Keith Clark

“ So long as the world was old, was the Old World, and looked toward the East, Edinburgh would be the chief city. When the world began to be new, and to look toward the New World, Glasgow came swiftly into being, and the race is to the swift.
There is history to Glasgow, when it was a green pleasant village, and there was romance. It is but a short way, a foot-path journey if the pleasant green fields still invited, out to Bothwell Castle; splendid ruin, and, therefore, recalling Mary and Darnley and the Lennoxes, but not Bothwell. ”

“ There is such a thing as being haunted, the dead do cry for revenge, the evil that men do does live after them.
It is a wide valley, yet closed in by great granite precipices, for safe guarding against betrayal. The first section of the strath is calm enough, human, green, habitable, with Loch Leven, a branch of Loch Etive, sparkling in the sun. The second wide opening is terrible as massacre, not green, very stern, and wild as Scottish nature, human or not, can become. Even the little clachan of the Macdonalds seems not to welcome the world except on suspicion. ”

“ Out of the dark of the time it is a shining scene; and out of the splendour of the moment it brings a note of tenderness.
Another decade, another August, and the Boroughmoor (where now run the links of Burntland) was covered with the white of a thousand tents, Scotland was gathered for war, the "ruddy lion ramped in gold" floated war-like over all, and James and all Scotland prepared to march down to Flodden, heeding not the warning which had sounded at midnight in ghostly voice at the Town Cross; a warning no doubt arranged by Margaret, never a Stewart, always a Tudor. ”

“ It is set for pageantry; life is always, has been always, a procession at Oban. If ever the history of Scotland is set forth as pageant—I do not know that this has ever been done, but it should be—it should be staged at Oban, on the esplanade.
Life moves swiftly through the streets and across the waters. For it is a place that all the world comes to, in its search for the next beautiful place. Steamers from the Caledonian Canal and Inverness, steamers from the Crinan Canal and Glasgow, coaches from the near country, railroads from the east and north, bring the world to Oban. ”

“ Standing upon its wind-swept battlements—I can never think that the wind dies down on the heights of Stirling—one looks upon the panorama of Scottish history. The Lomonds lie blue and far to the east, the Grampians gray and stalwart to the north, and on the west the peaks of the Highlands, Ben Lomond and all the hills that rampart "The Lady of the Lake." All around the sky were ramparts of low-lying clouds, lifting themselves here and there at the corners of the world into splendid impregnable bastions. Stirling looks a part of this ground plan, of this sky battlement. ”

“ A clear day in Edinburgh is possible. I have spent a month of such days, and have longed for the mists, a touch of them, that the castle might turn to a purple wonder, and the deep [Pg 140] blue shadows sink over it, and the gray precipice of the High Street look higher than ever. Gray is in truth the colour of Edinburgh, "the gray metropolis of the North." But it is never a dreary gray, never a heavy gray like London. There the gray is thick, charged with soot; one can rub it from his face. ”

“ It is very interesting, very fascinating; one wakes now and then, here and there, to keen remembrance, to a sensitiveness that so much beauty could not be only for to-day and of to-day, that men must have come hither to claim it or dispute possession of it in the beginning of time. Of course the Stewarts came out of this Island West! But, either because one has made a round circle of Scotland from out of romantic Edinburgh, or because one has come from practical Glasgow and is about to make a round circle of Scotland, Oban has a peculiarly satisfying and yet undemanding beauty. ”

“ 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 upon them as did the kings from David I, or even the Celtic kings before him, who sought refuge from the bleak Scottish north in this smiling land of dales and haughs, of burns and lochs. Not at any moment could life become monotonous even in this realm of romance, since the Border was near, and danger and dispute so imminent, so incessant. ”

“ There is no city which can be so "observed." I venture that when you have stood on Castle Hill—on the High Street with its narrow opening between the lands framing near and far pictures—on Calton Hill—when you have been [Pg 85] able to "rest and be thankful" at Corstorphine Hill—when you have climbed the Salisbury crags—when you have mounted to Arthur's Seat and looked down as did King Arthur before there was an Edinburgh—you will believe that not any slightest corner but fills the eye and soul. ”

“ It is from Pulpit Hill that Oban gives the best view of all the lyric lay of this water and land world; on a clear day when the wind is from the west, when sunshine has been drenching the world, and when the sun is about to sink behind Ben More. Pulpit Hill is a wooded steep bluff to the east of Oban, at its foot parklike drives and forest-embowered cottages with their windows open to the sea, with rich roses filling the air and flaunting fuchias filling the eye. It is an easy climb, even after a day of Scotch-seeing in the backward of the land. ”

“ While New Town, looking ever up to the old, looking across the stretch to Leith, and to the sea whence came so much threatening in the old days, and with its memories of Hume and Scott who are ancient, and of Stevenson, who, in spite of his immortal youth, does begin to belong to another generation than ours—New Town also, to a new American, is something old. It has all become Edinburgh, two perfect halves of a whole which is not less perfect for the imperfect uniting. ”

“ And now there is neither Margaret nor Mary, neither regent nor reformer, palace of neither Linlithgow nor Leven. How the destructions of man have thrown palaces and doctrines open to the winds of heaven. And how purifying this destruction. And what precious things have passed with them, what tears of women have been shed, and how are the mouths of men become dust.
Loch Leven has one lovely gracious memory of Mary in the days before everything was lost. She was lodging here, and had sent for Knox to come from Edinburgh. ”

