Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

J >> John Wilson >> Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2




The Tree of the Highlands is the Pine. There are Scotch firs, indeed,
well worth looking at, in the Lowlands, and in England, but to learn
their true character you must see them in the glen, among rooks, by the
river-side and on the mountain. "We for our parts," says Lauder very
finely, "confess that when we have seen it towering in full majesty in
the midst of some appropriate Highland scene, and sending its limbs
abroad with all the unrestrained freedom of a hardy mountaineer, as if
it claimed dominion over the savage region round it, we have looked upon
it as a very sublime object. People who have not seen it in its native
climate and soil, and who judge of it from the wretched abortions which
are swaddled and suffocated in English plantations, among dark, heavy,
and eternally wet clays, may well call it a wretched tree; but when its
foot is among its own Highland heather, and when it stands freely in
its native knoll of dry gravel, or thinly covered rock, over which its
roots wander afar in the wildest reticulation, whilst its tall,
furrowed, and often gracefully sweeping red and grey trunk, of enormous
circumference, rears aloft its high umbrageous canopy, then would the
greatest sceptic on this point be compelled to prostrate his mind before
it with a veneration which perhaps was never before excited in him by
any other tree." The colour of the pine has been objected to as
murky--and murky it often is, or seems to be; and so then is the colour
of the heather, and of the river, and of the loch, and of the sky itself
thunder-laden, and murkiest of all are the clouds. But a stream of
sunshine is let loose, and the gloom is confounded with glory; over all
that night-like reign the jocund day goes dancing, and the forest revels
in green or in golden light. Thousands and tens of thousands of pines
are there, and as you gaze upon the whole mighty array, you fear, lest
it might break the spell, to fix your gaze on any one single tree. But
there are trees there that will force you to look on themselves alone,
and they grow before your eyes into the kings of the forest. Straight
stand their stems in the sunshine, and you feel that as straight have
they stood in the storm. As yet you look not up, for your heart is awed,
and you see but the stately columns reddening away into the gloom. But
all the while you feel the power of the umbrage aloft, and when
thitherwards you lift your eyes, what a roof to such a cathedral! A cone
drops at your feet--nor other sound nor other stir--but afar off you
think you hear a cataract. Inaudible your footsteps on the soft yellow
floor, composed of the autumnal sheddings of countless years. Then it is
true that you can indeed hear the beating of your own heart; you fear,
but know not what you fear; and being the only living creature there,
you are impressed with a thought of death. But soon to that severe
silence you are more than reconciled; the solitude, without ceasing to
be sublime, is felt to be solemn and not awful, and ere long, utter as
it is, serene. Seen from afar, the forest was one black mass; but as you
advance, it opens up into spacious glades, beautiful as gardens, with
appropriate trees of gentler tribes, and ground-flowering in the sun.
But there is no murmur of bee--no song of bird. In the air a thin
whisper of insects--intermittent--and wafted quite away by a breath. For
we are now in the very centre of the forest, and even the cushat haunts
not here. Hither the red-deer may come--but not now--for at this season
they love the hill. To such places the stricken stag might steal to lie
down and die.

And thus for hours may you be lost in the forest, nor all the while have
wasted one thought on the outer-world, till with no other warning but an
uncertain glimmer and a strange noise, you all at once issue forth into
the open day, and are standing on the brink of a precipice above a
flood. It comes tumbling down with a succession of falls, in a mile-long
course, right opposite your stance--rocks, cliffs, and trees, all the
way up on either side, majestically retiring back to afford ample
channel, and showing an unobstructed vista, closed up by the purple
mountain, that seems to send forth the river from a cavern in its
breast. 'Tis the Glen of Pines. Nor ash nor oak is suffered to intrude
on their dominion. Since the earthquake first shattered it out, this
great chasm, with all its chasms, has been held by one race of trees. No
other seed could there spring to life; for from the rocks has all soil,
ages ago, been washed and swept by the tempests. But there they stand
with glossy boles, spreading arms, and glittering crest; and those two
by themselves on the summit, known all over Badenoch as "the
Giants"--their "statures reach the sky."

We have been indulging in a dream of old. Before our day the immemorial
gloom of Glenmore had perished, and it ceased to be a forest. But there
bordered on it another region of night or twilight, and in its vast
depths we first felt the sublimity of lonesome fear. Rothiemurchus! The
very word blackens before our eyes with necromantic characters--again we
plunge into its gulfs desirous of what we dread--again, "in pleasure
high and turbulent," we climb the cliffs of Cairngorm.

