2-NRLF B 4 Ibb Sflfl BERKELEY\ LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF I CALIFORNIA^/ EARTH SCIENCES LIBRARY LIFE AND LETTERS HUGH MILLER THE wifl HUGH MILLER i BY PETEE BAYN"E, M. A., which Hugh Miller VOL. I. BOSTON : TJLr) j ^r r> LIISTCOL 59 W A S H I N OT O 1C STREET. NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COMPANY. CINCINNATI : GEO. S. BLANCHARD & CO. 1871. EARTH SCIENCE LIBRARY ROCKWELL & CHURCHILL, STEREOTVPERS AND PRINTERS, 122 Washington Street, Boston. PUBLISHERS' PREFATORY NOTE AMERICAN EDITION. Y special arrangement with the family of Mr. Miller, the publishers are gratified in being able to present to the American reader Mr. Bay lie's very interesting Life and Letters of Hugh Miller, whose works they have previously published. The works of Hugh Miller have had quite as large a circle of readers in America as in Great Britain, and nowhere has his genius been more admired, or his sudden death more sincerely deplored. It was known soon after his decease that to Peter Bayne, Esq., was en- trusted the duty of preparing his biography. The work could have fallen to no better hands ; for Mr. Bayne, in the biographic sketches of his " Christian Life," had proved himself to be a master in this department of literature. He had also succeeded to the editorial chair of the " Witness," and was thus brought into intimate sympathy with Hugh Miller's public life and labors. The volumes, long expected, are at length completed, and will Form an enduring monument to the genius of the Cromarty geologist. In them the man is seen to have been far greater than the author, and to have built up a character grander than his works. Hugh Miller was one of the true heroes of our age, lifting himself from obscurity to eminence by force of genius, and by uncomplaining toil. Since Benjamin Franklin, there has been no finer example of a self- made man, with character fully rounded, and free alike from vanity and from dogmatism. Since John Knox, there has been no Scotch- man, combining in grander proportion the genius and religion of his country. He was a greater man than Robert Burns ; for while both VIII PREFATORY NOTE. rose from the people, and had a sore struggle with poverty and social obstacles, Burns fretted and succumbed and wrecked himself, while Miller endured without a murmur, and conquered, and enjoyed the fruits of victory. These volumes throw light on an important period in Hugh Miller's life. The American people are tolerably familiar with his early years, whose story has been told by his own pen in his " My Schools and Schoolmasters," with a wonderful charm. They are acquainted also with those geological writings ' which made him the most popular scientific writer of his day. But they have known little of that editorial career, during which the " Witness " became the most influential paper in Scotland, and its editor wielded a power over the Scottish nation second only to that of Chalmers. This part of his life is brought out with great fulness by his biographer, and will awaken general interest. Hugh Miller was a lover of truth, and scorned all evasions and tricks in argument. As one reads the record of his candor, his thoroughness in scientific study, and his unfaltering faith in the har- mony of science and revelation, the longing finds utterance that he were living to take part in present conflicts. The theories of Dar- win and Huxley and Spencer are more seductive and dangerous than those of Owen or Chambers. As Dr. McCosh well says, in his inter- esting reminiscences, "Had Hugh Miller lived, he would certainly have grappled with the ' Positive Philosophy,' as he did with the ' Vestiges of Creation.' " But he passed away ere this conflict was fairly begun, leaving to others both the labor and the honor of vindi- cating the truth. These volumes may be the last relating to Hugh Miller which the publishers will have the pleasure of presenting to the American pub- lic; and they are a fitting close to the series of his works, which have nurtured a love for science and strengthened religious faith in so many American homes. BOSTON, April 10, 1871. CONTENTS OF YOL. I. BOOK ONE. THE BOY. CHAPTER I. FAGR BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS . . . .17 CHAPTER II. DAME SCHOOL UNCLES JAMES AND SANDY BEGINNINGS OF LIT- ERATURE AND SCIENCE 33 CHAPTER III. THE DOOCOT CAVE ......... 42 CHAPTER IV. FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE SUTHERLAND HIGHLANDS EXPERIMENTS IN SELF-AMUSEMENT THE REBELLIOUS SCHOOL-BOY . . 51 BOOK TWO. THE APPRENTICE. CHAPTER I. BOYISH MAGAZINES A LAD OF HIS OWN WILL BECOMES AP- PRENTICE HARDSHIPS ALLEVIATIONS . . . .65 X CONTENTS. CHAPTER II. EARLY FRIENDSHIPS SWANSON, FINLAY, ROSS PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION TWO OJT NATURE'S GENTLEMEN . . .76 CHAPTER III. CONON-SIDE A MANIAC FRIEND LIFE IN THE BARRACK WAN- DERINGS IN THE WOODS SCENERY OF CONON-SIDE AT HOME AGAIN ........... 85 CHAPTER IY. RETURNS TO CONON-SIDE MAKES HIMSELF RESPECTED IN THE BARRACK COMPANIONS ATTEMPTS GEOMETRY AND ARCHITEC- TURE HARDSHIPS EXPERIMENT IN NECROMANCY DREAM THE BOTHY SYSTEM LITERARY RECREATIONS TEDIUM END OF APPRENTICESHIP THE BLESSING OF LABOR PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY . ....... 92 BOOK THREE. THE JOURNEYMAN. CHAPTER I. FAVORABLE OPINIONS FROM OLD DAVID WRIGHT AND UNCLE JAMES FIRST WORK AS JOURNEYMAN AUNT JENNY'S COT- TAGE SENDS POETICAL PIECES TO ROSS SELF-DELINEATION 107 CHAPTER II. GAIRLOCH LETTERS DESCRIPTIVE OF HIS JOURNEY FROM CONON- SIDE AND OF GAIRLOCH SCENERY LOVE-POETRY THE CARTER OLD JOHN FRASER A DREAM MAGNANIMOUS REVENGE GAIRLOCH LANDSCAPES BACK TO CROMARTY . . . .116 CONTENTS. XI CHAPTER III. COMES OF AGE SETS SAIL FOR EDINBURGH PARTING REFLEC- TIONS MORNING ON THE JIORAY FRITH FIRST SIGHT OF ED- INBURGH ABSENT FROM CHURCH FOR FIVE SUNDAYS AND " A FEW MORE" HOLYROOD, CHARLES II. 'S STATUE, EFFIGY OF KNOX, THE COLLEGE, FERGUSON'S GRAVE, DR. McCRIE THE PANORAMA, THE THEATRE 137 CHAPTER IV. NIDDRIE .BLACKGUARD WORKMEN MILLER PREJUDICED BY THEM AGAINST THEIR CLASS HIS OPINIONS ON TRADES* UN- IONS THE "BOATMAN'S TALE" RETURNS TO CROMARTY . 153 CHAPTER V. THE STONE-CUTTER'S DISEASE LINES TO SISTER JEANIE RE- NEWS HIS FRIENDSHIP WITH SWANSON AND CORRESPONDS WITH ROSS WRITES AN ODE ON GREECE AND OFFERS IT TO THE "SCOTSMAN" , . 165 CHAPTER VI. POEMS ADDRESSED TO ROSS SERIOUS THOUGHTS CORRESPOND- ENCE WITH SWANSON FREAKISH HUMOR DESCENDS INTO THE TOMB OF THE URQUHARTS IS CATECHISED BY MR. STEW- ART WRITING IN THE OPEN AIR A PROSELYTIZING BORE CORRESPONDENCE ON RELIGION 180 CHAPTER VII. POVERTY, HONORABLE AND DISHONORABLE FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE REV. MR. STEWART LOOKS INTO HIS FATHER'S BIBLE XII CONTENTS. THE SELFISH THEORY OF MORALS NEW-YEAR'S DAY MUS- INGS IMPORTANT COMMENT UPON AND ADDITION TO THESE TEN DAYS AFTERWARDS THE CHANGE EFFECTED IN HIS SPIR- ITUAL STATE 214: CHAPTER VIII. MILLER AT TWENTY-SIX LETTER TO ROSS THE BLESSING OF A TRUE FRIEND ROMANCE THE SHADOW OF RELIGION FORMER AND PRESENT VIEWS OF RELIGION FREE-THINKERS WHO CAN- NOT THINK AT ALL CHRISTIAN THE HIGHEST STYLE OF MAN PROJECT OF GOING TO INVERNESS SCHEMES OF SELF-CUL- TURE ........... 228 CHAPTER IX. SEEKS WORK IN INVERNESS UNSUCCESSFULLY RESOLVES TO PRINT HIS POEMS MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MR. CAR- RUTHERS IS ASKED TO ENLIST CORRECTS PROOF-SHEETS OF HIS POETRY, AND DECIDES THAT IT IS POOR RETAINS IN- FLEXIBLY HIS FIRST OPINION OF ITS MERITS, AND RESOLVES TO CULTIVATE PROSE DEATHS OF UNCLE JAMES AND OF WIL- LIAM ROSS DEDICATION OF HIS POEMS TO SWANSON . . 242 CHAPTER X. RESUMES WORK AS A STONE-CUTTER AT CROMARTY INTIMACY WITH MR. STEWART THE LITERARY LION OF THE PLACE WRITES FOR THE "INVERNESS COURIER" LETTERS ON THE HERRING FISHERY EXTRAORDINARY SHOAL OF HERRINGS A NIGHT ON GUILLIAM EMIGRATION OF HIGHLANDERS TO CAN- ADI. SCIENCE AT LAST ........ 24:9 CONTENTS. XIII CHAPTER XI. MILLER AND HIS NEW FRIENDS INTRODUCED TO PRINCIPAL BAIRD WILL NOT GO TO EDINBURGH FOR THE PRESENT HIS POEMS DO NOT SELL CORRESPONDS WITH MR. ISAAC FORSYTH WILL NOT RELINQUISH LITERARY AMBITION . . . 265 CHAPTER XII. MILLER'S POLITICAL VIEWS THE CROMARTY CHAPEL CASE IN CHARACTER OF VILLAGE JUNIUS ...... 274 CHAPTER XIII. MISS FRASER HER PARENTAGE, RESIDENCE IN EDINBURGH POSI- TION IN CROMARTY SOCIETY OF THE PLACE MILLER'S MAN- NER AND APPEARANCE A FASCINATING COMPANION HE AND MISS FRASER BECOME LOVERS GLIMPSES OF ROMANCE META- PHYSICAL LOVE-MAKING A NEW AMBITION AWAKES IN MIL- LER FABLE OF APOLLO AND" DAPHNE REVERSED LETTER TO MISS FRASER AND TO MRS. FRASER ..... 279 CHAPTER XIV. NEW OUTLOOK IN LIFE DIFFICULTIES OF PUBLICATION LET- TERS TO MISS FRASER 295 CHAPTER XV. LETTERS TO MISS DUNBAR, OF BOATH 3IR J. R. ROBERTSON'S RECOLLECTIONS OF MILLER 318 XIV CONTENTS. TWO LETTERS ON RELIGION CHAPTER XVI. . 398 MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS CHAPTER XVII. . 412 BOOK I. THE BOY " Hardy, bold, and wild, As best befits the mountain-child." TIERS OP HUGH MILLEH. CHAPTER I. BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS. S the voyager passes from the blue expanse of the Moray Frith into the land-locked bay of Cromarty, he sees on the left, crowning a swell of green up- land which runs crescent-like along the coast, a pillar of red sandstone, rising fifty feet into the air, and surmounted by a statue. The few white houses, embow- ered in garden foliage, which form the better part of the village of Cromarty, cluster beneath ; and the sea, faced by a row of thatched fishermen's cottages, comes rippling, at every flow of the tide, to within a bow-shot of its base. The statue represents a grave, strong-built man, of massive head and thoughtful face, who seems to look out steadfastly upon the wayes. Statue and pillar constitute the monu- ment reared by his countrymen to Hugh Miller. Almost at the foot of the pillar stands a humble cottage, and on the sward from which it rises is placed the village church-yard. In that cottage Hugh Miller was born ; and during his boyhood and early youth he was dependent on a 17 18 THE BOY. widowed mother who maintained herself and her family by the " sedulously plied but indifferently remunerated labor" of her needle. In that church-yard are several headstones chiselled by his hand when he earned his bread as a jour- neyman mason. Hugh Miller broke suddenly upon the public of Scotland in the prime of his years. He was already a man of ripe thought and confirmed intellectual habits, betraying none of the extravagance of opinion and spasmodic vehemence of language 9 usually characteristic of self-trained genius. Solidity and sobriety of judgment, sensitive dislike of par- adox, contempt for the catch- words of political sciolism and free-thinking conceit, purity, vigor, and elegance of style, which reminded critics of Goldsmith and of Addison, were the results of his self-education. Possessed of large stores of literary information, an original explorer in science, with definite and firmly held opinions on religious, political, and social questions, thoroughly understanding the character of his countrymen, and ardently sympathiz- ing with its nobler elements, he no sooner found a medium for the communication of his ideas than he became a most influential guide of opinion, and continued to be so to the hour of his death. Adopting literature and science hence- forward as the business of his life, he produced a series of unique and remarkable works, in which were intermingled racy and sagacious observations on men and manners, with delineations, exquisitely fresh and vivid, of nature's facts and beauties. They were at once pronounced by eminent critics to belong to a high and rare order of literary pro- ductions ; they became popular, and have retained their popularity with the best class of readers in Britain and America ; and they have been translated into most Euro- pean languages. It will be admitted that they bear the impress of an original, determinate, and admirable mind ; " MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS." 19 noble in all its ground-tones, richly endowed in respect both of intellect and of imagination, penetrated with reverence for God and for the revelation which God lias made of him- self in nature, providence, and Christ, full of brotherly sympathy, of candor, intelligence, and affection. A repu- tation thus founded is not likely to prove ephemeral ; and the name of Hugh Miller, we may safely presume, will be his most enduring monument. How the son of a sailor's widow came to address and retain an audience as wide as the world of culture, how the Cromarty stone-mason qualified himself for achieving a European reputation, is a question fitted to interest wise curiosity, and deserving an explicit and careful reply. Hugh Miller, as all the world knows, was the author of an autobiographic work entitled " My Schools and School- masters," and it may have occurred to some that he thus anticipated and superseded biography. But there are no good grounds for this opinion. The book which has been named, recognized by all judges as one of the most capti- vating and able of the author's performances, has a place in English literature from which it cannot be moved ; but it is no substitute for the biography of Hugh Miller. In the first place, it deals with but one portion of its author's career, and that the portion which preceded his emergence into public life. In the second place, a considerable amount of biographic material relating to Hugh Miller, unen- croached upon in the " Schools and Schoolmasters," is in existence. From early boyhood he was fond of jotting down particulars connected with his personal history, and for many years previously to his being harnessed to steady literary toil, he took great delight in letter-writing. In the third place, it will hardly be disputed by any one who reflects upon the subject, that biography is necessarily a different matter from autobiography, and that the latter is 20 THE BOY. to be regarded simply as one of the sources from which the biographer constructs his narrative. Mr. Lewes, whose Life of Goethe has a place of honor not only among biog- raphies, but among the select masterpieces of biography, may be held to have settled this point. He had before him Goethe's celebrated autobiography, in three volumes, a work which its author declares to have been composed in a spirit of austere veracity, and yet Mr. Lewes finds it char- acterized by " abiding inaccuracy of tone" Goethe, look- ing from the distance of half a century, beheld his own face through a medium which softened, brightened, or obliterated the features. Hugh Miller, when he wrote the " Schools and Schoolmasters," was not so old as Goethe when he wrote "Poetry and Truth from nry Life ; " nor am I pre- pared to say that the former departs from literal accuracy to the same extent as the latter ; but in the case of Hugh Miller, also, the impression made by an event or spectacle, as set down at the moment by the boy or lad, and the account of that impression given by the man of fifty, prove often to be two different things. " It is possible," says Hugh Miller himself, " for two histories of the same period and individual to be at once true to fact, and unlike each other in the scenes which they describe and the events which they record." Hugh Miller was born in the town of Cromarty on the 10th of October, 1802. The occurrence appears to have acted on the imagination of his father, as he had a " singu- lar dream," respecting his first-born. The midwife re- marked that the conformation of the head was unusual, and indicated, in her sage opinion, that the child would turn out an idiot.