scotch side of the
bridge the ground is unenclosed pasturage; it was very green, and
scattered over with that yellow flowered plant which we call grunsel; the
hills heave and swell prettily enough; cattle feeding; a few corn fields
near the river. At the top of the hill opposite is Springfield, a
village built by Sir William Maxwell--a dull uniformity in the houses, as
is usual when all built at one time, or belonging to one individual, each
just big enough for two people to live in, and in which a family, large
or small as it may happen, is crammed. There the marriages are
performed. Further on, though almost contiguous, is Gretna Green, upon a
hill and among trees. This sounds well, but it is a dreary place; the
stone houses dirty and miserable, with broken windows. There is a
pleasant view from the churchyard over Solway Firth to the Cumberland
mountains. Dined at Annan. On our left as we travelled along appeared
the Solway Firth and the mountains beyond, but the near country dreary.
Those houses by the roadside which are built of stone are comfortless and
dirty; but we peeped into a clay 'biggin' that was very 'canny,' and I
daresay will be as warm as a swallow's nest in winter. The town of Annan
made me think of France and Germany; many of the houses large and gloomy,
the size of them outrunning the comforts. One thing which was like
Germany pleased me: the shopkeepers express their calling by some device
or painting; bread-bakers have biscuits, loaves, cakes painted on their
window-shutters; blacksmiths horses' shoes, iron tools, etc. etc.; and so
on through all trades.
Reached Dumfries at about nine o'clock--market-day; met crowds of people
on the road, and every one had a smile for us and our car . . . . The
inn was a large house, and tolerably comfortable; Mr. Rogers and his
sister, whom we had seen at our own cottage at Grasmere a few days
before, had arrived there that same afternoon on their way to the
Highlands; but we did not see them till the next morning, and only for
about a quarter of an hour.
* * * * *
_Thursday_, _August_ 18_th_.--Went to the churchyard where Burns is
buried. A bookseller accompanied us. He showed us the outside of
Burns's house, where he had lived the last three years of his life, and
where he died. It has a mean appearance, and is in a bye situation,
whitewashed; dirty about the doors, as almost all Scotch houses are;
flowering plants in the windows.
Went on to visit his grave. He lies at a corner of the churchyard, and
his second son, Francis Wallace, beside him. There is no stone to mark
the spot; {5} but a hundred guineas have been collected, to be expended
on some sort of monument. 'There,' said the bookseller, pointing to a
pompous monument, 'there lies Mr. Such-a-one'--I have forgotten his
name,--'a remarkably clever man; he was an attorney, and hardly ever lost
a cause he undertook. Burns made many a lampoon upon him, and there they
rest, as you see.' We looked at the grave with melancholy and painful
reflections, repeating to each other his own verses:--
'Is there a man whose judgment clear
Can others teach the course to steer,
Yet runs himself life's mad career
Wild as the wave?--
Here let him pause, and through a tear
Survey this grave.
The Poor Inhabitant below
Was quick to learn, and wise to know,
And keenly felt the friendly glow
And softer flame;
But thoughtless follies laid him low,
And stain'd his name.'
The churchyard is full of grave-stones and expensive monuments in all
sorts of fantastic shapes--obelisk-wise, pillar-wise, etc. In speaking
of Gretna Green, I forgot to mention that we visited the churchyard. The
church is like a huge house; indeed, so are all the churches, with a
steeple, not a square tower or spire,--a sort of thing more like a
glass-house chimney than a Church of England steeple; grave-stones in
abundance, few verses, yet there were some--no texts. Over the graves of
married women the maiden name instead of that of the husband, 'spouse'
instead of 'wife,' and the place of abode preceded by 'in' instead of
'of.' When our guide had left us, we turned again to Burns's house.
Mrs. Burns was gone to spend some time by the sea-shore with her
children. We spoke to the servant-maid at the door, who invited us
forward, and we sate down in the parlour. The walls were coloured with a
blue wash; on one side of the fire was a mahogany desk, opposite to the
window a clock, and over the desk a print from the 'Cotter's Saturday
Night,' which Burns mentions in one of his letters having received as a
present. The house was cleanly and neat in the inside, the stairs of
stone, scoured white, the kitchen on the right side of the passage, the
parlour on the left. In the room above the parlour the Poet died, and
his son after him in the same room. The servant told us she had lived
five years with Mrs. Burns, who was now in great sorrow for the death of
'Wallace.' She said that Mrs. Burns's youngest son was at Christ's
Hospital.
We were glad to leave Dumfries, which is no agreeable place to them who
do not love the bustle of a town that seems to be rising up to wealth.
We could think of little else but poor Burns, and his moving about on
that unpoetic ground. In our road to Brownhill, the next stage, we
passed Ellisland at a little distance on our right, his farmhouse. We
might there have had more pleasure in looking round, if we had been
nearer to the spot; but there is no thought surviving in connexion with
Burns's daily life that is not heart-depressing. Travelled through the
vale of Nith, here little like a vale, it is so broad, with irregular
hills rising up on each side, in outline resembling the old-fashioned
valances of a bed. There is a great deal of arable land; the corn ripe;
trees here and there--plantations, clumps, coppices, and a newness in
everything. So much of the gorse and broom rooted out that you wonder
why it is not all gone, and yet there seems to be almost as much gorse
and broom as corn; and they grow one among another you know not how.
Crossed the Nith; the vale becomes narrow, and very pleasant; cornfields,
green hills, clay cottages; the river's bed rocky, with woody banks.
Left the Nith about a mile and a half, and reached Brownhill, a lonely
inn, where we slept. The view from the windows was pleasing, though some
travellers might have been disposed to quarrel with it for its general
nakedness; yet there was abundance of corn. It is an open country--open,
yet all over hills. At a little distance were many cottages among trees,
that looked very pretty. Brownhill is about seven or eight miles from
Ellisland. I fancied to myself, while I was sitting in the parlour, that
Burns might have caroused there, for most likely his rounds extended so
far, and this thought gave a melancholy interest to the smoky walls. It
was as pretty a room as a thoroughly dirty one could be--a square parlour
painted green, but so covered over with smoke and dirt that it looked not
unlike green seen through black gauze. There were three windows, looking
three ways, a buffet ornamented with tea-cups, a superfine largeish
looking-glass with gilt ornaments spreading far and wide, the glass
spotted with dirt, some ordinary alehouse pictures, and above the
chimney-piece a print in a much better style--as William guessed, taken
from a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds--of some lady of quality, in the
character of Euphrosyne. 'Ay,' said the servant girl, seeing that we
looked at it, 'there's many travellers would give a deal for that, it's
more admired than any in the house.' We could not but smile; for the
rest were such as may be found in the basket of any Italian image and
picture hawker.
William and I walked out after dinner; Coleridge was not well, and slept
upon the carriage cushions. We made our way to the cottages among the
little hills and knots of wood, and then saw what a delightful country
this part of Scotland might be made by planting forest trees. The ground
all over heaves and swells like a sea; but for miles there are neither
trees nor hedgerows, only 'mound' fences and tracts; or slips of corn,
potatoes, clover--with hay between, and barren land; but near the
cottages many hills and hillocks covered with wood. We passed some fine
trees, and paused under the shade of one close by an old mansion that
seemed from its neglected state to be inhabited by farmers. But I must
say that many of the 'gentlemen's' houses which we have passed in
Scotland have an air of neglect, and even of desolation. It was a beech,
in the full glory of complete and perfect growth, very tall, with one
thick stem mounting to a considerable height, which was split into four
'thighs,' as Coleridge afterwards called them, each in size a fine tree.
Passed another mansion, now tenanted by a schoolmaster; many boys playing
upon the lawn. I cannot take leave of the country which we passed
through to-day, without mentioning that we saw the Cumberland mountains
within half a mile of Ellisland, Burns's house, the last view we had of
them. Drayton has prettily described the connexion which this
neighbourhood has with ours when he makes Skiddaw say--
'Scurfell {9a} from the sky,
That Anadale {9b} doth crown, with a most amorous eye,
Salutes me every day, or at my pride looks grim,
Oft threatning me with clouds, as I oft threatning him.'
These lines recurred to William's memory, and we talked of Burns, and of
the prospect he must have had, perhaps from his own door, of Skiddaw and
his companions, indulging ourselves in the fancy that we might have been
personally known to each other, and he have looked upon those objects
with more pleasure for our sakes. We talked of Coleridge's children and
family, then at the foot of Skiddaw, and our own new-born John a few
miles behind it; while the grave of Burns's son, which we had just seen
by the side of his father, and some stories heard at Dumfries respecting
the dangers his surviving children were exposed to, filled us with
melancholy concern, which had a kind of connexion with ourselves. In
recollection of this, William long afterwards wrote the following Address
to the sons of the ill-fated poet:--
Ye now are panting up life's hill,
'Tis twilight time of good and ill,
And more than common strength and skill
Must ye display,
If ye would give the better will
Its lawful sway.
Strong-bodied if ye be to bear
Intemperance with less harm, beware,
But if your Father's wit ye share,
Then, then indeed,
Ye Sons of Burns, for watchful care
There will be need.
For honest men delight will take
To shew you favour for his sake,
Will flatter you, and Fool and Rake
Your steps pursue,
And of your Father's name will make
A snare for you.
Let no mean hope your souls enslave,
Be independent, generous, brave;
Your Father such example gave,
And such revere,
But be admonished by his grave,
And think and fear. {11}
* * * * *
_Friday_, _August_ 19_th_.--Open country for a considerable way. Passed
through the village of Thornhill, built by the Duke of Queensberry; the
'brother-houses' so small that they might have been built to stamp a
character of insolent pride on his own huge mansion of Drumlanrigg, which
is full in view on the opposite side of the Nith. This mansion is indeed
very large; but to us it appeared like a gathering together of little
things. The roof is broken into a hundred pieces, cupolas, etc., in the
shape of casters, conjuror's balls, cups, and the like. The situation
would be noble if the woods had been left standing; but they have been
cut down not long ago, and the hills above and below the house are quite
bare. About a mile and a half from Drumlanrigg is a turnpike gate at the
top of a hill. We left our car with the man, and turned aside into a
field where we looked down upon the Nith, which runs far below in a deep
and rocky channel; the banks woody; the view pleasant down the river
towards Thornhill, an open country--corn fields, pastures, and scattered
trees. Returned to the turnpike house, a cold spot upon a common, black
cattle feeding close to the door. Our road led us down the hill to the
side of the Nith, and we travelled along its banks for some miles. Here
were clay cottages perhaps every half or quarter of a mile. The bed of
the stream rough with rocks; banks irregular, now woody, now bare; here a
patch of broom, there of corn, then of pasturage; and hills green or
heathy above. We were to have given our horse meal and water at a
public-house in one of the hamlets we passed through, but missed the
house, for, as is common in Scotland, it was without a sign-board.
Travelled on, still beside the Nith, till we came to a turnpike house,
which stood rather high on the hill-side, and from the door we looked a
long way up and down the river. The air coldish, the wind strong.
We asked the turnpike man to let us have some meal and water. He had no
meal, but luckily we had part of a feed of corn brought from Keswick, and
he procured some hay at a neighbouring house. In the meantime I went
into the house, where was an old man with a grey plaid over his
shoulders, reading a newspaper. On the shelf lay a volume of the Scotch
Encyclopaedia, a History of England, and some other books. The old man
was a caller by the way. The man of the house came back, and we began to
talk. He was very intelligent; had travelled all over England, Scotland,
and Ireland as a gentleman's servant, and now lived alone in that
lonesome place. He said he was tired of his bargain, for he feared he
should lose by it. And he had indeed a troublesome office, for
coal-carts without number were passing by, and the drivers seemed to do
their utmost to cheat him. There is always something peculiar in the
house of a man living alone. This was but half-furnished, yet nothing
seemed wanting for his comfort, though a female who had travelled half as
far would have needed fifty other things. He had no other meat or drink
in the house but oat bread and cheese--the cheese was made with the
addition of seeds--and some skimmed milk. He gave us of his bread and
cheese, and milk, which proved to be sour.
