03.07. Melrose and Abbotsford
Chapter 7 Melrose.
-- The Abbey -- Abbotsford -- The Middle Ground -- Auld
Robin Gray Melrose, fifty miles south of Edinburgh, is a small town of a thousand inhabitants, but rejoicing in a number of hotels with high-sounding and promising names. The title that drew me was the "King’ s Arms." I soon discovered that the landlord undertook several roles or disguises in ministering to the different wants of his guests. He answered the bell of the room, he stood behind my chair at the table, I saw him figuring about the little hotel-bar in a clerk-like way, and I had strong reason to suspect that he prepared the meal set before me. My dinner consisted of two dishes. I mention the dinner mainly because in the neighborhood of Walter Scott who never wrote a book without describing a number of meals in the most appetizing way. Oftentimes the Great Wizard of the North has made me hungry, so that I would have to lay down the book and go off for refreshment -- this when a boy. His favorite way was to introduce a tired, belated knight, who is ushered into the large dining-hall of a castle, hung round with trophies of the chase, pieces of armor, and family portraits, and there would be placed before him "a half-demolished venison pasty flanked by a cobwebbed bottle filled with a golden-looking liquid." My dinner in the "King’s Arms" was cold veal with mint sauce, and for dessert a sweet omelet. Was it that those two dishes were so superior, or was it that an invisible hand poured that rare sauce, hunger, over the food? The recipe of this dessert I will give to any lady who feels desperate in the attempt to please an exacting household.
Melrose Abbey was built in the twelfth century. Judging from the ruins it was beautiful as well as colossal. Two-thirds of it is gone, but the third left is larger than some of our greatest church edifices in the South. The nave is entirely gone, with the exception of a section of wall. The transept and chancel in some sort still remain, in portions of the wall, and in a number of lofty pillars that shoot up far above the head, and in the tombs that lie thickly under our feet. But most of the roof is gone, and the stone pavement has disappeared in wide spaces. Where once hooded monks chanted and walked in procession along rich aisles, and through the soft light of stained windows, I look up now, and behold the sky is visible; I look down and when I am not walking on tombs I find the grass under my feet. High up on the edge of the roofless walls I noticed several jackdaws chattering away among themselves, while lower down some pigeons were cooing and apparently making nests in crevices not far from the vaulted passage in the wall along which surpliced choir-boys used to march and sing. Under the east window is the site of one of the most thrilling scenes in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," where the monk and soldier visit the crypt and open the tomb of Michael Scott, while the moonlight falls on them and on the face of the dead man through the panes of the window that is still left. Close by in the chancel is the heart of Robert Bruce. Sent to the Holy Land it was brought back, and in its silver case buried here. By its side is one of the monarchs of Scotland. Passing over a narrow, stone-covered place, between two pillars, the guide told me I had walked over seven noblemen. I comforted myself with the thought that they had walked when living over seven hundred seventy and seven people, while my stepping unwittingly over them when dead could do them no harm.
What a curious custom our forefathers had of burying the dead under the stone floors of the channels and aisles of the churches. I little dreamed when I started what glorious and historic names, names that had thrilled me with their achievements by tongue, and pen, and sword, would literally leap out of the stones under my feet, and greet me as it were from the dust -- the names of Addison, Knox, Massillon, Fenelon, and others. It is a decided sensation to have your attention called to the fact that you are standing on the last resting-place of a man who moved the nations, or just as you have planted your foot down to see an illustrious name looking up into your face.
Tennyson speaks in that strange poem of his called "Maud" about the feet of the living vexing the head of the dead. If he referred to this I have light at least on one line.
I was shown a postern door in the wall of the abbey communicating with an underground passage, that burrows its dark way to the river Tweed. By this secret route the monks could escape by boat when hard pressed. In the chancel I was shown an upright stone of several feet in height on which I was told that Sir Walter Scott used to sit when he visited the abbey. No sooner is the information given than down go a certain number and a certain set of tourists upon that stone. By repeated sittings they have already brought out a high state of polish, and a certain amount of wear.
