Leading Articles on Various Subjects Part 5

Liberty cannot long exist apart from it. The spirit of war and aggression is yet abroad: there are laws to be established, rights to be defended, invaders to be repulsed, tyrants to be deposed. And who but the patriot is equal to these things? How was the cry of 'Scotland for ever' responded to at Waterloo, when the Scots Greys broke through a column of the enemy to the rescue of their countrymen, and the Highlanders levelled their bayonets for the charge! A people cannot survive without the national spirit, except as slaves. The man who adds to the vigour of the feeling at the same time that he lessens its exclusiveness, deserves well of his country; and who can doubt that Sir Walter has done so?

The sympathies of Sir Walter, despite his high Tory predilections, were more favourable to the people as such than those of Shakespeare.

If the station be low among the characters of the dramatist, it is an invariable rule that the style of thinking and of sentiment is low also.

The humble wool-comber of Stratford-on-Avon, possessed of a mind more capacious beyond comparison than the minds of all the n.o.bles and monarchs of the age, introduced no such man as himself into his dramas--no such men as Bunyan or Burns,--men low in place, but kingly in intellect. Not so, however, the aristocratic Sir Walter. There is scarcely a finer character in all his writings than the youthful peasant of Glendearg, Halbert Glendinning, afterwards the n.o.ble knight of Avenel, brave and wise, and alike fitted to lead in the councils of a great monarch, or to carry his banner in war. His brother Edward is scarcely a lower character. And when was unsullied integrity in a humble condition placed in an att.i.tude more suited to command respect and regard, than in the person of Jeanie Deans?

A man of a lower nature, wrapt round by the vulgar prejudices of rank, could not have conceived such a character: he would have transferred to it a portion of his own vulgarity, dressed up in a few borrowed peculiarities of habit and phraseology. Even the character of Jeanie's father lies quite as much beyond the ordinary reach. Men such as Sheridan, Fielding, and Foote, would have represented him as a hypocrite--a feeble and unnatural mixture of baseness and cunning. Sir Walter, with all his prejudices and all his antipathies, not only better knew the national type, but he had a more comprehensive mind; and he drew David Deans, therefore, as a man of stern and inflexible integrity, and as thoroughly sincere in his religion. Not but that in this department he committed great and grievous mistakes. The main doctrine of revelation, with its influence on character--that doctrine of regeneration which our Saviour promulgated to Nicodemus, and enforced with the sanct.i.ty of an oath--was a doctrine of which he knew almost nothing. What has the first place in all the allegories of Bunyan, has no place in the fictions of Sir Walter. None of his characters exhibit the change displayed in the life of the ingenious allegorist of Elston, or of James Gardener, or of John Newton.

He found human nature a _terra incognita_ when it came under the influence of grace; and in this _terra incognita_, the field in which he could only grope, not see, his way, well-nigh all his mistakes were committed. But had his native honesty been less, his mistakes would have been greater.

He finds good even among Christians. What can be finer than the character of his Covenanter's widow, standing out as it does in the most exceptionable of all his works,--the blind and desolate woman, meek and forgiving in her utmost distress, who had seen her sons shot before her eyes, and had then ceased to see more?

Our subject, however, is one which we must be content not to exhaust.

THE LATE MR. KEMP.

The funeral of this hapless man of genius took place yesterday, and excited a deep and very general interest, in which there mingled the natural sorrow for high talent prematurely extinguished, with the feeling of painful regret, awakened by a peculiarly melancholy end. It was numerously attended, and by many distinguished men. The several streets through which it pa.s.sed were crowded by saddened spectators--in some few localities very densely; and the windows overhead were much thronged. At no place was the crowd greater, except perhaps immediately surrounding the burying-ground, than at the fatal opening beside the Ca.n.a.l Basin, into which the unfortunate man had turned from the direct road in the darkness of night, and had found death at its termination. The scene of the accident is a gloomy and singularly unpleasant spot. A high wall, perforated by a low, clumsy archway, closes abruptly what the stranger might deem a thoroughfare. There is a piece of sluggish, stagnant water on the one hand, thick and turbid, and somewhat resembling in form and colour a broad muddy highway, lined by low walls; not a tuft of vegetation is to be seen on its tame rectilinear sides: all is slimy and brown, with here and there dank, muddy recesses, as if for the frog and the rat; while on the damp flat above, there lie, somewhat in the style of the grouping in a Dutch painting, the rotting fragments of ca.n.a.l pa.s.sage-boats and coal-barges, with here and there some broken-backed hulk, muddy and green, the timbers peering out through the planking, and all around heaps of the nameless lumber of a deserted boat-yard. The low, clumsy archway is wholly occupied by a narrow branch of the ca.n.a.l,--brown and clay-like as the main trunk, from which it strikes off at nearly right angles. It struck us forcibly, in examining the place, that in the uncertain light of midnight, the flat, dead water must have resembled an ordinary cart-road, leading through the arched opening in the direction of the unfortunate architect's dwelling; and certainly at this spot, just where he might be supposed to have stepped upon the seeming road under the fatal impression, was the body found.

