This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.

RECOLLECTIONS
OF A
TOUR MADE IN SCOTLAND
A.D. 1803

BY DOROTHY WORDSWORTH

Edited by J. C. Shairp

CONTENTS.

POEMS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE JOURNAL

PREFACE.

Those who have long known the poetry of Wordsworth will be no strangers to the existence of this Journal of his sister, which is now for the first time published entire. They will have by heart those few wonderful sentences from it which here and there stand at the head of the Poet’s ‘Memorials of a Tour in Scotland in 1803.’ Especially they will remember that ‘Extract from the Journal of my Companion’ which preludes the ‘Address to Kilchurn Castle upon Loch Awe,’ and they may sometimes have asked themselves whether the prose of the sister is not as truly poetic and as memorable as her brother’s verse. If they have read the Memoirs of the Poet published by his nephew the Bishop of Lincoln, they will have found there fuller extracts from the Journal, which quite maintain the impression made by the first brief sentences. All true Wordsworthians then will welcome, I believe, the present publication. They will find in it not only new and illustrative light on those Scottish poems which they have so long known, but a faithful commentary on the character of the poet, his mode of life, and the manner of his poetry. Those who from close study of Wordsworth’s poetry know both the poet and his sister, and what they were to each other, will need nothing more than the Journal itself. If

it were likely to fall only into their hands, it might be left without one word of comment or illustration. But as it may reach some who have never read Wordsworth, and others who having read do not relish him, for the information of these something more must be said. The Journal now published does not borrow all its worth from its bearing on the great poet. It has merit and value of its own, which may commend it to some who have no heart for Wordsworth’s poetry. For the writer of it was in herself no common woman, and might have secured for herself an independent reputation, had she not chosen rather that other part, to forget and merge herself entirely in the work and reputation of her brother.

Dorothy Wordsworth was the only sister of the poet, a year and a half younger, having been born on Christmas Day 1771. The five children who composed the family, four sons and one daughter, lost their mother in 1778, when William was eight, and Dorothy six years old. The father died five years afterwards, at the close of 1783, and the family home at Cockermouth was broken up and the children scattered. Before his father’s death, William, in his ninth year, had gone with his elder brother to school at Hawkshead, by the lake of Esthwaite, and after the father died Dorothy was brought up by a cousin on her mother’s side, Miss Threlkeld, afterwards Mrs. Rawson, who lived in Halifax. During the eight years which Wordsworth spent at school, or, at any rate, from the time of his father’s death, he and his sister seem seldom, if ever, to have met.

The first college vacation in the summer of 1788 brought him back to his old school in the vale of Esthwaite, and either this or the next of his undergraduate summers

restored him to the society of his sister at Penrith. This meeting is thus described in the ‘Prelude:’—

‘In summer, making quest for works of art,
Or scenes renowned for beauty, I explored
That streamlet whose blue current works its way
Between romantic Dovedale’s spiry rocks;
Pried into Yorkshire dales, or hidden tracts
Of my own native region, and was blest
Between these sundry wanderings with a joy
Above all joys, that seemed another morn
Risen on mid-noon; blest with the presence, Friend!
Of that sole sister, her who hath been long
Dear to thee also, thy true friend and mine,
Now, after separation desolate
Restored to me—such absence that she seemed
A gift then first bestowed.’

They then together wandered by the banks of Emont, among the woods of Lowther, and ‘climbing the Border Beacon looked wistfully towards the dim regions of Scotland.’ Then and there too Wordsworth first met that young kinswoman who was his wife to be.

During the following summers the Poet was busy with walking tours in Switzerland and North Italy, his residence in France, his absorption in the French Revolution, which kept him some years longer apart from his sister. During those years Miss Wordsworth lived much with her uncle Dr. Cookson, who was a canon of Windsor and a favourite with the Court, and there met with people of more learning and refinement, but not of greater worth, than those she had left in her northern home.

In the beginning of 1794 Wordsworth, returned from his wanderings, came to visit his sister at Halifax, his head still in a whirl with revolutionary fervours. He was wandering about among his friends with no certain

dwelling-place, no fixed plan of life, his practical purposes and his opinions, political, philosophical, and religious, all alike at sea. But whatever else might remain unsettled, the bread-and-butter question, as Coleridge calls it, could not. The thought of orders, for which his friends intended him, had been abandoned; law he abominated; writing for the newspaper press seemed the only resource. In this seething state of mind he sought once more his sister’s calming society, and the two travelled together on foot from Kendal to Grasmere, from Grasmere to Keswick, ‘through the most delightful country that was ever seen.’

Towards the close of this year (1794) Wordsworth would probably have gone to London to take up the trade of a writer for the newspapers. From this however he was held back for a time by the duty of nursing his friend Raisley Calvert, who lay dying at Penrith. Early in 1795 the young man died, leaving to his friend, the young Poet, a legacy of £900. The world did not then hold Wordsworth for a poet, and had received with coldness his first attempt, ‘Descriptive Sketches and an Evening Walk,’ published two years before. But the dying youth had seen further than the world, and felt convinced that his friend, if he had leisure given him to put forth his powers, would do something which would make the world his debtor. With this view he bequeathed him the small sum above named. And seldom has such a bequest borne ampler fruit. ‘Upon the interest of the £900, £400 being laid out in annuity, with £200 deducted from the principal, and £100 a legacy to my sister, and £100 more which “The Lyrical Ballads” have brought me, my sister and I have contrived to live seven years, nearly eight.’ So wrote Wordsworth in 1805 to his friend Sir George

Beaumont. Thus at this juncture of the Poet’s fate, when to onlookers he must have seemed both outwardly and inwardly well-nigh bankrupt, Raisley Calvert’s bequest came to supply his material needs, and to his inward needs his sister became the best earthly minister. For his mind was ill at ease. The high hopes awakened in him by the French Revolution had been dashed, and his spirit, darkened and depressed, was on the verge of despair. He might have become such a man as he has pictured in the character of ‘The Solitary.’ But a good Providence brought his sister to his side and saved him. She discerned his real need and divined the remedy. By her cheerful society, fine tact, and vivid love for nature she turned him, depressed and bewildered, alike from the abstract speculations and the contemporary politics in which he had got immersed, and directed his thoughts towards truth of poetry, and the face of nature, and the healing that for him lay in these.

‘Then it was
That the beloved sister in whose sight
Those days were passed—
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self; for though bedimmed and changed
Much, as it seemed, I was no further changed
Than as a clouded or a waning moon:
She whispered still that brightness would return,
She, in the midst of all, preserved me still
A Poet, made me seek beneath that name,
And that alone, my office upon earth.

By intercourse with her and wanderings together in delightful places of his native country, he was gradually led back

‘To those sweet counsels between head and heart
Whence genuine knowledge grew.’

The brother and sister, having thus cast in their lots together, settled at Racedown Lodge in Dorsetshire in the autumn of 1795. They had there a pleasant house, with a good garden, and around them charming walks and a delightful country looking out on the distant sea. The place was very retired, with little or no society, and the post only once a week. But of employment there was no lack. The brother now settled steadily to poetic work; the sister engaged in household duties and reading, and then when work was over, there were endless walks and wanderings. Long years afterwards Miss Wordsworth spoke of Racedown as the place she looked back to with most affection. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘the first home I had.’

The poems which Wordsworth there composed were not among his best,—‘The Borderers,’ ‘Guilt or Sorrow,’ and others. He was yet only groping to find his true subjects and his own proper manner. But there was one piece there composed which will stand comparison with any tale he ever wrote. It was ‘The Ruined Cottage,’ which, under the title of the ‘Story of Margaret,’ he afterwards incorporated in the first Book of ‘The Excursion.’ It was when they had been nearly two years at Racedown that they received a guest who was destined to exercise more influence on the self-contained Wordsworth than any other man ever did. This was S. T. Coleridge. One can imagine how he would talk, interrupted only by their mutually reading aloud their respective Tragedies, both of which are now well-nigh forgotten, and by Wordsworth reading his ‘Ruined Cottage,’ which is not forgotten. Miss Wordsworth describes S. T. C., as he then was, in words that are well known. And he describes her thus, in words less known,—‘She is a woman indeed, in mind I

mean, and in heart; for her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty, but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. In every motion her innocent soul out-beams so brightly, that who saw her would say, “Guilt was a thing impossible with her.” Her information various, her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature, and her taste a perfect electrometer.’

The result of this meeting of the two poets was that the Wordsworths shifted their abode from Racedown to Alfoxden, near Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, to be near Coleridge. Alfoxden was a large furnished mansion, which the brother and sister had to themselves. ‘We are three miles from Stowey, the then abode of Coleridge,’ writes the sister, ‘and two miles from the sea. Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs, and valleys, with small brooks running down them, through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedgerows, but scattered over with trees. The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and bilberries, or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal. Walks extend for miles over the hill-tops, the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity—they are perfectly smooth, without rocks.’ It was in this neighbourhood, as the two poets loitered in the silvan combs or walked along the smooth Quantock hill-tops, looking seaward, with the ‘sole sister,’ the companion of their walks, that they struck each from the other his finest tones. It was with both of them the heyday of poetic creation. In these walks it was that Coleridge, with slight hints from Wordsworth, first chaunted the vision of the Ancient Mariner, and then alone, ‘The rueful woes of Lady

Christabel.’ This, too, was the birthday of some of the finest of the Lyrical Ballads, of ‘We are seven,’ ‘Simon Lee,’ ‘Expostulation and Reply,’ and ‘The Tables Turned,’ ‘It is the first mild day in March,’ and ‘I heard a thousand blended notes.’ Coleridge never knew again such a season of poetic creation, and Wordsworth’s tardier, if stronger, nature, received from contact with Coleridge that quickening impulse which it needed, and which it retained during all its most creative years.

But if Coleridge, with his occasional intercourse and wonderful talk, did much for Wordsworth, his sister, by her continual companionship, did far more. After the great revulsion from the excesses of the French Revolution, she was with him a continually sanative influence. That whole period, which ranged from 1795 till his settling at Grasmere at the opening of the next century, and of which the residence at Racedown and Alfoxden formed a large part, was the healing time of his spirit. And in that healing time she was the chief human minister. Somewhere in the ‘Prelude’ he tells that in early youth there was a too great sternness of spirit about him, a high but too severe moral ideal by which he judged men and things, insensible to gentler and humbler influences. He compares his soul to a high, bare craig, without any crannies in which flowers may lurk, untouched by the mellowing influences of sun and shower. His sister came with her softening influence, and sowed in it the needed flowers, and touched it with mellowing colours:

‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears,
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears
And love, and thought and joy.’

Elsewhere in the ‘Prelude’ he describes how at one time his soul had got too much under the dominion of the eye, so that he kept comparing scene with scene, instead of enjoying each for itself—craving new forms, novelties of colour or proportion, and insensible to the spirit of each place and the affections which each awakens. In contrast with this temporary mood of his own he turns to one of another temper:—

‘I knew a maid,
A young enthusiast who escaped these bonds,
Her eye was not the mistress of her heart,
She welcomed what was given, and craved no more;
Whate’er the scene presented to her view,
That was the best, to that she was attuned
By her benign simplicity of life.
Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field,
Could they have known her, would have loved; methought
Her very presence such a sweetness breathed,
That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills,
And everything she looked on, should have had
An intimation how she bore herself
Towards them and to all creatures. God delights
In such a being; for her common thoughts
Are piety, her life is gratitude.’

But it was not his sister the Poet speaks of here, but of his first meeting with her who afterwards became his wife.

The results of the residence at Racedown, but especially at Alfoxden, appeared in the shape of the first volume of the ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ which were published in the autumn of 1798 by Mr. Cottle at Bristol. This small volume opens with Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,’ and is followed by Wordsworth’s short but exquisite poems of the Alfoxden time, and is closed by the well-known lines on Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth reaches about the

highest pitch of his inspiration in this latter poem, which contains more rememberable lines than any other of his, of equal length, save perhaps the Immortality Ode. It was the result of a ramble of four or five days made by him and his sister from Alfoxden in July 1798, and was composed under circumstances ‘most pleasant,’ he says, ‘for me to remember.’ He began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it as he was entering Bristol in the evening.

Every one will recollect how, after its high reflections he turns at the close to her, ‘his dearest Friend,’ ‘his dear, dear Friend,’ and speaks of his delight to have her by his side, and of the former pleasures which he read in ‘the shooting lights of her wild eyes,’ and then the almost prophetic words with which he forebodes, too surely, that time when ‘solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief should be her portion.’

That September (1798) saw the break-up of the brief, bright companionship near Nether Stowey. Coleridge went with Wordsworth and his sister to Germany, but soon parted from them and passed on alone to Göttingen, there to study German, and lose himself in the labyrinth of German metaphysics. Wordsworth and Dorothy remained at Goslar, and, making no acquaintances, spent the winter—said to have been the coldest of the century—by the German stoves, Wordsworth writing more lyrical poems in the same vein which had been opened so happily at Alfoxden. There is in these poems no tincture of their German surroundings; they deal entirely with those which they had left on English ground. Early in spring they returned to England, to spend the summer with their friends the Hutchinsons at Sockburn-upon-Tees.

There Dorothy remained, while in September Wordsworth made with Coleridge the walking tour through the lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland, which issued in his choice of a home at Grasmere for himself and his sister.

At the close of the year Wordsworth and his sister set off and walked, driven forward by the cold, frosty winds blowing from behind, from Wensleydale over Sedbergh’s naked heights and the high range that divides the Yorkshire dales from the lake country. On the shortest day of the year (St. Thomas’s Day) they reached the small two-story cottage at the Townend of Grasmere, which, for the next eight years, was to be the poet’s home, immortalised by the work he did in it. That cottage has behind it a small orchard-plot or garden ground shelving upwards toward the woody mountains above, and in front it looks across the peaceful lake with its one green island, to the steeps of Silver-how on the farther side. Westward it looks on Helm Craig, and up the long folds of Easedale towards the range that divides Easedale from Borrowdale. In this cottage they two lived on their income of a hundred pounds a year, Dorothy doing all the household work, for they had then, it has been said, no servant. Besides this, she had time to write out all his poems—for Wordsworth himself could never bear the strain of transcribing—to read aloud to him of an afternoon or evening—at one such reading by her of Milton’s Sonnets it was that his soul took fire and rolled off his first sonnets—and to accompany him on his endless walks. Nor these alone—her eye and imagination fed him, not only with subjects for his poetry, but even with images and thoughts. What we are told of the poem of the ‘Beggars’ might be said of I know not how many more.

‘The sister’s eye was ever on the watch to provide for the poet’s pen.’ He had a most observant eye, and she also for him; and his poems are sometimes little more than poetic versions of her descriptions of the objects which she had seen; and which he treated as seen by himself. Look at the poem on the ‘Daffodils’ and compare with it these words taken from the sister’s Journal. ‘When we were in the woods below Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close by the water-side. As we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw there were a long belt of them along the shore. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about them. Some rested their heads on the stones, as on a pillow; the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, they looked so gay and glancing.’ It may also be noted that the Poet’s future wife contributed to this poem these two best lines—

‘They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude.’

Or take another description from Miss Wordsworth’s Journal of a birch-tree, ‘the lady of the woods,’ which her brother has not versified:—‘As we were going along we were stopped at once, at the distance, perhaps, of fifty yards from our favourite birch-tree: it was yielding to the gust of the wind, with all its tender twigs; the sun shone upon it, and it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower. It was a tree in shape, with stem and branches, but it was like a spirit of water.’

The life which the Poet and his sister lived during the eight years at the Townend of Grasmere stands out with

a marked individuality which it is delightful ever so often to recur to. It was as unlike the lives of most literary or other men, as the most original of his poems are unlike the ordinary run of even good poetry. Their outward life was exactly like that of the dalesmen or ‘statesmen’—for so the native yeomen proprietors are called—with whom they lived on the most friendly footing, and among whom they found their chief society. Outwardly their life was so, but inwardly it was cheered by imaginative visitings to which these were strangers. Sheltered as they then were from the agitations of the world, the severe frugality of the life they led ministered in more than one way to feed that poetry which introduced a new element into English thought. It kept the mind cool, and the eye clear, to feel once more that kinship between the outward world and the soul of man, to perceive that impassioned expression in the countenance of all nature, which, if felt by primeval men, ages of cultivation have long forgotten. It also made them wise to practise the same frugality in emotional enjoyment which they exercised in household economy. It has been well noted [0a] that this is one of Wordsworth’s chief characteristics. It is the temptation of the poetic temperament to be prodigal of passion, to demand a life always strung to the highest pitch of emotional excitement, to be never content unless when passing from fervour to fervour. No life can long endure this strain. This is specially seen in such poets as Byron and Shelley, who speedily fell from the heights of passion to the depths of languor and despondency. The same quick using up of the power of enjoyment produces the too common product of the

blasé man and the cynic. Wordsworth early perceived that all, even the richest, natures have but a very limited capacity of uninterrupted enjoyment, and that nothing is easier than to exhaust this capacity. Hence he set himself to husband it, to draw upon it sparingly, to employ it only on the purest, most natural, and most enduring objects, and not to speedily dismiss or throw them by and demand more, but to detain them till they had yielded him their utmost. From this in part it came that the commonest sights of earth and sky—a fine spring day, a sunset, even a chance traveller met on a moor, any ordinary sorrow of man’s life—yielded to him an amount of imaginative interest inconceivable to more mundane spirits. The simple healthiness and strict frugality of his household life suited well, and must have greatly assisted, that wholesome frugality of emotion which he exercised.

During those seven or eight Grasmere years, the spring of poetry which burst forth at Alfoxden, and produced the first volume of ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ flowed steadily on and found expression in other poems of like quality and spirit,—‘Hartleap Well,’ ‘The Brothers,’ ‘Michael,’ which, with others of the same order, written in Germany, appeared in the second volume of ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ And after these two volumes had gone forth, Grasmere still gave more of the same high order,—‘The Daffodils,’ ‘The Leech-Gatherer,’ and above all the ‘Ode on Immortality.’ It was too the conclusion of the ‘Prelude,’ and the beginning of the ‘Excursion.’ So that it may be said that those Grasmere years, from 1800 to 1807, mark the period when Wordsworth’s genius was in its zenith. During all this time, sister Dorothy was by his side, ministering to him, equally in body and in mind—doing the part of household servant,

and not less that of prompter and inspirer of his highest songs.

But this life of theirs, retired and uneventful as it seems, was not without its own incidents. Such was the homecoming of their younger sailor-brother John, who, in the first year of their residence at Grasmere—

‘Under their cottage roof, had gladly come
From the wild sea a cherished visitant.’

