GLEN DESSERAY
AND OTHER POEMS
BY J. C. SHAIRP
O FOR truth-breathed music ! soul-like lays !
Not of vain-glory born, nor love of praise,
But welling purely from profound heart-springs,
That lie deep down amid the life of things,
And singing on, heedless though mortal ear
Should never their lone murmur overhear !
GLEN DESSERAY
AND OTHER POEMS
LYRICAL AND ELEGIAC
BY
JOHN CAMPBELL SHAIRP
LL.D., LATE PRINCIPAL OF THE UNITED COLLEGE, ST. ANDREWS, AND
PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
EDITED BY
FRANCIS T. PALGRAVE
LL.D. EDINBURGH
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1888
All rights reserved
114817!
PR
534?
TO THE AUTHOR'S EARLY FRIENDS
WHO HAVE SURVIVED HIM ;
TO THE FRIENDS OF LATER YEARS ;
AND TO ALL WHO MISS HIS PRESENCE,
AND WHO VALUE HIS THOUGHTS, IN PROSE AND VERSE ;
THESE POEMS
ARE, FOR HIS SAKE, DEDICATED BY
E. S.
PREFACE
IN carrying out the labour of love entrusted to me
by those most nearly connected with this much-
honoured and regretted Friend, my wish has been
to present such a selection from his published and
manuscript verse as shall do justice to one of the
most sincere and high-minded poets of our century.
Nothing, as the verdict of Time constantly but vainly
proves, is more insecure than contemporary judgments
upon contemporary work in art and literature. In-
deed, " Fame herself," as a great critic observes, even
when she seems firmly established, "has but a short
memory." I shall therefore attempt no forecasting
or estimate of what Shairp's place in our poetry may
prove, beyond this, which can be safely hazarded ;
that in the following poems no sensitive mind can
fail to find the note of what his friend Matthew
Arnold has excellently described as distinction; the
note of a pure, refined, modest originality. It is be-
yond question a voice, not an echo, which we hear.
Even in his ballad- songs, easily as that form invites
to imitation, Shairp preserves an individual quality ;
viii PREFACE
nor, devoted as he was to Wordsworth, do we trace
in the lyrics more than a few slight reminiscences of
his manner.
In a Garland like this, chosen, unhappily, from
the silent treasury of the dead, where but little cer-
tainty can be felt which pieces might have seemed to
the writer worthy preservation, my endeavour in
selecting has been to follow the only safe rule admit
such poems alone as fairly seem on a level with the
poet's best work. A choice thus made is difficult,
and can hardly hope to satisfy every one. If, there-
fore, any readers Scottish readers in particular
find omissions to regret, let me ask their pardon on
the plea that I have tried to do what is most loyal to
Shairp's memory, and would far rather bear the blame
of bad taste on my own account, than follow those
deplorable examples of exhaustive publication by
which a mistaken " Love of Letters " has too often
Swampt the sacred poets with themselves,
sweeping -in the rejected fragments of the artist's
studio, and irreverently alloying with inferior ore the
pure gold of genius.
Although some short lyrics from the volume pub-
lished by Shairp in 1864 (under the title of the nar-
rative poem, Kilmahoe, which fills the larger portion
of it) have been included, yet the present book con-
PREFACE ix
tains in general the writer's maturer work, selected
either from the papers in the hands of his family, or
from pieces which have hitherto had only a magazine
publication. These latter I have regarded as bearing,
on the whole, the seal of Shairp's approval. But his
own corrected copies, where possible, are here fol-
lowed ; whilst, in case of the manuscripts, which
have not always received the last touches of the
writer, I have ventured to omit a very few lines.
For the notes, glossarial and illustrative, I am
mainly indebted to the Rev. T. Sinton, Minister of
Glengarry, and to Mr. Bayne of Helensburgh. -My
wish, at first, was to ask Mr. Sinton for a transliteration
into English sounds of the many Gaelic place-names
which occur. But a few specimens proved that this
would be well-nigh practically impossible in the case
of languages differing so deeply in their intonation.
And it may be feared that the ignorant indifference,
descending sometimes into stupid hostility, with which
the beautiful Celtic dialects yet surviving in our
islands are regarded by almost all except those to
whom they are mother-tongues, would have rendered
translation of the sound and the significance of
these relics of the past an almost useless and un-
valued labour.
It is also probable that some readers in Scotland
especially may find the foot-notes over numerous.
x PREFACE
Here I would plead that Poetry, in this age of facile
prose, requires every assistance to attract and hold
its audience. Better that fifty should find an explan-
ation superfluous, than one find a difficulty unsolved.
As the narrative of Principal Shairp's life is in
other and more competent hands, it remains for me
now only to offer some brief words on the aim and
character of these poems, on their sentiment and
style. Such critical notes, it is almost a truism to
say, can never really be adequate. As it is with the
special perfume of rose or lily, so the quality by which
the melody of Mozart differs from that of Beethoven,
the charm with which the childless Reynolds rendered
the children of his canvas ; Vergilian magic, even
when interpreted by the master-hand of Cardinal New-
man ; Shakespearean felicity; of all these things
the essence is indefinable, the secret inscrutable.
Through much of the Palace of Art our guides may
lead us ; but to the " inmost enchanted fountain "
the mystery of the Maker we never penetrate.
And stars of a lesser magnitude, if only they be
stars, shining with light of their own, each has also
a quality peculiar to itself, an influence not rained
from any other. This premised, let me take some
of the following poems, and try if I can put
into words some slight shadow of this influence, of
PREFACE xi
this essence, so that those readers may enter into
them with greater facility, to whom Shairp has been
hitherto unknown. And although a poet in the end
is his own best interpreter, yet in this case there is
the further reason for a short introduction, that the
ways and thoughts of the Highland peasantry, remote
and alien from most of us, so far as the remorseless
wheels of the car of civilization have yet spared them,
were my Friend's special care, and form everywhere
the moral atmosphere with which the wild landscape
of his native land is suffused and invested.
Glen Desseray is a little Epic, an Epyllion, as the
ancients said, of the Highlands. Into this poem, his
most sustained attempt, Shairp has thrown his deepest
feeling on the western mountain regions, "the Visions
of the hills, And Souls of lonely places " : throughout
connecting the landscape, as it unfolds itself, with the
human interests of the story. The narrative covers
some sixty or seventy years from the middle of the
eighteenth century, setting before us, as its principal
theme, the romantic wanderings of Prince Charles
Edward, whilst passing through that cloud of danger
and defeat, when the noble and gallant elements of
his character shone forth most brilliantly ; contrasted
with the scene of a Chief's return from exile ; followed
by a second gathering of clansmen for foreign service,
and, finally, by a glance at that " clearing of the
b
xii PREFACE
glens " which, during the last hundred years, has so
changed even the very landscape of the Highlands:
.whilst incidental pictures of Gaelic life, manners, and
character add animation to the long and varied
tapestry which the poet has embroidered for us.
Since Walter Scott, who practically revealed, whilst
he in some sense created, the Highlands for his
countrymen, has any one any poet, at least put
them before us with such vividness, such charm, such
inner truth, as Shairp ?
Skill in devising plot has not at any time been
common among our poets ; their genius turns much
more to sentiment, character, or description ; and it
is in these elements that the strength of Glen Desseray
will be found. The narrative wanders discursively
down the stream of Time, whilst tracing the incidents
of the tale through the long glens of North- Western
Scotland. It has something of the labyrinthine aspect
of wild Nature, of her apparent aimlessness. But
throughout is felt one intense fervour of interest in
the land of the Gael and its romantic natives ; one
pure and lofty passion of patriotism. It has the unity
of sentiment, the unity of heart.
It may be noticed, as a fine stroke of art, that in
Shairp's first version of this poem a love-episode was
given in Cantos V and VI, but rejected in favour of
the more pathetic and unusual picture of Muriel's
PREFACE xiii
sisterly devotion and the noble fervour of friendship
between Angus and Ronald ; which we may liken to
the similar groups of Chaucer's Palamon and Arcite,
the Amis and Amil of the beautiful ancient French
legend, or the love between David and Jonathan, of
which the poet himself reminds us.
Description of nature forms a large portion of
Shairp's work. His landscape is indicated by brief
characteristic features, calling up in succession clear
images before the mind ; but there is little realistic
detail, no attempt at " word-painting " for its own sake.
And at every instant the scene is connected with
human life or human feeling. It thus suggests a
picture, yet could not be reproduced on canvas.
Shairp, in a word, has followed that eternal aesthetic
canon of appropriateness ; which demands that each of
the Fine Arts shall render its subject solely through
the method peculiar to itself.
If we turn from the manner to the matter of
Shairp's landscape, in two marked features it seems
to differ from that of Wordsworth, asserting in these
its own originality, or, as we might also say, its ad-
herence to the actual facts. The narrow area of the
English Lake district contrasts with the wild Highland
regions by a finished beauty, a soft richness of effect,
an amenity, to put it in one significant word, which
can hardly be found elsewhere, I think, nearer than
xiv PREFACE
the mountain lakes, te, Lari maxume, and those
others, which are the charm of North- West Italy. It
was the wildness, the vast loca pastorum deserta, the
asperity of desolation, the glory touched with gloom
of the Highland world, by which Shairp was pene-
trated. This aspect of the soul of Nature he has
characterized in his fine essay on Keble, when speak-
ing of "her infinite and unhuman side, which yields
no symbols to soothe man's yearnings." Nowhere, he
writes, is this "so borne in on man as in the midst of
the vast deserts of the earth, or in the presence of the
mountains, which seem so impassive and unchange-
able. Their strength and permanence so contrast
with man of few years and full of trouble ; they are
so indifferent to his feelings or his destiny. He may
smile or weep, he may live or die ; they care not.
They are the same in all their ongoings, happen what
will to him. They respond to the sunrises and the
sunsets, but not to his sympathies. All the same they
fulfil their mighty functions, careless though no human
eye should ever look on them."
How different is this tone from that habitual with
Wordsworth ! To him, the sympathy between the
outer world and the inner world of man, the echo
and the lessons with which the landscape almost
consciously responds to the human heart, the pene-
tration of all Nature by the
PREFACE xv
Being that is in the clouds and air,
are the central ideas and convictions of his soul.
But the note struck in the words above quoted
from Shairp is dominant in his own landscape-work,
and it corresponds with the human sentiment which,
as must always be found in true landscape,
whether painted in words or in colours, atmo-
spheres every picture. The disappearance of the
old Highland life ; of the clans, not indeed as they
were in the lawless years of old, but in their later
pastoral phase ; the clearing of the glens under a long
train of circumstances which I can only note without
discussion, all these features of human activity and
joy and desolation seem to supply a soul to his deline-
ation of scenery, in harmony with its innermost char-
acter. What the memory of the lost friend was to
Tennyson in his great lyrical elegy, the warmth of
tender sympathy, of chastened enthusiasm for the Gael,
is in the poems before us. We have here the second
point of difference from Wordsworth. For that great
poet, we know, more or less saw his own heart, his own
thoughts and emotions, mirrored for him in Nature ;
not, indeed, in that mood of a somewhat morbid sadness
which, also, has lent a charm and interest of its own to
some splendid poetry of the latter days, a Childe
Harold or an Alastor, but with a sanity and breadth
of view which lifts his landscape above mere " subject-
xvi PREFACE
ive " imaginings. Wordsworth, speaking for and from
himself, speaks most often for humanity in general ; he
has, we might perhaps say, an impersonal personality.
He learned much, doubtless, from his simple-hearted
neighbours : but they are rarely part of his landscape.
Vox' hominem sonatj " Men, as they are men within
themselves," so far as his experience went, not the
men of Westmoreland, were Wordsworth's real theme.
There are passages, of course, in which Shairp's
own feeling for nature, his own deep and large-hearted
religious faith, reveal themselves. Such is the strik-
ing reflection in Glen Desseray (C. iii, 5), where he
touches on the blankness felt, when, in some scene to
which we have eagerly come, filled with the remem-
brance of a glorious Past, we find no trace of human
sentiment or human deed surviving ; in the Return
to Nature; or the profoundly -imagined Wilderness.
So, again, in those poems where a peculiar tenderness
of personal sympathy gives its tone to the landscape ;
as in the Three Friends in Yarrow, the Spring^ 1876,
and the lovely Busk aboon Traquair, distinguished
above all Shairp's early lyrics by such gracious
exquisiteness of sentiment and melody, that it_should
singly be enough to ensure him an abiding place in
that unique and delightful company, the song-
writers of Scotland. Yet, in his poems of this class,
self is never the leading note ; and, on a survey
PREFACE xvii
of his whole work, it must be felt that, within the
measure of his faculty, Shairp ranks in the great army,
the greater army (I should venture to call it), of
" objective " poets.
To this sphere, at any rate, conclusively belong
many of the latter pieces in this volume. The very
few brief songs it presents, which, if not strictly
ballads, have sprung from the ballad, and are its fine
flower in a more condensed and lyrical form, the
Cailleach, the Devorgnilla (despite its trochaic metre,
with the peculiar difficulties of which Shairp, like
Wordsworth before him, seems to me to contend in
vain), the graceful Hairst Rig, all " found " (to follow
a convenient Scottish usage) on reality ; all have an
underground, not of mere sentiment, the common de-
fect in such songs, but of true individuality. But as the
most note worthy specimen of Shairp's power in this field
we may rank the dialogue Lost on Schihallion, This
has a tragic pathos, a holy simplicity and grandeur as
of Nature herself, which make it a fit companion picture
to Lady Anne Lindsay's well-known masterpiece.
The power shown in these little lyrics, and,
under a different guise, in the ode on the Battle of
the Alma, may make us regret that Shairp did not
write more upon such directly "objective" subjects.
In them he has not that flash and movement of life
wherein Scott is well-nigh alone amongst our nine-
xviii PREFACE
teenth century poets. Yet these ballad -verses (to
which the Dyeing and Weaving of the Plaid, in the
Fifth Canto of Glen Desseray, may be added), display
a measure of Scott's Homeric simplicity and down-
right current of narration ; a truly Greek abstinence
from decoration for decoration's sake. The poet's
eye is on his object, and his object alone ; the verse
has the peculiar charm of disinterestedness ; a quality
which, I think, can only be imparted to his work by
a soul completely freed and purified from egotism.