It had been intended, as the funeral letters bore, to inter the body of Mr. Kemp in the vault under the Scott Monument,--a structure which, erected to do honour to the genius of one ill.u.s.trious Scotsman, will be long recognised as a proud trophy of the fine taste and vigorous talent of another. The arrangement was not without precedent; and had it been possible for Sir Walter to have antic.i.p.ated it, we do not think it would have greatly displeased him. The Egyptian architect inscribed the name of his kingly master on but the plaster of the pyramid, while he engraved his own on the enduring granite underneath; and so the name of the king has been lost, and only that of the architect has survived. And there are, no doubt, monuments in our own country which have been transferred in some sort, and on a somewhat similar principle, from their original object. There are fine statues which reflect honour on but the sculptor that chiselled them, and tombs and cenotaphs inscribed with names so very obscure, that they give place in effect, if not literally, like that of the Egyptian king, to the name of the architect who reared them. Had the Scott Monument been erected, like the monument of a neighbouring square, to express a perhaps not very seemly grat.i.tude for the services of some tenth-rate statesman, who procured places for his friends, and who did not much else, it would have been perilous to convert it into the tomb of a man of genius like poor Kemp. It would have been perilous had it been the monument of some mere _litterateur_. The _litterateur's_ works would have disappeared from the public eye, while that of the hapless architect would be for ever before it. And it would be thus the architect, not the _litterateur_, that would be permanently remembered. But the monument of Sir Walter was in no danger; and Sir Walter himself would have been quite aware of the fact. It would not have displeased him, that in the remote future, when all its b.u.t.tresses had become lichened and grey, and generation after generation had disappeared from around its base, the story would be told--like that connected in so many of our older cathedrals with 'prentice pillars' and 'prentice aisles'--that the poor architect who had designed its exquisite arches and rich pinnacles in honour of the Shakespeare of Scotland, had met an untimely death when engaged on it, and had found under its floor an appropriate grave.

The intention, however, was not carried into effect. It had been intimated in the funeral letters that the burial procession should quit the humble dwelling of the architect--for a humble dwelling it is--at half-past one. It had been arranged, too, that the workmen employed at the monument, one of the most respectable-looking bodies of mechanics we ever saw, should carry the corpse to the grave. They had gathered round the dwelling, a cottage at Morningside, with a wreath of ivy nodding from the wall; and the appearance of both it and them naturally suggested that the poor deceased, originally one of themselves, though he had risen, after a long struggle, into celebrity, had not risen into affluence. Death had come too soon. He had just attained his proper position--just reached the upper edge of the table-land which his genius had given him a right to occupy, and on which a competency might be soon and honourably secured--when a cruel accident struck him down. The time specified for the burial pa.s.sed--first one half-hour, and then another. The a.s.sembled group wondered at the delay. And then a gentleman from the dwelling-house came to inform them that some interdict or protest, we know not what--some, we suppose, perfectly legal doc.u.ment--had inhibited, at this late hour, the interment of the body in the monument, and that there was a grave in the course of being prepared for it in one of the city churchyards.

ANNIE M'DONALD AND THE FIFEs.h.i.+RE FORESTER.

It was the religion of Scotland that first developed the intellect of the country. Nor would it be at all difficult to show how. It is sufficiently easy to conceive the process through which earnest feeling concentrated on the great concerns of human destiny leads to earnest thinking, and how thinking propagates itself in its abstract character as such, even after the moving power which had first set its wheels in motion has ceased to operate. The Reformation was mainly a religious movement, but it was pregnant with philosophy and the arts.

The grand doctrine of justification by faith, for which Luther and the other reformers contended, was wonderfully linked, by the G.o.d from whom it emanated, with all the great discoveries of modern science, and not a few of the proudest triumphs of literature. It drew along with it in the train of events, as if by a golden chain, the philosophy of Bacon and Newton, and the poesy of Milton and Shakespeare. But though the general truth of the remark has been acknowledged, the connection which it intimates--a connection clearly referable to the will of that adorable Being who has made 'G.o.dliness profitable for all things'--has been too much lost sight of. Religious belief, trans.m.u.ted in its reflex influences into mere intellectual activity, has too often a.s.sumed another nature and name, and forgotten or disowned its origin; and whatever is suited to remind us of the certainty of the connection, or to ill.u.s.trate the mode of its operations, cannot be deemed other than important.