He was, what his brother calls him, ‘a silent poet,’ and had the heart and sense to feel the sterling quality of his brother’s poems, and to foretell with perfect confidence their ultimate acceptance, at the time when the critic wits who ruled the hour treated them with contempt. The two brothers were congenial spirits, and William’s poetry has many affecting allusions to his brother John, whose intention it was, when his last voyage was over, to settle in ‘Grasmere’s happy vale,’ and to devote the surplus of his fortune to his brother’s use. On his last voyage he sailed as captain of the ‘Earl of Abergavenny’ East-Indiaman, at the opening of February 1805; and on the 5th of that month, the ill-fated ship struck on the Shambles of the Bill of Portland, and the captain and most of the crew went down with her. To the brother and sister this became a permanent household sorrow. But in time they found comfort in that thought with which the Poet closes a remarkable letter on his brother’s loss,—‘So good must be better; so high must be destined to be higher.’

Another lesser incident was a short tour to the Continent, in which, as the brother and sister crossed Westminster Bridge, outside the Dover coach, both witnessed that sunrise which remains fixed for ever in the famous sonnet.

Another incident, and more important, was Wordsworth’s marriage in October 1802, when he brought home his young wife, Mary Hutchinson, his sister’s long-time friend, to their cottage at Townend. This is she whom he has sung in the lines—‘She was a phantom of delight;’ of whom he said in plain prose, ‘She has a sweetness all but angelic, simplicity the most entire, womanly self-respect and purity of heart speaking through all her looks, acts, and movements.’ The advent of Mrs. Wordsworth brought no change to Dorothy. She still continued to fill to her brother and his wife the same place which she had filled when her brother was alone, sharing in all the household duties and family interests, and still accompanying him in his rambles when Mrs. Wordsworth was detained at home. The year after the marriage, that is, in the fourth year of the Grasmere residence, after the first son was born, the brother and sister, accompanied by Coleridge, set out on that tour the Journal of which is here published. Portions of it have already appeared in the ‘Memoirs’ of Wordsworth, but it is now for the first time given in full, just as it came from the pen of Miss Wordsworth seventy years ago. As I shall have to speak of it again, I may now pass on and note the few facts that still remain to be told in illustration of the writer’s character.

In the years which followed the tour in Scotland, other children were added to Wordsworth’s family, till the small cottage at the Townend could no longer accommodate the household. The second child was the poet’s only daughter, whom after his sister he called Dorothy, generally known as Dora, for, as he tells Lady Beaumont, he could not find it in his heart to call her by another name. This second Dora occupies in Wordsworth’s later poetry the same

place which the first Dorothy held in his earlier. Aunt Dorothy’s love, as it expanded to take in each newcomer, did not lose any of its intensity towards her brother. While the uneasiness which the act of writing had always occasioned him was not diminished, weakness of eyesight increased. Then she had to write for him, she read to him, she walked with him as of old, besides sharing in all household cares. In November 1806, Wordsworth removed with his family to Coleorton, in Leicestershire, to spend the winter there in a house of Sir George Beaumont’s; ‘Our own cottage,’ he writes, ‘being far too small for our family to winter in, though we manage well enough in it during the summer.’ In the spring of 1807, Wordsworth and his wife visited London. Dorothy, who was left with the children, wrote the poem called ‘The Mother’s Return,’ as a welcome to Mrs. Wordsworth when she came back. This with two other poems, written by her for the children, one on ‘The Wind,’ the other called ‘The Cottager to her Infant,’ afterwards appeared in an edition of her brother’s poems.

This seems the proper place to give the account of Miss Wordsworth, as she appeared to De Quincey, when in 1807 he first made the acquaintance of Wordsworth, just before the Poet and his family quitted their old home in the cottage at Grasmere Townend. After speaking of Mrs. Wordsworth, he continues:—

‘Immediately behind her moved a lady, shorter, slighter, and perhaps, in all other respects, as different from her in personal characteristics as could have been wished for the most effective contrast. “Her face was of Egyptian brown;” rarely, in a woman of English birth, had I seen a more determinate gipsy tan. Her eyes were not soft as

Mrs. Wordsworth’s, nor were they fierce or bold; but they were wild and startling, and hurried in their motion. Her manner was warm, and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her, which—being alternately pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by the irresistible instincts of her temperament, and then immediately checked in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age and her maidenly condition—gave to her whole demeanour, and to her conversation, an air of embarrassment, and even of self-conflict, that was almost distressing to witness. Even her very utterance and enunciation often suffered in point of clearness and steadiness, from the agitation of her excessive organic sensibility. At times the self-counteraction and self-baffling of her feelings caused her even to stammer. But the greatest deductions from Miss Wordsworth’s attractions, and from the exceeding interest which surrounded her, in right of her character, of her history, and of the relation which she fulfilled towards her brother, were the glancing quickness of her motions, and other circumstances in her deportment (such as her stooping attitude when walking), which gave an ungraceful character to her appearance when out of doors . . . .

‘Her knowledge of literature was irregular and thoroughly unsystematic. She was content to be ignorant of many things; but what she knew, and had really mastered, lay where it could not be disturbed—in the temple of her own most fervid heart.’

It may not be amiss here to add from the same gossipy but graphic pen, a description of the Townend home, and of the way of life there, which has often before been quoted:—

‘A little semi-vestibule between two doors prefaced the entrance into what might be considered the principal room of the cottage. It was an oblong square, not above eight and a half feet high, sixteen feet long, and twelve broad, very prettily wainscoted from the floor to the ceiling with dark polished oak, slightly embellished with carving. One window there was—a perfect and unpretending cottage window—with little diamond panes, embowered at almost every season of the year with roses, and, in the summer and autumn, with a profusion of jasmine and other fragrant shrubs. From the exuberant luxuriance of the vegetation around it, this window, though tolerably large, did not furnish a very powerful light to one who entered from the open air . . . . I was ushered up a little flight of stairs, fourteen in all, to a little drawing-room, or whatever the reader chooses to call it. Wordsworth himself has described the fireplace of this room as his

“Half kitchen, and half parlour fire.”

It was not fully seven feet six inches high, and in other respects pretty nearly of the same dimensions as the rustic hall below. There was, however, in a small recess, a library of perhaps three hundred volumes, which seemed to consecrate this room as the poet’s study and composing-room, and such occasionally it was.

‘About four o’clock it might be when we arrived. At that hour in November the daylight soon declined, and in an hour and a half we were all collected about the tea-table.

‘This with the Wordsworths, under the simple rustic system of habits which they cherished then and for twenty

years after, was the most delightful meal of the day, just as dinner is in great cities, and for the same reason, because it was prolonged into a meal of leisure and conversation. That night I found myself, about eleven at night, in a pretty bedroom, about fourteen feet by twelve. Much I feared that this might turn out the best room in the house; and it illustrates the hospitality of my new friends to mention that it was . . . .

‘Next morning Miss Wordsworth I found making breakfast in the little sitting-room. No one was there, no glittering breakfast service; a kettle boiled upon the fire; and everything was in harmony with these unpretending arrangements.

‘I rarely had seen so humble a ménage; and, contrasting the dignity of the man with this honourable poverty, and this courageous avowal of it, his utter absence of all effort to disguise the simple truth of the case, I felt my admiration increased.

‘Throughout the day, which was rainy, the same style of modest hospitality prevailed. Wordsworth and his sister, myself being of the party, walked out in spite of the rain, and made the circuit of the two lakes, Grasmere and its dependency Rydal, a walk of about six miles.

‘On the third morning after my arrival in Grasmere, I found the whole family, except the two children, prepared for the expedition across the mountains. I had heard of no horses, and took it for granted that we were to walk; however, at the moment of starting, a cart, the common farmer’s cart of the country, made its appearance, and the driver was a bonny young woman of the vale. Accordingly we were all carted along to the little town or large village of Ambleside, three and a half miles distant. Our

style of travelling occasioned no astonishment; on the contrary, we met a smiling salutation wherever we appeared; Miss Wordsworth being, as I observed, the person most familiarly known of our party, and the one who took upon herself the whole expenses of the flying colloquies exchanged with stragglers on the road.’

When the family had to leave this cottage home at Townend, they migrated to Allan Bank in 1808, and there remained for three years. In the spring of 1811 they moved to the Parsonage of Grasmere, and thence, in the spring of 1813, to Rydal Mount, their final abode. Their sojourn in the Parsonage was saddened by the loss of two children, who died within six months of each other, and were laid side by side in the churchyard of Grasmere. The Parsonage looks right across the road on that burial-place, and the continual sight of this was more than they could bear. They were glad therefore to withdraw from it, and to exchange the vale of Grasmere, now filled for them with too mournful recollections, for the sweet retirement of Rydal.

Through all these changes sister Dorothy went of course with them, and shared the affliction of the bereaved parents, as she had formerly shared their happiness. In 1814, the year of the publication of the ‘Excursion,’ all of which Miss Wordsworth had transcribed, her brother made another tour in Scotland, and this time Yarrow was not unvisited. His wife and her sister went with him, but Dorothy, having stayed at home probably to tend the children, did not form one of the party, a circumstance which her brother always remembered with regret.

In the summer of 1820, however, she visited the Continent with her brother and Mrs. Wordsworth, but of this

tour no record remains. Another visit, the last but one, Wordsworth made to Scotland in 1831, accompanied by his daughter Dora. This time Yarrow was revisited in company with Sir Walter Scott, just before his last going from Tweedside. Wordsworth has chronicled his parting with Scott in two affecting poems, which if any reader does not know by heart, I would recommend him to read them in the Appendix to this Journal. [0b]

But by the time this expedition was made, Dorothy was an invalid confined to a sick-room. In the year 1829 she was seized by a severe illness, which so prostrated her, body and mind, that she never recovered from it. The unceasing strain of years had at last worn out that buoyant frame and fervid spirit. She had given herself to one work, and that work was done. To some it may seem a commonplace one,—to live in and for her brother, to do by him a sister’s duty. With original powers which, had she chosen to set up on her own account, might have won for her high literary fame, she was content to forget herself, to merge all her gifts and all her interests in those of her brother. She thus made him other and higher than he could have been had he stood alone, and enabled him to render better service to the world than without her ministry he could have done. With this she was well content. It is sad to think that when the world at last knew him for what he was, the great original poet of this century, she who had helped to make him so was almost past rejoicing in it. It is said that during those latter years he never spoke of her without his voice being sensibly softened and saddened. The return of the day when they two first came to Grasmere was to him a solemn

anniversary. But though so enfeebled, she still lived on, and survived her brother by nearly five years. Her death took place at Rydal Mount in January 1855, at the age of eighty-three. And now, beside her brother and his wife and others of that household, she rests in the green Grasmere churchyard, with the clear waters of Rotha murmuring by.

To return to the Journal. As we read it, let us bear always in mind that it was not meant for us, for the world, or ‘the general reader,’ but to be listened to by a small family circle, gathered round the winter fire. We should therefore remember that in reading it we are, as it were, allowed, after seventy years, to overhear what was not primarily meant for our ears at all. This will account for a fulness and minuteness of detail which to unsympathetic persons may perhaps appear tedious. But the writer was telling her story, not for unsympathetic persons, not for ‘general readers,’ much less for literary critics, but for ‘the household hearts that were her own,’ on whose sympathy she could reckon, even down to the minutest circumstances of this journey. And so there is no attempt at fine or sensational writing, as we now call it, no attempt at that modern artifice which they call word-painting. But there is the most absolute sincerity, the most perfect fidelity to her own experience, the most single-minded endeavour to set down precisely the things they saw and heard and felt, just as they saw and felt and heard them, while moving on their quiet way. And hence perhaps the observant reader who submits himself to the spirit that pervades this Journal may find in its effortless narrative a truthfulness, a tenderness of observation, a ‘vivid exactness,’ a far-reaching and suggestive insight,

for which he might look in vain in more studied productions.

Another thing to note is the historic value that now attaches to this Journal. It marks the state of Scotland, and the feeling with which the most finely gifted Englishmen came to it seventy years since, at a time before the flood of English interest and ‘tourism’ had set in across the Border. The Wordsworths were of course not average English people. They came with an eye awake and trained for nature, and a heart in sympathy with nature and with man in a degree not common either in that or in any other age. They were north-country English too, and between these and the Lowland Scots there was less difference of fibre and of feeling than there generally is between Cumbrians and Londoners. All their lives they had been wont to gaze across the Solway on the dimly-outlined mountains of the Scottish Border. This alone and their love of scenery and of wandering were enough, apart from other inducement, to have lured them northward. But that tide of sentiment, which in our day has culminated in our annual tourist inundation, was already setting in. It had been growing ever since ‘The Forty-five,’ when the sudden descent of the Highland host on England, arrested only by the disastrous pause at Derby, had frightened the Londoners from their propriety, and all but scared the Second George beyond seas. This terror in time subsided, but the interest in the northern savages still survived, and was further stimulated when, about fifteen years after, the portent of Macpherson’s Ossian burst on the astonished world of literature. Then about eleven years later, in 1773, the burly and bigoted English Lexicographer buttoned his great-coat up to the throat and set out on a Highland

sheltie from Inverness, on that wonderful ‘Tour to the Hebrides,’ by which he determined to extinguish for ever Macpherson and his impudent forgeries. Such a tour seemed at that day as adventurous as would now be a journey to the heart of Africa, and the stories which Johnson told of the Hebrideans and their lives let in on his Cockney readers the impression of a world as strange as any which Livingstone could now report of. Then, in 1786, came Burns, whose poetry, if it did not reach the ordinary Englishman of the literary class, at least thrilled the hearts of English poets. That Wordsworth had felt his power we know, for, independent as he stood, and little wont to acknowledge his indebtedness to any, he yet confesses in one place that it was Burns who first set him on the right track. This series of surprises coming from beyond the Tweed had drawn the eyes of Englishmen towards Scotland. Especially two such voices—Ossian speaking from the heart of the Highlands, Burns concentrating in his song the whole strength and the weakness also of Lowland character—seemed to call across the Borders on Wordsworth to come and look on their land. And during all the first days of that journey the thought of Burns and his untimely end, then so recent, lay heavy on his heart.

Again, it were well, as we read, to remember the time when this Diary was written. It was before Scott was known as an original poet, before he had given anything to the world save ‘The Border Minstrelsy.’ We are accustomed to credit Scott with whatever enchantment invests Scotland in the eyes of the English, and of foreigners. And doubtless a large portion of it is due to him, but perhaps not quite so much as we are apt to fancy. We

commonly suppose that it was he who first discovered the Trossachs and Loch Katrine, and revealed them to the world in ‘The Lady of the Lake.’ Yet they must have had some earlier renown, enough to make Wordsworth, travelling two years before the appearance even of Scott’s ‘Lay,’ turn aside to go in search of them.

To Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge this was the first time they had set foot on Scottish ground. Wordsworth himself seems to have crossed the Border two years before this, though of that journey there is no record remaining. As they set forth from Keswick on that August morning one can well believe that

‘Their exterior semblance did belie
Their soul’s immensity.’

None of the three paid much regard to the outward man. Coleridge, perhaps, in soiled nankeen trousers, and with the blue and brass in which he used to appear in Unitarian pulpits, buttoned round his growing corpulency; Wordsworth in a suit of russet, not to say dingy, brown, with a broad flapping straw hat to protect his weak eyesight. And as for Miss Wordsworth, we may well believe that in her dress she thought more of use than of ornament. These three, mounted on their outlandish Irish car, with a horse, now gibbing and backing over a bank, now reduced to a walk, with one of the poets leading him by the head, must have cut but a sorry figure, and wakened many a smile and gibe in passers-by. As they wound their way up Nithsdale, one can well imagine how some Border lord or laird, riding, or driving past in smart equipage, would look on them askance, taking them for what Burns calls a ‘wheen gangrel bodies,’

or for a set of Dominie Sampsons from the other side the Border, or for some offshoot of the ‘Auld Licht’ Seceders. Poor Coleridge, ill at ease, and in the dumps all the way, stretched asleep on the car cushions, while the other two were admiring the scenery, could not have added to their hilarity. And it must have been a relief to Wordsworth and his sister, though the Journal hints it not, when he left them at Loch Lomond. But however grotesque their appearance may have been, they bore within them that which made their journey rich in delight to themselves, not to say to others. They were then both in their prime, Wordsworth and his sister being just past thirty. They had the observant eye and the feeling heart which money cannot buy. No doubt to them, accustomed to the cleanness and comfort of the farms and cottages of Westmoreland, those ‘homes of ancient peace,’ with their warm stone porches and their shelter of household sycamores, the dirt and discomfort of the inns and of the humbler abodes they entered must have been repulsive enough. Even the gentlemen’s seats had to them an air of neglect and desolation, and the new plantations of larch and fir with which they had then begun to be surrounded, gave an impression of rawness, barrenness, and lack of geniality. Nor less in large towns, as in Glasgow, were they struck by the dulness and dreariness in the aspect and demeanour of the dim ‘common populations.’ They saw and felt these things as keenly as any could do. But, unlike ordinary travellers, they were not scared or disgusted by them. They did not think that the first appearance was all. They felt and saw that there was more behind. With lively interest they note the healthy young women travelling barefoot, though well

dressed, the children without shoes or stockings, the barefoot boys, some with their caps wreathed with wild-flowers, others who could read Virgil or Homer. They pass, as friends, beneath the humble cottage roofs, look with sympathy on the countenances of the inmates, partake, when bidden, of their homely fare, enter feelingly into their pathetic human histories. They came there not to criticise, but to know and feel.

Again, their intense love for their Westmoreland dales and meres did not send them to look on those of Scotland with a sense of rivalry, but of brotherhood. They were altogether free from that vulgar habit of comparing scene with scene which so poisons the eye to all true perception of natural beauty,—as though the one great end were to graduate all the various scenes of nature in the list of a competitive examination. Hence whatever new they met with, they were ready to welcome and enjoy. They could appreciate the long, bare, houseless, treeless glens, not less than the well-wooded lakes. And yet Miss Wordsworth’s home-heartedness makes her long for some touches of home and human habitation to break the long bleak solitudes she passed through. The absolute desolation of the Moor of Rannoch, so stirring to some, was evidently too much for her.

‘The loneliness
Loaded her heart, the desert tired her eye.’

Again, throughout the Journal we see how to her eye man and nature interact on each other. That deep feeling, so strong in her brother’s poetry, of the interest that man gives to nature, and still more the dignity that nature gives to man, is not less strongly felt by her. It is man seen

against a great background of nature and solitude that most stirs her imagination. The woman sitting sole by the margin of Daer Water, or the old man alone in the corn-field, or the boy solitary on the Moor of Crawfordjohn—these in her prose are pictures quite akin and equal to many a one that occurs in her brother’s verse. This sense of man with ‘grandeur circumfused,’ ‘the sanctity of nature given to man,’ is as primary in her as in her brother. I cannot believe that she merely learnt it from him. It must have been innate in both, derived by both from one original source.