We had yet ten or eleven miles to travel, and no food with us. William
lay under the wind in a corn-field below the house, being not well enough
to partake of the milk and bread. Coleridge gave our host a pamphlet,
'The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies;' he was well acquainted with Burns's
poems. There was a politeness and a manly freedom in this man's manners
which pleased me very much. He told us that he had served a gentleman, a
captain in the army--he did not know who he was, for none of his
relations had ever come to see him, but he used to receive many
letters--that he had lived near Dumfries till they would let him stay no
longer, he made such havoc with the game; his whole delight from morning
till night, and the long year through, was in field sports; he would be
on his feet the worst days in winter, and wade through snow up to the
middle after his game. If he had company he was in tortures till they
were gone; he would then throw off his coat and put on an old jacket not
worth half-a-crown. He drank his bottle of wine every day, and two if he
had better sport than usual. Ladies sometimes came to stay with his
wife, and he often carried them out in an Irish jaunting-car, and if they
vexed him he would choose the dirtiest roads possible, and spoil their
clothes by jumping in and out of the car, and treading upon them. 'But
for all that'--and so he ended all--'he was a good fellow, and a clever
fellow, and he liked him well.' He would have ten or a dozen hares in
the larder at once, he half maintained his family with game, and he
himself was very fond of eating of the spoil--unusual with true
heart-and-soul sportsmen.
The man gave us an account of his farm where he had lived, which was so
cheap and pleasant that we thought we should have liked to have had it
ourselves. Soon after leaving the turnpike house we turned up a hill to
the right, the road for a little way very steep, bare hills, with sheep.
After ascending a little while we heard the murmur of a stream far below
us, and saw it flowing downwards on our left, towards the Nith, and
before us, between steep green hills, coming along a winding valley. The
simplicity of the prospect impressed us very much. There was a single
cottage by the brook side; the dell was not heathy, but it was impossible
not to think of Peter Bell's Highland Girl.
We now felt indeed that we were in Scotland; there was a natural
peculiarity in this place. In the scenes of the Nith it had not been the
same as England, but yet not simple, naked Scotland. The road led us
down the hill, and now there was no room in the vale but for the river
and the road; we had sometimes the stream to the right, sometimes to the
left. The hills were pastoral, but we did not see many sheep; green
smooth turf on the left, no ferns. On the right the heath-plant grew in
abundance, of the most exquisite colour; it covered a whole hillside, or
it was in streams and patches. We travelled along the vale without
appearing to ascend for some miles; all the reaches were beautiful, in
exquisite proportion, the hills seeming very high from being so near to
us. It might have seemed a valley which nature had kept to herself for
pensive thoughts and tender feelings, but that we were reminded at every
turning of the road of something beyond by the coal-carts which were
travelling towards us. Though these carts broke in upon the tranquillity
of the glen, they added much to the picturesque effect of the different
views, which indeed wanted nothing, though perfectly bare, houseless, and
treeless.
After some time our road took us upwards towards the end of the valley.
Now the steeps were heathy all around. Just as we began to climb the
hill we saw three boys who came down the cleft of a brow on our left; one
carried a fishing-rod, and the hats of all were braided with
honeysuckles; they ran after one another as wanton as the wind. I cannot
express what a character of beauty those few honeysuckles in the hats of
the three boys gave to the place: what bower could they have come from?
We walked up the hill, met two well-dressed travellers, the woman
barefoot. Our little lads before they had gone far were joined by some
half-dozen of their companions, all without shoes and stockings. They
told us they lived at Wanlockhead, the village above, pointing to the top
of the hill; they went to school and learned Latin, Virgil, and some of
them Greek, Homer, but when Coleridge began to inquire further, off they
ran, poor things! I suppose afraid of being examined.
When, after a steep ascent, we had reached the top of the hill, we saw a
village about half a mile before us on the side of another hill, which
rose up above the spot where we were, after a descent, a sort of valley
or hollow. Nothing grew upon this ground, or the hills above or below,
but heather, yet round about the village--which consisted of a great
number of huts, all alike, and all thatched, with a few larger slated
houses among them, and a single modern-built one of a considerable
size--were a hundred patches of cultivated ground, potatoes, oats, hay,
and grass. We were struck with the sight of haycocks fastened down with
aprons, sheets, pieces of sacking--as we supposed, to prevent the wind
from blowing them away. We afterwards found that this practice was very
general in Scotland. Every cottage seemed to have its little plot of
ground, fenced by a ridge of earth; this plot contained two or three
different divisions, kail, potatoes, oats, hay; the houses all standing
in lines, or never far apart; the cultivated ground was all together
also, and made a very strange appearance with its many greens among the
dark brown hills, neither tree nor shrub growing; yet the grass and the
potatoes looked greener than elsewhere, owing to the bareness of the
neighbouring hills; it was indeed a wild and singular spot--to use a
woman's illustration, like a collection of patchwork, made of pieces as
they might have chanced to have been cut by the mantua-maker, only just
smoothed to fit each other, the different sorts of produce being in such
a multitude of plots, and those so small and of such irregular shapes.
Add to the strangeness of the village itself, that we had been climbing
upwards, though gently, for many miles, and for the last mile and a half
up a steep ascent, and did not know of any village till we saw the boys
who had come out to play. The air was very cold, and one could not help
thinking what it must be in winter, when those hills, now 'red brown,'
should have their three months' covering of snow.
The village, as we guessed, is inhabited by miners; the mines belong to
the Duke of Queensberry. The road to the village, down which the lads
scampered away, was straight forward. I must mention that we met, just
after we had parted from them, another little fellow, about six years
old, carrying a bundle over his shoulder; he seemed poor and half
starved, and was scratching his fingers, which were covered with the
itch. He was a miner's son, and lived at Wanlockhead; did not go to
school, but this was probably on account of his youth. I mention him
because he seemed to be a proof that there was poverty and wretchedness
among these people, though we saw no other symptom of it; and afterwards
we met scores of the inhabitants of this same village. Our road turned
to the right, and we saw, at the distance of less than a mile, a tall
upright building of grey stone, with several men standing upon the roof,
as if they were looking out over battlements. It stood beyond the
village, upon higher ground, as if presiding over it,--a kind of
enchanter's castle, which it might have been, a place where Don Quixote
would have gloried in. When we drew nearer we saw, coming out of the
side of the building, a large machine or lever, in appearance like a
great forge-hammer, as we supposed for raising water out of the mines.
It heaved upwards once in half a minute with a slow motion, and seemed to
rest to take breath at the bottom, its motion being accompanied with a
sound between a groan and 'jike.' There would have been something in
this object very striking in any place, as it was impossible not to
invest the machine with some faculty of intellect; it seemed to have made
the first step from brute matter to life and purpose, showing its
progress by great power. William made a remark to this effect, and
Coleridge observed that it was like a giant with one idea. At all
events, the object produced a striking effect in that place, where
everything was in unison with it--particularly the building itself, which
was turret-shaped, and with the figures upon it resembled much one of the
fortresses in the wooden cuts of Bunyan's 'Holy War.'
After ascending a considerable way we began to descend again; and now we
met a team of horses dragging an immense tree to the lead mines, to
repair or add to the building, and presently after we came to a cart,
with another large tree, and one horse left in it, right in the middle of
the highway. We were a little out of humour, thinking we must wait till
the team came back. There were men and boys without number all staring
at us; after a little consultation they set their shoulders to the cart,
and with a good heave all at once they moved it, and we passed along.
These people were decently dressed, and their manners decent; there was
no hooting or impudent laughter. Leadhills, another mining village, was
the place of our destination for the night; and soon after we had passed
the cart we came in sight of it. This village and the mines belong to
Lord Hopetoun; it has more stone houses than Wanlockhead, one large old
mansion, and a considerable number of old trees--beeches, I believe. The
trees told of the coldness of the climate; they were more brown than
green--far browner than the ripe grass of the little hay-garths. Here,
as at Wanlockhead, were haycocks, hay-stacks, potato-beds, and
kail-garths in every possible variety of shape, but, I suppose from the
irregularity of the ground, it looked far less artificial--indeed, I
should think that a painter might make several beautiful pictures in this
village. It straggles down both sides of a mountain glen. As I have
said, there is a large mansion. There is also a stone building that
looks like a school, and the houses are single, or in clusters, or rows
as it may chance.
We passed a decent-looking inn, the Hopetoun Arms; but the house of Mrs.
Otto, a widow, had been recommended to us with high encomiums. We did
not then understand Scotch inns, and were not quite satisfied at first
with our accommodations, but all things were smoothed over by degrees; we
had a fire lighted in our dirty parlour, tea came after a reasonable
waiting; and the fire with the gentle aid of twilight, burnished up the
room into cheerful comfort. Coleridge was weary; but William and I
walked out after tea. We talked with one of the miners, who informed us
that the building which we had supposed to be a school was a library
belonging to the village. He said they had got a book into it a few
weeks ago, which had cost thirty pounds, and that they had all sorts of
books. 'What! have you Shakespeare?' 'Yes, we have that,' and we found,
on further inquiry, that they had a large library, {19} of long standing,
that Lord Hopetoun had subscribed liberally to it, and that gentlemen who
came with him were in the habit of making larger or smaller donations.
Each man who had the benefit of it paid a small sum monthly--I think
about fourpence.
The man we talked with spoke much of the comfort and quiet in which they
lived one among another; he made use of a noticeable expression, saying
that they were 'very peaceable people considering they lived so much
underground;'--wages were about thirty pounds a year; they had land for
potatoes, warm houses, plenty of coals, and only six hours' work each
day, so that they had leisure for reading if they chose. He said the
place was healthy, that the inhabitants lived to a great age; and indeed
we saw no appearance of ill-health in their countenances; but it is not
common for people working in lead mines to be healthy; and I have since
heard that it is _not_ a healthy place. However this may be, they are
unwilling to allow it; for the landlady the next morning, when I said to
her 'You have a cold climate,' replied, 'Ay, but it is _varra halesome_.'
We inquired of the man respecting the large mansion; he told us that it
was built, as we might see, in the form of an H, and belonged to the
Hopetouns, and they took their title from thence, {20} and that part of
it was used as a chapel. We went close to it, and were a good deal
amused with the building itself, standing forth in bold contradiction of
the story which I daresay every man of Leadhills tells, and every man
believes, that it is in the shape of an H; it is but half an H, and one
must be very accommodating to allow it even so much, for the legs are far
too short.
We visited the burying-ground, a plot of land not very small, crowded
with graves, and upright grave-stones, overlooking the village and the
dell. It was now the closing in of evening. Women and children were
gathering in the linen for the night, which was bleaching by the
burn-side;--the graves overgrown with grass, such as, by industrious
culture, had been raised up about the houses; but there were bunches of
heather here and there, and with the blue-bells that grew among the grass
the small plot of ground had a beautiful and wild appearance.
William left me, and I went to a shop to purchase some thread; the woman
had none that suited me; but she would send a '_wee_ lad' to the other
shop. In the meantime I sat with the mother, and was much pleased with
her manner and conversation. She had an excellent fire, and her cottage,
though very small, looked comfortable and cleanly; but remember I saw it
only by firelight. She confirmed what the man had told us of the quiet
manner in which they lived; and indeed her house and fireside seemed to
need nothing to make it a cheerful happy spot, but health and good
humour. There was a bookishness, a certain formality in this woman's
language, which was very remarkable. She had a dark complexion, dark
eyes, and wore a very white cap, much over her face, which gave her the
look of a French woman, and indeed afterwards the women on the roads
frequently reminded us of French women, partly from the extremely white
caps of the elder women, and still more perhaps from a certain gaiety and
party-coloured appearance in their dress in general. White bed-gowns are
very common, and you rarely meet a young girl with either hat or cap;
they buckle up their hair often in a graceful manner.
I returned to the inn, and went into the kitchen to speak with the
landlady; she had made a hundred hesitations when I told her we wanted
three beds. At last she confessed she _had_ three beds, and showed me
into a parlour which looked damp and cold, but she assured me in a tone
that showed she was unwilling to be questioned further, that all _her_
beds were well aired. I sat a while by the kitchen fire with the
landlady, and began to talk to her; but, much as I had heard in her
praise--for the shopkeeper had told me she was a varra discreet woman--I
cannot say that her manners pleased me much. But her servant made
amends, for she was as pleasant and cheerful a lass as was ever seen; and
when we asked her to do anything, she answered, 'Oh yes,' with a merry
smile, and almost ran to get us what we wanted. She was about sixteen
years old: wore shoes and stockings, and had her hair tucked up with a
comb. The servant at Brownhill was a coarse-looking wench, barefoot and
barelegged. I examined the kitchen round about; it was crowded with
furniture, drawers, cupboards, dish-covers, pictures, pans, and pots,
arranged without order, except that the plates were on shelves, and the
dish-covers hung in rows; these were very clean, but floors, passages,
staircase, everything else dirty. There were two beds in recesses in the
wall; above one of them I noticed a shelf with some books:--it made me
think of Chaucer's Clerke of Oxenforde:--
'Liever had he at his bed's head
Twenty books clothed in black and red.'
They were baking oat-bread, which they cut into quarters, and half-baked
over the fire, and half-toasted before it. There was a suspiciousness
about Mrs. Otto, almost like ill-nature; she was very jealous of any
inquiries that might appear to be made with the faintest idea of a
comparison between Leadhills and any other place, except the advantage
was evidently on the side of Leadhills. We had nice honey to breakfast.