From a consideration of this character, we have been much pleased with a little work just published, which, taking up a single family in the humblest rank, shows, without any apparent intention of the kind on the part of the writer, how the Christianity of the country has operated on the popular intellect; and we think we can scarce do better than introduce it to the acquaintance of our readers. Most of them have perhaps seen a memoir of one Annie M'Donald, published in Edinburgh some eight or ten years ago. It is a humble production, given chiefly, as the t.i.tle-page intimates, in Annie's own words; and Annie ranked among the humblest of our people. She had never seen a single day in school. When best and most favourably circ.u.mstanced, she was the wife of a farm-servant,--no very exalted station surely; but still a lowlier station awaited her, and she pa.s.sed more than half a century in widowhood. One of her daughters became the wife of a poor labourer, her two grandchildren were labourers also. It is not easy to imagine a humbler lot, without crossing the line beyond which independence cannot be achieved; and yet Annie was a n.o.ble-hearted matron, one of the true aristocracy of the country. Her long life was a protracted warfare--a scene of privation, sorrow, and sore trial; but she struggled bravely through, ever trusting in G.o.d, dependent on Him, and Him only; and if the dignity of human nature consist in integrity the most inflexible, energy the most untiring, strong sound thinking, deep devotional feeling, and a high-toned yet chastened spirit of independence, then was there more true dignity to be found in the humble cottage of Annie M'Donald, than in half the proud mansions of the country. Many of our readers must be acquainted, as we have said, with her character, and some of the outlines of her story. Most of them are acquainted, too, with the character of another very remarkable person, John Bethune, the Fifes.h.i.+re Forester,--a man whose name, in all probability, they have never a.s.sociated with Annie M'Donald. He belongs to quite a different cla.s.s of persons. The venerable matron takes her place among those cultivators of the moral nature who live in close converse with their G.o.d, and on whom are re-stamped, if we may so speak, the lineaments of the divine image obliterated at the fall.

The poet, too early lost, ranks, on the other hand, among those hardy cultivators of the intellectual nature who, among all the difficulties incident to imperfect education, and a life of hards.h.i.+p and labour, struggle into notice through the force of an innate vigour, and impress the stamp of their mind on the literature of their country. Much of the interest of the newly published memoir before us arises from the connection which it establishes between the matron and the poet. It purports to be 'A Sketch of the Life of Annie M'Donald, by her Grandson, the late John Bethune.' And scarce any one can peruse it without marking the powerful influence which the high religious character of the grandmother exerted on the intellectual character of her descendant. The n.o.bility of the humble family from which he sprung was derived evidently from this source. That character, to borrow a homely but forcible metaphor from Burns, was the sustaining 'stalk of carle hemp' which bore it up and kept it from grovelling on the depressed level of its condition. How very interesting a subject of thought and inquiry! A little Highland girl, when tending cattle in the fields nearly a century ago, was led, through divine grace, to 'apprehend the mercy of G.o.d in Christ,' and to close with His free offers of salvation; and in the third generation we can see the effects of the transaction, not only in the blameless life and the pure sentiments of a true though humble poet, but in, also, the manly vigour of his thinking, and the high degree of culture which he was enabled to bestow on his intellectual faculties.

The story of Annie M'Donald is such an one as a poet of Wordsworth's cast would delight to tell. She was born in a remote and thinly inhabited district of the Highlands, and lost her father, a Highland crofter, while yet an infant. She was his youngest child, but the other members of the family were all very young and helpless; and her poor mother, a woman still in the prime of life, had to wander with them into the low country, friendless and penniless, in quest of employment. And employment after a weary pilgrimage she at length succeeded in procuring from a hospitable farmer in the parish of Kilmany, in Fifes.h.i.+re. An unoccupied hovel furnished her with a home; and here, with hard labour, she reared her children, till they were fitted to leave her one by one, and do something for themselves, chiefly in the way of herding cattle. Annie grew up to be employed like the rest; and when a little herd-girl in the fields, 'she frequently fell into strains of serious meditation,' says her biographer, 'on the works of G.o.d, and on her own standing before Him.'

