Part 10

The view from the top reaches from the huge _Harestane Broadlaw_--nearly as high as Ben Lomond--whose top is as flat as a table, and would make a race-course of two miles, and where the clouds are still brooding, to the _Cheviot_; and from the _Maiden Paps_ in Liddesdale, and that wild huddle of hills at _Moss Paul_, to _Dunse Law_, and the weird _Lammermoors_. There is _Ruberslaw_, always surly and dark. The _Dunion_, beyond which lies Jedburgh. There are the _Eildons_, with their triple heights; and you can get a glimpse of the upper woods of Abbotsford, and the top of the hill above Cauldshiels Loch, that very spot where the "wondrous potentate,"--when suffering from languor and pain, and beginning to break down under his prodigious fertility,--composed those touching lines:--

"The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill In Ettrick's vale is sinking sweet; The westland wind is hushed and still; The lake lies sleeping at my feet. Yet not the landscape to mine eye Bears those bright hues that once it bore, Though evening, with her richest dye, Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore.

With listless look along the plain I see Tweed's silver current glide, And coldly mark the holy fane Of Melrose rise in ruined pride. The quiet lake, and balmy air, The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree, Are they still such as once they were, Or is the dreary change in me?

Alas! the warped and broken board, How can it bear the painter's dye! The harp of strained and tuneless chord, How to the minstrel's skill reply! To aching eyes each landscape lowers, To feverish pulse each gale blows chill; And Araby or Eden's bowers Were barren as this moorland hill."

There, too, is _Minto Hill_, as modest and shapely and smooth as Clytie's shoulders, and _Earlston Black Hill_, with Cowdenknowes at its foot; and there, standing stark and upright as a warder, is the stout old _Smailholme Tower_, seen and seeing all around. It is quite curious how unmistakable and important it looks at what must be twenty and more miles. It is now ninety years since that "lonely infant," who has sung its awful joys, was found in a thunderstorm, as we all know, lying on the soft grass at the foot of the grey old Strength, clapping his hands at each flash, and shouting, "Bonny! bonny!"

We now descended into Yarrow, and forgathered with a shepherd who was taking his lambs over to the great Melrose fair. He was a fine specimen of a border herd--young, tall, sagacious, self-contained, and free in speech and air. We got his heart by praising his dog _Jed_, a very fine collie, black and comely, gentle and keen--"Ay, she's a fell yin; she can do a' but speak." On asking him if the sheep dogs needed much teaching--"Whyles ay and whyles no; her kind (Jed's) needs nane. She sooks't in wi' her mither's milk." On asking him if the dogs were ever sold, he said--"Never, but at an orra time. Naebody wad sell a gude dowg, and naebody wad buy an ill ane." He told us with great feeling, of the death of one of his best dogs by poison. It was plainly still a grief to him. "What was he poisoned with?" "Strychnia," he said, as decidedly as might Dr Christison. "How do you know?" "I opened him, puir fallow, and got him analeezed!"

Now we are on Birkindale Brae, and are looking down on the same scene as did

"James Boyd (the Earle of Arran, his brother was he),"

when he crossed Minchmoor on his way to deliver James the Fifth's message to

"Yon outlaw Murray, Surely whaur bauldly bideth he."

"Down Birkindale Brae when that he cam He saw the feir Foreste wi' his ee."

How James Boyd fared, and what the outlaw said, and what James and his nobles said and did, and how the outlaw at last made peace with his King, and rose up "Sheriffe of Ettricke Foreste," and how the bold ruffian boasted,

"Fair Philiphaugh is mine by right, And Lewinshope still mine shall be; Newark, Foulshiels, and Tinnies baith My bow and arrow purchased me.

And I have native steads to me The Newark Lee o' Hangingshaw. I have many steads in the Forest schaw, But them by name I dinna knaw."

And how King James snubbed

"The kene Laird of Buckscleuth, A stalwart man and stern was he."

When the Laird hinted that,

"For a king to gang an outlaw till Is beneath his state and dignitie. The man that wins yon forest intill He lives by reif and felony."

"Then out and spak the nobil King, And round him cast a wilie ee.

'Now haud thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott, Nor speak o' reif or felonie-- _For, had every honest man his awin kye,_ _A richt puir clan thy name wud be_!'"