When ready to depart, we learned that we might have seen the library,
which we had not thought of till it was too late, and we were very sorry
to go away without seeing it.
* * * * *
_Saturday_, _August_ 20_th_.--Left Leadhills at nine o'clock, regretting
much that we could not stay another day, that we might have made more
minute inquiries respecting the manner of living of the miners, and been
able to form an estimate, from our own observation, of the degree of
knowledge, health, and comfort that there was among them. The air was
keen and cold; we might have supposed it to be three months later in the
season and two hours earlier in the day. The landlady had not lighted us
a fire; so I was obliged to get myself toasted in the kitchen, and when
we set off I put on both grey cloak and spencer.
Our road carried us down the valley, and we soon lost sight of Leadhills,
for the valley made a turn almost immediately, and we saw two miles,
perhaps, before us; the glen sloped somewhat rapidly--heathy, bare, no
hut or house. Passed by a shepherd, who was sitting upon the ground,
reading, with the book on his knee, screened from the wind by his plaid,
while a flock of sheep were feeding near him among the rushes and coarse
grass--for, as we descended we came among lands where grass grew with the
heather. Travelled through several reaches of the glen, which somewhat
resembled the valley of Menock on the other side of Wanlockhead; but it
was not near so beautiful; the forms of the mountains did not melt so
exquisitely into each other, and there was a coldness, and, if I may so
speak, a want of simplicity in the surface of the earth; the heather was
poor, not covering a whole hillside; not in luxuriant streams and beds
interveined with rich verdure; but patchy and stunted, with here and
there coarse grass and rushes. But we soon came in sight of a spot that
impressed us very much. At the lower end of this new reach of the vale
was a decayed tree, beside a decayed cottage, the vale spreading out into
a level area which was one large field, without fence and without
division, of a dull yellow colour; the vale seemed to partake of the
desolation of the cottage, and to participate in its decay. And yet the
spot was in its nature so dreary that one would rather have wondered how
it ever came to be tenanted by man, than lament that it was left to waste
and solitude. Yet the encircling hills were so exquisitely formed that
it was impossible to conceive anything more lovely than this place would
have been if the valley and hill-sides had been interspersed with trees,
cottages, green fields, and hedgerows. But all was desolate; the one
large field which filled up the area of the valley appeared, as I have
said, in decay, and seemed to retain the memory of its connexion with man
in some way analogous to the ruined building; for it was as much of a
field as Mr. King's best pasture scattered over with his fattest cattle.
We went on, looking before us, the place losing nothing of its hold upon
our minds, when we discovered a woman sitting right in the middle of the
field, alone, wrapped up in a grey cloak or plaid. She sat motionless
all the time we looked at her, which might be nearly half an hour. We
could not conceive why she sat there, for there were neither sheep nor
cattle in the field; her appearance was very melancholy. In the meantime
our road carried us nearer to the cottage, though we were crossing over
the hill to the left, leaving the valley below us, and we perceived that
a part of the building was inhabited, and that what we had supposed to be
_one_ blasted tree was eight trees, four of which were entirely blasted;
the others partly so, and round about the place was a little potato and
cabbage garth, fenced with earth. No doubt, that woman had been an
inhabitant of the cottage. However this might be, there was so much
obscurity and uncertainty about her, and her figure agreed so well with
the desolation of the place, that we were indebted to the chance of her
being there for some of the most interesting feelings that we had ever
had from natural objects connected with man in dreary solitariness.
We had been advised to go along the _new_ road, which would have carried
us down the vale; but we met some travellers who recommended us to climb
the hill, and go by the village of Crawfordjohn as being much nearer. We
had a long hill, and after having reached the top, steep and bad roads,
so we continued to walk for a considerable way. The air was cold and
clear--the sky blue. We walked cheerfully along in the sunshine, each of
us alone, only William had the charge of the horse and car, so he
sometimes took a ride, which did but poorly recompense him for the
trouble of driving. I never travelled with more cheerful spirits than
this day. Our road was along the side of a high moor. I can always walk
over a moor with a light foot; I seem to be drawn more closely to nature
in such places than anywhere else; or rather I feel more strongly the
power of nature over me, and am better satisfied with myself for being
able to find enjoyment in what unfortunately to many persons is either
dismal or insipid. This moor, however, was more than commonly
interesting; we could see a long way, and on every side of us were larger
or smaller tracts of cultivated land. Some were extensive farms, yet in
so large a waste they did but look small, with farm-houses, barns, etc.,
others like little cottages, with enough to feed a cow, and supply the
family with vegetables. In looking at these farms we had always one
feeling. Why did the plough stop there? Why might not they as well have
carried it twice as far? There were no hedgerows near the farms, and
very few trees. As we were passing along, we saw an old man, the first
we had seen in a Highland bonnet, walking with a staff at a very slow
pace by the edge of one of the moorland cornfields; he wore a grey plaid,
and a dog was by his side. There was a scriptural solemnity in this
man's figure, a sober simplicity which was most impressive. Scotland is
the country above all others that I have seen, in which a man of
imagination may carve out his own pleasures. There are so many
_inhabited_ solitudes, and the employments of the people are so
immediately connected with the places where you find them, and their
dresses so simple, so much alike, yet, from their being folding garments,
admitting of an endless variety, and falling often so gracefully.
After some time we descended towards a broad vale, passed one farm-house,
sheltered by fir trees, with a burn close to it; children playing, linen
bleaching. The vale was open pastures and corn-fields unfenced, the land
poor. The village of Crawfordjohn on the slope of a hill a long way
before us to the left. Asked about our road of a man who was driving a
cart; he told us to go through the village, then along some fields, and
we should come to a 'herd's house by the burn side.' The highway was
right through the vale, unfenced on either side; the people of the
village, who were making hay, all stared at us and our carriage. We
inquired the road of a middle-aged man, dressed in a shabby black coat,
at work in one of the hay fields; he looked like the minister of the
place, and when he spoke we felt assured that he was so, for he was not
sparing of hard words, which, however, he used with great propriety, and
he spoke like one who had been accustomed to dictate. Our car wanted
mending in the wheel, and we asked him if there was a blacksmith in the
village. 'Yes,' he replied, but when we showed him the wheel he told
William that he might mend it himself without a blacksmith, and he would
put him in the way; so he fetched hammer and nails and gave his
directions, which William obeyed, and repaired the damage entirely to his
own satisfaction and the priest's, who did not offer to lend any
assistance himself; not as if he would not have been willing in case of
need; but as if it were more natural for him to dictate, and because he
thought it more fit that William should do it himself. He spoke much
about the propriety of every man's lending all the assistance in his
power to travellers, and with some ostentation or self-praise. Here I
observed a honey-suckle and some flowers growing in a garden, the first I
had seen in Scotland. It is a pretty cheerful-looking village, but must
be very cold in winter; it stands on a hillside, and the vale itself is
very high ground, unsheltered by trees.
Left the village behind us, and our road led through arable ground for a
considerable way, on which were growing very good crops of corn and
potatoes. Our friend accompanied us to show us the way, and Coleridge
and he had a scientific conversation concerning the uses and properties
of lime and other manures. He seemed to be a well-informed man; somewhat
pedantic in his manners; but this might be only the difference between
Scotch and English. {27}
Soon after he had parted from us, we came upon a stony, rough road over a
black moor; and presently to the 'herd's house by the burn side.' We
could hardly cross the burn dry-shod, over which was the only road to the
cottage. In England there would have been stepping-stones or a bridge;
but the Scotch need not be afraid of wetting their bare feet. The hut
had its little kail-garth fenced with earth; there was no other
enclosure--but the common, heathy with coarse grass. Travelled along the
common for some miles, before we joined the great road from Longtown to
Glasgow--saw on the bare hill-sides at a distance, sometimes a solitary
farm, now and then a plantation, and one very large wood, with an
appearance of richer ground above; but it was so very high we could not
think it possible. Having descended considerably, the common was no
longer of a peat-mossy brown heath colour, but grass with rushes was its
chief produce; there was sometimes a solitary hut, no enclosures except
the kail-garth, and sheep pasturing in flocks, with shepherd-boys tending
them. I remember one boy in particular; he had no hat on, and only had a
grey plaid wrapped about him. It is nothing to describe, but on a bare
moor, alone with his sheep, standing, as he did, in utter quietness and
silence, there was something uncommonly impressive in his appearance, a
solemnity which recalled to our minds the old man in the corn-field. We
passed many people who were mowing, or raking the grass of the common; it
was little better than rushes; but they did not mow straight forward,
only here and there, where it was the best; in such a place hay-cocks had
an uncommon appearance to us.
After a long descent we came to some plantations which were not far from
Douglas Mill. The country for some time had been growing into
cultivation, and now it was a wide vale with large tracts of corn; trees
in clumps, no hedgerows, which always make a country look bare and
unlovely. For my part, I was better pleased with the desert places we
had left behind, though no doubt the inhabitants of this place think it
'a varra bonny spot,' for the Scotch are always pleased with their own
abode, be it what it may; and afterwards at Edinburgh, when we were
talking with a bookseller of our travels, he observed that it was 'a fine
country near Douglas Mill.' Douglas Mill is a single house, a large inn,
being one of the regular stages between Longtown and Glasgow, and
therefore a fair specimen of the best of the country inns of Scotland.
As soon as our car stopped at the door we felt the difference. At an
English inn of this size, a waiter, or the master or mistress, would have
been at the door immediately, but we remained some time before anybody
came; then a barefooted lass made her appearance, but she only looked at
us and went away. The mistress, a remarkably handsome woman, showed us
into a large parlour; we ordered mutton-chops, and I finished my letter
to Mary; writing on the same window-ledge on which William had written to
me two years before.
After dinner, William and I sat by a little mill-race in the garden. We
had left Leadhills and Wanlockhead far above us, and now were come into a
warmer climate; but there was no richness in the face of the country.
The shrubs looked cold and poor, and yet there were some very fine trees
within a little distance of Douglas Mill, so that the reason, perhaps,
why the few low shrubs and trees which were growing in the gardens seemed
to be so unluxuriant, might be, that there being no hedgerows, the
general appearance of the country was naked, and I could not help seeing
the same coldness where, perhaps, it did not exist in itself to any great
degree, for the corn crops are abundant, and I should think the soil is
not bad. While we were sitting at the door, two of the landlady's
children came out; the elder, a boy about six years old, was running away
from his little brother, in petticoats; the ostler called out, 'Sandy,
tak' your wee brither wi' you;' another voice from the window, 'Sawny,
dinna leave your wee brither;' the mother then came, 'Alexander, tak'
your wee brother by the hand;' Alexander obeyed, and the two went off in
peace together. We were charged eightpence for hay at this inn, another
symptom of our being in Scotland. Left Douglas Mill at about three
o'clock; travelled through an open corn country, the tracts of corn large
and unenclosed. We often passed women or children who were watching a
single cow while it fed upon the slips of grass between the corn.
William asked a strong woman, about thirty years of age, who looked like
the mistress of a family--I suppose moved by some sentiment of compassion
for her being so employed,--if the cow would eat the corn if it were left
to itself: she smiled at his simplicity. It is indeed a melancholy thing
to see a full-grown woman thus waiting, as it were, body and soul devoted
to the poor beast; yet even this is better than working in a manufactory
the day through.
We came to a moorish tract; saw before us the hills of Loch Lomond, Ben
Lomond and another, distinct each by itself. Not far from the roadside
were some benches placed in rows in the middle of a large field, with a
sort of covered shed like a sentry-box, but much more like those boxes
which the Italian puppet-showmen in London use. We guessed that it was a
pulpit or tent for preaching, and were told that a sect met there
occasionally, who held that toleration was unscriptural, and would have
all religions but their own exterminated. I have forgotten what name the
man gave to this sect; we could not learn that it differed in any other
respect from the Church of Scotland. Travelled for some miles along the
open country, which was all without hedgerows, sometimes arable,
sometimes moorish, and often whole tracts covered with grunsel. {30}
There was one field, which one might have believed had been sown with
grunsel, it was so regularly covered with it--a large square field upon a
slope, its boundary marked to our eyes only by the termination of the
bright yellow; contiguous to it were other fields of the same size and
shape, one of clover, the other of potatoes, all equally regular crops.
The oddness of this appearance, the grunsel being uncommonly luxuriant,
and the field as yellow as gold, made William laugh. Coleridge was
melancholy upon it, observing that there was land enough wasted to rear a
healthy child.