Would you wish to know what is now the look of Glenmore? One now dead
and gone--a man of wayward temper, but of genius--shall tell you--and
think not the picture exaggerated--for you would not, if you were
_there_. "It is the wreck of the ancient forest which arrests all the
attention, and which renders Glenmore a melancholy, more than a
melancholy, a terrific spectacle. Trees of enormous height, which have
escaped alike the axe and the tempest, are still standing, stripped by
the winds, even of the bark, and, like gigantic skeletons, throwing far
and wide their white and bleached bones to the storms and rains of
heaven; while others, broken by the violence of the gales, lift up their
split and fractured trunks in a thousand shapes of resistance and of
destruction, or still display some knotted and tortuous branches,
stretched out, in sturdy and fantastic forms of defiance, to the
whirlwind and the winter. Noble trunks also, which had long resisted,
but resisted in vain, strew the ground; some lying on the declivity
where they have fallen, others still adhering to the precipice where
they were rooted, many upturned, with their twisted and entangled roots
high in air; while not a few astonish us by the space which they cover,
and by dimensions which we could not otherwise have estimated. It is one
wide image of death, as if the angel of destruction had passed over the
valley. The sight even of a felled tree is painful; still more is that
of the fallen forest, with all its green branches on the ground,
withering, silent, and at rest, where once they glittered in the dew and
the sun, and trembled in the breeze. Yet this is but an image of
vegetable death. It is familiar, and the impression passes away. It is
the naked skeleton bleaching in the winds, the gigantic bones of the
forest still erect, the speaking records of former life, and of strength
still unsubdued, vigorous even in death, which renders Glenmore one
enormous charnel-house."

What happened of old to the aboriginal Forests of Scotland, that long
before these later destructions they had almost all perished, leaving,
to bear witness what they were, such survivors? They were chiefly
destroyed by fire. What power could extinguish chance-kindled
conflagrations, when sailing before the wind? And no doubt fire was set
to clear the country at once of Scotch firs, wolves, wild-boars, and
outlaws. Tradition yet tells of such burnings; and, if we mistake not,
the pines found in the Scottish mosses, the logs and the stocks, all
show that they were destroyed by Vulcan, though Neptune buried them in
the quagmires. Storms no doubt often levelled them by thousands; but had
millions so fallen they had never been missed, and one Element
only--which has been often fearfully commissioned--could achieve the
work. In our own day the axe has indeed done wonders--and sixteen square
miles of the Forest of Rothiemurchus "went to the ground." John of
Ghent, Gilpin tells us, to avenge an inroad, set twenty-four thousand
axes at work in the Caledonian Forest.

Yet Scotland has perhaps sufficient forests at this day. For more has
been planted than cut down; Glenmore will soon be populous as ever with
self-sown pines, and Rothiemurchus may revive; the shades are yet deep
of Loch Arkaig, Glengarry, Glenmoriston, Strathglass, Glen-Strathfarrar,
and Loch-Shiel; deeper still on the Findhorn--and deepest of all on the
Dee, rejoicing in the magnificent pine-woods of Invercauld and Braemar.

We feel that we have spoken feebly of our Highland forests. Some,
perhaps, who have never been off the high-roads, may accuse us of
exaggeration too; but they contain wondrous beauties of which we have
said not a word; and no imagination can conceive what they may be in
another hundred years. But, apparently far apart from the forests,
though still belonging to them, for they hold in fancy by the tenure of
the olden time, how many woods, and groves, and sprinklings of fair
trees, rise up during a day's journey, in almost every region of the
North! And among them all, it may be, scarcely a pine. For the oak, and
the ash, and the elm, are also all native trees; nowhere else does the
rowan flush with more dazzling lustre; in spring, the alder with its
vivid green stands well beside the birk--the yew was not neglected of
yore, though the bow of the Celt was weak to that of the Saxon; and the
holly, in winter emulating the brightness of the pine, flourished, and
still flourishes on many a mountain-side. There is sufficient sylvan
scenery for beauty in a land of mountains. More may be needed for
shelter--but let the young plants and seedlings have time to grow--and
as for the old trees, may they live for ever! Too many millions of
larches are perhaps growing now behind the Tay and the Tilt; yet why
should the hills of Perthshire be thought to be disfigured by what
ennobles the Alps and the Apennines?

