The Spell of Scotland

t to let it lie there. These Middle Marches however are so essentially Scottish, the splendour and the romance, the history and the tragedy, that one would fain keep them so, and come u

in this realm of romance, since the Border was nea

istory and story have passed before. There was James II going to the siege of Roxburgh, and not returning; there was James IV going to the field of Flodden and not returning; there was James V going to hunt the deer; there was James VI going up t

ES

Bothwell-of all place of emotion this is the most difficult to realize, and I can but think Mary's heart was broken here, and the heartbreak at Carberry Hill was but an echo of this; past Lauder, where the nobles

lr

as to arrive there in the evening of a night when the moon would be at the full. I had seen it shine gloriousl

ng my eyes resolutely to all the glory and the memory that lay about, I went sou

to enter there until the magic hour should strike. The country roun

eed flows roun

slopes to

light of day and the coming shadows of night in a curious effect which no picture can report; t

from Bannockburn, and Flodden, and Culloden; and where men and women still insert their mortality into this immortality-Elizabeth Clephane who wrote the "Ninety and Nine" lies there; and out into the country and down by the Tweed toward the Holy Pool, the Haly Wheel, to wonder if when I came again in the mi

n this my first evening in Scotland! And whether or not you care for the pipes, there is nothing like

ways they could perform miracles and obtain food; which they did. That for the early time. And for the late, the encampment of Leslie's men in these fields before the day when

battle on the way against the Moslems in southern Spain, where "a Douglass! a Douglass!" rang in battle clash against "Allah, illah, allah," and the Douglass himself was slain. The heart of The Bruce flung against the infidel, was recove

also buried

St. Micha

ll'd one and the

the world over, Oxford, Paris, Bologna, Palermo, Toledo, and finally, perhaps because his wizardry had sent him like a wandering Jew from place to place, back to the Border, his home country, where he came and served the Evil One. Dante places him in the Pu

ld say

left the Eildon

To that height on the morrow I should climb, for it is there that Sir Walter Scott, a later wizard, had carried our Washi

nd Smailholm; and there you have Galashiels and Torwoodelee and Gala Water; and in that direction you see Teviotdale and the Braes of Yarrow; and Ettrick stream winding along like a silver thread to throw itself into the Tweed. It may be pertinacity, but to my eye, these gray hills and all this wild B

ugh to remember that perfect picture as im

s against th

he purpl

remembe

once mo

from the Bo

from the

music lull

s to qui

d ghost thy

ough the d

come home to

returnin

emory broods

der wat

full of b

ut of l

hat sung the

ugh a boy'

below the bl

n the gol

nd Tweed, an

too fai

that the v

d have wel

Melrose, mael ros, so the old Celtic goes, "the naked headland in the wood." And I was seeing, was hearing, what I have co

not see the moonlight flooding the Abbey, Melrose Abbey? Out of a remembered yesterday, out of

'st view fair

by the pal

beams of l

flout the

n arches are b

fted oriel g

d light's un

he ruined ce

s and buttre

d of ebon

r edges th

that teach thee

Tweed is he

hoot o'er the d

t go alone

t. David's

eturning, s

cene so sad

d not rise

the Cross in the market, looked expectan

the ringing o

was well n

d true, Charles' wain-as Charles should in Bonnie Scotland-held true to the pole. But it was a late July moon, and those Eildon hills and their circling kin rose so high against the night s

n December, on December 27, when the festival of St. John's is celebrated with torch lights in the ruins of the Abbey-

come, I mu

ot come

St. John's, I

wer I may

an October moon, in wh

OSE

n in the land where reform has meant ruin, and where from Kelso to Elgin, shattered fanes of the fai

the Tweed, and is so lovely, so dramatic a corner of the Tweed, that Dorothy Woodsworth declared, "we wished

before Saint Augustine came to Canterbury. It was the chief "island" between Iona and Lindisfarne. Very haughty were these monks of the West. "Rome errs, Alexandria errs

on these very hills round about us, and saw, when abiding in the fields, angels ascending and descending on golden ladders. Entering Melrose as a novice he became prior in 664, and l

n mountain, m

sea, from sh

. Cuthbert's c

them in fa

alive he lo

is relics m

h neither sinner nor saint, because Darnley crossed Mary in his veins-David determined to build him fair Abbeys. Of which, Melrose, "St. David's ruined pile," is the fairest. He brought Cistercians from Rievaulx in Yorkshire, to supplant the Culdees of Iona, and they builded them

he caused the Abbey to be pillaged and burned. And when Hertford came for Henry VIII, after the Thirty Nine Articles had annulled respect for buildings under the protection of Rome, the final ruin came to St. David's church-palace. Yet, late as 1810, church service, reformed, of course, was held in a roofed-over part of the Abbey ruin. To-day it is un

t exquisite ruins in the United Kingdom, perhaps second to Tintern, but why compare? It is of f

