B CHAPTER VII EYOND Dunkeld-which is the southern gateway of the Scottish Highlands there stretches a great wood, within the domain of the Duke of Athole, where one can wander for miles; the path sometimes mossy, always inviting; now threading dark glens, and again winding under hoary forest trees that grow on uplands; now giving glimpses of brook or pool, and now of grassy glade on which some group of century-old larches slant their shadows; one may hear noises of chattering squirrels, of whirring pheasants, of roaring wood-streams, of pines soughing in the wind; and at last, going up a side-path, the visitor will come to the door of a Hermitage, bedded in densest mass of foliage. Fifty years ago-to a month-the guide opened that door for me, entered with me, and closed it behind us. I then observed that the whole inner surface of the door was one great mirror, and that there were other mirrors around; while directly opposite was a life-size painting of Ossian fingering his harp; and as I was scanning the details of this picture, the guide touched some hidden spring; Ossian straightway disappeared, sliding into the wall, and through the chasm one looked out upon clouds of spray, behind which an Alpine water-fall with roar and foam plunged down sheer forty feet into a seething pool below. The water-fall through an artful collocation of mirrors seemed to pour down behind you as well; and from the ceiling to pour down above you, and to gird you all about with its din and splash and spray. With the cliffs and the pine boughs it made a pretty grouping of Ossianic charms; and I am sorry to hear that since 1869 or thereabout, the Hermitage, by reason of some vandal outrage, has wholly disappeared. The only memorial the traveller will find now in that region of the Ossianic harping, of which we spoke in the last chapter, is the Macpherson Stone, which some twenty-five miles farther northward, on the Highland trail, peers out from green copses in the upper valley of the Spey. I spoke also in our last talk of the literary ferment that had declared itself, and was in active progress along the Scottish border, and in Edinboro'. We had somewhat to say of the poet Crabbe, and of his long and successful poems-now little read; and of those other poems by Cowper, some of which will be always read, and which, when their art shall grow old-fashioned and out of date, will show a tender humanity and a kindly purpose, which I trust will never go out of date. PARSON WHITE You will remember that we found both of the last-named poets in the country; and that their work concerned itself largely with country life and with country scenes. And now we sidle into the country again, for our first studies today;-into the county of Hampshire, where lived, toward the close of the last century, two personages-not far apart in that pleasant region of rolling downs; unknown to each other; their ages, indeed, differing by more than a score of years; but both leaving books you ought to know something about. The first of these personages was a quiet clergyman1 of very simple tastes and simple habits, who lived in a beautiful parsonage— still standing, and still overgrown with ivies and banked about with great waving heaps of 1 Gilbert White, b. 1720; d. 1793. Oxford man; Fellow in 1744; curate of Faringdon 1758; after 1784, at Selborne. foliage-where he wrote The Natural History of Selborne. It is not a formal book or an ambitious book; it is simply a bundle of short letters extending over dates that cover twenty years in their stretch; and yet the book is so small you could carry it in your pocket. Its title describes the book; it tells what this quiet old gentleman saw and learned through twenty odd years of observation, about the birds, the beasts, the fishes, the trees, the flowers, the storms, the sunshine and the clouds of that little country parish of Selborne. And yet that simple story is told with such easy frankness, such delicacy, such simplicity, such truthfulness, such tender feeling for all God's creatures, whether beast or bird, that the little book has become almost as much a classic as Walton's Complete Angler; and the name of Gilbert White, which scarce a hundred Londoners knew when he died, is now known to every well-equipped English library everywhere. I have compared it with Walton's Complete Angler, though it has not the old fisherman's dalliance with the muses; nor has it much literary suggestiveness. There are no milkmaids courtesying to its periods, nor any songs, except those of the birds. Good old Parson White is simpler (if maybe); he is more homely; he is more direct; and by his tender particularity of detail he has given to the winged and creeping creatures of his pleasant Hampshire downs the freedom of all lands. It is true, indeed-as I have said in another connection-that we Americans do not altogether recognize his chaffinches and his titlarks; his daws and his fern-owl are strange to us; and his robin red-breast-though undoubtedly the same which in our nursery days flitted around the dead "Children in the Wood" (while tears stood in our eyes) and "Painfully Did cover them with leaves," is by no means our American red-breast. For one, I wish it were otherwise; I wish with all my heart that I could identify the old pitying, feathered mourners in the British wood, with the rollicking, joyous singer who perches every sunrise, through all the spring, upon some near tree, within stone's throw of my window, and stirs the dewy air with his loud bravura. Another noticeable thing about this old country parson is his freedom from all the artifices and buckram and abbreviations of learning, so that he is delightfully comprehensible |