(by-the-bye, why did Professor Aytoun leave out this excellent hit in his edition?)--all this and much more may you see if you take up _The Border Minstrelsy_, and read "The Song of the Outlaw Murray," with the incomparable notes of Scott. But we are now well down the hill. There to the left, in the hollow, is _Permanscore_, where the King and the outlaw met:--

"Bid him mete me at Permanscore, And bring four in his companie; Five Erles sall cum wi' mysel', Gude reason I sud honoured be."

And there goes our Shepherd with his long swinging stride. As different from his dark, wily companion, the Badenoch drover, as was Harry Wakefield from Robin Oig; or as the big, sunny Cheviot is from the lowering Ruberslaw; and there is _Jed_ trotting meekly behind him--may she escape strychnia, and, dying at the fireside among the children, be laid like

"Paddy Tims--whose soul at aise is-- With the point of his nose And the tips of his toes Turn'd up to the roots of the daisies"--

_unanaleezed_, save by the slow cunning of the grave. And may her master get the top price for his lambs!

Do you see to the left that little plantation on the brow of Foulshiels Hill, with the sunlight lying on its upper corner? If you were there you might find among the brackens and foxglove a little headstone with "I. T." rudely carved on it. That is _Tibbie Tamson's grave_, known and feared all the country round.

This poor outcast was a Selkirk woman, who, under the stress of spiritual despair--that sense of perdition, which, as in Cowper's case, often haunts and overmasters the deepest and gentlest natures, making them think themselves

"Damn'd below Judas, more abhorred than he was,"--

committed suicide; and being, with the gloomy, cruel superstition of the time, looked on by her neighbours as accursed of God, she was hurried into a rough white deal coffin, and carted out of the town, the people stoning it all the way till it crossed the Ettrick. Here, on this wild hillside, it found its rest, being buried where three lairds' lands meet. May we trust that the light of God's reconciled countenance has for all these long years been resting on that once forlorn soul, as His blessed sunshine now lies on her moorland grave! For "the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee."

Now, we see down into the Yarrow--there is the famous stream twinkling in the sun. What stream and valley was ever so be-sung! You wonder at first why this has been, but the longer you look the less you wonder. There is a charm about it--it is not easy to say what. The huge sunny hills in which it is embosomed give it a look at once gentle and serious. They are great, and their gentleness makes them greater. Wordsworth has the right words, "pastoral melancholy"; and besides, the region is "not uninformed with phantasy and looks that threaten the profane"--the Flowers of Yarrow, the Douglas Tragedy, the Dowie Dens, Wordsworth's Yarrow Unvisited, Visited, and Re-Visited, and, above all, the glamour of Sir Walter, and Park's fatal and heroic story. Where can you find eight more exquisite lines anywhere than Logan's, which we all know by heart:--

"His mother from the window looked, With all the longing of a mother; His little sister, weeping, walked The greenwood path to meet her brother. They sought him east, they sought him west, They sought him all the forest thorough-- They only saw the cloud of night, They only heard the roar of Yarrow."

And there is _Newark Tower_ among the rich woods; and _Harehead_, that cosiest, loveliest, and hospitablest of nests. Methinks I hear certain young voices among the hazels; out they come on the little haugh by the side of the deep, swirling stream, _fabulosus_ as was ever Hydaspes. There they go "running races in their mirth," and is not that--_an me ludit amabilis insania?_--the voice of _ma pauvre petite--animosa infans_--the wilful, rich-eyed, delicious Eppie?

"Oh blessed vision, happy child, Thou art so exquisitely wild!"

And there is _Black Andro and Glowr owr'em_ and _Foulshiels_, where Park was born and bred; and there is the deep pool in the Yarrow where Scott found him plunging one stone after another into the water, and watching anxiously the bubbles as they rose to the surface. "This," said Scott to him, "appears but an idle amusement for one who has seen so much adventure." "Not so idle, perhaps, as you suppose," answered Mungo, "this was the way I used to ascertain the depth of a river in Africa." He was then meditating his second journey, but had said so to no one.

We go down by _Broadmeadows_, now held by that Yair "Hoppringle"--who so well governed Scinde--and into the grounds of Bowhill, and passing _Philiphaugh_, see where stout David Lesly crossed in the mist at daybreak with his heavy dragoons, many of them old soldiers of Gustavus, and routed the gallant Graeme; and there is _Slainmens Lee_, where the royalists lie; and there is _Carterhaugh_, the scene of the strange wild story of _Tamlane_ and Lady Janet, when

"She prinked hersell and prinned hersell By the ae light of the moon, And she's awa' to Carterhaugh To speak wi' young Tamlane."