We left behind us, considerably to the right, a single high mountain;
{31a} I have forgotten its name; we had had it long in view. Saw before
us the river Clyde, its course at right angles to our road, which now
made a turn, running parallel with the river; the town of Lanerk in sight
long before we came to it. I was somewhat disappointed with the first
view of the Clyde: {31b} the banks, though swelling and varied, had a
poverty in their appearance, chiefly from the want of wood and hedgerows.
Crossed the river and ascended towards Lanerk, which stands upon a hill.
When we were within about a mile of the town, William parted from
Coleridge and me, to go to the celebrated waterfalls. Coleridge did not
attempt to drive the horse; but led him all the way. We inquired for the
best inn, and were told that the New Inn was the best; but that they had
very 'genteel apartments' at the Black Bull, and made less charges, and
the Black Bull was at the entrance of the town, so we thought we would
stop there, as the horse was obstinate and weary. But when we came to
the Black Bull we had no wish to enter the apartments; for it seemed the
abode of dirt and poverty, yet it was a large building. The town showed
a sort of French face, and would have done much more, had it not been for
the true British tinge of coal-smoke; the doors and windows dirty, the
shops dull, the women too seemed to be very dirty in their dress. The
town itself is not ugly; the houses are of grey stone, the streets not
very narrow, and the market-place decent. The New Inn is a handsome old
stone building, formerly a gentleman's house. We were conducted into a
parlour, where people had been drinking; the tables were unwiped, chairs
in disorder, the floor dirty, and the smell of liquors was most
offensive. We were tired, however, and rejoiced in our tea.
The evening sun was now sending a glorious light through the street,
which ran from west to east; the houses were of a fire red, and the faces
of the people as they walked westward were almost like a blacksmith when
he is at work by night. I longed to be out, and meet with William, that
we might see the Falls before the day was gone. Poor Coleridge was
unwell, and could not go. I inquired my road, and a little girl told me
she would go with me to the porter's lodge, where I might be admitted. I
was grieved to hear that the Falls of the Clyde were shut up in a
gentleman's grounds, and to be viewed only by means of lock and key.
Much, however, as the pure feeling with which one would desire to visit
such places is disturbed by useless, impertinent, or even unnecessary
interference with nature, yet when I was there the next morning I seemed
to feel it a less disagreeable thing than in smaller and more delicate
spots, if I may use the phrase. My guide, a sensible little girl,
answered my inquiries very prettily. She was eight years old, read in
the 'Collection,' a book which all the Scotch children whom I have
questioned read in. I found it was a collection of hymns; she could
repeat several of Dr. Watts'. We passed through a great part of the
town, then turned down a steep hill, and came in view of a long range of
cotton mills, {33} the largest and loftiest I had ever seen; climbed
upwards again, our road leading us along the top of the left bank of the
river; both banks very steep and richly wooded. The girl left me at the
porter's lodge. Having asked after William, I was told that no person
had been there, or could enter but by the gate. The night was coming on,
therefore I did not venture to go in, as I had no hope of meeting
William. I had a delicious walk alone through the wood; the sound of the
water was very solemn, and even the cotton mills in the fading light of
evening had somewhat of the majesty and stillness of the natural objects.
It was nearly dark when I reached the inn. I found Coleridge sitting by
a good fire, which always makes an inn room look comfortable. In a few
minutes William arrived; he had heard of me at the gate, and followed as
quickly as he could, shouting after me. He was pale and exceedingly
tired.
After he had left us he had taken a wrong road, and while looking about
to set himself right had met with a barefooted boy, who said he would go
with him. The little fellow carried him by a wild path to the upper of
the Falls, the Boniton Linn, and coming down unexpectedly upon it, he was
exceedingly affected by the solemn grandeur of the place. This fall is
not much admired or spoken of by travellers; you have never a full,
breast view of it; it does not make a complete self-satisfying place, an
abode of its own, as a perfect waterfall seems to me to do; but the
river, down which you look through a long vista of steep and ruin-like
rocks, the roaring of the waterfall, and the solemn evening lights, must
have been most impressive. One of the rocks on the near bank, even in
broad daylight, as we saw it the next morning, is exactly like the
fractured arch of an abbey. With the lights and shadows of evening upon
it, the resemblance must have been much more striking.
William's guide was a pretty boy, and he was exceedingly pleased with
him. Just as they were quitting the waterfall, William's mind being full
of the majesty of the scene, the little fellow pointed to the top of a
rock, 'There's a fine slae-bush there.' 'Ay,' said William, 'but there
are no slaes upon it,' which was true enough; but I suppose the child
remembered the slaes of another summer, though, as he said, he was but
'half seven years old,' namely, six and a half. He conducted William to
the other fall, and as they were going along a narrow path, they came to
a small cavern, where William lost him, and looking about, saw his pretty
figure in a sort of natural niche fitted for a statue, from which the boy
jumped out laughing, delighted with the success of his trick. William
told us a great deal about him, while he sat by the fire, and of the
pleasure of his walk, often repeating, 'I wish you had been with me.'
Having no change, he gave the boy sixpence, which was certainly, if he
had formed any expectations at all, far beyond them; but he received it
with the utmost indifference, without any remark of surprise or pleasure;
most likely he did not know how many halfpence he could get for it, and
twopence would have pleased him more. My little girl was delighted with
the sixpence I gave her, and said she would buy a book with it on Monday
morning. What a difference between the manner of living and education of
boys and of girls among the lower classes of people in towns! she had
never seen the Falls of the Clyde, nor had ever been further than the
porter's lodge; the boy, I daresay, knew every hiding-place in every
accessible rock, as well as the fine 'slae bushes' and the nut trees.
SECOND WEEK.
_Sunday_, _August_ 21_st_.--The morning was very hot, a morning to tempt
us to linger by the water-side. I wished to have had the day before us,
expecting so much from what William had seen; but when we went there, I
did not desire to stay longer than till the hour which we had prescribed
to ourselves; for it was a rule not to be broken in upon, that the person
who conducted us to the Falls was to remain by our side till we chose to
depart. We left our inn immediately after breakfast. The lanes were
full of people going to church; many of the middle-aged women wore long
scarlet cardinals, and were without hats: they brought to my mind the
women of Goslar as they used to go to church in their silver or gold
caps, with their long cloaks, black or coloured.
The banks of the Clyde from Lanerk to the Falls rise immediately from the
river; they are lofty and steep, and covered with wood. The road to the
Falls is along the top of one of the banks, and to the left you have a
prospect of the open country, corn fields and scattered houses. To the
right, over the river, the country spreads out, as it were, into a plain
covered over with hills, no one hill much higher than another, but hills
all over; there were endless pastures overgrown with broom, and scattered
trees, without hedges or fences of any kind, and no distinct footpaths.
It was delightful to see the lasses in gay dresses running like cattle
among the broom, making their way straight forward towards the river,
here and there as it might chance. They waded across the stream, and,
when they had reached the top of the opposite bank, sat down by the
road-side, about half a mile from the town, to put on their shoes and
cotton stockings, which they brought tied up in pocket-handkerchiefs.
The porter's lodge is about a mile from Lanerk, and the lady's house--for
the whole belongs to a lady, whose name I have forgotten {36a}--is upon a
hill at a little distance. We walked, after we had entered the private
grounds, perhaps two hundred yards along a gravel carriage-road, then
came to a little side gate, which opened upon a narrow gravel path under
trees, and in a minute and a half, or less, were directly opposite to the
great waterfall. I was much affected by the first view of it. The
majesty and strength of the water, for I had never before seen so large a
cataract, struck me with astonishment, which died away, giving place to
more delightful feelings; though there were some buildings that I could
have wished had not been there, though at first unnoticed. The chief of
them was a neat, white, lady-like house, {36b} very near to the
waterfall. William and Coleridge however were in a better and perhaps
wiser humour, and did not dislike the house; indeed, it was a very
nice-looking place, with a moderate-sized garden, leaving the green
fields free and open. This house is on the side of the river opposite to
the grand house and the pleasure-grounds. The waterfall Cora Linn {36c}
is composed of two falls, with a sloping space, which _appears_ to be
about twenty yards between, but is much more. The basin which receives
the fall is enclosed by noble rocks, with trees, chiefly hazels, birch,
and ash growing out of their sides whenever there is any hold for them;
and a magnificent resting-place it is for such a river; I think more
grand than the Falls themselves.
After having stayed some time, we returned by the same footpath into the
main carriage-road, and soon came upon what William calls an ell-wide
gravel walk, from which we had different views of the Linn. We sat upon
a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down
upon the waterfall, and over the open country, and saw a ruined tower,
called Wallace's Tower, which stands at a very little distance from the
fall, and is an interesting object. A lady and gentleman, more
expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at
the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls.
Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation
with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman,
who observed that it was a _majestic_ waterfall. Coleridge was delighted
with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in
his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime,
etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day
before. 'Yes, sir,' says Coleridge, 'it _is_ a majestic waterfall.'
'Sublime and beautiful,' replied his friend. Poor Coleridge could make
no answer, and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to
us and related the story, laughing heartily.
The distance from one Linn to the other may be half a mile or more, along
the same ell-wide walk. We came to a pleasure-house, of which the little
girl had the key; she said it was called the Fog-house, because it was
lined with 'fog,' namely moss. On the outside it resembled some of the
huts in the prints belonging to Captain Cook's Voyages, and within was
like a hay-stack scooped out. It was circular, with a dome-like roof, a
seat all round fixed to the wall, and a table in the middle,--seat, wall,
roof and table all covered with moss in the neatest manner possible. It
was as snug as a bird's nest; I wish we had such a one at the top of our
orchard, only a great deal smaller. We afterwards found that huts of the
same kind were common in the pleasure-grounds of Scotland; but we never
saw any that were so beautifully wrought as this. It had, however,
little else to recommend it, the situation being chosen without judgment;
there was no prospect from it, nor was it a place of seclusion and
retirement, for it stood close to the ell-wide gravel walk. We wished we
could have shoved it about a hundred yards further on, when we arrived at
a bench which was also close to the walk, for just below the bench, the
walk elbowing out into a circle, there was a beautiful spring of clear
water, which we could see rise up continually, at the bottom of a round
stone basin full to the brim, the water gushing out at a little outlet
and passing away under the walk. A reason was wanted for placing the hut
where it is; what a good one would this little spring have furnished for
bringing it hither! Along the whole of the path were openings at
intervals for views of the river, but, as almost always happens in
gentlemen's grounds, they were injudiciously managed; you were prepared
for a dead stand--by a parapet, a painted seat, or some other device.
We stayed some time at the Boniton Fall, which has one great advantage
over the other falls, that it is at the termination of the
pleasure-grounds, and we see no traces of the boundary-line; yet, except
under some accidental circumstances, such as a sunset like that of the
preceding evening, it is greatly inferior to the Cora Linn. We returned
to the inn to dinner. The landlord set the first dish upon the table, as
is common in England, and we were well waited upon. This first dish was
true Scottish--a boiled sheep's head, with the hair singed off; Coleridge
and I ate heartily of it; we had barley broth, in which the sheep's head
had been boiled. A party of tourists whom we had met in the
pleasure-grounds drove from the door while we were waiting for dinner; I
guess they were fresh from England, for they had stuffed the pockets of
their carriage with bundles of heather, roots and all, just as if
Scotland grew no heather but on the banks of the Clyde. They passed away
with their treasure towards Loch Lomond. A party of boys, dressed all
alike in blue, very neat, were standing at the chaise-door; we
conjectured they were charity scholars; but found on inquiry that they
were apprentices to the cotton factory; we were told that they were well
instructed in reading and writing. We had seen in the morning a flock of
girls dressed in grey coming out of the factory, probably apprentices
also.
After dinner set off towards Hamilton, but on foot, for we had to turn
aside to the Cartland Rocks, and our car was to meet us on the road. A
guide attended us, who might almost in size, and certainly in activity,
have been compared with William's companion who hid himself in the niche
of the cavern. His method of walking and very quick step soon excited
our attention. I could hardly keep up with him; he paddled by our side,
just reaching to my shoulder, like a little dog, with his long snout
pushed before him--for he had an enormous nose, and walked with his head
foremost. I said to him, 'How quick you walk!' he replied, '_That_ was
_not_ quick walking,' and when I asked him what he called so, he said
'Five miles an hour,' and then related in how many hours he had lately
walked from Lanerk to Edinburgh, done some errands, and returned to
Lanerk--I have forgotten the particulars, but it was a very short
time--and added that he had an old father who could walk at the rate of
four miles an hour, for twenty-four miles, any day, and had never had an
hour's sickness in his life. 'Then,' said I, 'he has not drunk much
strong liquor?' 'Yes, enough to drown him.' From his eager manner of
uttering this, I inferred that he himself was a drinker; and the man who
met us with the car told William that he gained a great deal of money as
an errand-goer, but spent it all in tippling. He had been a shoemaker,
but could not bear the confinement on account of a weakness in his chest.