Hitherto we have hardly said a word about Lochs, and have been doing our
best to forget them, while imagining scenes that were chiefly
characterised by other great features of Highland Landscape. A country
thus constituted, and with such an aspect, even if we could suppose it
without lochs, would still be a glorious region; but its lochs are
indeed its greatest glory: by them its glens, its mountains, and its
woods, are all illumined, and its rivers made to sing aloud for joy. In
the pure element, overflowing so many spacious vales and glens profound,
the great and stern objects of nature look even more sublime or more
beautiful in their reflected shadows, which appear in that stillness to
belong rather to heaven than earth. Or the evanescence of all that
imagery at a breath may touch us with the thought, that all it
represents, steadfast as seems its endurance, will as utterly pass away.
Such visions, when gazed on in that wondrous depth and purity they are
sometimes seen to assume on a still summer day, always inspire some such
faint feeling as this; and we sigh to think how transitory must be all
things, when the setting sun is seen to sink beneath the mountain, and
all its golden pomp at the same instant to evanish from the lake.

The first that takes possession of the imagination, dreaming of the
Highlands as the region of Lochs, is the Queen of them all, Loch Lomond.
A great poet has said that, "in Scotland, the proportion of diffused
water is often too great, as at the Lake of Geneva, for instance, and in
most of the Scottish lakes. No doubt it sounds magnificent, and flatters
the imagination, to hear at a distance of masses of water, so many
leagues in length and miles in width; and such ample room may be
delightful to the fresh-water sailor, scudding with a lively breeze amid
the rapidly-shifting scenery. But who ever travelled along the banks of
Loch Lomond, variegated as the lower part is by islands, without feeling
that a speedier termination of the long vista of blank water would be
acceptable, and without wishing for an interposition of green meadows,
trees, and cottages, and a sparkling stream to run by his side? In fact,
a notion of grandeur, as connected with magnitude, has seduced persons
of taste into a general mistake upon this subject. It is much more
desirable, for the purposes of pleasure, that lakes should be numerous
and small or middle-sized, than large, not only for communication by
walks and rides, but for variety, and for recurrence of similar
appearances. To illustrate this by one instance: how pleasing is it to
have a ready and frequent opportunity of watching, at the outlet of a
lake, the stream, pushing its way among the rocks, in lively contrast
with the stillness from which it has escaped! and how amusing to compare
its noisy and turbulent motions with the gentle playfulness of the
breezes that may be starting up, or wandering here and there, over the
faintly-rippled surface of the broad water! I may add, as a general
remark, that in lakes of great width the shores cannot be distinctly
seen at the same time, and therefore contribute little to mutual
illustration and ornament; and if the opposite shores are out of sight
of each other, like those of the American and Asiatic lakes, then
unfortunately the traveller is reminded of a nobler object--he has the
blankness of a sea-prospect without the grandeur and accompanying sense
of power."

We shall not be suspected of an inclination to dissent, on light
grounds, from any sentiments of Wordsworth. But finely felt and
expressed as all this is, we do not hesitate to say that it is not
applicable to Loch Lomond. Far be it from us to criticise this passage
sentence by sentence; for we have quoted it not in a captious, but a
reverent spirit, as we have ever done with the works of this illustrious
man. He has studied nature more widely and profoundly than we have; but
it is out of our power to look on Loch Lomond without a feeling of
perfection. The "diffusion of water" is indeed great; but in what a
world it floats! At first sight of it, how our soul expands! The sudden
revelation of such majestic beauty, wide as it is and extending afar,
inspires us with a power of comprehending it all. Sea-like indeed it
is--a Mediterranean Sea--enclosed with lofty hills and as lofty
mountains--and these indeed are the Fortunate Isles! We shall not dwell
on the feeling which all must have experienced on the first sight of
such a vision--the feeling of a lovely and a mighty calm; it is manifest
that the spacious "diffusion of water" more than conspires with the
other components of such a scene to produce the feeling; that to it
belongs the spell that makes our spirit serene, still, and bright, as
its own. Nor when such feeling ceases so entirely to possess, and so
deeply to affect us, does the softened and subdued charm of the scene
before us depend less on the expanse of the "diffusion of water." The
islands, that before had lain we knew not how--or we had only felt that
they were all most lovely--begin to show themselves in the order of
their relation to one another and to the shores. The eye rests on the
largest, and with them the lesser combine; or we look at one or two of
the least, away by themselves, or remote from all a tufted rock; and
many as they are, they break not the breadth of the liquid plain, for
it is ample as the sky. They show its amplitude, as masses and
sprinklings of clouds, and single clouds, show the amplitude of the
cerulean vault. And then the long promontories--stretching out from
opposite mainlands, and enclosing bays that in themselves are
lakes--they too magnify the empire of water; for long as they are, they
seem so only as our eye attends them with their cliffs and woods from
the retiring shores, and far distant are their shadows from the central
light. Then what shores! On one side, where the lake is widest,
low-lying they seem, and therefore lovelier--undulating with fields and
groves, where many a pleasant dwelling is embowered, into lines of hills
that gradually soften away into another land. On the other side, sloping
back, or overhanging, mounts beautiful in their bareness, for they are
green as emerald; others, scarcely more beautiful, studded with fair
trees--some altogether woods. They soon form into mountains--and the
mountains become more and more majestical, yet beauty never deserts
them, and her spirit continues to tame that of the frowning cliffs. Far
off as they are, Benlomond and Benvorlich are seen to be giants;
magnificent is their retinue, but they two are supreme, each in his own
dominion; and clear as the day is here, they are diadem'd with clouds.

