Ramsay

“ Ramsay! Whip and spur! Nothing's won but at cost of a sting! Throw off those jack-boots, Jean! They're a handicap! Loose your holsters, lad! An any highwaymen come at us to-day I'll send him a short way to a place where he'll stay! Whip up! Whip up!"
"What have you under your arm?" cries Jean breathlessly.
"Rare furs for the king," calls Radisson.
Then the wind is in our hair, and thatched cots race off in a blur on either side; plodding workmen stand to stare and are gone; open fields give place to forest, forest to village, village to bare heath; and still we race on. ”

“ Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again) , and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. ”

“ As a pastoral poet, Ramsay excels in painting all those homely virtues that befit the station to which most of his characters belonged. A fault, and a serious one, it was among the writers of conventional pastoral, to make their shepherds and shepherdesses talk like philosophers, and reason upon all the mysteries of life, death, and futurity. ”

“ You might say that Ramsay was not a fine painter, but a man of real genius. The world, not comprehending the distinction, would merely come to the gross conclusion, that he was both one and the other. Thus even truth is vulgarly debased into common-place and nonsense. ”

“ But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained that his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished; but there, like the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red fresh on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality, laid up across the bay among the sandhills. ”

“ Ramsay repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure. She blew the words back at him. "Charles Tansley . . ." she said. But he must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life the drawing-room; behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries; they must be furnished, they must be filled with life. ”

“ My dear Dean Ramsay--I was at once obliged, gratified, and comforted by your letter. This has been a great storm, but it has not rooted you up, and He whom you live to serve, evidently has yet more service for you to do. Those remaining in the world cannot be wife or brother to you, but how many there are who would if they could, and who will be all they can! ”

“ Ramsay"—no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) ”

“ This feeling being reciprocated by Ramsay, an intimacy sprung up between them, the consequence of which was, that Ramsay, after delivering his mails to the postmaster (a rheumatic old woman, deaf, and almost blind) , came as regularly as a clock to have a smoke and a chat with Dan and the Marvels. A curious character was Ramsay; a man who had seen better days--who had, indeed, once been very wealthy--who had been plundered and deceived from his youth upwards--and who yet retained a kindliness to every living thing with which he came in contact. ”

“ Ramsay said almost fiercely. "Gathered together bit by bit, pieced like some perfect old mosaic. It has been the one delight in a hard and gloomy life. All the house is the same. And the name of Dr. Alfred Ramsay is becoming known. Then it is all kicked away by a sudden and unexpected tragedy. Sit down."
Brownsden sat down obediently in a Cromwellian chair upholstered in speaking tapestry. It was his cue to get the other to talk. ”

“ Who is John Ramsay?"
"He is a trooper, sir, and out with General Sumpter. We don't see him often now, for he is afraid to come home, excepting when the Tories are away."
"These Tories are very troublesome, Mary," said Butler, laughing; "they annoy us all, on our side of the question. But love John Ramsay, my dear, and don't be ashamed of it, for I'll warrant he is a brave fellow, and deserves a pretty girl with a true heart, for his love to his country."
"That he does!" replied Mary, "for his greatest fault is that he ventures too much. ”

“ There is another view of the case not so creditable to the future poet, but still within the range of possibility—that the scion of the house of Ramsay, whose anxiety to let the world know he was of gentle lineage was so chronic, may have felt himself a cut above the children of the bonnet-lairdie. Ramsay's nature was not one wherein the finer sympathies and delicate regard for the feelings of others were mortised into a sturdy independence and a desire to carve his fortunes out of the block of favouring opportunity. ”

“ No, sir, claret is the liquor for boys: port for men: but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy!' Most toper sentiments! But Ramsay did not stint his guests. And these were constantly of a noble order. Lord Bute, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Bath, Lord Chesterfield, and the Duke of Richmond were often at the painter's table, discussing all sorts of political questions with him. Every man was a politician in those days; especially after dinner. But Ramsay was not content to be simply a talker upon the topics of the day—he became also a writer. ”

“ Scotland honored herself when she honored her poet Ramsay. Happy is the nation that appreciates her sons who bid her people look within to find enduring treasure. To Ramsay, the prophet’s words apply: “And they that be of thee shall build the old waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations and thou shalt be called ... the restorer of paths to dwell in.”
The second Allan Ramsay (1713–84) , an accomplished scholar and gentleman, was the son of the poet. Being carefully educated by his father and sent to Rome to study art, he became an able portrait-painter. ”

“ Ramsay; you are the finest human being that I know; you have neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness) , you live for science (involuntarily, sections of potatoes rose before her eyes) ; praise would be an insult to you; generous, pure-hearted, heroic man! But simultaneously, she remembered how he had brought a valet all the way up here; objected to dogs on chairs; would prose for hours (until Mr. Ramsay slammed out of the room) about salt in vegetables and the iniquity of English cooks. ”

“ Ramsay, she thought, stepping back and screwing up her eyes. (It must have altered the design a good deal when she was sitting on the step with James. There must have been a shadow.) When she thought of herself and Charles throwing ducks and drakes and of the whole scene on the beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs. Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee, writing letters. (She wrote innumerable letters, and sometimes the wind took them and she and Charles just saved a page from the sea.) But what a power was in the human soul! ”

