William Elliot Griffis

“ The blossoming of the heather, even though it be “the meanest flower that blows,” is hailed with delight as the opening of Nature’s floral calendar. With its clusters of pink, in the time of flowering in midsummer, and its mass of purple later on, it has a strange power to awaken deep-lying thoughts. To the natives, more especially, this wee, modest flower has a mystic potency to please and charm. It rouses among them, at home and abroad, a feeling of patriotism. It becomes, in the Scotsman’s associations, a link between his soul and the ground out of which he came and into which he will go. ”

“ Whether coming from the splendid machinery of the great mills, built with the aid of capital and thus reaching the highest perfection of craftsmanship joined to the last refinement of invention and experiment, or simply the handwork of the crofters in the distant isles, these tartans show a wonderful evolution of national art. From many women and girls on the islands far out at sea, without much of human society and whose dumb friends are but dogs, cattle, and sheep, come reminders of their industry and taste that are touching to both one’s imagination and sympathies. ”

“ If there is one figure in the past that still acts powerfully upon the tradition, literature, and imagination of Scotland,—in a word, upon that which remains and is imperishable, after stone and brass are but mouldering relics,—it is the figure and fortunes of Charles, the Young Pretender to the throne of Great Britain. With him ended Celtic Scotland, Scottish feudalism, and the age of Highland romance. ”

“ To ride in fast express trains from town to town, across the Strathmore, or Great Valley, containing the central plain of Scotland, on which lies almost every one of its large cities and industrial centres, makes one thrill when contrasting the present with the past. Our comrade, Quandril, so fresh on Scottish soil that she had hardly got the ship’s motion out of her head, was completely daft, when speeding from Edinburgh to Stirling. So much history, visualized and made real, acted like a fierce stimulant. ”

“ At Invergowrie there was a large, normal family, consisting of parents and children, with sufficient uniformity of dispositions and habits to make both the breakfast and the dinner time a delightful gathering, with merriment and leisure. The news of the day, the happenings of the neighborhood, the things alike and different as between Scotland and America, the annals of the village fair, or the social chat, or those pleasant nothings that lubricate life, made the moments pass all too rapidly. ”

“ Blessed is the heather, for it enlivens the sterile lands of northern and western Europe, which otherwise would be almost appalling in their vistas of desolation! Great masses of heather give, even to the most forbidding landscapes, a beauty suggesting something like human sympathy. The common heather, like the man suddenly lifted to fame and fortune, is apt to show the lack of early advantages, but give this plant of the moors a sheltered place and kindly care, and it will grow erect and “heave out its blooms”—as said an old mariner—so as to touch the top of a yardstick. ”

“ The Picts of Scotland are exactly where the ancient Ebisu or Ainu of Japan are—in the veins of the people now called the Japanese. The descendants of the Picts to-day talk Scotch, or English, either of the American or British variety. It is no more fashionable in Scotland to trace one’s lineage to Pictish forebears, than in Japan to the Ainu or Ebisu, from whom millions of Japanese are descended. Who wants to be descended from common savages, when gods, kings, nobles, and chiefs are as plentiful as herring or blackberries? ”

“ The chief scene of Scottish history, with its art, architecture, commercial prosperity, and general likeness to Christendom, is in the Lowlands. Here are almost all her great cities, industries, and monuments. In this region, and not in the Highlands, Scotland’s two greatest, or at least most famous, men were born and reared, and here are the cities, which are “the hope of democracy.” In fact, the Celtic Scots never produced a distinct civilization of their own. The Celts, with all their charming traits and bold achievements, have nowhere brought to perfection this composite flower of history. ”

“ He has enriched our experience, through imaginative contact with beings who are ever afterwards more intimately distinct and real for us than the people we daily meet. None could surpass and few equal Scott in clothing a historical fact or fossil with the pulsing blood and radiant bloom of life, compelling it to stand forth in resurrection of power. Scott thus surely possesses the final test of greatness, in his ability to impress our imagination, while haunting our minds with figures and events that seem to have life even more abundantly than mortal beings who are our neighbors. ”

“ We may delight in facts, for they are necessary; but truth is more. Whatever the facts concerning the historical Macbeth, they were long ago “stranded on the shore of the oblivious years.” They were, but the truth was, and is, and is to come. Human nature is the one thing that changes not, and that eternal element Shakespeare pictured.
We were visiting Dunkeld, in company with a party of pretty maidens and rosy-cheeked Scottish youth from Dundee, seeing its cathedral, ruins, waterfalls, and modern products, when we first realized that we were in the land of Macbeth. ”

“ What terrible paradox, or love of the ugly, must have dominated the taste of the sculptor, in the same age that reared some of the glorious abbeys of Scotland! The King’s Room, which had an oaken ceiling, with richly decorated beams, and in each partition a magnificently carved head,—the fame of which had gone all over Europe,—was abolished in 1777, when the roof, from its weight, threatened to fall in. ”

“ Reaching what are now the soldiers’ barracks, we see a little room in which Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England, in whom the two thrones of the island were united. It seems a rough room for a queen to live in.
The ascent of High Street is much like climbing a staircase, resting on landings at the second, third, or fourth floor. When, however, one reaches the top and scans the glorious panorama, he feels like asking, especially, as he sees that the highest and oldest building is Queen Margaret’s Chapel,—a house of worship,—“Does God live here?” ”