One is struck throughout by the absence of all effort at fine or imaginative writing. But this only makes more effective those natural gleams that come unbidden. After the dulness of Glasgow and the Vale of Leven comes that wakening up to very ecstasy among the islands of Loch Lomond,—that new world, magical, enchanting. And then that plunge into the heart of the Highlands, when they find themselves by the shores of Loch Katrine, alone with the native people there,—the smell of the peat-reek within, and the scent of the bog-myrtle without; those ‘gentle ardours’ that awake, as they move along Lochawe-side and look into the cove of Cruachan, or catch that Appin glen by Loch Linnhe, at the bright sunset hour, enlivened by the haymaking people; or that new rapture they drink in at the first glimpse, from Loch Etive shores, of the blue Atlantic Isles. And then what a fitting close to such a tour was that meeting with Walter Scott; the two great poets of their time, both in the morning of their power, and both still unknown, joining hands of friendship which was to last for life!

But I have said more than enough. Those who care

for the things which the Wordsworths cared for will find in this quiet narrative much to their mind. And they will find from it some new light shed on those delightful poems, memorial of that tour, which remain as an undying track of glory illuminating the path these two trod. These poems are printed in the Appendix, that those who know them well may read them once again, and that those who do not know them, except by Guide-book extracts, may turn to them, after reading the Journal, and try whether they cannot find in them something which they never found elsewhere.

There is one entry, the last in the Journal, made as late as 1832, which alludes to a fact which, but for this note, might have been left without comment. [0c] Throughout the whole tour no distinction seems to have been made between Saturday and Sunday. One would have thought that, if nothing else, sympathy at least, which they did not lack, would have led Wordsworth and his sister to turn aside and share the Sabbath worship of the native people. Even the tired jade might have put in his claim for his Sabbath rest; not to mention the scandal which the sight of Sunday travellers in lonely parts of Scotland must then have caused, and the name they must many a

time have earned for themselves, of ‘Sabbath-breakers.’ This last entry of 1832, however, marks a change, which, if it came to Dorothy, came not less decidedly to her brother. This change has been often remarked on, and has been stigmatised by ‘the enlightened ones’ as ‘the reaction.’ They say that the earlier nature-worship, which they call Pantheistic, speaks the true and genuine man; the later and more consciously Christian mood they regard as the product, not of deepened experience, but of timidity, or at least as the sign of decreasing insight. It is not so that I would interpret it. Wordsworth and his sister, with their rare gift of soul and eye, saw further into nature, and felt it more profoundly than common men can, and had no doubt found there something which the gross world dreams not of. They recovered thence a higher teaching, which men for ages had lost. They learnt to think of God as being actually very near to them in all they saw and heard; not as the mechanical Artificer, who makes a world and then dwells aloof from it, but as

‘The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves.’

In nature, which to most eyes is but a dull lifeless mass, impelled by dead mechanic movements, their finer spirits were aware of a breathing life, a living Presence, distinct, yet not alien from, their own spirits, and thence they drank life, and strength, and joy. And not in nature alone, but from their own hearts, from the deep places of their moral nature, and from their minglings with their fellow-men, they could oftentimes overhear

‘The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.’

And through this they learned to feel for themselves, and not conventionally, the upholding presence of One on whom the soul’s ‘dark foundations rest.’ Likely enough, in the prime of their strength they may have imagined that these teachings coming from nature and from man were in themselves enough.

But when sorrow and bereavement came, and with them the deepened sense of sin and of utter need, they learned that in nature alone was nothing which in the end they could abide by. They had been true to the lights they had, and they were led on to higher. They were led to go beyond nature and man for their ultimate support, and to overhear from that higher region another, diviner ‘tone, into which all the strains of this world’s music are ultimately to be resolved.’ The Poet, nor less his sister, came at length to feel, what philosophers find so hard to believe,—that The Being whom he had long known as near him in the solitudes of nature, as close to the beatings of his own heart, was He who had so loved him as to die for him. True it is that this later and more distinctly Christian experience is but faintly reflected in Wordsworth’s poetry compared with the earlier naturalistic mood. But this is explained by the fact that before the later experience became prominent, the early fervour of poetic creation had already passed. Not the less for this, however, was the poet’s later conviction a riper, more advanced wisdom—not a retrogression.

J. C. Shairp.

Cuilaluinn, June 1874.

FIRST WEEK.

William and I parted from Mary on Sunday afternoon, August 14th, 1803; and William, Coleridge, and I left Keswick on Monday morning, the 15th, at twenty minutes after eleven o’clock. The day was very hot; we walked up the hills, and along all the rough road, which made our walking half the day’s journey. Travelled under the foot of Carrock, a mountain covered with stones on the lower part; above, it is very rocky, but sheep pasture there; we saw several where there seemed to be no grass to tempt them. Passed the foot of Grisdale and Mosedale, both pastoral valleys, narrow, and soon terminating in the mountains—green, with scattered trees and houses, and each a beautiful stream. At Grisdale our horse backed upon a steep bank where the road was not fenced, just above a pretty mill at the foot of the valley; and we had a second threatening of a disaster in crossing a narrow bridge

between the two dales; but this was not the fault of either man or horse. Slept at Mr. Younghusband’s public-house, Hesket Newmarket. In the evening walked to Caldbeck Falls, a delicious spot in which to breathe out a summer’s day—limestone rocks, hanging trees, pools, and waterbreaks—caves and caldrons which have been honoured with fairy names, and no doubt continue in the fancy of the neighbourhood to resound with fairy revels.

Tuesday, August 16th.—Passed Rose Castle upon the Caldew, an ancient building of red stone with sloping gardens, an ivied gateway, velvet lawns, old garden walls, trim flower-borders with stately and luxuriant flowers. We walked up to the house and stood some minutes watching the swallows that flew about restlessly, and flung their shadows upon the sunbright walls of the old building; the shadows glanced and twinkled, interchanged and crossed each other, expanded and shrunk up, appeared and disappeared every instant; as I observed to William and Coleridge, seeming more like living things than the birds themselves. Dined at Carlisle; the town in a bustle with the assizes; so many strange faces known in former times and recognised, that it half seemed as if I ought to know them all, and, together with the noise, the fine ladies, etc., they put me into confusion. This day Hatfield was condemned [2] I stood at the door of the gaoler’s house, where he was; William entered the house, and Coleridge saw him; I fell into conversation with a debtor, who told me in a dry way that he was ‘far over-learned,’ and another man observed to William that we might learn from Hatfield’s fate ‘not to meddle with pen and ink.’ We gave a shilling to my companion, whom we found out to be

a friend of the family, a fellow-sailor with my brother John [3] ‘in Captain Wordsworth’s ship.’ Walked upon the city walls, which are broken down in places and crumbling away, and most disgusting from filth. The city and neighbourhood of Carlisle disappointed me; the banks of the river quite flat, and, though the holms are rich, there is not much beauty in the vale from the want of trees—at least to the eye of a person coming from England, and, I scarcely know how, but to me the holms had not a natural look; there was something townish in their appearance, a dulness in their strong deep green. To Longtown—not very interesting, except from the long views over the flat country; the road rough, chiefly newly mended. Reached Longtown after sunset, a town of brick houses belonging chiefly to the Graham family. Being in the form of a cross and not long, it had been better called Crosstown. There are several shops, and it is not a very small place; but I could not meet with a silver thimble, and bought a halfpenny brass one. Slept at the Graham’s Arms, a large inn. Here, as everywhere else, the people seemed utterly insensible of the enormity of Hatfield’s offences; the ostler told William that he was quite a gentleman, paid every one genteelly, etc. etc. He and ‘Mary’ had walked together to Gretna Green; a heavy rain came on when they were there; a returned chaise happened to pass, and the driver would have taken them up; but ‘Mr. Hope’s’ carriage was to be sent for; he did not choose to accept the chaise-driver’s offer.

Wednesday, August 17th.—Left Longtown after breakfast. About half-a-mile from the town a guide-post and two roads, to Edinburgh and Glasgow; we took the

left-hand road, to Glasgow. Here saw a specimen of the luxuriance of the heath-plant, as it grows in Scotland; it was in the enclosed plantations—perhaps sheltered by them. These plantations appeared to be not well grown for their age; the trees were stunted. Afterwards the road, treeless, over a peat-moss common—the Solway Moss; here and there an earth-built hut with its peat stack, a scanty growing willow hedge round the kailgarth, perhaps the cow pasturing near,—a little lass watching it,—the dreary waste cheered by the endless singing of larks.

We enter Scotland by crossing the river Sark; on the Scotch side of the bridge the ground is unenclosed pasturage; it was very green, and scattered over with that yellow flowered plant which we call grunsel; the hills heave and swell prettily enough; cattle feeding; a few corn fields near the river. At the top of the hill opposite is Springfield, a village built by Sir William Maxwell—a dull uniformity in the houses, as is usual when all built at one time, or belonging to one individual, each just big enough for two people to live in, and in which a family, large or small as it may happen, is crammed. There the marriages are performed. Further on, though almost contiguous, is Gretna Green, upon a hill and among trees. This sounds well, but it is a dreary place; the stone houses dirty and miserable, with broken windows. There is a pleasant view from the churchyard over Solway Firth to the Cumberland mountains. Dined at Annan. On our left as we travelled along appeared the Solway Firth and the mountains beyond, but the near country dreary. Those houses by the roadside which are built of stone are comfortless and dirty; but we peeped into a clay ‘biggin’ that was very ‘canny,’ and

I daresay will be as warm as a swallow’s nest in winter. The town of Annan made me think of France and Germany; many of the houses large and gloomy, the size of them outrunning the comforts. One thing which was like Germany pleased me: the shopkeepers express their calling by some device or painting; bread-bakers have biscuits, loaves, cakes painted on their window-shutters; blacksmiths horses’ shoes, iron tools, etc. etc.; and so on through all trades.

Reached Dumfries at about nine o’clock—market-day; met crowds of people on the road, and every one had a smile for us and our car . . . . The inn was a large house, and tolerably comfortable; Mr. Rogers and his sister, whom we had seen at our own cottage at Grasmere a few days before, had arrived there that same afternoon on their way to the Highlands; but we did not see them till the next morning, and only for about a quarter of an hour.

Thursday, August 18th.—Went to the churchyard where Burns is buried. A bookseller accompanied us. He showed us the outside of Burns’s house, where he had lived the last three years of his life, and where he died. It has a mean appearance, and is in a bye situation, whitewashed; dirty about the doors, as almost all Scotch houses are; flowering plants in the windows.

Went on to visit his grave. He lies at a corner of the churchyard, and his second son, Francis Wallace, beside him. There is no stone to mark the spot; [5] but a hundred guineas have been collected, to be expended on some sort of monument. ‘There,’ said the bookseller, pointing to a pompous monument, ‘there lies Mr. Such-a-one’—I have

forgotten his name,—‘a remarkably clever man; he was an attorney, and hardly ever lost a cause he undertook. Burns made many a lampoon upon him, and there they rest, as you see.’ We looked at the grave with melancholy and painful reflections, repeating to each other his own verses:—

‘Is there a man whose judgment clear
Can others teach the course to steer,
Yet runs himself life’s mad career
Wild as the wave?—
Here let him pause, and through a tear
Survey this grave.
The Poor Inhabitant below
Was quick to learn, and wise to know,
And keenly felt the friendly glow
And softer flame;
But thoughtless follies laid him low,
And stain’d his name.’

The churchyard is full of grave-stones and expensive monuments in all sorts of fantastic shapes—obelisk-wise, pillar-wise, etc. In speaking of Gretna Green, I forgot to mention that we visited the churchyard. The church is like a huge house; indeed, so are all the churches, with a steeple, not a square tower or spire,—a sort of thing more like a glass-house chimney than a Church of England steeple; grave-stones in abundance, few verses, yet there were some—no texts. Over the graves of married women the maiden name instead of that of the husband, ‘spouse’ instead of ‘wife,’ and the place of abode preceded by ‘in’ instead of ‘of.’ When our guide had left us, we turned again to Burns’s house. Mrs. Burns was gone to spend some time by the sea-shore with her children. We spoke to the servant-maid at the door, who invited us forward, and we sate down in the parlour. The walls were

coloured with a blue wash; on one side of the fire was a mahogany desk, opposite to the window a clock, and over the desk a print from the ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night,’ which Burns mentions in one of his letters having received as a present. The house was cleanly and neat in the inside, the stairs of stone, scoured white, the kitchen on the right side of the passage, the parlour on the left. In the room above the parlour the Poet died, and his son after him in the same room. The servant told us she had lived five years with Mrs. Burns, who was now in great sorrow for the death of ‘Wallace.’ She said that Mrs. Burns’s youngest son was at Christ’s Hospital.

We were glad to leave Dumfries, which is no agreeable place to them who do not love the bustle of a town that seems to be rising up to wealth. We could think of little else but poor Burns, and his moving about on that unpoetic ground. In our road to Brownhill, the next stage, we passed Ellisland at a little distance on our right, his farmhouse. We might there have had more pleasure in looking round, if we had been nearer to the spot; but there is no thought surviving in connexion with Burns’s daily life that is not heart-depressing. Travelled through the vale of Nith, here little like a vale, it is so broad, with irregular hills rising up on each side, in outline resembling the old-fashioned valances of a bed. There is a great deal of arable land; the corn ripe; trees here and there—plantations, clumps, coppices, and a newness in everything. So much of the gorse and broom rooted out that you wonder why it is not all gone, and yet there seems to be almost as much gorse and broom as corn; and they grow one among another you know not how. Crossed the Nith; the vale becomes narrow, and very pleasant;

cornfields, green hills, clay cottages; the river’s bed rocky, with woody banks. Left the Nith about a mile and a half, and reached Brownhill, a lonely inn, where we slept. The view from the windows was pleasing, though some travellers might have been disposed to quarrel with it for its general nakedness; yet there was abundance of corn. It is an open country—open, yet all over hills. At a little distance were many cottages among trees, that looked very pretty. Brownhill is about seven or eight miles from Ellisland. I fancied to myself, while I was sitting in the parlour, that Burns might have caroused there, for most likely his rounds extended so far, and this thought gave a melancholy interest to the smoky walls. It was as pretty a room as a thoroughly dirty one could be—a square parlour painted green, but so covered over with smoke and dirt that it looked not unlike green seen through black gauze. There were three windows, looking three ways, a buffet ornamented with tea-cups, a superfine largeish looking-glass with gilt ornaments spreading far and wide, the glass spotted with dirt, some ordinary alehouse pictures, and above the chimney-piece a print in a much better style—as William guessed, taken from a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds—of some lady of quality, in the character of Euphrosyne. ‘Ay,’ said the servant girl, seeing that we looked at it, ‘there’s many travellers would give a deal for that, it’s more admired than any in the house.’ We could not but smile; for the rest were such as may be found in the basket of any Italian image and picture hawker.

William and I walked out after dinner; Coleridge was not well, and slept upon the carriage cushions. We made our way to the cottages among the little hills and knots of wood, and then saw what a delightful country

this part of Scotland might be made by planting forest trees. The ground all over heaves and swells like a sea; but for miles there are neither trees nor hedgerows, only ‘mound’ fences and tracts; or slips of corn, potatoes, clover—with hay between, and barren land; but near the cottages many hills and hillocks covered with wood. We passed some fine trees, and paused under the shade of one close by an old mansion that seemed from its neglected state to be inhabited by farmers. But I must say that many of the ‘gentlemen’s’ houses which we have passed in Scotland have an air of neglect, and even of desolation. It was a beech, in the full glory of complete and perfect growth, very tall, with one thick stem mounting to a considerable height, which was split into four ‘thighs,’ as Coleridge afterwards called them, each in size a fine tree. Passed another mansion, now tenanted by a schoolmaster; many boys playing upon the lawn. I cannot take leave of the country which we passed through to-day, without mentioning that we saw the Cumberland mountains within half a mile of Ellisland, Burns’s house, the last view we had of them. Drayton has prettily described the connexion which this neighbourhood has with ours when he makes Skiddaw say—

‘Scurfell [9a] from the sky,
That Anadale [9b] doth crown, with a most amorous eye,
Salutes me every day, or at my pride looks grim,
Oft threatning me with clouds, as I oft threatning him.’

These lines recurred to William’s memory, and we talked of Burns, and of the prospect he must have had, perhaps from his own door, of Skiddaw and his companions, indulging ourselves in the fancy that we might have been

personally known to each other, and he have looked upon those objects with more pleasure for our sakes. We talked of Coleridge’s children and family, then at the foot of Skiddaw, and our own new-born John a few miles behind it; while the grave of Burns’s son, which we had just seen by the side of his father, and some stories heard at Dumfries respecting the dangers his surviving children were exposed to, filled us with melancholy concern, which had a kind of connexion with ourselves. In recollection of this, William long afterwards wrote the following Address to the sons of the ill-fated poet:—

Ye now are panting up life’s hill,
’Tis twilight time of good and ill,
And more than common strength and skill
Must ye display,
If ye would give the better will
Its lawful sway.

Strong-bodied if ye be to bear
Intemperance with less harm, beware,
But if your Father’s wit ye share,
Then, then indeed,
Ye Sons of Burns, for watchful care
There will be need.

For honest men delight will take
To shew you favour for his sake,
Will flatter you, and Fool and Rake
Your steps pursue,
And of your Father’s name will make
A snare for you.

Let no mean hope your souls enslave,
Be independent, generous, brave;
Your Father such example gave,
And such revere,
But be admonished by his grave,
And think and fear. [11]

Friday, August 19th.—Open country for a considerable way. Passed through the village of Thornhill, built by the Duke of Queensberry; the ‘brother-houses’ so small that they might have been built to stamp a character of insolent pride on his own huge mansion of Drumlanrigg, which is full in view on the opposite side of the Nith. This mansion is indeed very large; but to us it appeared like a gathering together of little things. The roof is broken into a hundred pieces, cupolas, etc., in the shape of casters, conjuror’s balls, cups, and the like. The situation would be noble if the woods had been left standing; but they have been cut down not long ago, and the hills above and below the house are quite bare. About a mile and a half from Drumlanrigg is a turnpike gate at the top of a hill. We left our car with the man, and turned aside into a field where we looked down upon the Nith, which runs far below in a deep and rocky channel; the banks woody; the view pleasant down the river towards Thornhill, an open country—corn fields, pastures, and scattered trees. Returned to the turnpike house, a cold spot upon a common, black cattle feeding close to the door. Our road led us down the hill to the side of the Nith, and we travelled along its banks for some miles. Here were clay cottages perhaps every half or quarter of a mile. The bed of the stream rough with rocks; banks irregular, now woody, now bare;

here a patch of broom, there of corn, then of pasturage; and hills green or heathy above. We were to have given our horse meal and water at a public-house in one of the hamlets we passed through, but missed the house, for, as is common in Scotland, it was without a sign-board. Travelled on, still beside the Nith, till we came to a turnpike house, which stood rather high on the hill-side, and from the door we looked a long way up and down the river. The air coldish, the wind strong.