If they keep at it, the time will come when the aforesaid rock will be brought even to the ground and disappear, just as the great toe of the Apostle Peter in Rome is steadily vanishing under the repeated kissings of the faithful. What a strange ambition this is, to sit in the seat of the great. What a fearful contrast is instantaneously drawn!
Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott, has been so often described that I will not undertake a needless task. Suffice to say that it is two and a half miles from Melrose in a northwesterly direction. The road leads through avenues of beechtrees, and lanes lined on either side with the blooming hawthorn hedge; then down near the banks of the Tweed, a stream of about twenty yards in width; and then up again and through smooth meadows, islanded with clumps of trees and dotted with sheep; and then through fields with soldier-like shocks of wheat; by a plot of ground where the crows were having a cawing assembly; past a grassy field where two or three horses were running races for their own amusement and enjoyment; so the road ran with varying charm until suddenly we looked down upon Abbotsford.
It lies a little below the road, between the highway and the river Tweed. Embowered in trees, pinnacled, tunneled, parapeted, and bewailed to an extraordinary degree, there is no other house like it. Designed by Scott himself, he succeeded in giving to a modern building an ancient look. We were carried through five rooms, among which was the library with its twenty thousand volumes, and the armory with its fine and interesting collection of every conceivable kind of warlike implement. Here we saw the pistols of Napoleon that were found on the field of Waterloo, and also the gun of Rob Roy. The study, however, with the chair on which he sat, and the table on which he wrote, was doubtless the attractive spot to all in the house that morning. Here it was in this room looking south he wove the webs in which we and countless other wandering flies have been caught. His was the master-hand that so blended and twisted together the fiber of history and the thread of fancy that it is difficult to say where the o ne ends and the other begins. Fully twenty tourists entered the house while I was there, at a shilling apiece: this meant five dollars income for the family descendants. And so the travelers pour in continually, and with them a steady stream of silver currency that swells into the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars annually. The money that the great author strove to amass in order to save his property is coming in at last. In passing out of Scotland the last impressive view had was of the hills and downs that like a great belt separate the two lands, Scotland and England. Thought was busy in recalling how often war, like a tide, had ebbed and flowed over this region; how armies would loom up on these hills coming from the south, and then at another time how the blue bonnets and highland plaid throng would surge down from the north upon the broad fields and meadows of "Merry England." Merry indeed! What a misnomer for a land that has been as often shaken by foreign wars and convulsed with civil strife. The bare low-lying hills, with their flocks and sheep-folds were more powerfully suggestive of another, simpler and more plaintive memory. I refer to the exquisite poem of Auld Robin Gray.
Written in Scotland by a Scottish woman and in a country like this, and, possibly, near this, I recalled with a new and increased interest the words: "When the sheep are in the fauld, And the kye are at hame, And a’ the world to sleep are gane-- The woes o’ my heart fall in showers from my e’e, While my gude man lies soun by me." The poem, when published, thrilled every heart, but the writer kept the authorship a secret for thirty or forty years. She then revealed it to Walter Scott. She attempted a sequel, but it did not take. Like Song-Replys, and volumes written in imitation of a striking book, it fell below the original. The heart-broken but dutiful woman of the poem was best left as she was first introduced.
If Enoch Arden had obtained his wife and settled down, the poem of Tennyson would not stir the reader as it does now. Evangeline leaves a great pain in the heart, but if she had overtaken her lover, not as many copies of Longfellow’s beautiful conception would have been sold.
There is a frantic desire on the part of most writers to marry everybody. You can see the sentences are all pointing, and the chapters are all swiftly rushing to this magical sentence of the conclusion, and "they were married and lived long and happily." But if this is the way with the books, life itself fails to show that congenial natures always thus come together in wedlock. The books have one record, and life another. When a story is true to nature it thrills. The little poem of Lady Lindsay has moved a great multitude.
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