Part 12 (1/2)
SOLACE
No star of golden influence hailed the birth Of hiht of eve, His pensive, artless song; Yea, those who mark out honour, ease, wealth, fame, As man's sole joys, shall find no joy in him; Yet of far nobler kind His silent pleasures prove
For not une unknown, Where, traced by Nature's hand, Isline
Oh! when the world's dull children bend the knee, Meanly obsequious, to soar joy Alone to stand aloof; Or when they jostle on wealth's crowded road, And swells the tuth reclined, To list the wrathful huay affect to scorn The loitering drealess the jeer, whose voice Comes from the erroneous path
Scorner, of all thy toils the end declare!
If pleasure, pleasure comes uncalled, to cheer The haunts of hiht
And happier he who can repress desire, Than they who seldom mourn a thwarted wish; The vassals they of fate-- The unbending conqueror he, And thou, blest Muse, though rudely strung thy lyre, Its tones can guile the dark and loneso tear
Thine many a bliss--oh, many a solace thine!
By thee up-held, the soul asserts her throne, The chastened passions sleep, And dove-eyed Peace prevails
And thou, fair Hope! when other coht's thick low the dark clouds round With beams of pro lyre, Lives thy unfading solace: sweet to raise Thy eye, O quiet Hope, And greet a friend in heaven!-- A friend, a brother, one whose awful throne In holy fear heaven's htiest sons approach: Man's heart to feel for reat power!
Conqueror of death, joy of the accepted soul, Oh, wonders raise no doubt when told of thee!
Thy way past finding out, Thy love, can tongue declare?
Cheered by thy smile, Peace dwells amid the storrief is blent a joy, And bea, in one of my walks this autumn, the cave in which I used to spend in boyhood so , as of old, with a huge fire, and occupied by a wilder and more careless party than even my truant schoolfellows It had been discovered and appropriated by a band of gipsies, who, attracted by the soot-stains on its roof and sides, and concluding that it had been inhabited by the gipsies of other days, had without consulting factor or landlord, at once entered upon possession, as the proper successors of its forood deal of the true gipsy blood in them, but not without mixture of a broken-down class of apparently British descent; and one of their women was purely Irish
Froipsies, I was not prepared for a eneral, and ascertained that at least one of the ways in which it had taken place was exeipsy husband had served as a soldier, and had ly curious to see e, whether araded classes of our own country, or, as exhibited in the writings of travellers and voyagers, in his aboriginal state; and I now did not hesitate to visit the gipsies, and to spend not unfrequently an hour or two in their company They at first see me inoffensive, and that I did not bewray counsel, they canise me as the ”quiet, sickly lad,” and to chatter as freely in my presence as in that of the other pitchers with ears, which they used to fabricate out of tin by the dozen and the score, and theof horn spoons, formed the main branch of business carried on in the cave I saw in these visits curious gliipsy life I could trust only to what I actually witnessed: as told me could on no occasion be believed; for never were there lies ipsies; but even the lying for elsewhere that set all probability so utterly at defiance--a consequence, in part, of their recklessly venturing, like unskilful authors, to expatiate in walks of invention over which their experience did not extend On one occasion an old gipsy wo my malady consumption, prescribed for me as an infallible remedy, raw parsley minced small and , I suppose, from my manner, that I lacked the necessary belief in her specific, she went on to say, that she had derived her knowledge of such matters from her mother, one of the most ”skeely women that ever lived” Her rievous hurt in half a lish doctors had shown they could do nothing for him His eye had been struck out of its socket by a blow, and hung half-way down his cheek; and though the doctors could of course return it to its place, it refused to stick, always falling out again Hera little slit at the back of the youngin the dislodged orb at a tug, she ament, and so kept the eye in its place And, save that the young lord continued to squint a little, he ell at once The peculiar anatomy on which this invention was framed must have, of course, rese eyes; but it did well enough for the wo no character for truth toher whether she ever attended church, she at once replied, ”O yes, at one tihter of a hter, you know: my father was the most powerful preacher in all the south, and I alent to hear hi her extemporary sally, and the reverend character hich she had insisted her sire, she spoke of hireatest ”king of the gipsies” that the gipsies ever had Even the children had caught this habit of monstrous mendacity
There was one of the boys of the band, considerably under twelve, who could extehted to get a listener; and a little girl, younger still, who ”lisped in _fiction_, for the _fiction_ cas that used to strike ipsies--a Hindu type of head, small of size, but with a considerable fulness of forehead, especially along the ist would perhaps say, of _individuality_ and _coular posture assu before their fires, in which the elbow rested on the knees brought close together, the chin on the pal in attitude a Mexican mummy) assumed an outlandish appearance, that reypt and Hindustan The peculiar type of head was derived, I doubt not, froinally different from that of the settled races of the country; nor is it impossible that the peculiar position--unlike any I have ever seen Scottish fein