* Cromarty was a more important place seventy years ago * Letter of Miller to Mr. Isaac Forsyth, Feb. 30, 1830. CROMARTY. 21 than it is now, but its dimensions never exceeded those of a considerable village. It is one of several miniature towns which stud the shores of the Maolbuie or llack Isle, a pen- insular block of land, washed on the north by the Frith of Cromarty, on the south by the Frith of Beauly, and abutting on the German Ocean in a green headland, fringed with pine, known to mariners as the Southern Sutor of Cromarty. On the landward side of this headland nestles the little town. The Maolbuie, stretching westward, rises from encircling sea, occasionally in abrupt crags, generally in gradual undulation. Here and there, along the water- courses and in the hollows, are glimpses of green field and leafy wood, but the general impression is that of a huge swell of brown moorland, overblown by sea-winds, trav- ersed by chill fogs, and constituting, on the whole, one of the most bleak and ungenial districts in Scotland. The natives of Cromarty have always been a hardy, long-lived race. The climate, though salubrious, is severe. The town is exposed at all seasons to high gales from the North Sea, laden with mist or sleet, and even at midsummer keen blasts from the Atlantic make their way through the west- ern hill-gorges, send the spray of the frith whistling through the air, and pierce to every nook and cranny of the shiver- ing town. But there are fertile spots in its immediate neighborhood, and in sheltered nooks the elm and poplar flourish ; the air, except when darkened by sea-fog, is clear and bracing ; a chain of hills, running along the frith on the north, leads the eye to the heights of Ben Wyvis sleep- ing in the pearl-blue of distance ; there are brooks rippling through wooded dells, and- caves hollowed in the rock ; and at all times, and from almost every point of view, there is a gleaming of green or purple waters, wreathed with snowy foam. In favorable weather Cromarty is a pleasant place ; one who had passed in it a kindly childhood and youth 22 THE BOY. might love it well. Nature, as seen in its vicinity, if not clad in Alpine grandeur, has many aspects of beauty and tenderness, and at least one aspect, that of ocean in calm or in storm, of utmost sublimity. Like all towns on the eastern coast of Scotland, Cromarty is inhabited principally by an English-speaking race, sub- stantially identical with that found in the lowlands of Scot- land. Hugh Miller never spoke the language of the Scottish Highlanders, and was apt in conversation to lay emphasis on the fact of his being a Teuton. But there was a dash of good Celtic blood in his veins. Donald Ross, called also Donald Roy, or the Red, the grandfather of his grandmother, was of the best Gaelic type, with the vivacity, courage, and religious susceptibility of his race. The history and char- acter of Donald, as portrayed in the revering narratives of his descendants, were among the sacred influences of Hugh Miller's childhood. The figure of his gray-haired sire, stand- ing up in the Church of Nigg, and defying the Presbytery, in the Name of God, to join a minister, not called by its people, to its stone-walls ; the ring which Miller's grand- mother had received, at the time of her marriage, from Don- ald, as her spousal ring to her other husband, the Head of the Church ; the mysterious hints which would pass round the fireside circle in the evening, that this patriarch, like the men of God of old, had been privileged with visions of the unseen world, with whisperings out of the abysmal deeps of futurity, all this was stamped upon the child's imagina- tion, predisposing him, in the dawn of his sympathies, to look with reverence on the religious character, and prepar- ing him to become, one day, a leader among the evangelical religionists of Scotland. Strong, however, as the influence of his Celtic ancestry may have been on Hugh Miller, it was not so powerful as that derived from his Lowland fathers. He was descended HIS FATHER. 23 on that side from a long line of seafaring men/ whose in- trepid and adventurous spirit had led them from their native Cromarty, to sail, in the earliest times of Scottish history, with Sir Andrew Wood or the " bold Bartons," and at a later period to voyage and fight under Anson, or to engage in buccaneering enterprises on the Spanish Main. For more than a hundred years before the birth of Hugh Miller, not one of his paternal ancestors had been laid in the church- yard of Cromarty. To the latest hour of his life, he cher- ished the profoundest enthusiasm for his father, the hardy and resolute seaman whose name he bore. He was only five years old when Hugh Miller, the elder, perished at sea ; but he had already learned to love his father with an affec- tion stronger than is common in childhood, and u long af- ter every one else had ceased to hope," he might be seen on the grassy knoll behind his mother's house, looking wist- fully out upon the Moray Frith for " the sloop with the two stripes of white and the two square topsails." Miller has left us, in the " Schools and Schoolmasters," a powerful and vivid sketch of his father, and the lineaments are those of a remarkable man. Very gentle, very brave, serenely invincible in every change of fortune, patient to endure individual wrong, but with a flash of keenest fire in him to avenge the cruelty or injustice which he saw prac- tised on others, he was great without knowing it, and, what is also perhaps an advantage, without its being known. Miller says finely that there was a " bit of picture " in all his recollections of his father, and most picturesquely has he arranged the pieces in the mosaic of his narrative. We see the bold seaman, bronzed by the southern sun, asleep in his open boat on the Ganges, and mark him start on awaking as he meets the glare of a tiger's e} r e, its paws rest- ing on the gunwale. We behold him afloat for three days in the open sea on the bottom of an upturned boat, sharks 24 THE BOY. glancing around him on the crests of the waves. He bears meekly the oppressions of a cruel captain, until his kind- hearted Irish comrade is being chained down to the deck beneath a tropical sun ; then, the genial warmth in his bosom kindling into electric flame, he faces the tyrant. " The captain drew a loaded pistol from his belt ; the sail- or struck up his hand ; and, as the bullet whistled through the rigging above, he grappled with him and disarmed him in a trice." At the action off the Dogger Bank he does the work of two men, and, when the action seems over, is utterly prostrate ; but no sooner does the sign of battle fly again along the line, than he springs to his feet, fresh as if he had awakened from morning slumber. 'Not less charac- teristic is the steadfastness of his manly ambition to realize a competence. As wave after wave of adversity meets him, he rises through the swell, his brow showing clear and proud in the light of victory. It was the deliberate conviction of Hugh Miller that his father was an abler man than he. To this opinion few will subscribe ; but the more we study the character of the son, the deeper will be our conviction that it is essentially the character of the father, developed, on the intellectual side, with more of symmetry and completeness, and seen at last under softer lights. Physiologists would probably have something to say on this point. Modern science tends to show that there was more in Mr. Shandy's philosophy of character than Sterne's humor gives account of, and that, if we can rightly estimate the effect of local circumstance and other influences to modify or to transmute, the ground- plan of a man's character may be found written in his bones. Hugh Miller's father was at the time of his birth a man of forty-four ; mature in every faculty ; of marked individual- ity and iron will. His mother was a girl of eighteen, who , had been brought up at her husband's knee, and had learned EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS. 25 to revere him as a father before she accepted him as a lover. Throughout life she displayed no special force of mind or . character. The first child of such a marriage was likely to bear the indelible stamp of his father's manhood. Fancy delights to construct oracles from the earliest rec- ollections of men who have become famous. We must guard against attaching too much importance to the infan- tile reminiscences of Miller. Those he mentions are grace- ful in themselves, and form a.singularly appropriate introduc- tion to the life of a man of science. He remembered going into the garden one day before completing his third year, and seeing there " a minute duckling, covered with soft, yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel- shells, of a deep, red color." The " duckling," he tells us, belonged to the vegetable kingdom, though he could no longer identify it ; the mussel-bearing plant was, he be- lieved, a scarlet-runner. If there is in this incident any- thing unusual, it is the circumstance that natural phenom- ena of form and color, so simple and common, should have powerfully affected the imagination of a child not three years old. The incidents first stored in memory are gen- erally those of change or excitement, a storm, a removal, a journey, a visit ^to a puppet show or waxwork. The forms of those natural objects by which a child is sur- rounded, leaves, trees, flowers, fall faintly on the mental tablets ; probably not one man in a thousand retains a more vivid recollection of them than of the curtains round his cradle. During Hugh Miller's life, the observation of a new fact in nature afforded him a thrill of pleasure which never lost its freshness, and it seems probable that the first consciousness of this pleasure arose in the breast of small, toddling, large-headed Hugh, when he opened wide his 26 THE BOY. eyes to take the bearings of the mysterious duckling and the vegetable mussels. More definitely important, in a biographic point of view, are those incidents of Miller's childhood which formed what he calls a " machinery of the supernatural." About the time when the incomprehensible duckling grew out of the earth before his eyes, he thought that he beheld the apparition of his buccaneering ancestor, John Feddes, " in the form of a large, tall, very old man, attired in a light- blue great-coat," who stood on the landing-place at the top of the stairs and regarded him with apparent com- placency. He was much frightened, and for years dreaded a reappearance of the phantom. Still more circumstantial is his account of what he saw on that night when, far away on the North Sea, his father's ship went down. " There were no forebodings," he is careful to tell us, in the Cromarty cottage. No storm agitated the air, and though the billows of a deep ground- swell broke heavily under leaden skies, the weather occa- sioned no alarm. A hopeful letter had been received from Ms father, written at Peterhead, and his mother sat " be- side the household fire, plying the cheerful needle." Sud- denly the door fell open and little Hugh was sent to shut it. " Day," he proceeds, " had not wholly disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a gray haze spread a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as I ever saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female ; they bore a livid and sodden appear- ance ; and directly fronting me,, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank, transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms % of the objects beyond. I APPARITIONS. 27 was fearfully startled and ran shrieking to my mother, tell- ing what I had seen ; and the house-girl, whom she next sent to shut the door, apparently affected by my terror, also returned frightened, and said that she, too, had seen the woman's hand ; which, however, did not seem to be the case. And finally my mother, going to the door, saw nothing, though she appeared much impressed by the ex- tremeness of my terror, and the minuteness of my descrip- tion. I communicate the story as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting to explain it. The supposed apparition may have been merely a momentary affection of the eye, of the nature described by Sir Walter Scott, in his ' Demonology,' and Sir David Brewster, in his ' Natural Magic.' But if so, the affection was one of which I expe- rienced no after return ; and its coincidence, in the case, with the probable time of my father's death, seems at least curious." Men who believe in a ghost-story seldom favor us with unqualified avowals of the fact. Hugh Miller seems to have been persuaded at fifty that the livid hand he saw at five was preternatural. The incident is thus invested with interest in a biographic point of view. It affords us a glimpse into the subtlest workings of Hugh Miller's mind. We must, therefore, consider it carefully. The appearance, to begin with, is to be classed among the more easily explicable phenomena of optical delusion. The child, from the day his mind began to receive impres- sions of any kind, had been encompassed with an atmos- phere of superstition. In days of steamships and tele- graphs, sailors and fishermen continue a superstitious race ; but it is only by the strongest effort of imagination that we can realize the extent to which the natural and the super- natural were confounded in remote fishing-towns like Cro- marty at the commencement of this century. Teach a 28 THE BOY. child to look for ghosts, and he will be sure to see them. Hugh had learned to associate the idea of his father .with a special manifestation of the awful and the supernatural. Often while the embers were burning low on winter even- ings, and every inmate of the cottage listened in awe-struck silence, had he hung upon the lips of " Jack Grant, the mate," as he told how his father had sailed from Peterhead beneath a gloomy twilight ; how a woman and child who begged a passage were taken on board ; how the wind rose and the snow-storm lashed the vessel ; how a dead-light gleamed out on the cross-trees ; how a ghostly woman, with a child in her arms, flitted round the master at the helm ; how, when dawn glimmered over the sea, the ship struck and rolled over amid the breakers on " the terrible bar of Findhorn ! " and how the corpse of the woman, still clasp- ing the babe in her arms, was floated out through a hole in the side of the wreck. Turn now to the passage quoted. His father being away at sea, the child is sent, as the dusk thickens, to close the cottage door. The night-mist is creeping up from the sea. I have seen that mist, seen it through the eyes of childhood, on the moorland of the Maolbuie, a few miles west of Cromarty ; and no one who has seen it can wonder that a vivid imagination should evoke spectral forms from its twilight imagery. The same power of fantasy which called up the ghost of old John Feddes, to stand upon the top of the stair, revealed to the eye of the boy, as he peered into the mist on that melancholy evening, a dissev- ered hand and arm. There is one little circumstance which renders it matter of demonstration that his mind was preoccupied by expectation of the marvellous. " Hand and arm," he informs us, " were apparently those of a female." How did he know this ? A child of five could not distin- guish between the " livid and sodden " hand and arm of a HIS MOTHER. 