“ Queen Margaret's chapel, the oldest and smallest religious house in Scotland, a tiny place indeed, where Margaret was praying when word was brought of the death of Malcolm in battle, and she, loyal and royal soul, died the very night while the enemies from the Highlands, like an army of Macbeth's, surrounded the castle. The place is quite authentic, Saxon in character with Norman touches. I know no place where a thousand years can be so swept away, and Saxon Margaret herself seems to kneel in the perpetual dim twilight before the chancel. ”

“ You must know your Scottish history, you must be filled with Scottish romance, above all, you must know your poetry and ballads, if you would rebuild and refill the country as you go. Not only over fair Melrose lies the moonlight of romance, making the ruin more lovely and more complete than the abbey could ever have been in its most established days, but over the entire land there lies the silver pall of moonlight, making, I doubt not, all things lovelier than in reality. ”

“ There was a certain magic about it on my day of pilgrimage. The north shore lay sparkling in the late afternoon sun, blue shimmering land against a clear blue sky, the thin rim of the continent playing here and there with opalescent colour where man had builded village or castle, or where man had not destroyed the ancient green. The south shore lay vague and gray, and growing darker, against the falling [Pg 158] afternoon, while the Lammermuirs stood up in paler dusk in the background, and the sun blazed behind them. And all about the Firth glittered like an inland lake, a Great Lake. ”

“ It is a continuing splendour, this name—the Kingdom of Fife. Than the thing nothing could be less royal, more democratic. For Fifeshire is given over to farm lands and coal fields and treeless stretches, and the fringe of Fife is made up of fishing villages "a hodden gray plaid wi' a gowden fringe," said a King Jamie. It lies there, separate from Scotland, although very Scottish, between the firths of the Forth and the Tay, with the Ochil hills a barrier on the landside. ”

“ And all the battle the next day, until King Edward rides hot-trod to Berwick, leaving half his host dead upon this pleasant green field that lies so unremembering to the south of the castle. There is no more splendid moment in human history, unless all battles seem to you too barbaric to be splendid. But it made possible a nation—and, I take it, Scotland has been necessary to the world. ”

“ It was Flodden that made men old, that tragic climax to this splendour.
"In the joyous moneth tyme of June," in the pleasant garden of the town-house of the great Earl of Angus, looking down on the still waters of the Nor' Loch, and across the woods and moors to the glittering blue Firth, there sat the pale stripling, Gavin Douglass, third son of Douglass, Archibald Bell-the-Cat, late in orders at Mony musk, but now come up to St. Giles as prior in spite of his youth, and more absorbed in poetry than men. ”

“ And if King James VIII and III had been defeated these two hundred years, and dead a lesser time, and our loyalty had always been to the Prince who came rather to establish his father than himself, the Fifteen seemed like yesterday. In this remote high corner of the world anything is possible, even the oblivion of time. It seemed very vital, that faraway moment, which in truth few persons to-day take into reckoning; even history recks little of it. But very near in this illusory twilight—was that the Fiery Cross that glimmered in the darkness? ”

“ Rich green fields spread down to the Forth, the red network of the bridge lifts itself into view, far to the left sweeps the Firth out to North Berwick Law and the Bass, and Edinburgh swims in the haze against the leonine mountain that is ever her guard.
The Abbey gives the town its special dignity. There is nothing left of the church built by Queen Margaret—where she robbed the box of the money the king had just given at mass if she found the poor requiring more immediate help. ”

“ But the flower of England was in France, while the flower of Scotland was here; and slain—the king, twelve earls, fifteen lords and chiefs, an archbishop, the French ambassador, and many French captains.
You walk back from the Field, and all the world is changed. The green haughs, the green woodlands, seem even in the summer sun to be dun and sere, and those burns which made merry on the outward way—can it be that there are red shadows in their waters? ”

“ The cloud is shaped rather like a dolphin with its tail hidden behind the hill. The sunlight on all the hill, but especially towards the summit, has turned from mere warm light to a delicate, definite rose-colour; the shadows are more intensely azure, the sky of a deeper green. The lake, which is perfectly calm, reflects and reverberates all this magnificence. The islands, however, are below the level of the sunshine, and lie dark and cold, the deep green Scotch firs on the Black Isles telling strongly against the snows of Cruachan. ”

“ Even Queen Victoria, who was so little a Stewart, much more a Hanoverian and a Puritan, was most proud of her Stewart blood, and regarded her summers in the Highlands as the most ancestral thing in her experience.
Scotland may at sometime dissolve the Union, which has been a union of equality, accept the lower estate of a province, an American "state," among the possible four of "Great Britain and Ireland," and enter on a more vigorous provincial life, live her own life, instead of exporting vigour to the colonies—and her exportation is almost done. ”

“ Glasgow does not aspire to picturesqueness or to historicalness. Glasgow is content, more than content, in having her commerce and her industry always "in spate."
Glasgow is the second city of size in the United Kingdom, and the first city in being itself. London is too varied and divided in interests; it never forgets that it is the capital of the world, and a royal capital. Glasgow never forgets that it is itself, very honestly and very democratically, a city of Scots. ”