The neighbourhood of Lanerk is exceedingly pleasant; we came to a sort of
district of glens or little valleys that cleave the hills, leaving a
cheerful, open country above them, with no superior hills, but an
undulating surface. Our guide pointed to the situation of the Cartland
Crags. We were to cross a narrow valley, and walk down on the other
side, and then we should be at the spot; but the little fellow made a
sharp turn down a footpath to the left, saying, 'We must have some
conversation here.' He paddled on with his small pawing feet till we
came right opposite to a gentleman's house on the other side of the
valley, when he halted, repeating some words, I have forgotten what,
which were taken up by the most distinct echo I ever heard--this is
saying little: it was the most distinct echo that it is possible to
conceive. It shouted the names of our fireside friends in the very tone
in which William and Coleridge spoke; but it seemed to make a joke of me,
and I could not help laughing at my own voice, it was so shrill and pert,
exactly as if some one had been mimicking it very successfully, with an
intention of making me ridiculous. I wished Joanna {41} had been there
to laugh, for the echo is an excellent laugher, and would have almost
made her believe that it was a true story which William has told of her
and the mountains. We turned back, crossed the valley, went through the
orchard and plantations belonging to the gentleman's house. By the bye,
we observed to our guide that the echo must bring many troublesome
visitors to disturb the quiet of the owner of that house. 'Oh no,' said
he, 'he glories in much company.' He was a native of that neighbourhood,
had made a moderate fortune abroad, purchased an estate, built the house,
and raised the plantations; and further, had made a convenient walk
through his woods to the Cartland Crags. The house was modest and neat,
and though not adorned in the best taste, and though the plantations were
of fir, we looked at it with great pleasure, there was such true
liberality and kind-heartedness in leaving his orchard path open, and his
walks unobstructed by gates. I hope this goodness is not often abused by
plunderers of the apple-trees, which were hung with tempting apples close
to the path.
At the termination of the little valley, we descended through a wood
along a very steep path to a muddy stream running over limestone rocks;
turned up to the left along the bed of the stream, and soon we were
closed in by rocks on each side. They were very lofty--of limestone,
trees starting out of them, high and low, overhanging the stream or
shooting up towards the sky. No place of the kind could be more
beautiful if the stream had been clear, but it was of a muddy yellow
colour; had it been a large river, one might have got the better of the
unpleasantness of the muddy water in the grandeur of its roaring, the
boiling up of the foam over the rocks, or the obscurity of its pools.
We had been told that the Cartland Crags were better worth going to see
than the Falls of the Clyde. I did not think so; but I have seen rocky
dells resembling this before, with clear water instead of that muddy
stream, and never saw anything like the Falls of the Clyde. It would be
a delicious spot to have near one's house; one would linger out many a
day in the cool shade of the caverns, and the stream would soothe one by
its murmuring; still, being an old friend, one would not love it the less
for its homely face. Even we, as we passed along, could not help
stopping for a long while to admire the beauty of the lazy foam, for ever
in motion, and never moved away, in a still place of the water, covering
the whole surface of it with streaks and lines and ever-varying circles.
Wild marjoram grew upon the rocks in great perfection and beauty; our
guide gave me a bunch, and said he should come hither to collect a store
for tea for the winter, and that it was 'varra hale-some:' he drank none
else. We walked perhaps half a mile along the bed of the river; but it
might _seem_ to be much further than it was, owing to the difficulty of
the path, and the sharp and many turnings of the glen. Passed two of
Wallace's Caves. There is scarce a noted glen in Scotland that has not a
cave for Wallace or some other hero. Before we left the river the rocks
became less lofty, turned into a wood through which was a convenient path
upwards, met the owner of the house and the echo-ground, and thanked him
for the pleasure which he had provided for us and other travellers by
making such pretty pathways.
It was four o'clock when we reached the place where the car was waiting.
We were anxious to be off, as we had fifteen miles to go; but just as we
were seating ourselves we found that the cushions were missing. William
was forced to go back to the town, a mile at least, and Coleridge and I
waited with the car. It rained, and we had some fear that the evening
would be wet, but the rain soon ceased, though the sky continued
gloomy--an unfortunate circumstance, for we had to travel through a
beautiful country, and of that sort which is most set off by sunshine and
pleasant weather.
Travelled through the Vale or _Trough_ of the Clyde, as it is called, for
ten or eleven miles, having the river on our right. We had fine views
both up and down the river for the first three or four miles, our road
being not close to it, but above its banks, along the open country, which
was here occasionally intersected by hedgerows.
Left our car in the road, and turned down a field to the Fall of
Stonebyres, another of the falls of the Clyde, which I had not heard
spoken of; therefore it gave me the more pleasure. We saw it from the
top of the bank of the river at a little distance. It has not the
imposing majesty of Cora Linn; but it has the advantage of being left to
itself, a grand solitude in the heart of a populous country. We had a
prospect above and below it, of cultivated grounds, with hay-stacks,
houses, hills; but the river's banks were lonesome, steep, and woody,
with rocks near the fall.
A little further on, came more into company with the river; sometimes we
were close to it, sometimes above it, but always at no great distance;
and now the vale became more interesting and amusing. It is very
populous, with villages, hamlets, single cottages, or farm-houses
embosomed in orchards, and scattered over with gentlemen's houses, some
of them very ugly, tall and obtrusive, others neat and comfortable. We
seemed now to have got into a country where poverty and riches were
shaking hands together; pears and apples, of which the crop was abundant,
hung over the road, often growing in orchards unfenced; or there might be
bunches of broom along the road-side in an interrupted line, that looked
like a hedge till we came to it and saw the gaps. Bordering on these
fruitful orchards perhaps would be a patch, its chief produce being gorse
or broom. There was nothing like a moor or common anywhere; but small
plots of uncultivated ground were left high and low, among the potatoes,
corn, cabbages, which grew intermingled, now among trees, now bare. The
Trough of the Clyde is, indeed, a singular and very interesting region;
it is somewhat like the upper part of the vale of Nith, but above the
Nith is much less cultivated ground--without hedgerows or orchards, or
anything that looks like a rich country. We met crowds of people coming
from the kirk; the lasses were gaily dressed, often in white gowns,
coloured satin bonnets, and coloured silk handkerchiefs, and generally
with their shoes and stockings in a bundle hung on their arm. Before we
left the river the vale became much less interesting, resembling a poor
English country, the fields being large, and unluxuriant hedges.
It had been dark long before we reached Hamilton, and William had some
difficulty in driving the tired horse through the town. At the inn they
hesitated about being able to give us beds, the house being
brim-full--lights at every window. We were rather alarmed for our
accommodations during the rest of the tour, supposing the house to be
filled with _tourists_; but they were in general only regular travellers
for out of the main road from town to town we saw scarcely a carriage,
and the inns were empty. There was nothing remarkable in the treatment
we met with at this inn, except the lazy impertinence of the waiter. It
was a townish place, with a great larder set out; the house throughout
dirty.
* * * * *
_Monday_, _August_ 22_d_.--Immediately after breakfast walked to the Duke
of Hamilton's house to view the picture-gallery, chiefly the famous
picture of Daniel in the Lions' Den, by Rubens. It is a large building,
without grandeur, a heavy, lumpish mass, after the fashion of the
Hopetoun H, {45} only five times the size, and with longer legs, which
makes it gloomy. We entered the gate, passed the porter's lodge, where
we saw nobody, and stopped at the front door, as William had done two
years before with Sir William Rush's family. We were met by a little
mean-looking man, shabbily dressed, out of livery, who, we found, was the
porter. After scanning us over, he told us that we ought not to have
come to that door. We said we were sorry for the mistake, but as one of
our party had been there two years before, and was admitted by the same
entrance, we had supposed it was the regular way. After many
hesitations, and having kept us five minutes waiting in the large hall,
while he went to consult with the housekeeper, he informed us that we
could not be admitted at that time, the housekeeper being unwell; but
that we might return in an hour: he then conducted us through long gloomy
passages to an obscure door at the corner of the house. We asked if we
might be permitted to walk in the park in the meantime; and he told us
that this would not be agreeable to the Duke's family. We returned to
the inn discontented enough, but resolved not to waste an hour, if there
were anything else in the neighbourhood worth seeing. The waiter told us
there was a curious place called Baroncleugh, with gardens cut out in
rocks, and we determined to go thither. We had to walk through the town,
which may be about as large as Penrith, and perhaps a mile further, along
a dusty turnpike road. The morning was hot, sunny, and windy, and we
were half tired before we reached the place; but were amply repaid for
our trouble.
The general face of the country near Hamilton is much in the ordinary
English style; not very hilly, with hedgerows, corn fields, and stone
houses. The Clyde is here an open river with low banks, and the country
spreads out so wide that there is no appearance of a regular vale.
Baroncleugh is in a beautiful deep glen through which runs the river
Avon, a stream that falls into the Clyde. The house stands very sweetly
in complete retirement; it has its gardens and terraces one above
another, with flights of steps between, box-trees and yew-trees cut in
fantastic shapes, flower-borders and summer-houses; and, still below,
apples and pears were hanging in abundance on the branches of large old
trees, which grew intermingled with the natural wood, elms, beeches,
etc., even to the water's edge. The whole place is in perfect harmony
with the taste of our ancestors, and the yews and hollies are shaven as
nicely, and the gravel walks and flower-borders kept in as exact order,
as if the spirit of the first architect of the terraces still presided
over them. The opposite bank of the river is left in its natural
wildness, and nothing was to be seen higher up but the deep dell, its
steep banks being covered with fine trees, a beautiful relief or contrast
to the garden, which is one of the most elaborate old things ever seen, a
little hanging garden of Babylon.
I was sorry to hear that the owner of this sweet place did not live there
always. He had built a small thatched house to eke out the old one: it
was a neat dwelling, with no false ornaments. We were exceedingly sorry
to quit this spot, which is left to nature and past times, and should
have liked to have pursued the glen further up; we were told that there
was a ruined castle; and the walk itself must be very delightful; but we
wished to reach Glasgow in good time, and had to go again to Hamilton
House. Returned to the town by a much shorter road, and were very angry
with the waiter for not having directed us to it; but he was too great a
man to speak three words more than he could help.
We stopped at the proper door of the Duke's house, and seated ourselves
humbly upon a bench, waiting the pleasure of the porter, who, after a
little time, informed us that we could not be admitted, giving no reason
whatever. When we got to the inn, we could just gather from the waiter
that it was not usual to refuse admittance to strangers; but that was
all: he could not, or would not, help us, so we were obliged to give it
up, which mortified us, for I had wished much to see the picture.
William vowed that he would write that very night to Lord Archibald
Hamilton, stating the whole matter, which he did from Glasgow.
I ought to have mentioned the park, though, as we were not allowed to
walk there, we saw but little of it. It looked pleasant, as all parks
with fine trees must be, but, as it seemed to be only a large, nearly
level, plain, it could not be a particularly beautiful park, though it
borders upon the Clyde, and the Avon runs, I believe, through it, after
leaving the solitude of the glen of Baroncleugh.
Quitted Hamilton at about eleven o'clock. There is nothing interesting
between Hamilton and Glasgow till we came to Bothwell Castle, a few miles
from Hamilton. The country is cultivated, but not rich, the fields
large, a perfect contrast to the huddling together of hills and trees,
corn and pasture grounds, hay-stacks, cottages, orchards, broom and
gorse, but chiefly broom, that had amused us so much the evening before
in passing through the Trough of the Clyde. A native of Scotland would
not probably be satisfied with the account I have given of the Trough of
the Clyde, for it is one of the most celebrated scenes in Scotland. We
certainly received less pleasure from it than we had expected; but it was
plain that this was chiefly owing to the unfavourable circumstances under
which we saw it--a gloomy sky and a cold blighting wind. It is a very
beautiful district, yet there, as in all the other scenes of Scotland
celebrated for their fertility, we found something which gave us a notion
of barrenness, of what was not altogether genial. The new fir and larch
plantations, here as in almost every other part of Scotland, contributed
not a little to this effect.
Crossed the Clyde not far from Hamilton, and had the river for some miles
at a distance from us, on our left; but after having gone, it might be,
three miles, we came to a porter's lodge on the left side of the road,
where we were to turn to Bothwell Castle, which is in Lord Douglas's
grounds. The woman who keeps the gate brought us a book, in which we
wrote down our names. Went about half a mile before we came to the
pleasure-grounds. Came to a large range of stables, where we were to
leave the car; but there was no one to unyoke the horse, so William was
obliged to do it himself, a task which he performed very awkwardly, being
then new to it. We saw the ruined castle embosomed in trees, passed the
house, and soon found ourselves on the edge of a steep brow immediately
above and overlooking the course of the river Clyde through a deep hollow
between woods and green steeps. We had approached at right angles from
the main road to the place over a flat, and had seen nothing before us
but a nearly level country terminated by distant slopes, the Clyde hiding
himself in his deep bed. It was exceedingly delightful to come thus
unexpectedly upon such a beautiful region.