It is the presence of such a soul, to touch here a
deeper note, that we feel in those strains of higher
mood which close the book ; although, as with poetry
of this order is inevitable, the voice comes from the
inner world of personal thought and the heart's deep-
est feelings. In these poems Shairp, I think, had
often before his mind the words or writings of our highly
loved and admired Arthur Clough. Shairp, indeed,
enjoyed a healthy happiness of faith, which, in the
beautiful verse left us by Clough, "too cruelly
distraught," and dying too soon, may be less per-
ceptible ; but they both
pii Vates et Phoebo digna locuti,
upon every line of their " soul-songs " have set the
same stamp of an absolute sincerity.
These large-hearted poems, however, are best left
to speak for themselves. Clough's name carries us
PREFACE xix
to that remaining section of Shairp's work, in which,
again, he may claim a field of his own, little laboured
by recent English writers. The large simplicity of
his style, his strongly- marked "objective" habit of
mind, are nowhere better seen than in the Character
Pieces, as I have ventured to entitle them. Many
readers in England will recognize the skill of por-
traiture in the Balliol Scholars ; to the faithfulness of
which, having myself been privileged not long after
to enter the same gifted company, I can bear witness.
It is, truly, a group drawn with the gracious insight
of a judgment evenly poised between discernment
and sympathy ; the love of truthfulness, and the
truthfulness that only comes of love.
Those, doubtless, who knew the Highland Students
whom Shairp taught and commemorated, would find
in his three monumental elegies the same sympathetic
fidelity. None of his work seems to me more ori-
ginal, more entirely his own, than this little series ;
and in the management of that most difficult of all our
metres the blank verse it is eminently successful.
Wordsworth's magnificent Michael must, indeed, have
been in his mind when he framed these clear-cut and
tender memorials ; but the disciple was worthy of
the master.
Returning nowfor a moment to the leading poem :
It will, I think, be felt that Glen Desseray is eminently
xx PREFACE
characteristic both of Shairp's own "aspects of
poetry," and of his own work as a poet. In the
beautiful volume of Lectures given from the Chair in
which, non passibus aequis, it has been my sad honour
to follow the Friend too early summoned to the Life
Unseen, he has defined the qualities which, to his
^f mind, were central in Poetry :
" One of the first characteristics of the genuine
and healthy poetic nature is this it is rooted rather
in the heart than in the head. Human-heartedness
is the soil from which all its other gifts originally
grow, and are continually fed. The true poet is not
an eccentric creature, not a mere artist living only for
art, not a dreamer or a dilettante, sipping the nectar
of existence while he keeps aloof from its deeper
interests. He is, above all things, a man among his
fellow-men, with a heart that beats in sympathy with
theirs, only larger, more open, more sensitive, more
intense." And again : " Whenever the soul comes
vividly in contact with any fact, truth, or existence,
whenever it realises and takes them home to itself
with more than common intensity, out of that meeting
of the soul and its object there arises a thrill of joy,
a glow of emotion ; and the expression of that glow,
that thrill, is poetry."
In a similar train of thought, putting always the
natural expression of the heart as his first and last
PREFACE xxi
requirement, Shairp elsewhere draws a decided line,
a line which I venture to think too decided, be-
tween what he speaks of as the " pure " and the
" ornate " styles in Poetry, epithets which, indeed, in
accordance with the passages just quoted, reveal the
style that he loved and practised, but by which the
knot of the question is rather cut than loosened.
Hence it may, I think, be said of Shairp that his bias
rendered him in some degree unwilling or unable to
recognize, with all its due force, that Poetry, in
Florizel's phrase,
Is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather ; but
The art itself is nature.
It was doubtless due in some degree to this deep-
seated mode of regarding poetry that in Shairp's
work we may at times find an apparent carelessness
in the choice of words, a want of finish in style,
an absence of that evenness in metrical flow which
the ear demands. Truly might he have said of
himself, with Dante, while still on the Mount of
Probation
lo mi son un che, quando
Amore spira, noto, ed a quel modo
Ch' ei detta dentro, vo significando.
These little lapses, these proofs of natural freshness
xxii PREFACE
and freedom, we might also better say, are perhaps
seen most in his earlier verse ; in regard to the later,
we must recollect that the chords of the harp were
broken, before the minstrel could complete his melody.
Qul mai piu no ; ma rivedrenne altrove.
F. T. P.
/a;/. 9, 1888
CONTENTS
LYRICS OF HIGHLAND LIFE AND
LANDSCAPE
GLEN DESSERAY ; OR, THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN
PAGE
Canto First The Chief Restored ... 3
Canto Second Bothain-Airidh ; or, The Shealings 22
Canto Third On the Track of the Prince . . 36
Canto Fourth The Home by Lochourn . . 45
Canto Fifth The War Summons . . -53
Canto Sixth The Soldier's Return . . . 68
THE MOUNTAIN WALK ...... 88
A DREAM OF GLEN-SALLACH .... 98
THE MOOR OF RANNOCH 100
THE LASS OF LOCH LINNE 104
THE FOREST OF SLI'-GAOIL 106
RETURN TO NATURE 108
CAILLEACH BEIN-Y-VREICH no
DESOLATION ........ 112
A CRY FROM CRAIG-ELLACHIE . . . .114
BEN CRUACHAN 119
xxiv CONTENTS
PAGE
ON VISITING DRUIM-A LIATH . . . .124
SCHIHALLION . .128
TORRIDON GLEN 130
LOCH TORRIDON 134
PROGNOSTIC 139
THE WILDERNESS 140
THE HIGHLAND RIVER 144
LOST ON SCHIHALLION 146
WILD FLOWERS IN JUNE 149
ALT COCHIN DOUN . . . . . .157
THE SHEPHERD'S HOUSE . . . . 159
AUTUMN IN THE HIGHLANDS
October ........ 162
Garth Castle . . . . . . .164
CLATTO 167
AUCHMORE . . . . ~. . . . 170
DRUMUACHDAR . . . . . . .172
LOWLAND LYRICS
THE BUSH ABOON TRAQUAIR . . . .179
THRIEVE CASTLE 182
DEVORGUILLA ; OR THE ABBEY OF THE SWEET
HEART . . . 185
THEN AND Now 188
CONTENTS xxv
PAGE
THE BLUE BELLS - . . . . . . 191
THE HAIRST RIG 193
MANOR WATER 195
SONG OF THE SOUTH COUNTREE . . . . 198
THREE FRIENDS IN YARROW .... 201
CHARACTER PIECES
BALLIOL SCHOLARS, 1840-1843 .... 209
DEAN STANLEY AT ST. ANDREWS . . . . 221
THE DEATH OF PRINCE ALBERT .... 223
ON THE DEATH OF SIR JAMES SIMPSON . . 225
SPRING, 1876 228
HIGHLAND STUDENTS
I 231
II .236
III . '. 242
VARIA
THE BATTLE OF THE ALMA 249
GRASMERE 253
PARTING 254
POETIC TRUTH 256
PRAYER 257
RELIEF 258
xxvi CONTENTS
PAGE
MEMORIES ........ 259
HIDDEN LIFE 262
"I HAVE A LIFE" ...... 264
" 'TWIXT GLEAMS OF JOY " 265
ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES 269
INDEX OF FIRST LINES 277
LYRICS OF HIGHLAND LIFE
AND LANDSCAPE
GLEN DESSERAY;
OR
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN l
CANTO FIRST
THE CHIEF RESTORED
I
EIGHTY years have come and gone
Since on the dark December night,
East and west Glen Desseray shone
With fires illumining holm and height
A sudden and a marvellous sight !
Never since dread Culloden days
The Bens 2 had seen such beacons blaze ;
But those were lurid, boding bale
And vengeance on the prostrate Gael,
These on the tranquil night benign,
1 For the scheme and idea of this Poem, see Note at end.
2 Bens, used of the loftier mountains.
GLEN DESSERAY, OR
As with a festal gladness, shine.
One from the knoll that shuts the glen
Flings down the loch a beard of fire ;
Up on the braesides, 1 homes of men
Answer each other, high and higher,
Across the valley with a voice
Of light that shouts, Rejoice, Rejoice.
Nor less, within, the red torch-pine
And peat-fires piled on hearth combine
To brighten rafters glossy-clear
With lustre strange for many a year.
And blithe sounds since the Forty-five
Unheard within these homes revive,
Now with the pibroch, now with song,
Driving the night in joy along.
What means it all ? how can it be
Such sights and sounds of revelry
From a secluded silent race
Break on the solitary place ?
That music sounds, these beacons burn
In honour of a Chief's return.
II
Long had our people sat in gloom
Within their own Glen Desseray,
O'er-shadowed by the cloud of doom
1 Braesides, hillsides.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN
That gathered on that doleful day,
When ruin from Culloden moor
The hills of Albyn darkened o'er,
From east to west, from shore to shore.
No loyal home in glen or strath
But felt the red-coats' vengeful wrath ;
Yet most on these our glens it fell,
They that had served the Prince so well ;
Who first the friendless Prince had hailed,
When his foot touched the Moidart strand,
And last had sheltered, ere he sailed
Forever from his Father's land.
Ill
No home in all this glen but mourned
Some loved one laid in battle low ;
Who from the headlong rout returned
Reserved for heavier woe,
From their own hills with helpless gaze
Beheld their flocks by spoilers driven,
Their roofs with ruthless fires ablaze,
Reddening the dark night heaven.
Some on the mountains hunted down
With their blood stained the heather brown,
And many more were driven forth
Lorn exiles from their native earth ;
While he, the gentle and the brave
GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Lochiel, who led them, doomed to bide
A life-long exile, found a grave
Far from his own Loch Arkaig side.
And when at last war guns were hushed,
And back to wasted farms they fared,
With bitter memories, spirits crushed,
The few, whom sword and famine spared,
Saw the old order banished, saw
The old clan-ties asunder torn,
For their chief's care a factor's scorn,
And iron rule of Saxon law.
One rent to him constrained to bring,
"The German lairdie," called a king ;
They o'er the sea in secret sent
To their own Chief another rent
In his far place of banishment.
IV
When forty years had come and gone,
At length on lone Glen Desseray shone
A day like sudden spring new-born
From the womb of winter dark and lorn,
The day for which all hearts had yearned,
With tidings of their Chief returned.
Yea, spring-like on that wintry time,
The tidings came from southron clime,
That he their leal long-exiled lord
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN
Ere long would meet their hearts' desires,
Their chieftain to his own restored
Another home would re-instate,
Would build the house long desolate
The ruined home where dwelt his sires :
Not he who led the fatal war,
No! nor his son they sleep afar,
But sprung from the old heroic tree
An offshoot in the third degree.
It wakened mountain, loch, and glen,
That cry " Lochiel comes back again ; "
Loch Leven and Loch Linnhe's shore
Shout to the head of Nevis Ben,
The crags and corries 1 of Mamore
Rang to that word, "He comes again."
High up along Lochaber Braes
Fleeter than fiery cross it sped,
The Great Glen heard with glad amaze
And rolled it on to Loch Askaig-head.
From loch to hill the tidings spread,
And smote with joy each dwelling place
Of Camerons clachan, 2 farm, and shiel, 8
And the long glens that interlace
1 Corries, deep circular hollows in the hills.
Clachan, village. 3 Shiel, shepherd's hut, chalet.
GLEN DESSERAY, OR
The mountains piled benorth Lochiel.
Glen-Mallie and Glen-Camgarie
Resounded to the joyful cry,
Westward with the sunset fleeing,
It roused the homes of green Glenpean ;
Glen Kinzie tossed it on unbarred
It swept o'er rugged Mam-Clach-Ard,
Start at these sounds the rugged bounds
Of Arisaig, Moidart, Morar, and Knoydart,
Down to the ocean's misty bourn
By dark Loch Nevish and Lochourn.
VI
Many a heart that news made glad,
Hearts that for years scant gladness had,
But him it gladdened more than all,
The Patriarch of Glen Desseray,
Dwelling where sunny Sheneval
From the green braeside fronts noon-day,
My grandsire, Ewen Cameron, then
Numbering three score years and ten.
Of all our clansmen still alive,
None in the gallant Forty-five
Had borne a larger, nobler part,
Had seen or suffered more ;
Thenceforward on no living heart
Was graven richer store
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 9
Of mournful memories and sublime,
Gleaned from that wild adventurous time.
VII
For when the Prince's summons called,
Answered to that brave appeal
No nobler heart than Archibald,
Brother worthy of Lochiel.
Him following fain, my grandsire flew
To the gathering by Loch Shiel,
Thence a foster-brother true
Followed him through woe and weal.
Nothing could these two divide,
Marching forward side by side,
Two friends, each of the other sure,
Through Prestonpans and Falkirk Muir.
But when on dark Culloden day
A wounded man Gillespic lay,
My grandsire bore him to the shore
And helped him over seas away.
Seven years went by ; less fiercely burned
The conqueror's vengeance 'gainst the Gael
Gillespic Cameron fain returned
To see his native vale.
Waylaid and captured on his road
By the basest souls alive,
His blood upon the scaffold flowed,
io GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Last victim of the Forty-five.
Thenceforth wrapt in speechless gloom
Ewen mourned that lovely head ;
His heart become a living tomb
Haunted by memory of the dead.
Never more from his lips fell
Name of him he loved so well,
But the less he spake, the more his heart
'Mid these sad memories dwelt apart.
VIII
But when on lone Glen Desseray broke
The first flash of that joyous cry,
From his long dream old Ewen woke
I wot his heart leapt high.
No news like that had fallen on him,
Within his cabin smoky dim
For forty summers long and more.
Straightway beyond his cottage door
He sprang and gazed, the white hair o'er
His shoulders streaming, and the last
Wild sunset gleam on his worn cheek cast :
He looked and saw his Marion turn
Home from the well beside the burn,
And cried, " Good tidings ! Thou and I
Will see our Chief before we die."