Noel Paton might paint that night, when

"'Twixt the hours of twelve and yin A north wind _tore the bent_";

when "fair Janet" in her green mantle

"---- heard strange elritch sounds Upon the wind that went."

And straightway

"About the dead hour o' the night She heard the bridles ring; Their oaten pipes blew wondrous shrill, The hemlock small blew clear; And louder notes from hemlock large And bog reed, struck the ear,"

and then the fairy cavalcade swept past, while Janet, filled with love and fear, looked out for the milk-white steed, and "gruppit it fast," and "pu'd the rider doon," the young Tamlane, whom, after dipping "in a stand of milk and then in a stand of water,"

"She wrappit ticht in her green mantle, And sae her true love won!"

This ended our walk. We found the carriage at the Philiphaugh home-farm, and we drove home by _Yair_ and _Fernilee_, _Ashestiel_ and _Elibank_, and passed the bears as ferocious as ever, "the orange sky of evening" glowing through their wild tusks, the old house looking even older in the fading light. And is not this a walk worth making? One of our number had been at the Land's End and Johnnie Groat's, and now on Minchmoor; and we wondered how many other men had been at all the three, and how many had enjoyed Minchmoor more than he.

_Dr John Brown._

FOOTNOTE:

[3] The native word for hollows in the hills: thus, Dryhope, Gameshope, Chapelhope, &c.

In Praise of Walking

As a man grows old, he is told by some moralists that he may find consolation for increasing infirmities in looking back upon a well-spent life. No doubt such a retrospect must be very agreeable, but the question must occur to many of us whether our life offers the necessary materials for self-complacency. What part of it, if any, has been well spent? To that I find it convenient to reply, for my own purposes, any part in which I thoroughly enjoyed myself. If it be proposed to add "innocently," I will not quarrel with the amendment. Perhaps, indeed, I may have a momentary regret for some pleasures which do not quite deserve that epithet, but the pleasure of which I am about to speak is obtrusively and pre-eminently innocent. Walking is among recreations what ploughing and fishing are among industrial labours: it is primitive and simple; it brings us into contact with mother earth and unsophisticated nature; it requires no elaborate apparatus and no extraneous excitement. It is fit even for poets and philosophers, and he who can thoroughly enjoy it must have at least some capacity for worshipping the "cherub Contemplation." He must be able to enjoy his own society without the factitious stimulants of the more violent physical recreations. I have always been a humble admirer of athletic excellence. I retain, in spite of much head-shaking from wise educationalists, my early veneration for the heroes of the river and the cricket-field. To me they have still the halo which surrounded them in the days when "muscular Christianity" was first preached and the whole duty of man said to consist in fearing God and walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours. I rejoice unselfishly in these later days to see the stream of bicyclists restoring animation to deserted highroads or to watch even respected contemporaries renewing their youth in the absorbing delights of golf. While honouring all genuine delight in manly exercises, I regret only the occasional admixture of lower motives which may lead to its degeneration. Now it is one merit of walking that its real devotees are little exposed to such temptations. Of course there are such things as professional pedestrians making "records" and seeking the applause of the mob. When I read of the immortal Captain Barclay performing his marvellous feats, I admire respectfully, but I fear that his motives included a greater admixture of vanity than of the emotions congenial to the higher intellect. The true walker is one to whom the pursuit is in itself delightful; who is not indeed priggish enough to be above a certain complacency in the physical prowess required for his pursuit, but to whom the muscular effort of the legs is subsidiary to the "cerebration" stimulated by the effort; to the quiet musings and imaginings which arise most spontaneously as he walks, and generate the intellectual harmony which is the natural accompaniment to the monotonous tramp of his feet. The cyclist or the golf-player, I am told, can hold such intercourse with himself in the intervals of striking the ball or working his machine. But the true pedestrian loves walking because, so far from distracting his mind, it is favourable to the equable and abundant flow of tranquil and half-conscious meditation. Therefore I should be sorry if the pleasures of cycling or any other recreation tended to put out of fashion the habit of the good old walking tour.