It cannot be that the "proportion of diffused water is here too great;"
and is it then true that no one "ever travelled along the banks of Loch
Lomond, variegated as the lower part is by islands, without feeling that
a speedier termination to the long vista of blank water would be
acceptable, and without wishing for an interposition of green meadows,
trees, and cottages, and a sparkling stream to run by his side?" We have
travelled along them in all weathers and never felt such a wish. For
there they all are--all but the "sparkling stream to run by our side,"
and we see not how that well could be in nature. "Streams that sparkle
as they run," cross our path on their own; and brighter never issued
from the woods. Along the margin of the water, as far as Luss--ay, and
much farther--the variations of the foreground are incessant; "had it no
other beauties," it has been truly said, "but those of its shores, it
would still be an object of prime attraction; whether from the
bright-green meadows sprinkled with luxuriant ash-trees, that sometimes
skirt its margin, or its white pebbled shores on which its gentle
billows murmur, like a miniature ocean, or its bold rocky promontories
rising from the dark water, rich in wildflowers and ferns, and tangled
with wild roses and honeysuckles, or its retired bays where the waves
dash, reflecting, like a mirror, the trees which hang over them, an
inverted landscape." The islands are for ever arranging themselves into
new forms, every one more and more beautiful; at least so they seem to
be, perpetually occurring, yet always unexpected, and there is a
pleasure even in such a series of slight surprises that enhances the
delight of admiration. And alongside, or behind us, all the while, are
the sylvan mountains, "laden with beauty;" and ever and anon open glens
widen down upon us from chasms; or forest-glades lead our hearts away
into the inner gloom--perhaps our feet; and there, in a field that looks
not as if it had been cleared by his own hands, but left clear by
nature, a woodsman's hut.

Half-way between Luss and Tarbet the water narrows, but it is still
wide; the new road, we believe, winds round the point of Firkin, the old
road boldly scaled the height, as all old roads loved to do; ascend it,
and bid the many-isled vision, in all its greatest glory, farewell.
Thence upwards prevails the spirit of the mountains. The lake is felt to
belong to them--to be subjected to their will--and that is capricious;
for sometimes they suddenly blacken it when at its brightest, and
sometimes when its gloom is like that of the grave, as if at their
biding, all is light. We cannot help attributing the "skyey influences"
which occasion such wonderful effects on the water, to prodigious
mountains; for we cannot look on them without feeling that they reign
over the solitude they compose; the lights and shadows flung by the sun
and the clouds imagination assuredly regards as put forth by the vast
objects which they colour; and we are inclined to think some such belief
is essential in the profound awe, often amounting to dread, with which
we are inspired by the presences of mere material forms. But be this as
it may, the upper portion of Loch Lomond is felt by all to be most
sublime. Near the head, all the manifold impressions of the beautiful
which for hours our mind had been receiving, begin to fade; if some
gloomy change has taken place in the air, there is a total obliteration,
and the mighty scene before us is felt to possess not the hour merely,
but the day. Yet should sunshine come, and abide a while, beauty will
glimpse upon us even here, for green pastures will smile vividly high up
among the rocks; the sylvan spirit is serene the moment it is touched
with light, and here there is not only many a fair tree by the
water-side, but yon old oak-wood will look joyful on the mountain, and
the gloom become glimmer in the profound abyss.

