Part 9

So numerous and descriptive are his allusions to them that a luminous account of the characteristics of the Carrick brooks and rivers might easily be compiled from Burns' poems. At one moment we find him appealing to them for sympathy in his grief:

'Ye hazelly shaws and briery dens, Ye burnies, wimplin' down your glens Wi' toddlin' din, Or foaming, strang, wi' hasty stens, Frae linn to linn.'

The same appeal forms the burden of his song on the Banks and braes o' bonnie Doon. He leads us where

'In gowany glens the burnie strays, Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes, Wi' hawthorns gray.'

He pictures the stream after a rain-storm, when

'Tumbling brown, the burn comes down And roars frae bank to brae;'

or when the breath of the Atlantic has swept over the wintry hills and the

'Burns wi' snawy wreeths up-choked Wild-eddying swirl, Or through the mining outlet bocked Down-headlong hurl.'

But nowhere does his delight in these features of his native landscape find more exuberant expression than in his Halloween, when he interrupts his narrative of Leezie's misadventure to give a graphic picture of one of his brooks in the calm moonlight of an autumn evening.

'Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays, As thro' the glen it wimpl't; Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't; 'Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle; Whyles cookit underneath the braes, Below the spreading hazel Unseen that night.'

Born near the river Ayr, and having spent his boyhood and youth in its valley, Burns had ever a special affection for that stream, along whose banks he had composed some of his finest poems. When his enforced emigration to America was settled, and his trunk on its way to the ship, he wrote a parting song in the burden of which the banks of Ayr are made to stand for his native country as a whole:

'The bursting tears my heart declare, Farewell, the bonnie banks of Ayr.'

When the respite came, and he found himself famous and in Edinburgh, the Address which he wrote to the Scottish capital contrasted his reception there with what had gone before, and again his heart was by his beloved river:

'From marking wildly-scattered flowers, As on the banks of Ayr I stray'd, And singing, lone, the ling'ring hours, I shelter in thy honour'd shade.'

And lastly, when the shadows were beginning to gather around him at Ellisland, his thoughts would go back to the same scene. In one of his latest and most pathetic songs we find once more a reminiscence of his associations with the river of his youth:

'Ayr gurgling kiss'd his pebbled shore O'erhung with wild woods, thick'ning green; The fragrant birch, and hawthorn hoar, Twin'd am'rous round the raptur'd scene.

The flowers sprang wanton to be prest, The birds sang love on every spray, Till too, too soon, the glowing west, Proclaim'd the speed of winged day.'

When Burns moved from Ayrshire to Nithsdale, he found at his new home another valley and another river that could minister to his inspiration. The Nith took the place of the Ayr. But it could not wholly fill that place, for its landscape is less ample, the hills come closer down upon the valley, while the river, in its lower course, curves from side to side in a wide alluvial plain, without the variety that marks the lower part of the Ayr. We seem to recognise the influence of these differences in the allusions in the songs.

The landscapes of Burns are marked by some curious limitations. Though he was born within sight of the picturesque mountain group of Arran, it does not come within his poetic outlook. Though the 'craggy ocean pyramid' of the Clyde rose so stupendously from the firth in front of him, he makes no use of it further than to tell how 'Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig.' Its distant grandeur does not seem to have struck his imagination. Indeed, if we examine his treatment of scenery, we may observe that it is the nearer detail that appeals to him. His pictures are exquisite foregrounds with seldom any distinct distance. But perhaps more remarkable still is the small place which the sea takes in the poetry of Burns. We must bear in mind that he was born and spent his boyhood within sight and hearing of the open Firth of Clyde. The dash of the breakers along the sandy beach behind his father's 'clay biggin' must have been one of the most familiar sounds to his young ears. Yet the allusions to the sea in his poems betray little trace of this association. They are in large measure introduced to mark the wide distance between separated friends.

It must be remembered, however, that his life, after he began to write, was passed inland, where the wide firth could only be seen from the rising ground at a distance of several miles. Yet Burns has left testimony that his imagination had not been insensible to the life and movement of the ocean. One of the most effective touches in his picture of the night scene in the Brigs of Ayr is given in the reference to the neighbouring sea--

'The tide-swollen Firth, wi' sullen-sounding roar, Through the still night dashed hoarse along the shore';

and when his native Muse gives him her benediction she tells how she had watched his passionate love of Nature:

'I saw thee seek the sounding shore, Delighted with the dashing roar; Or when the North his fleecy store Drove thro' the sky; I saw grim Nature's visage hoar Strike thy young eye.'

II. The UPLANDS of the British Isles consist of undulating plains or plateaux which lie from 1000 to more than 2000 feet above the sea. Seen from a distance, they look like ranges of hill or mountain, but without that variety of peak and crest which a true mountain outline would present. Though they may rise steeply out of the lower grounds, we have only to climb to their summit to find ourselves at the edge of a wide rolling platform, which may stretch for leagues without ever rising into any sharp prominence, or departing from the same monotony of moorland. Yet if we attempt to cross this seemingly continuous tableland, we find our progress barred by many valleys which, deep sunk beneath the general level, divide the plateau into separate blocks or ridges.

The surface of these uplands is for the most part treeless and even bushless. Where not covered with peat-moss, it is clothed with bent or with heather, kept short and green by periodical burning in the springtime. Herds of cattle and flocks of sheep wander over the pastures, but, save the stone fences, there is little other visible trace of human occupation. It is in the little hollows that lead down into the main valleys, and in these valleys themselves, that trees make their appearance, first in scattered saplings of birch, alder or mountain-ash, and then in thicker copsewoods or in artificial plantations of fir and larch. In these sheltered depressions, the farms and villages of the region have been planted, and cultivation has been slowly pushed upward on the slopes of the fells. Thus the larger part of the area of the uplands is uninhabited, the population being restricted to the more or less sheltered 'hopes,' hollows, dales, and valleys.

This type of scenery presents many local varieties, according to the geological structure of the ground. Where the rocks have been but little disturbed, the sides of the valleys display a succession of parallel bars of stone with intervening grassy slopes, such as may be seen among the moors of the East Riding, or in the dales of the Pennine Chain. Where, on the other hand, the rocks have been much compressed and pushed over each other by powerful movements of the terrestrial crust, their erosion has given rise to no regular topography, but they decay into rounded forms covered with heath and herbage, or breaking here and there into rocky scarps, as in Wales and southern Scotland.

Of the British uplands, the only district that claims notice here in connection with our literature is that of the wide Border country of England and Scotland. It stretches through the moorlands of Northumberland and Cumberland into the range of the Cheviots on the one hand, and on the other into the great tract of high ground, which extends through the Lammermuir and other groups of fells from the North Sea to the Solway Firth. For many centuries this region has been pre-eminently pastoral. The natural forest, which in old times clothed much of its surface, has almost wholly disappeared before modern agriculture, and the plough has in successive generations crept higher up the slopes from the meadows of the dales. But there can be little doubt that though roads and railways have done much to open up these solitudes, the natural features remain essentially unchanged.

It was among these uplands that the Border ballads had their birth. We may therefore pause for a few moments to inquire what trace may still be discernible of the influence of the landscape upon the tales of war and love, of feud and raid and rescue, which have made that Border-land famous in our literature.