Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets Part 31

They spent part of the year 1819 in Florence, where Sh.e.l.ley pa.s.sed several hours dayly in the Gallery, studying the works of art, and making notes. The summer of 1820 was spent chiefly at the Baths of Guiliano, near Pisa, where Sh.e.l.ley made a solitary journey on foot during some of the hottest weather of the season to the summit of Monte San Pelegrino, a mountain on which stands a pilgrimage chapel, much frequented; and during this expedition he conceived the idea of The Witch of Atlas, and immediately on his return sat down and wrote it in three days. An overflowing of the Serchio inundated the house, and caused them to quit San Guiliano: they returned to Pisa.

In 1821, the Spanish Revolution excited throughout Italy a similar spirit. In Naples, Genoa, Piedmont, almost every where, the spirit of revolt showed itself; and Sh.e.l.ley, still at Pisa, sympathized enthusiastically with these movements. Then came the news of the Greek insurrection, and the battle of Navarino, which put the climax to his joy; and in this exultation he wrote h.e.l.las. These circ.u.mstances seem to have given a new life to him. He had now his new boat, and was sailing it on the Arno. It was a pleasant summer, says Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, bright in all but Sh.e.l.ley's health; yet he enjoyed himself greatly. He was in high antic.i.p.ation of the arrival of Leigh Hunt; and at this juncture, the now happy poet and his family made their last remove. Let us give the deeply interesting picture of Sh.e.l.ley's last home in the words of his gifted wife.

"The Bay of Spezia is of considerable extent, and is divided by a rocky promontory into a larger and a smaller one. The town of Lerici is situated on the eastern point, and in the depth of the smaller bay, which bears the name of this town, is the village of Sant Arenzo. Our house, Casa Magni, was close to this village; the sea came up to the door, a steep hill sheltered it behind. The proprietor of the estate was insane; he had begun to erect a large house at the summit of the hill behind, but his malady prevented its being finished, and it was falling into ruin. He had, and this, to the Italians, seemed a glaring symptom of decided madness, rooted up the olives on the hill-side, and planted forest trees. These were mostly young; but the plantation was more in English taste than I ever saw elsewhere in Italy. Some fine walnut and ilex trees intermingled their dark, ma.s.sy foliage, and formed groups which still haunt my memory, as then they satiated the eye with a sense of loveliness. The scene was, indeed, of unimaginable beauty; the blue extent of waters, the almost land-locked bay, the near Castle of Lerici, shutting it in to the east, and distant Porto Venere to the west; the various forms of precipitous rocks that bound in the beach, near which there was only a winding, rugged path toward Lerici, and none on the other side; the tideless sea, leaving no sands nor s.h.i.+ngle, formed a picture such as one sees in Salvator Rosa's landscapes only. Sometimes the suns.h.i.+ne vanished when the sirocco raged--the ponente, the wind was called on that sh.o.r.e. The gales and squalls that hailed our first arrival surrounded the bay with foam; the howling wind swept round our exposed house, and the sea roared unremittingly, so that we almost fancied ourselves on board s.h.i.+p. At other times suns.h.i.+ne and calm invested sea and sky, and the rich tints of Italian heaven bathed the scene in bright and ever-varying hues.

"The natives were wilder than the place. Our near neighbors, of Sant Arenzo, were more like savages than any people I ever before lived among. Many a night they pa.s.sed on the beach, singing, or, rather, howling; the women dancing about among the waves that broke at their feet, the men leaning against the rocks, and joining in their loud, wild chorus. We could get no provisions nearer than Sarzana, at a distance of three miles and a half off, with the torrent of the Margra between; and even there the supply was deficient. Had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas, we could scarcely have felt ourselves further from civilization and comfort; but where the sun s.h.i.+nes, the latter becomes an unnecessary luxury, and we had enough society among ourselves. Yet, I confess, housekeeping became rather a toilsome task, especially as I was suffering in my health, and could not exert myself actively."

