Part 45

About a mile to the north of the new town lies Old Aberdeen. In advancing toward it you become every moment more aware of its far greater antiquity. It looks as if it had a fixed attachment to the past, and had refused to move. There is a quietness, a stationariness about it. One old house or villa after another stands in its garden or court as it has done for centuries. The country about has an old Saxon look. It carried me away into Germany, with its unfenced fields of corn and potatoes; villages seen in the distance also unfenced, but with a few trees clustered about them, and the country naked except for its corn. To the right lay the sea, to the left this open country, and on before arose, one beyond the other, tower and spire of an antique character, as of a very ancient city. Presently I came to the college--King's College--with the royal crown of Scotland surmounting its tower, in fine and ample dimensions, and its courts and corridors seen through the ancient gateway. Then, on the other hand, the equally antique gateway to the park of Mr. Powis Leslie, with its two tall round towers of most ancient fashion, with galleries and spires surmounted with crescents. Then, onward, the ancient, massy Cathedral, with its two stone spires, and tall western window of numerous narrow windowlets, and ponderous walls running along the road side, with a coping of a yard high, and stuccoed. Every thing had a heavy, ancient, and German character. I could have imagined myself in Saxony or Franconia; and, to augment the illusion, a woman at a cottage door inquiring the time of day, received the answer "half twa," as near as possible "half two" in Plat-deutsch. Still further to increase the illusion, the people talked of the bridge as "she." Truly the repose of centuries, and the fashion of a far-gone time, so far as relates to our country, lay over the whole place.

I had now to inquire my way to the Brig of Balgounie, a spot which makes a conspicuous figure in Byron's boyish history. "The Brig of Don," says he himself, in a note in Don Juan, canto x., p. 309, "near the 'auld town' of Aberdeen, with its one arch, and its black, deep salmon stream, is in my memory as yesterday. I still remember, though perhaps I may misquote, the awful proverb which made me pause to cross it, and yet lean over it with a childish delight, being an only son, at least by the mother's side. The saying, as recollected by me, was this, but I have never heard or seen it since I was nine years of age:

'Brig of Balgounie, wight (strong) is thy wa', Wi' a wife's ae son on a mare's ae foal, Down shalt thou fa'.'"

How accurate was his recollection of this old bridge; a proof of the delight with which he had enjoyed this scenery. We are told that on holiday afternoons he would get down to the sea-side and find great amusement there. Here was the sea just below; and it will be seen that the whole way that he had to come from New Aberdeen was full of a spirit and an aspect to fall deep into the heart of an embryo poet. There is a new and direct way now from the city nearer to the sea, and from the new bridge of Don the view of the old bridge is very picturesque. It is one tall, gray pointed arch, with cottages about it on both sides on the high banks of the Don, and mills, with masses of trees. On the low ground below the bridge at the left-hand end stands a white house, and little fishermen's huts or sheds scattered here and there. On the other bank of the river the ground is high and knolly. Clumps of trees seem to close in upon the bridge, and behind and above them is a little group of fishermen's houses, called the huts of Balgounie. Below the bridge the river widens out into a broad expanse, and between high, broomy banks, comes down to the new bridge, and thence to the sea meadows, where the white billows are seen chasing each other at its mouth. Above the bridge the river is dark and deep, and the high banks are overhung with wood. The valley of the Don above is very picturesque with woods and rocks, and is enlivened with mills and factories.

The view from the bridge itself down into the river is striking. I suppose it must be forty or fifty feet from its center to the water, yet a man living close by told me that he once saw a sailor leap from it for a wager. The bridge is remarkably strongly built. It is said to have been built in the time of Bruce, yet it has by no means a very ancient look, and being of solid granite, is not very likely to fulfill the prophecy of its fall. Yet Mr. Chambers, in his "Picture of Scotland," says this superstition has not always been confined to children, for our late Earl of Aberdeen, who was an only son, and rode a favorite horse, which was "a mare's ae foal," always dismounted on approaching this bridge, and used to have his horse led over at a little distance after him. The people near do not now seem to partake of it. "Fall!" say they; "ay, when the rocks on which it is based fall!" It is, in fact, like a solid piece of rock itself; and is in possession of funds, left in 1605 by Sir Alexander Hay, which, though then only producing five-and-forty shillings a year, have so accumulated that they are not only amply sufficient to maintain it in repair, but have built the new brig. At each end of the bridge you see several large iron rings in the wall. These, I was told, were to secure ropes or chains to, from which to suspend scaffolding for the repair of the bridge on the outside. Every care is thus taken of it. "She is verra rich, is the auld brig," said the man before mentioned. "She has been verra useful in her time, for before the new brig was built she was the only means of getting to the north country--there was no fording the river. And the new brig has been built wi' her money, ay, every sixpence of it, gran' brig as the new on' is, with her five granite arches; and the auld brig gives £100 a year to take care of her too. But she's verra well off in the world yet, for all that; she has plenty left for herself." Thus do they talk of the auld brig as if she were a wealthy old lady. If, however, any one should pay her a visit from New Aberdeen, I would counsel him to go by the old road for its picturesque effect, but to be careful to inquire the road in Old Aberdeen down to the brig, for it is particularly obscure. He must ask, too, for "The Auld Brig o' Don," for the name of the brig of Balgounie seems known to few of the younger generation.