We asked the turnpike man to let us have some meal and water. He had no meal, but luckily we had part of a feed of corn brought from Keswick, and he procured some hay at a neighbouring house. In the meantime I went into the house, where was an old man with a grey plaid over his shoulders, reading a newspaper. On the shelf lay a volume of the Scotch Encyclopædia, a History of England, and some other books. The old man was a caller by the way. The man of the house came back, and we began to talk. He was very intelligent; had travelled all over England, Scotland, and Ireland as a gentleman’s servant, and now lived alone in that lonesome place. He said he was tired of his bargain, for he feared he should lose by it. And he had indeed a troublesome office, for coal-carts without number were passing by, and the drivers seemed to do their utmost to cheat him. There is always something peculiar in the house of a man living alone. This was but half-furnished, yet nothing seemed wanting for his comfort, though a female who had travelled half as far would have needed fifty other things. He had no other meat or drink in the house but oat bread and cheese—the cheese was made with the addition of seeds—and some skimmed milk. He gave us of his bread and cheese, and milk, which proved to be sour.

We had yet ten or eleven miles to travel, and no food with us. William lay under the wind in a corn-field below the house, being not well enough to partake of the milk and bread. Coleridge gave our host a pamphlet, ‘The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies;’ he was well acquainted with Burns’s poems. There was a politeness and a manly freedom in this man’s manners which pleased me very much. He told us that he had served a gentleman, a captain in the army—he did not know who he was, for none of his relations had ever come to see him, but he used to receive many letters—that he had lived near Dumfries till they would let him stay no longer, he made such havoc with the game; his whole delight from morning till night, and the long year through, was in field sports; he would be on his feet the worst days in winter, and wade through snow up to the middle after his game. If he had company he was in tortures till they were gone; he would then throw off his coat and put on an old jacket not worth half-a-crown. He drank his bottle of wine every day, and two if he had better sport than usual. Ladies sometimes came to stay with his wife, and he often carried them out in an Irish jaunting-car, and if they vexed him he would choose the dirtiest roads possible, and spoil their clothes by jumping in and out of the car, and treading upon them. ‘But for all that’—and so he ended all—‘he was a good fellow, and a clever fellow, and he liked him well.’ He would have ten or a dozen hares in the larder at once, he half maintained his family with game, and he himself was very fond of eating of the spoil—unusual with true heart-and-soul sportsmen.

The man gave us an account of his farm where he had lived, which was so cheap and pleasant that we thought

we should have liked to have had it ourselves. Soon after leaving the turnpike house we turned up a hill to the right, the road for a little way very steep, bare hills, with sheep.

After ascending a little while we heard the murmur of a stream far below us, and saw it flowing downwards on our left, towards the Nith, and before us, between steep green hills, coming along a winding valley. The simplicity of the prospect impressed us very much. There was a single cottage by the brook side; the dell was not heathy, but it was impossible not to think of Peter Bell’s Highland Girl.

We now felt indeed that we were in Scotland; there was a natural peculiarity in this place. In the scenes of the Nith it had not been the same as England, but yet not simple, naked Scotland. The road led us down the hill, and now there was no room in the vale but for the river and the road; we had sometimes the stream to the right, sometimes to the left. The hills were pastoral, but we did not see many sheep; green smooth turf on the left, no ferns. On the right the heath-plant grew in abundance, of the most exquisite colour; it covered a whole hillside, or it was in streams and patches. We travelled along the vale without appearing to ascend for some miles; all the reaches were beautiful, in exquisite proportion, the hills seeming very high from being so near to us. It might have seemed a valley which nature had kept to herself for pensive thoughts and tender feelings, but that we were reminded at every turning of the road of something beyond by the coal-carts which were travelling towards us. Though these carts broke in upon the tranquillity of the glen, they added much to the picturesque effect of the different views, which

indeed wanted nothing, though perfectly bare, houseless, and treeless.

After some time our road took us upwards towards the end of the valley. Now the steeps were heathy all around. Just as we began to climb the hill we saw three boys who came down the cleft of a brow on our left; one carried a fishing-rod, and the hats of all were braided with honeysuckles; they ran after one another as wanton as the wind. I cannot express what a character of beauty those few honeysuckles in the hats of the three boys gave to the place: what bower could they have come from? We walked up the hill, met two well-dressed travellers, the woman barefoot. Our little lads before they had gone far were joined by some half-dozen of their companions, all without shoes and stockings. They told us they lived at Wanlockhead, the village above, pointing to the top of the hill; they went to school and learned Latin, Virgil, and some of them Greek, Homer, but when Coleridge began to inquire further, off they ran, poor things! I suppose afraid of being examined.

When, after a steep ascent, we had reached the top of the hill, we saw a village about half a mile before us on the side of another hill, which rose up above the spot where we were, after a descent, a sort of valley or hollow. Nothing grew upon this ground, or the hills above or below, but heather, yet round about the village—which consisted of a great number of huts, all alike, and all thatched, with a few larger slated houses among them, and a single modern-built one of a considerable size—were a hundred patches of cultivated ground, potatoes, oats, hay, and grass. We were struck with the sight of haycocks fastened down with aprons, sheets,

pieces of sacking—as we supposed, to prevent the wind from blowing them away. We afterwards found that this practice was very general in Scotland. Every cottage seemed to have its little plot of ground, fenced by a ridge of earth; this plot contained two or three different divisions, kail, potatoes, oats, hay; the houses all standing in lines, or never far apart; the cultivated ground was all together also, and made a very strange appearance with its many greens among the dark brown hills, neither tree nor shrub growing; yet the grass and the potatoes looked greener than elsewhere, owing to the bareness of the neighbouring hills; it was indeed a wild and singular spot—to use a woman’s illustration, like a collection of patchwork, made of pieces as they might have chanced to have been cut by the mantua-maker, only just smoothed to fit each other, the different sorts of produce being in such a multitude of plots, and those so small and of such irregular shapes. Add to the strangeness of the village itself, that we had been climbing upwards, though gently, for many miles, and for the last mile and a half up a steep ascent, and did not know of any village till we saw the boys who had come out to play. The air was very cold, and one could not help thinking what it must be in winter, when those hills, now ‘red brown,’ should have their three months’ covering of snow.

The village, as we guessed, is inhabited by miners; the mines belong to the Duke of Queensberry. The road to the village, down which the lads scampered away, was straight forward. I must mention that we met, just after we had parted from them, another little fellow, about six years old, carrying a bundle over his shoulder; he seemed poor and half starved, and was scratching his fingers, which were

covered with the itch. He was a miner’s son, and lived at Wanlockhead; did not go to school, but this was probably on account of his youth. I mention him because he seemed to be a proof that there was poverty and wretchedness among these people, though we saw no other symptom of it; and afterwards we met scores of the inhabitants of this same village. Our road turned to the right, and we saw, at the distance of less than a mile, a tall upright building of grey stone, with several men standing upon the roof, as if they were looking out over battlements. It stood beyond the village, upon higher ground, as if presiding over it,—a kind of enchanter’s castle, which it might have been, a place where Don Quixote would have gloried in. When we drew nearer we saw, coming out of the side of the building, a large machine or lever, in appearance like a great forge-hammer, as we supposed for raising water out of the mines. It heaved upwards once in half a minute with a slow motion, and seemed to rest to take breath at the bottom, its motion being accompanied with a sound between a groan and ‘jike.’ There would have been something in this object very striking in any place, as it was impossible not to invest the machine with some faculty of intellect; it seemed to have made the first step from brute matter to life and purpose, showing its progress by great power. William made a remark to this effect, and Coleridge observed that it was like a giant with one idea. At all events, the object produced a striking effect in that place, where everything was in unison with it—particularly the building itself, which was turret-shaped, and with the figures upon it resembled much one of the fortresses in the wooden cuts of Bunyan’s ‘Holy War.’

After ascending a considerable way we began to descend

again; and now we met a team of horses dragging an immense tree to the lead mines, to repair or add to the building, and presently after we came to a cart, with another large tree, and one horse left in it, right in the middle of the highway. We were a little out of humour, thinking we must wait till the team came back. There were men and boys without number all staring at us; after a little consultation they set their shoulders to the cart, and with a good heave all at once they moved it, and we passed along. These people were decently dressed, and their manners decent; there was no hooting or impudent laughter. Leadhills, another mining village, was the place of our destination for the night; and soon after we had passed the cart we came in sight of it. This village and the mines belong to Lord Hopetoun; it has more stone houses than Wanlockhead, one large old mansion, and a considerable number of old trees—beeches, I believe. The trees told of the coldness of the climate; they were more brown than green—far browner than the ripe grass of the little hay-garths. Here, as at Wanlockhead, were haycocks, hay-stacks, potato-beds, and kail-garths in every possible variety of shape, but, I suppose from the irregularity of the ground, it looked far less artificial—indeed, I should think that a painter might make several beautiful pictures in this village. It straggles down both sides of a mountain glen. As I have said, there is a large mansion. There is also a stone building that looks like a school, and the houses are single, or in clusters, or rows as it may chance.

We passed a decent-looking inn, the Hopetoun Arms; but the house of Mrs. Otto, a widow, had been recommended to us with high encomiums. We did not then

understand Scotch inns, and were not quite satisfied at first with our accommodations, but all things were smoothed over by degrees; we had a fire lighted in our dirty parlour, tea came after a reasonable waiting; and the fire with the gentle aid of twilight, burnished up the room into cheerful comfort. Coleridge was weary; but William and I walked out after tea. We talked with one of the miners, who informed us that the building which we had supposed to be a school was a library belonging to the village. He said they had got a book into it a few weeks ago, which had cost thirty pounds, and that they had all sorts of books. ‘What! have you Shakespeare?’ ‘Yes, we have that,’ and we found, on further inquiry, that they had a large library, [19] of long standing, that Lord Hopetoun had subscribed liberally to it, and that gentlemen who came with him were in the habit of making larger or smaller donations. Each man who had the benefit of it paid a small sum monthly—I think about fourpence.

The man we talked with spoke much of the comfort and quiet in which they lived one among another; he made use of a noticeable expression, saying that they were ‘very peaceable people considering they lived so much underground;’—wages were about thirty pounds a year; they had land for potatoes, warm houses, plenty of coals, and only six hours’ work each day, so that they had leisure for reading if they chose. He said the place was healthy, that the inhabitants lived to a great age; and indeed we saw no appearance of ill-health in their countenances; but it is not common for people working in lead mines to be healthy; and I have since heard that it is not a healthy place. However this may be, they are unwilling to allow it; for the landlady the next morning, when I said to her ‘You have

a cold climate,’ replied, ‘Ay, but it is varra halesome.’ We inquired of the man respecting the large mansion; he told us that it was built, as we might see, in the form of an H, and belonged to the Hopetouns, and they took their title from thence, [20] and that part of it was used as a chapel. We went close to it, and were a good deal amused with the building itself, standing forth in bold contradiction of the story which I daresay every man of Leadhills tells, and every man believes, that it is in the shape of an H; it is but half an H, and one must be very accommodating to allow it even so much, for the legs are far too short.

We visited the burying-ground, a plot of land not very small, crowded with graves, and upright grave-stones, overlooking the village and the dell. It was now the closing in of evening. Women and children were gathering in the linen for the night, which was bleaching by the burn-side;—the graves overgrown with grass, such as, by industrious culture, had been raised up about the houses; but there were bunches of heather here and there, and with the blue-bells that grew among the grass the small plot of ground had a beautiful and wild appearance.

William left me, and I went to a shop to purchase some thread; the woman had none that suited me; but she would send a ‘wee lad’ to the other shop. In the meantime I sat with the mother, and was much pleased with her manner and conversation. She had an excellent fire, and her cottage, though very small, looked comfortable and cleanly; but remember I saw it only by firelight. She confirmed what the man had told us of the quiet manner in which they lived; and indeed her house and fireside seemed to need

nothing to make it a cheerful happy spot, but health and good humour. There was a bookishness, a certain formality in this woman’s language, which was very remarkable. She had a dark complexion, dark eyes, and wore a very white cap, much over her face, which gave her the look of a French woman, and indeed afterwards the women on the roads frequently reminded us of French women, partly from the extremely white caps of the elder women, and still more perhaps from a certain gaiety and party-coloured appearance in their dress in general. White bed-gowns are very common, and you rarely meet a young girl with either hat or cap; they buckle up their hair often in a graceful manner.

I returned to the inn, and went into the kitchen to speak with the landlady; she had made a hundred hesitations when I told her we wanted three beds. At last she confessed she had three beds, and showed me into a parlour which looked damp and cold, but she assured me in a tone that showed she was unwilling to be questioned further, that all her beds were well aired. I sat a while by the kitchen fire with the landlady, and began to talk to her; but, much as I had heard in her praise—for the shopkeeper had told me she was a varra discreet woman—I cannot say that her manners pleased me much. But her servant made amends, for she was as pleasant and cheerful a lass as was ever seen; and when we asked her to do anything, she answered, ‘Oh yes,’ with a merry smile, and almost ran to get us what we wanted. She was about sixteen years old: wore shoes and stockings, and had her hair tucked up with a comb. The servant at Brownhill was a coarse-looking wench, barefoot and barelegged. I examined the kitchen round about; it was

crowded with furniture, drawers, cupboards, dish-covers, pictures, pans, and pots, arranged without order, except that the plates were on shelves, and the dish-covers hung in rows; these were very clean, but floors, passages, staircase, everything else dirty. There were two beds in recesses in the wall; above one of them I noticed a shelf with some books:—it made me think of Chaucer’s Clerke of Oxenforde:—

‘Liever had he at his bed’s head
Twenty books clothed in black and red.’

They were baking oat-bread, which they cut into quarters, and half-baked over the fire, and half-toasted before it. There was a suspiciousness about Mrs. Otto, almost like ill-nature; she was very jealous of any inquiries that might appear to be made with the faintest idea of a comparison between Leadhills and any other place, except the advantage was evidently on the side of Leadhills. We had nice honey to breakfast. When ready to depart, we learned that we might have seen the library, which we had not thought of till it was too late, and we were very sorry to go away without seeing it.

Saturday, August 20th.—Left Leadhills at nine o’clock, regretting much that we could not stay another day, that we might have made more minute inquiries respecting the manner of living of the miners, and been able to form an estimate, from our own observation, of the degree of knowledge, health, and comfort that there was among them. The air was keen and cold; we might have supposed it to be three months later in the season and two hours earlier in the day. The landlady had not lighted us a fire; so

I was obliged to get myself toasted in the kitchen, and when we set off I put on both grey cloak and spencer.

Our road carried us down the valley, and we soon lost sight of Leadhills, for the valley made a turn almost immediately, and we saw two miles, perhaps, before us; the glen sloped somewhat rapidly—heathy, bare, no hut or house. Passed by a shepherd, who was sitting upon the ground, reading, with the book on his knee, screened from the wind by his plaid, while a flock of sheep were feeding near him among the rushes and coarse grass—for, as we descended we came among lands where grass grew with the heather. Travelled through several reaches of the glen, which somewhat resembled the valley of Menock on the other side of Wanlockhead; but it was not near so beautiful; the forms of the mountains did not melt so exquisitely into each other, and there was a coldness, and, if I may so speak, a want of simplicity in the surface of the earth; the heather was poor, not covering a whole hillside; not in luxuriant streams and beds interveined with rich verdure; but patchy and stunted, with here and there coarse grass and rushes. But we soon came in sight of a spot that impressed us very much. At the lower end of this new reach of the vale was a decayed tree, beside a decayed cottage, the vale spreading out into a level area which was one large field, without fence and without division, of a dull yellow colour; the vale seemed to partake of the desolation of the cottage, and to participate in its decay. And yet the spot was in its nature so dreary that one would rather have wondered how it ever came to be tenanted by man, than lament that it was left to waste and solitude. Yet the encircling hills were so exquisitely formed that it was impossible to conceive anything more

lovely than this place would have been if the valley and hill-sides had been interspersed with trees, cottages, green fields, and hedgerows. But all was desolate; the one large field which filled up the area of the valley appeared, as I have said, in decay, and seemed to retain the memory of its connexion with man in some way analogous to the ruined building; for it was as much of a field as Mr. King’s best pasture scattered over with his fattest cattle.

We went on, looking before us, the place losing nothing of its hold upon our minds, when we discovered a woman sitting right in the middle of the field, alone, wrapped up in a grey cloak or plaid. She sat motionless all the time we looked at her, which might be nearly half an hour. We could not conceive why she sat there, for there were neither sheep nor cattle in the field; her appearance was very melancholy. In the meantime our road carried us nearer to the cottage, though we were crossing over the hill to the left, leaving the valley below us, and we perceived that a part of the building was inhabited, and that what we had supposed to be one blasted tree was eight trees, four of which were entirely blasted; the others partly so, and round about the place was a little potato and cabbage garth, fenced with earth. No doubt, that woman had been an inhabitant of the cottage. However this might be, there was so much obscurity and uncertainty about her, and her figure agreed so well with the desolation of the place, that we were indebted to the chance of her being there for some of the most interesting feelings that we had ever had from natural objects connected with man in dreary solitariness.

We had been advised to go along the new road, which would have carried us down the vale; but we met some

travellers who recommended us to climb the hill, and go by the village of Crawfordjohn as being much nearer. We had a long hill, and after having reached the top, steep and bad roads, so we continued to walk for a considerable way. The air was cold and clear—the sky blue. We walked cheerfully along in the sunshine, each of us alone, only William had the charge of the horse and car, so he sometimes took a ride, which did but poorly recompense him for the trouble of driving. I never travelled with more cheerful spirits than this day. Our road was along the side of a high moor. I can always walk over a moor with a light foot; I seem to be drawn more closely to nature in such places than anywhere else; or rather I feel more strongly the power of nature over me, and am better satisfied with myself for being able to find enjoyment in what unfortunately to many persons is either dismal or insipid. This moor, however, was more than commonly interesting; we could see a long way, and on every side of us were larger or smaller tracts of cultivated land. Some were extensive farms, yet in so large a waste they did but look small, with farm-houses, barns, etc., others like little cottages, with enough to feed a cow, and supply the family with vegetables. In looking at these farms we had always one feeling. Why did the plough stop there? Why might not they as well have carried it twice as far? There were no hedgerows near the farms, and very few trees. As we were passing along, we saw an old man, the first we had seen in a Highland bonnet, walking with a staff at a very slow pace by the edge of one of the moorland cornfields; he wore a grey plaid, and a dog was by his side. There was a scriptural solemnity in this man’s figure, a sober simplicity which was most impressive. Scotland

is the country above all others that I have seen, in which a man of imagination may carve out his own pleasures. There are so many inhabited solitudes, and the employments of the people are so immediately connected with the places where you find them, and their dresses so simple, so much alike, yet, from their being folding garments, admitting of an endless variety, and falling often so gracefully.