Let scepticism a.s.sert what it may, such is the nature of man. G.o.d has written on every human heart the great truth of man's responsibility; and the simple, ignorant herd-girl could read it there, amid the solitude of the fields. But the inscription seemed fraught with terror: she was perplexed by alternate doubts and fears, and troubled by wildly vivid imaginings during the day, and by frightful dreams by night. Her mother had been unable to send her to school, but she got occasional lessons in the evenings from a fellow-servant; and through the desultory a.s.sistance obtained in this way, backed by her solitary efforts at self-instruction, she learned to read. She must have deemed that an important day on which she found she could at length converse with books; and the books with which she most loved to discourse were such as related to the spiritual state. She pored over the Shorter Catechism, and acquainted herself with her Bible. But for years together, at this period, she suffered much distress of mind. Her imagination possessed a wild activity, and the scenes and shapes which it was continually calling up before her were all of horror and dismay--the place of the lost, the appalling forms with which fancy invests the fallen spirits, the terrors of the last day, and the dread throne of judgment. But a time of peace and comfort came; and she was enabled to lay hold on G.o.d in faith and hope as _her_ G.o.d, through the all-sufficient blood of the atonement. And this hold she never after relinquished.

There was no pause in her humble toils. From her early occupations in the fields, she pa.s.sed in riper youth to the labours of the farm-house; and at the age of twenty-five experienced yet another change, in becoming the wife of a farm-servant, a quiet man of solid character, and whose religious views and feelings coincided with her own. Her humble home was a solitary hut on the uplands, far from even her nearest neighbours; but it was her home, and she was happy. With the consent of her husband, she took her aged mother under her care, and succeeded in repaying more than the obligations incurred in infancy; for her instructions, through the blessing of G.o.d, were rendered apparently the means of the old woman's conversion. There were sorrows that came to her even at the happiest, but they were mingled with comfort. She lost one of her children by small-pox at a very early age; and yet, very early as the age was, evidence was not wanting in its death that the Psalmist spoke with full meaning when he said that G.o.d can perfect praise out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. But there was a deeper grief awaiting her. After a happy union of twelve years, her husband was seized in the night in their lonely s.h.i.+eling by a mortal distemper, at a time when only herself and her young children were present, and ere a.s.sistance could be procured he expired. There is something extremely touching in the details of this event, as given by the poet, her grandson.

They strongly show how real an evil poverty is, in even the most favourable circ.u.mstances, when the hour of distress comes. Cowper ceased to envy the "'_peasant's nest_" when he thought how its solitude made scant the means of life.' We would almost covet the hut of Annie M'Donald as described by her grandson. 'It appeared,'

he says, 'as if separated and raised above the world by the cultureless and elevated solitude on which it stood. Around it on every side were grey rocks, peering out from among tufted gra.s.s, heath furze, and many-coloured mosses; forming what had been, till more recently--when the whole was converted into a plantation--a rather extensive sheep-walk. For an extent equal to more than half the horizon, the eye might stretch away to the distant mountains, or repose on the intervening valleys; and from the highest part of the hill, a little to the eastward, the dark blue of the German Ocean was clearly visible. It must have been a cheerful spot in the clear sunny days of summer, when even heaths and moors look gay--when the deep blue of the hills seems as if softening its tints to harmonize with the deep blue of the sky--when the hum of the bee is heard amid the heath, and the lark high overhead. But it must have been a gloomy and miserable solitude on that night when the husband of Annie lay tossing in mortal agony, and no neighbour near to counsel or a.s.sist, her weeping children around her, and with neither lamp nor candle in the cottage. It was only by the 'light of a burning coal taken from the fire, and exchanged for another as the flame waxed faint, that she was enabled to watch the progress of the fatal malady, and to tell at what time death set his unalterable seal on the pallid features of her husband.'

Long years of incessant labour followed; her children were young and helpless, and her aged mother still with her. She removed to another cottage, where she rented an acre or two of land, that enabled her to keep a cow, and gave her opportunity, as the place was situated beside a considerable stream, of earning a small income as a bleacher of home-made linen. The day, and not unfrequently the night, was spent in toil; but she was strengthened to endure, and so her children were bred up in hardy independence. 'During the weeks of harvest,' says her biographer, 'she was engaged as a reaper by the farmer from whom she rented her little tenement; and when her day's work was done, while her fellow-labourers retired to rest, she employed herself in reaping her own crops, or providing gra.s.s for the cow, and often continued her toil by the light of the harvest moon till it was almost midnight.