“ Probably the ages to come will show us that the most enduring monuments of centuries of strife, in this borderland, must not be looked for in its memorials of stone, but in language. The “winged words” may outlast what, because of material solidity, was meant for permanence and strength. Minstrelsy and ballad, poem and song, keep alive the acts of courage and the gallantry of the men and the sacrifice and devotion of the women which light up these dark centuries. To Scott, Billings, and Percy we owe a debt of gratitude, for rescuing from oblivion the gems of poet and harpist. ”

“ Our historic record and vocabulary, with the tendency of Americans to-day to go to Paris rather than London for their garments, the cultivation of their tastes, and for many of their ideas, show that the United States, like Scotland, has been mightily influenced by French taste. We, Scots and Yankees, are alike debtors to the land in which feudalism, chivalry, and Gothic art, and not a few canons of taste and things of beauty, reached their highest development. ”

“ Like a mountain of emerald rising out of a sapphire sea, stood the land whose9 name and color, in sentiment and in reality, is Nature’s favorite, earth’s best counterpart to the sky.
After seeing the Giant’s Causeway, meeting the paddle-wheel steamer from Londonderry, and passing Rathlin Island,—refuge once of Robert the Bruce,—we sight the real land of our quest when we discern the larger isle of Arran, which rises like a minaret out of the sea. In law and geography, as well as the outpost of history, it is recognized as an integral part of Scotland. ”

“ Some heather is white, but most of the plants are of a lilac rose color, varying through pink to purple. It is this varying depth of color in the blooms which adds to the glory of the August moors and hillsides.
Under ordinary environment, most of the plants have no human care to give them comfortable growth. Out on the desolate moor, or on the arid slopes, each bush has to wrestle with the tempest and withstand the bombardment of sand and gravel hurled by the wind. ”

“ Being a place of commerce rather than of art, literature, or romance, and touching the national history only at long intervals, few tourists see or stay long in “Jute-opolis.” Nevertheless, from many visits and long dwelling in the city and suburbs, Dundee is a place dearly loved by us three; for here, in health and in sickness, in the homes of the hospitable people and as leader of the worship of thousands, in the great Ward Chapel, where he often faced over a thousand interested hearers, the writer learned to know the mind of the Scottish people more intimately than in any other city. ”

“ For a millennium and a half, or from Roman times, this border land was a region given up to lawlessness, nor did anything approaching order seem possible until Christianity had been generally accepted. Faith transformed both society and the face of nature. By the twelfth century, churches, abbeys, and monasteries had made the rugged landscape smile in beauty, while softening somewhat the manners of the rude inhabitants. Yet even within times of written history, nine great battles and innumerable raids, of which several are notable in record, song, or ballad, took place in this region. ”

“ There is a church at Birnie, not far away to the southwest, built in 1150, which is believed to be the oldest house of public worship still in use in Scotland. Here is preserved an old Celtic altar bell of hammered iron. Such is the odor of sanctity of this ancient edifice that there is a local saying that “To be thrice prayed for in the kirk of Birnie will either mend or end you.” ”

“ Scotland’s scientific frontier is young.
Sixteen times did we cross this border-line, to see homes and native people as well as places. In some years we went swiftly over the steel rails by steam, in others tarried in town and country, and rambled over heath, hill, and moor, to see the face of the land. We lived again, in our saunterings, by the magic of imagination, in the past of history. Affluent is the lore to be enjoyed in exploring what was once the Debatable or No Man’s Land.
What area is richer in ruins than that of the shire counties bordering the two countries? ”

“ LOCH LOMOND AND THE TROSSACHS
The Scotch lakes form the one element of repose in a landscape which, in almost every other feature, suggests the most terrific activities of nature. Excelling all in size, beauty, and romantic interest is Loch Lomond, in Rob Roy’s country. It is the pride of the Scottish inland waters, as Cayuga is the gem in the chain of finger lakes in central New York. ”

“ While Scotsmen are musing on what is deepest in man, the fires of devotion burn brightly and the soul utters itself in song, so that Scotland is not least among the nations in its repertoire of either poetry or music.
“Why are the Scotch so different from the English?” is a question often asked. In my view the roots of the difference are best discerned in a critical study of the Reformation. In Scotland this great movement of the human mind was far more consistent and radical than in England, and it therefore affected all classes more thoroughly. ”

“ AMERICA’S DEBT TO SCOTLAND
It is a tradition, rather than a fact, that we Americans—not of Canada—of the United States of America are an English people. The burden of popular and uncritical historiography is responsible for this notion. Because of the overpowering influence of law and language, and because our most direct relations, in war and in peace, have been with Great Britain, it is assumed that we are both an English people and an English nation. ”

“ Schaff thus draws the religious map of Scotland: “The Puritans overthrew both monarchy and prelacy, but only to be overthrown in turn by the nemesis of history.... Romanism in the Highlands is only an unsubdued remnant of the Middle Ages, largely reinforced by Irish emigrants to the large cities. Episcopacy is an English exotic, for Scotsmen educated in England and associated with the English aristocracy. The body of the people are Presbyterians to the backbone.” ”