Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands Volume I Part 12

It was a beautiful, sunny day that we drove out to Craigmiller Castle, formerly one of the royal residences. It was here that Mary retreated after the murder of Rizzio, and where, the chronicler says, she was often heard in those days wishing that she were in her grave. It seems so strange to see it standing there all alone, in the midst of gra.s.sy fields, so silent, and cold, and solitary. I got out of the carriage and walked about it. The short, green gra.s.s was gemmed with daisies, and sheep were peacefully feeding and resting, where was once all the life and bustle of a court.

We had no one to open the inside of the castle for us, where there are still some tolerably preserved rooms, but we strolled listlessly about, looking through the old arches, and peeping through slits and loopholes into the interior.

The last verse of Queen Mary's lamentation seemed to be sighing in the air:--

"O, soon for me shall simmer's suns Nae mair light up the morn; Nae mair for me the autumn wind Wave o'er the yellow corn.

But in the narrow house of death Let winter round me rave, And the next flowers that deck the spring Bloom on my peaceful grave."

Only yesterday, it seemed, since that poor heart was yearning and struggling, caught in the toils of this sorrowful life. How many times she looked on this landscape through sad eyes! I suppose just such little daisies grew here in the gra.s.s then, and perhaps she stooped and picked them, wishing, just as I do, that the pink did not grow on the under side of them, where it does not show. Do you know that this little daisy is the _gowan_ of Scotch poetry? So I was told by a "charming young Jessie" in Glasgow, one day when I was riding out there.

The view from Craigmiller is beautiful--Auld Reekie, Arthur's Seat, Salisbury Crags, and far down the Frith of Forth, where we can just dimly see the Ba.s.s Hock, celebrated as a prison, where the Covenanters were immured.

It was this fortress that Habakkuk Mucklewrath speaks of in his ravings, when he says, "Am not I Habakkuk Mucklewrath, whose name is changed to Magor-Missabib, because I am made a terror unto myself, and unto all that are around me? I heard it: when did I hear it? Was it not in the tower of the Ba.s.s, that overhangeth the wide, wild sea? and it howled in the winds, and it roared in the billows, and it screamed, and it whistled, and it clanged, with the screams, and the clang, and the whistle of the sea birds, as they floated, and flew, and dropped, and dived, on the bosom of the waters."

These Salisbury Crags, which overlook Edinburgh, have a very peculiar outline; they resemble an immense elephant crouching down. We pa.s.sed Mushats Cairn, where Jeanie Deans met Robertson; and saw Liberton, where Reuben Butler was a schoolmaster. n.o.body doubts, I hope, the historical accuracy of these points.

Thursday, 21st. We took cars for Aberdeen. The appropriation of old historical names to railroad stations often reminds me of Hood's whimsical lines on a possible railroad in the Holy Land. Think of having Bannockburn shouted by the station master, as the train runs whistling up to a small station house. Nothing to be seen there but broad, silent meadows, through which the burn wimples its way. Here was the very Marathon of Scotland. I suppose we know more about it from the "Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled," than we do from history; yet the real scene, as narrated by the historian, has a moral grandeur in it.

The chronicler tells us, that when on this occasion the Scots formed their line of battle, and a venerable abbot pa.s.sed along, holding up the cross before them, the whole army fell upon their knees.

"These Scots will not fight," said Edward, who was reconnoitring at a distance. "See! they are all on their knees now to beg for mercy."

"They kneel," said a lord who stood by, "but it is to G.o.d alone; trust me, those men will win or die."

The bold lyric of Burns is but an inspired kind of version of the real address which Bruce is said to have made to his followers; and whoever reads it will see that its power lies not in appeal to brute force, but to the highest elements of our nature, the love of justice, the sense of honor, and to disinterestedness, self-sacrifice, courage unto death.

These things will live and form high and imperishable elements of our nature, when mankind have learned to develop them in other spheres than that of physical force. Burns's lyric, therefore, has in it an element which may rouse the heart to n.o.ble endurance and devotion, even when the world shall learn war no more.

We pa.s.sed through the town of Stirling, whose castle, magnificently seated on a rocky throne, looks right worthy to have been the seat of Scotland's court, as it was for many years. It brought to our minds all the last scenes of the Lady of the Lake, which are laid here with a minuteness of local description and allusion characteristic of Scott.

According to our guide book, one might find there the visible counterpart of every thing which he has woven into his beautiful fiction--"the Lady's Rock, which rang to the applause of the mult.i.tude;"

"the Franciscan steeple, which pealed the merry festival;" "the sad and fatal mound," apostrophized by Douglas,--

"That oft has heard the death-axe sound As on the n.o.blest of the land, Fell the stern headsman's b.l.o.o.d.y hand;"--

the room in the castle, where "a Douglas by his sovereign bled;" and not far off the ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey. One could not but think of the old days Scott has described.