After a number of years thus spent, the expiration of the farmer's lease occasioned her removal. Her family were now grown up; she could afford, in consequence, to have recourse to means of subsistence which, if more scanty, were less laborious than those which she had plied so long; and so, removing to a neighbouring village, she earned a livelihood for herself and her infirm mother by spinning carpet worsted at twopence a-day, the common wages for a woman at that period.' 'The cottage which she now occupied,' we again quote, 'happened to be one of a number which the Countess of Leven charitably kept for the accommodation of poor people who were unable to pay a rent. She, however, considered that she had no right to reckon herself among this cla.s.s, so long as it should please G.o.d to afford her strength to provide for her own necessities; and therefore she deemed it unjustifiable to deprive the truly indigent of what had been intended exclusively for them. Influenced by these motives, she removed at the next term to an adjacent hamlet, and here her aged mother died.' We need not minutely follow her after-course: it bore but one complexion to the end. She taught a school for many years, and was of signal use to not a few of her pupils. At an earlier period she experienced a desire to be able to write. There was a friend at a distance whom she wished to comfort, by suggesting to her those topics of consolation which she herself had found of such solid use; and the wish had suggested the idea. And so she did learn to write. She took up a pen, and tried to imitate the letters in her Bible; an acquaintance subsequently furnished her with a copy of the alphabet commonly used in writing; and such was all the instruction she ever received in an art to which in after life she devoted a considerable portion of her time, and in the exercise of which she derived no small enjoyment. In extreme old age she was rendered unable by deafness properly to attend to her school, and so, with her characteristic conscientiousness, she threw it up; but bodily strength was spared to her in a remarkable degree, and her last years were not wasted in idleness. 'Her spinning-wheel was again eagerly resorted to; even outdoor labour, when it could be obtained, was sometimes adopted.' And the editor of the memoir before us--Alexander Bethune, the brother and biographer of John--relates that he recollects seeing her engaged in reaping, on one occasion, when in her eighty-second year; and that on the same field her favourite nephew the poet, at that time a boy of ten, was also essaying the labours of the harvest. In one of the simple but touching epistles which we owe to her singularly acquired accomplishment of writing--a letter to one of her daughters--we find her thus expressing herself:--

'We finished our harvest last Monday, and here again I have cause for thankfulness. I would desire to be doubly thankful to G.o.d for enabling my old and withered arms to use the sickle almost as well as they were wont to do when I was young, and for the favourable weather and abundant crop which in His mercy He has bestowed on us. But, my dear child, there is in very deed a more important harvest before us. Oh!

may G.o.d, for Christ's sake, ripen us by the suns.h.i.+ne of His Spirit for the sickle of death, and stand by us in that trying hour, that we may be cut down as a shock of corn which is fully ripe.'

Annie survived twelve years longer; for her life was prolonged through three full generations. 'In the intervals of domestic duty, her book and her pen were her constant companions.' 'The process of committing her thoughts to paper was rendered tedious, latterly, by the weakness and tremor of her hand; and her mind not unfrequently outran her pen, leaving blanks in her composition, which she did not always detect so as to enable her to fill them up. And this circ.u.mstance sometimes rendered her meaning a little obscure. But with all these deficiencies, her letters were generally appreciated by those to whom they were addressed. Her conversation, too, was much sought after by serious individuals in all ranks in society; and occasionally it was pleasing to see the promiscuous visitors who met in her lowly cottage laying aside for a time the fastidious distinctions of birth and station, and humbly uniting in the exercise of Christian love.' At length she could no longer leave her bed: 'her hearing was so much impaired, that it was with the greatest difficulty she could be made to understand what was said to her; and those friends who came to visit her were frequently requested to sit down by her bedside, where she might see their faces, though she could no longer enjoy their conversation. After raising herself to a convenient position, she generally addressed them upon the importance of preparing for another world while health and strength remained; and tried to direct their attention to the merits and sufferings of the Saviour as the only sure ground of hope upon which sinners could rest their salvation in the hour of trial.' As for her own departure, she 'had a thousand reasons,' she said, 'for wis.h.i.+ng to be gone; but there was one reason which overbalanced them all--G.o.d's time had not yet arrived.' But at length it did arrive. 'Lay me down,' she said, for the irritability of her nervous system had rendered frequent change of posture necessary, and her friends had just been indulging her,--'Lay me down; let me sleep my last sleep in Jesus.' And these were her last words. Her grandson John seems to have cherished, when a mere boy, years before she died, the design of writing her story; and the whole tone of his memoir (apparently one of his earlier prose compositions) shows how thorough was the respect which he entertained for her memory. She forms the subject, too, of a copy of verses evidently of later production, and at least equal to any he ever wrote, in which he affectingly tells us how, when sadness and disease pressed upon the springs of life, and he lingered in suspense and disappointment, the hopes which she had so long cherished--

'The glorious hopes which flattered not-- Dawned on him by degrees.'

