The night-wind that sobs in the trees-- Ah, would that my spirit could tell What an infinite meaning it breathes, What a sorrow and longing it wakes!
[Illustration: _Northwest Corner of Dunfermline Abbey._]
[Illustration: _The Nave--Looking West--Dunfermline Abbey._]
Oban, September 4, 1890.--Going westward from Stronachlacher, a drive of several delicious miles, through the country of Rob Roy, ends at Inversnaid and the shore of Loch Lomond. The rain had passed, but under a dusky, lowering sky the dense white mists, driven by a fresh morning wind, were drifting along the heath-clad hills, like a pageant of angels trailing robes of light. Loch Arklet and the little shieling where was born Helen, the wife of the Macgregor, were soon passed,--a peaceful region smiling in the vale; and presently, along the northern bank of the Arklet, whose copious, dark, and rapid waters, broken into foam upon their rocky bed, make music all the way, I descended that precipitous road to Loch Lomond which, through many a devious turning and sudden peril in the fragrant coppice, reaches safety at last, in one of the wildest of Highland glens. This drive is a chief delight of Highland travel, and it appears to be one that "the march of improvement,"--meaning the extension of railways,--can never abolish; for, besides being solitary and beautiful, the way is difficult. You easily divine what a sanctuary that region must have been to the bandit chieftain, when no road traversed it save perhaps a sheep-track or a path for horses, and when it was darkly covered with the thick pines of the Caledonian forest. Scarce a living creature was anywhere visible. A few hardy sheep, indeed, were grazing on the mountain slopes; a few cattle were here and there couched among the tall ferns; and sometimes a sable company of rooks flitted by, cawing drearily overhead. Once I saw the slow-stepping, black-faced, puissant Highland bull, with his menacing head and his dark air of suspended hostility and inevitable predominance. All the cataracts in those mountain glens were at the flood, because of the continuous heavy rains of an uncommonly wet season, and at Inversnaid the magnificent waterfall,--sister to Lodore and Aira Force,--came down in great floods of black and silver, and with a long resounding roar that seemed to shake the forest. Soon the welcome sun began to pierce the mists; patches of soft blue sky became visible through rifts in the gray; and a glorious rainbow, suddenly cast upon a mountain-side of opposite Inveruglas, spanned the whole glittering fairy realm with its great arch of incommunicable splendour. The place of Rob Roy's cavern was seen, as the boat glided down Loch Lomond,--a snug nest in the wooded crag,--and, after all too brief a sail upon those placid ebon waters, I mounted the coach that plies between Ardlui and Crianlarich. Not much time will now elapse before this coach is displaced,--for they are building a railroad through Glen Falloch, which, running southerly from Crianlarich, will skirt the western shore of Loch Lomond and reach to Balloch and Helensburgh, and thus will make the railway communication complete, continuous, and direct between Glasgow and Oban. At intervals all along the glen were visible the railway embankments, the piles of "sleepers," the heaps of steel rails, the sheds of the builders, and the red flag of the dynamite blast. The new road will be a popular line of travel. No land "that the eye of heaven visits" is lovelier than this one. But it may perhaps be questioned whether the exquisite loveliness of the Scottish Highlands will not become vulgarised by over-easiness of accessibility. Sequestration is one of the elements of the beautiful, and numbers of people invariably make common everything upon which they swarm. But nothing can debase the unconquerable majesty of those encircling mountains. I saw "the skyish head" of Ben More, at one angle, and of Ben Lui at another, and the lonely slopes of the Grampian hills; and over the surrounding pasture-land, for miles and miles of solitary waste, the thick, ripe heather burnished the earth with brown and purple bloom and filled the air with dewy fragrance.