Chapter 38

a man evidently not shooting for a wager, and performing a match from the mean motive of avarice or ambition, but blazing away "at his own sweet will," and, without seeming to know it, making a great noise in the world. Such, believe us, is ever the mode in which true genius displays at once the earnestness and the modesty of its character.--But, Hamish--Hamish--Hamish--look with both thine eyes on yonder bank--yonder sunny bank, beneath the shade of that fantastic cliff's superincumbent shadow--and seest thou not basking there a miraculous amount of the right sort of feathers? They have packed, Hamish--they have packed, early as it yet is in the season; and the question is--_What shall we do?_ We have it. Take up a position--Hamish--about a hundred yards in the rear--on yonder knoll--with the Colonel's Sweeper. Fire from the rest--mind, from the rest, Hamishright into the centre of that bed of plumage, and we shall be ready, with Brown Bess and her sister, to pour in our quartette upon the remains as they rise--so that not escape shall one single feather. Let our coming "to the present" be your signal.--Bang! Whew!--what a flutter! Now take that--and that--and that--and that! Ha! Hamish--as at the springing of a mine, the whole company has perished. Count the dead. Twenty-one! Life is short--and by this compendious style we take Time by the forelock. But where the devil are the ducks? Oh, yes! with the deer at the Still. Bag, and be stirring. For the Salmon-pond is murmuring in our ear; and in another hour we must be at Inveraw. Who said that Cruachan was a steep mountain? Why, with a gentle, smooth, and easy slope, he dips his footsteps in the sea-salt waters of Loch Etive's tide, as if to accommodate the old gentleman who, half-a-century ago, used to beard him in his pride on his throne of clouds. Heaven bless him!--he is a kind-hearted mountain, though his forehead be furrowed, and his aspect grim in stormy weather. A million memories "o' auld lang syne" revive, as almost "smooth-sliding without a step" Surefoot travels through the sylvan haunts, by us beloved of yore, when every day was a dream, and every dream filled to overflowing with poetic visions that swarmed in every bough, on every bent, on every heather-bell, on every dewdrop, in every mote o' the sun, in every line of gossamer, all over greenwood and greensward, grey cliff, purple heath, blue lock, "wine-faced sea,"

"with locks divinely spreading, Like sullen hyacinths in vernal hue,"

and all over the sky, seeming then a glorious infinitude, where light, and joy, and beauty had their dwelling in calm and storm alike for evermore.

Heaven bless thee--with all her sun, moon, and stars! there thou art, dearest to us of all the lochs of Scotland--and they are all dear--mountain-crowned, cliff-guarded, isle-zoned, grove-girdled, wide-winding, and far-stretching, with thy many-bayed banks and braes of brushwood, fern, broom, and heather, rejoicing in their huts and shielings, thou glory of Argyllshire, rill-and-river-fed, sea-arm-like, floating in thy majesty, magnificent Loch Awe!

Comparisons, so far from being odious, are always suggested to our hearts by the spirit of love. We behold Four Lochs--Loch Awe, before our bodily eyes, which sometimes sleep--Loch Lomond, Windermere, Killarney, before those other eyes of ours that are waking ever. The longest is Loch Awe, which from that bend below Sonnachan to distant Edderline, looks like a river. But cut off, with the soft scythe or sickle of fancy, twenty miles of the length of the mottled snake, who never coils himself up except in misty weather, and who is now lying outstretched in the sunshine, and the upper part, the head and shoulders, are of themselves a Loch. Pleasant are his many hills, and magnificent his one mountain. For you see but Cruachan. He is the master-spirit. Call him the noblest of Scotland's Kings. His subjects are princes; and gloriously they range around him, stretching high, wide, and far away, yet all owing visible allegiance to him, their sole and undisputed sovereign. The setting and the rising sun do him homage. Peace loves--as now--to dwell within his shadow; but high among the precipices are the halls of the storms. Green are the shores as emerald. But the dark heather with its purple bloom sleeps in sombre shadow over wide regions of dusk, and there is an austere character in the cliffs. Moors and mosses intervene between holms and meadows, and those black spots are stacks of last year's peats--not huts, as you might think; but those other specks are huts, somewhat browner--few roofed with straw, almost all with heather--though the better houses are slated--nor is there in the world to be found slate of a more beautiful pale-green colour than in the quarries of Ballahulish. The scene is vast and wild; yet so much beauty is interfused, that at such an hour as this its character is almost that of loveliness; the rude and rugged is felt to be rural, and no more; and the eye, gliding from the cottage gardens on its banks to the islands on the bosom of the Loch, loses sight of the mighty masses heaved up to the heavens, while the heart forgets that they are there, in its sweet repose. The dim-seen ruins of castle or religious house, secluded from all the stir that disturbed the shore, carries back our dreams to the olden time, and we awake from our reveries of "sorrows suffered long ago," to enjoy the apparent happiness of the living world.