The Castle stands nobly, overlooking the Clyde. When we came up to it I
was hurt to see that flower-borders had taken place of the natural
overgrowings of the ruin, the scattered stones and wild plants. It is a
large and grand pile, of red freestone, harmonizing perfectly with the
rocks of the river, from which, no doubt, it has been hewn. When I was a
little accustomed to the unnaturalness of a modern garden, I could not
help admiring the excessive beauty and luxuriance of some of the plants,
particularly the purple-flowered clematis, and a broad-leaved creeping
plant without flowers, which scrambled up the castle wall along with the
ivy, and spread its vine-like branches so lavishly that it seemed to be
in its natural situation, and one could not help thinking that, though
not self-planted among the ruins of this country, it must somewhere have
its natural abode in such places. If Bothwell Castle had not been close
to the Douglas mansion we should have been disgusted with the possessor's
miserable conception of 'adorning' such a venerable ruin; but it is so
very near to the house that of necessity the pleasure-grounds must have
extended beyond it, and perhaps the neatness of a shaven lawn and the
complete desolation natural to a ruin might have made an unpleasing
contrast; and besides, being within the precincts of the
pleasure-grounds, and so very near to the modern mansion of a noble
family, it has forfeited in some degree its independent majesty, and
becomes a tributary to the mansion; its solitude being interrupted, it
has no longer the same command over the mind in sending it back into past
times, or excluding the ordinary feelings which we bear about us in daily
life. We had then only to regret that the castle and house were so near
to each other; and it was impossible not to regret it; for the ruin
presides in state over the river, far from city or town, as if it might
have had a peculiar privilege to preserve its memorials of past ages and
maintain its own character and independence for centuries to come.
We sat upon a bench under the high trees, and had beautiful views of the
different reaches of the river above and below. On the opposite bank,
which is finely wooded with elms and other trees, are the remains of an
ancient priory, built upon a rock: and rock and ruin are so blended
together that it is impossible to separate the one from the other.
Nothing can be more beautiful than the little remnants of this holy
place; elm trees--for we were near enough to distinguish them by their
branches--grow out of the walls, and overshadow a small but very elegant
window. It can scarcely be conceived what a grace the castle and priory
impart to each other; and the river Clyde flows on smooth and unruffled
below, seeming to my thoughts more in harmony with the sober and stately
images of former times, than if it had roared over a rocky channel,
forcing its sound upon the ear. It blended gently with the warbling of
the smaller birds and chattering of the larger ones that had made their
nests in the ruins. In this fortress the chief of the English nobility
were confined after the battle of Bannockburn. If a man is to be a
prisoner, he scarcely could have a more pleasant place to solace his
captivity; but I thought that for close confinement I should prefer the
banks of a lake or the sea-side. The greatest charm of a brook or river
is in the liberty to pursue it through its windings; you can then take it
in whatever mood you like; silent or noisy, sportive or quiet. The
beauties of a brook or river must be sought, and the pleasure is in going
in search of them; those of a lake or of the sea come to you of
themselves. These rude warriors cared little perhaps about either; and
yet if one may judge from the writings of Chaucer and from the old
romances, more interesting passions were connected with natural objects
in the days of chivalry than now, though going in search of scenery, as
it is called, had not then been thought of. I had heard nothing of
Bothwell Castle, at least nothing that I remembered, therefore, perhaps,
my pleasure was greater, compared with what I received elsewhere, than
others might feel.
At our return to the stables we found an inferior groom, who helped
William to yoke the horse, and was very civil. We grew hungry before we
had travelled many miles, and seeing a large public-house--it was in a
walled court some yards from the road--Coleridge got off the car to
inquire if we could dine there, and was told we could have nothing but
eggs. It was a miserable place, very like a French house; indeed we
observed, in almost every part of Scotland, except Edinburgh, that we
were reminded ten times of France and Germany for once of England.
Saw nothing remarkable after leaving Bothwell, except the first view of
Glasgow, at some miles distance, terminated by the mountains of Loch
Lomond. The suburbs of Glasgow extend very far, houses on each side of
the highway,--all ugly, and the inhabitants dirty. The roads are very
wide; and everything seems to tell of the neighbourhood of a large town.
We were annoyed by carts and dirt, and the road was full of people, who
all noticed our car in one way or other; the children often sent a
hooting after us.
Wearied completely, we at last reached the town, and were glad to walk,
leading the car to the first decent inn, which was luckily not far from
the end of the town. William, who gained most of his road-knowledge from
ostlers, had been informed of this house by the ostler at Hamilton; it
proved quiet and tolerably cheap, a new building--the Saracen's Head. I
shall never forget how glad I was to be landed in a little quiet
back-parlour, for my head was beating with the noise of carts which we
had left, and the wearisomeness of the disagreeable objects near the
highway; but with my first pleasant sensations also came the feeling that
we were not in an English inn--partly from its half-unfurnished
appearance, which is common in Scotland, for in general the deal
wainscots and doors are unpainted, and partly from the dirtiness of the
floors. Having dined, William and I walked to the post-office, and after
much seeking found out a quiet timber-yard wherein to sit down and read
our letter. We then walked a considerable time in the streets, which are
perhaps as handsome as streets can be, which derive no particular effect
from their situation in connexion with natural advantages, such as
rivers, sea, or hills. The Trongate, an old street, is very
picturesque--high houses, with an intermixture of gable fronts towards
the street. The New Town is built of fine stone, in the best style of
the very best London streets at the west end of the town, but, not being
of brick, they are greatly superior. One thing must strike every
stranger in his first walk through Glasgow--an appearance of business and
bustle, but no coaches or gentlemen's carriages; during all the time we
walked in the streets I only saw three carriages, and these were
travelling chaises. I also could not but observe a want of cleanliness
in the appearance of the lower orders of the people, and a dulness in the
dress and outside of the whole mass, as they moved along. We returned to
the inn before it was dark. I had a bad headache, and was tired, and we
all went to bed soon.
* * * * *
_Tuesday_, _August_ 23_d_.--A cold morning. Walked to the
bleaching-ground, {53} a large field bordering on the Clyde, the banks of
which are perfectly flat, and the general face of the country is nearly
so in the neighbourhood of Glasgow. This field, the whole summer
through, is covered with women of all ages, children, and young girls
spreading out their linen, and watching it while it bleaches. The scene
must be very cheerful on a fine day, but it rained when we were there,
and though there was linen spread out in all parts, and great numbers of
women and girls were at work, yet there would have been many more on a
fine day, and they would have appeared happy, instead of stupid and
cheerless. In the middle of the field is a wash-house, whither the
inhabitants of this large town, rich and poor, send or carry their linen
to be washed. There are two very large rooms, with each a cistern in the
middle for hot water; and all round the rooms are benches for the women
to set their tubs upon. Both the rooms were crowded with washers; there
might be a hundred, or two, or even three; for it is not easy to form an
accurate notion of so great a number; however, the rooms were large, and
they were both full. It was amusing to see so many women, arms, head,
and face all in motion, all busy in an ordinary household employment, in
which we are accustomed to see, at the most, only three or four women
employed in one place. The women were very civil. I learnt from them
the regulations of the house; but I have forgotten the particulars. The
substance of them is, that 'so much' is to be paid for each tub of water,
'so much' for a tub, and the privilege of washing for a day, and, 'so
much' to the general overlookers of the linen, when it is left to be
bleached. An old man and woman have this office, who were walking about,
two melancholy figures.
The shops at Glasgow are large, and like London shops, and we passed by
the largest coffee-room I ever saw. You look across the piazza of the
Exchange, and see to the end of the coffee-room, where there is a
circular window, the width of the room. Perhaps there might be thirty
gentlemen sitting on the circular bench of the window, each reading a
newspaper. They had the appearance of figures in a fantoccine, or men
seen at the extremity of the opera-house, diminished into puppets.
I am sorry I did not see the High Church: both William and I were tired,
and it rained very hard after we had left the bleaching-ground; besides,
I am less eager to walk in a large town than anywhere else; so we put it
off, and I have since repented of my irresolution.
Dined, and left Glasgow at about three o'clock, in a heavy rain. We were
obliged to ride through the streets to keep our feet dry, and, in spite
of the rain, every person as we went along stayed his steps to look at
us; indeed, we had the pleasure of spreading smiles from one end of
Glasgow to the other--for we travelled the whole length of the town. A
set of schoolboys, perhaps there might he eight, with satchels over their
shoulders, and, except one or two, without shoes and stockings, yet very
well dressed in jackets and trousers, like gentlemen's children, followed
us in great delight, admiring the car and longing to jump up. At last,
though we were seated, they made several attempts to get on behind; and
they looked so pretty and wild, and at the same time so modest, that we
wished to give them a ride, and there being a little hill near the end of
the town, we got off, and four of them who still remained, the rest
having dropped into their homes by the way, took our places; and indeed I
would have walked two miles willingly, to have had the pleasure of seeing
them so happy. When they were to ride no longer, they scampered away,
laughing and rejoicing. New houses are rising up in great numbers round
Glasgow, citizen-like houses, and new plantations, chiefly of fir; the
fields are frequently enclosed by hedgerows, but there is no richness,
nor any particular beauty for some miles.
The first object that interested us was a gentleman's house upon a green
plain or holm, almost close to the Clyde, sheltered by tall trees, a
quiet modest mansion, and, though white-washed, being an old building,
and no other house near it, or in connexion with it, and standing upon
the level field, which belonged to it, its own domain, the whole scene
together brought to our minds an image of the retiredness and sober
elegance of a nunnery; but this might be owing to the greyness of the
afternoon, and our having come immediately from Glasgow, and through a
country which, till now, had either had a townish taint, or at best
little of rural beauty. While we were looking at the house we overtook a
foot-traveller, who, like many others, began to talk about our car. We
alighted to walk up a hill, and, continuing the conversation, the man
told us, with something like a national pride, that it belonged to a
Scotch Lord, Lord Semple; he added, that a little further on we should
see a much finer prospect, as fine a one as ever we had seen in our
lives. Accordingly, when we came to the top of the hill, it opened upon
us most magnificently. We saw the Clyde, now a stately sea-river,
winding away mile after mile, spotted with boats and ships, each side of
the river hilly, the right populous with single houses and
villages--Dunglass Castle upon a promontory, the whole view terminated by
the rock of Dumbarton, at five or six miles distance, which stands by
itself, without any hills near it, like a sea-rock.
We travelled for some time near the river, passing through clusters of
houses which seemed to owe their existence rather to the wealth of the
river than the land, for the banks were mostly bare, and the soil
appeared poor, even near the water. The left side of the river was
generally uninhabited and moorish, yet there are some beautiful spots:
for instance, a nobleman's house, {56} where the fields and trees were
rich, and, in combination with the river, looked very lovely. As we went
along William and I were reminded of the views upon the Thames in Kent,
which, though greatly superior in richness and softness, are much
inferior in grandeur. Not far from Dumbarton, we passed under some
rocky, copse-covered hills, which were so like some of the hills near
Grasmere that we could have half believed they were the same. Arrived at
Dumbarton before it was dark, having pushed on briskly that we might have
start of a traveller at the inn, who was following us as fast as he could
in a gig. Every front room was full, and we were afraid we should not
have been admitted. They put us into a little parlour, dirty, and
smelling of liquors, the table uncleaned, and not a chair in its place;
we were glad, however, of our sorry accommodations.
While tea was preparing we lolled at our ease, and though the room-window
overlooked the stable-yard, and at our entrance there appeared to be
nothing but gloom and unloveliness, yet while I lay stretched upon the
carriage cushions on three chairs, I discovered a little side peep which
was enough to set the mind at work. It was no more than a smoky vessel
lying at anchor, with its bare masts, a clay hut and the shelving bank of
the river, with a green pasture above. Perhaps you will think that there
is not much in this, as I describe it: it is true; but the effect
produced by these simple objects, as they happened to be combined,
together with the gloom of the evening, was exceedingly wild. Our room
was parted by a slender partition from a large dining-room, in which were
a number of officers and their wives, who, after the first hour, never
ceased singing, dancing, laughing, or loud talking. The ladies sang some
pretty songs, a great relief to us. We went early to bed; but poor
Coleridge could not sleep for the noise at the street door; he lay in the
parlour below stairs. It is no uncommon thing in the best inns of
Scotland to have shutting-up beds in the sitting-rooms.