29 man and the " livid and sodden " hand and arm of a woman. His imagination, haunted by the woman of Jack Grant's narrative, created her. The whole affair, then, resolves itself, into a strong men- tal impression of little Hugh's throwing itself out in bodiless form on the mist of the night. And as was the boy so was the man. A sustained intensity of mental vision, a creative power of fantasy, characterized Miller to the last. Not powerful enough to overbear or to pervert the scientific in- stinct with which it was associated, it had a pervasive influ- ence on his mental operations ; the feeling, belief, impres- sion, on his mind had for him a substantive reality ; and there was an antecedent probability that, if the steadiness of his intellectual nerve were shaken by disease, or by excess of mental toil, some fixed idea might obtain the mastery over him and hurl his reason from her throne. It has been said that his mother was not remarkable for mental power or for strength of character. She had, how- ever, one intellectual faculty in extraordinary vigor, to wit, memory, and she loaded it with knowledge of a peculiarly unprofitable kind. Her belief in fairies, witches, dreams, presentiments, ghosts, was unbounded, and she was re- strained by no modern scruples from communicating either her fairy lore, or the faith with which she received it, to her son. Her faith in her legendary personages was inextrica- bly involved with her belief in the angels and spirits of Scripture, and to betray scepticism as to apparitions and fairies was in her view to take part with the Sadducee or the infidel. " Such was the powerful influence," says Mrs. Miller, " to which little Hugh was subjected for the first six years of his life, a kind of education the force of which he himself could scarcely estimate. Add to everything else that much of his mother's sewing was making garments for the dead. Fancy that little, low room in the winter even- 30 THE BOY. ings, its atmosphere at all times murky from the dark earth- ern floor, the small windows, the fire on the hearth which, though furnished with a regular chimney, allowed much smoke to escape before it found passage. Fancy little Hugh sitting on a low stool by that hearth-fire, his mother engaged at a large chest, which serves her for a table on which stands a single candle. Her work is dressing the shroud and the winding-sheet, the dead irons click inces- santly, and her conversation as she passes to and fro to heat her irons at the fire is of the departed, and of myste- rious warnings and spectres. Suddenly, as the hour grows late, distinct raps are heard on this chest, the forerunners, she says, of another dissolution. Her tall, thin figure is drawn up in an attitude of intense listening for these signs from the unseen world. The child has been surrounded and permeated with the weird atmosphere. Then a paroxysm of terror supervenes and he is put to bed, to that bed in the corner, in a recess in the wall, where he can still see the work proceed, and hear the monotonous click-click of those irons, till his little eyes close, and the world of dreams min- gles with that of reality. I have no doubt that the over- powering terror of those early times, the inability to dis- tinguish between waking and sleeping visions, returned in his last days, stimulating the action of a dfseased brain. The peculiarity of his mother's character told against him. There was plenty of affection, but no counterbalancing grain of anything which could in the least qualify these tre- mendous doses of the supernatural. He did not learn to read so early as most children, though, as he has told me, he learned his letters first when almost in arms, off the sign- boards above the shop-doors, so that, until after six, the marvellous in its lighter and more harmless forms, as in 4 Jack and the Bean-stalk,' etc., did not mingle with its darker and stronger shadows. From his mother Hugh un- HIS MOTHER. 31 doubtedly drew almost all the materials for his ' Scenes and Legends' and ' Lykewake,' etc., and every minutest touch I have given you has been gathered from his lips and hers." Hugh Miller's mother was evidently one who, in the jar- gon of the spirit-rapping fraternity, would be called a good medium. Interpreted into the language of persons who are neither knaves nor fools, this will mean that she was one who, having long permitted fantasy to be sole regent of her mind, had fallen into the habit of mistaking the pale shapes and flitting shadows of its ghostly moonlight for the sub- stantial forms of noonday. Mrs. Miller closes her account of this singular woman with the following anecdote : u She told me that, on the night of Hugh's death, suspecting no evil and anticipating no bad tidings, about midnight she saw a wonderfully bright light, like a ball of electric fire, flit about the room, and linger first on one object of furniture and then on another. She sat up in bed to watch its prog- ress. At last it alighted, when, just as she wondered, with her eyes fixed on it, what it might portend, it was suddenly quenched, did not die out, but, as it were, extinguished itself in a moment, leaving utter blackness behind, and on her frame the thrilling effect, of a sudden and awful calamity." The power of distinguishing between visions seen when the eyes were shut and actual phenomena, seen when the eyes were open, had manifestly been impaired in this woman ; and we cannot believe that the influence of so superstitious a mother upon Hugh Miller was not powerful, merely be- cause he has refrained from saying much about her in the " Schools and Schoolmasters." Had he completely emanci- pated himself from that influence, we might have had a full statement of its nature and extent ; but, though he evidently believed some of the ghostly sights of his childhood to have been preternatural, he would instinctively shrink from the confession that his notions of the night-side of nature, and 32 THE BOY. of the boundary line between the visible and the invisible world, were to the last modified by what he had learned at his mother's knee. It is fair to her to add that her power of enchaining the attention of listeners, while she told her tales, was quite extraordinary, and that her son assuredly owed to her, in part at least, his genius for narrative. CHAPTER II. DAME SCHOOL - UNCLES JAMES AND SANDY BEGINNINGS OF LITERATURE AND SCIENCE. brave, kind father, then, is dead ; and the boy, gaze he never so long across the waves, will not again clap his hands and run to tell his mother that the sloop is in the offing. The girlish widow, with her son of five, and her two daughters just emerging from infancy, must face the world alone. Of fixed yearly income she has about twelve pounds, but she is skilled as a seamstress, and applies herself industriously to her needle. By way of substitute for a father's authority over her chil- dren, and for a husband's counsels to herself, she has the vigilant, superintending friendliness of her two brothers, known to readers of the " Schools and Schoolmasters " as Uncle James and Uncle Sandy. These occupied a single dwelling, into which they took one of the little girls, and in which Hugh lived as much as at home. He could hardly have been more happy in fireside guides and instructors. James, the elder, was a saddler ; Alexander, a carpenter. In any rank of society they would have been exceptional men. Thoughtful, sagacious, modest, independent ; ardent in their love of knowledge, and with no inconsiderable stock of information ; reverent towards God ; mindful of duty, they were such as the best Scottish peasants and mechanics of the olden time used to be. " I never knew a man," says Miller, " more rigidly just in his dealings than 33 34 THE BOY. Uncle James, or who regarded every species of meanness with a more thorough contempt." What a grand contribu- tion to the education of Hugh Miller was made by Uncle James in leaving that impression on his memory ajid his heart ! When Miller first heard Dr. M'Crie preach, he wrote to his Uncle James : " In age and figure I know not where to point out any one who more resembles him than yourself." Collating this with his description of the mili- tary bearing and combined modesty and dignity of de- meanor of Dr. M'Crie, we are led to form a favorable idea of Uncle James* outer man. Uncle Sandy had been in the navy, had fought in many engagements in the great French war, and had settled down in his native place to a life of happy industry, digging his sawyer's pit in summer in some protected nook of the green wood, and finding entertain- ment at eventide in the wonders of the field or the shore. He fought his battles over again and yet again for the ben- efit of little Hugh ; but it was from others, not from him- self, that the boy heard of his personal exploits ; and his estimate of military splendors was not extravagant. " Proph- ecy, I find," he said, " gives to all our glories but a single verse, and it is a verse of judgment." In after life Miller thought of writing a life of Alexander Wright. Such were Hugh Miller's instructors from the end of his fifth year, instructors to whom, as he justly testifies, he owed more than to any of the teachers whose schools he afterwards attended. The tales with which they charmed him called intellect and imagination into genial and health- ful exercise. " I remember," he says, in an account of his early years, composed for Principal Baird when he w^as twenty-seven, and largely drawn upon in the " Schools and Schoolmasters," " I remember that, from my fourth to my sixth year, I derived much pleasure from oral narrative, and that my imagination, even at this early period, had BOOKS. 35 acquired strength enough to present me with vividly-colored pictures of all the scenes described to me, and of all the incidents related." His eye had not yet opened on the world of books. Hugh had been sent to a dame's school before his father's death, and in the course of his sixth year, after much labor and small apparent profit, he made the discovery that " the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books." Did ever child in Eastern romance light on so wonderful a talis- man? The gates flew open and the gardens of knowledge stretched before him, the trees drooping with golden fruit, the earth radiant with flowers. Hugh Miller had made what he calls the grand acquirement of his life ; he could hold converse with books. Now at last, like all children of talent, he revelled in the traditionary literature of the nursery : " Jack the Giant Killer" " Blue Beard," "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp." Two other books gave him equal or greater de- light : the " Pilgrim's Progress," and Pope's "Homer." u I saw," says Miller, " even at this immature period, that no writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer." Pope's transmutations of the " Iliad" and " Odyssey " have often been favorite reading with children. One of the choice sports of Arnold's early boyhood was to act the battles of the Homeric heroes, and recite their several speeches according to Pope. Hugh was now promoted from the dame's school to the parish school, and introduced into the society of one hundred and twenty boys. These, with a class of girls, bringing the whole number up to one hundred and fifty, were under the superintendence of a single master ; and, when it is added that the competence of that master's ac- quirements and the excellence of his character were quali- fied by sluggishness and associated with no force, fineness, 36 THE BOY. or sympathetic richness of mind, it; will be evident that little deserving the name of education could be had in the place. A boy of six, however strong his intellectual bent, requires a certain amount of well-applied compulsion to induce him to prefer his lessons to his play. Hugh, left to do as he chose, preferred the latter ; but if, in his lessons, he was " an egregious trifier," he was intellectual enough in his sports. In addition to the nursery treasures already mentioned, the narratives of Cook, Anson, and Woods Rogers afforded him inexhaustible delight, and inflamed him with a passionate desire to be a sailor. He spent much of his time sauntering about the harbor, or peering and prying aboard the ships. One of his amusements was to trace on the maps of an old geographical grammar the path of vessels to and from the countries visited by his father or by Uncle Sandy. He began to compose before he could write. u I was in the habit," he says, in the account of his life previ- ously referred to, " of quitting my school companions for the sea-shore, where I would saunter for whole hours, pour- ing out long blank verse effusions (rhyme was a discovery of after date) about sea-fights, storms, ghosts, and desert islands. These effusions were no sooner brought to a close than forgotten ; and no one knew anything of them but myself ; for I had not yet attained the art of writing, and I could compose only when alone." That passion for linguis- tic expression, that rapture in fitting thought and emo- tion to words, by which nature seems to point out the born literary man, was already characteristic of Miller. Following this child, whose very amusements are intel- lectual, into the school-room, we perceive that he is in a fair way to earn the reputation of dunce. Accustomed to learn by the eye, to stray down vistas of picture con- structed for him by his imagination from the materials of Ms favorite books, he takes no interest in the mechanical SCHOOL. 