He found the Saviour whom she had wors.h.i.+pped; and one of the last subsidiary hopes in which he indulged ere he bade the world farewell, was that in the place to which he was going he should meet with his beloved grandmother. We have occupied so much s.p.a.ce with our narrative, brief as it is, that we cannot follow up our original intention of showing how, in principle, the intellectual history of Bethune is an epitome of that of his country; but we must add that it would be well if, in at least one important respect, the history of his country resembled his history more. The thoughtful piety of the grandmother prepared an atmosphere of high-toned thought, in which the genius of the grandson was fostered. It const.i.tuted, to vary the figure, the table-land from which he arose; but how many of a resembling cla.s.s, and indebted in a similar way, have directed the influence of their writings to dissipate that atmosphere--to lower that table-land! We refer the reader to the interesting little work from which we have drawn our materials. It is edited by the surviving Bethune, the brother and biographer of the poet, and both a vigorous writer and a worthy man. There are several of the pa.s.sages which it comprises of his composition; among the rest, the very striking pa.s.sage with which the memoir concludes, and in which he adds a few additional facts ill.u.s.trative of his grandmother's character, and describes her personal appearance. The description will remind our readers of one of the more graphic pictures of Wordsworth, that of the stately dame on whose appearance the poet remarks quaintly, but significantly,

'Old times are living there.'

'From the date of her birth,' says Alexander Bethune, 'it will be seen that she (Annie M'Donald) was in her ninety-fourth year at the time of her death. In person she was spare; and ere toil and approaching age had bent her frame, she must have been considerably above the middle size. Even after she was far advanced in life, there was in her appearance a rigidity of outline and a sinewy firmness which told of no ordinary powers of endurance. There was much of true benevolence in the cast of her countenance; while the depth of her own Christian feelings gave an expression of calm yet earnest sympathy to her eye, which was particularly impressive. Limited as were her resources, she had been a regular contributor to the Bible and Missionary Societies for a number of years previous to her death. Nor was she slow to minister to the necessities of others according to her ability.

Notwithstanding the various items thus disposed of during the latter part of her life, she had saved a small sum of money, which at her death was left to her unmarried daughters.'

The touching description of the poet we must also subjoin. No one can read it without feeling its truth, or without being convinced that, to be thoroughly true in the circ.u.mstances, was to be intensely poetical.

The recollection of such a relative affectionately retained was of itself poetry.

MY GRANDMOTHER.

Long years of toil and care, And pain and poverty, have pa.s.sed Since last I listened to her prayer, And looked upon her last; Yet how she spoke, and how she smiled Upon me, when a playful child-- The l.u.s.tre of her eye-- The kind caress--the fond embrace-- The reverence of her placid face,-- All in my memory lie As fresh as they had only been Bestowed and felt, and heard and seen, Since yesterday went by.

Her dress was simply neat-- Her household tasks so featly done: Even the old willow-wicker seat On which she sat and spun-- The table where her Bible lay, Open from morn till close of day-- The standish, and the pen With which she noted, as they rose, Her thoughts upon the joys, the woes, The final fate of men, And sufferings of her Saviour G.o.d,-- Each object in her poor abode Is visible as then.

Nor are they all forgot, The faithful admonitions given, And glorious hopes which flattered not, But led the soul to heaven!

These had been hers, and have been mine When all beside had ceased to s.h.i.+ne-- When sadness and disease, And disappointment and suspense, Had driven youth's fairest fancies hence, Short'ning its fleeting lease: 'Twas then these hopes, amid the dark Just glimmering, like an unquench'd spark, Dawned on me by degrees.

To her they gave a light Brighter than sun or star supplied; And never did they s.h.i.+ne more bright Than just before she died.

Death's shadow dimm'd her aged eyes, Grey clouds had clothed the evening skies, And darkness was abroad; But still she turned her gaze above, As if the eternal light of love On her glazed organs glowed, Like beacon-fire at closing even, Hung out between the earth and heaven, To guide her soul to G.o.d.

And then they brighter grew, Beaming with everlasting bliss, As if the eternal world in view Had weaned her eyes from this: And every feature was composed, As with a placid smile they closed On those who stood around, who felt it was a sin to weep O'er such a smile and such a sleep-- So peaceful, so profound; And though they wept, their tears expressed Joy for her time-worn frame at rest-- Her soul with mercy crowned.