'd roof ros

lofty, lig

hat locked eac

e lys or a qu

re carved grot

with clustered

with capital f

lances which gar

ny other, is the east window over the high altar, throu

n the east

er shafts of

ed tracer

have thought s

rs straight

reakish kno

spell when the

he willow wre

ight, so pal

prophet and

on the gla

midst his

Michael b

on the Apos

ms kissed t

he pavement a

ots

uilt the "keep" which centers all

ed mansion of all the land. Scott, like the monks, could not leave the silver wash of the Tweed; and, more loving than t

nd athwart the shifting shadows of oak, ash, and thorn-Puck of Pook's hill must have known the Border country in its most embroidered days-you

e to its consciousness through the homespun, alas, to-day too often the factory-spun wo

emark it when he himself recognized how his vision was quickened through her companionship?-has spoke

he Cheviot hills, where East a

Tweed, a

ut o' ae

it runs, its short h

the stretch o

p of Berw

row of the thousands who through the centuries have exiled themselves f

I maun wa

anes far fra

, that sunken way that runs along the boundary for one-half its length, and may have been a fosse, or may have been a concealed road o

rough the s

it a jo

gain and aga

e voice of

ots

d come hither by rail from Galashiels-that noisy modern factory town, once the housing place for Melrose pilgrims, which to-day speaks nothing of the romance of Gala water, and surely not these factory folk "can match the lads o' Gala Water."

hole. Sir Walter wished to possess the Border, or as much of it as might be, so he

either of which would suit me, but both would make a very desirable property indeed, and could be had for betw

had extended to a thousand acres, to the inclusion of many fi

resolved on no more building, and no pur

been knighted, and was, in truth, the Chief of the Border; a royal ambition which

s had become safer, in those scant seven years that were left to him. Even Scott could be mistaken, for

s lay on Hu

e spied wi

he saw a l

down by the

s o' the gras

o' the ve

tt o' her

siller bell

ank at all, but that is in an entirely different dir

se if they knew that Scott wished them to have lived at his Huntlie Bank, they straightway would have managed to have lived there. Always, as

d a basement doorway. "My dreams about my cottage go on," he wrote to Joanna Baillie, as we all dream of building cottages into castles. "My present intention is to have only two spare bedrooms," but "I can

ver that may be, and are confident that Sir Walter if

alled this "perhaps the most incongruous pile that gentlemanly modernism ever designed." This may c

s through a sort of transubstantiation of personality that comes by looking on what the great

ich Queen Mary prayed, the quaigh of her great great and last grandson, the tumbler from which Bobbie Burns drank-one of them-the purse int

DY, ABB

es I, the pistol of Claverhouse, the pistol of Napoleon, a hunting flask of James III; and here are the keys of Loch Leven castle, dropped in the lake by Mary

cony, also book-lined, and escape through a little doorway. When Scott first came to the cottage of Abbotsford he wrote, furiously, in a little window embrasure with only a curta

esire to write, the ruling passion. He was wheeled to the desk, he took the pen,-nothing came. He sank back and burst into tears.

and now he could never read him all over again for the first time. It is rather because Scott the man is so immortal that he seems like a man still living; or at least like one who died but yesterday. Into the dining-room whe

ter glow, "so warm that every window was wide open, and so peacefully still that the sound of

yb

tored so much precious personal dust. The time had become thrawn; dark skies hung over the Cheviots and the Eildon, and ov

was by this very way that there passed the funeral train of Scott, the chief carriage drawn by Scott's own horses. Thousands and thousands of pilgrims have followed that fu

e across the river, with the ringing of bells in the ear. For it was ordered on that September day of 1832, by the Provost, "tha

me to forget; the stream of pilgrims has been so uninterrupted for nearly a century. Through the market-place of Melrose it passed, t

and very lonely. And one wonders if Michael Scot did not call to Walter Scott to come and join the quiet there, a

and pass through the little winding street-and wonder if the early Roman name of Trimontium,

ve come the wrong way. There is a steep climb to the heights of Bemersyde, where on the crest all Melrose Glen lies beautifully storied b

, the Dunion, the Ruberslaw, the Eildon rise, and in the great bend of the river with richly wooded braes abou

h woodlands on either side, and to the east,

y three years old. It is in truth his birthplace, for without the clear air of the Border he would have fol

utiful Scottish panorama may be glimpsed, and here Scott brought Turner to make his sketch of the Border. And here, because a kinsman agreed to save Sandyknowe Tower from t

nun in Dry

oks upon

monk in M

th a word

d leaves a peninsula for Dryburgh. The gray walls of the ruin lift above

TOMB OF SIR WALTER

is made chiefly because in the quiet sheltered ruined St. Mary's aisle sleeps Sir Walte

than Augustus or Columba. These were white monks that David brought up from Alnwick where his queen had been a Northumbrian p

would prefer that Sir Walter were there with his kin, instead of here with his kindred. But this is a sweet place, a historic place, begun by Hugh de Moreville, who was a slayer of Thomas à Becket, and was Constab

e you carry away, but tha

here with c

ites sing