Part 16

This is no uncommon scene in Scotland, and why does it yield more pleasure than the celebrated one that you have gone a hundred miles to see, besides spending no end of money on the way? Simply because you have approached it with a pure, healthy mind, undebauched by rumour or praise. It has in it the element of unexpectedness; which, indeed, is the condition of all delight, for pleasure must surprise if it is to be worthy of the name. The pleasure that is expected and looked for never comes, or if it does it is in a shape so changed that recognition is impossible. Besides, you have found out the scene, and have thereby a deeper interest in it. This same law pervades everything. You hear of Coleridge's wonderful conversation, and in an evil hour make your appearance at Highgate. The mild-beaming, silvery-haired sage, who conceived listening to be the whole duty of man, talks for the space of three mortal hours--by you happily unheard. For, after the first twenty minutes, you are conscious of a hazy kind of light before your eyes, a soothing sound is murmuring in your ears, a delicious numbness is creeping over all your faculties, and by the end of the first half-hour you are snoring away as comfortably as if you were laid by the side of your lawful spouse. You are disappointed of course: of the musical wisdom which has been flowing in plenteous streams around, you have not tasted one drop; and you never again hear a man praised for power or brilliancy of conversation without an inward shudder. The next day you take your place on the coach, and are fortunate enough to secure your favourite seat beside the driver. Outside of you is a hard-featured man, wrapt in a huge blue pilot-coat. You have no idea to what class of society he may belong. It is plain that he is not a gentleman in the superfine sense of that term. He has a very remarkable gift of silence. When you have smoked your cigar out, you hazard a remark about the weather. He responds. You try his mind as an angler tries a stream, to see if anything will rise. One thing draws on another, till, after an hour's conversation, which has flown over like a minute, you find that you have really learned something. [Sidenote: Pleasure not to be sought at a distance.] The unknown individual in the pilot-coat, who has strangely come out of space upon you, and as strangely returns into space again, has looked upon the world, and has formed his own notions and theories of what goes on there. On him life has pressed as well as on you; joy at divers times has lighted up his grim features; sorrow and pain have clouded them. There is something in the man; you are sorry when he is dropped on the road, and say "Good-bye," with more than usual feeling. Why is all this? The man in the pilot-coat does not talk so eloquently as S.T.C, but he instructs and pleases you--and just because you went to hear the celebrated Talker, as you go to see the Irish Giant, or the Performing Pig, you are disappointed, as you deserved to be. The man in the pilot-coat has come upon you naturally, unexpectedly. At its own sweet will "the cloud turned forth its silver lining on the night." Happiness may best be extracted from the objects surrounding us. The theory on which our loud tumultuary modern life is based--that we can go to Pleasure, that if we frequent her haunts we are sure to find her--is a heresy and a falsehood. She will not be constrained. She obeys not the call of the selfish or the greedy. Depend upon it she is as frequently found on homely roads, and amongst rustic villages and farms, as among the glaciers of Chamouni, or the rainbows of Niagara.