In New Aberdeen, the admirer of Lord Byron will also naturally seek to take a glance at the different houses in which he lived as a child with his mother. These are in Queen-street, one at nearly each end of the street; one at the house in Broad-street, then occupied by Mr. Leslie, father of the present surgeon of that name; and one in Virginia-street, not far from the docks. The visitor will not be surprised to find that these are but ordinary houses in ordinary streets in general, when he recollects that Mrs. Byron was then reduced by the matrimonial robbery of her husband to an income of £123 a year, and that her effects, that is, the furniture of her lodgings, &c., when sold, on her setting out with her boy for England, amounted only to £74, 17_s._, 7_d._ In these houses she was merely a lodger. The best situation which she occupied was in Mr. Leslie's house in Broad-street, over a shop. All these places are still well known. The schools to which Byron went in Aberdeen are also objects of interest. That in Long Acre, kept by a Mr. Bower, whom he calls _Bodsy_ Bower, a name, he says, given him on account of his dapperness, was a common day school, where little boys and girls were sent principally to be out of the way at home. This school has long been closed. The next school to which he went, and where he continued to go till he left Aberdeen, was the grammar school. This, of course, remains, and though it has been considerably enlarged since Byron was there, that room in which he studied continues exactly as it was at that time. It is an ordinary school-room, with benches and desks cut deep with hundreds of names, and hundreds of other names printed and written over them with ink, and the walls adorned in the like style, as well as with grotesque figures, drawn with the pens of schoolboys. Amid this multitude of names, the Rev. Dr. Melville, the present master, assured me that diligent search had been made to discover that of Byron, but in vain. There are many of his old schoolfellows still living in the place, and all seem to recollect him as "a mischievous urchin." It must, however, be recollected, that Byron was little more than ten years of age when he left Aberdeen, and that was forty-seven years ago.

The place to which perhaps still more interest will attach, connected with the poet's boyhood in this part of the country, is Ballater, where his mother was advised to take him on recovering from the scarlet fever in 1796. It would appear as if Mrs. Byron, as well as her child, was so delighted with the summer residence there, as to return thither the two following summers. These are all the opportunities there could possibly be, for they left for England in the autumn of 1798, on the death of the old Lord Byron. They were the summer residences here, however, that awoke the poetic feeling in him. He was here in the midst of the most beautiful mountain scenery, and so intensely did it operate upon him, that through his whole life he looked back to his abode here as the most delicious period in his memory.

The vale of the Dee, or the Dee-side, as they call it, all the way from Aberdeen, a distance of forty miles, is fine; beautifully wooded by places, the hills, as you advance, become more and more striking. You pass the Castle of Drum, one of the oldest inhabited castles in Scotland; a seat of the Burnets, of Bishop Burnet's line, finely situated on the right hand on rising ground, and various other interesting places. But it is as you approach Ballater that the scenery becomes most striking. It becomes truly Highland. The hills get lofty, bare, gray, and freckled. They are, in fact, bare and tempest-tinted granite, having an air of majestic desolation. Some rise peaked and splintered, and their sides covered with _debris_, yet, as it were, bristled with black and sharp-looking pine forests. Some of the hills run along the side of the Dee, covered with these woods, exactly as the steep Black Forest Hills are in the neighborhood of Wildbad.

As you approach Ballater the valley expands. You see a breadth of green meadow, and a neat white village stretching across it, and its church lifting its spire into the clear air, while the mountains sweep round in a fine chain of peaked hills, and close it in. All up Dee-side there is well-cultivated land, but, with the exception of this meadow, on which Ballater stands, all is now hill, dark forest, and moorland; while below, on the banks of the winding and rapid Dee, birch woods present themselves in that peculiar beauty so truly belonging to the Highlands. On your right first looks out the dark height of Culbleen, mentioned by Byron in his earlier poems:

"When I see some dark hill point its crest to the sky, I think of the rocks that o'ershadow Culbleen;"

then "Morven, streaked with snow;" and Loch na Garr lifts himself long and lofty over the lower chains that close the valley beyond Ballater.

