CHAPTERXXIVTHE LAND OF MARMION
Berwick-upon-Tweed, September 8, 1890.—It had long been my wish to see something of royal Berwick, and our acquaintance has at length begun. This is a town of sombre gray houses capped with red roofs; of elaborate, old-fashioned, disused fortifications; of dismantled military walls; of noble stone bridges and stalwart piers; of breezy battlement walks, fine sea-views, spacious beaches, castellated remains, steep streets, broad squares, narrow, winding ways, many churches, quaint customs, and ancient memories. The present, indeed, has marred the past in this old town, dissipating the element of romance and putting no adequate substitute in its place. Yet the element of romance is here, for such observers as can look on Berwick through the eyes of the imagination; and even those who can imagine nothing must at least perceive that its aspect is regal. Viewed, as I had often viewed it, from the great Border bridge between England andScotland, it rises on its graceful promontory,—bathed in sunshine and darkly bright amid the sparkling silver of the sea,—a veritable ocean queen. To-day I have walked upon its walls, threaded its principal streets, crossed its ancient bridge, explored its suburbs, entered its municipal hall, visited its parish church, and taken long drives through the country that encircles it; and now at midnight, sitting in a lonely chamber of the King's Arms and musing upon the past, I hear not simply the roll of a carriage wheel or the footfall of a late traveller dying away in the distance, but the music with which warriors proclaimed their victories and kings and queens kept festival and state. This has been a pensive day, for in its course I have said farewell to many lovely and beloved scenes. Edinburgh was never more beautiful than when she faded in the yellow mist of this autumnal morning. On Preston battlefield the golden harvest stood in sheaves, and the meadows glimmered green in the soft sunshine, while over them the white clouds drifted and the peaceful rooks made wing in happy indolence and peace. Soon the ruined church of Seton came into view, with its singular stunted tower and its venerable gray walls couched deep in trees, and around it the cultivated, many-coloured fields and the breezy, emerald pastures stretching away to the verge of the sea. A glimpse, and it is gone. But one sweet picture no sooner vanishes than its place is filled with another. Yonder, on the hillside, is the manor-house, with stately battlement and tower, its antique aspect softened by great masses of clinging ivy. Here, nestled in the sunny valley, are the little stone cottages,roofed with red tiles and bright with the adornment of arbutus and hollyhock. All around are harvest-fields and market-gardens,—the abundant dark green of potato-patches being gorgeously lit with the intermingled lustre of millions of wild-flowers, white and gold, over which drift many flights of doves. Sometimes upon the yellow level of the hayfields a sudden wave of brilliant poppies seems to break,—dashing itself into scarlet foam. Timid, startled sheep scurryaway into their pastures, as the swift train flashes by them. A woman standing at her cottage door looks at it with curious yet regardless gaze. Farms teeming with plenty are swiftly traversed, their many circular, cone-topped hayricks standing like towers of amber. Tall, smoking chimneys in the factory villages flit by and disappear. Everywhere are signs of industry and thrift, and everywhere also are denotements of the sentiment and taste that are spontaneous in the nature of this people. Tantallon lies in the near distance, and speeding toward ancient Dunbar I dream once more the dreams of boyhood, and can hear the trumpets, and see the pennons, and catch again the silver gleam of the spears of Marmion. Dunbar is left behind, and with it the sad memory of Mary Stuart, infatuated with barbaric Bothwell, and whirled away to shipwreck and ruin,—as so many great natures have been before and will be again,—upon the black reefs of human passion. The heedless train is skirting the hills of Lammermoor now, and speeding through plains of a fertile verdure that is brilliant and beautiful down to the margin of the ocean. Close by Cockburnspath is the long, lonely, melancholy beach that well may have been in Scott's remembrance when he fashioned that weird and tragic close of the most poetical and pathetic of his novels, while, near at hand, on its desolate headland, the grim ruin of Fast Castle,—which is deemed the original of his Wolf's Crag,—frowns darkly on the white breakers at its surge-beaten base. Edgar of Ravenswood is no longer an image of fiction, when you look upon that scene of gloomy grandeur and mystery. But do not look upon it too closely nor too long,—forof all scenes that are conceived as distinctly weird it may truly be said that they are more impressive in the imagination than in the actual prospect. This coast is full of dark ravines, stretching seaward and thickly shrouded with trees, but in them now and then a glimpse is caught of a snugly sheltered house, overgrown with flowers, securely protected from every blast of storm. The rest is open land, which many dark stone walls partition, and many hawthorn hedges, and many little white roads, winding away toward the shore: for this is Scottish sea-side pageantry, and the sunlit ocean makes a silver setting for the jewelled landscape, all the way to Berwick.
Tantallon Castle.
Tantallon Castle.