Loch Lomond is a sea! Along its shores might you voyage in your swift schooner, with shifting breezes, all a summer's day, nor at sunset, when you dropped anchor, have seen half the beautiful wonders. It is many-isled; and some of them are in themselves little worlds, with woods and hills. Houses are seen looking out from among old trees, and children playing on the greensward that slopes safely into deep water, where in rushy havens are drawn up the boats of fishermen, or of woodcutters who go to their work on the mainland. You might live all your life on one of those islands, and yet be no hermit. Hundreds of small bays indent the shores, and some of a majestic character take a fine bold sweep with their towering groves, enclosing the mansion of a Colquhoun or a Campbell at enmity no more, or the turreted castle of the rich alien, who there finds himself as much at home as in his hereditary hall, Sassenach and Gael now living in gentle friendship. What a prospect from the Point of Firkin! The Loch in its whole length and breadth--the magnificent expanse unbroken, though bedropped, with unnumbered isles--and the shores diversified with jutting cape and far-shooting peninsula, enclosing sweet separate seclusions, each in itself a loch. Ships might be sailing here, the largest ships of war; and there is anchorage for fleets. But the clear course of the lovely Leven is rock-crossed and intercepted with gravelly shallows, and guards Loch Lomond from the white-winged roamers that from all seas come crowding into the Firth of Clyde, and carry their streaming flags above the woods of Ardgowan. And there stands Ben. What cares he for all the multitude of other lochs his gaze commands--what cares he even for the salt-sea foam tumbling far away off into the ocean? All-sufficient for his love is his own loch at his feet. How serenely looks down the Giant! Is there not something very sweet in his sunny smile? Yet were you to see him frown--as we have seen him--your heart would sink; and what would become of you--if all alone by your own single self, wandering over the wide moor that glooms in utter houselessness between his corries and Glenfalloch--what if you were to hear the strange mutterings we have heard, as if moaning from an earthquake among quagmires, till you felt that the sound came from the sky, and all at once from the heart of night that had strangled day burst a shattering peal that might waken the dead--for Benlomond was in wrath, and vented it in thunder?

Perennially enjoying the blessing of a milder clime, and repaying the bounty of nature by beauty that bespeaks perpetual gratitude--merry as May, rich as June, shady as July, lustrous as August, and serene as September, for in her meet the characteristic charms of every season, all delightfully mingled by the happy genius of the place commissioned to pervade the whole from heaven, most lovely yet most majestic, we breathed the music of thy name, and start in this sterner solitude at the sweet syllabling of Windermere, Windermere! Translucent thy waters as diamond without a flaw. Unstained from source to sea are all the streams soft issuing from their silver springs among those beautiful mountains. Pure are they all as dew--and purer look the white clouds within their breast. These are indeed the Fortunate Groves! Happy is every tree. Blest the "Golden Oak," which seems to shine in lustre of his own, unborrowed from the sun. Fairer far the flower-tangled grass of those wood-encircled pastures than any meads of Asphodel. Thou need'st no isles on thy heavenly bosom, for in the sweet confusion of thy shores are seen the images of many isles, fragments that one might dream had been gently loosened from the land, and had floated away into the lake till they had lost themselves in the fairy wilderness. But though thou need'st them not, yet hast thou, O Windermere! thine own steadfast and enduring isles--her called the Beautiful--and islets not far apart that seem born of her; for theirs the same expression of countenance--that of celestial calm--and, holiest of the sisterhood, one that still retains the ruins of an oratory, and bears the name of the Virgin Mother Mild, to whom prays the mariner when sailing, in the moonlight, along Sicilian seas.