"The castle gates were open flung, The quivering drawbridge rocked and rung, And echoed loud the flinty street Beneath the coursers' clattering feet, As slowly down the steep descent Fair Scotland's king and n.o.bles went, While all along the crowded way Was jubilee and loud huzza."

The place has been long deserted as a palace; but it is one of the four fortresses, which, by the articles of union between Scotland and England, are always to be kept in repair.

We pa.s.sed by the town of Perth, the scene of the "Fair Maid's"

adventures. We had received an invitation to visit it, but for want of time were obliged to defer it till our return to Scotland.

Somewhere along here Mr. S. was quite excited by our proximity to Scone, the old crowning-place of the Scottish kings; however, the old castle is entirely demolished, and superseded by a modern mansion, the seat of the Earl of Mansfield.

Still farther on, surrounded by dark and solemn woods, stands Glamis Castle, the scene of the tragedy in Macbeth. We could see but a glimpse of it from the road, but the very sound of the name was enough to stimulate our imagination. It is still an inhabited dwelling, though much to the regret of antiquarians and lovers of the picturesque, the characteristic outworks and defences of the feudal ages, which surrounded it, have been levelled, and velvet lawns and gravel walks carried to the very door. Scott, who pa.s.sed a night there in 1793, while it was yet in its pristine condition, comments on the change mournfully, as undoubtedly a true lover of the past would. Albeit the gra.s.s plats and the gravel walks, to the eye of sense, are undoubtedly much more agreeable and convenient. Scott says in his Demonology, that he never came any where near to being overcome with a superst.i.tious feeling, except twice in his life, and one was on the night when he slept in Glamis Castle. The poetical and the practical elements in Scott's mind ran together, side by side, without mixing, as evidently as the waters of the Alleghany and Monongahela at Pittsburg. Scarcely ever a man had so much relish for the supernatural, and so little faith in it. One must confess, however, that the most sceptical might have been overcome at Glamis Castle, for its appearance, by all accounts, is weird and strange, and ghostly enough to start the dullest imagination.

On this occasion Scott says, "After a very hospitable reception from the late Peter Proctor, seneschal of the castle, I was conducted to my apartment in a distant part of the building. I must own, that when I heard door after door shut, after my conductor had retired, I began to consider myself as too far from the living, and somewhat too near the dead. We had pa.s.sed through what is called 'the King's Room,' a vaulted apartment, garnished with stags' antlers and similar trophies of the chase, and said by tradition to be the spot of Malcolm's murder, and I had an idea of the vicinity of the castle chapel. In spite of the truth of history, the whole night scene in Macbeth's castle rushed at once upon my mind, and struck my imagination more forcibly than even when I have seen its terrors represented by the late John Kemble and his inimitable sister. In a word, I experienced sensations which, though not remarkable either for timidity or superst.i.tion, did not fail to affect me to the point of being disagreeable, while they were mingled at the same time with a strange and indescribable kind of pleasure."

Externally, the building is quaint and singular enough; tall and gaunt, crested with innumerable little pepper box turrets and conical towers, like an old French chateau.

Besides the tragedy of Macbeth, another story of still more melancholy interest is connected with it, which a pen like that of Hawthorne, might work up with gloomy power.

In 1537 the young and beautiful Lady Glamis of this place was actually tried and executed for witchcraft. Only think, now! what capabilities in this old castle, with its gloomy pine shades, quaint architecture, and weird a.s.sociations, with this bit of historic verity to start upon.

Walter Scott says, there is in the castle a secret chamber; the entrance to which, by the law of the family, can be known only to three persons at once--the lord of the castle, his heir apparent, and any third person whom they might choose to take into their confidence. See, now, the materials which the past gives to the novelist or poet in these old countries. These ancient castles are standing romances, made to the author's hands. The castle started a talk upon Shakspeare, and how much of the tragedy he made up, and how much he found ready to his hand in tradition and history. It seems the story is all told in Holingshed's Chronicles; but his fertile mind has added some of the most thrilling touches, such as the sleep walking of Lady Macbeth. It always seemed to me that this tragedy had more of the melancholy majesty and power of the Greek than any thing modern. The striking difference is, that while fate was the radical element of those, free will is not less distinctly the basis of this. Strangely enough, while it commences with a supernatural oracle, there is not a trace of fatalism in it; but through all, a clear, distinct recognition of moral responsibility, of the power to resist evil, and the guilt of yielding to it. The theology of Shakspeare is as remarkable as his poetry. A strong and clear sense of man's moral responsibility and free agency, and of certain future retribution, runs through all his plays.