For my part, when I try to summon up remembrance of "well-spent" moments, I find myself taking a kind of inverted view of the past; inverted, that is, so far as the accidental becomes the essential. If I turn over the intellectual album which memory is always compiling, I find that the most distinct pictures which it contains are those of old walks. Other memories of incomparably greater intrinsic value coalesce into wholes. They are more massive but less distinct. The memory of a friendship that has brightened one's whole life survives not as a series of incidents but as a general impression of the friend's characteristic qualities due to the superposition of innumerable forgotten pictures. I remember him, not the specific conversations by which he revealed himself. The memories of walks, on the other hand, are all localised and dated; they are hitched on to particular times and places; they spontaneously form a kind of calendar or connecting thread upon which other memories may be strung. As I look back, a long series of little vignettes presents itself, each representing a definite stage of my earthly pilgrimage summed up and embodied in a walk. Their background of scenery recalls places once familiar, and the thoughts associated with the places revive thoughts of the contemporary occupations. The labour of scribbling books happily leaves no distinct impression, and I would forget that it had ever been undergone; but the picture of some delightful ramble includes incidentally a reference to the nightmare of literary toil from which it relieved me. The author is but the accidental appendage of the tramp. My days are bound each to each not by "natural piety" (or not, let me say, by natural piety alone) but by pedestrian enthusiasm. The memory of school days, if one may trust to the usual reminiscences, generally clusters round a flogging, or some solemn words from the spiritual teacher instilling the seed of a guiding principle of life. I remember a sermon or two rather ruefully; and I confess to memories of a flogging so unjust that I am even now stung by the thought of it. But what comes most spontaneously to my mind is the memory of certain strolls, "out of bounds," when I could forget the Latin grammar, and enjoy such a sense of the beauties of nature as is embodied for a child in a pond haunted by water-rats, or a field made romantic by threats of "mantraps and spring-guns." Then, after a crude fashion, one was becoming more or less of a reflecting and individual being, not a mere automaton set in movement by pedagogic machinery.

The day on which I was fully initiated into the mysteries is marked by a white stone. It was when I put on a knapsack and started from Heidelberg for a march through the Odenwald. Then I first knew the delightful sensation of independence and detachment enjoyed during a walking tour. Free from all bothers of railway time-tables and extraneous machinery, you trust to your own legs, stop when you please, diverge into any track that takes your fancy, and drop in upon some quaint variety of human life at every inn where you put up for the night. You share for the time the mood in which Borrow settled down in the dingle after escaping from his bondage in the publishers' London slums. You have no dignity to support, and the dress-coat of conventional life has dropped into oblivion, like the bundle from Christian's shoulders. You are in the world of Lavengro, and would be prepared to take tea with Miss Isopel Berners or with the Welsh preacher who thought that he had committed the unpardonable sin. Borrow, of course, took the life more seriously than the literary gentleman who is only escaping on ticket-of-leave from the prison-house of respectability, and is quite unequal to a personal conflict with "blazing Bosville"--the flaming tinman. He is only dipping in the element where his model was thoroughly at home. I remember, indeed, one figure in that first walk which I associate with Benedict Moll, the strange treasure-seeker whom Borrow encountered in his Spanish rambles. My acquaintance was a mild German innkeeper, who sat beside me on a bench while I was trying to assimilate certain pancakes, the only dinner he could provide, still fearful in memory, but just attackable after a thirty-miles' tramp. He confided to me that, poor as he was, he had discovered the secret of perpetual motion. He kept his machine upstairs, where it discharged the humble duty of supplying the place of a shoe-black; but he was about to go to London to offer it to a British capitalist. He looked wistfully at me as possibly a capitalist in (very deep) disguise, and I thought it wise to evade a full explanation. I have not been worthy to encounter many of such quaint incidents and characters as seem to have been normal in Borrow's experience; but the first walk, commonplace enough, remains distinct in my memory. I kept no journal, but I could still give the narrative day by day--the sights which I dutifully admired and the very state of my bootlaces. Walking tours thus rescue a bit of one's life from oblivion. They play in one's personal recollections the part of those historical passages in which Carlyle is an unequalled master; the little islands of light in the midst of the darkening gloom of the past, on which you distinguish the actors in some old drama actually alive and moving. The devotee of other athletic sports remembers special incidents: the occasion on which he hit a cricket-ball over the pavilion at Lord's, or the crab which he caught as his boat was shooting Barnes Bridge. But those are memories of exceptional moments of glory or the reverse, and apt to be tainted by vanity or the spirit of competition. The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread of other memories, and yet each walk is a little drama in itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catastrophes, according to the requirements of Aristotle; and it is naturally interwoven with all the thoughts, the friendships, and the interests that form the staple of ordinary life.