Killarney! From the village of Cloghereen issued an uncouth figure, who called himself the "Man of the Mountain;" and pleased with Pan, we permitted him to blow his horn before us up to the top of Mangerton, where the Devil, 'tis believed, scooped out the sward beneath the cliffs into a Punch-bowl. No doubt he did, and the Old Potter wrought with fire. 'Tis the crater of an extinct volcano. Charles Fox, Weld says, and Wright doubts, swam the Pool. Why not? 'Tis not so cold as the Polar Sea. We swam across it--as Mulcocky, were he alive, but he is dead, could vouch; and felt braced like a drum. What a panorama! Our first feeling was one of grief that we were not an Irishman. We knew not where to fix our gaze. Surrounded by the dazzling bewilderment of all that multitudinous magnificence, the eye, as if afraid to grapple with the near glory--for such another day never shone from heaven--sought relief in the remote distance, and slid along the beautiful river Kenmare, insinuating itself among the recesses of the mountains, till it rested on the green glimmer of the far-off sea. The grandeur was felt, far off as it was, of that iron-bound coast. Coming round with an easy sweep, as the eyes of an eagle may do, when hanging motionless aloft he but turns his head, our eyes took in all the mighty range of the Reeks, and rested in awe on Carran Tual. Wild yet gentle was the blue aerial haze over the glimpses of the Upper Lake, where soft and sweet, in a girdle of rocks, seemed to be hanging, now in air and now in water--for all was strangely indistinct in the dim confusion--masses of green light that might be islands with their lovely trees; but suddenly tipt with fire shone out the golden pinnacles of the Eagle's Nest; and as again they were tamed by cloud-shadow, the glow of Purple Mountain for a while enchained our vision, and then left it free to feast on the forests of Glena, till, wandering at the capricious will of fancy, it floated in delight over the woods of Mucruss, and long lost among the trembling imagery of the water, found lasting repose on the steadfast beauty of the sylvan isle of Inisfallen.

But now for the black mass of rapid waters that, murmuring from loch to river, rush roaring through that rainbow-arch, and bathe the green woods in freshening spray-mist through a loveliest landscape, that steals along with its meadow-sprinkling trees close to the very shore of Loch Etive, binding the two lochs together with a sylvan band--her whose calmer spirit never knows the ebb or flow of tide, and her who fluctuates even when the skies are still with the swelling and subsiding tumult duly sent up into and recalled down from the silence of her inland solitude. And now for one pool in that river, called by eminence the Salmon Pool, whose gravelly depths are sometimes paved with the blue backs of the silver-scaled shiners, all strong as sunbeams, for a while reposing there, till the river shall blacken in its glee to the floods falling in Glen-Scrae and Glenorchy, and then will they shoot through the cataract--for 'tis all one fall between the lochs--passionate of the sweet fresh waters in which the Abbey-Isle reflects her one ruined tower, or Kilchurn, at all times dim or dark in the shadow of Cruachan, see his grim turrets, momentarily less grim, imaged in the tremblings of the casual sunshine. Sometimes they lie like stones, nor, unless you stir them up with a long pole, will they stir in the gleam, more than if they were shadows breathed from trees when all winds are dead. But at other times, they are on feed; and then no sooner does the fly drop on the water in its blue and yellow gaudiness (and oh! but the brown mallard wing is bloody--bloody!) than some snout sucks it in--some snout of some swine-necked shoulder-bender; and instantly--as by dexterously dropping your elbow you give him the butt, and strike the barb through his tongue--down the long reach of the river vista'd along that straight oak-avenue--but with clear space of greensward between wood and water--shoots the giant steel-stung in his fear, bounding blue-white into the air, and then down into the liquid element with a plunge as of a man, or rather a horse, till your heart leaps to your mouth, or, as the Greeks we believe used to say, to your nose, and you are seen galloping along the banks, by spectators in search of the picturesque, and ignorant of angling, supposed in the act of making your escape, with an incomprehensible weapon in both hands, from some rural madhouse.