After some time we descended towards a broad vale, passed one farm-house, sheltered by fir trees, with a burn close to it; children playing, linen bleaching. The vale was open pastures and corn-fields unfenced, the land poor. The village of Crawfordjohn on the slope of a hill a long way before us to the left. Asked about our road of a man who was driving a cart; he told us to go through the village, then along some fields, and we should come to a ‘herd’s house by the burn side.’ The highway was right through the vale, unfenced on either side; the people of the village, who were making hay, all stared at us and our carriage. We inquired the road of a middle-aged man, dressed in a shabby black coat, at work in one of the hay fields; he looked like the minister of the place, and when he spoke we felt assured that he was so, for he was not sparing of hard words, which, however, he used with great propriety, and he spoke like one who had been accustomed to dictate. Our car wanted mending in the wheel, and we asked him if there was a blacksmith in the village. ‘Yes,’ he replied, but when we showed him the wheel he told William that he might mend it himself without a blacksmith, and he would put him in the way; so he fetched hammer and nails and gave his directions, which William obeyed, and repaired the damage entirely to his own satisfaction and the priest’s, who did not offer to lend any

assistance himself; not as if he would not have been willing in case of need; but as if it were more natural for him to dictate, and because he thought it more fit that William should do it himself. He spoke much about the propriety of every man’s lending all the assistance in his power to travellers, and with some ostentation or self-praise. Here I observed a honey-suckle and some flowers growing in a garden, the first I had seen in Scotland. It is a pretty cheerful-looking village, but must be very cold in winter; it stands on a hillside, and the vale itself is very high ground, unsheltered by trees.

Left the village behind us, and our road led through arable ground for a considerable way, on which were growing very good crops of corn and potatoes. Our friend accompanied us to show us the way, and Coleridge and he had a scientific conversation concerning the uses and properties of lime and other manures. He seemed to be a well-informed man; somewhat pedantic in his manners; but this might be only the difference between Scotch and English. [27]

Soon after he had parted from us, we came upon a stony, rough road over a black moor; and presently to the ‘herd’s house by the burn side.’ We could hardly cross the burn dry-shod, over which was the only road to the cottage. In England there would have been stepping-stones or a bridge; but the Scotch need not be afraid of wetting their bare feet. The hut had its little kail-garth fenced with earth; there was no other enclosure—but the common, heathy with coarse grass. Travelled along the common for some miles, before we joined the great road from Longtown to Glasgow—saw on the bare hill-sides at a distance, sometimes a

solitary farm, now and then a plantation, and one very large wood, with an appearance of richer ground above; but it was so very high we could not think it possible. Having descended considerably, the common was no longer of a peat-mossy brown heath colour, but grass with rushes was its chief produce; there was sometimes a solitary hut, no enclosures except the kail-garth, and sheep pasturing in flocks, with shepherd-boys tending them. I remember one boy in particular; he had no hat on, and only had a grey plaid wrapped about him. It is nothing to describe, but on a bare moor, alone with his sheep, standing, as he did, in utter quietness and silence, there was something uncommonly impressive in his appearance, a solemnity which recalled to our minds the old man in the corn-field. We passed many people who were mowing, or raking the grass of the common; it was little better than rushes; but they did not mow straight forward, only here and there, where it was the best; in such a place hay-cocks had an uncommon appearance to us.

After a long descent we came to some plantations which were not far from Douglas Mill. The country for some time had been growing into cultivation, and now it was a wide vale with large tracts of corn; trees in clumps, no hedgerows, which always make a country look bare and unlovely. For my part, I was better pleased with the desert places we had left behind, though no doubt the inhabitants of this place think it ‘a varra bonny spot,’ for the Scotch are always pleased with their own abode, be it what it may; and afterwards at Edinburgh, when we were talking with a bookseller of our travels, he observed that it was ‘a fine country near Douglas Mill.’ Douglas Mill is a single house, a large inn, being one of the regular stages between

Longtown and Glasgow, and therefore a fair specimen of the best of the country inns of Scotland. As soon as our car stopped at the door we felt the difference. At an English inn of this size, a waiter, or the master or mistress, would have been at the door immediately, but we remained some time before anybody came; then a barefooted lass made her appearance, but she only looked at us and went away. The mistress, a remarkably handsome woman, showed us into a large parlour; we ordered mutton-chops, and I finished my letter to Mary; writing on the same window-ledge on which William had written to me two years before.

After dinner, William and I sat by a little mill-race in the garden. We had left Leadhills and Wanlockhead far above us, and now were come into a warmer climate; but there was no richness in the face of the country. The shrubs looked cold and poor, and yet there were some very fine trees within a little distance of Douglas Mill, so that the reason, perhaps, why the few low shrubs and trees which were growing in the gardens seemed to be so unluxuriant, might be, that there being no hedgerows, the general appearance of the country was naked, and I could not help seeing the same coldness where, perhaps, it did not exist in itself to any great degree, for the corn crops are abundant, and I should think the soil is not bad. While we were sitting at the door, two of the landlady’s children came out; the elder, a boy about six years old, was running away from his little brother, in petticoats; the ostler called out, ‘Sandy, tak’ your wee brither wi’ you;’ another voice from the window, ‘Sawny, dinna leave your wee brither;’ the mother then came, ‘Alexander, tak’ your wee brother by the hand;’ Alexander obeyed, and the two went off in peace together. We were charged eightpence for hay at this inn,

another symptom of our being in Scotland. Left Douglas Mill at about three o’clock; travelled through an open corn country, the tracts of corn large and unenclosed. We often passed women or children who were watching a single cow while it fed upon the slips of grass between the corn. William asked a strong woman, about thirty years of age, who looked like the mistress of a family—I suppose moved by some sentiment of compassion for her being so employed,—if the cow would eat the corn if it were left to itself: she smiled at his simplicity. It is indeed a melancholy thing to see a full-grown woman thus waiting, as it were, body and soul devoted to the poor beast; yet even this is better than working in a manufactory the day through.

We came to a moorish tract; saw before us the hills of Loch Lomond, Ben Lomond and another, distinct each by itself. Not far from the roadside were some benches placed in rows in the middle of a large field, with a sort of covered shed like a sentry-box, but much more like those boxes which the Italian puppet-showmen in London use. We guessed that it was a pulpit or tent for preaching, and were told that a sect met there occasionally, who held that toleration was unscriptural, and would have all religions but their own exterminated. I have forgotten what name the man gave to this sect; we could not learn that it differed in any other respect from the Church of Scotland. Travelled for some miles along the open country, which was all without hedgerows, sometimes arable, sometimes moorish, and often whole tracts covered with grunsel. [30] There was one field, which one might have believed had been sown with grunsel, it was so regularly covered with it—a large square field upon a slope, its boundary marked to

our eyes only by the termination of the bright yellow; contiguous to it were other fields of the same size and shape, one of clover, the other of potatoes, all equally regular crops. The oddness of this appearance, the grunsel being uncommonly luxuriant, and the field as yellow as gold, made William laugh. Coleridge was melancholy upon it, observing that there was land enough wasted to rear a healthy child.

We left behind us, considerably to the right, a single high mountain; [31a] I have forgotten its name; we had had it long in view. Saw before us the river Clyde, its course at right angles to our road, which now made a turn, running parallel with the river; the town of Lanerk in sight long before we came to it. I was somewhat disappointed with the first view of the Clyde: [31b] the banks, though swelling and varied, had a poverty in their appearance, chiefly from the want of wood and hedgerows. Crossed the river and ascended towards Lanerk, which stands upon a hill. When we were within about a mile of the town, William parted from Coleridge and me, to go to the celebrated waterfalls. Coleridge did not attempt to drive the horse; but led him all the way. We inquired for the best inn, and were told that the New Inn was the best; but that they had very ‘genteel apartments’ at the Black Bull, and made less charges, and the Black Bull was at the entrance of the town, so we thought we would stop there, as the horse was obstinate and weary. But when we came to the Black Bull we had no wish to enter the apartments; for it seemed the abode of dirt and poverty, yet it was a large building. The town showed a sort of French face, and would have done much more, had it not been for the true British tinge

of coal-smoke; the doors and windows dirty, the shops dull, the women too seemed to be very dirty in their dress. The town itself is not ugly; the houses are of grey stone, the streets not very narrow, and the market-place decent. The New Inn is a handsome old stone building, formerly a gentleman’s house. We were conducted into a parlour, where people had been drinking; the tables were unwiped, chairs in disorder, the floor dirty, and the smell of liquors was most offensive. We were tired, however, and rejoiced in our tea.

The evening sun was now sending a glorious light through the street, which ran from west to east; the houses were of a fire red, and the faces of the people as they walked westward were almost like a blacksmith when he is at work by night. I longed to be out, and meet with William, that we might see the Falls before the day was gone. Poor Coleridge was unwell, and could not go. I inquired my road, and a little girl told me she would go with me to the porter’s lodge, where I might be admitted. I was grieved to hear that the Falls of the Clyde were shut up in a gentleman’s grounds, and to be viewed only by means of lock and key. Much, however, as the pure feeling with which one would desire to visit such places is disturbed by useless, impertinent, or even unnecessary interference with nature, yet when I was there the next morning I seemed to feel it a less disagreeable thing than in smaller and more delicate spots, if I may use the phrase. My guide, a sensible little girl, answered my inquiries very prettily. She was eight years old, read in the ‘Collection,’ a book which all the Scotch children whom I have questioned read in. I found it was a collection of hymns; she could repeat several of Dr. Watts’. We passed through a great

part of the town, then turned down a steep hill, and came in view of a long range of cotton mills, [33] the largest and loftiest I had ever seen; climbed upwards again, our road leading us along the top of the left bank of the river; both banks very steep and richly wooded. The girl left me at the porter’s lodge. Having asked after William, I was told that no person had been there, or could enter but by the gate. The night was coming on, therefore I did not venture to go in, as I had no hope of meeting William. I had a delicious walk alone through the wood; the sound of the water was very solemn, and even the cotton mills in the fading light of evening had somewhat of the majesty and stillness of the natural objects. It was nearly dark when I reached the inn. I found Coleridge sitting by a good fire, which always makes an inn room look comfortable. In a few minutes William arrived; he had heard of me at the gate, and followed as quickly as he could, shouting after me. He was pale and exceedingly tired.

After he had left us he had taken a wrong road, and while looking about to set himself right had met with a barefooted boy, who said he would go with him. The little fellow carried him by a wild path to the upper of the Falls, the Boniton Linn, and coming down unexpectedly upon it, he was exceedingly affected by the solemn grandeur of the place. This fall is not much admired or spoken of by travellers; you have never a full, breast view of it; it does not make a complete self-satisfying place, an abode of its own, as a perfect waterfall seems to me to do; but the river, down which you look through a long vista of steep and ruin-like rocks, the roaring of the waterfall, and the solemn evening lights, must have been most impressive. One of the rocks on the near bank, even in broad daylight, as we

saw it the next morning, is exactly like the fractured arch of an abbey. With the lights and shadows of evening upon it, the resemblance must have been much more striking.

William’s guide was a pretty boy, and he was exceedingly pleased with him. Just as they were quitting the waterfall, William’s mind being full of the majesty of the scene, the little fellow pointed to the top of a rock, ‘There’s a fine slae-bush there.’ ‘Ay,’ said William, ‘but there are no slaes upon it,’ which was true enough; but I suppose the child remembered the slaes of another summer, though, as he said, he was but ‘half seven years old,’ namely, six and a half. He conducted William to the other fall, and as they were going along a narrow path, they came to a small cavern, where William lost him, and looking about, saw his pretty figure in a sort of natural niche fitted for a statue, from which the boy jumped out laughing, delighted with the success of his trick. William told us a great deal about him, while he sat by the fire, and of the pleasure of his walk, often repeating, ‘I wish you had been with me.’ Having no change, he gave the boy sixpence, which was certainly, if he had formed any expectations at all, far beyond them; but he received it with the utmost indifference, without any remark of surprise or pleasure; most likely he did not know how many halfpence he could get for it, and twopence would have pleased him more. My little girl was delighted with the sixpence I gave her, and said she would buy a book with it on Monday morning. What a difference between the manner of living and education of boys and of girls among the lower classes of people in towns! she had never seen the Falls of the Clyde, nor had ever been further than the porter’s lodge; the boy, I daresay, knew every hiding-place in every accessible rock, as well as the fine ‘slae bushes’ and the nut trees.

SECOND WEEK.

Sunday, August 21st.—The morning was very hot, a morning to tempt us to linger by the water-side. I wished to have had the day before us, expecting so much from what William had seen; but when we went there, I did not desire to stay longer than till the hour which we had prescribed to ourselves; for it was a rule not to be broken in upon, that the person who conducted us to the Falls was to remain by our side till we chose to depart. We left our inn immediately after breakfast. The lanes were full of people going to church; many of the middle-aged women wore long scarlet cardinals, and were without hats: they brought to my mind the women of Goslar as they used to go to church in their silver or gold caps, with their long cloaks, black or coloured.

The banks of the Clyde from Lanerk to the Falls rise immediately from the river; they are lofty and steep, and covered with wood. The road to the Falls is along the top of one of the banks, and to the left you have a prospect of the open country, corn fields and scattered houses. To the right, over the river, the country spreads out, as it were, into a plain covered over with hills, no one hill much higher than another, but hills all over; there were endless pastures overgrown with broom, and scattered trees, without hedges or fences of any kind, and no distinct footpaths. It was delightful to see the lasses in gay dresses running

like cattle among the broom, making their way straight forward towards the river, here and there as it might chance. They waded across the stream, and, when they had reached the top of the opposite bank, sat down by the road-side, about half a mile from the town, to put on their shoes and cotton stockings, which they brought tied up in pocket-handkerchiefs. The porter’s lodge is about a mile from Lanerk, and the lady’s house—for the whole belongs to a lady, whose name I have forgotten [36a]—is upon a hill at a little distance. We walked, after we had entered the private grounds, perhaps two hundred yards along a gravel carriage-road, then came to a little side gate, which opened upon a narrow gravel path under trees, and in a minute and a half, or less, were directly opposite to the great waterfall. I was much affected by the first view of it. The majesty and strength of the water, for I had never before seen so large a cataract, struck me with astonishment, which died away, giving place to more delightful feelings; though there were some buildings that I could have wished had not been there, though at first unnoticed. The chief of them was a neat, white, lady-like house, [36b] very near to the waterfall. William and Coleridge however were in a better and perhaps wiser humour, and did not dislike the house; indeed, it was a very nice-looking place, with a moderate-sized garden, leaving the green fields free and open. This house is on the side of the river opposite to the grand house and the pleasure-grounds. The waterfall Cora Linn [36c] is composed of two falls, with a sloping space, which appears to be about twenty yards between, but is much more. The basin which receives the fall is enclosed by noble rocks, with trees, chiefly hazels, birch,

and ash growing out of their sides whenever there is any hold for them; and a magnificent resting-place it is for such a river; I think more grand than the Falls themselves.

After having stayed some time, we returned by the same footpath into the main carriage-road, and soon came upon what William calls an ell-wide gravel walk, from which we had different views of the Linn. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country, and saw a ruined tower, called Wallace’s Tower, which stands at a very little distance from the fall, and is an interesting object. A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. ‘Yes, sir,’ says Coleridge, ‘it is a majestic waterfall.’ ‘Sublime and beautiful,’ replied his friend. Poor Coleridge could make no answer, and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to us and related the story, laughing heartily.

The distance from one Linn to the other may be half a mile or more, along the same ell-wide walk. We came to a pleasure-house, of which the little girl had the key; she said it was called the Fog-house, because it was lined with ‘fog,’ namely moss. On the outside it resembled some of the huts in the prints belonging to Captain Cook’s Voyages,

and within was like a hay-stack scooped out. It was circular, with a dome-like roof, a seat all round fixed to the wall, and a table in the middle,—seat, wall, roof and table all covered with moss in the neatest manner possible. It was as snug as a bird’s nest; I wish we had such a one at the top of our orchard, only a great deal smaller. We afterwards found that huts of the same kind were common in the pleasure-grounds of Scotland; but we never saw any that were so beautifully wrought as this. It had, however, little else to recommend it, the situation being chosen without judgment; there was no prospect from it, nor was it a place of seclusion and retirement, for it stood close to the ell-wide gravel walk. We wished we could have shoved it about a hundred yards further on, when we arrived at a bench which was also close to the walk, for just below the bench, the walk elbowing out into a circle, there was a beautiful spring of clear water, which we could see rise up continually, at the bottom of a round stone basin full to the brim, the water gushing out at a little outlet and passing away under the walk. A reason was wanted for placing the hut where it is; what a good one would this little spring have furnished for bringing it hither! Along the whole of the path were openings at intervals for views of the river, but, as almost always happens in gentlemen’s grounds, they were injudiciously managed; you were prepared for a dead stand—by a parapet, a painted seat, or some other device.

We stayed some time at the Boniton Fall, which has one great advantage over the other falls, that it is at the termination of the pleasure-grounds, and we see no traces of the boundary-line; yet, except under some accidental circumstances, such as a sunset like that of the preceding

evening, it is greatly inferior to the Cora Linn. We returned to the inn to dinner. The landlord set the first dish upon the table, as is common in England, and we were well waited upon. This first dish was true Scottish—a boiled sheep’s head, with the hair singed off; Coleridge and I ate heartily of it; we had barley broth, in which the sheep’s head had been boiled. A party of tourists whom we had met in the pleasure-grounds drove from the door while we were waiting for dinner; I guess they were fresh from England, for they had stuffed the pockets of their carriage with bundles of heather, roots and all, just as if Scotland grew no heather but on the banks of the Clyde. They passed away with their treasure towards Loch Lomond. A party of boys, dressed all alike in blue, very neat, were standing at the chaise-door; we conjectured they were charity scholars; but found on inquiry that they were apprentices to the cotton factory; we were told that they were well instructed in reading and writing. We had seen in the morning a flock of girls dressed in grey coming out of the factory, probably apprentices also.

After dinner set off towards Hamilton, but on foot, for we had to turn aside to the Cartland Rocks, and our car was to meet us on the road. A guide attended us, who might almost in size, and certainly in activity, have been compared with William’s companion who hid himself in the niche of the cavern. His method of walking and very quick step soon excited our attention. I could hardly keep up with him; he paddled by our side, just reaching to my shoulder, like a little dog, with his long snout pushed before him—for he had an enormous nose, and walked with his head foremost. I said to him, ‘How quick you walk!’ he replied, ‘That was not quick walking,’ and when I asked

him what he called so, he said ‘Five miles an hour,’ and then related in how many hours he had lately walked from Lanerk to Edinburgh, done some errands, and returned to Lanerk—I have forgotten the particulars, but it was a very short time—and added that he had an old father who could walk at the rate of four miles an hour, for twenty-four miles, any day, and had never had an hour’s sickness in his life. ‘Then,’ said I, ‘he has not drunk much strong liquor?’ ‘Yes, enough to drown him.’ From his eager manner of uttering this, I inferred that he himself was a drinker; and the man who met us with the car told William that he gained a great deal of money as an errand-goer, but spent it all in tippling. He had been a shoemaker, but could not bear the confinement on account of a weakness in his chest.