To this wild region they had come to indulge Sh.e.l.ley's pa.s.sion for boating. News came of Leigh Hunt having arrived at Pisa. Sh.e.l.ley, and his friend Captain Ellerker Williams, set out to welcome him, and were on their return to Lerici when the fatal squall came on, and they went down in a moment. The particulars of that event, and the singular scene of the burning of the body by his friends, Byron, Hunt, Trelawney, and Captain Shenley, have been so vividly related by Mr. Hunt as to be familiar to every one. Sh.e.l.ley had gone down with the last volume of Keats, the Lamia, &c., in his jacket pocket, where it was found open.

The bodies came on sh.o.r.e near Via Reggio, but had been so long in the sea as to be much decomposed. Wood was therefore collected on the strand, and they were burned in the old cla.s.sical style. The magnificent Bay of Spezia, says Mr. Hunt, is on the right of this spot, Leghorn on the left, at equal distances of about twenty-two miles. The headlands projecting boldly and far into the sea, form a deep and dangerous gulf, with a heavy swell and a strong current generally running right into it.

So ended this extraordinary man his short, but eventful and influential life; and his ashes were buried near his friend John Keats, under a beautiful ruined tower in the English burial-ground at Rome. It was remarkable, that Sh.e.l.ley always said that no presentiment of evil ever came to him except as an unusual elevation of spirits. When he was last seen, just before his embarking for his return, he was said to be in most brilliant spirits. On the contrary, Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley says, "If ever shadow of evil darkened the present hour, such was over my mind when they went. During the whole of our stay at Lerici an intense presentiment of coming evil brooded over my mind, and covered this beautiful place and genial summer with the shadow of coming misery. * *

A vague expectation of evil shook me to agony, and I could scarcely bring myself to let them go." The very beauty of the place, she says, seemed unearthly in its excess; the distance they were from all signs of civilization, the sea at their feet, its murmurings or its roarings forever in their ears, led the mind to brood over strange thoughts, and, lifting it from every-day life, caused it to be familiar with the unreal. "Sh.e.l.ley," she adds, "had now, as it seemed, almost antic.i.p.ated his own destiny; and when the mind figures his skiff wrapped from sight by the thunder-storm, as it was last seen upon the purple sea, and then as the cloud of the tempest pa.s.sed away, no sign remained of where it had been--who but will regard as a prophecy the last stanza of the Adonais?

'The breath, whose might I have invoked in song, Descend upon me: my spirit's bark is driven Far from the sh.o.r.e, far from the trembling throng, Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The ma.s.sy earth and sphered skies are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; While burning through the inmost veil of heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.'"

LORD BYRON.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

In The Rural Life of England, I have already recorded my visits to two of the most interesting haunts of Lord Byron--Newstead Abbey and Annesley Hall. In this paper we will take a more chronological and consecutive survey of his haunts and abodes.

Lord Byron was, it appears, born in London, in lodgings in Holles-street, as his mother was on her way from France to Scotland. His mother, whose history and ill-starred marriage are well known through Moore's life of the poet, had accompanied her husband to France soon after their marriage, to avoid the swarm of claimants on her property, the creditors of her dissipated husband, which that marriage had brought upon her. The Byrons, who had inherited the estate of Newstead, in Nottinghams.h.i.+re, since the reign of Henry VIII., when it was granted to Sir John Byron, generally called The Little Sir John Byron, had distinguished themselves greatly in the civil wars, but had of late years been much more conspicuous for their poverty and eccentricity.

Commodore Byron, whose name will always be remembered from the narrative of the sufferings of himself and crew, in consequence of the wreck of the Wager, and who was still better known by the name of "Foul-weather Jack," from the singular fact that he never put to sea, even when holding the rank of admiral, and in command of the fleet for the protection of the West Indies, without encountering the most tempestuous weather, was his grandfather. His father, Captain Byron, appears to have been one of the most unprincipled and dissipated men of his day. He ran off with the wife of Lord Carmarthen to the Continent; and this, of course, leading to a divorce, he married Lady Carmarthen, and had by her one daughter, the present Hon. Augusta Leigh, the wife of Colonel Leigh.