37 % operations of memory. The Latin Rudiments in particular prove incapable of imaginative illumination. The sluggard schoolmaster never tells him that, if he be but brave enough to grope for a time as through a dark passage, the classic wonderland will open on his sight. An intelligent and spirited boy, to work heartily at his tasks, must know what he is about, and have some conception of the guerdon which is to reward his toil. It never occurs to this schoolmaster that lie may.be the dunce, stolidly inapprehensive of the re- quirements of the case, and of the nature of his duty towards his peculiar pupil. He takes the more obvious, comfortable, and human-natural course of deciding that Hugh's uncles have overrated his abilities, and that he is a mere ordinary dullard. Miller's trifling proved infectious. He had one day, on some impulse of the moment, taken to relating, to the boy who sat next him, the adventures of Sir William Wallace. A group of fascinated listeners soon hung round the inter- esting dunce. To narratives from blind Harry succeeded tales from Cook and Anson ; and when these were ex- hausted imagination was called upon to supply the article in request. The improvising practice he had enjoyed in his solitary walks now stood him in good stead, and he re- galed his auditors with boyish histories, Of battle, bold adventure, dungeon, wreck, Flights, terrors, sudden rescues. *' In a short time," these are his own words, "my narratives had charmed the very shadow of discipline out of the class." In his English reading lessons he appeared to some advantage, the master contriving to make out that he could distinguish between good and bad in style ; but on the whole he looked upon school attendance as a mere cur- 38 THE BOY. tailment of his freedom, made no progress whatever in spell- ing or parsing, and in Latin failed utterly. In some respects, always excepting those for which it was specially intended, the school was not amiss. In the company of one hundred and fifty boys and girls, there is likely to be not a little that will contribute to mental and physical development. From the windows could be seen at all hours ships and boats, entering or leaving the harbor ; at certain seasons the turf before the door glittered with myriads of herrings, the air became alive with bustle of curing operations ; a pig- slaughtering establishment was at hand, where Hugh, turning characteristically from the slay- ing processes, could look inquiringly into the mysteries of porcine anatomy ; and there was a chance, at any moment, of taking part in a glorious expedition sent forth to exact, arte vel Marte, the tribute of peats which the boatmen of Boss, as they arrived with their cargoes, were bound to pay to the school. An annual cock-fight was celebrated by the boys and their teacher ; but in this he took no more inter- est than in the killing of the pigs ; the tenderness he had derived from his father forbade him. In his tenth year the spell cast over his imagination by the narratives of the sea-captains had been broken. He had read " The Adventures of Sir William Wallace," by the Scottish Homer of the fifteenth century, of whom we know only that his name was Harry, that he was blind, that he earned his bread by repeating his poetry in the laird's hall and by the farmer's ingle, and that he professed to base his narrative on a history of Wallace, written in Latin by his chaplain, named Blair. The poem is Homerically crowded with incident, and its hero-worship of Wallace is as fervent as Homer's of Odysseus. There is no trace of that senti- mental delicacy which glows in the chivalrous romances of the nineteenth century ; no cosmopolitan sympathy ; not BLIND HARRY. 39 the faintest surmise that anything can be said on the other side of the question. National bards are ruthless partisans, from " the Ionian father of the rest," downwards. Homer does not apologize for Ulysses when he lays waste the town of the harmless Cyconians, and distributes their goods, wives, and children among his followers. Homer has not one tear of pity for the tortured Melanthius, tortured for no fault but his courage, or for the female slaves, cruelly murdered for not having been inconceivably faithful to their master and mistress ; and it never occurs to him as possi- ble that any one can think the slaughter of the suitors themselves, for the sole fault of continuing to pay their addresses to a woman who would not frankly say No, and whose husband, they reasonably trusted, was at the bot- tom of the sea, rather startling in its sternness. Compare the return of Odysseus with the return of Enoch Arden, who, by Homeric law, ought to have cut down his Annie with one blow, and her Philip Kay with another, and you will perceive the difference, in what may be called emo- tional atmosphere, between the time of Tennyson and those periods of national life in which poems like Homer's " Odyssey," and Blind Harry's " Wallace," come into exist- ence. In general poetical capacity the Scottish minstrel is incomparably inferior to Homer ; but it was owing doubt- less to the entireness and intensity of his patriotic devotion to Scotland and to Wallace, that his book was for centuries " the Bible of the Scottish people," and that it profoundly affected the boyish imaginations of Robert Burns, of Wal- ter Scott, and of Hugh Miller. The fiery patriotism of this book inspired those national songs of Burns, and those magical tones occurring at intervals in all his poems, which will thrill readers to their inmost hearts so long as love of country endures. Its effect on Hugh Miller was to make him a Scottish patriot to the finger-tips. Affection for his 40 THE BOY. country was from that time a ruling passion in his breast, and his ideal of a great man was a great Scotchman. No wise critic will dispute that this .was an important and an auspicious advance in the development of the boy. It appears to be a law of the feelings that, to be sound, strong, and healthful, they must proceed from the particu- lar to the general, philanthropy rooting itself in household kindness, cosmopolitan interest in the human race growing out of undistinguishing ardor of affection for one's coun- trymen. He who, as a boy, is indifferent to his own coun- try, will, as a man, be indifferent to all countries. Hugh Miller, we need not doubt, owed much of that home-bred vigor, that genial strength, racy picturesqueness and idio- matic pith, which characterize his writings, to the early influence of Blind Harry. Meanwhile he has been learning to read in a book whose lessons he could not outgrow, and whose illuminated let- tering, of gem and flower and shell, has a charm for eye and heart, which had been absent from the Latin Eudi- ments. Upon the sands at ebb-tide, when the slant sun- light strikes ruddy from the west, the boy may be seen trotting by the side of TJnclQ Sandy, hunting for lump-fish in the weeded pools, hanging in ecstasy over the sea^mosses, that glance through the lucid wave with more delicate splendor of rubied flush and scarlet gleam, of golden tress and silken fringe, of tender pearl and beaming silver, than graced the jewelled princesses of his fairy-books, and drink- ing in with eager attention every word uttered by his guide. We can picture him a kilted urchin, probably barefooted, with bright auburn hair, glowing blue eyes, cheek touched with the crimson of health, the face marked by quiet thoughtfulness and incipient power. H}s uncles were doubtless perplexed with their nephew ; but, on the whole, despite the head-shaking of the schoolmaster, and Hugh's THE SEA-SHORE. 41 manifest lack of interest in the Rudiments, they could not believe that the boy who, since the dawn of his faculties, had been a good listener, a voracious reader, a quick and intelligent observer, was the dunce his pedagogue pro- nounced him. CHAPTEE III. THE DOOCOT CAVE. E was twelve years old when the notable adventure of the Doocot Cave afforded him the subject of his first verses. The incident, slight in itself, happens to possess extraordinary interest in a biographical point of view. " Man in immediate presence," says Goethe, " still more in remembrance, fashions and models the exter- nal world according to his own peculiarities." An event which impresses the mind strongly in boyhood becomes en- twined, as we proceed in our life-journey, with innumerable associations, and when at successive stages in our path we attempt to recall its precise circumstances, we fail to place them in their original bareness before the mind's eye. Sup- pose, then, that in endeavoring to know a man, to realize what, in the stages of his growth, he was and what he could do, we met with successive accounts from his pen of one and the same incident, would we not feel that a curiously in- structive opportunity was afforded us of taking the obser- vations necessary for our purpose ? How glad would the biographer of a great painter be to light upon a series of pic- tures from his hand, the subject the same in all, but the occa- sions when they were painted falling at different dates in his history, from the morning of life until its afternoon ! It is this advantage we possess in connection with Hugh Miller's boyish adventure in the Doocot Cave. There exist at least four accounts of the incident drawn up by himself, 42 FIRST VERSES. 43 four successive paintings of the same scene by the boy, the stripling, the man of twenty-seven, and the man of fifty. The first is that referred to in the " Schools and School- masters," as executed in " enormously bad verse," a day or two after the occurrence. The copy before me is the iden- tical one which excited the admiring wonder of Miss Bond, mistress of the Cromarty Boarding School. Attached to it is that pictorial representation of the scene which Miller describes as consisting of " horrid crags of burnt umber, per- forated by yawning caverns of India ink, and crested by a dense forest of sap-green." You can see what is intended ; the sea is below the cavern, and the sward and wood are above ; but the whole is not superior to the ordinarj 7 " daub- ing of child-artists. The verses exhibit internal evidence of having been written within a day or two of the event they record. The agony of distress and terror experienced by the boy of twelve when he and his companion a lad still younger found themselves, as night came on, with the sea before, impassable rocks on either hand, and a dark cav- ern behind, this, and their contrasted rapture when the boats hailed them at midnight, supersede all reflection on the beauties of the landscape or the wonders of the cave. The grammar and spelling are about as bad as possible. Here are the first two lines : " When I to you unfolds my simple tale, And paints the horrors of a rocky vail." He forgets to say what will happen when the dreadful revelation takes place, and strikes presently into descrip- tion of the cave. We need not retain the childish misspell- ing : " There stands a cavern on the sea-beat shore, Which stood for ages since the days of yore, 44 THE BOY. Whose open mouth stands forth awfully wide, And oft takes in the roaring, swelling tide. Out through the cavern water oozes fast, Which ends in nothing but white stones at last. Two boys, the author one, away did stray, Being on a beauteous and a sunshine day." The contemptuous " nothing but white stones " hardly betrays the future geologist, and the naivete of " the author one " is charming. The three last stanzas relate, in very flat prose fitted with rhyme, that the boys went to the cav- ern "for some stones," found that the water had filled in round them, tried' to get out. but could not, were doubly pained when ' ' the night came on, down poured the heavy rain," and " ran so very fast " to the boats when they came to rescue them. Nothing here but the sternest historical realism. Fancy has not gilded the clouds, nor enthusiasm softened the colors ; the fact stands simply out as an ex- perience of unromantic misery. For several years this version seems to have contented Hugh, the revision it underwent extending only to verbal alterations. The lad of nineteen, however, discards the whole, and produces a more polished and melodious ditty. The friend who shared the adventure is dismissed, and the interest centres in the " author," or, as he is now more poet- ically styled, " the Muses' youngest child," or, with a touch, of remorseful pathos, " the Muses' rude, untoward child." He has learned to sketch in Scott's lighter manner, and there is something of gracefulness and vivacity in his handling : " Well may fond memory love to trace The semblance of that lonely place, Much may she joy to picture fair Each cliff that frowns in darkness there ; For when alone in youth I strayed To haunted cave or forest glade, SECOND EDITION. 