Wordsworth says that "it must be more desirable, for the purposes of
pleasure, that lakes should be numerous, and small or middle-sized, than
large, not only for communication by walks and rides, but for variety,
and for recurrence of similar appearances." The Highlands have them of
all sizes--and that surely is best. But here is one which, it has been
truly said, is not only "incomparable in its beauty as in its
dimensions, exceeding all others in variety as it does in extent and
splendour, but unites in itself every style of scenery which is found in
the other lakes of the Highlands." He who has studied, and understood,
and felt all Loch Lomond, will be prepared at once to enjoy any other
fine lake he looks on; nor will he admire nor love it the less, though
its chief character should consist in what forms but one part of that of
the Wonder in which all kinds of beauty and sublimity are combined.

We feel that it would be idle, and worse than idle, to describe any
number of the Highland lochs, for so many of the finest have been seen
by so many eyes that few persons probably will ever read these pages to
whom such descriptions would be, at the best, more than shadowings of
scenery that their own imaginations can more vividly re-create. There
are other reasons for not saying a single word about some of the most
beautiful; for genius has pictured and peopled them and the surrounding
regions in colours that will never fade. Besides, in the volumes to
which these "Remarks" are a preface--contributed with pleasure, somewhat
impaired indeed by the consciousness of their many defects and
imperfections--views of them all are submitted to the eye; and it is not
to be thought that we could by words add to the effect of the works of
such artists. These objections do not apply to what we have written
respecting the character of the Scenery of the Highlands, apart, as far
as that may be, from their lochs; and it may have in some measure
illustrated them also, if it has at all truly characterised the
mountains, the glens, the rivers, the forests, and the woods.

We may be allowed, however, to say, that there cannot be a greater
mistake than to think, as many, we believe, do who have only heard of
the Highland Lochs, that, with the exception of those famous for their
beauty as well as their grandeur, beauty is not only not the quality by
which they are distinguished, but that it is rarely found in them at
all. There are few, possessing any very marked character, in which
beauty is not either an ingredient or an accompaniment; and there are
many "beautiful exceedingly," which, lying out of the way even of
somewhat adventurous travellers, or very remote, are known, if even by
that, only by name. It does not, indeed, require much, in some
situations, to give a very touching beauty to water. A few trees, a few
knolls, a few tufted rocks, will do it, where all around and above is
stern or sterile; and how strong may be the gentle charm, if the torrent
that feeds the little loch chance to flow into it from a lucid pool
formed by a waterfall, and to flow out of it in a rivulet that enlivens
the dark heather with a vale of verdure over which a stag might
bound--and more especially if there be two or three huts in which it is
perceived there is human life! We believe we slightly touched before on
such scenes; but any little repetition will be excused for the sake of a
very picturesque passage, which we have much pleasure in quoting from
the very valuable "Guide to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland," by
the brothers Anderson. We well remember walking into the scene here so
well painted, many long years ago, and have indeed, somewhere or other,
described it. The Fall of Foyers is the most magnificent cataract, out
of all sight and hearing, in Britain. The din is quite loud enough in
ordinary weather--and it is only in ordinary weather that you can
approach the place from which you have a full view of all its grandeur.
When the Fall is in flood--to say nothing of being drenched to the
skin--you are so blinded by the sharp spray-smoke, and so deafened by
the dashing and clashing, and tumbling and rumbling thunder, that your
condition is far from enviable, as you cling, "lonely lover of nature,"
to a shelf by no means eminent for safety, above the horrid gulf. Nor in
former times was there any likelihood of your being comforted by the
accommodations of the General's Hut. In ordinary Highland
weather--meaning thereby weather neither very wet nor very dry--it is
worth walking a thousand miles for one hour to behold the Fall of
Foyers. The spacious cavity is enclosed by "complicated cliffs and
perpendicular precipices" of immense height, and though for a while it
wears to the eye a savage aspect, yet beauty fears not to dwell even
there, and the horror is softened by what appears to be masses of tall
shrubs, or single shrubs almost like trees. And they are trees, which on
the level plain would look even stately; but as they ascend ledge above
ledge the walls of that awful chasm, it takes the eye time to see them
as they really are, while on our first discernment of their character,
serenely standing among the tumult, they are felt on such sites to be
sublime.

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