Hugh Miller

“ The young imagination delights to dwell amid the bosky recesses of this little spot, where human foot has never yet trodden, and where the crabs and the wild berries ripen and decay unplucked and untasted. There was a time, however, when the interest which attached to it owed almost all its intensity to the horrible. The eastern turret of the old castle of Cromarty has, with all its other turrets, long since disappeared; but the deep foliage of the ledge mantles as thickly as ever, and the precipice of the Look-out rears its dark front as proudly over the beach. ”

“ In one of the recesses which open into the hill, a clump of forest-trees has sprung up, and, lifting their boughs to the edge of the precipice above, cover its rough iron features as if with a veil; while, from the shade below, a fine spring, dedicated in some remote age to “Our Ladye,” comes bubbling to the light with as pure and copious a stream as in the days of the priest and the pilgrim. We see the beach covered over with sea-shells and weeds, the cork buoys of the fishermen, and fragments of wrecks. The air is full of fragrance. Only look at yonder white patch in the hollow of the hill ”

“ Perhaps no personage of real life can be more properly regarded as a hermit of the churchyard than the itinerant sculptor, who wanders from one country burying-ground to another, recording on his tablets of stone the tears of the living and the worth of the dead. If possessed of an ordinary portion of feeling and imagination, he can scarce fail of regarding his profession as a school of benevolence and poetry. For my own part, I have seldom thrown aside the hammer and trowel of the stone-mason for the chisel of the itinerant sculptor, without receiving some fresh confirmation of the opinion. ”

“ Not long ago I wrought for about a week in the burying-ground of Kirk-Michael, a ruinous chapel in the eastern extremity of the parish of Resolis, distant about six miles from the town of Cromarty. It is a pleasant solitary spot, lying on the sweep of a gentle declivity. The sea flows to within a few yards of the lower wall; but the beach is so level, and so little exposed to the winds, that even in the time of tempest there is heard within its precincts only a faint rippling murmur, scarcely loud enough to awaken the echoes of the ruin. ”

“ When a false religion gives place in any country to the true, there is commonly a mass of what may be termed neutral superstitions which survive the change. Thor and Woden are dethroned and forgotten, but the witch, the fairy, and the seer, the ghost of the departed, and the wraith of the dying, the spirits of the moor and the forest, of the sea and the river, remain as potent as before. The great national colossuses of heathenism are prostrated before the genius of Christianity; but the little idols of the household can be vanquished by only philosophy and the arts. ”

“ We enter this singular recess along the bed of the stream, and find ourselves shut out, when we have advanced only a few paces, from well-nigh the entire face of nature and the whole works of man. A line of mural precipices rises on either hand—here advancing in gigantic columns, like those of an Egyptian portico—there receding into deep solitary recesses tapestried with ivy, and darkened by birch and hazel. The cliffs vary their outline at every step, as if assuming in succession all the various combinations of form which constitute the wild and the picturesque ”

“ The cavern narrowed and lowered as he proceeded; the floor, which was of a white stone resembling marble, was hollowed into cisterns, filled with a water so exceedingly pure that it sparkled to the light like spirits in crystal, and from the roof there depended clusters of richly embossed icicles of white stone, like those which, during a severe frost, hang at the edge of a waterfall. The springs from above trickled along their channelled sides, and then tinkled into the cisterns, like rain from the eaves of a cottage after a thunder-shower. ”

“ The Halloween of the year 1560 was a very different thing in the parish of Cromarty from that of the year 1829. It is now as dark and opaque a night—unless it chance to be brightened by the moon—as any in the winter season; it was then clear as the glass of a magician;—people looked through it and saw the future. Late in October that year, Alaster overheard his mistress and one of her youthful companions—the daughter of a neighbouring farmer—talking over the rites of the coming night of frolic and prediction. ”

“ The shop of such a person could not be other than a rare school of ingenuity—a place of shifts and expedients—and where, according to the favourite phrase of its master, things were done in a business-like manner; and Sandy Rose was no very backward pupil. There are ingenious young men who are a great deal too apt to confound the idea of talent itself with the knavish exercise of it; and who, seeing nothing very knowing in simple honesty, exert their ingenuity in the opposite tract, rather out of a desire of doing clever things than from any very decided bias to knavery. ”