I have witnessed scenes aars” ht have made rare use, but which forhtly to ee cere were to take place in the cave, and I sauntered the way, in the hope of ascertaining how its iny that, of the parties to be united, the bridegroo as ”Peter Bell,” and the bride as e had taken place a few years previous in a cave near Roseipsy, possessed of the rare accolishcouple, and the ceremony was deemed co si in the wood above, I encountered two very drunk gipsies, and saw the first-fruits of the coand thinly liht, and, froht have passed for seven feet any day, were it not that his trousers,to the ave hi on stilts The boys of the place called hiht dapper little felloho always showed off a co in corduroy inexpressibles, they had learned to distinguish as ”Billy Breeches” The giant, who carried a bagpipe, had broken down ere I carass, he was droning out in fitful blasts a diabolical ; but, just as I passed, Billy also gave way, after wasting an infinity of exertion in keeping erect; and, falling over the prostrateout its soul as he pressed against it, in a lengthenedan aspect of more than ordinary picturesqueness It had its two fires, and its double portion of s out in the cal close to the roof, as if by a reversed gravitation, and turned its foaipsy woreat pot, that dispensed through the cave the savoury odour of unlucky poultry out short in the middle of their days, and of hapless hares destroyed without the game licence, depended over the other An ass, the coround; two urchins, of about from ten to twelve years a-piece--wretchedly supplied in the article of clothing--for the one, provided with only a pair of tattered trousers, was naked from the waist upwards, and the other, furnished with only a dilapidated jacket, was naked fro up fuel for the fire, still further in front; a few of the ordinary ined under cover of the smoke, apparently in a mood not in the least busy; and on a couch of dried fern sat evidently the central figure of the group, a young, sparkling-eyed brunette, more than ordinarily marked by the Hindu peculiarities of head and feature, and attended by a savage-looking fellow of about twenty, dark as aflexible hair, black as jet, hanging down to his eyes, and clustering about his cheeks and neck These were, I ascertained, the bride and bridegroorooress of the work I observed that the party, ere less coht of an intruder An elderly tinker, the father of the bride, grey as a leafless thorn in winter, but still stalwart and strong, sat adold, he said, or, as he pronounced the word, ”guild,” which had been found in an old cairn, and was of iuild and that was the best o'
guild;” but if I pleased, he would sell it to ed with so the offer, ere interrupted by the sounds of the bagpipe Giant Gri their feet, and were seen staggering towards the cave ”Where's the whisky, Billy!” inquired the proprietor of the gold, addressing himself to the man of the small clothes
”Whisky!” said Billy, ”ask Grimbo” ”Where's the whisky, Grimbo?”
reiterated the tinker ”Whisky!” replied Griain, after a pause and a hiccup, ”Whisky!” ”Ye confounded blacks!”
said the tinker, springing to his feet with an agility wonderful for an age so advanced as his, ”Have you drunk it all? But take that, Gri a blow full on the side of the giant's head, which prostrated his vast length along the floor of the cave ”And take that, Billy,” he iterated, dealing such another blow to the shorter ht athwart his prostrate co to me, he remarked with perfect coolness, ”That, ”
”Honest lad,” whispered one of the woh_ ti your ways” I had already begun to think so without pro, as I had proposed, one of the witnesses of the wedding
There is a sort of grotesque humour in scenes of the kind described, that has charms for artists and authors of a particular class--soenius; and hence, through their representations, literary and pictorial, the ludicrous point of view has come to be the conventional and ordinary one And yet it is a sad enough radation so extreipsy that seeree of _Pariahism_ which has been reached by only one other class in the country, and that a se towns An education in Scotland, however secular in its character, always casts a certain ahtenment on the conscience; a home, however humble, whose inmates win their bread by honest industry, has a sienerations there has been no education of any kind, or in which bread has been the wages of infamy, the moral sense seems so wholly obliterated, that there appears to survive nothing in the mind to which the missionary or the moralist can appeal It seems scarce possible for a man to know even a very little of these classes, without learning, in consequence, to respect honest labour, and even secular knowledge, as at least the _second-best_ things, in theira people
CHAPTER XVIII
”For such is the flaw or the depth of the plan In the make of that wonderful creature called man, No two virtues, whatever relation they claih like as was ever twin-brother to brother
Possessing the one shall ifor n, an ornate dial-stone; and the dial-stone still exists, to show that e of the profession in those parts of the country in which it ranks highest Gradually as I recovered health and strength, little jobs ca in I executed sculptured tablets in a style not common in the north of Scotland; introduced into the churchyards of the locality a better type of tombstone than had obtained in them before, save, mayhap, at a very early period; distanced all ; and at length found that, without exposing h tear and wear to which the ordinary stone-cutter e, too, rather than the reverse, that ht me not unfrequently for a few days into country districts sufficiently distant from home to present me with new fields of observation, and to open up new tracts of inquiry Sohbourhood of soe--oftener than once I sheltered beside soust shadow of lairdshi+p lay heavy on society; and in this way I caood deal of the Scottish people, in their ht have ree shelf I succeeded in picking up a rare book, or, as not less welcoer; or there lay within the reach of an evening walk so piece of antiquity, or some rock-section, which I found it profitable to visit A solitary burying-ground, too, situated, as country burying-grounds usually are, in soroups of ancient trees, forhtful scene of labour than a dusty work-shed, or soether I found my new mode of life a quiet and happy one Nor, with all its tranquillity, was it a sort of life in which the intellect was in any great danger of falling asleep There was scarce a locality in which new ga down, kept the faculties in full play Letthe courses of inquiry, physical anda few days, first in the burying-ground of Kirk