45 Each rock, each lonely dell, I knew, Where flow'rets bloomed or berries grew ; Knew where, to shelf of whitened rock, At eve the sable cormorants flock ; Could point the little arm to where Deep the wild fox had dug his lair ; Had marked with curious eye the cell Where the rock-pigeon loved to dwell ; Had watched the seal with silent ken, And, venturous, stormed the badger's den." In the following lines there seems to be an echo from By- ron's tales : " Oft had our poet wished to brave The giddy height and foaming wave, That wildly dashed and darkly frowned The Doocot's yawning caves around. For many a tale of wondrous kind With wild impatience fired his mind ; Tales of dark caves where never ray Of summer's sun was seen to play ; Tales of a spring whose ceaseless wave Nor gurgling sound nor murmur gave, But like that queen who, in her pride, Latona's ruthless twins defied, To meltless marble, as it flows Through stiffening moss and lichens, grows. Before he deem these marvels true The caves must meet his curious view." Considerable progress here from the " water oozing fast " and " nothing but white stones," of the first edition. In that performance the arrival of the boat had been emphat- ically chronicled, " the author" dwelling with manifest sat- isfaction on the event. It would not, however, have been poetical enough for " the Muses' youngest child " to be taken off at midnight by mere terrestrial fishermen. In the new 46 THE BOY. edition, accordingly, he remains until " Aurora" makes her appearance : " And clear and calm the billow rolled, With shade of green and crest of gold." The second of these lines is finely colored. A moral now coronat opus in the tone of Scott's introduc- tions to his cantos. It turns on " art and guile," " vice at- tired in beauty's smile," and other matters which the reader may imagine. In the vigor of early manhood, Miller described the ad- venture of the cave in his letter to Principal Baird. He writes in prose, having estimated his talents with the cool- est judgment, and decided that, for the present, he will quit poetry. The picture has become full in detail, and glowing in tint : " The cave proved a mine of wonders. "We found it of great depth, and, when at its farthest ex- tremity, the sea and opposite land appeared to us as they would if viewed through the tube of a telescope. We dis- covered that its sides and roof were crusted over with a white stone resembling marble, and that it contained a petrifying spring. The pigeons which we disturbed were whizzing by us through the gloom, reminding us of the hags of our story-books, when on their night voyage through the air. A shoal of porpoises were tempesting the water in their unwieldy gambols, scarcely an hundred yards from the cavern's mouth, and a flock of sea-gulls were screaming around them, like harpies round the viands of the Trojan. To add to the interest of the place, we had learned from tradition that, in the lang syne, this cave had furnished Wallace with a hiding-place, and that more re- cently it had been haunted by smugglers. In the midst of our engagements, however, the evening began to darken, PROSE VERSION. 47 and we discovered that our very fine cave was neither more nor less than a prison. We attempted climbing round, but in vain ; for the shelf from whence we had leaped was un- attainable, and there was no other path. ' What will my mother think?' said the poor little fellow, whom I had brought into this predicament, as he burst into tears. c I would care nothing for myself, but my mother.' The appeal was powerful, and, had he not cried, I probably would ; but the sight of his tears roused my pride, and, with a feeling which Rochefoiicault would have at once recognized as springing from the master principle, I at- tempted to comfort him ; and for the time completely for- got my own sorrow in exulting, with all clue sympathy, over his. Night came on both dark and rainy, and we lay down together in a corner of the cave. A few weeks prior, the corpse of a fisherman, who had been drowned early in the preceding winter, had been found on the beach below. It was much gashed by the sharp rocks, and the head was beaten to pieces. I had seen it at the time it was carried through the streets of Cromarty to the church, where in this part of the country the bodies of drowned persons are commonly put until the coffin and grave be prepared ; and all this night long, sleeping or waking, the image of this corpse was continually before me. As often as I slum- bered, a mangled, headless thing would come stalking into the cave and attempt striking me, when I would awaken with a start, cling to my companion, and hide my face in his breast. About one o'clock in the morning we were relieved by two boats, which our friends, who had spent the early part of the night in searching for us in the woods above, had fitted out to try along the shore for our bodies ; they having at length concluded that we had fallen over the cliffs, and were killed." Last of all, written when he was turned of fifty, we have 48 THE BOY, the narrative of the occurrence as it appears in the " Schools and Schoolmasters," The passage, too long to quote in its completeness, is one of the most rich and elab- orate in the works of Hugh Miller, The " nothing but white stones" of the first description, and the " meltless marble " of the second, have become the blended poetry and science of the following sentences : " There were little pools at the side of the cave, where we could see the work of congelation going on, as at the commencement of an October frost, when the cold north wind ruffles, and but barely ruffles, the surface of some mountain lochan or slug- gish^ mountain stream, and shows the newly formed needles of ice projecting mole-like from the shores into the water. So rapid was the course of deposition, that there were cases in which the sides of the hollows seemed growing almost in proportion as the water rose in them ; the springs, lip- ping over, deposited their minute crystals on the edges ; and the reservoirs deepened and became more capacious as their mounds were built up by this curious masonry." The idea of the telescope, which occurs first in the third descrip- tion, is finely worked out in the fourth : u The long, tele- scopic prospect of the sparkling sea, as viewed from the inner extremity of the cavern, while all around was dark as midnight ; the sudden gleam of the sea-gull, seen for a moment from the recess, as it flitted past in the sun- shine ; the black, heaving bulk of the grampus, as it threw up its slender jets of spray, and then, turning downwards, displayed its glossy back and vast angular fin ; even the pigeons, as they shot whizzing by, one moment scarce vis- ible in the gloom, the next radiant in the light, all ac- quired a new interest, from the peculiarity of the setting in which we saw them. They formed a series of sun-gilt vignettes, framed in jet ; and it was long ere we tired of SECOND PROSE VERSION. 49 seeing and admiring in them much of the strange and the beautiful." The scenery of the heavens is hardly referred to in the first sketch. The fact of a rain-storm having aggravated the horrors of the situation is mentioned, but the boy thinks of nothing except the additional pain it occasioned. When Hugh Miller had watched the sunsets of forty other sum- mers, he "put in the sky" of his picture thus: "The sun had sunk behind the precipices, and all was gloom along their bases, and double gloom in their caves ; but their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose higher and higher, chased by the shadows ; and then, after lingering for a moment on their crests of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and the whole be- came sombre and gray. The sea-gull sprang upward from where he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in his deep-sea stack ; the dusky cormo- rant flitted past, with heavier and more frequent stroke, to his whitened shelf high on the precipice ; the pigeons came whizzing downwards from the uplands and the opposite land, and disappeared amid the gloom of their caves ; every creature that had wings made use of them in speed- ing homewards ; but neither my companion nor myself had any, and there was no possibility of getting home without them. . . . For the last few hours mountainous piles of clouds had been rising dark and stormy in the sea- mouth ; they had flared portentously in the setting sun, and had worn, with the decline of evening, almost every meteoric tint of anger, from fiery red to a sombre, thun- derous brown, and from sombre brown to doleful black." All these things were seen by Hugh Miller, as he stood on the threshold of the cave, or looked out from within through its rock-hewn telescope ; but it was not the Hugh Miller of twelve years who saw them ; it was the Hugh 50 THE BOY. Miller of fifty who was transported by imagination to stand again in the entrance of the cave, or gaze again from its interior, and to see " what the eye brought with it the means of seeing." It was as if Turner at fifty had taken it into his head to paint the first sunset on which he had looked with boyish delight, and in so doing had thrown upon the canvas the science and subtlety of a life spent in the observation of nature. CHAPTER IV. FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE SUTHERLAND HIGHLANDS EXPERI- MENTS IN SELF-AMUSEMENT THE REBELLIOUS SCHOOL- BOY. OON after the occurrence which has detained us so long, the boy proceeded on a visit to certain rela- tives in- the Highlands of Sutherland ; a visit which was repeated in two successive autumns. His faculties were thus exercised by new scenes and new acquaintances ; he listened to discussions on the poems of Ossiaii, and began secretly to think it probable that the famed Celtic bard belonged to the ancient clan MacPher- son ; he added to the picture-gallery of his imagination a few fresh subjects, long, low valleys in tender blue, en- livened by green-wooded knolls and delicately draped with wreaths of morning mist ; reaches of quiet lake with gray ruins nodding on slim promontories ; waterfalls glancing by the silvery boles of birch-trees, and sending up a steamy spray to fall gemlike on their drooping foliage ; and he laid the foundation of that thorough comprehension of the character of the Highlanders, and of the condition of the Highlands, which made him in after life one of the best authorities on all Highland questions. Whether in Sutherland or at home, his mind was con- stantly active, constantly growing. His school-fellows wondered and derided as they beheld him launching on the horse-pond a succession of mysterious vessels constructed 51 52 THE BOY. from the descriptions of Anson, Cook, and other voyagers. In the "Schools and Schoolmasters" we hear of one of these, a proa, similar to those used by the Ladrone island- ers, .but this was no more than a single specimen of his ship-carpentering. " I used," he wrote to Baird, " to keep in exercise the risible faculties of all the mimic navigators of the pond, with slim, fish-like boats of bark, like those of the North American Indians, awkward high-pooped galleys, like those I had seen in an old edition of Dryden's "Vir- gil," two-keeled vessels, like the double canoes of Otaheite, and wall-sided half vessels, like the proas of the Ladrone islands. Nor could I," he proceeds, " derive, like my com- panions, any pleasure from the merely mechanical opera- tion of plain sailing. I had a story connected with every voyage, and every day had its history of expeditions of discovery, and cases of mutiny and shipwreck." Naviga- tion gave place to chemistry, but his experiments were " wofully unfortunate." Then he tried painting ; but, as the art seems to have required boiling of oil, and as he boiled it so effectually that the flame found its way out at the chimney-top, and a " sublime fire-scene," threatening to become more sublime than agreeable, was the result, the brush was thrown aside. The founding of leaden images was next attempted, but one of the busts being waggishly like a neighbor, and troubles arising in consequence, this, also, was abandoned. "My ingenuity gained me such a reprimand that I flung my casts into the fire." He now took a turn at "mosaic work," and this was followed by attempts to fashion watch-seals. " When I had worn the points of my fingers with cutting and polishing until the blood appeared, I forsook the grindstone." He fell in with a book on natural magic, palmistry, and astrology, and for a time went wool-gathering upon that particular range of the mountains of vanity. He became a sufficient adept in AMUSEMENTS* 53 palmistry to make out, from a perusal of the mystic char- acters inscribed on the palm of his left hand, that his life was to be strange and eventful, that he was to become a revolutionary leader, and that he was to die, like Wallace, on the scaffold. Verse- writing, prose- writing, and " a third sort of composition "which imitated the style of Macpher- son's ' Ossian,' " were engaged in, probably with fitfulness, ]but with passionate enjoyment. His principal amusement at this period, however, was one of which he has singularly enough omitted mention in the " Schools and Schoolmasters." He drew the map of a country in the sand, and, having collected quantities of variously colored shells from the beach, arranged them so as to represent its inhabitants. Appointing himself king of the miniature community, he designed its towns, roads, canals, harbors, and other public works. He ruled his dominions by every different form of government with which he was acquainted, and attacked or defended them by every stratagem of war with which books or his uncles had made him familiar. In his fourteenth year all other amusements yielded to that of heading a band of his school-fellows, with whom, in the harvest vacation, he spent every day, from dawn to sunset, in or about a deep cavern, penetrating one of the steepest precipices which skirt the southern base of the hill of Cromarty. One of the brotherhood brought a pot, another a pitcher ; the shore supplied shell-fish, the wood fuel, the fields potatoes, peas, and beans ; and so they went a-gypsying the long summer day. u The time not employed in cooking," says Miller in his letter to Principal Baird, " or in procuring victuals, we spent in acting little dramatic pieces, of which I sketched out the several plans, leaving the dialogue to be supplied by the actors. Robbers, buccaneers, outlaws of every 54 THE BOY. description, were the heroes of these dramas. They fre- quently, despite of my arrangements to the contrary, ter- minated in skirmishes of a rather tragic cast, in which, with our spears of elder and swords of hazel, we exchanged pretty severe blows. We were sometimes engaged, too, in conflicts with other boys, in which, as became a leader, I distinguished myself by a cool yet desperate courage. Nor was I entitled to the rank I held from only the abilities which I displayed in framing plays and in fighting. I swam, climbed, leaped, and wrestled better than any other lad of my years and inches in the place." With schooling, in the mean time, it fared as ill as pos- sible. Hugh had made up his mind not to learn, and he could neither be coaxed nor beaten out of his determina- tion. Sooth to say, he had become a self-willed, turbulent lad, and the haziness of conception on the subject of meum and tuum, indicated by potato-pilfering and orchard-rob- bing, was not the darkest shade which we have to bring into harmony at this period, as we best may, with the idyllic brightness of his boyhood. In the letter to Prin- cipal Baird and elsewhere, he mentions a fact or two which he omits from the " Schools and Schoolmasters," but which cannot be withheld consistently with biographic veracity. Setting his schoolmaster, his uncles, and his mother at defiance, he played truant three weeks out of four, and cast off every trammel of authority. Distressed and alarmed, his relatives tried force. .The stubborn will and intrepid spirit which he had inherited from his father were roused to fiercer opposition. He carried about with him a long clasp-knife, with which to repel any attack that might be made upon him by his uncles. They next had recourse to expostulation. They represented to him, with affectionate earnestness, that he was losing his sole chance of escaping a life of manual labor, and urged that the possession of BOY-ATHEIST. 