In one of his earliest rambles, Mr Macdonald follows the river for some miles above the city. The beauty of the Clyde below Glasgow is well known to the civilised world. Even the _roué_ of landscape, to whom the Rhine is weariness and the Alps common-place, has felt his heart leap within him while gazing on that magnificent estuary. But it is not only in her maturity that the Clyde is fair. Beauty attends her from her birth on Rodger Law until she is wedded with ocean--Bute, and the twin Cumbraes, bridesmaids of the stream; Arran, groomsman to the main. With Mr Macdonald's book in pocket to be a companion at intervals--for one requires no guide, having years before learned every curve and bend of the river--let us start along its banks towards Carmyle and Kenmure wood. We pass Dalmarnock Bridge, and leave the city, with its windowed factories and driving wheels and everlasting canopy of smoke behind. The stream comes glittering down between green banks, one of which rises high on the left, so that further vision in that quarter is intercepted. On the right are villages and farms; afar, the Cathkin Braes, the moving cloud shadows mottling their sunny slopes; and straight ahead, and closing the view, the spire of Cambuslang Church, etched on the pallid azure of the sky. We are but two miles from the city, and everything is bright and green. The butterfly flutters past; the dragonfly darts hither and thither. See, he poises himself on his winnowing wings, about half a yard from one's nose, which he curiously inspects; that done, off darts the winged tenpenny-nail, his rings gleaming like steel. There are troops of swallows about. Watch one. Now he is high in air--now he skims the Clyde. You can hear his sharp, querulous twitter as he jerks and turns. Nay, it is said that the kingfisher himself has been seen gleaming along these sandy banks, illuminating them like a meteor. [Sidenote: Dalbeth Convent.] At some little distance a white house is pleasantly situated amongst trees--it is Dalbeth Convent. As we pass, one of the frequent bells summoning the inmates to devotion is stirring the sunny Presbyterian air. A little on this side of the convent, a rapid brook comes rushing to the Clyde, crossed by a rude bridge of planks, which has been worn by the feet of three generations at the very least. The brook, which is rather huffy and boisterous in its way, particularly after rain, had, a few days before, demolished and broken up said wooden planks, and carried one of them off. Arriving, we find a woman and boy anxious to cross, yet afraid to venture. Service is proffered, and, after a little trouble, both are landed in safety on the farther bank. The woman is plainly, yet neatly dressed, and may be about forty-five years of age or thereby. The boy has turned eleven, has long yellow hair hanging down his back, and looks thin and slender for his years. With them they have something wrapped up in a canvas cloth, which, to the touch as they are handed across, seem to be poles of about equal length. For the slight service the woman returns thanks in a tone which smacks of the southern English counties. "Good-bye" is given and returned, and we proceed, puzzling ourselves a good deal as to what kind of people they are, and what their business may be in these parts, but can come to no conclusion. However, it does not matter much, for the ironworks are passed now, and the river banks are beautiful. They are thickly wooded, and at a turn the river flows straight down upon you for a mile, with dusty meal-mills on one side, a dilapidated wheel-house on the other, and stretching from bank to bank a half-natural, half-artificial shallow horse-shoe fall, over which the water tumbles in indolent foam--a sight which a man who has no pressing engagements, and is fond of exercise, may walk fifty miles to see, and be amply rewarded for his pains. In front is a ferry--a rope extending across the river by which the boat is propelled--and lo! a woman in a scarlet cloak on the opposite side hails the ferryman, and that functionary comes running to his duty. [Sidenote: Carmyle.] Just within the din of the shallow horse-shoe fall lies the village of Carmyle, an old, quiet, sleepy place, where nothing has happened for the last fifty years, and where nothing will happen for fifty years to come. Ivy has been the busiest thing here; it has crept up the walls of the houses, and in some instances fairly "put out the light" of the windows. The thatched roofs are covered with emerald moss. The plum-tree which blossomed some months ago blossomed just the same in the spring which witnessed the birth of the oldest inhabitant. For half a century not one stone has been placed upon another here--there are only a few more green mounds in the churchyard. It is the centre of the world. All else is change: this alone is stable. There is a repose deeper than sleep in this little, antiquated village--ivy-muffled, emerald-mossed, lullabied for ever by the fall of waters. The meal-mills, dusty and white as the clothes of the miller himself, whir industriously; the waters of the lade come boiling out from beneath the wheel, and reach the Clyde by a channel dug by the hand of man long ago, but like a work of nature's now, so covered with furze as it is. Look down through the clear amber of the current, and you see the "long green gleet of the slippery stones" in which the silver-bellied eel delights. Woe betide the luckless village urchin that dares to wade therein. There is a sudden splash and roar. When he gets out, he is laid with shrill objurgations across the broad maternal knee, and fright and wet clothes are avenged by sound whacks from the broad maternal hand. Leaving the village, we proceed onward. The banks come closer, the stream is shallower, and whirls in eddy and circle over a rocky bed. There is a woodland loneliness about the river which is aided by the solitary angler standing up to his middle in the water, and waiting patiently for the bite that never comes, or by the water-ousel flitting from stone to stone. [Sidenote: Kenmuir Bank.] In a quarter of an hour we reach Kenmuir Bank, which rises some seventy feet or so, filled with trees, their trunks rising bare for a space, and then spreading out with branch and foliage into a matted shade, permitting the passage only of a few flakes of sunlight at noon, resembling, in the green twilight, a flock of visionary butterflies alighted and asleep. Within, the wood is jungle; you wade to the knees in brushwood and bracken. The trunks are clothed with ivy, and snakes of ivy creep from tree to tree, some green with life, some tarnished with decay. At the end of the Bank there is a clear well, in which, your face meeting its shadow, you may quench your thirst. Seated here, you have the full feeling of solitude. An angler wades out into mid-channel--a bird darts out of a thicket, and slides away on noiseless wing--the shallow wash and murmur of the Clyde flows through a silence as deep as that of an American wilderness--and yet, by to-morrow, the water which mirrors as it passes the beauty of the lucken-gowan hanging asleep, will have received the pollutions of a hundred sewers, and be bobbing up and down among the crowds of vessels at the Broomielaw. Returning homeward by the top of Kenmuir Bank, we gaze westward. Out of a world of smoke the stalk of St Rollox rises like a banner-staff, its vapoury streamer floating on the wind; and afar, through the gap between the Campsie and Kilpatrick hills, Benlomond himself, with a streak of snow upon his shoulder. Could one but linger here for a couple of hours, one would of a verity behold a sight--the sun setting in yonder lurid, smoke-ocean. The wreaths of vapour which seem so common-place and vulgar now, so suggestive of trade and swollen purses and rude manners, would then become a glory such as never shepherd beheld at sunrise on his pastoral hills. Beneath a roof of scarlet flame, one would see the rolling edges of the smoke change into a brassy brightness, as with intense heat; the dense mass and volume of it dark as midnight, or glowing with the solemn purple of thunder; while right in the centre of all, where it has burned a clear way for itself, the broad fluctuating orb, paining the eye with concentrated splendours, and sinking gradually down, a black spire cutting his disk in two. But for this one cannot wait, and the apparition will be unbeheld but by the rustic stalking across the field in company with his prodigious shadow, and who, turning his face to the flame, will conceive it the most ordinary thing in the world. We keep the upper road on our return, and in a short time are again at Carmyle; we have no intention of tracing the river bank a second time, and so turn up the narrow street. But what is to do?

