A. R. Hope Moncrieff

“ The mists blind the Celt on his perilous mountain-side, the sea is smitten white on his rocks, the wind bends and dwarfs his pine wood, and as Nature is cruel to him, and as his light and heat are gathered from the moor, and his most plenteous food from the whirlpool and the foam, we need not be surprised that few are the gracious shapes that haunt his fancy. ”

“ But when we see the spirit in which many of India's rulers undertake their difficult task—the patient labours of officials, following the pattern of men like Outram, Lawrence, Havelock, the devotion to duty that often meets no reward but an early grave—we take hope that their work may after all weld into strength a free, prosperous, and united nation. And though we wisely forbear to force our faith upon these benighted souls, it rests with ourselves in time, through the power of example, to win a nobler victory than any in the blood-stained annals of Hindostan. ”

“ Presently the tall sky-line breaks and drops; let in between the monsters appears a terrace of tiny riverside houses, huddled together as in a miniature. There is a tiny tavern with a plank-built terrace rising on piles out of the water, a tiny shop all aslant, a tiny brown house with a pot-belly of a bow-window. It all babbles of Jack and Poll, of crimps and tots of rum, and incredible yarns in the bar-parlour. Next, between the dusky wharves, an Italian church-tower soars up out of a nest of poor houses; the sun catches its white face and transfigures it. ”

“ There is a desperate temptation in the hubbub to leap into destruction. Water-horses and kelpies, keep stabled in your rock-stalls—for if you issue forth the river will sweep you down, before you have finished one neigh, to Castle Urquhart, and dash you, in a sheet of foam, to the top of her rocking battlements.... We emerge, like a gay creature of the element, from the chasm, and wing our way up the glen towards the source of the cataract. In a few miles all is silent. A more peaceful place is not among all the mountains. ”

“ For reasons based on a heavy clay soil, it does not lend itself to builders’ designs. Of late a few villas have straggled on to the lanes between Kingsbury and its lonely church; else few but scattered farm-buildings break this green expanse, a preserve of real rurality, traversed by lanes and hedgerow paths giving solitary ways across brooks and meadows, northward to Edgware, westward to Harrow, so little trodden that blackberries can grow ripe here within sound of the Metropolitan Railway whistles, and the plainest hint of London’s close neighbourhood is a crop of notices to trespassers. ”

“ Then, the dearest sight of all—ships appearing out of the land, fore and main and mizzen, peak and truck, halliards and stays, and men like flies furling top-gallant sails above the roofs of London. As we open the region of the docks we are in a great city of ships—big steamers basking lazily with their red bellies half out of water, frantic spluttering tugs, placid brown-sailed barges, reckless banging lighters—and behind all this, clumps and thickets and avenues of masts and spars and tackle stretching stretching infinitely on every side. ”

“ The very existence of the island of South Uist is itself a tragedy which shames our civilisation. Nowhere in our proud Empire is there a spot more desolate, grim, hopelessly poverty-stricken. It is a wilderness of rocks and of standing water, on which, in the summer, golden lichen and spreading water-lilies mock the ghastly secrets of starvation and disease that they conceal. The water is constantly utterly unfit for drinking purposes. There is not a tree on the island, and one wonders how the miserable cattle and sheep contrive to live on the scant grey herbage. ”

“ He was a living, a strenuous protest in perpetual kilt against the civilisation, the taming, the softening of mankind. He was essentially wild. His virtues were those of human nature in the rough and unreclaimed, open and unsubdued as the Moor of Rannoch. He was a true autochthon, terrigena,—a son of the soil,—as rich in local colour, as rough in the legs, and as hot at the heart, as prompt and hardy, as heathery as a gorcock. Courage, endurance, staunchness, fidelity and warmth of heart, simplicity, and downrightness were his staples ”

“ The scene then ensuing has been often described—the garrison pressing forward with cheers of welcome and triumph—the rough Highlanders suddenly appearing through the darkness among the ruins they had fought so many battles to save—their begrimed faces running with tears in the torchlight, as they caught up in their arms the pale children, and kissed their country-women, too, in that spasm of glad emotion; even the ladies ready to hug them for hysteric joy—the gaunt, crippled figures tottering out to join in the general rejoicing, now that for a moment all believed their trials at an end. ”