Ballater, though a neat village now, did not exist when Byron was here. There were a few cottages for the use of visitors, near the other side of the present bridge, but those who came to drink the waters generally located themselves in farm-houses as near as they could to "the wells," which are two miles down the opposite bank of the Dee. Mrs. Byron chose her summer residence in one of the most thoroughly-secluded and out-of-the-world spots which it was possible to find, perhaps, in the whole island. It lies four miles below Ballater, on the same side of the river as the spring, that is, two miles beyond "the wells," as they call them, some chalybeate springs which issue from the hills, and which now bring many people to Ballater in summer. You proceed to them along the feet of the hills, and at the feet, also, of a dark pine wood. The river is below you; above you are these mountain forests, and the way lies sometimes through the wood. Under beeches which shade the way, there are benches set at intervals, so that a more charming walk, with the noble mountain views opposite to you, can not well be conceived. At about two miles on the road, after passing under stupendous dark cliffs that show themselves above the craggy and steep forest, you find a couple of rows of houses, and here are the waters issuing out of pipes into stone basins. Going still forward, you come out upon the wild moorlands. Above you, on the right hand, rise the desolate hills; below, on the left, wanders on the Dee, amid its birch woods; and the valley is one of those scenes of chaotic beauty, which perhaps the Highlands only show. It is a sea of heath-clad little hills, sprinkled with the light green birch-trees, and here and there a dark Scotch fir. It is a fairy land of purple beauty, such as seems to belong to old romance, and where the people of old romance might be met without wonder. And through all goes the sound of the river like a distant ocean. Those who have been in the Highlands know and recollect such scenes, so carpeted with the crimson heather, so beautified with the light-hued, fairy birch woods. Still the way leads on till you come down to the Dee, where it makes a wide and splendid sweep deep below the bank on which you are, and then you wonder where can be Bellatrich, the house you seek, for you see no house at all! In the birch wood, however, you now discern one white cottage, and that must be it. No! To that cottage I went, and out came a woman with spectacles on and her Bible open in her hand. I asked if she could tell me where Bellatrich was, and I expected her to say "Here!" but she replied, in a low, quiet voice, "I will show you, for it is not easy to find." And so on we went for another quarter of a mile, when, coming to a little hidden valley running at right angles from the river up into the moorlands, she showed me a smoke rising above the trees, and told me there I should find the house.

And here was the place to which Byron's mother used to _retire_ in the summer months from Aberdeen with her boy. The valley is divided by a wild brook hidden among green alders, and its slopes are hung with the native birch and a few oaks. At the upper end stands a farm-house, but this is new, and the farmer, to show me the house in which Byron lived, took me into his farm-yard. The house Mrs. Byron inhabited is now a barn, or sort of hayloft rather, in his yard. It was exactly one of the one-storied, long Highland huts, and is now included in the quadrangle of his farm-yard; but the bed in which Byron used to lie is still there. It is one of the deal, cupboard sort of beds that are common in Highland huts. There it stands among his straw. He says many people come to see the place, and several have tried to buy the bed from him, but that he should think it quite a shame to sell it.

Imagine, then, Mrs. Byron living here upward of forty years ago, and Byron a boy of about ten years of age; soon after which he left for England, to be converted out of a poor Highland boy into a lord. There was probably another hut or so near, as there is now, but that was all. The house they lived in was but a hut itself. There was no Ballater then. That has sprung up under the management of Mr. Farquarson, the laird of Ballater. There was only the water issuing from the moorland rocks, and no house at it, but those few huts near Ballater Bridge, where Lords Panmure and Kennedy, and some of their jovial companions, notorious up here, used to come and to drink the waters, in order to remedy their drinking too much whisky. There was no carriage road then. There was no cultivated meadow. All was moorland, and woods, and wild mountains. There was a rude road at the margin of the river, but so stony that no carriage could exist upon it. Nay, this present farmer says that when he came to live here, within these ten years, there was no road into this little hidden valley. There was no bridge over the brook, but they went through amid the great stones, and that without taking any trouble to put them aside. There was no garden, and there was no field. Around rose, as they do now, dark moorland mountains, and the little black-faced sheep, and the black cattle roamed over the boggy, heathery, and birch-scattered valley, as they do still, except within the little circle of cultivation that the present tenant has made.