Lady Carmarthen did not live long; and covered with debt, and pursued by hungry creditors, Captain Byron looked out for some woman of fortune to victimize to his own comfort. This species of legalized robbery, that is, of selecting a simple and unsuspecting woman to plunder under the sanction of the laws, instead of running the hazard of hanging or transportation by the more vulgar method of highway robbery, house-breaking, or forgery, is one so fas.h.i.+onable, that a man like Captain Byron was not likely to boggle at it. Of all species of theft, it is the most dastardly and despicable, because it is performed under the sacred name of affection. The vampire who means to suck the blood of the selected victim, makes his approach with flatteries and vows of the deepest attachment, of the most eternal tenderness, and protection from the ills of life. He wins the heart of the confiding woman by the basest lies, and then deliberately proceeds to the altar to p.r.o.nounce before the all-seeing G.o.d the same falsehood, "to love and comfort," and "cherish till death," the helpless creature that is binding herself for life to ruin and deception. One would think it were enough for a man to feel, as he stands thus before G.o.d and man, that he is a mere seeker of creature comforts and worldly honor while he is wedding a rich wife; but knowingly to have picked out his prey under the pretense of loving her above all of her s.e.x, in order to hand over her estate to his creditors, to defray the scores of his gambling and licentiousness, that characterizes a monster of so revolting a kind, that nothing but the gradual corruption of society through the medium of conventionalism could save him from the expatriating execrations of his fellows. There are cases of peculiar aggravation of this kind, those where the property of the victim is almost wholly demanded for the liquidation of the demon-lover's debts, and the wife is left to instantaneous beggary. The marriage of Captain Byron was one very much of this kind. His wife's most convertible property, as bank shares, salmon fisheries, money securities, were hastily disposed of; then went the timber from her estates, then the estates themselves, all amounting to probably 30,000, leaving her a mere annuity of 123! The property gone to this mite, the harpy husband still hung upon her, and upbraided her with the want of further means to contribute to his reckless riot. With cash extorted from her now severe poverty, he at length luckily departed again for the Continent, and died at Valenciennes in 1791, when Byron was three years old.

Such were the circ.u.mstances in which Lord Byron entered the world. If he were the prey of violent pa.s.sions; if he, too, had a tendency to dissipation; if he, in future years, followed his father's example, though not to so culpable a degree, and married an heiress,

"And spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste,"

there may be some excuse for him, drawn from hereditary taint. His father was not the solitary instance of irregularity, violent pa.s.sions, and wastefulness. His great-uncle, to whose t.i.tle and diminished property he succeeded, was of the like stamp. His violence had led to his wife's separation from him; he had killed his next neighbor, Mr.

Chaworth, in a duel; he had shot his coachman; he had hewed down extensive plantations on his estate, with the avowed purpose of preventing his son's enjoyment of their profit, because he had offended him. This son, and also his grandson, died before him, and the wifeless and childless old lord had led a moody and solitary life in the decaying abbey of Newstead, which threatened to drop about his ears, feeding a heap of crickets on the hearth, and feared by the whole peasant population of the country round.

Such was the paternal lineage of Lord Byron; his maternal one, if more moral, was not the less fiery and volcanic. His mother, a little fat woman, was a woman of a most excitable temperament, an evil which no doubt was much aggravated by the outrage on her warm affections and trust in her husband, which the base object of his marriage with her revealed in all its blackness to her. She appeared all feeling and pa.s.sion, with very little judgment to control them. She was fond to distraction of her child, and used to spoil him to the utmost extreme, at the same time that her pa.s.sions occasionally broke out so impetuously against his freaks, that she would fling the tongs or poker at his head when a mere child.