[Sidenote: The acrobat.]

The children are gathered in a circle, and the wives are standing at the open doors. There is a performance going on. The tambourine is sounding, and a tiny acrobat, with a fillet round his brow, tights covered with tinsel lozenges, and flesh-coloured shoes, is striding about on a pair of stilts, to the no small amazement and delight of the juveniles. He turns his head, and--why, it's the little boy I assisted across the brook at Dalbeth three hours ago, and of course that's the old lady who is thumping and jingling the tambourine, and gathering in the halfpennies! God bless her jolly old face! who would have thought of meeting her here? I am recognised, the boy waves me farewell, the old lady smiles and curtsies, thumps her tambourine, and rattles the little bells of it with greater vigour than ever. The road to Glasgow is now comparatively uninteresting. The trees wear a dingy colour; you pass farm-houses, with sooty stacks standing in the yard. 'Tis a coaly, dusty district, which has characteristics worth noting. For, as the twilight falls dewily on far-off lea and mountain, folding up daisy and buttercup, putting the linnet to sleep beside his nest of young in the bunch of broom, here the circle of the horizon becomes like red-hot steel; the furnaces of the Clyde iron-works lift up their mighty towers of flame, throwing

"Large and angry lustres o'er the sky, And shifting lights across the long dark roads;"

and so, through chase of light and shade, through glimmer of glare and gloom, we find our way back to Glasgow--its low hum breaking into separate and recognisable sounds, its nebulous brightness into far-stretching street-lamps, as we draw near.