Eh? eh? not in our hat--not in our waistcoat--not in our jacket--not in our breeches! By the ghost of Autolycus some pickpocket, while we were moralising, has abstracted our Lascelles! We may as well tie a stone to each of our feet, and sink away from all sense of misery in the Salmon Pool. Oh! that it had been our purse! Who cares for a dozen dirty sovereigns and a score of nasty notes? And what's the use of them to us now, or indeed at any time? And what's the use of this identical rod? Hang it, if a little thing would not make us break it! A multiplying reel, indeed! The invention of a fool. The Tent sees not us again; this afternoon we shall return to Edinburgh. Don't talk to us of flies at the next village. There are no flies at the village--there is no village. O Beelzebub! O Satan! was ever man tempted as we are tempted? See--see a Fish--a fine Fish--an enormous Fish--leaping to insult us! Give us our gun that we may shoot him--no--no, dang guns--and dang this great clumsy rod! There--let it lie there for the first person that passes--for we swear never to angle more. As for the Awe, we never liked it--and wonder what infatuation brought us here. We shall be made to pay for this yet--whew! there was a twinge--that big toe of ours we'll warrant is as red as fire, and we bitterly confess that we deserve the gout. Och! och! och!

But hark! whoop and hollo, and is that too the music of the hunter's horn? Reverberating among the woods a well-known voice salutes our ear; and there! bounds Hamish over the rocks like a chamois taking his pastime. Holding up our LASCELLES! he places it with a few respectful words--hoping we have not missed it--and standing aloof--leaves us to our own reflections and our flies. Nor do those amount to remorse--nor these to more than a few dozens. Samson's strength having been restored--we speak of our rod, mind ye, not of ourselves--we lift up our downcast eyes, and steal somewhat ashamed a furtive glance at the trees and stones that must have overheard and overseen all our behaviour. We leave those who have been in anything like the same predicament to confess--not publicly--there is no occasion for that--nor on their knees--but to their own consciences, if they have any, their grief and their joy, their guilt, and, we hope, their gratitude. Transported though they were beyond all bounds, we forgive them; for even those great masters of wisdom, the Stoics, were not infallible, nor were they always able to sustain, at their utmost strength, in practice the principles of their philosophy.

Phin! this Rod is thy masterpiece. And what Gut! _There she has it!_ Reel-music for ever! Ten fathom are run out already--and see how she shoots, Hamish;--such a somerset as that was never thrown from a spring-board. Just the size for strength and agility--twenty pound to an ounce--jimp weight, Hamish--ha! Harlequin art thou--or Columbine? Assuredly neither Clown nor Pantaloon. Now we have turned her ladyship's nose up the stream, her lungs, if she have any, must be beginning to labour, and we almost hear her snore. What! in the sulks already--sullen among the stones. But we shall make you mudge, madam, were we to tear the very tongue out of your mouth. Ay, once more down the middle to the tune of that spirited country-dance--"Off she goes!" Set corners, and reel! The gaff, Hamish--the gaff! and the landing-net! For here is a shallow of the silver sand, spreading into the bay of a ford--and ere she recovers from her astonishment, here will we land her--with a strong pull, a long pull, and a pull altogether--just on the edge of the greensward--and then smite her on the shoulder, Hamish--and, to make assurance doubly sure, the net under her tail, and hoist her aloft in the sunshine, a glorious prize, dazzling the daylight, and giving a brighter verdure to the woods.

He who takes two hours to kill a fish--be its bulk what it may--is no man, and is not worth his meat, nor the vital air. The proportion is a minute to the pound. This rule were we taught by the "Best at Most" among British sportsmen--Scrope the Matchless on moor, mountain, river, loch, or sea; and with exquisite nicety have we now carried it into practice. Away with your useless steelyards. Let us feel her teeth with our forefinger, and then held out at arm's length--so--we know by feeling, that she is, as we said soon as we saw her side, a twenty-pounder to a drachm, and we have been true to time, within two seconds. She has literally no head; but her snout is in her shoulders. That is the beauty of a fish--high and round shoulders, short-waisted, no loins, but all body, and not long of terminating--the shorter still the better--in a tail sharp and pointed as Diana's, when she is crescent in the sky.