At the age of eleven brought to England, and, with all this ancestral fire in him, introduced to the ruinous and gloomy abode of his forefathers, with the stories of their recent doings rife all around him, no wonder that on his peculiarly sensitive mind the impression became deep. He grew up a Byron in the eccentricity and other characteristics of his life; like his father, his morals were not very nice, his habits were not very temperate, he too married to repair the waste of his lands, and quitted his wife to live abroad, and die there a comparatively early death. Happily, there was implanted in him an ethereal principle, which gave a higher object to the exercise of his pa.s.sions and energies than had of late distinguished his fathers. He was a born poet, and the divine gift of poetry converted, in some degree, his hereditary impetuosity into an enn.o.bling instrument. His very dissipations extended his knowledge of life and human nature, and if they led him too frequently to seek to embellish sensuality, they compelled him to depict in the strongest terms that language can furnish, the disgust and remorse which inevitably pursue vice. He was a strange mixture of the poet and the man of the world; of the radical and the aristocrat; of the scoffer at creeds, and the wors.h.i.+per of the Divine Being in the sublimity of his works. Well was it for him and the world that his early years were cast amid the beauty and the solitude of nature, where he could wander wholly abandoned to the influences of heath and mountain, river and forest; and that the prospect of aristocratic splendor did not come in to disturb those influences till they had acquired a life-long power over him. The grandeur of nature can not make a poet; thousands and millions live during their whole existences amid its most glorious displays, and are little more sentient than the rocks that tower around them; but where the spark of poetry lies latent, it is sure to call it forth.

They who ever visit, then, the earliest scenes of Lord Byron's life, will not be surprised at the influence which they exercised upon him, nor at the fondness with which he cherished the memory of them. This is strongly expressed in one of his juvenile poems.

LACHIN-Y-GAIR.

"Away, ye gay landscapes, ye gardens of roses!

In you let the minions of luxury rove; Restore me the rocks, where the snow-flake reposes, Though still they are sacred to freedom and love: Yet, Caledonia, beloved are thy mountains, Round their white summits though elements war; Though cataracts foam 'stead of smooth-flowing fountains, I sigh for the valley of dark Loch na Garr.

"Ah! there my young footsteps in infancy wandered; My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid; On chieftains long perished my memory pondered, As daily I strode through the pine-covered glade: I sought not my home till the day's dying glory Gave place to the rays of the bright polar star; For fancy was cheered by traditional story, Disclosed by the natives of dark Loch na Garr."

_Hours of Idleness_, p. 111.

The feeling thus ardent in youth was equally vivid to the last. Only about two years before his death he wrote thus in The Island:

"He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue; Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face, And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace.

Long have I roved through lands which are not mine, Adored the Alp, and loved the Apennine; Revered Parna.s.sus, and beheld the steep Jove's Ida, and Olympus crown the deep; But 'twas not all long ages' love, nor all _Their_ nature held me in their thrilling thrall; The infant rapture still survived the boy, And Loch na Garr with Ida looked o'er Troy; Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount, And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount."

The city of Aberdeen was the place where the chief part of the earlier boyhood of Byron was spent. He went thither as an unconscious infant, and there, in the neighboring Highlands, he continued till in his eleventh year, when the t.i.tle fell to him, and he was brought by his mother to England. Aberdeen is a city which must have been a very charming abode for a boy of Byron's disposition, ready either to mix in the throng of lads of his own age in all their plays, contentions, and enterprises, to shoot a marble, or box out a quarrel, or to stroll away into the country and enjoy nature and liberty with an equal zest. There are people who are inclined to think that a great deal of the sublime tone of some of Byron's poetry, as that of the Childe Harold, of the sentiment, almost sentimentality of his Hours of Idleness, and many of his smaller poems throughout his works, was put on by him at will and for effect. They do not see how these things could proceed from the same mind as the rodomontade of many of his most familiar letters, or the slang and wild humor of many parts of Don Juan. How little do such persons know of the human mind! Did not Tam O'Shanter, and Mary in Heaven, and the Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night, all proceed from the same mind, and one of the most earnest minds that ever lived? Did not the sublime scenes of the Iliad, and the battle of the beggars in the Odyssey, and the trick of Ulysses in the cave of Polypheme, when he called himself Noman--so that when Polypheme roared out as they put out his eye, and he told his neighbors who came running to inquire what was the matter, that Noman hurt him, they replied,

"If no man hurt thee, why dost thou complain?"