The neighbourhood of Lanerk is exceedingly pleasant; we came to a sort of district of glens or little valleys that cleave the hills, leaving a cheerful, open country above them, with no superior hills, but an undulating surface. Our guide pointed to the situation of the Cartland Crags. We were to cross a narrow valley, and walk down on the other side, and then we should be at the spot; but the little fellow made a sharp turn down a footpath to the left, saying, ‘We must have some conversation here.’ He paddled on with his small pawing feet till we came right opposite to a gentleman’s house on the other side of the valley, when he halted, repeating some words, I have forgotten what, which were taken up by the most distinct echo I ever heard—this is saying little: it was the most distinct echo that it is possible to conceive. It shouted the names of our fireside friends in the very tone in which William and Coleridge spoke; but it seemed to

make a joke of me, and I could not help laughing at my own voice, it was so shrill and pert, exactly as if some one had been mimicking it very successfully, with an intention of making me ridiculous. I wished Joanna [41] had been there to laugh, for the echo is an excellent laugher, and would have almost made her believe that it was a true story which William has told of her and the mountains. We turned back, crossed the valley, went through the orchard and plantations belonging to the gentleman’s house. By the bye, we observed to our guide that the echo must bring many troublesome visitors to disturb the quiet of the owner of that house. ‘Oh no,’ said he, ‘he glories in much company.’ He was a native of that neighbourhood, had made a moderate fortune abroad, purchased an estate, built the house, and raised the plantations; and further, had made a convenient walk through his woods to the Cartland Crags. The house was modest and neat, and though not adorned in the best taste, and though the plantations were of fir, we looked at it with great pleasure, there was such true liberality and kind-heartedness in leaving his orchard path open, and his walks unobstructed by gates. I hope this goodness is not often abused by plunderers of the apple-trees, which were hung with tempting apples close to the path.

At the termination of the little valley, we descended through a wood along a very steep path to a muddy stream running over limestone rocks; turned up to the left along the bed of the stream, and soon we were closed in by rocks on each side. They were very lofty—of limestone, trees starting out of them, high and low, overhanging the stream or shooting up towards the sky. No place of the kind could be more beautiful if the stream had been clear,

but it was of a muddy yellow colour; had it been a large river, one might have got the better of the unpleasantness of the muddy water in the grandeur of its roaring, the boiling up of the foam over the rocks, or the obscurity of its pools.

We had been told that the Cartland Crags were better worth going to see than the Falls of the Clyde. I did not think so; but I have seen rocky dells resembling this before, with clear water instead of that muddy stream, and never saw anything like the Falls of the Clyde. It would be a delicious spot to have near one’s house; one would linger out many a day in the cool shade of the caverns, and the stream would soothe one by its murmuring; still, being an old friend, one would not love it the less for its homely face. Even we, as we passed along, could not help stopping for a long while to admire the beauty of the lazy foam, for ever in motion, and never moved away, in a still place of the water, covering the whole surface of it with streaks and lines and ever-varying circles. Wild marjoram grew upon the rocks in great perfection and beauty; our guide gave me a bunch, and said he should come hither to collect a store for tea for the winter, and that it was ‘varra hale-some:’ he drank none else. We walked perhaps half a mile along the bed of the river; but it might seem to be much further than it was, owing to the difficulty of the path, and the sharp and many turnings of the glen. Passed two of Wallace’s Caves. There is scarce a noted glen in Scotland that has not a cave for Wallace or some other hero. Before we left the river the rocks became less lofty, turned into a wood through which was a convenient path upwards, met the owner of the house and the echo-ground, and thanked him for the pleasure which he had provided

for us and other travellers by making such pretty pathways.

It was four o’clock when we reached the place where the car was waiting. We were anxious to be off, as we had fifteen miles to go; but just as we were seating ourselves we found that the cushions were missing. William was forced to go back to the town, a mile at least, and Coleridge and I waited with the car. It rained, and we had some fear that the evening would be wet, but the rain soon ceased, though the sky continued gloomy—an unfortunate circumstance, for we had to travel through a beautiful country, and of that sort which is most set off by sunshine and pleasant weather.

Travelled through the Vale or Trough of the Clyde, as it is called, for ten or eleven miles, having the river on our right. We had fine views both up and down the river for the first three or four miles, our road being not close to it, but above its banks, along the open country, which was here occasionally intersected by hedgerows.

Left our car in the road, and turned down a field to the Fall of Stonebyres, another of the falls of the Clyde, which I had not heard spoken of; therefore it gave me the more pleasure. We saw it from the top of the bank of the river at a little distance. It has not the imposing majesty of Cora Linn; but it has the advantage of being left to itself, a grand solitude in the heart of a populous country. We had a prospect above and below it, of cultivated grounds, with hay-stacks, houses, hills; but the river’s banks were lonesome, steep, and woody, with rocks near the fall.

A little further on, came more into company with the river; sometimes we were close to it, sometimes above it,

but always at no great distance; and now the vale became more interesting and amusing. It is very populous, with villages, hamlets, single cottages, or farm-houses embosomed in orchards, and scattered over with gentlemen’s houses, some of them very ugly, tall and obtrusive, others neat and comfortable. We seemed now to have got into a country where poverty and riches were shaking hands together; pears and apples, of which the crop was abundant, hung over the road, often growing in orchards unfenced; or there might be bunches of broom along the road-side in an interrupted line, that looked like a hedge till we came to it and saw the gaps. Bordering on these fruitful orchards perhaps would be a patch, its chief produce being gorse or broom. There was nothing like a moor or common anywhere; but small plots of uncultivated ground were left high and low, among the potatoes, corn, cabbages, which grew intermingled, now among trees, now bare. The Trough of the Clyde is, indeed, a singular and very interesting region; it is somewhat like the upper part of the vale of Nith, but above the Nith is much less cultivated ground—without hedgerows or orchards, or anything that looks like a rich country. We met crowds of people coming from the kirk; the lasses were gaily dressed, often in white gowns, coloured satin bonnets, and coloured silk handkerchiefs, and generally with their shoes and stockings in a bundle hung on their arm. Before we left the river the vale became much less interesting, resembling a poor English country, the fields being large, and unluxuriant hedges.

It had been dark long before we reached Hamilton, and William had some difficulty in driving the tired horse through the town. At the inn they hesitated about being able to give us beds, the house being brim-full—lights at

every window. We were rather alarmed for our accommodations during the rest of the tour, supposing the house to be filled with tourists; but they were in general only regular travellers for out of the main road from town to town we saw scarcely a carriage, and the inns were empty. There was nothing remarkable in the treatment we met with at this inn, except the lazy impertinence of the waiter. It was a townish place, with a great larder set out; the house throughout dirty.

Monday, August 22d.—Immediately after breakfast walked to the Duke of Hamilton’s house to view the picture-gallery, chiefly the famous picture of Daniel in the Lions’ Den, by Rubens. It is a large building, without grandeur, a heavy, lumpish mass, after the fashion of the Hopetoun H, [45] only five times the size, and with longer legs, which makes it gloomy. We entered the gate, passed the porter’s lodge, where we saw nobody, and stopped at the front door, as William had done two years before with Sir William Rush’s family. We were met by a little mean-looking man, shabbily dressed, out of livery, who, we found, was the porter. After scanning us over, he told us that we ought not to have come to that door. We said we were sorry for the mistake, but as one of our party had been there two years before, and was admitted by the same entrance, we had supposed it was the regular way. After many hesitations, and having kept us five minutes waiting in the large hall, while he went to consult with the housekeeper, he informed us that we could not be admitted at that time, the housekeeper being unwell; but that we might return in an hour:

he then conducted us through long gloomy passages to an obscure door at the corner of the house. We asked if we might be permitted to walk in the park in the meantime; and he told us that this would not be agreeable to the Duke’s family. We returned to the inn discontented enough, but resolved not to waste an hour, if there were anything else in the neighbourhood worth seeing. The waiter told us there was a curious place called Baroncleugh, with gardens cut out in rocks, and we determined to go thither. We had to walk through the town, which may be about as large as Penrith, and perhaps a mile further, along a dusty turnpike road. The morning was hot, sunny, and windy, and we were half tired before we reached the place; but were amply repaid for our trouble.

The general face of the country near Hamilton is much in the ordinary English style; not very hilly, with hedgerows, corn fields, and stone houses. The Clyde is here an open river with low banks, and the country spreads out so wide that there is no appearance of a regular vale. Baroncleugh is in a beautiful deep glen through which runs the river Avon, a stream that falls into the Clyde. The house stands very sweetly in complete retirement; it has its gardens and terraces one above another, with flights of steps between, box-trees and yew-trees cut in fantastic shapes, flower-borders and summer-houses; and, still below, apples and pears were hanging in abundance on the branches of large old trees, which grew intermingled with the natural wood, elms, beeches, etc., even to the water’s edge. The whole place is in perfect harmony with the taste of our ancestors, and the yews and hollies are shaven as nicely, and the gravel walks and flower-borders kept in as exact order, as if the spirit of the first architect of the terraces still

presided over them. The opposite bank of the river is left in its natural wildness, and nothing was to be seen higher up but the deep dell, its steep banks being covered with fine trees, a beautiful relief or contrast to the garden, which is one of the most elaborate old things ever seen, a little hanging garden of Babylon.

I was sorry to hear that the owner of this sweet place did not live there always. He had built a small thatched house to eke out the old one: it was a neat dwelling, with no false ornaments. We were exceedingly sorry to quit this spot, which is left to nature and past times, and should have liked to have pursued the glen further up; we were told that there was a ruined castle; and the walk itself must be very delightful; but we wished to reach Glasgow in good time, and had to go again to Hamilton House. Returned to the town by a much shorter road, and were very angry with the waiter for not having directed us to it; but he was too great a man to speak three words more than he could help.

We stopped at the proper door of the Duke’s house, and seated ourselves humbly upon a bench, waiting the pleasure of the porter, who, after a little time, informed us that we could not be admitted, giving no reason whatever. When we got to the inn, we could just gather from the waiter that it was not usual to refuse admittance to strangers; but that was all: he could not, or would not, help us, so we were obliged to give it up, which mortified us, for I had wished much to see the picture. William vowed that he would write that very night to Lord Archibald Hamilton, stating the whole matter, which he did from Glasgow.

I ought to have mentioned the park, though, as we were not allowed to walk there, we saw but little of it. It looked

pleasant, as all parks with fine trees must be, but, as it seemed to be only a large, nearly level, plain, it could not be a particularly beautiful park, though it borders upon the Clyde, and the Avon runs, I believe, through it, after leaving the solitude of the glen of Baroncleugh.

Quitted Hamilton at about eleven o’clock. There is nothing interesting between Hamilton and Glasgow till we came to Bothwell Castle, a few miles from Hamilton. The country is cultivated, but not rich, the fields large, a perfect contrast to the huddling together of hills and trees, corn and pasture grounds, hay-stacks, cottages, orchards, broom and gorse, but chiefly broom, that had amused us so much the evening before in passing through the Trough of the Clyde. A native of Scotland would not probably be satisfied with the account I have given of the Trough of the Clyde, for it is one of the most celebrated scenes in Scotland. We certainly received less pleasure from it than we had expected; but it was plain that this was chiefly owing to the unfavourable circumstances under which we saw it—a gloomy sky and a cold blighting wind. It is a very beautiful district, yet there, as in all the other scenes of Scotland celebrated for their fertility, we found something which gave us a notion of barrenness, of what was not altogether genial. The new fir and larch plantations, here as in almost every other part of Scotland, contributed not a little to this effect.

Crossed the Clyde not far from Hamilton, and had the river for some miles at a distance from us, on our left; but after having gone, it might be, three miles, we came to a porter’s lodge on the left side of the road, where we were to turn to Bothwell Castle, which is in Lord Douglas’s grounds. The woman who keeps the gate brought us a

book, in which we wrote down our names. Went about half a mile before we came to the pleasure-grounds. Came to a large range of stables, where we were to leave the car; but there was no one to unyoke the horse, so William was obliged to do it himself, a task which he performed very awkwardly, being then new to it. We saw the ruined castle embosomed in trees, passed the house, and soon found ourselves on the edge of a steep brow immediately above and overlooking the course of the river Clyde through a deep hollow between woods and green steeps. We had approached at right angles from the main road to the place over a flat, and had seen nothing before us but a nearly level country terminated by distant slopes, the Clyde hiding himself in his deep bed. It was exceedingly delightful to come thus unexpectedly upon such a beautiful region.

The Castle stands nobly, overlooking the Clyde. When we came up to it I was hurt to see that flower-borders had taken place of the natural overgrowings of the ruin, the scattered stones and wild plants. It is a large and grand pile, of red freestone, harmonizing perfectly with the rocks of the river, from which, no doubt, it has been hewn. When I was a little accustomed to the unnaturalness of a modern garden, I could not help admiring the excessive beauty and luxuriance of some of the plants, particularly the purple-flowered clematis, and a broad-leaved creeping plant without flowers, which scrambled up the castle wall along with the ivy, and spread its vine-like branches so lavishly that it seemed to be in its natural situation, and one could not help thinking that, though not self-planted among the ruins of this country, it must somewhere have its natural abode in such places. If Bothwell Castle had not been close to the Douglas mansion we

should have been disgusted with the possessor’s miserable conception of ‘adorning’ such a venerable ruin; but it is so very near to the house that of necessity the pleasure-grounds must have extended beyond it, and perhaps the neatness of a shaven lawn and the complete desolation natural to a ruin might have made an unpleasing contrast; and besides, being within the precincts of the pleasure-grounds, and so very near to the modern mansion of a noble family, it has forfeited in some degree its independent majesty, and becomes a tributary to the mansion; its solitude being interrupted, it has no longer the same command over the mind in sending it back into past times, or excluding the ordinary feelings which we bear about us in daily life. We had then only to regret that the castle and house were so near to each other; and it was impossible not to regret it; for the ruin presides in state over the river, far from city or town, as if it might have had a peculiar privilege to preserve its memorials of past ages and maintain its own character and independence for centuries to come.

We sat upon a bench under the high trees, and had beautiful views of the different reaches of the river above and below. On the opposite bank, which is finely wooded with elms and other trees, are the remains of an ancient priory, built upon a rock: and rock and ruin are so blended together that it is impossible to separate the one from the other. Nothing can be more beautiful than the little remnants of this holy place; elm trees—for we were near enough to distinguish them by their branches—grow out of the walls, and overshadow a small but very elegant window. It can scarcely be conceived what a grace the castle and priory impart to each other; and the river Clyde flows on smooth

and unruffled below, seeming to my thoughts more in harmony with the sober and stately images of former times, than if it had roared over a rocky channel, forcing its sound upon the ear. It blended gently with the warbling of the smaller birds and chattering of the larger ones that had made their nests in the ruins. In this fortress the chief of the English nobility were confined after the battle of Bannockburn. If a man is to be a prisoner, he scarcely could have a more pleasant place to solace his captivity; but I thought that for close confinement I should prefer the banks of a lake or the sea-side. The greatest charm of a brook or river is in the liberty to pursue it through its windings; you can then take it in whatever mood you like; silent or noisy, sportive or quiet. The beauties of a brook or river must be sought, and the pleasure is in going in search of them; those of a lake or of the sea come to you of themselves. These rude warriors cared little perhaps about either; and yet if one may judge from the writings of Chaucer and from the old romances, more interesting passions were connected with natural objects in the days of chivalry than now, though going in search of scenery, as it is called, had not then been thought of. I had heard nothing of Bothwell Castle, at least nothing that I remembered, therefore, perhaps, my pleasure was greater, compared with what I received elsewhere, than others might feel.

At our return to the stables we found an inferior groom, who helped William to yoke the horse, and was very civil. We grew hungry before we had travelled many miles, and seeing a large public-house—it was in a walled court some yards from the road—Coleridge got off the car to inquire if we could dine there, and was told we could have nothing but eggs. It was a miserable place, very like a French

house; indeed we observed, in almost every part of Scotland, except Edinburgh, that we were reminded ten times of France and Germany for once of England.

Saw nothing remarkable after leaving Bothwell, except the first view of Glasgow, at some miles distance, terminated by the mountains of Loch Lomond. The suburbs of Glasgow extend very far, houses on each side of the highway,—all ugly, and the inhabitants dirty. The roads are very wide; and everything seems to tell of the neighbourhood of a large town. We were annoyed by carts and dirt, and the road was full of people, who all noticed our car in one way or other; the children often sent a hooting after us.

Wearied completely, we at last reached the town, and were glad to walk, leading the car to the first decent inn, which was luckily not far from the end of the town. William, who gained most of his road-knowledge from ostlers, had been informed of this house by the ostler at Hamilton; it proved quiet and tolerably cheap, a new building—the Saracen’s Head. I shall never forget how glad I was to be landed in a little quiet back-parlour, for my head was beating with the noise of carts which we had left, and the wearisomeness of the disagreeable objects near the highway; but with my first pleasant sensations also came the feeling that we were not in an English inn—partly from its half-unfurnished appearance, which is common in Scotland, for in general the deal wainscots and doors are unpainted, and partly from the dirtiness of the floors. Having dined, William and I walked to the post-office, and after much seeking found out a quiet timber-yard wherein to sit down and read our letter. We then walked a considerable time in the streets, which are perhaps as handsome as streets can be, which derive no particular effect from

their situation in connexion with natural advantages, such as rivers, sea, or hills. The Trongate, an old street, is very picturesque—high houses, with an intermixture of gable fronts towards the street. The New Town is built of fine stone, in the best style of the very best London streets at the west end of the town, but, not being of brick, they are greatly superior. One thing must strike every stranger in his first walk through Glasgow—an appearance of business and bustle, but no coaches or gentlemen’s carriages; during all the time we walked in the streets I only saw three carriages, and these were travelling chaises. I also could not but observe a want of cleanliness in the appearance of the lower orders of the people, and a dulness in the dress and outside of the whole mass, as they moved along. We returned to the inn before it was dark. I had a bad headache, and was tired, and we all went to bed soon.

Tuesday, August 23d.—A cold morning. Walked to the bleaching-ground, [53] a large field bordering on the Clyde, the banks of which are perfectly flat, and the general face of the country is nearly so in the neighbourhood of Glasgow. This field, the whole summer through, is covered with women of all ages, children, and young girls spreading out their linen, and watching it while it bleaches. The scene must be very cheerful on a fine day, but it rained when we were there, and though there was linen spread out in all parts, and great numbers of women and girls were at work, yet there would have been many more on a fine day, and they would have appeared happy, instead of stupid and cheerless. In the middle of the field is a wash-house, whither the

inhabitants of this large town, rich and poor, send or carry their linen to be washed. There are two very large rooms, with each a cistern in the middle for hot water; and all round the rooms are benches for the women to set their tubs upon. Both the rooms were crowded with washers; there might be a hundred, or two, or even three; for it is not easy to form an accurate notion of so great a number; however, the rooms were large, and they were both full. It was amusing to see so many women, arms, head, and face all in motion, all busy in an ordinary household employment, in which we are accustomed to see, at the most, only three or four women employed in one place. The women were very civil. I learnt from them the regulations of the house; but I have forgotten the particulars. The substance of them is, that ‘so much’ is to be paid for each tub of water, ‘so much’ for a tub, and the privilege of washing for a day, and, ‘so much’ to the general overlookers of the linen, when it is left to be bleached. An old man and woman have this office, who were walking about, two melancholy figures.