* * * * *
_Wednesday_, _August_ 24_th_.--As soon as breakfast was over, William and
I walked towards the Castle, a short mile from the town. We overtook two
young men, who, on our asking the road, offered to conduct us, though it
might seem it was not easy to miss our way, for the rock rises singly by
itself from the plain on which the town stands. The rock of Dumbarton is
very grand when you are close to it, but at a little distance, under an
ordinary sky, and in open day, it is not grand, but curiously wild. The
castle and fortifications add little effect to the general view of the
rock, especially since the building of a modern house, which is
white-washed, and consequently jars, wherever it is seen, with the
natural character of the place. There is a path up to the house, but it
being low water we could walk round the rock, which we resolved to do.
On that side next the town green grass grows to a considerable height up
the rock, but wherever the river borders upon it, it is naked stone. I
never saw rock in nobler masses, or more deeply stained by time and
weather; nor is this to be wondered at, for it is in the very eye of
sea-storms and land-storms, of mountain winds and water winds. It is of
all colours, but a rusty yellow predominates. As we walked along, we
could not but look up continually, and the mass above being on every side
so huge, it appeared more wonderful than when we saw the whole together.
We sat down on one of the large stones which lie scattered near the base
of the rock, with sea-weed growing amongst them. Above our heads the
rock was perpendicular for a considerable height, nay, as it seemed, to
the very top, and on the brink of the precipice a few sheep, two of them
rams with twisted horns, stood, as if on the look-out over the wide
country. At the same time we saw a sentinel in his red coat, walking
backwards and forwards between us and the sky, with his firelock over his
shoulder. The sheep, I suppose owing to our being accustomed to see them
in similar situations, appeared to retain their real size, while, on the
contrary, the soldier seemed to be diminished by the distance till he
almost looked like a puppet moved with wires for the pleasure of
children, or an eight years' old drummer in his stiff, manly dress beside
a company of grenadiers. I had never before, perhaps, thought of sheep
and men in soldiers' dresses at the same time, and here they were brought
together in a strange fantastic way. As will be easily conceived, the
fearlessness and stillness of those quiet creatures, on the brow of the
rock, pursuing their natural occupations, contrasted with the restless
and apparently unmeaning motions of the dwarf soldier, added not a little
to the general effect of this place, which is that of wild singularity,
and the whole was aided by a blustering wind and a gloomy sky. Coleridge
joined us, and we went up to the top of the rock.
The road to a considerable height is through a narrow cleft, in which a
flight of steps is hewn; the steps nearly fill the cleft, and on each
side the rocks form a high and irregular wall; it is almost like a long
sloping cavern, only that it is roofed by the sky. We came to the
barracks; soldiers' wives were hanging out linen upon the rails, while
the wind beat about them furiously--there was nothing which it could set
in motion but the garments of the women and the linen upon the rails; the
grass--for we had now come to green grass--was close and smooth, and not
one pile an inch above another, and neither tree nor shrub. The standard
pole stood erect without a flag. The rock has two summits, one much
broader and higher than the other. When we were near to the top of the
lower eminence we had the pleasure of finding a little garden of flowers
and vegetables belonging to the soldiers. There are three distinct and
very noble prospects--the first up the Clyde towards Glasgow--Dunglass
Castle, seen on its promontory--boats, sloops, hills, and many buildings;
the second, down the river to the sea--Greenock and Port-Glasgow, and the
distant mountains at the entrance of Loch Long; and the third extensive
and distant view is up the Leven, which here falls into the Clyde, to the
mountains of Loch Lomond. The distant mountains in all these views were
obscured by mists and dingy clouds, but if the grand outline of any one
of the views can be seen, it is sufficient recompense for the trouble of
climbing the rock of Dumbarton.
The soldier who was our guide told us that an old ruin which we came to
at the top of the higher eminence had been a wind-mill--an inconvenient
station, though certainly a glorious place for wind; perhaps if it really
had been a wind-mill it was only for the use of the garrison. We looked
over cannons on the battery-walls, and saw in an open field below the
yeomanry cavalry exercising, while we could hear from the town, which was
full of soldiers, 'Dumbarton's drums beat bonny, O!' Yet while we stood
upon this eminence, rising up so far as it does--inland, and having the
habitual old English feeling of our own security as islanders--we could
not help looking upon the fortress, in spite of its cannon and soldiers,
and the rumours of invasion, as set up against the hostilities of wind
and weather rather than for any other warfare. On our return we were
invited into the guard-room, about half-way down the rock, where we were
shown a large rusty sword, which they called Wallace's Sword, and a trout
boxed up in a well close by, where they said he had been confined for
upwards of thirty years. For the pleasure of the soldiers, who were
anxious that we should see him, we took some pains to spy him out in his
black den, and at last succeeded. It was pleasing to observe how much
interest the poor soldiers--though themselves probably new to the
place--seemed to attach to this antiquated inhabitant of their garrison.
When we had reached the bottom of the rock along the same road by which
we had ascended, we made our way over the rough stones left bare by the
tide, round the bottom of the rock, to the point where we had set off.
This is a wild and melancholy walk on a blustering cloudy day: the naked
bed of the river, scattered over with sea-weed; grey swampy fields on the
other shore; sea-birds flying overhead; the high rock perpendicular and
bare. We came to two very large fragments, which had fallen from the
main rock; Coleridge thought that one of them was as large as
Bowder-Stone, {61} William and I did not; but it is impossible to judge
accurately; we probably, without knowing it, compared them with the whole
mass from which they had fallen, which, from its situation, we consider
as one rock or stone, and there is no object of the kind for comparison
with the Bowder-Stone. When we leave the shore of the Clyde grass begins
to show itself on the rock; go a considerable way--still under the
rock--along a flat field, and pass immediately below the white house,
which wherever seen looks so ugly.
Left Dumbarton at about eleven o'clock. The sky was cheerless and the
air ungenial, which we regretted, as we were going to Loch Lomond, and
wished to greet the first of the Scottish lakes with our cheerfullest and
best feelings. Crossed the Leven at the end of Dumbarton, and, when we
looked behind, had a pleasing view of the town, bridge, and rock; but
when we took in a reach of the river at the distance of perhaps half a
mile, the swamp ground, being so near a town, and not in its natural
wildness, but seemingly half cultivated, with houses here and there, gave
us an idea of extreme poverty of soil, or that the inhabitants were
either indolent or miserable. We had to travel four miles on the banks
of the 'Water of Leven' before we should come to Loch Lomond. Having
expected a grand river from so grand a lake, we were disappointed; for it
appeared to me not to be very much larger than the Emont, and is not near
so beautiful; but we must not forget that the day was cold and gloomy.
Near Dumbarton it is like a river in a flat country, or under the
influence of tides; but a little higher up it resembles one of our
rivers, flowing through a vale of no extreme beauty, though prettily
wooded; the hills on each side not very high, sloping backwards from the
bed of the vale, which is neither very narrow nor very wide; the prospect
terminated by Ben Lomond and other mountains. The vale is populous, but
looks as if it were not inhabited by cultivators of the earth; the houses
are chiefly of stone; often in rows by the river-side; they stand
pleasantly, but have a tradish look, as if they might have been off-sets
from Glasgow. We saw many bleach-yards, but no other symptom of a
manufactory, except something in the houses that was not rural, and a
want of independent comforts. Perhaps if the river had been glittering
in the sun, and the smoke of the cottages rising in distinct volumes
towards the sky, as I have seen in the vale or basin below Pillsden in
Dorsetshire, when every cottage, hidden from the eye, pointed out its
lurking-place by an upright wreath of white smoke, the whole scene might
have excited ideas of perfect cheerfulness.
Here, as on the Nith, and much more than in the Trough of the Clyde, a
great portion of the ground was uncultivated, but the hills being less
wild, the river more stately, and the ground not heaved up so irregularly
and tossed about, the imperfect cultivation was the more to be lamented,
particularly as there were so many houses near the river. In a small
enclosure by the wayside is a pillar erected to the memory of Dr.
Smollett, who was born in a village at a little distance, which we could
see at the same time, and where, I believe, some of the family still
reside. There is a long Latin inscription, which Coleridge translated
for my benefit. The Latin is miserably bad {63}--as Coleridge said, such
as poor Smollett, who was an excellent scholar, would have been ashamed
of.
Before we came to Loch Lomond the vale widened, and became less populous.
We climbed over a wall into a large field to have a better front view of
the lake than from the road. This view is very much like that from Mr.
Clarkson's windows: the mountain in front resembles Hallan; indeed, is
almost the same; but Ben Lomond is not seen standing in such majestic
company as Helvellyn, and the meadows are less beautiful than Ulswater.
The reach of the lake is very magnificent; you see it, as Ulswater is
seen beyond the promontory of Old Church, winding away behind a large
woody island that looks like a promontory. The outlet of the lake--we
had a distinct view of it in the field--is very insignificant. The bulk
of the river is frittered away by small alder bushes, as I recollect; I
do not remember that it was reedy, but the ground had a swampy
appearance; and here the vale spreads out wide and shapeless, as if the
river were born to no inheritance, had no sheltering cradle, no hills of
its own. As we have seen, this does not continue long; it flows through
a distinct, though not a magnificent vale. But, having lost the pastoral
character which it had in the youthful days of Smollett--if the
description in his ode to his native stream be a faithful one--it is less
interesting than it was then.
The road carried us sometimes close to the lake, sometimes at a
considerable distance from it, over moorish grounds, or through
half-cultivated enclosures; we had the lake on our right, which is here
so wide that the opposite hills, not being high, are cast into
insignificance, and we could not distinguish any buildings near the
water, if any there were. It is however always delightful to travel by a
lake of clear waters, if you see nothing else but a very ordinary
country; but we had some beautiful distant views, one in particular, down
the high road, through a vista of over-arching trees; and the near shore
was frequently very pleasing, with its gravel banks, bendings, and small
bays. In one part it was bordered for a considerable way by irregular
groups of forest trees or single stragglers, which, although not large,
seemed old; their branches were stunted and knotty, as if they had been
striving with storms, and had half yielded to them. Under these trees we
had a variety of pleasing views across the lake, and the very rolling
over the road and looking at its smooth and beautiful surface was itself
a pleasure. It was as smooth as a gravel walk, and of the bluish colour
of some of the roads among the lakes of the north of England.
Passed no very remarkable place till we came to Sir James Colquhoun's
house, which stands upon a large, flat, woody peninsula, looking towards
Ben Lomond. There must be many beautiful walks among the copses of the
peninsula, and delicious views over the water; but the general surface of
the country is poor, and looks as if it ought to be rich and well
peopled, for it is not mountainous; nor had we passed any hills which a
Cumbrian would dignify with the name of mountains. There was many a
little plain or gently-sloping hill covered with poor heath or broom
without trees, where one should have liked to see a cottage in a bower of
wood, with its patch of corn and potatoes, and a green field with a hedge
to keep it warm. As we advanced we perceived less of the coldness of
poverty, the hills not having so large a space between them and the lake.
The surface of the hills being in its natural state, is always beautiful;
but where there is only a half cultivated and half peopled soil near the
banks of a lake or river, the idea is forced upon one that they who do
live there have not much of cheerful enjoyment.
But soon we came to just such a place as we had wanted to see. The road
was close to the water, and a hill, bare, rocky, or with scattered copses
rose above it. A deep shade hung over the road, where some little boys
were at play; we expected a dwelling-house of some sort; and when we came
nearer, saw three or four thatched huts under the trees, and at the same
moment felt that it was a paradise. We had before seen the lake only as
one wide plain of water; but here the portion of it which we saw was
bounded by a high and steep, heathy and woody island opposite, which did
not appear like an island, but the main shore, and framed out a little
oblong lake apparently not so broad as Rydale-water, with one small
island covered with trees, resembling some of the most beautiful of the
holms of Windermere, and only a narrow river's breadth from the shore.
This was a place where we should have liked to have lived, and the only
one we had seen near Loch Lomond. How delightful to have a little shed
concealed under the branches of the fairy island! the cottages and the
island might have been made for the pleasure of each other. It was but
like a natural garden, the distance was so small; nay, one could not have
forgiven any one living there, not compelled to daily labour, if he did
not connect it with his dwelling by some feeling of domestic attachment,
like what he has for the orchard where his children play. I thought,
what a place for William! he might row himself over with twenty strokes
of the oars, escaping from the business of the house, and as safe from
intruders, with his boat anchored beside him, as if he had locked himself
up in the strong tower of a castle. We were unwilling to leave this
sweet spot; but it was so simple, and therefore so rememberable, that it
seemed almost as if we could have carried it away with us. It was
nothing more than a small lake enclosed by trees at the ends and by the
way-side, and opposite by the island, a steep bank on which the purple
heath was seen under low oak coppice-wood, a group of houses
over-shadowed by trees, and a bending road. There was one remarkable
tree, an old larch with hairy branches, which sent out its main stem
horizontally across the road, an object that seemed to have been singled
out for injury where everything else was lovely and thriving, tortured
into that shape by storms, which one might have thought could not have
reached it in that sheltered place.