That night they talked, how many a year
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN
Had gone, since the last Lochiel was here,
How gentle hearts and brave had been
The old Lochiels their youth had seen ;
Aye as they spake, more hotly burned
The fire within them back returned
Old days seemed ready to revive
That perished in the Forty-five.
That night ere Ewen laid his head
On pillow, to his wife he said :
" Yule-time is near, for many a year
Mirth-making through the glens hath ceased,
But the clan once more, as in days of yore,
Shall hold this Yule with game and feast."
IX
Next morning, long ere screech o' day,
Old Ewen roused hath ta'en the brae
With gun on shoulder, and the boy,
Companion of his toils and joy,
The dark-haired Angus by his side
O'er the black braes o' Glen Kinzie, on
Among the mists with slinging stride
They fare, nor stayed till they had won
Corrie-na-Gaul, the cauldron deep
Which the Lochiels were used to keep
A sanctuary where the deer might hide,
And undisturbed all year abide.
12 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Not a cranny, rock, or stone
In that corrie but was known
To my grandsire's weird grey eye ;
All the lairs where large stags lie
Well he knew, but passed them by,
For stags were lean ere yule-time grown.
Crawling on, he saw appear
O'er withered fern one twinkling ear
His gun is up the crags resound
Startled, a hundred antlers bound
Up the passes fast away ;
Lifeless stretched along the ground,
Large and sleek, one old hind lay.
Straight they laid her on their backs,
And o'er the hills between them bore,
Up and down by rugged tracks,
Sore-wearied, ere beside their door
They laid her down " A bonny beast
To crown our coming yule-time feast "
As night came down on scour 1 and glen,
From rough Scour-hoshi-brachcalen.
X
That night they slept the slumber sound
That waits on labour long and sore ;
Next day he sent the message round
1 Scour, high projecting rock.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 13
The glen from door to door,
On to the neighbouring glens Glenpean
The summons hears, and all that be in
Glen Kinzie's bounds Loch Arkaig, stirred
From shore to shore the call has heard ;
To Clunes it passed, from toun to toun, 1
That all the people make them boun 2
Against the coming New-Year's-Day,
To gather for a shinty fray 3
Within the long Glen Desseray,
And meet at night round Ewen's board,
In honour of Lochiel restored.
XI
Blue, frosty, bright, the morning rose
That New Year's day above the snows,
Veiling the range of Scour and Ben,
That either side wall in the glen.
But down on the Strath the night frost keen
Had only crisped the long grass green,
When the men of Loch Arkaig, boat and oar
At Kinloch leaving, sprang to shore.
Crisp was the sward beneath their tread
As they westward marched, and at their head
The Piper of Achnacarry blew
1 Toun, farm, or township.
2 Boun t ready. 3 Shinty fray, see Note at end.
I 4 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
The thrilling pibroch of Donald Dhu.
That challenge the Piper of the Glen
As proudly sounded back again
From his biggest pipe, till far off rang
The tingling crags to the wild war-clang
Of the pibroch that loud to battle blown
The Cameron clan had for ages known.
To-day, as other, yet the same,
It summons to the peaceful game ;
From the braeside homes down trooping come
The champions of Glen Desseray, some
In tartan philabegs arrayed
The garb which tyrant laws forbade,
But still they clung to, unafraid ;
Some in home-woven 'fartan trews,
Rough spun, and dyed with various hues,
By mother's hands or maiden's wrought,
In hues by native fancy taught ;
But all with hazel camags 1 slung
Their shoulders o'er, men old and young,
With mountaineer's long slinging pace,
Move cheerily down to the trysting-place.
XII
Yonder a level space of ground
Two miles and more from west to east,
1 Camag, the Gaelic for a club. J. C. S.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 15
Where from rough Mam-Clach-Ard released
In loop 1 on loop the river wound,
Through many a slow and lazy round,
Ere plunging downward to the lake.
On that long flat of green they take
Their stations ; on the west the men
Of Desseray, Kinzie, Pean Glen,
Ranged 'gainst the stalwart lads who bide
Down long Loch Arkaig, either side.
The ground was ta'en, the clock struck ten,
As Ewen, patriarch of the glen,
Struck off, and sent the foremost ball
Down the Strath flying, with a cry ;
" Fye, lads, set on," and one and all
To work they fell right heartily.
XIII
Now fast and furious on they drive,
Here youngsters scud with feet of wind,
There in a melee dunch 2 and strive ;
The veterans outlook keep behind.
Now up, now down, the ball they toss ;
Now this, now that side of the Strath ;
And many a leaper, brave to cross
The river, finds a chilling bath ;
1 Loop, see Note at end.
- Dunch, swing and plunge forward.
16 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
And many a fearless driver bold,
To win renown, was sudden rolled
Headlong in hid quagmire ;
And many a stroke of stinging pain
In the close press was given and ta'en
Without or guile or ire.
So all the day the clansmen played,
And to and fro their tulzie l swayed,
Untired, along the hollow vale,
And neither side could win the hail ; 2
But high the clamour, upward flung,
Along the precipices rung,
And smote the snowy peaks, and went
Far up the azure firmament.
All day, too, watching from the knowes,
Stood maidens fair, with snooded brows,
And bonny blithe wee bairns ;
Those watching whom I need na say,
These eyeing now their daddies play,
Now jinking 3 round the cairns.
XIV
The loud game fell with sunset still,
And echo died on strath and hill ;
As gloamin' deepened, each side the glen,
1 Tulzie, scuffle. 2 Hail, goal.
3 Jinking, turning and darting to escape being caught.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 17
High above the homes of men,
Blinks of kindling fires were seen,
Such as shine out upon Hallowe'en ;
Single fires on rocky shelf
Each several farm-house for itself
Has lighted there in wavering line
Either side the vale they shine
From dusk to dawn, to blaze and burn
In welcome of their Chief's return.
But broader, brighter than the rest,
Down beside Loch-Arkaig-head,
From a knoll's commanding crest
One great beacon flaring red,
As with a wedge of splendour clove
The blackness of the vault above.
And far down the quivering waters flung
Forward its steady pillar of light,
To tell, more clear than trumpet tongue,
Glen Desseray hails her Chief to-night.
XV
The while the bonfires blazed without,
With logs and peats by keen hands fed
Children and men a merry rout ;
In every home the board was spread.
On ev'ry hearth the fires burned clear,
And round and round abundant cheer
C
i8 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Passed freely for the men who came
From distant glens to join the game.
Freely that feast flowed most of all
In the old home at Sheneval ;
There Ewen Cameron, seated high,
Welcomed a various company.
Flower of the glens old men, his peers,
White with the snows of seventy years ;
And clansmen, strong in middle age,
And sprightly youths in life's first stage-
Down to his own bright dark-haired boy,
Who, seated in a chimney nook,
To his inmost bosom took
The impress of that night of joy.
XVI
He feasted them with the venison fine
Himself had brought from Corrie-na-Gaul,
And sent around the ruddy wine,
High spiced, in antique bowl
Rare wine, which to the Western Isles
Ships of France in secret bore,
Thence through Skye and o'er the Kyles,
Brought to the mainland shore.
Far back that night their converse ran
To the old glories of the clan ;
The battles, where in mortal feud
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 19
Clan Cameron 'gainst Clan Chattan stood ;
And great Sir Ewen, huge of frame,
'Mid loyal hearts the foremost name,
How, yet a boy, he gave his heart
To the King's cause and great Montrose ;
How hand to hand, in tangled den
He closed with Cromwell's staunchest men,
And conqueror from the death-grips rose :
How the war-summons of Dundee
In hoary age he sprang to meet
Dashed with his clan in headlong charge
Down Killiecrankie's cloven gorge
To victory deadlier than defeat.
At these old histories inly burned
The heart of Ewen back returned
The vigour of long-vanished years,
A youth he stood 'mid hoary peers.
Even as in autumn you have seen
Some ancient pine alone look green
'Mid all the wasted wood's decay ;
Some pine, that having summer long
Repaired its verdure, fresh and strong
Waits the bleak winter day.
XVII
As Ewen's spirit caught the glow
Cast from the heights of long ago,
20 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
His own old memories became
Within his heart a living flame ;
And, bursting the reserve that long
Had kept them down, broke forth in song.
i
" What an August morn J;hat was !
Think na' ye our hearts were fain, 1
Branking down the Cuernan Pass,
To Glenfinnan's trysting-plain ;
2
" Where the glen lies open, where
Spread the blue waves of Loch Shiel
Lealest hearts alone were there,
Keppoch, Moidart, brave Lochiel ;
3
" There was young Clanranald true
Crowding all round Scotland's Heir
Him, the Lad with bonnet blue
And the long bright yellow hair.
4
" Kingly look that morn he wore
In our Highland garb arrayed,
By his side the broad claymore,
O'er his brow the white cockade,
1 Fain, eager.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 21
5
Well I ween, he looked with pride
On that gathering by Loch Shiel,
As while the veteran, old and tried,
Tullibardine, true as steel,
6
" On the winds with dauntless hand
Flung the crimson flag unfurled,
Pledge that we to death would stand
For the Stuarts 'gainst the world.
7
" Jeanie Cameron gazed apart,
Where our people crowned the brae,
Proudly beat her gallant heart
At the sight of that brave day.
8
" Loud the shouting shakes the earth,
Far away the mountains boom,
As the Chiefs and Clansmen forth
March to victory and to doom."
The while he sang, in fervent dream
The old man's eye beheld the gleam
Of yet another Forty-five
Along those western shores revive,
And Moidart mountains re-illume
The glory, but no more the gloom.
22 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
CANTO SECOND
BOTHAIN-AIRIDH ; OR, THE SHEALINGS 1
I
WHEN from copse, and craig, and summit
Comes the cuckoo's lonely cry
Down the glen from morn to midnight
Sounding, warm June days are nigh.
At that cry, the heart of Allan
Turns towards the shealings green,
Where for ages every summer
Men of Sheaniebhal have been.
Bonny shealings, green and bielded, 2
Where there meet two corrie burns,
Ault-na-noo and Ault-a-bhealaich,
Pouring from high mountain urns.
Small green knolls of pasture fringing
Skirts of darksome Mam-clach-ard,
Scour-na-naat and Scour-na-ciecha
Westward keeping aweful guard.
Allan then, one grave glance round him
East and west the long glen cast,
1 Shealings, summer grazing high on the hills ; also, shep-
herd's huts, chalets. 2 Bielded, sheltered.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 23
Saw the clouds were high and steady,
Knew the wintry weather was past ;
Then spake loud to all his people
" Mak' ye for the shealings boun : "
On the morrow every door was
Closed within the old farm-toun.
II
When the light lay on the mountains
Of a morning calm and mild,
From their homes the people going
Set their faces to the wild.
Then were seen whole families climbing
Up among the hoary cairns,
Grandsires, grandames, fathers, mothers,
Lads and lasses, winsome bairns,
Driving calves, and kye for milking,
Goats and small sheep on before,
Two white ponies trudging after
With their all of household store.
Here the blackcock, all his rivals
Driven aloof, on yonder mound
Sits and spreads his snowy pinion,
Drumming to his mates around.
There the redcock, new in plumage,
Scarlet crest in fresh May-glow,
From the distant heights replying,
24 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Calls aloud with cheery crow.
Yonder Alpine hare before them
Canters lazily away,
With her coat snow-white in winter,
Now returned to dark -blue grey ;
Then aloof, on hind legs rising,
Perking ears in curious mood,
Listens, " whence have these intruders
Come to scare my solitude ?"
Downward the hen-harrier stooping,
To and fro doth flit and wheel,
Stealthily along the heather,
Hunting for his morning meal.
Ill
Westward sloped the sun, ere reaching
Hillocks by the meeting burns,
Men begin last summer's bothies
Thatching, with dry heath and ferns.
Wives the while, small ingles kindle,
Spread fresh heather beds on floor ;
For the milk and cheese make ready
Roomy sconce in ben-most bore. 1
Angus and his kilted comrades
In the hill-burn plash and shout,
All about the granite boulders
1 Sconce, shelter : Ben-most bore, innermost corner.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 25
Cuddling l for the speckled trout.
Well-a-day ! but life was bonny
With our folk in those old days ;
Children barefoot, morn and even,
Wandering high on brackeny braes ;
Lips and faces purpled over
With the rich abundant fill
Of blae, wortle, and crow-berries,
Gathered wide from craig and hill ;
Nature's own free gladness sharing
Through the sweetest of the year,
With the red grouse crowing round them,
And far-heard the belling deer ;
From behind, the mountain quiet
Blending with the lilting cry
Of the women homeward calling
Down their goats and dauted kye. 2
IV
It befell one time of shealings
Allan with his youngest boy,
Angus, high above the bothies
Wandered on some hill-employ ;
When from top of Ault-a-bhealaich
Looking, they beheld the bowl,
1 Cuddling, groping.
2 Dauted kye, favourite, doated-on cattle.
26 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Caldron-shaped and dark in shadow,
Far beneath, of Corrie-na-Gaul.
" Was not that the hiding-place," cried
Angus, starting at the name,
" Where ye refuged, when Prince Charlie
Guiding, through these hills ye came ?"
" Many a place we had for hiding,"
Answered Allan, " first and last :"
" Tell me all the way ye travelled,
Whence the Prince came, whither passed."
"Well, dear laddie ! sith ye will it,
I will teach thee what befell
After that the Prince bade Flora,
And the shores of Skye farewell.
V
' As he steered up dark Loch Nevish,
And set foot on mainland shore,
Deadly foes were close behind him,
Deadly, keeping watch before.
Seaward, every frith and islet,
Girt and swept by hostile sail ;
Landward, one long line of sentries,
Post on post, kept hill and dale.
High and low, on glen and summit,
From Glenfinnan to Lochourn,
All the day saw guards patrolling,
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 27
All the night red watch-fires burn.
