The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV | Page 2

of mind would have led him to sympathise with bold and savage scenery. In proof of this, we remember that, although he often had seen the gigantic ridges of Arran looming through the purple evening air, or with the "morning suddenly spread" upon their summer summits, or with premature snow tinging their autumnal tops, he never once alludes to them, so far as we remember, either in his poetry or prose; and that although he spent a part of his youth on the wild smuggling coast of Carrick, he has borrowed little of his imagery from the sea--none, we think, except the two lines in the "Vision"--
"I saw thee seek the sounding shore,?Delighted with the dashing roar."
His descriptions are almost all of inland scenery. Yet, that there was a strong sense of the sublime in his mind is manifest from the lines succeeding the above--
"And when the North his fleecy store?Drove through the sky,?I saw grim Nature's visage hoar?Struck thy young eye;"
as well as from the delight he expresses in walking beside a planting in a windy day, and listening to the blast howling through the trees and raving over the plain. Perhaps his mind was most alive to the sublimity of _motion_, of agitation, of tumultuous energy, as exhibited in a snow-storm, or in the "torrent rapture" of winds and waters, because they seemed to sympathise with his own tempestuous passions, even as the fierce Zanga, in the "Revenge," during a storm, exclaims---
"I like this rocking of the battlements.?Rage on, ye winds; burst clouds, and waters roar!?You bear a just resemblance of my fortune,?And suit the gloomy habit of my soul."
Probably Burns felt little admiration of the calm, colossal grandeur of mountain-scenery, where there are indeed vestiges of convulsion and agony, but where age has softened the storm into stillness, and where the memory of former strife and upheaving only serves to deepen the feeling of repose--vestiges which, like the wrinkles on the stern brow of the Corsair,
"Speak of passion, but of passion past."
With these records of bygone "majestic pains," on the other hand, the genius of Milton and Wordsworth seemed made to sympathise; and the former is never greater than standing on Niphates Mount with Satan, or upon the "hill of Paradise the highest" with Michael, or upon the "Specular Mount" with the Tempter and the Saviour; and the latter is always most himself beside Skiddaw or Helvellyn. Byron professes vast admiration for Lochnagar and the Alps; but the former is seen through the enchanting medium of distance and childish memory; and among the latter, his rhapsodies on Mont Blanc, and the cold "thrones of eternity" around him, are nothing to his pictures of torrents, cataracts, thunderstorms; in short, of all objects where unrest--the leading feeling in _his_ bosom--constitutes the principal element in _their_ grandeur. It is curious, by the way, how few good descriptions there exist in poetry of views _from_ mountains. Milton has, indeed, some incomparable ones, but all imaginary--such, at least, as no actual mountain on earth can command; but, in other poets, we at this moment remember no good one. They seem always looking up _to_, not down from, mountains. Wordsworth has given us, for example, no description of the view from Skiddaw; and there does not exist, in any Scottish poetical author, a first-rate picture of the view either from Ben Lomond, Schehallion, Ben Cruachan, or Ben Nevis.
After all, Burns was more influenced by some other characteristics of Scotland than he was by its scenery. There was, first, its romantic history. _That_ had not then been separated, as it has since been, from the mists of fable, but lay exactly in that twilight point of view best adapted for arousing the imagination. To the eye of Burns, as it glared back into the past, the history of his country seemed intensely poetical--including the line of early kings who pass over the stage of Boece' and Buchanan's story as their brethren over the magic glass of Macbeth's witches--equally fantastic and equally false--the dark tragedy of that terrible thane of Glammis and Cawdor--the deeds of Wallace and Bruce--the battle of Flodden--and the sad fate of Queen Mary; and from most of these themes he drew an inspiration which could scarcely have been conceived to reside even in them. On Wallace, Bruce, and Queen Mary, his mind seems to have brooded with peculiar intensity--on the two former, because they were patriots; and on the latter, because she was a beautiful woman; and his allusions to them rank with the finest parts in his or any poetry. He seemed especially adapted to be the poet-laureate of Wallace--a modern edition, somewhat improved, of the broad, brawny, ragged bard who actually, it is probable, attended in the train of Scotland's patriot hero, and whose constant occupation it was to