“ To the east, the coast retires into a semicircular rocky recess, terminating seawards in a lofty, dark-browed precipice, and bristling throughout all its extent with a countless multitude of crags that at every heave of the wave break the surface into a thousand eddies. Towards the west, there is a broken and somewhat dreary waste of sand. The terrace itself, however, is a sweet little spot, with its grassy slopes that recline towards the sun, partially covered with thickets of wild-rose and honeysuckle, and studded in their season with violets and daisies, and the delicate rock geranium. ”

“ Women, taken in the collective, are more poetical, more timid, more credulous than men. If we but add to these general traits one or two that are less so, and a few very common circumstances; if we but add a judgment not naturally vigorous, an imagination more than commonly active, an ignorance of books and of the world, a long-cherished belief in the supernatural, a melancholy old age, and a solitary fireside—we have compounded the elements of that terrible poetry which revels among skulls, and coffins, and enchantments, as certainly as Nature did when she moulded the brain of a Shakspere. ”

“ Between the times of Macbeth and an age comparatively recent, there occurs a wide chasm in the history of Cromarty. The Thane, magnified by the atmosphere of poetry which surrounds him, towers like a giant over the remoter brink of the gap, while, in apparent opposition to every law of perspective, the people on its nearer edge seem diminished into pigmies. And yet the Urquharts of Cromarty—though Sir Thomas, in his zeal for their honour, has dealt by them as the poets of ancient Greece did by the early history of their country—were a race of ancient standing and of no little consideration. ”

“ The writer of these chapters had the good fortune to witness at this cairn a scene which, without owing anything to the supernatural, almost equalled the one described. He was, like the fisherman, returning from Inverness to Cromarty in a clear frosty night in December. There was no moon, but the whole sky towards the north was glowing with the Aurora Borealis, which, shooting from the horizon to the central heavens, in flames tinged with all the hues of the rainbow, threw so strong a light, that he could have counted every tree of the wood, and every tumulus of the moor. ”

“ It reached an eminence directly above the links; and drawing up beside an immense pile of brushwood, and a few empty tar-barrels, its leader planted the tree of liberty amid shouts, and music, and the shooting of muskets, on the very spot on which the town gallows had been planted about two centuries before. No one, however, so much as thought of the circumstance; for people were too thoroughly excited to employ themselves with anything but the future; besides, a very little ingenuity could have made it serve the purpose of either party. ”

“ Alas! the epitaph of the famous American printer may now be written over the greater part of the volumes of this my second library; and so unfavourable is the present age to the production of more, that even that wise provision of nature which implants curiosity in the young, while it renders the old communicative, seems abridged of one-half its usefulness. For though the young must still learn, the old need not teach; the press having proved such a supplanter of the past-world schoolmaster, Tradition, as the spinning-wheel proved in the last age to the distaff and spindle. ”

“ Art thou not discouraged and beaten back, O Church! from thy duty, by the sounding of the shaking leaf of a parliament of the worms of the earth, that creep, peep, and cry, appearing out of their holes and dens in this time in Scotland’s dark night, when only such creatures come abroad in their native shapes and colours. For if the sun did now as clearly shine on the land as at former times, they would not so appear. It is in the night-time that evil spirits and wild beasts seize on folk, and cry in the streets to fleg and flichter them ”

“ The gloom of evening, deepened by the coming storm, was closing around them as they entered one of the wildest recesses of the valley, an immense precipitous hollow scooped out of the side of one of the hills; the wind began to howl through the cliffs, and the thickening flakes of snow to beat against their faces. “It will be a terrible night, lads, in the Moray Firth,” said the foremost traveller, a broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-looking man, of about five feet eight; “I would ill like to hae to beat up through the drift along the rough shores o’ Cadboll. ”

“ A circular rainbow had formed round his torch; there was a blue mist gathering in the hollows of the cave; the very roof and sides began to heave and reel, as if the living rock were a Flushing lugger riding on the ground-swell; and there was a low humming noise that came sounding from the interior, like that of bees in a hawthorn thicket on an evening of midsummer. Willie, however, had become much less timorous than at first, and, though he could not well account for the fact, much less disposed to wonder. ”