Fast across the hills of Morar
Sped the Prince to Borrodale
That leal House, when first he landed,
Welcomed him with glad ' all hail.'
There before his eyes the bonny
Homestead lay a blackened heap
Mid the craigs and woods o'erhanging,
The old Laird in hiding deep
With his sons kept. Thither guided,
Lay the Prince in safety there
For three days, till foemen prowling
Close and closer girt their lair.
Then these leal Macdonalds longer
Could not their loved Prince conceal,
He must leave Clanranald's country
For the mountains of Lochiel.
Soon to Cameron of Glenpean
Came the word that he must wait
For the Prince, on one lone hill, and
Guide him through that desperate strait.
To our toun, came Donald crying,
' Up and help the Prince with me,'
For he knew of these hill-passes
I had better skill than he.
28 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
VI
" Long we kept the cairn of trysting,
But none living came that way ;
Then to seek them through the mountains
Far we wandered : summer day
Into midnight deep was darkening,
When low down faint forms appear,
Through a slack l between the mountains
Moving dim like straggling deer.
Who they might be, all unknowing,
Down we hurried to the vale ;
Forward one then stept to meet us
Who but brave Glenaladale ?
Glad was he to find no stranger,
But Glenpean, whom he knew ;
Glad the Prince to greet a Cameron
Long since proven leal and true.
Two days after dark Culloden,
A night 'neath Donald's roof he lay,
When in haste for Moidart making
Came he by Loch Arkaig way.
VII
" ' Come, thrice welcome ! fain are we to
Place our lives within thy hand,
1 Slack, opening between two hills.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 29
Through these fires, where'er you lead us,
We will follow thy command,'
Low the Prince to Donald whispered,
For the watch-fires blazed anear,
And the sentry-voices answering,
Each to other, smote our ear.
4 Trust us, Prince ! our best endeavour
We will give to bring you through,
But the paths are rough and rocky,
And the hours of darkness few.'
Then, as leaders, I and Donald
On thro' darkness groped and crawled,
Down black moss-hags 1 gashed and miry,
Up great corries, torrent-scrawled ;
Till all faint with toil and travel,
As around the watch-fires wane,
In the first grey of the dawning
Yonder summit we attain,
Southern wall of long Glen Desseray,
Mamnyn-Callum that round hill
There, like hares far-hunted, squatting
Close we kept all day and still ;
Eyeing the red-coats beneath us,
How like wasps they swarm and spread
From their camp within the meadow,
Pitched beside Loch-Arkaig-head.
1 Moss-hags, pits or gashes in a boggy moor.
30 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Though so near, Glenpean bade the
Prince take rest, and nothing dread,
For yestreen all Mamnyn-Callum
They had searched from base to head.
VIII
" Sundown over Scour-na-ciecha,
Forth we creep from out our lair,
Just as the watch-fires rekindling
Leap up through the gloamin' air.
On the face of Meal-na-Sparden,
'Neath the sentries close, we keep
Westward, down yon cliff descending
To Glen-Lochan-Anach deep.
At the darkest of the night, we
Crossed our own Glen-head, and heard
Eerie voices of the howlets
Hooting from dim Mam-clach-ard.
Crawling then, up Ault-a-bhealaich,
Just at this spot waning dim
O'er the mountains of Glengarry
Ghost-like hung the crescent's rim.
When we turned the bealach, 1 downward
By yon rocky rough burn-head ;
With this right hand, through the darkness
Him, our darling Prince, I led.
1 Bealach, narrow pass.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 31
O ! to think that such as I should
Grasp within this hand of mine
Him, the heir of all these Islands,
Last of Albyn's kingly line !
Think that he was fain to refuge
In yon grim and dripping hold ;
He whose home should hae been a palace,
And his bed a couch of gold !
IX
" All these gnarl'd black-corried mountains
Hold no den like Corrie-na-Gaul
Womb of blackest rain-storms cradle
Of the winds, that fiercest howl.
See ye yon grey rocky screetan J
Down from that dark precipice strown,
There I led them to a cavern
Under yon huge shelter-stone.
All the day we heard the gun-shots
On the mountains overhead,
Well we knew red-coats were busy
Shooting our poor people dead.
Two days we had all but fasted,
Now were growing hunger-faint,
All the while the Prince would cheer us,
1 Screetan, stony ravine, track of torrent, or stony debris
on mountain-side.
32 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Not one murmur or complaint ;
Though for many days, the choicest
Fare he had his want to fill
Was scant oatmeal, cold spring water,
And wild berries from the hill.
So in search of food I ventured
Down to where some shealings were,
But I found them all abandoned,
And the bothies empty and bare.
Baffled, I returned and brought them
Forth from our dark cavern-bed,
And, though full the daylight, led them
Warily to a mountain head,
That o'erlooked Glen-quoich's dark waters
There, what saw we close below
But a camp with red-coats swarming,
And a troop in haste to go
Up the very hill we lodged in ?
All about they searched that day,
Close we cowered, and heaven so guided
That they came not where we lay.
Then the Prince said, * Not another
Sun shall rise ere we shall make
Trial to pass the chain of sentries
Life upon that hazard stake.'
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 33
X
" Gloamin' fell, we rose and started
From our lair, a stealthy race
O'er that stream and flat Lon-meadow,
Up yon wrinkled mountain face,
Druim-a-chosi, from that summit
Seen, a watch-fire wildly burned
In the glen, across our pathway
Westward to the side we turned :
And so close we passed it, voices
Of the sentinels reached our ear
Low we crouched, and round the hillocks
Crawled, like stalkers of the deer.
Up a hill flank (Druim-a-chosi
Will not let us now discern)
Scrambling up a torrent's bed, we
Won the ridge of Leach-na-fearn.
There, in our descending pathway
Down before us, full in view
Watch-fires twain in grey dawn flickered,
That way we must venture through.
Then I said, ' Prince ! ere you venture,
Let me first the passage prove ; '
And, with that, few steps to westward
Crept adown a torrent's groove.
There I watched till warders pacing
Passed each other, back to back ;
D
34 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Swift, but mute, I passed between them,
Safe returned the self-same track.
And we all kept close in shelter,
Till again they face to face
Met and passed each other, leaving,
Back to back, an empty space.
Quick I darted forward, whispering,
' Now's our time, Prince ! follow me : '
Few brief breathless moments crawling
Down the corrie l we were free.
Out beyond the chain of sentries,
Down by Lochan-doire-dhu,
'Neath the bield 2 of birks and alders,
Past the mouth of Corrie-hoo,
Up the rock of Innis-craikie
Just as the last star grew pale
On the brow of Scour-a-vorrar,
Reached we Corrie-scorridale.
XI
" There, in rocky den safe-sheltered,
O the welcome blest repose !
Time at last for food and slumber,
Respite from relentless foes.
When a day and night were over,
We arose and wandered on,
1 Corrie, see note, p. 7. 2 Bield, shelter.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 35
Northward to the Seaforth country,
West from long Glenmorriston.
Then, I knew my work was ended,
For those hills to me were strange,
And a clansman of Glengarry's
Bred amid that mountain range
One who had shar'd Culloden battle
Was at hand a guide to be.
Then the Prince turned round, and gazing
On my face, spake words to me :
' Allan ! what can I repay thee
For thy service done so well ?
Naught but thanks are mine to render,
Heart-deep thanks, and long farewell.'
In his own he grasped this right hand,
The Prince grasped it never since
Never while I breathe shall mortal
Grasp this hand which touched the Prince. 1
Think na ye the tears came fa'ing,
Think na ye my heart was sair,
Watching him depart, and knowing
I should see his face nae mair."
1 See Note at end.
36 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
CANTO THIRD
"ON THE TRACK OF THE PRINCE "
I
DOWN to Loch Nevish went the day,
And all that night young Angus lay
'Tween dream and waking, heart on fire
With inextinguishable desire
To trace each step the Prince had gone
From Morar to Glengarry, on,
O'er rifted peak, and cove profound,
Exploring every inch of ground,
Until he reached the famed ravine
Through which he passed the guards between ;
For every spot the Prince had trode
To him with sacred radiance glowed.
II
When the first streaks of morning broke
Above Glengarry mountains, woke
Young Angus from his heather bed,
Stole through the bothy door, and said
No word to any of the way
Him listed take that summer day.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 37
Up by the Ault-a-bhealaich burn
Lightly he went, and at the turn
Of waters, plunged down Corrie-na-Gaul,
That dark cavernous cauldron-bowl,
O'er-canopied, morn and eve, with mist,
Therein he sought the cave he wist
His father pointed out yestreen
Where he erewhile with the Prince had been.
Thence down the corrie-burn he bore,
And up on precipiced Scour-a-vhor
Sought where they refuged. Then in haste
He hurried o'er the low wide waste,
The Lon, o'er which the wanderers ran
That night, when their last march began
To pass the sentries ; then he hied
Up Druimahoshi's rugged side ;
But on his spirit solemn awe
Fell when, the summit won, he saw
To westward Knoydart peaks up-crowd,
Scarred, jagg'd, black-corried some in cloud,
Some by slant sunbursts glory-kissed,
Beyond through fleeces broad of mist
Like splintered spears weird peaks of Skye,
And many an isle he could not name,
That looming into vision came
From ocean's outer mystery.
38 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
III
Long Angus stood and gazed, and when,
Downward, he searched the farther glen,
The westering sun toward ocean bending
From the hill edge slant rays was sending
Backward o'er gnarled Scour-a-chlive,
And greener flanks of Leach-na-fern.
Well Angus knew the Prince had passed
The guards up there, and keenly cast
His eyes all over them to discern
Some crevice in their mountain wall
Up which the wanderer's feet could crawl.
IV
Three burns there are, as I have seen,
Poured from that hill-side one between
Scour-a-chlive and Leach-na-fern,
Called of the people the March-burn,
Because its channel doth divide
Rough Knoydart from Glengarry side :
And one, Ault-Scouapich, that doth leap,
The Besom burn down the middle steep ;
Westmost of all a stream that drains
The severed peaks of Scour-a-chlive,
Called from old time the Burn of brains,
Through the rough hill-flank down doth drive
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 39
A deep indented furrow, till,
The level reached, within a still
Small meadowy spot, that greenly gleams
Amid the waste, made glad with streams,
That hill-burn, loop on loop, entwined
Goes wandering gently down, to find
The great Glen-river. Of these three
Which might the very channel be
By which the Prince passed upward, no
Foot-print or sign remains to show.
So to himself young Angus said,
As o'er and o'er with eager ken
From left to right his eyes surveyed
The northern steep that walls the glen.
V
Wearied and baffled with the quest
All day pursued in vain,
His eyes went wandering east and west
To corrie and scaur, in blank unrest,
Again and yet again.
O'er earth our mightiest movements pass,
And leave no deeper impress than
Cloud-shadows on the mountain grass,
So fleeting and so frail is man.
The Princely feet that mountain wall
Passed over, but have left no scrawl ;
40 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
This desert saw what here befell
But hath no voice or sign to tell,
And the rocks keep their secret well.
As thoughts like these athwart him swept
Fain had he sat him down and wept.
VI
But day was westering, and the cloud
Down on the glooming summits bowed
Brought o'er his heart a sudden fear
Of night in that lone place austere.
Then he arose in haste, and clomb
The steep in panting hope to win
On the other side some human home,
Or even some cave to shelter in.
Soon as he crossed the highest cope,
He saw, cleaving the northern slope,
A birchen corrie with its burn
Now bare, now hidden. "Thou my turn
Wilt serve," he cried ; " with thee for guide,
I'll go where'er thy waters glide."
Soon as his eager footstep trode
Beside it, on the grassy sod,
The pleasant murmur in his ear
Was like a voice of human cheer,
And seemed to lift away the load
That all day long had overawed
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 41
And weighed his spirit down with stress
Of too prevailing loneliness :
Lightly he trode down Corriebeigh,
The burn companion of his way,
Now by the greensward winding, gliding,
Now in the birchen coppice hiding,
Then plunging forward and chafing far
Underneath some crumbling scaur,
Anon in daylight re-appearing
To greet him with a sound of cheering,
Till it reached far down in a glimmering pass
A little lochan, 1 marged with grass :
He watched the small burn steal therein
And rest for its wandering water win,
And the thought arose within his breast,
" Haply I too may here find rest."
VII
Then turning round, small space aloof,
Under a bield of the birchen wood,
He saw a bothy of wicker woof
With bracken and heather for its roof,
Like lair of wild beast, rough and rude.
A moment's space, he paused before
The opening dark that seemed a door,
And gazed around, indistinct and dim
1 Lochan, small lake.
42 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
The black crags vague in vapour swim ;
Naught clear in all the glimmering pass
But the lochan-gleam with its marge of grass,
And the flash of the great white waterfall
Down thundering from the northern wall,
And filling with o'eraweing roar
The solemn pass forevermore.
No time to look or listen long,
Ere forth there stept from the bothy door
An old man, tall, erect, and strong
Threescore years he had seen or more,
Survivor of the Forty-five,
One of the old Glengarry clan,
Who wont not from his lair to drive
Any wandering man ;
He kindly welcomed Angus in,
Unquestioning of his home or kin.
VIII
But when the lad, with bashful face,
Told how he came to that lone place,
That he had wandered since break of day
From the shealings of Glen Desseray,
One of Lochiel's own people son
Of veteran Ewen Cameron
At hearing of that well-known name
Murdoch MacdonnelPs cheek like flame
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 43
Brightened, and in his hand he took
The lad's, and to the ingle-nook
Of the bothy led him, saying aloud,
" Son of my battle friend, how proud
Am I to bid thee welcome here ;
For him thy Sire, true man sincere.
Years have gone by, since we two met,
Like me, he must be touched with eld,
But till the Gael their Prince forget
In honour will his name be held."
IX
Upon the settle seated, o'er
That ancient tale they went once more,
And Murdoch told the very place
The burn that grooves the southern face
Of Leach-na-fern where Angus led
The Prince across the watershed,
Thence through the sentinels crept their way,
Down the clefts of this same Corriebeigh.