and marched away without helping him--did not these proceed from the same mind? Did not the puns of Hood, and the sober ballad of Eugene Aram, and the Song of the s.h.i.+rt, proceed from one and the same mind? Did not John Gilpin and the loftiest strains of pious poetry proceed from that of Cowper? Did not Chatterton write equally Sly d.i.c.k and the tragedy of Ella? In fact, we might run through the whole circuit of poetic and prose literature, and show that the moods of our minds are as various and changeable as those of external nature. The very gravest, the most steadfast of us, have our transitions from sad to gay, from frivolous to the highest tone of the highest purpose, with a rapidity that seems to belong to the most changeful of us. There is, in fact, no such chameleon, no such kaleidoscope as the human mind. Light and shadow pa.s.s over us, and communicate their l.u.s.ters or their glooms. Facts give us a turn up or down, and the images of our brain present new and ever new arrangements. But in all this change there is no mere chance, far less confusion; every movement depends on a fixed principle. Perhaps there have been few men in whom circ.u.mstances--circ.u.mstances of physical organization, of life, and education--cherished and made habitual so many varied moods as in Lord Byron. Thrown at a very early age into the bosom of a beautiful and solitary nature, he imbibed a profound and sincere love of nature and solitude. Sent early to public schools to battle his way among boys of his own age, and with a personal defect which often subjected him to raillery, his native spirit made him bristle up and show fight, as he did afterward with his reviewers.

Raised to rank and wealth, and, spite of his crooked foot, endowed with, in all other respects, a very fine person, he was led to plunge into the dissipations of young men of his cla.s.s, and he thus acquired a tone of libertinism that ever afterward, under the same circ.u.mstances, was sure to show itself. Led by his quick sense of right and wrong, and by his shrewd insight into character, to despise priestcraft and political despotism, and spurred on by the spirit of the time, especially abroad where he traveled, he imbibed a spirit of skepticism and radicalism as principles. From these causes, he soon began to exhibit the most opposite phases of character. In solitude and nature he was religious in his tone--in society, a scoffer; in solitude he was pensive, and even sentimental--in society he was convivial, fond of practical jokes, satirical. He wrote like a radical, and spoke like an aristocrat. In him Childe Harold and Don Juan, the sublime and the ludicrous, the n.o.ble and the mean, the sarcastic and the tender, the voluptuous and beautifully spiritual, the pious and the impious, were all embodied. He was all these by turns, and in all, for the moment, most sincere. Like an instrument of many strings, each had its peculiar tone, and answered faithfully to the external impulse. Multifarious as were his moods, you might in any given circ.u.mstances have predicated which of these would prevail. There would be no sensuality in the face of the Alps, there would be no sublimity in the city saloon. If he had to speak in the House of Lords, his speech, by the spirit of antagonism, would a.s.suredly be radical; did he come into contact with the actual mob, he would case himself in the hauteur of the aristocrat. With nature, he was ashamed of men, and his doings and sayings among them; with men, he was ashamed of nature and poetry. He would laugh at his own flights of sentiment. He was a many-sided monster, showing now sublime and now grotesque, but with a feeling in the depths of his soul that he ought to be something greater than he was or dared to be.