The shops at Glasgow are large, and like London shops, and we passed by the largest coffee-room I ever saw. You look across the piazza of the Exchange, and see to the end of the coffee-room, where there is a circular window, the width of the room. Perhaps there might be thirty gentlemen sitting on the circular bench of the window, each reading a newspaper. They had the appearance of figures in a fantoccine, or men seen at the extremity of the opera-house, diminished into puppets.

I am sorry I did not see the High Church: both William and I were tired, and it rained very hard after we had left the bleaching-ground; besides, I am less eager to walk in a

large town than anywhere else; so we put it off, and I have since repented of my irresolution.

Dined, and left Glasgow at about three o’clock, in a heavy rain. We were obliged to ride through the streets to keep our feet dry, and, in spite of the rain, every person as we went along stayed his steps to look at us; indeed, we had the pleasure of spreading smiles from one end of Glasgow to the other—for we travelled the whole length of the town. A set of schoolboys, perhaps there might he eight, with satchels over their shoulders, and, except one or two, without shoes and stockings, yet very well dressed in jackets and trousers, like gentlemen’s children, followed us in great delight, admiring the car and longing to jump up. At last, though we were seated, they made several attempts to get on behind; and they looked so pretty and wild, and at the same time so modest, that we wished to give them a ride, and there being a little hill near the end of the town, we got off, and four of them who still remained, the rest having dropped into their homes by the way, took our places; and indeed I would have walked two miles willingly, to have had the pleasure of seeing them so happy. When they were to ride no longer, they scampered away, laughing and rejoicing. New houses are rising up in great numbers round Glasgow, citizen-like houses, and new plantations, chiefly of fir; the fields are frequently enclosed by hedgerows, but there is no richness, nor any particular beauty for some miles.

The first object that interested us was a gentleman’s house upon a green plain or holm, almost close to the Clyde, sheltered by tall trees, a quiet modest mansion, and, though white-washed, being an old building, and no other house near it, or in connexion with it, and standing upon the

level field, which belonged to it, its own domain, the whole scene together brought to our minds an image of the retiredness and sober elegance of a nunnery; but this might be owing to the greyness of the afternoon, and our having come immediately from Glasgow, and through a country which, till now, had either had a townish taint, or at best little of rural beauty. While we were looking at the house we overtook a foot-traveller, who, like many others, began to talk about our car. We alighted to walk up a hill, and, continuing the conversation, the man told us, with something like a national pride, that it belonged to a Scotch Lord, Lord Semple; he added, that a little further on we should see a much finer prospect, as fine a one as ever we had seen in our lives. Accordingly, when we came to the top of the hill, it opened upon us most magnificently. We saw the Clyde, now a stately sea-river, winding away mile after mile, spotted with boats and ships, each side of the river hilly, the right populous with single houses and villages—Dunglass Castle upon a promontory, the whole view terminated by the rock of Dumbarton, at five or six miles distance, which stands by itself, without any hills near it, like a sea-rock.

We travelled for some time near the river, passing through clusters of houses which seemed to owe their existence rather to the wealth of the river than the land, for the banks were mostly bare, and the soil appeared poor, even near the water. The left side of the river was generally uninhabited and moorish, yet there are some beautiful spots: for instance, a nobleman’s house, [56] where the fields and trees were rich, and, in combination with the river, looked very lovely. As we went along

William and I were reminded of the views upon the Thames in Kent, which, though greatly superior in richness and softness, are much inferior in grandeur. Not far from Dumbarton, we passed under some rocky, copse-covered hills, which were so like some of the hills near Grasmere that we could have half believed they were the same. Arrived at Dumbarton before it was dark, having pushed on briskly that we might have start of a traveller at the inn, who was following us as fast as he could in a gig. Every front room was full, and we were afraid we should not have been admitted. They put us into a little parlour, dirty, and smelling of liquors, the table uncleaned, and not a chair in its place; we were glad, however, of our sorry accommodations.

While tea was preparing we lolled at our ease, and though the room-window overlooked the stable-yard, and at our entrance there appeared to be nothing but gloom and unloveliness, yet while I lay stretched upon the carriage cushions on three chairs, I discovered a little side peep which was enough to set the mind at work. It was no more than a smoky vessel lying at anchor, with its bare masts, a clay hut and the shelving bank of the river, with a green pasture above. Perhaps you will think that there is not much in this, as I describe it: it is true; but the effect produced by these simple objects, as they happened to be combined, together with the gloom of the evening, was exceedingly wild. Our room was parted by a slender partition from a large dining-room, in which were a number of officers and their wives, who, after the first hour, never ceased singing, dancing, laughing, or loud talking. The ladies sang some pretty songs, a great relief to us. We went early to bed; but poor Coleridge could

not sleep for the noise at the street door; he lay in the parlour below stairs. It is no uncommon thing in the best inns of Scotland to have shutting-up beds in the sitting-rooms.

Wednesday, August 24th.—As soon as breakfast was over, William and I walked towards the Castle, a short mile from the town. We overtook two young men, who, on our asking the road, offered to conduct us, though it might seem it was not easy to miss our way, for the rock rises singly by itself from the plain on which the town stands. The rock of Dumbarton is very grand when you are close to it, but at a little distance, under an ordinary sky, and in open day, it is not grand, but curiously wild. The castle and fortifications add little effect to the general view of the rock, especially since the building of a modern house, which is white-washed, and consequently jars, wherever it is seen, with the natural character of the place. There is a path up to the house, but it being low water we could walk round the rock, which we resolved to do. On that side next the town green grass grows to a considerable height up the rock, but wherever the river borders upon it, it is naked stone. I never saw rock in nobler masses, or more deeply stained by time and weather; nor is this to be wondered at, for it is in the very eye of sea-storms and land-storms, of mountain winds and water winds. It is of all colours, but a rusty yellow predominates. As we walked along, we could not but look up continually, and the mass above being on every side so huge, it appeared more wonderful than when we saw the whole together.

We sat down on one of the large stones which lie scattered near the base of the rock, with sea-weed growing amongst

them. Above our heads the rock was perpendicular for a considerable height, nay, as it seemed, to the very top, and on the brink of the precipice a few sheep, two of them rams with twisted horns, stood, as if on the look-out over the wide country. At the same time we saw a sentinel in his red coat, walking backwards and forwards between us and the sky, with his firelock over his shoulder. The sheep, I suppose owing to our being accustomed to see them in similar situations, appeared to retain their real size, while, on the contrary, the soldier seemed to be diminished by the distance till he almost looked like a puppet moved with wires for the pleasure of children, or an eight years’ old drummer in his stiff, manly dress beside a company of grenadiers. I had never before, perhaps, thought of sheep and men in soldiers’ dresses at the same time, and here they were brought together in a strange fantastic way. As will be easily conceived, the fearlessness and stillness of those quiet creatures, on the brow of the rock, pursuing their natural occupations, contrasted with the restless and apparently unmeaning motions of the dwarf soldier, added not a little to the general effect of this place, which is that of wild singularity, and the whole was aided by a blustering wind and a gloomy sky. Coleridge joined us, and we went up to the top of the rock.

The road to a considerable height is through a narrow cleft, in which a flight of steps is hewn; the steps nearly fill the cleft, and on each side the rocks form a high and irregular wall; it is almost like a long sloping cavern, only that it is roofed by the sky. We came to the barracks; soldiers’ wives were hanging out linen upon the rails, while the wind beat about them furiously—there was nothing which it could set in motion but the garments of the

women and the linen upon the rails; the grass—for we had now come to green grass—was close and smooth, and not one pile an inch above another, and neither tree nor shrub. The standard pole stood erect without a flag. The rock has two summits, one much broader and higher than the other. When we were near to the top of the lower eminence we had the pleasure of finding a little garden of flowers and vegetables belonging to the soldiers. There are three distinct and very noble prospects—the first up the Clyde towards Glasgow—Dunglass Castle, seen on its promontory—boats, sloops, hills, and many buildings; the second, down the river to the sea—Greenock and Port-Glasgow, and the distant mountains at the entrance of Loch Long; and the third extensive and distant view is up the Leven, which here falls into the Clyde, to the mountains of Loch Lomond. The distant mountains in all these views were obscured by mists and dingy clouds, but if the grand outline of any one of the views can be seen, it is sufficient recompense for the trouble of climbing the rock of Dumbarton.

The soldier who was our guide told us that an old ruin which we came to at the top of the higher eminence had been a wind-mill—an inconvenient station, though certainly a glorious place for wind; perhaps if it really had been a wind-mill it was only for the use of the garrison. We looked over cannons on the battery-walls, and saw in an open field below the yeomanry cavalry exercising, while we could hear from the town, which was full of soldiers, ‘Dumbarton’s drums beat bonny, O!’ Yet while we stood upon this eminence, rising up so far as it does—inland, and having the habitual old English feeling of our own security as islanders—we could not help looking upon the fortress,

in spite of its cannon and soldiers, and the rumours of invasion, as set up against the hostilities of wind and weather rather than for any other warfare. On our return we were invited into the guard-room, about half-way down the rock, where we were shown a large rusty sword, which they called Wallace’s Sword, and a trout boxed up in a well close by, where they said he had been confined for upwards of thirty years. For the pleasure of the soldiers, who were anxious that we should see him, we took some pains to spy him out in his black den, and at last succeeded. It was pleasing to observe how much interest the poor soldiers—though themselves probably new to the place—seemed to attach to this antiquated inhabitant of their garrison.

When we had reached the bottom of the rock along the same road by which we had ascended, we made our way over the rough stones left bare by the tide, round the bottom of the rock, to the point where we had set off. This is a wild and melancholy walk on a blustering cloudy day: the naked bed of the river, scattered over with sea-weed; grey swampy fields on the other shore; sea-birds flying overhead; the high rock perpendicular and bare. We came to two very large fragments, which had fallen from the main rock; Coleridge thought that one of them was as large as Bowder-Stone, [61] William and I did not; but it is impossible to judge accurately; we probably, without knowing it, compared them with the whole mass from which they had fallen, which, from its situation, we consider as one rock or stone, and there is no object of the kind for comparison with the Bowder-Stone. When we leave the shore

of the Clyde grass begins to show itself on the rock; go a considerable way—still under the rock—along a flat field, and pass immediately below the white house, which wherever seen looks so ugly.

Left Dumbarton at about eleven o’clock. The sky was cheerless and the air ungenial, which we regretted, as we were going to Loch Lomond, and wished to greet the first of the Scottish lakes with our cheerfullest and best feelings. Crossed the Leven at the end of Dumbarton, and, when we looked behind, had a pleasing view of the town, bridge, and rock; but when we took in a reach of the river at the distance of perhaps half a mile, the swamp ground, being so near a town, and not in its natural wildness, but seemingly half cultivated, with houses here and there, gave us an idea of extreme poverty of soil, or that the inhabitants were either indolent or miserable. We had to travel four miles on the banks of the ‘Water of Leven’ before we should come to Loch Lomond. Having expected a grand river from so grand a lake, we were disappointed; for it appeared to me not to be very much larger than the Emont, and is not near so beautiful; but we must not forget that the day was cold and gloomy. Near Dumbarton it is like a river in a flat country, or under the influence of tides; but a little higher up it resembles one of our rivers, flowing through a vale of no extreme beauty, though prettily wooded; the hills on each side not very high, sloping backwards from the bed of the vale, which is neither very narrow nor very wide; the prospect terminated by Ben Lomond and other mountains. The vale is populous, but looks as if it were not inhabited by cultivators of the earth; the houses are chiefly of stone; often in rows by the river-side; they stand pleasantly, but have a tradish look, as if they might

have been off-sets from Glasgow. We saw many bleach-yards, but no other symptom of a manufactory, except something in the houses that was not rural, and a want of independent comforts. Perhaps if the river had been glittering in the sun, and the smoke of the cottages rising in distinct volumes towards the sky, as I have seen in the vale or basin below Pillsden in Dorsetshire, when every cottage, hidden from the eye, pointed out its lurking-place by an upright wreath of white smoke, the whole scene might have excited ideas of perfect cheerfulness.

Here, as on the Nith, and much more than in the Trough of the Clyde, a great portion of the ground was uncultivated, but the hills being less wild, the river more stately, and the ground not heaved up so irregularly and tossed about, the imperfect cultivation was the more to be lamented, particularly as there were so many houses near the river. In a small enclosure by the wayside is a pillar erected to the memory of Dr. Smollett, who was born in a village at a little distance, which we could see at the same time, and where, I believe, some of the family still reside. There is a long Latin inscription, which Coleridge translated for my benefit. The Latin is miserably bad [63]—as Coleridge said, such as poor Smollett, who was an excellent scholar, would have been ashamed of.

Before we came to Loch Lomond the vale widened, and became less populous. We climbed over a wall into a large field to have a better front view of the lake than from the road. This view is very much like that from Mr. Clarkson’s windows: the mountain in front resembles Hallan;

indeed, is almost the same; but Ben Lomond is not seen standing in such majestic company as Helvellyn, and the meadows are less beautiful than Ulswater. The reach of the lake is very magnificent; you see it, as Ulswater is seen beyond the promontory of Old Church, winding away behind a large woody island that looks like a promontory. The outlet of the lake—we had a distinct view of it in the field—is very insignificant. The bulk of the river is frittered away by small alder bushes, as I recollect; I do not remember that it was reedy, but the ground had a swampy appearance; and here the vale spreads out wide and shapeless, as if the river were born to no inheritance, had no sheltering cradle, no hills of its own. As we have seen, this does not continue long; it flows through a distinct, though not a magnificent vale. But, having lost the pastoral character which it had in the youthful days of Smollett—if the description in his ode to his native stream be a faithful one—it is less interesting than it was then.

The road carried us sometimes close to the lake, sometimes at a considerable distance from it, over moorish grounds, or through half-cultivated enclosures; we had the lake on our right, which is here so wide that the opposite hills, not being high, are cast into insignificance, and we could not distinguish any buildings near the water, if any there were. It is however always delightful to travel by a lake of clear waters, if you see nothing else but a very ordinary country; but we had some beautiful distant views, one in particular, down the high road, through a vista of over-arching trees; and the near shore was frequently very pleasing, with its gravel banks, bendings, and small bays. In one part it was bordered for a considerable way by irregular groups of forest trees or single stragglers, which,

although not large, seemed old; their branches were stunted and knotty, as if they had been striving with storms, and had half yielded to them. Under these trees we had a variety of pleasing views across the lake, and the very rolling over the road and looking at its smooth and beautiful surface was itself a pleasure. It was as smooth as a gravel walk, and of the bluish colour of some of the roads among the lakes of the north of England.

Passed no very remarkable place till we came to Sir James Colquhoun’s house, which stands upon a large, flat, woody peninsula, looking towards Ben Lomond. There must be many beautiful walks among the copses of the peninsula, and delicious views over the water; but the general surface of the country is poor, and looks as if it ought to be rich and well peopled, for it is not mountainous; nor had we passed any hills which a Cumbrian would dignify with the name of mountains. There was many a little plain or gently-sloping hill covered with poor heath or broom without trees, where one should have liked to see a cottage in a bower of wood, with its patch of corn and potatoes, and a green field with a hedge to keep it warm. As we advanced we perceived less of the coldness of poverty, the hills not having so large a space between them and the lake. The surface of the hills being in its natural state, is always beautiful; but where there is only a half cultivated and half peopled soil near the banks of a lake or river, the idea is forced upon one that they who do live there have not much of cheerful enjoyment.

But soon we came to just such a place as we had wanted to see. The road was close to the water, and a hill, bare, rocky, or with scattered copses rose above it. A deep shade hung over the road, where some little boys were at play;

we expected a dwelling-house of some sort; and when we came nearer, saw three or four thatched huts under the trees, and at the same moment felt that it was a paradise. We had before seen the lake only as one wide plain of water; but here the portion of it which we saw was bounded by a high and steep, heathy and woody island opposite, which did not appear like an island, but the main shore, and framed out a little oblong lake apparently not so broad as Rydale-water, with one small island covered with trees, resembling some of the most beautiful of the holms of Windermere, and only a narrow river’s breadth from the shore. This was a place where we should have liked to have lived, and the only one we had seen near Loch Lomond. How delightful to have a little shed concealed under the branches of the fairy island! the cottages and the island might have been made for the pleasure of each other. It was but like a natural garden, the distance was so small; nay, one could not have forgiven any one living there, not compelled to daily labour, if he did not connect it with his dwelling by some feeling of domestic attachment, like what he has for the orchard where his children play. I thought, what a place for William! he might row himself over with twenty strokes of the oars, escaping from the business of the house, and as safe from intruders, with his boat anchored beside him, as if he had locked himself up in the strong tower of a castle. We were unwilling to leave this sweet spot; but it was so simple, and therefore so rememberable, that it seemed almost as if we could have carried it away with us. It was nothing more than a small lake enclosed by trees at the ends and by the way-side, and opposite by the island, a steep bank on which the purple heath was seen under low oak coppice-wood, a group of houses

over-shadowed by trees, and a bending road. There was one remarkable tree, an old larch with hairy branches, which sent out its main stem horizontally across the road, an object that seemed to have been singled out for injury where everything else was lovely and thriving, tortured into that shape by storms, which one might have thought could not have reached it in that sheltered place.

We were now entering into the Highlands. I believe Luss is the place where we were told that country begins; but at these cottages I would have gladly believed that we were there, for it was like a new region. The huts were after the Highland fashion, and the boys who were playing wore the Highland dress and philabeg. On going into a new country I seem to myself to waken up, and afterwards it surprises me to remember how much alive I have been to the distinctions of dress, household arrangements, etc. etc., and what a spirit these little things give to wild, barren, or ordinary places. The cottages are within about two miles of Luss. Came in view of several islands; but the lake being so very wide, we could see little of their peculiar beauties, and they, being large, hardly looked like islands.

Passed another gentleman’s house, which stands prettily in a bay, [67] and soon after reached Luss, where we intended to lodge. On seeing the outside of the inn, we were glad that we were to have such pleasant quarters. It is a nice-looking white house, by the road-side; but there was not much promise of hospitality when we stopped at the door: no person came out till we had shouted a considerable time. A barefooted lass showed me up-stairs, and again my hopes revived; the house was clean for a Scotch inn, and the view very pleasant to the lake, over the top of the village—

a cluster of thatched houses among trees, with a large chapel in the midst of them. Like most of the Scotch kirks which we had seen, this building resembles a big house; but it is a much more pleasing building than they generally are, and has one of our rustic belfries, not unlike that at Ambleside, with two bells hanging in the open air. [68] We chose one of the back rooms to sit in, being more snug, and they looked upon a very sweet prospect—a stream tumbling down a cleft or glen on the hill-side, rocky coppice ground, a rural lane, such as we have from house to house at Grasmere, and a few outhouses. We had a poor dinner, and sour ale; but as long as the people were civil we were contented.