Anon his board the old man piled
With the best increase of the wild
Red-spotted trout, fresh from the stream,
Hill-berries, stored in autumn hours,
And goat-milk cheese, and yellow cream
Rich with the juice of mountain flowers :
And oatmeal cake and barley scone,
44 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Sweet viands for a hungry guest
To break his day-long fast upon,
Before he sought his couch of rest.
That couch old Murdoch's hands had spread
With the fresh crop of heather green
Turned upward never prince, I ween,
On easier pillow laid his head.
Though soft the bed, and the rough way
Had wearied him, yet Angus lay
Far into night, through the still gloom
Listening the sleepless cataract boom,
In busy thought back-wandering through
The lonely places, strange and new,
That day had to his sight revealed,
Ere slumber soft his eyelids sealed.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 45
CANTO FOURTH
THE HOME BY LOCHOURN
I
EARLY young Angus rose to meet
The morning. Glimmering at his feet
There lay the lochan, clear as glass,
The margin green with reeds and grass,
Within the lap of the awesome pass,
That from Glengarry's westmost bourne
Breaks headlong down on lone Lochourn.
Over the shoulder of the world
The sun looked, and the pale mists curled
On black crag-faces, smit to gold,
And rose and lingered, crept and rolled
Up the ravines and splintered heights,
All beautiful with the dawning lights.
A pleasant morn it was of June,
The time of year that most awakes
The mountain melodists to tune
Their sweetest songs from heaths and brakes
The mavis' voice rang from the copse,
Upon his knoll the blackcock crowed,
And up toward the bare hill-tops
46 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
The cuckoo shouted loud.
Across the deep gorge, under all
Kept sounding on the torrent fall,
That thundering down with sleepless wave
We Gael call Essan-corrie-Graive.
II
Soon as the early meal was o'er,
Murdoch looked from the bothy door,
And said, " I go to Lochourn's lone side,
Where my bairns in our winter home delay ;
Wilt thither go with me, and bide
Beneath my roof one other day ?
To-morrow, my Ronald shall be thy guide
Over the hills to Glen Desseray."
Westward they went with morning joy,
That old rtian and light-hearted boy :
Ah ! beautiful the mountain road
As ever foot of mortal trode,
Winding west through the cloven defile
Of crags fantastic, pile on pile,
Towering rock, huge boulder stone,
Heather-crowned and lichen-grown,
And crumpled mountain walls, ravined
With birchen-corries, sunlight-sheened,
Where the torrent plunged and flashed in spray
Down to the little lochans that lay
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 47
Gleaming in the lap of the Pass
Fringed with reeds, and marged with grass.
As they the early day beguile
Sauntering through the long defile,
Upon young Angus' wondering sense
With new-born beauty, power intense,
Of craig and scaur, of copse and dell
And far-off peaks the vision fell ;
All seemed endued, he knew not how,
With glory never seen till now.
Ill
At length old Murdoch silence broke,
And Angus from his dream awoke,
" Ye see that slack l on the water-shed ;
That was the way your Father led
Our noble Prince the sentinels through ;
Then down by this same Corrie-hoo
They came, and crossed our path just here,
And round the end of yon small mere,
Up through that hazel wood they went,
Over yon rocky sheer ascent,
And reached, as the last star grew pale,
The Cave of Corrie-scorridale ;
And there I've heard your Father tell
He bade the Prince a long farewell."
1 Slack, see note, p. 28.
48 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
IV
Then round a rock a sudden turn
Showed far below deep-walled Lochourn-
Blue inlet from the distant seas
Piercing far up the mountain world ;
In the calm noon no breath or breeze
Along the azure waters curled.
At sight thereof their sense was smote
With fresh sea-savour ; though remote
From the main ocean many a mile
Inflooded past cape, creek, and kyle, 1
The sea-loch, flanked by precipice walls,
With ever-lessening murmur crawls,
Till 'neath the Pass he lies subdued
By the o'eraweing solitude ;
And yet some vigour doth retain,
Some freshness of the parent main.
V
So have I seen it : many a day
Is gone since last I passed that way,
Yet still in memory lives impressed
The image of its aweful rest.
The winds there wont to work their will
That day were quiet all was still,
2 Kyle, sound or strait.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 49
Save that one headlong cataract hoar
From steep Glenelg's opposing shore
Sent o'er the loch a lulling sound,
That made the hush but more profound.
There in clear mirror imaged lay
The lichened cliffs tall, silver-grey,
Their ledges interlaced with green ;
The cataract of white-sheeted spray
Down flashing through the dark ravine,
The birches clambering up midway
The sea-marge and hill-tops between ;
Each herb, each floweret, tiny-leaved,
Into that lucid depth received,
Therein repeated, hue and line,
With more than their own beauty shine,
Embedded in a nether sky,
More fairy-fleeced than that on high :
A scene it seemed of beauty and peace,
So deep it could not change or cease.
VI
Through such a scene, on such a day,
They wandered down that lovely noon,
Now 'neath high headlands making way
Among huge blocks at random strewn ;
Now round some gentle bay they wind,
Green nook, with golden shingle lined,
So GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Whither the weary fisher oars
His boat for mooring ; then by doors
They went, of kindly crofter-folk,
Whence many a gladsome greeting broke ;
And Murdoch told them, now was time
To the high shealings they should climb ;
Himself there with his goats had been
And seen the pastures growing green.
To-morrow he and his would drive
Their ponies and sheep, and bonny kine,
Up to the back of Scour-a-chlaive,
Where the springs ran clear and the grass
was fine :
And there the clansmen would forgather
All in the pleasant bright June weather ;
So he warned the Lochside, toun by toun,
To make them for the shealings boune.
VII
The day had westered far, and on
The yellow pines the sunset shone,
Streamed back from Lurvein, kindling them
To redder lustre, branch and stem,
Ere they reached the pine-tree on the crown
Sole-standing of the promontory,
Whence they beheld far-gazing down
The loch inlaid with sunset glory.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN
Long time beside that sole pine-tree
They stood and gazed in ecstasy,
For the face of heaven was all a-glow
With molten splendour backward streamed
From the sunken sun, and the loch below,
Flushed with an answering glory, gleamed.
Each purple cloud aloft that burned
In the depth below was back returned.
There headlands, each o'erlapping each,
Projecting down the long loch's reach,
With point of rock and plume of pine,
All glorious in the sunset shine :
And far down on the verge of sight
Rock-islets interlacing lie,
That lapt in floor of molten light
Seemed natives less of earth than sky.
From height of heaven to ocean bed
One living splendour penetrated,
And made that moment seem to be
Bridal of earth and sky and sea.
VIII
As died away the wondrous glow,
They wandered down to a home below ;
A little home, where the mountain burn,
Thrown from the pine-crags, touched the
shore :
52 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
There waiting for their Sire's return
His family meet him at the door ;
His own wife, Marion, hail and leal, 1
Just risen from her humming wheel,
Their eldest Donald, nearing now
The verge of manhood, hunter keen ;
And Ronald, with the open brow
And bright eye-glance of blithe sixteen.
And his one daughter, loved so well,
The dark-haired, blue-eyed Muriel.
These all were waiting, fain to know
How soon they might to the shealing go ;
And while much-wondering whence the boy,
To whom their Sire had been convoy,
They made him welcome with their best
Beneath their roof that night to rest.
There in that beautiful retreat
Companions young and converse sweet
Woke Angus to another mood
Than he had nursed in solitude.
No more by cave and mountain-slack
He dreamed o'er the lorn Prince's track ;
Those weary wanderings all forgot
Were changed for fields of happier thought,
And fairer visions, fresh with dew
Of a dream-land not old but new.
1 Hail and leal, healthy and faithful.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 53
CANTO FIFTH
THE WAR SUMMONS
I
SOON as the kindling dawn had tipt
With gold Scour-vorrar's lonely head,
Before a single ray had dipt
Down to the loch's deep-shadowed bed,
Betimes old Marion was astir,
Thinking of that young wanderer,
And eident l fitly to prepare
For all the household morning fare.
That over, Murdoch rose and went
Up through the pines, the steep ascent,
His two lads with him, to convoy
Homeward the wandering Cameron boy.
From the high peaks soon they showed a track,
That followed on would lead him back
To where his people's shealings lay,
On heights above Glen Desseray ;
Then bade farewell but ere they part
The three lads vowed with eager heart
That they, ere long, with willing feet,
Would hasten o'er the hills to meet.
1 Eident, diligent.
GLEN DESSERAY, OR
II
Many a going and return
Down to lone, beautiful Lochourn,
That pathway witnessed many a time
These young lads crossed it, fain to climb
Each to the other's shealings, there
The pastimes of the hills to share
To fish together the high mere,
Track to his lair the straggling deer,
From refuge in the cairn of rocks
Unearth the lamb-destroying fox ;
Or creep, with balanced footing nice,
Where o'er some awful chasm hung,
On ledge of dripping precipice,
The brooding eagle rears her young.
So from that wild, free nurture grew
'Tween these three lads firm friendship true.
But most the soul of Ronald clave
To Angus, his own chosen friend
To Angus more than brother gave
Tender affection without end
Such as young hearts give in their prime
A weight of love, no lesser than
The love wherewith, in that old time,
David was loved by Jonathan.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 55
III
At length the loud war-thunder broke
O'er Europe, and the land awoke,
Even to the innermost recess
Of this far-western wilderness.
And the best councillors of the Crown
They who erewhile had hunted down
Our sires on their own mountains, now,
Led by a wiser man, 'gan trow
'Twere better and more safe to use
Our good claymores and hardy thews
'Gainst Britain's foes, than shoot us dead,
Food for the hill-fox and the glead. 1
To all the Chieftains of the North
An edict from the King went forth,
That who should to his standard bring
From his own hills a stalwart band
Of clansmen in his following,
Himself should lead them and command.
He could not hear our own Lochiel
With heart unmoved that strong appeal,
To rouse once more the ancient breed
Of warriors, as his sires had done,
And help his country in her need
With the flower of brave Clan Cameron.
1 Glead, kite.
56 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
IV
Then every morning Achnacarry
Saw clansmen mustering in hot hurry
Saw every glen that owns Lochiel,
Lochaber Braes, and all Mam-more,
Glenluy, west to fair Loch Shiel,
Their bravest to the trysting pour.
Westward the summons passed, as flame
By shepherds lit, some dry March day,
Sweeps over heathery braes so came
The tidings to Glen Desseray ;
And found the men of Shenebhal
Down in the meadow, busy all
Their stacks of barley set to bind,
Against the winter's rain and wind :
All the flower of the Glen
Grown, or nearly grown to men
Heard that summons, all between
Thirty years and bright eighteen,
Loth or willing, slow or fleet,
Kose their Chieftain's call to meet ;
Angus, youngest, eager most
To join the quickly mustering host.
Though sad his sire, he could but feel
His boy must follow young Lochiel,
And his mother's heart, tho' wae,
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 57
Did not dare to say him nay.
When the following morn appeared.
Down the loch their boat they steered
To Achnacarry, there to enrol
Their names upon the muster-scroll,
And receive their Chief's command,
To gather when a month was gone,
And follow to a foreign land
The young heir of Clan Cameron.
V
What were they doing by Lochourn,
At the Farm of Rounieval,
When there came that sudden turn
To Angus' fortunes, changing all ?
The tidings found, at close of day,
Ronald and Muriel on their way
Homeward, by the winding shore,
Driving the cattle on before.
At hearing of that startling word
The heart of Ronald, deeply stirred,
Wrought to and fro Must I then part
From him, the brother of my heart ;
Let him go forth, on some far shore,
To perish, seen of me no more ?
It must not be, shall not be so,
Where Angus goeth, I will go.
58 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Soon to his sister's ear he brought
The secret thing that in him wrought
" I go with Angus side by side
"We'll meet, whatever fate betide."
VI
Who, that hath ever known the power
Of home, but to life's latest hour
Will bear in mind the deathly knell,
That on his infant spirit fell,
When first some voice, low- whispering said
" One lamb in the home-fold lies dead ;"
Or that drear hour, scarce less forlorn,
When tidings to his ear was borne,
That the first brother needs must part
From the home-circle, heart to heart
Fast bound, must leave the well-loved place,
Alone the world's bleak road to face.
Then as their hearts strain after him,
With many a prayer and yearning dim,
The old home, they feel, erst so serene,
No more can be as it has been.
Just so that sudden summons fell
Upon the heart of Muriel,
Even like a sudden funeral bell
An iron knell of deathly doom
To wither all her young life's bloom.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 59
VII
Few words of dool that night they spake,
Though their two hearts were nigh to break,
But with the morrow's purpling dawn
Ronald and Muriel they are gone
Up through the pine-trees, till they clomb
The highest ridge upon the way
That strikes o'er Knoydart mountains from
Lochourn-side to Glen Desseray ;
And there they parted. Not, I ween,
Was that their latest parting morn ;
Yet seldom have those mountains seen
Two sadder creatures, more forlorn,
Than these two moving, each apart,
To commune with their own lone heart,
To Achnacarry, one to share
The muster of the clansmen there,
And one, all lonely, to return
Back to the desolate, dark Lochourn.
And yet no wild and wayward wail
Went up from bonny Rounieval,
But Muriel set her to prepare
Against the final parting day,
A tartan plaid for Ronald's wear,
When he was far away.
60 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
She took the has-wool, 1 lock by lock,
The choice wool, she in summers old,
What time her father sheared his flock,
Had gathered by the mountain fold.
She washed and carded it clean and fine,
Then, sitting by the birling 2 wheel,
She span it out, a slender twine,
And hanked it on the larger reel,
Singing a low, sad chaunt the while,
That might her heavy heart beguile.
VIII
The hanks she steeped in diverse grains
Rich grains, last autumn time distilled
By her own hands, with curious pains,
Learnt from old folk in colours skilled.
Deep dyes of orange, which she drew
From crotal 3 dark on mountain top,
And purples of the finest hue
Pressed from fresh heather crop.