_August 10, 1812._

A HIGHLAND CLEARING.

How quickly the years fly! One twelvemonth more, and it will be a full quarter of a century since we last saw the wild Highland valley so well described by Mr. Robertson in his opening paragraphs.{1} And yet the recollection is as fresh in our memory now as it was twenty years ago. The chill winter night had fallen on the brown round hills and alder-skirted river, as we turned from off the road that winds along the Kyle of the Dornoch Frith into the bleak gorge of Strathcarron.

The shepherd's cottage, in which we purposed pa.s.sing the night, lay high up in the valley, where the lofty sides--partially covered at that period by the remnants of an ancient forest--approach so near each other, and rise so abruptly, that for the whole winter quarter the sun never falls on the stream below. There were still some ten or twelve miles of broken road before us. The moon in its first quarter hung low over the hills, dimly revealing their rough outline, and throwing its tinge of faint bronze on the broken clumps of wood in the hollows. A keen frost had set in; and a thick trail of fog-rime, raised by its influence in the calm, and which at the height of some eighty or a hundred feet hung over the river--scarce less defined in its margin than the river itself, for it winded wherever the stream winded, and ran straight as an arrow wherever the stream ran straight--occupied the whole length of the valley, like an enormous snake lying uncoiled in its den. The numerous turf cottages on either side were invisible in the darkness, save that ever and anon the brief twinkle of a light indicated their existence and their places. In a recess of the stream the torch of some adventurous fisher now gleamed red on rock and water, now suddenly disappeared, eclipsed by the overhanging brushwood, or by some jutting angle of the bank. The distant roar of the stream mingled sullenly in the calm, with its nearer and hoa.r.s.er dash, as it chafed on the ledges below, filling the air with a wild music, that seemed the appropriate voice of the impressive scenery from amid which it arose. It was late ere we reached the shepherd's cottage--a dark, raftered, dimly-lighted building of turf and stone. The weather for several weeks before had been rainy and close, and the flocks of the inmate had been thinned by the common scourge of the sheep-farmer at such seasons on marshy and unwholesome farms. The rafters were laden with skins besmeared with blood, that dangled overhead to catch the conservative influences of the smoke; and on a rude plank table below there rose two tall pyramids of dark-coloured joints of braxy mutton, heaped up each on a corn riddle. The shepherd--a Highlander of colossal proportions, but hard and thin, and worn by the cares and toils of at least sixty winters--sat moodily beside the fire. The state of his flocks was not particularly cheering; and he had, besides, seen a vision of late, he said, that filled his mind with strange forebodings. He had gone out after nightfall on the previous evening to a dank hollow on the hill-side, in which many of his flock had died; the rain had ceased a few hours before, and a smart frost had set in, that, as on this second evening, filled the whole valley with a wreath of silvery vapour, dimly lighted by the thin fragment of a moon that appeared as if resting at the time on the hill-top. The wreath stretched out its grey folds beneath him, for he had climbed half-way up the acclivity, when suddenly what seemed the figure of a man in heated metal--the figure of a brazen man brought to a red heat in a furnace--sprang up out of the darkness; and after stalking over the surface of the fog for a few seconds--in which, however, it traversed the greater part of the valley--as suddenly disappeared, leaving an evanescent trail of flame behind it. There could be little doubt that the old shepherd had merely seen one of those shooting lights that in mountain districts, during unsettled weather, so frequently startle the night traveller, and that some peculiarity of form in the meteor had been exaggerated by the obscuring influence of the frost-rime and the briefness of the survey; but the apparition had filled his whole mind, as one of strange and frightful portent from the spiritual world. And often since that night has it returned to us in recollection, as a vision in singular keeping with the wild valley which it traversed, and the credulous melancholy of the solitary shepherd, its only witness,--

'A meteor of the night of distant years, That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld Musing at midnight upon prophecies.'

By much the greater part of Strathcarron, in those days, was in the possession of its ancient inhabitants; and we learn from the description of Mr. Robertson, that it has since undergone scarce any change. 'Strathcarron,' he says, 'is still in the old state.'