What a place for a civilized woman and her only son! How he got so far around as he did is to me a miracle. He got up the valley quite to Braemar, and there was no carriage road thither! There was no turnpike road from Aberdeen further than to Banchory, half way to Ballater, forty-six years ago, and that then made, was the first turnpike road in Aberdeenshire. So a gentleman of Aberdeen assured me. Further, all was a mere track, in which a horse could go. Yet the boy Byron, with his lame feet, and very lame he was, according to those who knew him, and plenty of such remain, rambled all about this wild region. The passion with which he traversed those scenes is expressed in his poem to Mary Duff, the equally-beloved object of his boyish heart.

"When I roved a young Highlander on the dark heath, And climbed thy steep summit, oh Morven! of snow, To gaze on the torrent that thundered beneath, Or the mist of the tempest that gathered below; Untutored by science, a stranger to fear, And rude as the rocks where my infancy grew, No feeling, save one, to my bosom was dear, Need I say, my sweet Mary, 'twas centered in you?

"Yet it could not be love, for I knew not the name-- What passion can dwell in the heart of a child? But still I perceive an emotion the same As I felt when a boy in the crag-covered wild. One image alone on my bosom impressed, I loved my bleak regions, nor panted for new; And few were my wants, for my wishes were blessed, And pure were my thoughts, for my soul was with you.

"I arose with the dawn; with my dog for my guide, From mountain to mountain I bounded along: I breasted the billows of Dee's rushing tide, And heard at a distance the Highlander's song," &c.

That he was intensely happy here, the poetry and memories of his whole life testify. That he must have strolled far and wide, and, as he says, with his dog for his guide, is no doubt true; but, lame as he was, it appears little less than miraculous. "I mind him weel," said a shepherd still living in the valley near the farm; "he was just such a boy as yon," pointing to a boy of eleven or twelve, "and used to play about wi' us here. His feet were _both_ turned in, and he used to lift one over the other as he walked; and when he ran he would sometimes catch one against the other, and tumble over neck and heels. We heard that in England he had got his feet straightened."

How such a boy could get about there, over the rough heath and up the distant mountains, is strange enough. We do not hear that he had any pony, and there were only his mother or the maid to accompany him. Mrs. Byron, by all accounts, was not well-fitted for much walking, far less climbing up hills; yet it is quite certain that he rambled far and wide, and, it is most probable, alone. Loch na Garr, Morven, and Culbleen are the grand features of the mountain scenery, and it is evident that the wild and beautiful solitudes of the Dee-side, and the mountains around, had made a deep and indelible impression on his imagination. It is just the scenery to awake the poet, where the soul and the organization of the poet exist. The deep solitude; the stern mountains, with all their changes of storm and sunshine, now blazing and burning out in all the brightness of a clear sun, now softly beaming beneath the slanting light of evening, and now black as midnight beneath a gloomy sky, looking awfully forth from their sable and yet transparent veil of shadow. These, and the sound of waters, and the mild beauty of the low, heath-clad hills and soft glens, where the birch hangs its weeping and fragrant branches over the lovely harebell and the secret nest of the grouse, were the imagery which surrounded the boy Byron during the summer months; and the boy "was father to the man," seeking out ever afterward, from land to land, all that was lovely and sublime in nature.

But he was now called upon to say,

"Adieu, then, ye hills, where my childhood was bred. Thou sweet flowing Dee, to thy waters adieu!"

and the scene changed to England; solitude to cities; poverty to fortune; and the nameless obscurity of the juvenile mountain wanderer to title and unimagined fame.

Before, however, quitting this favorite scene of the early life of Byron, which he never again visited, I must notice it under the aspect which it happened to present to me from the particular time of my arrival. It was on the 18th of August, just one week after the commencement of the grouse-shooting season, and every inn on the road was crowded with sportsmen and their servants. Lord Castlereagh, on his way to his shooting-ground in Braemar, was my next neighbor on the mail from Aberdeen; and his wide acquaintance with the sports of various countries, the _capercailzie_ and bear-shooting of the north of Europe, in particular of Russia, made his descriptions of them, as well as of the deer-shooting of Braemar--his particular sport--very interesting. But the weather of that wet summer was at this time outrageously rainy, and from every wayside inn the lugubrious faces of sportsmen were visible. As we drew up at the village of Banchory, the window was thronged with livery-servants, and a gentleman at an open upper window, eyeing anxiously the showery clouds hanging upon the hills, caught sight of Lord Castlereagh, and called out, in a tone of momentary animation quickly relapsing into melancholy, "Ha, Cass! are you there? Here I have been these four days, and nothing but this confounded rain. Not a foot have I yet been able to set upon the heath. There are six of us."

"Who is that who addresses you so familiarly?"

"Oh! it is Sir John Guest!" Poor Sir John! What a purgatory!