“ Ramsay was a successful poet, and not too much of a poet to be also a successful man of business. He exchanged wig-making for bookselling, kept a shop in the High Street of Edinburgh, and finally retired to a villa which he had built for himself on the Castle Hill. A good-humoured, care-defying man, he enjoyed life in an easy way, and was not disposed to repine when his road lay down the hill. ”

“ Portraits of Ramsay by himself, Lilie, and Alexander Nasmyth are in the National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.
Ramsay was a man of considerable culture, a traveller, an excellent linguist, and a good scholar. His literary gifts—as evidenced by the volume of essays entitled ‘The Investigator,’ 1762—were far above the average, and his love of letters was genuine. ”

“ Ramsay--I beg to thank you most truly for your very acceptable gift so kindly sent to me yesterday evening. I had heard with the greatest satisfaction of the admirable sketch you had read to the Royal Society of the public character of the latest of our Scottish worthies--a very remarkable man in many respects; one whose name must ever stand in the foremost rank of Christian philanthropists; all whose great and various talents and acquirements being devoted with untiring energy to the one great object--the temporal and eternal benefit of mankind. ”

“ Ramsay muttered under his breath. "As a criminal psychologist, you have no equal in the world. It was your marvellous book on the ramifications of the criminal mind that first attracted you to me. And it was my privilege to do you some trifling service "
"To save my life and my reputation. If only I had your scientific knowledge!"
"Yes, yes," Ramsay said impatiently. "If ever I found myself in trouble, you promised to come and help me. Hence my telegram this morning. Brownsden, I am in the deepest distress—nobody but you can save me. Look round you." ”

“ He was face to face with black, implacable reality, and before its presence all the superficialities and conventionalities which had usurped its place vanished like the shades they were.
He walked, always with that chill sense of isolation on him, from Chelsea to the City; in motion, in continual motion only, was his misery endurable. Ramsay was not at the office when he arrived, and a message from him, left with the secretary, informed Julian that he would not be there that day. ”

“ He had a vast opinion of himself; and between pride of blood, pride of genius, and plenty of means, he was tolerably happy. How different from poor maudlin Fergusson, or from that dark-browed, dark-eyed, impetuous being who was, within a year of Ramsay's death, to appear upon the banks of Doon, coming into the world to sing divinely, to act insanely, and prematurely to die! ”

“ For four years Ramsay was engaged in the southern part of Wales, after which he gradually pushed on northwards. His energy and the excellence of his work soon won the approval of his chief, and on a reorganisation of the survey, early in 1845, Ramsay was appointed ‘local director’ for Great Britain. The more northern part of Wales soon became the field of his personal work, and during the summers of 1848–51 he was engaged in the Snowdonian region.
In 1847 he was appointed professor of geology at University College, London, a post where the duties were not very heavy ”

“ Lee asked me several questions about General Ramsay; how long my husband and I had been acquainted with him; if he was a good-hearted man, likely to give himself the trouble to answer a letter; ‘because,’ said she, ‘my impatience is nearly as great as yours, and I shall want an answer by return of post.’ She then wrote down his name and the name of the street in which he lived ”

“ Ramsay's face—into a rapture of sympathy, of delight in the reward they had, which, though the reason of it escaped her, evidently conferred on them the most supreme bliss of which human nature was capable. ”

“ Ramsay was educated at the Crawford village school till his fifteenth year, when his mother died. Next year, in 1701, he was apprenticed by his stepfather to an Edinburgh wig-maker. There is an unsupported legend that Ramsay desired to devote himself to art.
Ramsay soon started in business as a wig-maker for himself, married in 1712, and speedily became a substantial citizen. Prudence in money matters, resourcefulness, and love of personal independence characterised him through life. ”

“ Notable among Ramsay's songs for freshness and grace are ‘The Yellow-haired Laddie,’ ‘The Lass o'Patie's Mill,’ and ‘Lochaber no more.’ During the same years (1724–7) he published in two volumes, mainly from the Bannatyne MS., ‘The Evergreen,’ which reached a second edition in 1761. This anthology, which he describes as ‘Scots poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600,’ represents the author of ‘Chrysts-Kirke,’ Dunbar, and other Scottish ‘makaris;’ and contains one remarkable political satire, ‘The Vision,’ which, though disguised, is no doubt Ramsay's own, and is his best sustained lyric. ”

“ He is more important than purple or green, or even the red cranberry sauce.
Mr. Ramsay was the head clerk; and as far as I am concerned I am for him. He never pinched the girls’ arms when he passed them in dark corners of the store; and when he told them stories when business was dull and the girls giggled and said: “Oh, pshaw!” it wasn’t G. Bernard they meant at all. Besides being a gentleman, Mr. Ramsay was queer and original in other ways. He was a health crank, and believed that people should never eat anything that was good for them. ”

“ That Ramsay was influenced by the spirit of his age cannot be denied, but he was sufficiently strong, both intellectually and imaginatively, to yield to that influence only so far as it was helpful to him in the inspiration of his great work, but to resist it when it would have imposed the fetters of an absurd mannerism upon the 'machinery' and the 'atmosphere' of his pastoral. The last decades of the seventeenth, and the first two or three of the eighteenth centuries, were periods when pastoral poetry was in fashion. ”