“ Suddenly a hissing noise was heard overhead; the shipmaster looked up, and saw one of those meteors that are known as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction of the cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared the earth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctly from the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of the out-houses, an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until it almost touched the roof, when a cock crew from within. ”

“ It is now covered by a fir-wood, and roughened by thickets of furze and juniper, but enough may still be seen to justify his choice. On one side it descends somewhat abruptly into a narrow ravine, through the bottom of which there runs a little tinkling streamlet; on the other, it slopes gently towards the shore. We look on the one hand, and see, through the chance vistas which have been opened in the wood, the country rising above us in long undulations of surface, like waves of the sea after a storm, and variegated with fields, hedge-rows, and clumps of copse-wood. ”

“ In the evening of this vexatious day he stood in front of the steadings of [Pg 351] Roderick Ross of the Hill, a plain decent farmer, much beloved by the poor for the readiness with which he imparted to them of his substance, and not a little respected by Urquhart himself for his rough strong sense and sterling honesty. A grey, weather-wasted headstone still marks out his grave; but of the cottage which he inhabited, of his garden fence, and the large gnarled elms which sprung out of it, of his barns, his cow-houses, and his sheep-folds, there is not a single vestige. ”

“ Space—wide, interminable space—in which he who contemplates it finds himself lost, and is oppressed by a sense of his own littleness, is at all times the circumstance to which the prospect owes most of its power; but it is only during the storms of winter, when the firmament in all its vastness seems converted into a hall of the tempest, and the earth in all its extent into a gymnasium for contending elements, that the scene assumes its full sublimity and grandeur. On the north a chain of alternate currents and whirlpools howl, toss, and rage, as if wrestling with the hurricane ”

“ To all the bravery of the soldier and learning of the scholar, he added much of the knight-errant, and more of the visionnaire and projector. Zealous for the honour of his country, and fully determined to wage war, both with his pen and his sword, against all the defaulters who disgraced it—credulous yet sagacious—enterprising but rash, he appears to have chosen the Admirable Crichton as his pattern and model for imitation. For his learning he may be denominated the Sir Walter Raleigh of Scotland, and his pedantry was the natural fruit of erudition deeply engrained in his mind. ”

“ They have also begun to discover, that a good Whig may be a bad man; nay, that one may be at once Whig and Tory—a Tory to his servants and dependants, a Whig to his superiors and his country. For my own part, I am a Whig—a born Whig; but no similarity of political principle will ever lead me to put any confidence in the man to whom I could not intrust my private concerns; and as for the Whiggism that horsewhipped the poor woman who was picking a few withered sticks out of its hedge, it may wear the laurel leaf and the blue ribbon in any way it pleases, but I assure it—it won’t be of my party. ”

“ The coffin lay beside the door; the corpse in the middle of the apartment.—Never shall I forget the scene which I witnessed from the old chapel of St. Regulus on the evening of the following Sabbath.
It was one of those lovely evenings which we so naturally associate with ideas of human enjoyment; when, from some sloping eminence, we look over the sunlit woods, fields, and cottages, of a wide extent of country, and dream that the inhabitants are as happy as the scene is beautiful. The sky was without a cloud, and the sea without a wrinkle. ”

“ The autumn was well-nigh over; she had been weak and ailing for months before; and she had now become so feeble as to be confined for days together to her bed. But happily, the poor solitary woman had at least one attached friend in the daughter of a farmer of the parish, a young and beautiful girl, who, though naturally of no melancholy temperament, seemed to derive almost all she enjoyed of pleasure from the society of the widow. ”

“ I find I must devote one other chapter to the consideration of the interesting remains which form almost the sole materials of this earlier portion of my history. But the class of these to which I am now about to turn, are to be found, not on the face of the country, but locked up in the minds of the inhabitants. And they are falling much more rapidly into decay—mouldering away in their hidden recesses, like bodies of the dead; while others, which more resemble the green mound and the monumental tablet, bid fair to abide the inquiry of coming generations. ”

“ I was acquainted in my younger days with a very old man, who has assured me that he repeatedly saw the apparition when on its twilight peregrinations along the road; and once as he lay a-bed in the morning in his mother’s cottage, long after the sun had risen. There was a broad stream of light falling through an opening in the roof, athwart the grey and mottled darkness of the interior, and the apparition stood partly in the light, partly in the shadow. ”