Black hues which she had brewed from bark
Of the alders, green and dark,
Which overshadow streams that go,
After they have won the vale,
1 Has-wool, see Note at end.
2 Birling, whirring, rattling.
3 Crotal, a lichen (Omphalodes) now called Cudbear.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 61
Seaward winding still and slow,
Down by gloomy Barrisdale.
Thereto she added diverse juices,
Taken for their colouring uses,
From the lily flowers that float
High on mountain lochs remote ;
And yellow tints the tanzy yields,
Growing in forsaken fields
All these various hues she found
On her native Highland ground.
IX
But besides she fused and wrought
In her chalice tinctures brought
From far-off countries blue of Ind,
From plants that by the Ganges grew,
And brilliant scarlets, well refined,
From cochineal, the cactus rind
Yields on warm hills of Mexico.
When in these tinctures long had lain
The several hanks, and drank the grain,
She sunned them on the homeside grass,
Before the door, above the burn,
Then to the weaver's home did pass,
Who lived to westward, down Lochourn.
She watched the webster while he tried
Her hanks, and put the dyes to proof,
62 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Then to the loom her fingers tied,
Just as he bade her, warp and woof,
The threads of bonny haslock woo'
Her haslock woo' well dyed and fine,
And she matched the colours, hue with hue,
Laid them together, line on line.
And as the treddles rattling went,
And the swift shuttle whistled through,
It seemed as though her heart-strings blent
With every thread that shuttle drew.
X
When two moons had waxed and waned,
And the third was past the full,
And the weary cup was all but drained
Of long suspense, and naught remained,
But the one day of parting dool,
From Achnacarry Ronald passed
Down to Lochourn, to bid farewell
To father, mother, brother dear,
And his sole sister Muriel.
For word had come the new-raised band,
Ere two days pass must leave their land,
To inarch on foreign service where,
Not even their chief could yet declare.
Far had the autumn waned that morn,
When Ronald left his home forlorn,
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 63
And all his family rose and went
Forth by his side to cheer his way,
To the tryst whither he was bent,
At foot of long Glen Desseray.
And as they went was Muriel wearing
Around her breast the new-woven plaid,
And Ronald tall, with gallant bearing,
Walked in clan tartan garb arrayed.
A while they kept the winding shores
Of wan Lochourn from friendly doors
Many a heartily breathed farewell
On the ears of the passing family fell.
Then up through dark Glen Barrisdale lay
Their path the morning chill and grey,
And drearily the fitful blast
Moaned down the corries, as they passed,
And floated in troops around their head
From withered birks * the wan leaves dead ;
And the swathes of mist, in the black gulphs curled,
On the gusty breezes swayed and swirled,
Up to the cloud that in solid mass
Roofed the Mam above and the lonely Pass.
Into that cloud the travellers bore
Lochourn and his islands were seen no more.
1 Birks, birch-trees.
64 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
XI
As they passed from the Mam and its cloudy cowl
Beneath lay Loch Nevish with grim, black scowl
The blackest, sullenest loch that fills
The ocean-rents of these gnarled hills ;
Those flanking hills, where evermore
Dank vapours swim, wild rain-floods pour.
Where ends the loch the way is barred
By the awesome pass of Mam-clach-ard,
By some great throes of Nature rent
Between two mountains imminent ;
Scour-na-naat with sharp wedge soaring,
Scour-na-ciche, cataracts pouring
From precipice to precipice,
Headlong down many a blind abyss.
A place it was, e'en at noon or morn,
Of dim, weird sights, and sounds forlorn,
But after nightfall, lad nor lass
In all Lochiel would face that pass.
Now as these travellers climb the Mam,
They were aware of a stern, grim calm
The calm of the autumn afternoon,
When night and storm will be roaring soon.
But little time, I ween, had they
To watch strange shapes, weird sounds to hear,
For they must hasten on their way
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 65
Not feed on phantasies of fear,
Lest night should fall on them before
They reached Loch Arkaig's distant shore.
XII
Down to that try sting place they fare,
Many people were gathered there
Father, mother, sister, friend,
From all the glens, deep-hearted Gael,
Each for some parting brother, blend
Manhood's tears with woman's wail.
Beneath them on the water's marge,
Lay floating ready the eight-oared barge,
To Achnacarry soon to bear
His clansmen to their young Chief there.
When the Knoydart family reached that crowd,
And heard their lamentations loud,
Behind a green knoll, out of view,
With their young warrior all withdrew
That knoll which sent, in by-gone days,
Down the long loch the beacon's blaze.
There Angus and his people all
Were waiting them of Rounieval,
And while the old folk, in sorrow peers,
Mingle their common grief and tears,
And Angus, home and parents leaving,
Is set to bear with manly grieving,
F
66 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Yet one peculiar pang was there,
Which only he and Muriel share
A pang deep-hid in either breast,
Nor once to alien ear confessed.
XIII
Then Muriel suddenly unbound
The plaid wherewith herself was drest,
Threw it her brother's shoulders round,
And wrapt it o'er his manly breast.
" This plaid my own hands dyed and wove,
Memorial of our true home-love ;
Let its fast colours symbol be
Of thoughts and prayers that cling to thee."
Then from her breast his mother took
A little Gaelic Bible book
" For my sake read, and o'er it pray,
We here shall meet when you're far away."
With that, impatient cries wax'd loud
" Unmoor the barge " one swift embrace,
One clinging kiss to each dear face,
And rushing blindly through the crowd,
Angus and Ronald take their place
Within the boat. The piper blew
The thrilling pibroch of Donald Dhu ;
But the sound on the Knoydart weepers fell,
And on many more, like a funeral knell ;
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 67
And the farther down the loch they sail,
In deeper sadness died the wail,
And their eyes grew dimmer, and yet more dim,
Down the wan water following him
Watching so fleetly disappear
All that on earth they hold most dear,
Till round the farthest jutting Rhu
The barge, oar-driven, swept from view.
Then from the knoll they turned away,
And tears no more they cared repress,
But set their face through gloamin' grey,
Back to the western wilderness.
68 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
CANTO SIXTH
THE SOLDIER'S RETURN
I
SEVEN Summers long had fired the glens
With flush of heather glow ;
Seven Winters robed the sheeted Bens
From head to foot with snow,
And brought their human denizens
Alternate joy and woe.
When all those years were come and gone,
One calm October day
The dwellers of Glenmorriston
Forth-looking from their huts at dawn,
Beheld a traveller wandering on
The long glen west away.
Young he seemed, but travel-worn,
More weak of gait than youth should be
A philabeg, 1 but soiled and torn,
Was round him on his shoulder borne
A tartan plaid hung carelessly.
" Whence comes yon stranger ? whither goes ?
They each to other wondering cry
" Is he some wanderer from Kintail ?
1 Philabeg, Highlander's kilt.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 69
Macdonald's land of Armadale ?
Or Macleod's country, far in Skye ?
Or haply some Clanranald man
From southern market makes his way
Back, where his home by hungry shore
Hears the Atlantic breakers roar
On Barra and Benbecula."
II
Unasked, unanswering, he passed on,
None spake to him, he spake to none ;
But while they questioned whence, and who,
Among themselves, they little knew
.That this was Angus Cameron.
Southward he turned, and noonday found
Him high upon the mountain-ground,
Whence he beheld Glengarry's strath,
With its long winding river path
Streaming beneath him ; and discerned
Loch Quoich, amid dark Scours inurned.
And all around it, east and west,
His eye wide- wandering went in quest
Of the old homesteads that he knew,
But the blue smoke from very few
Could he discover ; yet he wist
The rest were lost in haze and mist.
So west he turned through mountain doors
70 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
That open downward on the shores
Of lone Lochourn. In that deep pass
Still lay the little loch, reed-fringed,
With upper marge of greenest grass,
And birks beyond it, autumn-tinged.
He looked the summer bothies bare,
All ruinous sank in disrepair ;
From them the voice of milking song
And laughter had been absent long.
He paused and listened, but no sound,
Save of the many rills that come
Down corrie-beds through the desert dumb ;
And over all the voice profound
Of the great cataract, high aloof,
Down flashing from the rock-wall roof.
Ill
The solemn Pass he erst had known
Seemed still as lovely, but more lone,
As westward on with weary pace
He travelled, and no human face
Looked on him, no sound met his ear
That told of man or far or near.
Late had waned the afternoon
Ere he reached Lochourn's rough shore,
No gleam by random breezes strewn
Flitted its dark face o'er ;
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 71
'Neath leaden sky, the waters roll'd
More drear and sullen than of old,
And the silence of all human sounds,
Since he had passed Glengarry bounds,
Lay heavy on his loaded breast
With something of a dim unrest.
But one bright gleam of western day
On the scarr'd forehead of Lurvein lay ;
And like an outstretched hand of hope
Seemed beckoning toward yonder cope
Of headland, that projects above
The sheltered home beside the burn,
Where first he met that young friend's love,
Who thither will no more return.
IV
But ere he reached the well-known spot,
This way and that he turned in thought
How 'neath that roof he should declare
The burden of the tale he bare ;
How show to those poor hearts forlorn
The frail memorials he had borne
From the far field by Ebro's wave,
Where Ronald fills a soldier's grave ;
The plaid, whose every thread was spun
By Muriel's fingers the holy book,
Which from his mother's hands the son
72 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Even at their last leave-taking took
The plaid, which Ronald oft had wound
'Neath cold night-heavens his breast around,
Discoloured, by the grape-shot torn,
In Angus' hands now homeward borne ;
That book he oft with reverent heed
By flickering camp-fires woke to read,
That tattered plaid, that treasured book,
Soiled with his latest life-blood's stains,
On these his loved ones' eyes must look
Their all of him that now remains.
Then rose his inward sight before
Those faces not as long ago
But the mother's high brow furrowed o'er
Deep with the charact'ry of woe,
Which suffering years must have graven there-
And Muriel's cheek, though pale still fair,
Her large blue eyes, thro' weeping dim,
Gazing on these last wrecks of him.
V
But when he reached that headland's crown,
And stood beside the sole pine-tree,
O'er the sheer precipice gazing down,
Ah ! what a sight was there to see !
Two roofless gables, gaping blank,
In the damp sea-winds moss-o'ergrown,
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 73
And choaked with growth of nettles rank
The home-floor, and once warm hearth-stone.
One look sufficed at once the whole
Sad history flashed upon his soul ;
He saw that household's ruined fate,
He knew that all was desolate.
With face to earth he cast him down,
As in a stupor long he lay,
And when he woke as from a swoon,
And looked abroad, last gleams of day
Even from the highest peaks were gone,
And the lone Loch lay shimmering wan ;
From that waste desolated shore
He turned away and looked no more.
VI
From that home, now no more a home,
Up through the dusky pines he clomb ;
Up and on, without let or bound,
On-clambering to the high lone ground
Where Knoydart, cloven by sheer defiles,
Yawns with torrent-roaring chasms,
Huddled screetan, 1 and rent rock-piles,
Nature's work in her wildest spasms :
There, as the darkness deeper fell
And going grew impossible,
1 Screetan^ see p. 31.
74 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Beneath a rock he laid his length,
As one bereft of hope and strength,
And if no further step he passed,
Content that this should be his last.
The hope, that had his heart sustained
Through years of toil, to ruin hurled
What shelter any more remained
In this forsaken world ?
What but to share with this poor home
The desolation of its doom ?
But they the true, the gentle-hearted,
To what strange bourne had they departed ?
Dwell they in noisome city pent ?
Or are they tenants now, where rent
None ask, in that drear place of graves,
Which Nevish-Loch at full-tide laves ?
Or dwell they far o'er ocean thrown
Like sea-waifs on some land unknown ?
VII
All through that night, I heard him tell,
Strange sounds upon his hearing fell,
Weirdlier sounds than shriek of owl,
Wild cats' scream, hill-foxes' howl,
As though the ancient mountains, rent
To their deep foundations, sent
On the midnight moan on moan,
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 75
Ghostly language of their own,
Converse terrible, austere,
Seldom heard by mortal ear.
Then in hurried blinks o' the moon
Cliff and crag dim-seen appeared
Haggard forms, like eldrich croon, 1
Or shapeless beings, vast and weird,
Formless passed before his face
Dwellers of that awesome place.
Angus had been used to bide
Foeman's shot and shell unmoved
Badajos Busaco tried,
And found his mettle unreproved.
Never before face of man
Had he quailed, but now there ran
Creepings cold thro' all his frame,
O'er his limbs strange trembling came,
And the hair upon his head
Rose erect with very dread
Of this place this awesome hour,
When the nether world had power.
All he had listened to, as a child,
Of mountain glamourie dark and wild,
To harrow up the soul with fear,
Now palpable to eye and ear,
Seemed gathered to confront him here.
1 Eldrich croon, Better explained as croon for crone, un-
earthly shape, as of an old woman.
76 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
VIII
Never stood he so aghast,
Never through such night had passed,
But the dawning came at last :
And when earliest streaks of light
The eastern peaks had silver-barred,
Behold ! his tarrying place all night
None other was than Mam-clach-ard.
Forward then, 'mid the glimmer of dawn,
Through the rough Pass he wandered on,
And one by one stars faded on high,
As the tide of light washed up the sky :
But when he reached the eastern door,
Where that high cloven Pass looks o'er
Lochiel's broad mountains, grisly and hoar,
The sun, new-ris'n from the under-world,
Had all the glens beneath outrolled,
Up the braes the mists had furled,
And touched their snowy fleeces with gold.
There far below, inlaid between
Steep mountain walls, lay calm and green
Glen Desseray, bright in morning sheen.
As down the rough track Angus trode
The path that led to his old abode,
Calm as of old the lone green glen
Lay stretched before him long miles ten ;
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 77
He looked, the braes as erst were fair,
But smoke none rose on the morning air ;
He listened, came no blithe cock-crowing
From wakening farms, no cattle-lowing,
No voice of man, no cry of child,
Blent with the loneness of the wild ;
Only the wind thro' the bent and ferns,
Only the moan of the corrie-burns.
IX
Can it be ? doth this silence tell
The same sad tale as yester-eve ?
