Chapter 44

Was it not a Paragon of a Parish? But we have not told you one half of its charms. There was a charm in every nook--and Youth was the master of the spell. Small magicians were we in size, but we were great in might. We had but to open our eyes in the morning, and at one look all nature was beautiful. We have said nothing about the Burns. The chief was the Yearn--endearingly called the Humbie, from a farm near the Manse, and belonging to the minister. Its chief source was, we believe, the Brother Loch. But it whimpled with such an infantine voice from the lucid bay, which then knew nor sluice nor dam, that for a while it was scarcely even a rill, and you had to seek for it among the heather. In doing so, ten to one some brooding birdie fluttered off her nest--but not till your next step would have crushed them all--or perhaps--but he had no nest there--a snipe. There it is--betrayed by a line of livelier verdure. Ere long it sparkled within banks of its own and "braes of green bracken," and as you footed along, shoals of minnows, and perhaps a small trout or two, brastled away to the other side of the shallow, and hid themselves in the shadows. 'Tis a pretty rill now--nor any longer mute; and you hear it murmur. It has acquired confidence on its course, and has formed itself into its first pool--a waterfall, three feet high, with its own tiny rocks, and a single birk--no, it is a rowan--too young yet to bear berries--else might a child pluck the highest cluster. Imperceptibly, insensibly, it grows just like life. The Burn is now in his boyhood; and a bold, bright boy he is--dancing and singing--nor heeding which way he goes along the wild, any more than that wee rosy-cheeked, flaxen-headed girl seems to heed, who drops you a curtsy, and on being asked by you, with your hand on her hair, where she is going, answers wi' a soft Scottish accent--ah! how sweet--"Owre the hill to see my Mither." Is that a house? No--a fauld. For this is the Washing-Pool. Look around you, and you never saw such perfectly white sheep. They are Cheviots; for the black-faces are on the higher hills to the north of the moor. We see a few rigs of flax--and "lint is in the bell"--the steeping whereof will sadly annoy the bit burnie, but poor people must spin--and as this is not the season, we will think of nothing that can pollute his limpid waters. Symptoms of husbandry! Potato-shaws luxuriating on lazy-beds, and a small field with alternate rigs of oats and barley. Yes, that is a house--"an auld clay bigging,"--in such Robin Burns was born--in such was rocked the cradle of Pollok. We think we hear two separate liquid voices--and we are right--for from the flats beyond Floak, and away towards Kingswells, comes another yet wilder burnie, and they meet in one at the head of what you would probably call a meadow, but which we call a holm. There seems to be more arable land hereabouts than a stranger could have any idea of; but it is a long time since the ploughshare traced those almost obliterated furrows on the hill-side; and such cultivation is now wisely confined, you observe, to the lower lands. We fear the Yearn--for that is his name now--heretofore he was anonymous--is about to get flat. But we must not grudge him a slumber or a sleep among the saughs, lulled by the murmur of millions of humble-bees--we speak within bounds--on their honied flowerage. We are confusing the seasons, for a few minutes ago we spoke of "lint being in the bell;" but in imagination's dream how sweetly do the seasons all slide into one another! After sleep comes play, and see and hear now how the merry Yearn goes tumbling over rocks, nor will rest in any one linn, but impatient of each beautiful prison in which one would think he might lie a willing thrall, hurries on as if he were racing against time, nor casts a look at the human dwellings now more frequent near his sides. But he will be stopped by-and-by, whether he will or no; for there, if we be not much mistaken, there is a mill. But the wheel is at rest--the sluice on the lade is down--with the lade he has nothing more to do than to fill it; and with undiminished volume he wends round the miller's garden--you see Dusty Jacket is a florist--and now is hidden in a dell; but a dell without any rocks. 'Tis but some hundred yards across from bank to brae--and as you angle along on either side, the sheep and lambs are bleating high overhead; for though, the braes are steep, they are all intersected with sheep-walks, and ever and anon among the broom and the brackens are little platforms of close-nibbled greensward, yet not bare--and nowhere else is the pasturage more succulent--nor do the young creatures not care to taste the primroses, though were they to live entirely upon them, they could not keep down the profusion--so thickly studded in places are the constellations--among sprinklings of single stars. Here the hill-blackbird builds--and here you know why Scotland is called the lintie's land. What bird lilts like the lintwhite? The lark alone. But here there are no larks--a little further down and you will hear one ascending or descending over almost every field of grass or of the tender braird. Down the dell before you, flitting from stone to stone, on short flight seeks the water-pyet--seemingly a witless creature with its bonnie white breast--to wile you away from the crevice, even within the waterfall, that holds its young--or with a cock of her tail she dips and disappears. There is grace in the glancing sandpiper--nor, though somewhat fantastical, is the water-wagtail inelegant--either belle or beau--an outlandish bird that makes himself at home wherever he goes, and, vain as he looks, is contented if but one admire him in a solitary place--though it is true that we have seen them in half-dozens on the midden in front of the cottage door. The blue slip of sky overhead has been gradually widening, and the dell is done. Is that snow? A bleachfield. Lasses can bleach their own linen on the green near the pool, "atween twa flowery braes," as Allan has so sweetly sung, in his truly Scottish pastoral "The Gentle Shepherd." But even they could not well do without bleachfields on a larger scale, else dingy would be their smocks and their wedding-sheets. Therefore there is beauty in a bleachfield, and in none more than in Bell's-Meadows. But where is the Burn? They have stolen him out of his bed, and, alas! nothing but stones! Gather up your flies, and away down to yonder grove. There he is like one risen from the dead; and how joyful his resurrection! All the way from this down to the Brigg o' Humbie the angling is admirable, and the burn has become a stream. You wade now through longer grass--sometimes even up to the knees; and half-forgetting pastoral life, you ejaculate "Speed the plough!" Whitewashed houses--but still thatched--look down on you from among trees, that shelter them in front; while behind is an encampment of stacks, and on each side a line of offices, so that they are snug in every wind that blows. The Auld Brigg is gone, which is a pity; for though the turn was perilous sharp, time had so coloured it that in a sunny shower we have mistaken it for a rainbow. That's Humbie House, God bless it! and though we cannot here with our bodily sense see the Manse, with our spiritual eye we can see it anywhere. Ay! there is the cock on the Kirk-spire! The wind we see has shifted to the south; and ere we reach the Cart, we shall have to stuff our pockets. The Cart!--ay, the river Cart--not that on which pretty Paisley stands, but the Black Cart, beloved by us chiefly for sake of Cath-Cart Castle, which, when a collegian at Glasgow, we visited every Play-Friday, and deepened the ivy on its walls with our first sombre dreams. The scenery of the Yearn becomes even sylvan now; and though still sweet its murmurs to our ear, they no longer sink into our hearts. So let it mingle with the Cart, and the Cart with the Clyde, and the Clyde widen away in all his majesty, till the river becomes a firth, and the firth the sea;--but we shut our eyes, and relapse into the vision that showed us the solitary region dearest to our imagination and our hearts, and opening them on completion of the charm that works within the spirit when no daylight is there, rejoice to find ourselves again sole-sitting on the Green-Brae above the Brother Loch.