Throughout its whole extent the turf cottages of the aborigines rise dark and thick as heretofore, from amid their irregular patches of potatoes and corn. But in an adjacent glen, through which the Calvie works its headlong way to the Carron, that terror of the Highlanders, a summons of removal, has been served within the last few months on a whole community; and the graphic sketch of Mr. Robertson relates both the peculiar circ.u.mstances in which it has been issued, and the feelings which it has excited. We find from his testimony, that the old state of things which is so immediately on the eve of being broken up in this locality, lacked not a few of those sources of terror to the proprietary of the country, that are becoming so very formidable to them in the newer states. A spectral poor-law sits by our waysides, wrapped up in death-flannels of the English cut, and shakes its skinny hand at the mansion-houses of our landlords,--vision beyond comparison more direfully portentous than the apparition seen by the lone shepherd of Strathcarron. But in the Highlands, at least, it is merely the landlord of the new and improved state of things--the landlord of widespread clearings and stringent removal-summonses--that it threatens. The existing poor-law in Glencalvie is a self-enforcing law, that rises direct out of the unsophisticated sympathies of the Highland heart, and costs the proprietary nothing. 'The const.i.tution of society in the glen,' says Mr. Robertson, 'is remarkably simple.

Four heads of families are bound for the whole rental of 55, 13s. a year; the number of souls is about ninety. Sixteen cottages pay rent; three cottages are occupied by old lone women, who pay no rent, and who have a grace from the others for the grazing of a few goats or sheep, by which they live. This self-working poor-law system,' adds Mr. Robertson, 'is supported by the people themselves; the laird, I am informed, never gives anything to it.' Now there must be at least some modic.u.m of good in such a state of things, however old-fas.h.i.+oned; and we are pretty sure such of our English neighbours as leave their acres untilled year after year, to avoid the crus.h.i.+ng pressure of the statute-enforced poor-law that renders them not worth the tilling, would be somewhat unwilling, were the state made theirs, to improve it away. Nor does it seem a state--with all its simplicity, and all its perhaps blameable indifferency to modern improvement--particularly hostile to the development of mind or the growth of morals. 'The people of Amat and Glencalvie themselves supported a teacher for the education of their children,' says Mr. Robertson. 'The laird,' he adds, 'has never lost a farthing of rent. In bad years, such as 1836 or 1837, the people may have required the favour of a few weeks'

delay, but they are now not a single farthing in arrears.'

Mr. Robertson gives us the tragedy of a clearing in its first act. We had lately the opportunity of witnessing the closing scene in the after-piece, by which a clearing more than equally extensive has been followed up, and which bids fair to find at no distant day many counterparts in the Highlands of Scotland. Rather more than twenty years ago, the wild, mountainous island of Rum, the home of considerably more than five hundred souls, was divested of all its inhabitants, to make way for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand sheep. It was soon found, however, that there are limits beyond which it is inconvenient to depopulate a country on even the sheep-farm system: the island had been rendered too thoroughly a desert for the comfort of the tenant; and on the occasion of a clearing which took place in a district of Skye, and deprived of their homes many of the old inhabitants, some ten or twelve families of the number were invited to Rum, and may now be found squatting on the sh.o.r.es of the only bay of the island, on a strip of unprofitable mora.s.s. But the whole of the once peopled interior remains a desert, all the more lonely in its aspect from the circ.u.mstance that the solitary glens, with their green, plough-furrowed patches, and their ruined heaps of stone, open upon sh.o.r.es every whit as solitary as themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around. We spent a long summer's day amidst its desert recesses, and saw the sun set behind its wilderness of pyramidal hills. The evening was calm and clear; the armies of the insect world were sporting by millions in the light; a brown stream that ran through the valley at our feet yielded an incessant poppling sound from the myriads of fish that were incessantly leaping in the pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and gold that incessantly fluttered over them; the half-effaced furrows borrowed a richer hue from the yellow light of sunset; the broken cottage-walls stood up more boldly prominent on the hill-side, relieved by the lengthening shadows; along a distant hill-side there ran what seemed the ruins of a grey stone fence, erected, says tradition, in a very remote age to facilitate the hunting of deer: all seemed to bespeak the place a fitting habitation for man, and in which not only the necessaries, but not a few also of the luxuries of life, might be procured; but in the entire prospect not a man nor a man's dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was one without figures. And where, it may be asked, was the one tenant of the island for whose sake so many others had been removed?

We found his house occupied by a humble shepherd, who had in charge the wreck of his property,--property no longer his, but held for the benefit of his creditors. The great sheep-farmer had gone down under circ.u.mstances of very general bearing, and on whose after development, when in their latent state, improving landlords had failed to calculate; the island itself was in the market, and a report went current at the time that it was on the eve of being purchased by some wealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. The cycle--which bids fair to be that of the Highlands generally--had already revolved in the depopulated island of Rum.