To go back, however, from his character to himself. Aberdeen presented to the boy ample food for two of his propensities, those toward the enjoyment of nature and society. The country round, though not sublime, is beautiful. The sea is at hand, an ever grand and stirring object. The Dee comes winding from the mountains of the west through a vale of great loveliness; the Don, from the north, through scenes perhaps still more striking. There is an air of antiquity about the town, with its old churches, colleges, and towers, that is peculiarly pleasing, and the country has likewise a primitive look that wins at once on the spectator. To one of us from the south, the approach to it by the sea is very striking. I do not mean the immediate approach, for this is flat, but the coast voyage out from Edinburgh. The whole coast is bleak, yet green, and presenting to the sea bold and time-worn rocks. For a considerable part of the way they appear to be of red sandstone, and are therefore scooped out into the boldest caves, hollows, and promontories imaginable. Here and there are deep, dark caverns, into which the sea rushes as into its own peculiar dens, and in other places it has cut out arches and doorways through these rocks where they stand insulated, and you see the light through them displaying other rocks behind. One of these is noted for presenting, by effect of light behind it, the appearance of a lady all in white, standing at the mouth of a cave, and beckoning with her hand. As you skim along the coasts of Fife, Forfar, Kincardine, and Aberdeen, these rocks and caverns present ever-new forms, while all the country above them is green, smiling, and cultured now, but formerly must have been savage indeed, and giving rise, and no wonder, to strange superst.i.tions and legends. Bleak little towns ever and anon stretch along the sh.o.r.e; though green, the country is very bare of trees. Dundee, Arbroath, Montrose, are good large towns; and there are the ruins of Arbroath Abbey and Dunnottar Castle, with others of less note. Dunnottar can not be pa.s.sed without thinking of Old Mortality, whom Scott found in the church-yard there restoring the inscriptions on the grave-stones of the Covenanters; nor can Uri, an old-fas.h.i.+oned house on the bare uplands above Stonehaven, as the abode of Barclay, the writer of the celebrated Apology for Quakerism, and in our day for that of his pedestrian descendant, Captain Barclay. How singular are the reflections which arise on human life and its combinations when gazing on such a place as this! What should induce a man at one time to go forth from a remote scene and solitary old house like this, to mingle with the ferment of the times--to become an active apostle of Quakerism, and the expositor of its faith; and another, nearly two centuries afterward, to march out of the same house down into England, not for an exhibition of Quakerism, but of pedestrianism; not of _reasoning_, but of _walking_ powers? Why should that house--just that house and its family, be destined to produce great Quakers, ending in great walkers and great brewers? How often in my boyhood had I read Barclay's Preface to his Apology, dated from "Uri in Scotland, the Place of my Pilgrimage," and addressed to King Charles II., by "Robert Barclay, the servant of Jesus Christ, called by G.o.d to a dispensation of the Gospel revealed anew in this our age," &c. And there it stood, high, bare, and solitary, eliciting the oddest compound ideas of "hops and heresy," according to the phrase of a clergyman of the time, or, rather, of Quakerism, London porter, and walking-matches against time!

Beyond this the coast becomes more and more what is called iron-bound, and the rocks--probably of trap or whinstone--as you advance northward, stand up in the sea, black and curdled as it were, and worn into caverns and perpendicular indentures exactly as you see them in Bewick's wood-cuts. Stepping then on land at Aberdeen, how agreeable is the change! The city, built all of a gray and l.u.s.trous granite, has a look of cleanness and neatness almost inconceivable. Since the days of Byron's boyhood great must have been the changes. The main streets are all evidently new; and on advancing into the great street which traverses almost the whole length of the city, Union-street, a mile in length and seventy feet wide, you are struck with a pleasant surprise.

The width and extent, the handsome yet plain buildings of clean granite, and the fine public buildings visible in different directions, are far more than you expected in a town so far north.[32] On the river you find an imposing a.s.semblage of s.h.i.+ps; you find the Marischal College now built in a very graceful style; and a market-house, I suppose in extent, convenience of arrangement, and supply, inferior to none in the kingdom.

The olden streets, such as were in existence in Byron's time, are much more like what you would have looked for, of a narrower and more ordinary character.

About a mile to the north of the new town lies Old Aberdeen. In advancing toward it you become every moment more aware of its far greater antiquity. It looks as if it had a fixed attachment to the past, and had refused to move. There is a quietness, a stationariness about it. One old house or villa after another stands in its garden or court as it has done for centuries. The country about has an old Saxon look. It carried me away into Germany, with its unfenced fields of corn and potatoes; villages seen in the distance also unfenced, but with a few trees cl.u.s.tered about them, and the country naked except for its corn. To the right lay the sea, to the left this open country, and on before arose, one beyond the other, tower and spire of an antique character, as of a very ancient city. Presently I came to the college--King's College--with the royal crown of Scotland surmounting its tower, in fine and ample dimensions, and its courts and corridors seen through the ancient gateway. Then, on the other hand, the equally antique gateway to the park of Mr. Powis Leslie, with its two tall round towers of most ancient fas.h.i.+on, with galleries and spires surmounted with crescents. Then, onward, the ancient, ma.s.sy Cathedral, with its two stone spires, and tall western window of numerous narrow windowlets, and ponderous walls running along the road side, with a coping of a yard high, and stuccoed. Every thing had a heavy, ancient, and German character. I could have imagined myself in Saxony or Franconia; and, to augment the illusion, a woman at a cottage door inquiring the time of day, received the answer "half twa," as near as possible "half two" in Plat-deutsch. Still further to increase the illusion, the people talked of the bridge as "she." Truly the repose of centuries, and the fas.h.i.+on of a far-gone time, so far as relates to our country, lay over the whole place.