The profit of walking in the footsteps of the past is that you learn the value of the privilege of life in the present. The men and women of the past had their opportunity and each improved it after his kind. These are the same plains in which Wallace and Bruce fought for the honour, and established the supremacy, of the kingdom of Scotland. The same sun gilds these plains to-day, the same sweet wind blows over them, and the same sombre, majestic ocean breaks in solemn murmurs on their shore. "Hodie mihi, cras tibi,"—as it was written on the altar skulls in the ancient churches. Yesterday belonged to them; to-day belongs to us; and well will it be for us if we improve it. In such an historic town as Berwick the lesson is brought home to a thoughtful mind with convincing force and significance. So much has happened here,—and every actor in the great drama is long since dead and gone! Hither came King John, and slaughtered the people as if they were sheep, and burnt the city,—himselfapplying the torch to the house in which he had slept. Hither came Edward the First, and mercilessly butchered the inhabitants, men, women, and children, violating even the sanctuary of the churches. Here, in his victorious days, Sir William Wallace reigned and prospered; and here, when Menteith's treachery had wrought his ruin, a fragment of his mutilated body was long displayed upon the bridge. Here, in the castle, of which only a few fragments now remain (these being adjacent to the North British railway station), Edward the First caused to be confined in a wooden cage that intrepid Countess of Buchan who had crowned Robert Bruce, at Scone. Hither came Edward the Third, after the battle of Halidon Hill, which lies close by this place, had finally established the English power in Scotland. All the princes that fought in the wars of the Roses have been in Berwick and have wrangled over the possession of it. Richard the Third doomed it to isolation. Henry the Seventh declared it a neutral state. By Elizabeth it was fortified,—in that wise sovereign's resolute and vigorous resistance to the schemes of the Roman Catholic church for the dominance of her kingdom. John Knox preached here, in a church on Hide Hill, before he went to Edinburgh to shake the throne with his tremendous eloquence. The picturesque, unhappy James the Fourth went from this place to Ford Castle and Lady Heron, and thence to his death, at Flodden Field. Here it was that Sir John Cope first paused in his fugitive ride from the fatal field of Preston, and here he was greeted as affording the only instance in which the first news of a defeat had been brought by the vanquished General himself. And withinsight of Berwick ramparts are those perilous Farne islands, where, at the wreck of the steamer Forfarshire, in 1838, the heroism of a woman wrote upon the historic page of her country, in letters of imperishable glory, the name of Grace Darling. (There is a monument to her memory, in Bamborough churchyard.) Imagination, however, has done for this region what history could never do. Each foot of this ground was known to Sir Walter Scott, and for every lover of that great author each foot of it is hallowed. It is the Border Land,—the land of chivalry and song, the land that he has endeared to all the world,—and you come to it mainly for his sake.
"Day set on Norhams castled steep,And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,And Cheviot's mountains lone."
"Day set on Norhams castled steep,And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,And Cheviot's mountains lone."
"Day set on Norhams castled steep,And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,And Cheviot's mountains lone."
"Day set on Norhams castled steep,
And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot's mountains lone."
Norham Castle—in the time of Marmion.
Norham Castle—in the time of Marmion.
The village of Norham lies a few miles west of Berwick, upon the south bank of the Tweed,—a group of cottages clustered around a single long street. The buildings are low and are mostly roofed with dark slate or red tiles. Some of them are thatched, and grass and flowers grow wild upon the thatch. At one end of the main highway is a market-cross, near to which is a little inn. Beyond that and nearer to the Tweed, which flows close beside the place, is a church of great antiquity, set toward the western end of a long and ample churchyard, in which many graves are marked with tall, thick, perpendicular slabs, many with dark, oblong tombs, tumbling to ruin, and many with short, stunted monuments. The church tower is low, square, and of enormous strength. Upon the south side of the chancel are five windows, beautifully arched,—the dog-toothedcasements being uncommonly complete specimens of that ancient architectural device. This church has been restored; the south aisle in 1846, by I. Bononi; the north aisle in 1852, by E. Gray. The western end of the churchyard is thickly masked in great trees, and looking directly east from this point your gaze falls upon all that is left of the stately Castle of Norham, formerly called Ublanford,—built by Flamberg, Bishop of Durham, in 1121, and restored by Hugh Pudsey, another Prince of that See, in 1164. It must once have been a place of tremendous fortitude and of great extent. Now it is wide open to the sky, and nothingof it remains but roofless walls and crumbling arches, on which the grass is growing and the pendent bluebells tremble in the breeze. Looking through the embrasures of the east wall you see the tops of large trees that are rooted in the vast trench below, where once were the dark waters of the moat. All the courtyards are covered now with sod, and quiet sheep nibble and lazy cattle couch where once the royal banners floated and plumed and belted knights stood round their king. It was a day of uncommon beauty,—golden with sunshine and fresh with a perfumed air; and nothing was wanting to the perfection of solitude. Near at hand a thin stream of pale blue smoke curled upward from a cottage chimney. At some distance the sweet voices of playing children mingled with the chirp of small birds and the occasional cawing of the rook. The long grasses that grow upon the ruin moved faintly, but made no sound. A few doves were seen, gliding in and out of crevices in the mouldering turret. And over all, and calmly and coldly speaking the survival of nature when the grandest works of man are dust, sounded the rustle of many branches in the heedless wind.
The day was setting over Norham as I drove away,—the red sun slowly obscured in a great bank of slate-coloured cloud,—but to the last I bent my gaze upon it, and that picture of ruined magnificence can never fade out of my mind. The road eastward toward Berwick is a green lane, running between harvest-fields, which now were thickly piled with golden sheaves, while over them swept great flocks of sable rooks. There are but few trees in that landscape,—scattered groups of the ash and the plane,—to break the prospect. Fora long time the stately ruin remained in view,—its huge bulk and serrated outline, relieved against the red and gold of sunset, taking on the perfect semblance of a colossal cathedral, like that of Iona, with vast square tower, and chancel, and nave: only, because of its jagged lines, it seems in this prospect as if shaken by a convulsion of nature and tottering to its momentary fall. Never was illusion more perfect. Yet as the vision faded I could remember only the illusion that will never fade,—the illusion that a magical poetic genius has cast over those crumbling battlements, rebuilding the shattered towers, and pouring through their ancient halls the glowing tide of life and love, of power and pageant, of beauty, light, and song.
THE END