[Sidenote: Paisley.]

The tourist who travels by train from Glasgow to Greenock must pass the town of Paisley. If he glances out of the carriage window he will see beneath him a third-rate Scotch town, through which flows the foulest and shallowest of rivers.

The principal building in the town, and the one which first attracts the eye of a stranger, is the jail; then follow the church spires in their order of merit. Unfortunately the train passes not through Paisley, but over it; and from his "coign of vantage" the tourist beholds much that is invisible to the passenger in the streets. All the back-greens, piggeries, filthy courts, and unmentionable abominations of the place, are revealed to him for a moment as the express flashes darkly across the railway bridge. For the seeing of Scotch towns a bird's-eye view is plainly the worst point of view. In all likelihood the tourist, as he passes, will consider Paisley the ugliest town he has ever beheld, and feel inwardly grateful that his lot has not been cast therein. But in this the tourist may be very much mistaken. Paisley is a remarkable place--one of the most remarkable in Scotland. Just as Comrie is the abode of earthquakes, Paisley is the abode of poetic inspiration. There is no accounting for the tastes of the celestials. Queen Titania fell in love with Bottom when he wore the ass's head; and Paisley, ugly as it is, is the favourite seat of the Muses. There Apollo sits at the loom and earns eighteen shillings per week. At this moment, and the same might have been said of any moment since the century came in, there is perhaps a greater number of poets living and breathing in this little town than in the whole of England. Whether this may arise from the poverty of the place, on the principle that the sweetness of the nightingale's song is connected in some subtle way with the thorn against which she leans her breast, it may be useless to inquire. Proceed from what cause it may, Paisley has been for the last fifty years or more an aviary of singing birds. To said aviary I had once the honour to be introduced. Some years ago, when dwelling in the outskirts of the town, I received a billet intimating that the L.C.A. would meet on the evening of the 26th Jan. 18--, in honour of the memory of the immortal Robert Burns, and requesting my attendance. N.B.--Supper and drink, 1s. 6d. Being a good deal puzzled by the mystic characters, I made inquiries, and discovered that L.C.A. represented the "Literary and Convivial Association," which met every Saturday evening for the cultivation of the minds of its members--a soil which for years had been liberally irrigated with toddy--with correspondent effects. To this cheap feast of the gods on the sacred evening in question I directed my steps, and beheld the assembled poets. [Sidenote: The poets.] There could scarcely have been fewer than eighty present. Strange! Each of these conceited himself of finer clay than ordinary mortals; each of these had composed verses, some few had even published small volumes or pamphlets of verse by subscription, and drank the anticipated profits; each of these had his circle of admirers and flatterers, his small public and shred of reputation; each of these envied and hated his neighbour; and not unfrequently two bards would quarrel in their cups as to which of them was possessor of the larger amount of fame. At that time the erection of a monument to Thom of Inverury had been talked about, _apropos_ of which one of the bards remarked, "Ou ay, jist like them. They'll bigg us monuments whan we're deid: I wush they'd gie us something whan we're leevin'." In that room, amid that motley company, one could see the great literary world unconsciously burlesqued and travestied, shadowed forth there the emptiness and noise of it, the blatant vanity of many of its members. The eighty poets presented food for meditation. Well, it is from this town that I propose taking a walk, for behind Paisley lie Gleniffer Braes, the scene of Tannahill's songs. One can think of Burns apart from Ayrshire, of Wordsworth apart from Cumberland, but hardly of Tannahill apart from the Braes of Gleniffer. The district, too, is of but little extent; in a walk of three hours you can see every spot mentioned by the poet. You visit his birthplace in the little straggling street, where the sound of the shuttle is continually heard. You pass up to the green hills where he delighted to wander, and whose charms he has celebrated; and you return by the canal where, when the spirit "finely touched to fine issues," was disordered and unstrung, he sought repose. Birth, life, and death lie side by side. The matter of the moral is closely packed. The whole tragedy sleeps in the compass of an epigram.

[Sidenote: Stanley Castle.]