I had now to inquire my way to the Brig of Balgounie, a spot which makes a conspicuous figure in Byron's boyish history. "The Brig of Don," says he himself, in a note in Don Juan, canto x., p. 309, "near the 'auld town' of Aberdeen, with its one arch, and its black, deep salmon stream, is in my memory as yesterday. I still remember, though perhaps I may misquote, the awful proverb which made me pause to cross it, and yet lean over it with a childish delight, being an only son, at least by the mother's side. The saying, as recollected by me, was this, but I have never heard or seen it since I was nine years of age:

'Brig of Balgounie, wight (strong) is thy wa', Wi' a wife's ae son on a mare's ae foal, Down shalt thou fa'.'"

How accurate was his recollection of this old bridge; a proof of the delight with which he had enjoyed this scenery. We are told that on holiday afternoons he would get down to the sea-side and find great amus.e.m.e.nt there. Here was the sea just below; and it will be seen that the whole way that he had to come from New Aberdeen was full of a spirit and an aspect to fall deep into the heart of an embryo poet. There is a new and direct way now from the city nearer to the sea, and from the new bridge of Don the view of the old bridge is very picturesque. It is one tall, gray pointed arch, with cottages about it on both sides on the high banks of the Don, and mills, with ma.s.ses of trees. On the low ground below the bridge at the left-hand end stands a white house, and little fishermen's huts or sheds scattered here and there. On the other bank of the river the ground is high and knolly. Clumps of trees seem to close in upon the bridge, and behind and above them is a little group of fishermen's houses, called the huts of Balgounie. Below the bridge the river widens out into a broad expanse, and between high, broomy banks, comes down to the new bridge, and thence to the sea meadows, where the white billows are seen chasing each other at its mouth. Above the bridge the river is dark and deep, and the high banks are overhung with wood.

The valley of the Don above is very picturesque with woods and rocks, and is enlivened with mills and factories.

The view from the bridge itself down into the river is striking. I suppose it must be forty or fifty feet from its center to the water, yet a man living close by told me that he once saw a sailor leap from it for a wager. The bridge is remarkably strongly built. It is said to have been built in the time of Bruce, yet it has by no means a very ancient look, and being of solid granite, is not very likely to fulfill the prophecy of its fall. Yet Mr. Chambers, in his "Picture of Scotland,"

says this superst.i.tion has not always been confined to children, for our late Earl of Aberdeen, who was an only son, and rode a favorite horse, which was "a mare's ae foal," always dismounted on approaching this bridge, and used to have his horse led over at a little distance after him. The people near do not now seem to partake of it. "Fall!" say they; "ay, when the rocks on which it is based fall!" It is, in fact, like a solid piece of rock itself; and is in possession of funds, left in 1605 by Sir Alexander Hay, which, though then only producing five-and-forty s.h.i.+llings a year, have so acc.u.mulated that they are not only amply sufficient to maintain it in repair, but have built the new brig. At each end of the bridge you see several large iron rings in the wall.

These, I was told, were to secure ropes or chains to, from which to suspend scaffolding for the repair of the bridge on the outside. Every care is thus taken of it. "She is verra rich, is the auld brig," said the man before mentioned. "She has been verra useful in her time, for before the new brig was built she was the only means of getting to the north country--there was no fording the river. And the new brig has been built wi' her money, ay, every sixpence of it, gran' brig as the new on'

is, with her five granite arches; and the auld brig gives 100 a year to take care of her too. But she's verra well off in the world yet, for all that; she has plenty left for herself." Thus do they talk of the auld brig as if she were a wealthy old lady. If, however, any one should pay her a visit from New Aberdeen, I would counsel him to go by the old road for its picturesque effect, but to be careful to inquire the road in Old Aberdeen down to the brig, for it is particularly obscure. He must ask, too, for "The Auld Brig o' Don," for the name of the brig of Balgounie seems known to few of the younger generation.