55 faculties whose right use would enable him to rise in life, made it the more disgraceful in him to sink actually below his father's station. The arguments were unanswerable, and Hugh seems to have made no attempt to answer them, but he held his own course. His mother, profoundly afflicted by the seeming disappointment of her hopes, gave him up altogether, and bestowed her affection on his two sisters. In the winter of 181G, both the little girls died. Hugh loved them, and was deeply affected when the music of their voices, which had cheered the cottage so long, passed suddenly away forever. But keener far was the pang which struck to his heart when he overheard his mother remarking how different would her condition have been, had it pleased Heaven to take her son and leave one of her daughters. " It was bitter for me," he says, " to think, and yet I could not think otherwise, that she had cause of sorrow, both for those whom she had lost, and for him who survived ; and I would willingly have laid down my life, could the sacrifice have restored to her one of my sisters." A noble impulse and sincere, but an impulse merely ; in a few weeks he was again at the head of his band. " A particular way of thinking," he remarks, " a peculiar course of reading, a singular train of oral narration, had con- curred from the period at which I first thought, read, or listened, in giving my character the impress it then bore, and it was not in the power of detached accident or effort to effect a change." He had, at this time, cast all religion to the winds. We have it explicitly in his own words that he became an atheist. " A boy-atheist," he writes to Mr John Swanson, in 1828, "is surely an uncommon character. I was one in reality ; for, possessed of a strong memory, which my uncles, and an early taste for reading, had stored with religious sentiments and stories of religious men, I was compelled, for the sake of peace, either to do that 56 THE BOY. which was right ; or by denying the truth - of the Bible to set every action, good and bad, on the same level." His atheism, however, was a mere affectation, a drossy scum on the surface of his nature, with no real basis either in head or in heart. It was one form of his rebelliousness at the time. He was obstinately wilful and irreligious, and he thought it bold and fine and also logically consistent to call himself an atheist. ~ Three schoolmasters in succession had an opportunity of" exercising their talents upon Hugh, and in each case the failure was signal. His schooling ended when he was fif- teen in a pitched battle with the dominie. His gains from ten years of nominal education were small. Penmanship, clear and strong, a smattering of arithmetic, spelling of which a boy of ten might be ashamed, syntax which joined substantives in the singular to verbs in the plural and vice versa, were his scholastic acquirements. His miscellaneous reading, however, had been extensive ; he had stored up a vast amount of information in a capacious and retentive memory ; he composed freely in prose and verse, though there is hardly any sign of vitality in his writings of this period except the delight they evince in the work of com- position. Before the close of the day on which his conflict with the schoolmaster took place, he had avenged himself in a copy of satirical verses, which, to say the least, show a great advance, in flexibility and in command of language, on those in which he first recorded the adventure in the Doocot cave. As given in " Schools and Schoolmasters," they are much improved, the epithets freshened and bur- nished, and the best line in the whole, " Nature's born fop, a saint by art," added. I find the lines in the "Village Observer," a CONTRADICTIONS OF CHARACTER. 57 manuscript magazine in Miller's boyish handwriting, dated Feb., 1820. Such was Hugh Miller at the time he left school. A rugged, proud, and stiff-necked lad, impossible to drive and difficult to lead, his character already marked with strong lines, and developing from within or through self-chosen influences. " I saw," said Baxter of Cromwell, " that what he learned must be from himself ;" and the observation 'might already have been made of Hugh Miller. To his friends he was a perplexity and offence ; to his uncles, in particular, who knew him too well and were too sagacious to accept the off-hand theory of his schoolmasters that he was merely a stupid and bad boy, he must have seemed a mass of contradictions. Intellectual in his wildest play, fond of books, and capable of discerning excellence from its counterfeits in thought and style, passionately addicted to the observation of nature, and forgetting no fact he once ascertained, how could he be dull in the ordinary sense? If, again, capacity to influence one's fellows was a test of power, could it be said that he, who was undisputed sover- eign of the boys of the place, was the stupidest of them all? A dunce who from childhood had entertained his companions with tales of his own invention, who fitted his play-fellows with dramatic parts by way of pastime, who was never weary when his pen was in his hand, who pos- sessed more literary information than any one twice his age in Cromarty, was a phenomenon new to the experience of Uncle James and Uncle Sandy. It was a puzzle for them, and it is something of a puzzle for us. Not a few among them men of the highest eminence as thinkers and writers will decide with impatient em- phasis that Hugh's rebellion against the tyranny of gram- mar was the genial assertion of his native force, the burst- ing of the flower-pot by the oak sapling, the most propi- 58 THE BOY. tious thing which could have befallen him. There is much to be said on this side of the question. The boy who was dux of the school in Cromart}^ when Hugh Miller was dunce, the model boy, who was the delight of the school- master, and who carried off the highest prizes when he went to college, the boy whom the story-books designate for a Lord Mayor's coach and a handsome fortune, be- came a respectable and useful minister of the Church of Scotland, and would probably never have been heard of beyond the circle of his parishioners, but for the circum- stance of his having been mentioned in the works of his friend, the dunce. The name of the dux has been touched by the pen of the dunce, and is likely to live as long as the English language. By taking the bit into his teeth, leap- ing the fences, and scouring the plain at his own wild will, Hugh Miller obtained that freedom for his faculties which is necessary to all vigorous growth, to all beauty and ca- pricious grace of movement. Had he received the techni- cal training of a college professor, would college professors have said that they would give their hand from their wrist for the curio safelidtas of his style? Take young creatures, colts, or lambs, mew them up, feed and fodder them on the most approved scientific principles ; you will have them sleek and fat, but will there be buoyancy or elastic strength in their limbs ; will there be the light of health and joy in their eyes ; will not the " poor things," like Tennyson's hot- house flowers, " look unhappy " ? The law of freedom ap- plies to all life, human as well as animal, and the finer and fresher the mental qualities, the greater is the risk that constraint will benumb or pervert them. The grand thing to be secured is mental force, and it is possible that labo- rious effort to attain skill in the expression of force may draw fatally on the original force itself. The faculties, like over-drilled soldiers, may have no strength left to play WAS IT WELL? 59 their part in life's battle. It is a Shakespearian opinion that " Universal plodding prisons up The nimble spirits in the arteries ; As motion and long-during action tires The sinewy vigor of the traveller." The worst possible result of school discipline is to take the edge from that exultant ardor with which a strong youth thinks of work, for rnind or for body, as the supreme of pleasures. Hugh Miller's freedom was not unredeemed trifling ; it was his native force developing in its own way and seeking its own nourishment. If he turned from the Latin Rudiments, he found a literature in which he never tired to expatiate, a literature whose teaching he accepted with enthusiasm ; a literature which acquainted him with foreign lands, and caused him to thrill at the deeds of brave men ; a literature whose inmost spirit he vitally as- similated and made his own. If attention to his grammati- cal task in the dingy school-room pained him, his powers were concentrated in highest action when he accompanied Uncle Sandy in his researches on the shore at ebb-tide, or when, in solitary rambles, he looked carefully, constantly, lovingly, into the face of nature. Even in those doings with his brethren of the cave which seem to have occa- sioned his relatives most alarm, he was acquiring habits of self-possession, courage, fidelity, reticence, which are not always imparted by artificial training. And let us not forget that stubbornness of purpose, in- flexibility of will, the unpardonable sin in the eyes of most pedagogues, is after all the indispensable basis of charac- ter for any man who will do much. Acquire it as he may, the ability to go forward in the path he has chosen, to face the pelting shower and the scorching sun, to do wholly, heartily, inflexibly, what he deliberately wills to do, is of 60 THE BOY. sovereign importance for a man. Quicquid vult valde vult, this is the diploma of masterhood in nature's university ; " unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," this is the" hope- less doom. " I sowed flower-seed," wrote John Sterling respecting his management of his garden in boyhood, " and then turned up the ground again and planted potatoes, and then rooted out the potatoes to insert acorns, and apple- pips, and at last, as may be supposed, reaped neither roses, nor potatoes, nor oak-trees, nor apples." The words are an epitome of Sterling's biography. Hugh Miller, even in boy- hood, had a purpose, and held to it, firmly resolved that he would not have his limbs straightened on the Procrustean bed prepared for him, conscious that he was neither dunce nor reprobate, but growing in his own way. It must be carefully noted that the character always re- mained sound in the vital parts. Of meanness, untruthful- ness, cruelty, avarice, he showed no trace. Had his sensual passions been vehement as those of Burns or Mirabeau, the probability is that he would have fallen into debauch- ery ; but his wildest passion was a passion for freedom ; his dissipation was to wander in the wood or by the wave. Neither morally nor intellectually was he, at any time, dissolute. And yet it is impossible to hide from ourselves that there is another side to all this. It is difficult to believe that insubordination, turbulence, habitual neglect of tasks with which a sentiment of duty is more or less associated, can be other than disadvantageous to the mind. To check the lawlessness natural to man ; to break self-will to the yoke ; to change the faculties from a confused barbarian herd or horde (Jieer of the old German tribes) into a disciplined or exercised company (exercitus of the Romans) must ever be an essential part of the training of youth. Educated THE OTHER SIDE. 61 human nature is more natural than uneducated. Shakes- peare says, again : " Nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean ; so, o'er that art, Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art That nature makes." Does not this throw us back on the reflection that educa- tion of the highest kind, based on nature, guided by nature, yet raising nature to heights otherwise unattainable, is not to be easily attained? In every case where an original mind is concerned, education is too subtle a process, re- quiring too intimate and individual a communion of soul with soul, to be managed by the rough, common methods. A boy of genius would require a teacher of genius, one whose perceptions were so keen, whose sympathies were so fine and true, that he could understand the exceptional mind, obey its monitions as he led it on, apply to it a con- straint which would be felt as gentleness, and a gentleness which would tell as constraint. Had Hugh Miller found such a teacher, the advantage to himself and the world might doubtless have been great. He had capacities in him for consummate scholarship, an exact and tenacious memory, great attention, great application, true taste, and clear judg- ment. Learning could never with him have been pedantry ; and it is indisputable that the man who can converse with the ancients in their own tongues commands a wider intel- lectual horizon than the man who knows only his native language. One cannot help wishing that Hugh Miller had seen Homer himself lead out Achilles to poise a javelin, or had perceived how different a person is the brawny, broad- shouldered, highly unrhetorical Ulysses of the " Odysse}^" from the Ulysses whom Pope taught to look and speak " in a manner worthy of the times of civilization." Had Hugh 62 THE BOY. Miller's father survived, his shrewd sense and peremptory authority might have given a new color to the schooling of the boy ; and, without sacrificing his freedom, Hugh might have taken enough along with him to go to college. Once at a university, the ambition of scholarship would have laid hold on him, and with genius unimpaired and materials extended, he might, in the first bloom of his manhood, have taken his place among the foremost intellectual workers of his time. There is another consideration which lends a melancholy emphasis to these regrets. Hugh Miller came of a long- lived, strong-boned race, and we have learned from himself that he was the most athletic boy of his years in Cromarty. Had he proceeded to a University, he would have avoided those fifteen years in the quarry and the hewing-shed, dur- ing which his robust constitution was shaken, and the seeds of ineradicable disease were sown in his frame. In that case, the tear and wear of the severest of the intellectual professions, journalism, though combined with unremitting attention to science, might have failed to prevent his attain- ing a green old age. In his letter to Baird, he refers to the obscurity and hardship of his life as a mason, as " punish- ment for his early carelessness." But why follow these speculations farther, or launch into the vainest and vaguest of all philosophies, the philosophy of what might have been? By natural endowment and the action of circum- stances, in one word, by the will of God, Miller was fitted for the work appointed him, and this is all we require to know or can know. - BOOK II. THE APPRENTICE. " Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work." " Befreit der Mensch sich der sich Uberwindet." CHAPTER I. BOYISH MAGAZINES A LAD OF HIS OWN WILL BECOMES APPRENTICE HARDSHIPS ALLEVIATIONS. OY-LIFE, with its freshness of faculty, its exuber- ance of delights, its opulence of wayward force, lies behind Hugh Miller. In the autumn of 1819 his mother, after a widowhood of fourteen years, accepts n second husband, and he removes with her to the house of his step-father. " I had no particular objections to the match," he writes to a friend a few years later, " but you may be certain that it gave me much disgust at the time." It compels him to realize the fact that the world has changed for him, and that duty now demands that play shall cease and work begin. Half a year, however, glides away pleasantly enough, his own expression is " very agreeably," in the house of his step-father. He still con- tinues those sportings with literature which have from in- fancy been among his choicest enjoyments. I have before me Nos. L, II. , and III. of a tiny Magazine, written in Miller's hand, and entitled, " The Village Observer, or Monthly MSS." They are dated January, February, March, 1820. Hugh is the editor and principal contributor. It is in February of this year that he enters on his appren- ticeship, and the March number closes the series. The pen gives place to the hammer for a time. These " Village Observers " are absolutely authentic documents of Miller's history at this time, and enable us to 65 66 THE APPRENTICE. realize the circumstances of his life before any tint of fancy, or association from the pursuits of a subsequent period, had softened their harsher features. In the three numbers there is not the remotest allusion to his appren- ticeship. This may be imputed to the disagreeableness of the subject ; but it is somewhat remarkable that place is not found for a brief description of those rare and beautiful birds discovered by him in the quarry on the evening of his first day of labor, and delineated with enthusiastic minute- ness in tne " Old Red Sandstone." The one was a gold- finch, very uncommon in the highlands of Scotland, with " hood of vermilion and wings inlaid with gold ; " the other a bird of the woodpecker tribe, u variegated with light blue and a grayish-yellow." Neither does Hugh, in capacity of village observer, give us, in his March number for 1820, any hint of that "exquisite pleasure" which, as we are told in the " Old Red Sandstone," he derived from contemplating the adjacent landscape when resting, on the second day, from his toil at the hour of noon. " All the workmen," he says in that book, " rested at mid-day, and I went to enjoy my half-hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory, that stretched half-way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in BEGINNINGS OF TOIL. 67 marble. They reminded me of the pretty French story, in which an old artist is described as tasking the ingenuity of his future son-in-law, by giving him, as a subject for his pencil, a flower-piece composed of only white flowers, of which the one half were to bear their proper color, the other half a deep purple hue, and yet all be perfectly natural ; and how the young man resolved the riddle and gained his mistress by introducing a transparent purple vase into the picture, and making the light pass through it on the flowers that were drooping over the edge. I returned to the quarry, convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest employments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it." This is beautiful writing and excellent philosophy ; but there is not a word in any degree resembling it, whether descriptive or philosophical, in the " Monthly MSS.," edited by Hugh Miller at the time. Nor is mention made of the ripple-marked sandstone, on behold- ing which, on the same day, he " felt as completely at fault as Robinson Crusoe did on his discovering the print of the man's foot on the sand." What is, perhaps, still more surprising, there is a similar absence of reference to ornithological, geological, or aesthetic alleviations of his early toil in the account of this period, written by him ten years subsequently for Principal Baird. " My first six months of labor," he writes to Baird in 1829, " presented only a series of disasters. I was at the time of a slender make and weak constitution ; and I soon found I was ill-fitted for such employments as the trundling of loaded wheelbarrows over a plank, or the raising of huge blocks of stone out of a quarry. My hands were soon fretted into large blisters, my breast became the seat of a dull, oppressive pain, and I was much distressed, after exer- tion more than usually violent, by an irregular motion of my heart. My spirits were almost always miserably low ; and 68 THE APPRENTICE. I was so wrapped up in a wretched, apathetic absence of mind, that I have wrought for whole hours together with scarcely a thought of what I was doing myself, and scarcely conscious of what others were doing around me." Both these narratives may be strictly consistent with fact. In that case they afford a striking illustration of Miller's own remark, that two varying descriptions may be given by the same person of the same events, and yet both be vera- cious, lie said nothing, in the earlier documents, of the rare birds, the beautiful landscape, the rippled-marked stone, because it was not until afterwards that he regarded them as of importance. He mentally associated with his first years of labor feelings which belonged to a later time. He was an observer from infancy, and his observations gave him joy ; his memory became stored with facts ; but not until he studied geology did he apprehend that these facts had any scientific value. When geology took possession of Miller, the possession was complete. He thought, talked, wrote of geology ; his leading articles, his discussions of political and religious questions, were full of it. From the boyish magazines he edited, it is absent ; from the poems which he composed in boyhood and youth, it is absent ; in the letters which he wrote to his favorite associates, of which we have an uninterrupted series, beginning a year or two later than the time at which we have arrived, we look for it in vain ; and in the narrative composed at the request of Baird, there is not one throb of scientific enthusiasm. It was, I believe, at a time much later than that of his ap- prenticeship that Hugh Miller, though his eye had always beamed with delight when it rested on an object of beauty, learned .to take a geological interest in the ammonite, " graceful in its curves as those of the Ionic volute, and greatly more delicate in its sculpturing," or to read, hour THE " VILLAGE OBSERVER/'' 69 after hour, with scientific curiosity, in the " marvellous library of the Scotch Lias." Boys and girls are moralists and politicians before they care about science. Charlotte Bronte and her brother and sisters also played at Magazines, and wrote solemn essays lauding the Duke and execrating the Whigs. Hugh Miller and his boy friends in 1820 were ardent politicians, censur- ing the conduct of government, bewailing the horrors of Peterloo, sternly criticising the motives and proceedings of the Reformers. One of the most important articles in their Magazine is a " Retrospective Essay," in which the events of the time are reviewed in an ethico-historical spirit. There is no name attached to the piece, but I take it to be Miller's, and it is at all events a specimen at first hand of the kind of speculation and of talk which went on in the circle of his acquaintance. The retrospective essayist thinks that the cruelties committed at Manchester in the Peterloo affair " will be held in as much detestation by future ages as the firing upon the inhabitants of Toulon, or the massacre of Glencoe." A clever simile, however, catches his eye, and he follows the bright game even at the risk of inconsistency. " Smollett," he says, " has some- where observed that an English mob, like a dancing bear, may be irritated to a very dangerous degree of rage, yet pacified by firing a pistol over his nose. Such was it with our British Radicals ; those whose vivid harangues were inspired with all the spirit of heroism, and whom we would have supposed lions in the field, slunk frightened at the hostile preparations against them, and were heard of no more." Severities comparable both to the massacre of Glencoe and to the firing of a pistol over a bear's nose are not easily imagined, but it would be hard to debar boy lit- terateurs from saying all the fine things which turn tip, in discussing a subject, merely because they occur on opposite 70 THE APPRENTICE. sides of the question. Very young and very old politicians are generally Conservative, and the former invariably ex- press the highest moral and religious sentiments. Our retrospective essayist has little or no sympathy with the patriots. " Reform ," he writes, " was but the name which a few designing men had affixed to a daring rebellion ; and whose aims were that, after having pulled down with the teeth of a deluded multitude those men whose tyranny was most obnoxious, to set themselves up as rulers, and in their turn be tyrants. Happily their conduct and principles were of such a nature as to exclude from their meetings men of piety or true independence. The religious opinions of Cob- bett held back all true Christians from his standard, and the enthusiasm with which Carlyle was defended disgusted all men of sense or feeling. At their meetings it was im- possible to be an oppositionist ; and though they termed themselves men of liberty and forbearance, the man who dared openly to oppose their schemes ran the risk of having his brains beat out. Indeed, the liberty they would have secured for themselves was of no universal kind ; it was a liberty which only bad men would have profited by, and from which the virtuous would have turned with disgust ; those laws which bind the victorious would no longer have existed, and instead of a few there would have been a mul- tiplicity of tyrants." The last number of the "Village Observer" contains a few verses on criticism, headed " extempore," which seem to be by Miller. The two opening lines are not without spirit : " Critics, like lions, make not carrion game; The work has merit, or they'll ne'er condemn." Perhaps the most significant trait which the number pre- sents of Hugh is this from a "Journal of the Week:" ENGAGES WITH DAVID WRIGHT. 71 " Wrote a moral essay upon the advantages of industry, but tore it in pieces on considering that its author was one of the most indolent personages on earth, did nothing, but still determined on reform." Farewell, then, to the busy idleness of verse-making and magazine-editing. In the last days of February, Miller still has leisure to put together the number for March, but no other number follows. He binds himself verbally, but by no legal instrument, apprentice for three years to " old David Wright," stone-mason, brother-in-law of his mother. Old David was something of a character. The man who, standing on the thwarts of his boat, which had just sunk, the sea-water being at the moment up to his throat, could so accurately appreciate the points of his situation, and retain so clear a perception of the thing to be done, as to say, on seeing his snuff-box floating off, " Od, Andro man, just rax out your han' and tak' in my snuff-box," must have had an enviable firmness of nerve and quietness of self-possession. Miller's uncles, who had taken the right measure of his capacity, and who had loved and watched over him as a son, have done their utmost to oppose this decision. Their sure instinct tells them that the place of this recruit is not in the ranks ; they have earnestly wished to see him en- rolled among the brain-workers of the community ; and, like all Scottish peasants of the old historic type, they regard the ministers of the Church of Christ as taking pre- cedence of all others in the intellectual aristocracy. They have told him that if he will only return to his books, and prepare for college, their home and their savings will be at his command. They have tried to appeal to his pride and desire for advancement. Uncle James has gone the length of hinting with some bitterness that if he has found books too hard for him, he may find labor harder still, and may 72 THE APPRENTICE. turn from the latter with the same inconstancy with which he turned from the former. But Hugh, as James Wright knoWs and has said, is " a lad of his own will," and his mind is made up. As for his declinature of the clerical profession, he satisfies both himself and Uncle James on that head, by the consideration that he has no call to the sacred office. The feeling of independence, strong in Hugh Miller as in Robert Burns, rebels against the idea of his going to college, dependent on the bounty of rela- tives. Strangely enough, too, that passion for literature, whether in the form of reading or of writing, which had marked him from his childhood as the predestined author, drove him to the quarry. The conception of a literary ca- reer founded upon a complete University education, and commencing with the instruments and furtherances which ages have accumulated, had not dawned upon his mind. Literature had been to him a coy maiden, radiant, fasci- nating, but free and light-winged as a forest bird, and he shrank from formal irreversible espousals. He has observed that " Cousin George," a mason, though hard- worked during several months in the year, has the months of winter to himself. This decides him in favor of the trade of mason. In winter and early spring he will return to his beloved Muse, to dally with her in a life-long court- ship ; or, if it is to end in marriage, for the thought of rising by literature does lurk, deep hidden, in his heart, she will take his hand as a beneficent princess takes that of a knightly though low-born suitor, and lift him at once to fame and fortune. Uncle James' remark on the proba- bility of his failing at labor as he has failed at study, he takes note of ; it may be pleasant to teach Uncle James that he can will to work as well as will to play, and that, though others have lost the mastership of him, he has not lost mastership of himself. Enough ; he declares unaltera- HARDSHIP. 