“ Even the gloomy stillness of noon, broken by the fall of some big fruit thudding to the ground like a cannon-ball, or by some seed-capsule exploding with a report like a shot, even this heavy siesta of Nature is not altogether voiceless, for beneath it, as Humboldt [178] says, one can catch a faint stifled undertone, a buzz and hum of insects that crowd the earth and the lowest strata of air, a confused vibrating murmur, which from every bush, from the cracked bark of trees, from the soil burrowed by creeping things, proclaims life audibly manifest to him who listens. ”

“ The “Fifers” are thus supposed to be a race apart; but it would be more like the truth to take Fifeishness as the essence of Saxon Scotland. Fife is, in fact, an epitome of the Lowlands, showing great stretches of practically prosaic farming, others of grimy coal-field, with patches of moor, bog, and wind-blown firs, here and there swelling into hill features, that in the abrupt Lomonds attain almost mountain dignity in face of their Highland namesake, sixty miles away. Open to cold sea winds, it nurses the hardy frames of “buirdly chiels and clever hizzies” ”

“ Our age has a new heart for such open heights as border the Portsmouth road between Thursley and Liphook. At its highest point, about 900 feet, the road passes along the brow of a wide and deep depression known as the Devil’s Punch Bowl, round which stretches of bracken, gorse and heath, broken dells, ponds and pine-crested ridges, fall into the valleys by slopes and hollows rich in green lanes, in tangled coppices, in old cottages, and in other picturesque “bits,” the whole airy swell making a smaller and drier edition of Dartmoor. ”

“ In the Highlands best known to tourists, the blending of blood, language, and customs has gone so far that a stranger may be excused for confounding a Perthshire strath with the true kailyard scenery. Beyond the Great Glen, still more markedly beyond the sounds, firths, and minches of the west coast, we find Highlanders less touched by the spirit of a practical age, whose first breath sets them shivering and drawing their tartans about them as they wake from fond dreams of a romantic past. All Scotland, alas! ”

“ It may be truly said of this green-robed damsel that “when she is good she is very, very good,” and that when not so good, she is seldom “horrid.” The worst of it is flats fit for market-gardens and football fields, of which the largest stretch extends on the west side of London. Yet here, too, one is seldom out of sight of some pleasant rise, some oasis of park wood, some straggling line of hedgerow timber; and even that most dreary edge of the county, the marshlands of the Lea, is overlooked by the heights of Clapton and Enfield. ”

“ But, to be fair to the tropical woods, so often drowned in the exuberance of their own greenery, it should be remembered how river banks and other open edges may show bright with hanging clusters of bloom and radiant festoons climbing to the tree-tops, while the ground, parched and swamped by turns, will lack that carpet of sweet and humble flowers, springing among soft turf, that is the special charm of an English spring. ”

“ That amateur of beauty, for his part, has nothing but good to say of Perth: he remembers with pleasure the precipices of Kinnoul, the swirling pools of the “Goddess-river,” even the humble “Lead,” in which other less gifted children have found “a treasure of flowing diamond,” now covered up to belie his vision of its defilement; and his lifelong impression was that “Scottish sheaves are more golden than are bound in other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere visible to human eyes are so like the ‘corn of heaven’ as those of Strath Tay and Strath-Earn.” ”

“ In less than a month, we could throw into India as many English soldiers as, in 1857, arrived only in time to stamp out the embers of an almost ruinous conflagration.
In any case, the conscience of England has set up a new standard to judge its achievements—by the good we can do to this great people, and not by the gain we can wring from them, the honour of our mastery must stand or fall.
The work of education may well be longer and harder than that of conquest. The conduct of our countrymen here causes yet too much shame and doubt in thoughtful minds. ”

“ A charm of homeliness rests upon churches, halls, farms, and hamlets, scattered roomily in secure confidence, where man may well nestle in the kindly lap of earth and rejoice in nature’s gifts to a generation for which rough edges of peril have been blunted by use and wont. Yet when she fondles not, but scrimps their daily bread with frowns, her hardy sons love their motherland the more dearly for her rare smiles, even though the poverty of their home makes it easier for them to believe that elsewhere must be their abiding city. ”

“ And ah! at times there comes a gloomier van to doors that must open for grief as well as for joy; then poor comfort it is to aching hearts if their dear ones have not so far to travel to that freshly laid-out cemetery that makes such a weary journey from the inner parts of London, where not even the dead may rest. But if one go-cart be turned into a household tombstone, neighbour mothers are happier in setting on their legs a brood of future citizens, who will grow up to know nothing of this suburb but as a great toy-box of bricks and mortar. ”