In New Aberdeen, the admirer of Lord Byron will also naturally seek to take a glance at the different houses in which he lived as a child with his mother. These are in Queen-street, one at nearly each end of the street; one at the house in Broad-street, then occupied by Mr. Leslie, father of the present surgeon of that name; and one in Virginia-street, not far from the docks. The visitor will not be surprised to find that these are but ordinary houses in ordinary streets in general, when he recollects that Mrs. Byron was then reduced by the matrimonial robbery of her husband to an income of 123 a year, and that her effects, that is, the furniture of her lodgings, &c., when sold, on her setting out with her boy for England, amounted only to 74, 17_s._, 7_d._ In these houses she was merely a lodger. The best situation which she occupied was in Mr. Leslie's house in Broad-street, over a shop. All these places are still well known. The schools to which Byron went in Aberdeen are also objects of interest. That in Long Acre, kept by a Mr. Bower, whom he calls _Bodsy_ Bower, a name, he says, given him on account of his dapperness, was a common day school, where little boys and girls were sent princ.i.p.ally to be out of the way at home. This school has long been closed. The next school to which he went, and where he continued to go till he left Aberdeen, was the grammar school. This, of course, remains, and though it has been considerably enlarged since Byron was there, that room in which he studied continues exactly as it was at that time. It is an ordinary school-room, with benches and desks cut deep with hundreds of names, and hundreds of other names printed and written over them with ink, and the walls adorned in the like style, as well as with grotesque figures, drawn with the pens of schoolboys. Amid this mult.i.tude of names, the Rev. Dr. Melville, the present master, a.s.sured me that diligent search had been made to discover that of Byron, but in vain.

There are many of his old schoolfellows still living in the place, and all seem to recollect him as "a mischievous urchin." It must, however, be recollected, that Byron was little more than ten years of age when he left Aberdeen, and that was forty-seven years ago.

The place to which perhaps still more interest will attach, connected with the poet's boyhood in this part of the country, is Ballater, where his mother was advised to take him on recovering from the scarlet fever in 1796. It would appear as if Mrs. Byron, as well as her child, was so delighted with the summer residence there, as to return thither the two following summers. These are all the opportunities there could possibly be, for they left for England in the autumn of 1798, on the death of the old Lord Byron. They were the summer residences here, however, that awoke the poetic feeling in him. He was here in the midst of the most beautiful mountain scenery, and so intensely did it operate upon him, that through his whole life he looked back to his abode here as the most delicious period in his memory.

The vale of the Dee, or the Dee-side, as they call it, all the way from Aberdeen, a distance of forty miles, is fine; beautifully wooded by places, the hills, as you advance, become more and more striking. You pa.s.s the Castle of Drum, one of the oldest inhabited castles in Scotland; a seat of the Burnets, of Bishop Burnet's line, finely situated on the right hand on rising ground, and various other interesting places. But it is as you approach Ballater that the scenery becomes most striking. It becomes truly Highland. The hills get lofty, bare, gray, and freckled. They are, in fact, bare and tempest-tinted granite, having an air of majestic desolation. Some rise peaked and splintered, and their sides covered with _debris_, yet, as it were, bristled with black and sharp-looking pine forests. Some of the hills run along the side of the Dee, covered with these woods, exactly as the steep Black Forest Hills are in the neighborhood of Wildbad.

As you approach Ballater the valley expands. You see a breadth of green meadow, and a neat white village stretching across it, and its church lifting its spire into the clear air, while the mountains sweep round in a fine chain of peaked hills, and close it in. All up Dee-side there is well-cultivated land, but, with the exception of this meadow, on which Ballater stands, all is now hill, dark forest, and moorland; while below, on the banks of the winding and rapid Dee, birch woods present themselves in that peculiar beauty so truly belonging to the Highlands.

On your right first looks out the dark height of Culbleen, mentioned by Byron in his earlier poems:

"When I see some dark hill point its crest to the sky, I think of the rocks that o'ershadow Culbleen;"

then "Morven, streaked with snow;" and Loch na Garr lifts himself long and lofty over the lower chains that close the valley beyond Ballater.