and one takes particular interest in this place, and its little stairway whereby ascent is made to the balcony, also book-lined, and escape through a little doorway. When Scott first came to the cottage of Abbotsford he wrote, furiously, in a little window embrasure with only a curtain between him and the domestic world. Here he had not only a library, but a study, where still stands the desk at which the Waverleys were written, and the well-worn desk chair.
After he had returned from Italy, whither he went in search of health and did not find it, he felt, one day, a return of the old desire to write, the ruling passion. He was wheeled to the desk, he took the pen—nothing came. He sank back and burst into tears. As Lockhart reports it—"It was like Napoleon resigning his empire. The scepter had departed from Judah; Scott was to write no more."
Scott has always seemed like a contemporary. Not because of his novels; I fear the Waverleys begin to read a little stilted to the young generation, and there are none left to lament with Lowell that he had read all of Scott and now he could never read him all over again for the first time. It is rather because Scott the man is so immortal that he seems like a man still living; or at least like one who died but yesterday. Into the dining-room where we cannot go—and perhaps now that we think it over it is as well—he was carried in order that out of it he might look his last on "twilight and Tweed and Eildon hill." And there he died, even so long ago as September, 1832.
"It was a beautiful day," that day we seem almost to remember as we stand here in the vivid after glow, "so warm that every window was wide open, and so peacefully still that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed, was distinctly audible."
Dryburgh
Five days after they carried him to rest in the Abbey—rival certainly in this instance of The Abbey of England, where is stored so much precious personal dust. The time had become thrawn; dark skies hung over the Cheviots and the Eildon, and over the haughs of Ettrick and Yarrow; the silver Tweed ran leaden, and moaned in its going; there was a keening in the wind.
The road from Abbotsford past Melrose to Dryburgh is—perhaps—the loveliest walk in the United Kingdom; unless it be the road from Coventry past Kenilworth to Stratford. It was by this very way that there passed the funeral train of Scott, the chief carriage drawn by Scott's own horses. Thousands and thousands of pilgrims have followed that funeral train; one goes to Holy Trinity in Stratford, to the Invalides in Paris, but one walks to Dryburgh through the beautiful Tweedside which is all a shrine to Sir Walter.
The road runs away from the river to the little village of Darnick, with its ivy-shrouded tower, across the meadows to the bridge across the river, with the ringing of bells in the ear. For it was ordered on that September day of 1832, by the Provost, "that the church bell shall toll from the time the funeral procession reaches Melrose Bridge till it passes the village of Newstead."
I do not suppose the people of this countryside, who look at modern pilgrims so sympathetically, so understandingly, have ever had time to forget; the stream of pilgrims has been so uninterrupted for nearly a century. Through the market-place of Melrose it passed, the sloping stony square, where people of the village pass and repass on their little village errands. And it did not stop at the Abbey.
The day was thickening into dusk then; it is ripening into sunset glory to-day. And the Abbey looks very lovely, and very lonely. And one wonders if Michael Scot did not call to Walter Scott to come and join the quiet there, and if the dust that once was the heart of Bruce did not stir a little as the recreator of Scotland was carried by.
To the village of Newstead you move on; with the sound of immemorial bells falling on the ear, and pass through the little winding street—and wonder if the early Roman name of Trimontium, triple mountains, triple Eildon, was its first call name out of far antiquity as Scott believed.
Then the road ascends between hedgerows, and begins to follow the Tweed closely—and perhaps you meet pilgrims on Leaderfoot bridge who have come the wrong way. There is a steep climb to the heights of Bemersyde, where on the crest all Melrose Glen lies beautifully storied before you. And here you pause—as did those horses of Scott's, believing their master would fain take one last look at his favourite view.
There is no lovelier landscape in the world, or in Scotland. The blue line of the Cheviots bars back the world, the Dunion, the Ruberslaw, the Eildon rise, and in the great bend of the river with richly wooded braes about is the site of Old Melrose. Small wonder he paused to take farewell of all the country he had loved so well.
The road leads on past Bemersyde village with woodlands on either side, and to the east, near a little loch, stands Sandyknowe Tower.
Near the tower lies the remnant of the village of Smailholm, where Scott was sent out of Edinburgh when only three years old. It is in truth his birthplace, for without the clear air of the Border he would have followed the other Scott children; and without the romance of the Border he might have been merely a barrister.
Sandyknowe is brave in spite of its ruin, for it is built of the very stone of the eternal hills, and has become part of the hills. From its balcony, sixty feet high, a beautiful Scottish panorama may be glimpsed, and here Scott brought Turner to make his sketch of the Border. And here, because a kinsman agreed to save Sandyknowe Tower from the mortality that comes even to stone if Scott would write a ballad and make it immortal, is laid the scene of "Eve of St. John's"—with these last haunting intangible lines—
"There is a nun in Dryburgh bower
Ne'er looks upon the sun;
There is a monk in Melrose tower
He speaketh a word to none."
Then, back to the Tweed, where the river sweeps out in a great circle, and leaves a peninsula for Dryburgh. The gray walls of the ruin lift above the thick green of the trees; yew and oak and sycamore close in the fane.
Druid and Culdee and Roman have built shrines in this lovely spot, but to-day pilgrimage is made chiefly because in the quiet sheltered ruined St. Mary's aisle sleeps Sir Walter. It would make one-half in love with death to think of being buried in so sweet a place.
Dryburgh is also one of St. David's foundations, in the "sacred grove of oaks," the Darach Bruach of the worship that is older than Augustus or Columba. These were white monks that David brought up from Alnwick where his queen had been a Northumbrian princess, and their white cloaks must have seemed, among these old old oaks, but the white robes of the Druids come back again.
It is a well-kept place, vines covering over the crumbling gray stone, kept by the Lords of Buchan. And, perhaps too orderly, too fanciful, too "improved"; one likes better the acknowledged ruin of Melrose, and one would prefer that Sir Walter were there with his kin, instead of here with his kindred. But this is a sweet place, a historic place, begun by Hugh de Moreville, who was a slayer of Thomas à Becket, and was Constable of Scotland. His tomb is marked by a double circle on the floor of the Chapter House, and there is nothing of the Chapter House; it is open to beating rain and scorching sun—fit retribution for his most foul deed.
It is not this remembrance you carry away, but that of St. Mary's aisle, in
"Dryburgh where with chiming Tweed
The lintwhites sing in chorus."
CHAPTER III
BORDER TOWNS
Kelso
t is a very great