“ But a fresher delight is to be found in the footpaths, which go wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected yet strangely familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idylls and eclogues. These by-paths admit the wayfarer into the very heart of rural life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of intrusiveness. ”

“ The first obstacle encountered was the Secunder Bagh, one of those walled gardens which played such a part in the operations about Lucknow and Delhi. Its gloomy ruins stand to-day to tell a dreadful tale. The approaches had first to be cleared, and the walls battered by guns that could hardly be forced up a steep bank under terrible fire. In half-an-hour, a small hole had been knocked through one gate, then, Highlanders and Sikhs racing to be foremost in the fierce assault, the enclosure was carried, where two thousand mutineers were caught as in a trap. ”

“ From these wooded gorges, so rich in finned and feathered life, the river emerges on a tamer plain, to enter the sea by the Sahara of Culbin, a singular coast-line, where cultivated fields have been long ago overwhelmed by sandhills, banks of shingle, and piles of stones, all barren but for patches of bent and broom, sheltering huge foxes, hares, and rabbits, that sally forth to prey upon the farms behind, like any Highland chieftain. ”

“ Sheer from the water edge rise the mountains, green at their base, flecked with heather along their sides, ridge upon ridge, peak upon peak, overwhelming the mind with a feeling of that Omnipotence which weigheth the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance, before whom men are altogether vanity. West from the lodge the loch bends slightly towards the south, and, narrowing as it recedes, it stretches out towards the setting sun, pushing a tapering finger among the roots of the giant hills; and the farther west it goes, the higher rise the enveloping mountains. ”

“ No one now would choose a retirement at Ponder’s End, that industrial eastern neighbour of Enfield overshadowing the Lea Valley with its tall smoke-stacks and long rows of workmen’s homes. Yet just beyond the grimy hideousness of Ponder’s End Station, the bridge leading over to Chingford Marshes gives a peep of the Lea that by moonshine might still make a trysting-place for shepherds and milkmaids. Daylight dulls all memories of romance with smoke and mist ”

“ The fate of Troy would be a mere squib beside the awful conflagration raised by such irresistible invaders, stalking across the country on their jointed stilts, picking up bank directors and baker’s boys as we gather blackberries, trampling down the British army like ants, scorching up everything about them by an invisible heat-ray, and poisoning the landscape by fumes unknown to our chemistry, while all the artillery that can be hurried up for the defence of London has little more effect on them than pop-guns. ”

“ Rising in a wild solitude, it leaves the open ground to hide its charms among noble forests and beneath steep cliffs, at whose foot the angler may have to run for his life, its sudden spates now pressed up in a gorge a few feet wide, then making a bore-like wave on such a dark basin as that of the old Bridge of Dulsie, “shut in by grey and fantastic rocks, surmounted with the greenest of grass swards, with clumps of the ancient weeping birches with their gnarled and twisted stems, backed again by the dark pine trees. ”

“ Between Hoy and Stennis, for instance, the ebb is simply a foaming and swirling torrent, against which sail and even steam are powerless. That vast body of water pouring into the Atlantic is as irresistible as a Canadian rapid. But if you study the tides, you can seek out secluded nooks, where the seals are basking on the tangle, and the wild duck are wheeling round the bay, and the blue rocks are darting out of the caves, and the grouse are crowing among the heather, and where for ten months out of the twelve the peace is absolute, and silence unbroken save by the shepherd’s dog. ”

“ The north border of this “south land” is the winding Thames, its rich banks rising to wooded eminences like St. Ann’s Hill and St. George’s Hill, the swell of Richmond Park, the Ridgeway of Wimbledon, and those suburban eminences from which the Crystal Palace shines over Kent. The east side of this zone is masked by the spread of Greater London, rich and poor; and the west side, too, becomes more thickly dotted with villages and villas; while to the south that giant octopus goes on stretching its grimy tentacles over the green fields turned into “eligible building sites.” ”

“ Now choked by a tramway, it passes Kensal Green, London’s largest cemetery, where lie in peace all kinds of celebrities, from princes to authors, beneath a forest of tombstones, spaciously enclosed among streets, chimney stacks, gas-works, railway and canal banks, public houses for the cheering of mutes and mourners—an elaborate contrast to such a country churchyard as might make the weary soul half in love with death. ”