Coleridge was not well, so he did not stir out, but William and I walked through the village to the shore of the lake. When I came close to the houses, I could not but regret a want of loveliness correspondent with the beauty of the situation and the appearance of the village at a little distance; not a single ornamented garden. We saw potatoes and cabbages, but never a honeysuckle. Yet there were wild gardens, as beautiful as any that ever man cultivated, overgrowing the roofs of some of the cottages, flowers and creeping plants. How elegant were the wreaths of the bramble that had ‘built its own bower’ upon the riggins in several parts of the village; therefore we had chiefly to regret the want of gardens, as they are symptoms of leisure and comfort, or at least of no painful industry. Here we first saw houses without windows, the smoke coming out of the open window-places; the chimneys were like stools with four legs, a hole being left in the roof for the smoke, and over that a slate placed upon four sticks—sometimes the whole leaned as if it were going to fall. The fields close to Luss lie flat to the lake, and a

river, as large as our stream near the church at Grasmere, flows by the end of the village, being the same which comes down the glen behind the inn; it is very much like our stream—beds of blue pebbles upon the shores.

We walked towards the head of the lake, and from a large pasture field near Luss, a gentle eminence, had a very interesting view back upon the village and the lake and islands beyond. We then perceived that Luss stood in the centre of a spacious bay, and that close to it lay another small one, within the larger, where the boats of the inhabitants were lying at anchor, a beautiful natural harbour. The islands, as we look down the water, are seen in great beauty. Inch-ta-vanach, the same that framed out the little peaceful lake which we had passed in the morning, towers above the rest. The lake is very wide here, and the opposite shores not being lofty the chief part of the permanent beauty of this view is among the islands, and on the near shore, including the low promontories of the bay of Luss, and the village; and we saw it under its dullest aspect—the air cold, the sky gloomy, without a glimpse of sunshine.

On a splendid evening, with the light of the sun diffused over the whole islands, distant hills, and the broad expanse of the lake, with its creeks, bays, and little slips of water among the islands, it must be a glorious sight.

Up the lake there are no islands; Ben Lomond terminates the view, without any other large mountains; no clouds were upon it, therefore we saw the whole size and form of the mountain, yet it did not appear to me so large as Skiddaw does from Derwent-water. Continued our walk a considerable way towards the head of the lake, and went up a high hill, but saw no other reach of the

water. The hills on the Luss side become much steeper, and the lake, having narrowed a little above Luss, was no longer a very wide lake where we lost sight of it.

Came to a bark hut by the shores, and sate for some time under the shelter of it. While we were here a poor woman with a little child by her side begged a penny of me, and asked where she could ‘find quarters in the village.’ She was a travelling beggar, a native of Scotland, had often ‘heard of that water,’ but was never there before. This woman’s appearance, while the wind was rustling about us, and the waves breaking at our feet, was very melancholy: the waters looked wide, the hills many, and dark, and far off—no house but at Luss. I thought what a dreary waste must this lake be to such poor creatures, struggling with fatigue and poverty and unknown ways!

We ordered tea when we reached the inn, and desired the girl to light us a fire; she replied, ‘I dinna ken whether she’ll gie fire,’ meaning her mistress. We told her we did not wish her mistress to give fire, we only desired her to let her make it and we would pay for it. The girl brought in the tea-things, but no fire, and when I asked if she was coming to light it, she said ‘her mistress was not varra willing to gie fire.’ At last, however, on our insisting upon it, the fire was lighted: we got tea by candlelight, and spent a comfortable evening. I had seen the landlady before we went out, for, as had been usual in all the country inns, there was a demur respecting beds, notwithstanding the house was empty, and there were at least half-a-dozen spare beds. Her countenance corresponded with the unkindness of denying us a fire on a cold night, [70] for she was the most cruel and hateful-looking woman I

ever saw. She was overgrown with fat, and was sitting with her feet and legs in a tub of water for the dropsy,—probably brought on by whisky-drinking. The sympathy which I felt and expressed for her, on seeing her in this wretched condition—for her legs were swollen as thick as mill-posts—seemed to produce no effect; and I was obliged, after five minutes’ conversation, to leave the affair of the beds undecided. Coleridge had some talk with her daughter, a smart lass in a cotton gown, with a bandeau round her head, without shoes and stockings. She told Coleridge with some pride that she had not spent all her time at Luss, but was then fresh from Glasgow.

It came on a very stormy night; the wind rattled every window in the house, and it rained heavily. William and Coleridge had bad beds, in a two-bedded room in the garrets, though there were empty rooms on the first floor, and they were disturbed by a drunken man, who had come to the inn when we were gone to sleep.

Thursday, August 25th.—We were glad when we awoke to see that it was a fine morning—the sky was bright blue, with quick-moving clouds, the hills cheerful, lights and shadows vivid and distinct. The village looked exceedingly beautiful this morning from the garret windows—the stream glittering near it, while it flowed under trees through the level fields to the lake. After breakfast, William and I went down to the water-side. The roads were as dry as if no drop of rain had fallen, which added to the pure cheerfulness of the appearance of the village, and even of the distant prospect, an effect which I always seem to perceive from clearly bright roads, for they are always brightened by rain, after a storm; but when we

came among the houses I regretted even more than last night, because the contrast was greater, the slovenliness and dirt near the doors; and could not but remember, with pain from the contrast, the cottages of Somersetshire, covered with roses and myrtle, and their small gardens of herbs and flowers. While lingering by the shore we began to talk with a man who offered to row us to Inch-ta-vanach; but the sky began to darken; and the wind being high, we doubted whether we should venture, therefore made no engagement; he offered to sell me some thread, pointing to his cottage, and added that many English ladies carried thread away from Luss.

Presently after Coleridge joined us, and we determined to go to the island. I was sorry that the man who had been talking with us was not our boatman; William by some chance had engaged another. We had two rowers and a strong boat; so I felt myself bold, though there was a great chance of a high wind. The nearest point of Inch-ta-vanach is not perhaps more than a mile and a quarter from Luss; we did not land there, but rowed round the end, and landed on that side which looks towards our favourite cottages, and their own island, which, wherever seen, is still their own. It rained a little when we landed, and I took my cloak, which afterwards served us to sit down upon in our road up the hill, when the day grew much finer, with gleams of sunshine. This island belongs to Sir James Colquhoun, who has made a convenient road, that winds gently to the top of it.

We had not climbed far before we were stopped by a sudden burst of prospect, so singular and beautiful that it was like a flash of images from another world. We stood with our backs to the hill of the island, which we

were ascending, and which shut out Ben Lomond entirely, and all the upper part of the lake, and we looked towards the foot of the lake, scattered over with islands without beginning and without end. The sun shone, and the distant hills were visible, some through sunny mists, others in gloom with patches of sunshine; the lake was lost under the low and distant hills, and the islands lost in the lake, which was all in motion with travelling fields of light, or dark shadows under rainy clouds. There are many hills, but no commanding eminence at a distance to confine the prospect, so that the land seemed endless as the water.

What I had heard of Loch Lomond, or any other place in Great Britain, had given me no idea of anything like what we beheld: it was an outlandish scene—we might have believed ourselves in North America. The islands were of every possible variety of shape and surface—hilly and level, large and small, bare, rocky, pastoral, or covered with wood. Immediately under my eyes lay one large flat island, bare and green, so flat and low that it scarcely appeared to rise above the water, with straggling peat-stacks and a single hut upon one of its out-shooting promontories—for it was of a very irregular shape, though perfectly flat. Another, its next neighbour, and still nearer to us, was covered over with heath and coppice-wood, the surface undulating, with flat or sloping banks towards the water, and hollow places, cradle-like valleys, behind. These two islands, with Inch-ta-vanach, where we were standing, were intermingled with the water, I might say interbedded and interveined with it, in a manner that was exquisitely pleasing. There were bays innumerable, straits or passages like calm rivers, landlocked lakes, and, to the main water, stormy promontories. The solitary hut on the flat green island seemed unsheltered

and desolate, and yet not wholly so, for it was but a broad river’s breadth from the covert of the wood of the other island. Near to these is a miniature, an islet covered with trees, on which stands a small ruin that looks like the remains of a religious house; it is overgrown with ivy, and were it not that the arch of a window or gateway may be distinctly seen, it would be difficult to believe that it was not a tuft of trees growing in the shape of a ruin, rather than a ruin overshadowed by trees. When we had walked a little further we saw below us, on the nearest large island, where some of the wood had been cut down, a hut, which we conjectured to be a bark hut. It appeared to be on the shore of a little forest lake, enclosed by Inch-ta-vanach, where we were, and the woody island on which the hut stands.

Beyond we had the same intricate view as before, and could discover Dumbarton rock with its double head. There being a mist over it, it had a ghost-like appearance—as I observed to William and Coleridge, something like the Tor of Glastonbury from the Dorsetshire hills. Right before us, on the flat island mentioned before, were several small single trees or shrubs, growing at different distances from each other, close to the shore, but some optical delusion had detached them from the land on which they stood, and they had the appearance of so many little vessels sailing along the coast of it. I mention the circumstance, because, with the ghostly image of Dumbarton Castle, and the ambiguous ruin on the small island, it was much in the character of the scene, which was throughout magical and enchanting—a new world in its great permanent outline and composition, and changing at every moment in every part of it by the effect of sun and wind, and mist and

shower and cloud, and the blending lights and deep shades which took place of each other, traversing the lake in every direction. The whole was indeed a strange mixture of soothing and restless images, of images inviting to rest, and others hurrying the fancy away into an activity still more pleasing than repose. Yet, intricate and homeless, that is, without lasting abiding-place for the mind, as the prospect was, there was no perplexity; we had still a guide to lead us forward.

Wherever we looked, it was a delightful feeling that there was something beyond. Meanwhile, the sense of quiet was never lost sight of; the little peaceful lakes among the islands might make you forget that the great water, Loch Lomond, was so near; and yet are more beautiful, because you know that it is so: they have their own bays and creeks sheltered within a shelter. When we had ascended to the top of the island we had a view up to Ben Lomond, over the long, broad water without spot or rock; and, looking backwards, saw the islands below us as on a map. This view, as may be supposed, was not nearly so interesting as those we had seen before. We hunted out all the houses on the shore, which were very few: there was the village of Luss, the two gentlemen’s houses, our favourite cottages, and here and there a hut; but I do not recollect any comfortable-looking farm-houses, and on the opposite shore not a single dwelling. The whole scene was a combination of natural wildness, loveliness, beauty, and barrenness, or rather bareness, yet not comfortless or cold; but the whole was beautiful. We were too far off the more distant shore to distinguish any particular spots which we might have regretted were not better cultivated, and near Luss there was no want of houses.

After we had left the island, having been so much taken with the beauty of the bark hut and the little lake by which it appeared to stand, we desired the boatman to row us through it, and we landed at the hut. Walked upon the island for some time, and found out sheltered places for cottages. There were several woodman’s huts, which, with some scattered fir-trees, and others in irregular knots, that made a delicious murmuring in the wind, added greatly to the romantic effect of the scene. They were built in the form of a cone from the ground, like savages’ huts, the door being just large enough for a man to enter with stooping. Straw beds were raised on logs of wood, tools lying about, and a forked bough of a tree was generally suspended from the roof in the middle to hang a kettle upon. It was a place that might have been just visited by new settlers. I thought of Ruth and her dreams of romantic love:

‘And then he said how sweet it were,
A fisher or a hunter there,
A gardener in the shade,
Still wandering with an easy mind,
To build a household fire, and find
A home in every glade.’

We found the main lake very stormy when we had left the shelter of the islands, and there was again a threatening of rain, but it did not come on. I wanted much to go to the old ruin, but the boatmen were in a hurry to be at home. They told us it had been a stronghold built by a man who lived there alone, and was used to swim over and make depredations on the shore,—that nobody could ever lay hands on him, he was such a good swimmer, but at last they caught him in a net. The men pointed out to

us an island belonging to Sir James Colquhoun, on which were a great quantity of deer.

Arrived at the inn at about twelve o’clock, and prepared to depart immediately: we should have gone with great regret if the weather had been warmer and the inn more comfortable. When we were leaving the door, a party with smart carriage and servants drove up, and I observed that the people of the house were just as slow in their attendance upon them as on us, with one single horse and outlandish Hibernian vehicle.

When we had travelled about two miles the lake became considerably narrower, the hills rocky, covered with copses, or bare, rising more immediately from the bed of the water, and therefore we had not so often to regret the want of inhabitants. Passed by, or saw at a distance, sometimes a single cottage, or two or three together, but the whole space between Luss and Tarbet is a solitude to the eye. We were reminded of Ulswater, but missed the pleasant farms, and the mountains were not so interesting: we had not seen them in companies or brotherhoods rising one above another at a long distance. Ben Lomond stood alone, opposite to us, majestically overlooking the lake; yet there was something in this mountain which disappointed me,—a want of massiveness and simplicity, perhaps from the top being broken into three distinct stages. The road carried us over a bold promontory by a steep and high ascent, and we had a long view of the lake pushing itself up in a narrow line through an avenue of mountains, terminated by the mountains at the head of the lake, of which Ben Lui, if I do not mistake, is the most considerable. The afternoon was showery and misty, therefore we did not see this prospect so distinctly

as we could have wished, but there was a grand obscurity over it which might make the mountains appear more numerous.

I have said so much of this lake that I am tired myself, and I fear I must have tired my friends. We had a pleasant journey to Tarbet; more than half of it on foot, for the road was hilly, and after we had climbed one small hill we were not desirous to get into the car again, seeing another before us, and our path was always delightful, near the lake, and frequently through woods. When we were within about half a mile of Tarbet, at a sudden turning looking to the left, we saw a very craggy-topped mountain amongst other smooth ones; the rocks on the summit distinct in shape as if they were buildings raised up by man, or uncouth images of some strange creature. We called out with one voice, ‘That’s what we wanted!’ alluding to the frame-like uniformity of the side-screens of the lake for the last five or six miles. As we conjectured, this singular mountain was the famous Cobbler, near Arrochar. Tarbet was before us in the recess of a deep, large bay, under the shelter of a hill. When we came up to the village we had to inquire for the inn, there being no signboard. It was a well-sized white house, the best in the place. We were conducted up-stairs into a sitting-room that might make any good-humoured travellers happy—a square room, with windows on each side, looking, one way, towards the mountains, and across the lake to Ben Lomond, the other.

There was a pretty stone house before (i.e. towards the lake) some huts, scattered trees, two or three green fields with hedgerows, and a little brook making its way towards the lake; the fields are almost flat, and screened on that

side nearest the head of the lake by a hill, which, pushing itself out, forms the bay of Tarbet, and, towards the foot, by a gentle slope and trees. The lake is narrow, and Ben Lomond shuts up the prospect, rising directly from the water. We could have believed ourselves to be by the side of Ulswater, at Glenridden, or in some other of the inhabited retirements of that lake. We were in a sheltered place among mountains; it was not an open joyous bay, with a cheerful populous village, like Luss; but a pastoral and retired spot, with a few single dwellings. The people of the inn stared at us when we spoke, without giving us an answer immediately, which we were at first disposed to attribute to coarseness of manners, but found afterwards that they did not understand us at once, Erse being the language spoken in the family. Nothing but salt meat and eggs for dinner—no potatoes; the house smelt strongly of herrings, which were hung to dry over the kitchen fire.

Walked in the evening towards the head of the lake; the road was steep over the hill, and when we had reached the top of it we had long views up and down the water. Passed a troop of women who were resting themselves by the roadside, as if returning from their day’s labour. Amongst them was a man, who had walked with us a considerable way in the morning, and told us he was just come from America, where he had been for some years,—was going to his own home, and should return to America. He spoke of emigration as a glorious thing for them who had money. Poor fellow! I do not think that he had brought much back with him, for he had worked his passage over: I much suspected that a bundle, which he carried upon a stick, tied in a pocket-handkerchief, contained his all. He was almost blind, he said, as were many of the

crew. He intended crossing the lake at the ferry; but it was stormy, and he thought he should not be able to get over that day. I could not help smiling when I saw him lying by the roadside with such a company about him, not like a wayfaring man, but seeming as much at home and at his ease as if he had just stepped out of his hut among them, and they had been neighbours all their lives. [80b] Passed one pretty house, a large thatched dwelling with out-houses, but the prospect above and below was solitary.

The sun had long been set before we returned to the inn. As travellers, we were glad to see the moon over the top of one of the hills, but it was a cloudy night, without any peculiar beauty or solemnity. After tea we made inquiries respecting the best way to go to Loch Ketterine; the landlord could give but little information, and nobody seemed to know anything distinctly of the place, though it was but ten miles off. We applied to the maid-servant who waited on us: she was a fine-looking young woman, dressed in a white bed-gown, her hair fastened up by a comb, and without shoes and stockings. When we asked her about the Trossachs she could give us no information, but on our saying, ‘Do you know Loch Ketterine?’ she answered with a smile, ‘I should know that loch, for I was bred and born there.’ After much difficulty we learned from her that the Trossachs were at the foot of the lake, and that by the way we were to go we should come upon them at the head, should have to travel ten miles to the foot [80a] of the water, and that there was no inn by the way. The girl spoke English very distinctly; but she had few

words, and found it difficult to understand us. She did not much encourage us to go, because the roads were bad, and it was a long way, ‘and there was no putting-up for the like of us.’ We determined, however, to venture, and throw ourselves upon the hospitality of some cottager or gentleman. We desired the landlady to roast us a couple of fowls to carry with us. There are always plenty of fowls at the doors of a Scotch inn, and eggs are as regularly brought to table at breakfast as bread and butter.

Friday, August 26th.—We did not set off till between ten and eleven o’clock, much too late for a long day’s journey. Our boatman lived at the pretty white house which we saw from the windows: we called at his door by the way, and, even when we were near the house, the outside looked comfortable; but within I never saw anything so miserable from dirt, and dirt alone: it reminded one of the house of a decayed weaver in the suburbs of a large town, with a sickly wife and a large family; but William says it was far worse, that it was quite Hottentotish.

After long waiting, and many clumsy preparations, we got ourselves seated in the boat; but we had not floated five yards before we perceived that if any of the party—and there was a little Highland woman who was going over the water with us, the boatman, his helper, and ourselves—should stir but a few inches, leaning to one side or the other, the boat would be full in an instant, and we at the bottom; besides, it was very leaky, and the woman was employed to lade out the water continually. It appeared that this crazy vessel was not the man’s own, and that his was lying in a bay at a little distance. He said he would