My clansmen here who wont to dwell
Have they too ta'en their last long leave ?
Adown this glen too, hath there been
The besom of destruction keen
Sweeping it of its people clean ?
That anxious tremour in his breast
One half-hour onward set at rest :
Where once his home had been, now stare
Two gables, roofless, gaunt, and bare ;
Two gables, and a broken wall,
Are all now left of Sheniebhal,
The huts around of the old farm-toun,
Wherein the poorer tenants dwelt,
Moss-covered stone-heaps, crumbling down,
Into the wilderness slowly melt.
78 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
The slopes below, where had gardens been,
Lay thick with rushes darkly green,
The furrows on the braes above
Where erst the flax and the barley throve,
With ferns and heather covered o'er,
To Nature had gone back once more.
And there beneath, the meadow lay,
The long smooth reach of meadowy ground,
Where intertwining east away
In loop on loop the river wound :
There, where he heard a former day
The blithe, loud shouting, shinty play,
Was silence now as the grave profound.
A few steps led to the Mound of the Cave,
A hillock strewn with many a grave,
Lone place, to which some far and faint
Remembrance of Columban Saint
Come, ages gone, from the Isle of Y, 1
Gave immemorial sanctity.
There children lost in life's first day
Whom to Kilmallie (that long way),
They did not bear, were laid to sleep,
That o'er them kindred watch might keep,
And mothers thither steal to weep.
There he himself in childhood's morn
Had seen two infants, younger-born,
1 F, corruptly called lona.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 79
His own sweet brothers, laid to rest ;
And now he came in loving quest
To see their little graves, but they
From sight had melted quite away,
'Neath touch of time's obscure effacing
Had passed unto the waste around,
And now no eye could mark the tracing
'Twixt holy earth, and common ground.
X
Then looking back with one wide ken,
Where stood the Farms, each side the glen
Tom-na-hua, Cuil, Glach-fern,
Each he clearly could discern ;
Once groups of homes, wherein did dwell
The people he had known so well,
These stood blank skeletons, one and all,
Like his own home, Sheniebhal ;
And he sighed as he gazed on the pathways
untrodden,
" These be the homes of the men of Culloden ! "
" This desolation ! whence hath come ?
What power hath hushed this living glen
Once blithe with happy sounds of men
Into a wilderness blank and dumb ?
Alas for them ! leal souls and true !
Kindred and clansmen whom I knew !
So GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Their homes stand roofless on the brae,
And the hearts that loved them, where are they ?
Ah me ! what days with them I've seen
On the summer braes at the shealings green !
What nights of winter dark and long
Made brief and bright by the joy of song !
The men in peace so gentle and mild,
In battle onset lion-wild,
When the pibroch of Donald Dhu
Sounded the summons of Lochiel,
From these homes to his standard flew,
By him stood through woe and weal,
Against Clan-Chattan, age by age
Held his ancient heritage :
And when the Stuart cause was down,
And Lochiel rose for King and Crown,
Who like these same Cameron men
Gave their gallant heart-blood pure
At Inverlochy, Killiecrankie,
Preston-pans, Culloden Muir ?
And when red vengeance on -the Gael
Fell bloody, did their fealty fail ?
Did they not screen with lives of men
Their outlawed Prince in desert and den ?
And when their Chief fled far away,
Who were his sole support but they ?
Alas for them ! those faithful men !
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 81
And this is all reward they have !
These unroofed homes, this emptied glen
A forlorn exile, then the grave."
XI
That night, as October winds were tiding l
The birchen woods down Lochiel's long shore,
The wan, dead leaves on the rain-blast whirling,
A low knock came to our cottage door.
" Lift the latch, bid him welcome," cried my sire.
Straight a plaided stranger entered in,
And we saw by the light of the red peat fire,
A long, lank form, and a visage thin.
We children stared as tho' a ghost
Had crossed the door on that face unknown ;
But my father cried " O loved and lost !
That voice, my brother, is thine own."
Then each on the other's neck they fell,
And long embraced, and wept aloud ;
We children stood I remember well
Our heads in wondering silence bowed.
But when our uncle raised his head,
Gazing around the house, he said
" I've travelled down Glen Desseray bare,
Looked on our desolate home to-day,
But those my heart most longed for, where ?
1 Tirling, slightly touching, thrilling.
82 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
Father and mother, where are they ?
For them has their own country found
No home, save underneath the ground ? "
" Too truly has your heart divined,"
My father answered him, " for they
Came hither but not long to stay
With the fall o' the year away they dwined,
Not loth another home to find,
Where none could say them nay.
Above their heads to-night the sward
Is green in Kilmallie's old kirkyard."
XII
In vain for him the board we strewed,
He little cared for rest or food
On this alone intent to know,
Whence had come the ruin and woe.
" Tell me, O tell me whence," he cried,
" Hath spread this desolation wide ;
What ministers of dark despair
From nether pit or upper air
On the poor country of the Gael,
Have breathed this blasting blight and bale.
By lone Lochourn, too, I have been,
And Runieval in ruin seen ;
I know that home is desolate
Tell me the dwellers' earthly fate."
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 83
" Ah, these are gone, with many more,"
My father said, " to a far-off shore,
By some great lake, whereof we know
Only the name Ontario.
They tell us there are broad lands there,
Whereof whoever will may share,
Great forests trees of giant stem
Glen-mallie pines are naught to them.
But of all that we nothing know,
Save the great name, Ontario."
" But whence came all this ruin ? Tell
From whom the cruel outrage fell,
On our poor people." With a sigh
My father fain had put him by ;
" A tale so full of sorrow and wrong,
To-night to tell were all too long,
Weary and hungry thou need'st must be
Sit down at the board we have spread for thee ! "
I wot we had spread it of our best.
But for him our dainties had little zest ;
Nor would he eat or drink, until
Of that dark tale he had heard his fill.
XIII
Not many days my father's roof
That soldier-brother could retain ;
To wander to far lands aloof
84 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
His heart was on the strain.
But while within our home he stayed,
He turned him every day,
To where, in sombre beech-trees' shade
His parents both are lowly laid,
'Neath mountain flag-stone grey.
The last time that he lingered there,
Some moss he gathered from the grave,
The one memorial he could bear,
Where'er his wandering feet might fare,
Beyond the western wave.
And then he left my father's door,
And bidding farewell evermore
To dwellers on this mountain shore,
He set his face to that world afar,
On which descends the evening star.
We never knew what there befell
Some said that he found Muriel,
With her old parents yet alive,
Where still Glengarry clansmen thrive,
And there, on great Ontario's side,
He led her home, his wedded bride.
But others whispered 'twas not so
That ere he came her head was low,
And nothing left him but to keep,
Far in primeval forest deep,
Watch o'er his loved one's lonely sleep.
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 85
And her poor parents' age to tend,
Till they should to the grave descend.
Authentic voice none o'er the sea
Came, telling how these things might be
His fate in that far land was dumb,
And silent as the world to come.
We only know such fervent thought
Of all the past within him wrought,
That, ere he sailed, he turned aside,
That dreary moor to wander o'er,
Where the last gleam of Albyn's pride
In blood went down to rise no more ;
And while the bark on Moray Firth,
That bore him from his native earth,
Waited the breeze to fill her sail,
This coronach, this woful wail,
He breathed for the down-trodden Gael.
i
The moorland wide, and waste, and brown,
Heaves far and near, and up and down
Few trenches green the desert crown,
And these are the graves of Culloden !
2
What mournful thoughts to me they yield,
Gazing with sorrow yet unhealed,
On Scotland's last and saddest field
O ! the desolate Moor of Culloden !
86 GLEN DESSERAY, OR
3
Ah me ! what carnage vain was there !
What reckless fury mad despair !
On this wide moor such odds to dare
O, the wasted lives of Culloden !
4
For them laid there, the brave and young,
How many a mother's heart was wrung !
How many a coronach sad was sung,
O, the green, green graves of Culloden
5
What boots it now to point and tell,
Here the Clan Chattan bore them well,
Shame-maddened, yonder Keppoch fell
Lavish of life on Culloden.
Here Camerons clove the red line through,
There Stuarts dared what men could do,
Charged lads of Athole, staunch and true,
To the cannon mouths on Culloden.
7
In vain the wild onset in vain
Claymores cleft English skulls in twain
THE SEQUEL OF CULLODEN 87
The cannon fire poured in like rain,
Mowing down the clans on Culloden.
8
Through all the glens, from shore to shore,
What wailing went ! but that is o'er
Hearts now are cold, that once were sore,
For the loved ones lost on Culloden.
9
The Highlands all one hunting ground,
Where men are few, and deer abound,
And desolation broods profound
O'er the homes of the men of Culloden.
10
That, too, will pass the hunter's deer,
The drover's sheep will disappear,
But when another race will you rear,
Like the men that died at Culloden ?
88
THE MOUNTAIN WALK
PART I
FROM beaten paths and common tasks reprieved,
My face I set towards the lonely grounds
Where Moidart and Lochaber, northward heaved,
Meet with rough Knoydart bounds.
And with me went an aged man on whom
Still lightly hung his threescore years and ten,
Intent to see once more before the tomb
His long-unpeopled glen.
O'er "Faeth," 2 " Maam," " Gual," each shape of
mountain-pass,
From morn to eve, an autumn day we clomb
A lone waste wilderness where no man was,
Nor any human home ;
And looked o'er mountain backs, misty or bared,
Ridged multitudinous to the northern bourn,
1 See Note at end.
2 In Gaelic Felth, sluggish pool in marshy moorland ; Mam,
high rounded hill ; Guala, high ridge, literally shoulder.
THE MOUNTAIN WALK 89
Where high o'er all the great scours l watch and guard
Loch Nevish and Lochourn ;
Saw far to west through yawning gaps upleap
Dark Moidart mountains with their clov'n defiles,
And here and there let in the great blue deep,
With the far outer Isles ;
While close beneath our feet clear streams were
flowing
Down long glens walled the steep dark hills between,
With their long streaks of grassy margin glowing
Bright with resplendent sheen.
And by the stream's grass-mounds and grey-mossed
heaps
Lay, once the homes where thriving men had been,
And far up corries, 2 where the white burn leaps,
Were pleasant airidhs 3 green.
But no smoke rose from any old abode ;
From the green summer shealings came no song,
No face of man looked on us where we trode,
From dawn to gloamin' long.
Only high up hoarse-barking raven's croak
Knelled on the iron crags, or glead's wild screams,
1 Scours, here used for rocky frowning heights.
2 Carries, hillside hollows. 3 Airidhs, shealing-pastures.
90 THE MOUNTAIN WALK
And down the awful precipices broke
The everlasting streams ;
The while the old man told how times remote
Had named the balloch 1 from some famous man,
Slain in old battle when the Camerons smote
Their foes of Chattan clan ;
Or on " the squally shoulder " he would pause,
And, pointing to grey stones, would whisper, " Here
The mourners builded Evan's cairn, because
They rested with his bier
" On the long journey from his native glen,
Down to his last home by the sea-loch side ; "
And, " There by night and weariness o'erta'en,
Long since a shepherd died."
And then more lightly, " O'er these very knowes 2
I ran the browse 3 upon my wedding-day
With other lads to win my young bride's house,
Now fifty years away."
Late in the afternoon my steps he stayed
On a high mountain pass, and bade me look,
Where the burn, plunging from the height, had made
One small and sheltered nook :
1 Balloch, narrow pass. 2 Knowes, knolls.
3 Browse, horse race run sometimes at country weddings.
THE MOUNTAIN WALK 91
"Beneath that bank we rested us at eve,
The first day's weary journey ended, when
Full sixty years since we were forced to leave
For ever our dear glen.
" A day it was of lamentation sore,
As we set face against the steep ascent,
Slowly the lowing cattle moved before,
Behind we weeping went.
" And well we might ; the old folk from that day
Found never home like that they had resigned ;
And we thenceforth our happy childhood lay
In that far glen behind."
And so with talk like this the day wore on,
No rock unnamed, no cairn without its tale,
Till, from the western scours 1 the last gleams gone,
To the deep-shadowed vale
Down through Leaena-vaata slow we passed,
" The hollow of the wolf," so named of old,
Since hunters there o'ertook and slew the last
Grim spoiler of the fold.
There where Loch Aragat hath his utmost bound
And from the western glens the waters meet,
Beneath the kindly shepherd's roof we found
Welcome, and warm retreat.
1 Scours, here used for mountain-tops.
92 THE MOUNTAIN WALK
PART II
All night enfolded in the lap of Bens, 1
Around our sleep the loud and lulling sound
Of many waters meeting from the glens
Made lullaby profound.
Next day the westering morn our guide we make,
Where a strong stream in jambs of granite pent,
From pool to pool, down-plunging to the lake,
Hath grooved itself a vent.
That strait throat passed, back falls the mountain's
bound,
Before us there out-spread in silence, lay,
With loop on loop of river interwound,
Long, green Glen Desseray.
A long, flat, meadowy, strath of natural grass,
Where calm, from side to side, the river flows,
After the turmoil of yon splintered pass,
Loitering in slow repose.
Each side steep mountain-flanks wall the green flat,
To west the long glen closes, grimly barred
By the stern-precipiced shelves of Scour-na-naat
And by dark Maam-clach-ard.
1 Ben, mountain-head ; by metaphor used for the mountain
itself.
THE MOUNTAIN WALK 93
There as we stood on the mute glen to gaze
The old man pointed to the hillocks green,
Where, either side the strath, in former days,
The Clansmen's homes had been ;
Homes that had reared the Camerons, who in old
Centuries of ceaseless battle, true and leal,
Against Clan Chattan had been brave to hold
His country for Lochiel ;
Who, in the latest rising of the clans,
For King and Chief, devoted hearts and pure,
Had led the crashing charge at Preston-pans,
Died on Culloden moor.
For all those homesteads only here and there
A gaunt, grey, weathered gable for the hum
Of many human voices, on the air
Blank, aweful silence dumb.