Such is an off-hand picture of Our Parish--pray give us one of yours, that both may gain by comparison. But is ours a true picture? True as Holy Writ--false as any fiction in an Arabian tale. How is this? Perception, memory, imagination, are all moods--states of mind. But mind, as we said before, is one substance, and matter another; and mind never deals with matter without metamorphosing it like a mythologist. Thus truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, become all one and the same; for they are so essentially blended, that we defy you to show what is biblical--what apocryphal--and what pure romance. How we transpose and dislocate while we limn in aerial colours! Where tree never grew we drop it down centuries old--or we tear out the gnarled oak by the roots, and steep what was once his shadow in sunshine--hills sink at a touch, or at a beck mountains rise; yet amidst all those fluctuations the spirit of the place remains the same; for in that spirit has imagination all along been working, and boon nature smiles on her son as he imitates her creations--but "hers are heavenly, his an empty dream."

Where lies Our Parish, and what is its name? Seek, and you will find it either in Renfrewshire, or in Utopia, or in the Moon. As for its name, men call it the Mearns. M'Culloch, the great Glasgow painter--and in Scotland he has no superior--will perhaps accompany you to what once was the Moor. All the Four Lochs, we understand, are there still; but the Little Loch transmogrified into an auxiliar appurtenance to some cursed Wark--the Brother Loch much exhausted by daily drains upon him by we know not what wretch--the White Loch _larched_--and the Black Loch of a ghastly blue, cruelly cultivated all close round the brim. From his moor

"The parting genius is with sighing sent;"

but sometimes, on blear-eyed days, he is seen disconsolately sitting in some yet mossy spot among the ruins of his ancient reign. That painter has studied the aspect of the Old Forlorn, and has shown it more than once on bits of canvass not a foot long; and such pictures will survive after the Ghost of the Genius has bade farewell to the ruined solitudes he had haunted ever since the flood, or been laid beneath the yet unprofaned Green-Brae, above the Brother Loch, whence we devoutly trust he will re-issue, though ages may have to elapse, to see all his quagmires in their primeval glory, and all his hags more hideously beautiful, as they yawn back again into their former selves, frowning over the burial in their bottoms of all the harvests that had dared to ripen above their heads.

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed. | | Table of Contents: Corrected 336 to 335 | | Page 127: Corrected word order problem | | Page 132: Changed "this to happen her" to "this to happen to her" | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+