And lo, and behold! there is Diana--but not crescent--for round and broad is she as the sun himself--shining in the south, with as yet a needless light--for daylight has not gone down in the west--and we can hardly call it gloaming. Chaste and cold though she seem, a nunlike luminary who has just taken the veil--a transparent veil of fine fleecy clouds--yet, alas! is she frail as of old, when she descended on the top of Latmos, to hold dalliance with Endymion. She has absolutely the appearance of being in the family way--and not far from her time. Lo! two of her children stealing from ether towards her feet. One on her right hand, and another on her left--the fairest daughters that ever charmed mother's heart--and in heaven called stars. What a celestial trio the three form in the sky! The face of the moon keeps brightening as the lesser two twinkle into darker lustre; and now, though day is still lingering, we feel that it is Night. When the one comes and when the other goes, what eye can note, what tongue can tell--but what heart feels not in the dewy hush divine--as the power of the beauty of earth decays over us, and a still dream descends upon us in the power of the beauty of heaven!

But hark! the regular twang and dip of oars coming up the river--and lo! indistinct in the distance, something moving through the moonshine--and now taking the likeness of a boat--a barge--with bonneted heads leaning back at every flashing stroke--and, Hamish, list! a choral song in thine own dear native tongue! Sent hither by the Queen of the sea-fairies to bear back in state Christopher North to the Tent? No. 'Tis the big coble belonging to the tacksman of the Awe--and the crew are going to pull her through the first few hours of the night--along with the flowing tide--up to Kinloch-Etive, to try a cast with their long net at the mouth of the river, now winding dim like a snake from King's House beneath the Black Mount, and along the bays at the head of the Loch. A rumour that we were on the river had reached them--and see an awning of tartan over the stern, beneath which, as we sit, the sun may not smite our head by day, nor the moon by night. We embark--and descending the river like a dream, rapidly but stilly, and kept in the middle of the current by cunning helmsman, without aid of idle oar, all six suspended, we drop along through the sylvan scenery, gliding serenely away back into the mountain-gloom, and enter into the wider moonshine trembling on the wavy verdure of the foam-crested sea. May this be Loch-Etive? Yea--verily; but so broad here is its bosom, and so far spreads the billowy brightness, that we might almost believe that our bark was bounding over the ocean, and marching merrily on the main. Are we--into such a dream might fancy for a moment half beguile herself--rowing back, after a day among the savage islanders, to our ship lying at anchor in the offing, on a voyage of discovery round the world?

Where are all the dogs? Ponto, Piro, Basta, trembling partly with cold, partly with hunger, partly with fatigue, and partly with fear, among and below the seats of the rowers--with their noses somewhat uncomfortably laid between their fore-paws on the tarry timbers; but O'Bronte boldly sitting at our side, and wistfully eyeing the green swell as it heaves beautifully by, ready at the slightest signal to leap overboard, and wallow like a walrus in the brine, of which you might almost think he was born and bred, so native seems the element to the "Dowg o' Dowgs." Ay, these are sea-mews, O'Bronte, wheeling white as silver in the moonshine; but we _shall_ not shoot them--no--no--no--we _will_ not shoot you, ye images of playful peace, so fearlessly, nay, so lovingly attending our bark as it bounds over the breasts of the billows, in motion quick almost as your slowest flight, while ye linger around, and behind, and before our path, like fair spirits wiling us along up this great Loch, farther and farther through gloom and glimmer, into the heart of profounder solitude. On what errands of your own are ye winnowing your way, stooping ever and anon just to dip your wing-tips in the waves, and then up into the open air--the blue light filling this magnificent hollow--or seen glancing along the shadows of the mountains as they divide the Loch into a succession of separate bays, and often seem to block it up, till another moonlight reach is seen extending far beyond, and carries the imagination on--on--on--into inland recesses that seem to lose at last all connection with the forgotten sea. All at once the moon is like a ghost;--and we believe--Heaven knows why--in the authenticity of Ossian's Poems.