Only the hill-burns down the corries broke,
Only one hern harsh-screaming from the fen,
And but one shepherd's solitary smoke,
Far in the upper glen.
Then, one by one, the old man, sad at heart,
Pointed the stances, 1 where in childhood time
From four blithe farm-towns, each a mile apart,
He had seen the blue smoke climb.
1 Stances, sites.
94 THE MOUNTAIN WALK
Two on the north side, dry on ferny knowes,
The noonday sun had welcomed with frank look,
The southern two, withdrawn 'neath high-hill brows,
Each cower'd in bielded J nook.
Then closer drawing 'neath rank weeds he showed
The larachs 2 of the homes, wall, hearth and floor,
Where in each town large brotherhoods abode,
Twelve families and more.
And as he traced each home, the names he told
Of men and women who there once had been,
How lived and died they in wild days of old,
What weirdly sights had seen.
And last he led me to his own farm-town,
Even to his father's home there lay the hearth
Grey-lichened, walls around it crumbled down,
Till all but blent with earth.
"There yawned the window to the crag behind,
Through which my grandsire gallant burst away,
When two red-coats, who had him in the wind,
After Culloden day,
" The threshold crossed to seize him ; fleet of foot,
He took the crag they fired and missed their aim,
1 Bielded, sheltered. 2 Larachs, foundations.
THE MOUNTAIN WALK 95
Then, throwing down their guns, in hot pursuit,
Fast on his track they came.
" He slacked his speed, and let the foremost near,
Then heaved a slag l of rock, and laid him low ;
The chase was over he left free from fear,
Forth to the hills to go."
And then, with lowered voice and deepened feeling,
Pointing one spot upon the floor, he said,
" Here on these very stones we bairns were kneeling,
And there my father prayed,
" One stormy Sabbath-night, when wild winds hurried
A loosened snow-heap from the crag, and o'er
The rigging 2 rolled it clean, and deeply buried
The house, and blocked the door
" With a great boulder. 33 These and many more
Tales through the glen beguiled us west away
O'er Maam-clach-ard to dark Loch Nevish 3 s shore
Down with declining day.
There, 3 neath a roof, where people of the old kind
Still keep the ancient faith, through the deep calm,
All night we heard the cataracts behind
Down-thundering from the Maam ;
1 Slag, loose fragment. 2 Rigging, roof.
96 THE MOUNTAIN WALK
The while they told how oft when no wind stirred;
Unearthly sounds the mountain stillness rent
At midnight, by belated travellers heard,
As through the Maam they went ;
And apparitions when the spirit fled,
Crossing the gaze of melancholy seers,
And trystings where the living met the dead
By lonely mountain meres ;
All the weird, visionary lore that lives
Still by the dim lochs of the western sea,
And to that region and its people gives
Strange eerie glamourie.
Next morn we clomb the Maam with eastward foot
And walked the higher ranges of the glen,
Looked on green summer shealings, long left mute
By old Glen-Desseray men.
One last look back there lay the glen inlaid
Deep in its walling hills a meadowy strath,
Through which in loop on loop the river strayed,
A slowly- winding path.
And all the west, jagg'd precipices riven
With gorge and gully and ravine black-gloomed,
Closed in above them in the twilight heaven
The great peaks ghostly loomed.
THE MOUNTAIN WALK 97
All these days, as we wandered, morn to eve,
The old man, piece by piece, the tale unrolled,
How once the Cameron clansmen wont to live
Within these glens of old.
Things too his grandsire and his sire had seen,
After Culloden, till the ruthless time
That swept the glens of all their people clean,
Things mute in prose or rhyme.
Written before 1870.
9 8
A DREAM OF GLEN-SALLACH l
THAT summer glen is far away,
Who loved me then, their graves are green,
But still that dell and distant day,
Lie bright in memory's softest sheen.
Are these still there, outspread in space,
The grey mossed-trees, the mountain stream ?
Or in some ante-natal place,
That only cometh back in dream ?
There first upon my soul was cast
Dim reverence, blent with glorious thrills,
From out an old heroic past,
Lapped in the older calm of hills.
Still after thirty summers loom
On dreaming hours the lichened trees,
The ivied walls, the warrior's tomb,
'Mid those old mountain sanctities.
How awed I stood ! where once had kneeled
The pilgrims by the holy well,
1 See Note at end.
A DREAM OF GLEN-SALLACH 99
O'er which, through centuries unrepealed,
Rome's consecration still doth dwell.
How crept among the broken piles !
And clansmen's grave-stones moss-o'ergrown,
Where rests the Lord of all the Isles,
With plaid and claymore graven in stone.
In deep of noon, mysterious dread
Fell on me in that glimmering glen,
Till, as from haunted ground, I fled
Back to the kindly homes of men.
Thanks to that glen ! its scenery blends
With childhood's most ideal hour,
When Highland hills I made my friends,
First owned their beauty, felt their power.
Still, doubtless, o'er Kilbrannan Sound,
As lovely lights from Arran gleam,
'Mid hills that gird Glen-Sallach round,
As happy children dream their dream.
The western sea, as deep of tone,
Is murmuring 'gainst that caverned shore ;
But, one whole generation gone,
No more those haunts are ours, no more.
This poem, and the six following, were published in 1864.
100
THE MOOR OF RANNOCH
O'ER the dreary moor of Rannoch
Calm these hours of Sabbath shine ;
But no kirk-bell here divideth
Week-day toil from rest divine.
Ages pass, but save the tempest,
Nothing here makes toil or haste ;
Busy weeks nor restful Sabbath
Visit this abandoned waste.
Long ere prow of earliest savage
Grated on blank Albyn's shore,
Lay these drifts of granite boulders,
Weather-bleached and lichened o'er.
Beuchaille Etive's furrowed visage,
To Schihallion looked sublime,
O'er a wide and wasted desert,
Old and unreclaimed as time.
THE MOOR OF RANNOCH 101
Yea ! a desert wide and wasted,
Washed by rain-floods to the bones ;
League on league of heather blasted,
Storm-gashed moss, grey boulder-stones ;
And along these dreary levels,
As by some stern destiny placed,
Yon sad lochs of black moss water
Grimly gleaming on the waste ;
East and west, and northward sweeping,
Limitless the mountain plain,
Like a vast low heaving ocean,
Girdled by its mountain chain :
Plain, o'er which the kingliest eagle,
Ever screamed by dark Lochowe,
Fain would droop a laggard pinion,
Ere he touched Ben-Aulder's brow :
Mountain-girdled, there Bendoran
To Schihallion calls aloud,
Beckons he to lone Ben-Aulder,
He to Nevis crowned with cloud.
Cradled here old Highland rivers,
Etive, Cona, regal Tay,
Like the shout of clans to battle,
Down the gorges break away.
102 THE MOOR OF RANNOCH
And the Atlantic sends his pipers
Up yon thunder-throated glen,
O'er the moor at midnight sounding
Pibrochs never heard by men.
Clouds, and mists, and rains before them
Crowding to the wild wind tune,
Here to wage their all-night battle,
Unbeheld by star and moon.
Loud the while down all his hollows,
Flashing with a hundred streams,
Corrie-bah from out the darkness
To the desert roars and gleams.
Sterner still, more drearly driven,
There o' nights the north wind raves,
His long homeless lamentation,
As from Arctic seamen's graves.
Till his mighty snow-sieve shaken
Down hath blinded all the lift, 1
Hid the mountains, plunged the moorland
Fathom-deep in mounded drift.
Such a time, while yells of slaughter
Burst at midnight on Glencoe,
Hither flying babes and mothers
Perished 'mid the waste of snow.
1 Lift, sky.
I/
THE MOOR OF RANNOCH 103
Countless storms have scrawled unheeded
Characters o'er these houseless moors ;
But that night engraven forever
In all human hearts endures.
Yet the heaven denies not healing
To the darkest human things,
And to-day some kindlier feeling
Sunshine o'er the desert flings.
Though the long deer-grass is moveless,
And the corrie-burns l are dry ;
Music comes in gleams and shadows
Woven beneath the dreaming eye.
Desert not deserted wholly !
Where such calms as these can come,
Never tempest more majestic
Than this boundless silence dumb.
1 Corrie-burn, stream in hollow on hillside.
io 4
THE LASS OF LOCH LINNE
THE spray may drive, the rain may pour,
Knee-deep in brine, what careth she ?
Her brother's boat she'll drag to shore,
Aloud she'll sing her Highland glee.
Her feet and head alike all bare,
A drenched plaid swathed about her form,
Around her floats the Highland air,
Within the Highland blood beats warm.
All night they've toiled and not in vain :
To count and store the fish be thine ;
Then drench thy clothes in morning rain,
And dry them in the noon sunshine !
The gleam breaks through, the day will clear,
Then to the peats up yonder glen ;
O there is life and freedom here !
That cannot breathe 'mid throngs of men.
THE LASS OF LOCH LINNE 105
What has thy life and history been ?
Brave lass upon this wind-beat shore !
I may not guess at distance seen,
A nameless image, and no more.
Sweet chime the sea beside thy home,
Thy fire blink bright on heartsome meal !
No more of dearth or clearance come
To darken down thine own Lochiel !
io6
THE FOREST OF SLI'-GAOIL
THAT IS, THE HILL OF LOVE l
IN this bare treeless forest lone,
By winds Atlantic overblown,
I sit and hear the weird wind pass
Drearily through the long bent-grass ;
And think how that low sighing heard
By Ossian, when no wind was stirred,
Filled his old sightless eyes with tears,
His soul with thoughts of other years,
For the spirits of the men he mourned
In that low eerie sound returned.
And doth not this bleak forest ground
Live in old epic song renowned ?
Of him the chief who came of yore
To -hunting of the mighty boar,
And left the deed, to float along
The dateless stream of Highland song,
A maid's lorn love, a chiefs death-toil,
Still speaking in thy name, Sli'-gaoil!
1 See Note at end.
THE FOREST OF SLI'-GAOIL 107
Well now may harp of Ossian moan,
Through long bent-grass and worn grey stone :
But how could song so long ago,
Come loaded with still elder wo ?
Were then, as now, these hills o'ercast
With shadows of some long-gone past ?
Did winds, that wandered o'er them, chime
Melodies of a lorn foretime ?
As now, the very mountain burns
For something sigh that not returns ?
io8
RETURN TO NATURE
ON the braes l around Glenfinnan
Fast the human homes are thinning,
And the wilderness is winning
To itself these graves again.
Names or dates here no man knoweth,
O'er grey headstones heather groweth,
Up Loch-Shiel the sea-wind bloweth
Over sleep of nameless men.
Who were those forgotten sleepers ?
Herdsmen strong, fleet forest-keepers,
Aged men, or widowed weepers
For their foray-fallen ones ?
Babes cut off 'mid childhood's prattle,
Men who lived with herds and cattle,
Clansmen from Culloden battle,
Camerons, or Clandonald's sons ?
Blow ye winds, and rains effacing !
Blur the words of love's fond tracing !
1 Braes, hillsides.
RETURN TO NATURE 109
Nature to herself embracing
All that human hearts would keep :
What they knew of good or evil
Faded, like the dim primeval
Day that saw the vast upheaval
Of these hills that hold their sleep..
1 10
CAILLEACH BEIN-Y-VREICH 1
WEIRD wife of Bein-y-Vreich ! horo ! horo !
Aloft in the mist she dwells ;
Vreich horo ! Vreich horo ! Vreich horo !
All alone by the lofty wells.
Weird, weird wife ! with the long grey locks,
She follows her fleet-foot stags,
Noisily moving through splintered rocks,
And crashing the grisly crags.
Tall wife ! with the long grey hose, in haste
The rough stony beach she walks ;
But dulse 2 or seaweed she will not taste,
Nor yet the green kail stalks.
And I will not let my herds of deer,
My bonny red deer go down ;
I will not let them down to the shore,
To feed on the sea-shells brown.
O better they love in the corrie's recess,
Or on mountain top to dwell,
1 See Note at end. 2 Dulse, sea-celery.
CAILLEACH BEIN-Y-VREICH in
And feed by my side on the green green cress,
That grows by the lofty well.
Broad Bein-y-Vreich is grisly and drear,
But wherever my feet have been,
The well-springs start for my darling deer,
And the grass grows tender and green.
And there high up on the calm nights clear,
Beside the lofty spring,
They come to my call, and I milk them there,
And a weird wild song I sing.
But when hunter men round my dun deer prowl,
I will not let them nigh ;
Through the rended cloud I cast one scowl,
They faint on the heath and die.
And when the north wind o'er the desert bare
Drives loud, to the corries below
I drive my herds down, and bield 1 them there
From the drifts of the blinding snow.
Then I mount the blast, and we ride full fast,
And laugh as we stride the storm,
I, and the witch of the Cruachan Ben,
And the scowling-eyed Seul-Gorm.
1 Bield, shelter.
112
DESOLATION
BY the wee birchen corries lie patches of green,
Where gardens and bareheaded bairnies have been,
But the huts now are rickles * of stones nettle-grown,
And the once human homes, e'en their names are
unknown.
But the names that this side the Atlantic have perished,
'Mid far western forests still dearly are cherished,
There men talk of each spot, on the hills that surround
Their long vanished dwellings, as paradise ground.
Not a pass in these hills, not a cairn, nor a corrie,
But lives by the log-fire in legend and story ;
And darkly the cloud on their countenance gathers,
As they think on those desolate homes of their
fathers.
O hearts, to the hills of old memory true !
In the land of your love there are mourners for you,
1 Rickles, heaps.
DESOLATION 113
As they wander by peopleless lochside and glen,
Where the red deer are feeding o'er homesteads of
men.
For the stillness they feel o'er the wilderness spread
Is not nature's own silence, but that of the dead ;
E'en the lone piping plover, and small corrie burn
Seem sighing for those that will never return.
A CRY FROM CRAIG-ELLACHIE
COMPOSED AFTER TRAVELLING TO INVERNESS FOR THE FIRST
TIME IN THE NEWLY-OPENED HIGHLAND RAILWAY, 1864
I
LAND of bens and glens and corries