I enjoyed this ride to Aberdeen more than any thing we had seen yet, the country is so wild and singular. In the afternoon we came in sight of the German Ocean. The free, bracing air from the sea, and the thought that it actually _was_ the German Ocean, and that over the other side was Norway, within a day's sail of us, gave it a strange, romantic charm.

"Suppose we just run over to Norway," said one of us; and then came the idea, what we should do if we got over there, seeing none of us understood Norse.

The whole coast along here is wild and rock-bound; occasionally long points jut into the sea; the blue waves sparkle and dash against them in little jets of foam, and the sea birds dive and scream around them.

On one of these points, near the town of Stonehaven, are still seen the ruins of Dunottar Castle, bare and desolate, surrounded on all sides by the restless, moaning waves; a place justly held accursed as the scene of cruelties to the Covenanters, so appalling and brutal as to make the blood boil in the recital, even in this late day.

During the reigns of Charles and James, sovereigns whom Macaulay justly designates as Belial and Moloch, this castle was the state prison for confining this n.o.ble people. In the reign of James, one hundred and sixty-seven prisoners, men, women, and children, for refusing the oath of supremacy, were arrested at their firesides: herded together like cattle; driven at the point of the bayonet, amid the gibes, jeers, and scoffs of soldiers, up to this dreary place, and thrust promiscuously into a dark vault in this castle; almost smothered in filth and mire; a prey to pestilent disease, and to every malignity which brutality could inflict, they died here unpitied. A few escaping down the rocks were recaptured, and subjected to shocking tortures.

A moss-grown gravestone, in the parish churchyard of Dunottar, shows the last resting-place of these sufferers.

Walter Scott, who visited this place, says, "The peasantry continue to attach to the tombs of these victims an honor which they do not render to more splendid mausoleums; and when they point them out to their sons, and narrate the fate of the sufferers, usually conclude by exhorting them to be ready, should the times call for it, to resist to the death in the cause of civil and religious liberty, like their brave forefathers."

It is also related by Gilfillan, that a minister from this vicinity, having once lost his way in travelling through a distant part of Scotland, vainly solicited the services of a guide for some time, all being engaged in peat-cutting; at last one of the farmers, some of whose ancestors had been included among the sufferers, discovering that he came from this vicinity, had seen the gravestones, and could repeat the inscriptions, was willing to give up half a day's work to guide him on his way.

It is well that such spots should be venerated as sacred shrines among the descendants of the Covenanters, to whom Scotland owes what she is, and all she may become.

It was here that Scott first became acquainted with Robert Paterson, the original of Old Mortality.

Leaving Stonehaven we pa.s.sed, on a rising ground a little to our left, the house of the celebrated Barclay of Ury. It remains very much in its ancient condition, surrounded by a low stone wall, like the old fortified houses of Scotland.

Barclay of Ury was an old and distinguished soldier, who had fought under Gustavus Adolphus in Germany, and one of the earliest converts to the principles of the Friends in Scotland. As a Quaker, he became an object of hatred and abuse at the hands of the magistracy and populace; but he endured all these insults and injuries with the greatest patience and n.o.bleness of soul.

"I find more satisfaction," he said, "as well as honor, in being thus insulted for my religious principles, than when, a few years ago, it was usual for the magistrates, as I pa.s.sed the city of Aberdeen, to meet me on the road and conduct me to public entertainment in their hall, and then escort me out again, to gain my favor."

Whittier has celebrated this incident in his beautiful ballad, called "Barclay of Ury." The son of this Barclay was the author of that Apology which bears his name, and is still a standard work among the Friends.

The estate is still possessed by his descendants.

A little farther along towards Aberdeen, Mr. S. seemed to amuse himself very much with the idea, that we were coming near to Dugald Dalgetty's estate of Drumthwacket, an historical remembrance which I take to be somewhat apocryphal.

It was towards the close of the afternoon that we found ourselves crossing the Dee, in view of Aberdeen. My spirits were wonderfully elated: the grand sea scenery and fine bracing air; the n.o.ble, distant view of the city, rising with its harbor and shipping, all filled me with delight. Besides which the Dee had been enchanted for me from my childhood, by a wild old ballad which I used to hear sung to a Scottish tune, equally wild and pathetic. I repeated it to C----, and will now to you.

"The moon had climbed the highest hill That rises o'er the banks of Dee, And from her farthest summit poured Her silver light o'er tower and tree,--

When Mary laid her down to sleep, Her thoughts on Sandy far at sea, And soft and low a voice she heard, Saying, 'Mary, weep no more for me.'

She from her pillow gently raised Her head, to see who there might be; She saw young Sandy shivering stand, With pallid cheek and hollow ee.

'O Mary dear, cold is my clay; It lies beneath the stormy sea; The storm, is past, and I'm at rest; So, Mary, weep no more for me.'