We were now entering into the Highlands. I believe Luss is the place
where we were told that country begins; but at these cottages I would
have gladly believed that we were there, for it was like a new region.
The huts were after the Highland fashion, and the boys who were playing
wore the Highland dress and philabeg. On going into a new country I seem
to myself to waken up, and afterwards it surprises me to remember how
much alive I have been to the distinctions of dress, household
arrangements, etc. etc., and what a spirit these little things give to
wild, barren, or ordinary places. The cottages are within about two
miles of Luss. Came in view of several islands; but the lake being so
very wide, we could see little of their peculiar beauties, and they,
being large, hardly looked like islands.
Passed another gentleman's house, which stands prettily in a bay, {67}
and soon after reached Luss, where we intended to lodge. On seeing the
outside of the inn, we were glad that we were to have such pleasant
quarters. It is a nice-looking white house, by the road-side; but there
was not much promise of hospitality when we stopped at the door: no
person came out till we had shouted a considerable time. A barefooted
lass showed me up-stairs, and again my hopes revived; the house was clean
for a Scotch inn, and the view very pleasant to the lake, over the top of
the village--a cluster of thatched houses among trees, with a large
chapel in the midst of them. Like most of the Scotch kirks which we had
seen, this building resembles a big house; but it is a much more pleasing
building than they generally are, and has one of our rustic belfries, not
unlike that at Ambleside, with two bells hanging in the open air. {68}
We chose one of the back rooms to sit in, being more snug, and they
looked upon a very sweet prospect--a stream tumbling down a cleft or glen
on the hill-side, rocky coppice ground, a rural lane, such as we have
from house to house at Grasmere, and a few outhouses. We had a poor
dinner, and sour ale; but as long as the people were civil we were
contented.
Coleridge was not well, so he did not stir out, but William and I walked
through the village to the shore of the lake. When I came close to the
houses, I could not but regret a want of loveliness correspondent with
the beauty of the situation and the appearance of the village at a little
distance; not a single ornamented garden. We saw potatoes and cabbages,
but never a honeysuckle. Yet there were wild gardens, as beautiful as
any that ever man cultivated, overgrowing the roofs of some of the
cottages, flowers and creeping plants. How elegant were the wreaths of
the bramble that had 'built its own bower' upon the riggins in several
parts of the village; therefore we had chiefly to regret the want of
gardens, as they are symptoms of leisure and comfort, or at least of no
painful industry. Here we first saw houses without windows, the smoke
coming out of the open window-places; the chimneys were like stools with
four legs, a hole being left in the roof for the smoke, and over that a
slate placed upon four sticks--sometimes the whole leaned as if it were
going to fall. The fields close to Luss lie flat to the lake, and a
river, as large as our stream near the church at Grasmere, flows by the
end of the village, being the same which comes down the glen behind the
inn; it is very much like our stream--beds of blue pebbles upon the
shores.
We walked towards the head of the lake, and from a large pasture field
near Luss, a gentle eminence, had a very interesting view back upon the
village and the lake and islands beyond. We then perceived that Luss
stood in the centre of a spacious bay, and that close to it lay another
small one, within the larger, where the boats of the inhabitants were
lying at anchor, a beautiful natural harbour. The islands, as we look
down the water, are seen in great beauty. Inch-ta-vanach, the same that
framed out the little peaceful lake which we had passed in the morning,
towers above the rest. The lake is very wide here, and the opposite
shores not being lofty the chief part of the permanent beauty of this
view is among the islands, and on the near shore, including the low
promontories of the bay of Luss, and the village; and we saw it under its
dullest aspect--the air cold, the sky gloomy, without a glimpse of
sunshine.
On a splendid evening, with the light of the sun diffused over the whole
islands, distant hills, and the broad expanse of the lake, with its
creeks, bays, and little slips of water among the islands, it must be a
glorious sight.
Up the lake there are no islands; Ben Lomond terminates the view, without
any other large mountains; no clouds were upon it, therefore we saw the
whole size and form of the mountain, yet it did not appear to me so large
as Skiddaw does from Derwent-water. Continued our walk a considerable
way towards the head of the lake, and went up a high hill, but saw no
other reach of the water. The hills on the Luss side become much
steeper, and the lake, having narrowed a little above Luss, was no longer
a very wide lake where we lost sight of it.
Came to a bark hut by the shores, and sate for some time under the
shelter of it. While we were here a poor woman with a little child by
her side begged a penny of me, and asked where she could 'find quarters
in the village.' She was a travelling beggar, a native of Scotland, had
often 'heard of that water,' but was never there before. This woman's
appearance, while the wind was rustling about us, and the waves breaking
at our feet, was very melancholy: the waters looked wide, the hills many,
and dark, and far off--no house but at Luss. I thought what a dreary
waste must this lake be to such poor creatures, struggling with fatigue
and poverty and unknown ways!
We ordered tea when we reached the inn, and desired the girl to light us
a fire; she replied, 'I dinna ken whether she'll gie fire,' meaning her
mistress. We told her we did not wish her mistress to give fire, we only
desired her to let her make it and we would pay for it. The girl brought
in the tea-things, but no fire, and when I asked if she was coming to
light it, she said 'her mistress was not varra willing to gie fire.' At
last, however, on our insisting upon it, the fire was lighted: we got tea
by candlelight, and spent a comfortable evening. I had seen the landlady
before we went out, for, as had been usual in all the country inns, there
was a demur respecting beds, notwithstanding the house was empty, and
there were at least half-a-dozen spare beds. Her countenance
corresponded with the unkindness of denying us a fire on a cold night,
{70} for she was the most cruel and hateful-looking woman I ever saw.
She was overgrown with fat, and was sitting with her feet and legs in a
tub of water for the dropsy,--probably brought on by whisky-drinking.
The sympathy which I felt and expressed for her, on seeing her in this
wretched condition--for her legs were swollen as thick as
mill-posts--seemed to produce no effect; and I was obliged, after five
minutes' conversation, to leave the affair of the beds undecided.
Coleridge had some talk with her daughter, a smart lass in a cotton gown,
with a bandeau round her head, without shoes and stockings. She told
Coleridge with some pride that she had not spent all her time at Luss,
but was then fresh from Glasgow.
It came on a very stormy night; the wind rattled every window in the
house, and it rained heavily. William and Coleridge had bad beds, in a
two-bedded room in the garrets, though there were empty rooms on the
first floor, and they were disturbed by a drunken man, who had come to
the inn when we were gone to sleep.
* * * * *
_Thursday_, _August_ 25_th_.--We were glad when we awoke to see that it
was a fine morning--the sky was bright blue, with quick-moving clouds,
the hills cheerful, lights and shadows vivid and distinct. The village
looked exceedingly beautiful this morning from the garret windows--the
stream glittering near it, while it flowed under trees through the level
fields to the lake. After breakfast, William and I went down to the
water-side. The roads were as dry as if no drop of rain had fallen,
which added to the pure cheerfulness of the appearance of the village,
and even of the distant prospect, an effect which I always seem to
perceive from clearly bright roads, for they are always brightened by
rain, after a storm; but when we came among the houses I regretted even
more than last night, because the contrast was greater, the slovenliness
and dirt near the doors; and could not but remember, with pain from the
contrast, the cottages of Somersetshire, covered with roses and myrtle,
and their small gardens of herbs and flowers. While lingering by the
shore we began to talk with a man who offered to row us to
Inch-ta-vanach; but the sky began to darken; and the wind being high, we
doubted whether we should venture, therefore made no engagement; he
offered to sell me some thread, pointing to his cottage, and added that
many English ladies carried thread away from Luss.
Presently after Coleridge joined us, and we determined to go to the
island. I was sorry that the man who had been talking with us was not
our boatman; William by some chance had engaged another. We had two
rowers and a strong boat; so I felt myself bold, though there was a great
chance of a high wind. The nearest point of Inch-ta-vanach is not
perhaps more than a mile and a quarter from Luss; we did not land there,
but rowed round the end, and landed on that side which looks towards our
favourite cottages, and their own island, which, wherever seen, is still
their own. It rained a little when we landed, and I took my cloak, which
afterwards served us to sit down upon in our road up the hill, when the
day grew much finer, with gleams of sunshine. This island belongs to Sir
James Colquhoun, who has made a convenient road, that winds gently to the
top of it.
We had not climbed far before we were stopped by a sudden burst of
prospect, so singular and beautiful that it was like a flash of images
from another world. We stood with our backs to the hill of the island,
which we were ascending, and which shut out Ben Lomond entirely, and all
the upper part of the lake, and we looked towards the foot of the lake,
scattered over with islands without beginning and without end. The sun
shone, and the distant hills were visible, some through sunny mists,
others in gloom with patches of sunshine; the lake was lost under the low
and distant hills, and the islands lost in the lake, which was all in
motion with travelling fields of light, or dark shadows under rainy
clouds. There are many hills, but no commanding eminence at a distance
to confine the prospect, so that the land seemed endless as the water.
What I had heard of Loch Lomond, or any other place in Great Britain, had
given me no idea of anything like what we beheld: it was an outlandish
scene--we might have believed ourselves in North America. The islands
were of every possible variety of shape and surface--hilly and level,
large and small, bare, rocky, pastoral, or covered with wood.
Immediately under my eyes lay one large flat island, bare and green, so
flat and low that it scarcely appeared to rise above the water, with
straggling peat-stacks and a single hut upon one of its out-shooting
promontories--for it was of a very irregular shape, though perfectly
flat. Another, its next neighbour, and still nearer to us, was covered
over with heath and coppice-wood, the surface undulating, with flat or
sloping banks towards the water, and hollow places, cradle-like valleys,
behind. These two islands, with Inch-ta-vanach, where we were standing,
were intermingled with the water, I might say interbedded and interveined
with it, in a manner that was exquisitely pleasing. There were bays
innumerable, straits or passages like calm rivers, landlocked lakes, and,
to the main water, stormy promontories. The solitary hut on the flat
green island seemed unsheltered and desolate, and yet not wholly so, for
it was but a broad river's breadth from the covert of the wood of the
other island. Near to these is a miniature, an islet covered with trees,
on which stands a small ruin that looks like the remains of a religious
house; it is overgrown with ivy, and were it not that the arch of a
window or gateway may be distinctly seen, it would be difficult to
believe that it was not a tuft of trees growing in the shape of a ruin,
rather than a ruin overshadowed by trees. When we had walked a little
further we saw below us, on the nearest large island, where some of the
wood had been cut down, a hut, which we conjectured to be a bark hut. It
appeared to be on the shore of a little forest lake, enclosed by
Inch-ta-vanach, where we were, and the woody island on which the hut
stands.
Beyond we had the same intricate view as before, and could discover
Dumbarton rock with its double head. There being a mist over it, it had
a ghost-like appearance--as I observed to William and Coleridge,
something like the Tor of Glastonbury from the Dorsetshire hills. Right
before us, on the flat island mentioned before, were several small single
trees or shrubs, growing at different distances from each other, close to
the shore, but some optical delusion had detached them from the land on
which they stood, and they had the appearance of so many little vessels
sailing along the coast of it. I mention the circumstance, because, with
the ghostly image of Dumbarton Castle, and the ambiguous ruin on the
small island, it was much in the character of the scene, which was
throughout magical and enchanting--a new world in its great permanent
outline and composition, and changing at every moment in every part of it
by the effect of sun and wind, and mist and shower and cloud, and the
blending lights and deep shades which took place of each other,
traversing the lake in every direction. The whole was indeed a strange
mixture of soothing and restless images, of images inviting to rest, and
others hurrying the fancy away into an activity still more pleasing than
repose. Yet, intricate and homeless, that is, without lasting
abiding-place for the mind, as the prospect was, there was no perplexity;
we had still a guide to lead us forward.
Wherever we looked, it was a delightful feeling that there was something
beyond. Meanwhile, the sense of quiet was never lost sight of; the
little peaceful lakes among the islands might make you forget that the
great water, Loch Lomond, was so near; and yet are more beautiful,
because you know that it is so: they have their own bays and creeks
sheltered within a shelter. When we had ascended to the top of the
island we had a view up to Ben Lomond, over the long, broad water without
spot or rock; and, looking backwards, saw the islands below us as on a
map. This view, as may be supposed, was not nearly so interesting as
those we had seen before. W
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