73 bly for stone and lime, and becomes apprentice to his uncle, old David Wright. The engagement is understood to be for three years. In the chill February morning of 1820, he takes his way to the quarry. Eelieved or not relieved by touches of romance, Hugh Miller's first season of labor proves to be one of sternest hardship, putting to the strain his whole faculty of endur- ance. The dark side is given in all his contemporary or nearly contemporary renderings of the subject ; the lights in the picture come out only when it is seen through the vista of years. Still quite a boy, slender and loose- jointed, unintermitted toil presses hard on him both in mind and in body. His spirits fail. He is constantly in pain, often prostrated by sickness. He shows at first no quickness or dexterity in acquiring his trade, and is the most awkward of the apprentices. Uncle David begins to be of opinion that this incomprehensible compound of genius and dunce is incapable -of attaining the skill of an ordinary mechanic. The lad is sorely tempted to become a dram-drinker. We have two accounts of his triumph over this temptation, the one harshly realistic, of date 1829, the other more picturesque, dated 1853 . "It is probable," he writes to Baird, " that the want of money alone prevented me from indulging, at this period, in the low vice of dram-drinking." He thus describes the affair in " My Schools and Schoolmasters : " " In laying down the foundation-stone of one of the larger houses built this year by Uncle David and his partner, the workmen had a royal ' founding-pint,' and two whole glasses of the whiskey came to my share. A full-grown man would not have deemed a gill of usquebaugh an overdose, but it was con- siderably too much for me ; and when the party broke up, and I got home to my books, I found, as I opened the pages of a favorite author, the letters dancing before my 74 THE APPRENTICE. eyes, and that I could no longer master the sense. I have the volume at present before me, a small edition of the Essays of Bacon, a good deal worn at the corners by the friction of the pocket ; for of Bacon I never tired. The condition into which I had brought myself was, I felt, one of degradation. I had sunk, by nry own act, for the time, to a lower level of intelligence than that on which it was my privilege to be placed ; and though the state could have been no very favorable one for forming a resolution, I in that hour determined that I should never again sacri- fice my capacity of intellectual enjoyment to a drinking usage ; and, with God's help, I was enabled to hold by the determination." It was, therefore, not " the want of money alone" which prevented him from becoming a tip- pler ; but we may be permitted to think that this little circumstance was a valuable auxiliary to Bacon. Soon, also, there come alleviations of his hardship more practical than those derived from geological discovery and admiration of Highland scenery. As he does not sink under exertion, his physical stamina gradually asserts itself, and makes labor a source of strength. It was a characteristic of Miller during life that he progressed in any pursuit not by little and little, but by leaps. His master and fellow-workmen, who, during the first months of his apprenticeship, have regarded him as too awkward to learn his trade, are suddenly astonished to find him one of the most expert hewers in the squad. " So flattered was my vanity," he writes to Baird, " by the respect which they paid me on this account, and such satisfaction did I derive from emulating them in what they confessed the better department of their profession, that the coming winter, to which, a few .weeks before, I had looked forward as good men do to the pleasures of another state of existence, was no longer an object of desire." ALLEVIATIONS. 75 To throw down the tools, however, could not but be a re- lief, and the leisure of winter is hailed with satisfaction. After a pedestrian journey to Strath-Carron, in company with his cousin, George Munro, in the course of which he makes some observations, not of an important character, on an old Scotch forest of native pine, he returns to Cromarty. The education of toil has already done more for him than any previous education, and the unruly boy has become a thoughtful, docile young man. CHAPTER II. EARLY FRIENDSHIPS - SWANSON, FINLAY, ROSS - PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION - TWO OF NATURE'S GENTLEMEN. Ms early boyhood Miller had given proof of the blended faithfulness and tenderness of his nature by the affection with which he clung to one or two chosen friends. His friendship with John Swanson, him of the Doocot cave, already warm and confi- dential when Hugh was twelve and John ten, continued in freshness and intensity until the hour of Miller's death. Finlay, whom he describes as a gentle-spirited boy, who loved to share with him the solitude of the caves by moon- light, seems to have held the first place in his regard in the period immediately preceding his apprenticeship. In the "Village Observer" for January, 1820, I find " The Fare- well," a copy of verses in which, on departing for the south, Finlay bids adieu to Cromarty, and which is alluded to and partly quoted in the u Schools and Schoolmasters." The five stanzas of which it consists, though boyish, are not without a certain pensive sincerity and sweetness : " Ye pleasures of childhood, farewell, ID which I have oft had a part ; Where mirth and where gladness prevail, Without affectation or art. " How oft when the school set me free, I've wandered amongst these green woods, When nothing was heard but the bee, Or the cataract pouring its floods. 76 WILLIAM ROSS. 77 * $ Ye shepherds who merrily sing, And laugh out the long summer's day, Expert at the ball or the ring, Whose lives are one routine of play ; " To you my dear crook I resign, My colly, my pipe, and my horn ; To leave you indeed I repine, But I must away with the morn. " New scenes may arise on my sight, The world and its follies be new, But never such scenes of delight Shall I witness secluded from you." By far the most remarkable, however, of these early friends of Miller was William Ross. There are many memorials of Ross in Miller's papers, and I can perceive that the account given of him in the " Schools and School- masters " is not too highly colored. The child of parents crushed into the dust by poverty, his father half imbecile, his mother feeble in health and broken-spirited, his own ener- gies depressed by perpetual sickness, he had received from capricious nature a mental organization of exquisite delicacy, enriched with fine and tender elements. Modest, gentle, affectionate ; tremulously alive to the feelings and claims of others ; depreciating everything in himself, exalting every capacity and accomplishment of one he loved ; unaffectedly religious, and unmoved by utmost calamity from simple faith in a divine care and a heavenly love, William Ross was the very ideal of a bosom-friend. There is a letter dated Nigg, 10th July, 1821, from Ross to Miller, which, unimportant as it is otherwise, will serve to introduce him to the reader. He had just lost by death one of the very few who had been kind to him in his boyhood- 78 THE APPRENTICE. " Where think you have I sitten down to write you? In my grandmother's room, and before the very table at which I once used to read (in happier days) a chapter in the big old Bible and sing a psalm every night and .morning. I cannot tell you how I feel. The remembrance of the inno- cence and happiness of the days that are gone has softened my heart, indifferent as it has become to the pure feelings of devotion. I have done reading just now the three last chapters of the Gospel of St. John, and with the history of the sufferings of our Saviour I was never more affected. I feel my soul raised above the things of this world in the contemplation of the truly godlike patience with which, in his human nature, he bore the terrible evils which were inflicted on him, and his resignation to the will of his heavenly Father. " Oh that I could fix the present mood, and render it per- manent ! What a world of happiness dwells in the bosom of the devout man ; amid all the storms of adversity he has a fortress and a God. His hopes repose on that Prov- idence who has the disposal of all events ; not knowing himself what is good or evil of the things of this life, he does his duty, and trusts to his Father for the rest. How far different is God from man ! If we ask his favor he will not withhold it. ' To the poor he is a friend, and he will not hide his face from the needy.' I find we must love him before we can truly love one another. I see this love as the master principle as the purifier of the heart ; it warms our affections to our friends, makes us grateful to our benefactors and forgiving to our enemies. Oh, my dear Miller, bear with me now as you have often done before ! I am weak as a child. " My mind is filled with recollections of the joys that are gone, and the dear sainted friend that has left me. I went to her house, but I did not see her waiting my approach, WILLIAM ROSS. 79 her feet did not sound in the passage as I entered the door ; ' my dear Willie/ was not heard on my unexpected appear- ance. The good hand that once nursed me was not stretched out with an air of tender affection towards me. I looked to the place where she used to sit, but she was not there ; in her bodily shape I did not behold her, yet her image was before me, and all the good she did me was present in iny view. What a vacancy is here ! what a change has death made to me ! But I must have done ; the last light of evening is taking its leave. Good-by." The difference between the character of Miller, who met every check and insult with pugnacity, and that of Boss, whose gentleness was feminine, and who could not bear to be thought ill of even by those who acted to him meanly and unkindly, tended probably to cement their friendship. The proceedings of Ross on completing his apprenticeship, and commencing practice as a house-painter on his own account, illustrate in a touching manner his simplicity and kindliness. The master who had enjoyed his services for five years and valuable services they were, for William's talent in his vocation was eminent seems to have quite cast him off when his term expired. He writes to Mil- ler : " Want stared me in the face ; and, having determined not to be a burden to any, I meant to leave, if I possibly could, the place ; for, though I had no prospect of employ- ment, I deemed it better to starve among strangers (if nothing else awaited me) than in this country On the Tuesday after you had left me I waited on Mr. , and told him what I meant to do if he would trust me. He would not ; and after so downright a refusal you cannot imagine the perturbed state of my mind. What hurt me most was that he should have doubted my probity. I then went straight to Mr. , to see what he thought of 80 THE APPRENTICE. me ; for after the first shock was over I was indifferent to what I might meet with. He was not quite so direct with me, but what he said amounted to a refusal too. Before evening I had paid them both, which so reduced my slender finances that I could go nowhere, and here, without money or employment, I could not well stay. The Mend who would have sympathized with me was gone ; and perhaps, 'twas better that he was. The way in which I have been treated could not but have hurt you. " Now that you have my worst news, I will tell you bet- ter. Colonel G sent for me to refresh the walls of his dining-room, and gave me 5s. when I had done. Soon after I saw Mr. , who asked- me whether I was em- ployed, and told me, on my replying in the negative, that his brother-in-law, Mr. , had bought paint at London, and was looking out for some one to paint his house for him by the day. I would do the work most readily, I said, but as my old master had thought of getting it for himself, I could not think of interfering. He assured me, however, that that was out of the question, as it was owing to the exorbitancy of my master's estimate that Mr. had procured the materials for himself. I accordingly went and settled with Mr. for the work at 3s. per day. This will make a sad change, I am afraid, in all I enjoyed of the favorable opinion of my master ; but I can't help it/-' Was there not a delicacy of honor in the reluctance of the lad, whom starvation actually stared in the face, to ac- cept work which his old master had " thought of getting," such as is rarely met with in any rank of life ? In a letter written shortly afterwards, we have this note of that mas- ter's conduct : " I came here to furnish brushes for the work, but my master would sell me none." Brushes, how- over, were obtained, and lie proceeds : " I am happier in WILLIAM ROSS. 81 my mind than usual. There are glimpses of sunshine breaking out upon me, and a less troubled sky overhead. Oh, how grateful ought I to be to that bounteous Benefactor who knows our wants, and can and will supply them ! I hardly know, my dear Miller, how to conclude. I trust I am grateful to him for you too." It must have been a sweetly toned nature which unkindness so bitter did not provoke to one angry word, and which was so easily stimu- lated to childlike gladness and to pious gratitude. In the deep forest one beam penetrates to the wounded bird, and it breaks on the instant into song. We shall take another extract from these letters of Wil- liam Ross. It is interesting not only from its references to himself, but on account of the few bold and vigorous strokes with which it sketches- Miller's uncles, James and Alexander Wright, and still more because of its vivid glimpse of the boy Miller : " I trust I am no misanthrope ; but, with one exception, and on that one I need not be very explicit in writing to you, it is dead and inanimate nature that I derive all my pleasures from, not the world of men. I have but one friend Really, my dear Miller, I am one of the weakest young fellows I ever knew. All that is worth anything in me lies on the sur- face of my character, a little taste, perhaps, a little fancy, and more than a little warmth of heart ; but I have no energy of will, no strength of judgment ; I feel I cannot come in contact with superior men without sinking into a mere nonentity, and losing all command of even the few powers I have. I always felt thus when in company with your uncles ; they are both strong-minded men, strong in sentiment and intellect, and there is a depth and mas- siveness in their character which common circumstances fail to render apparent to the unobservant, but which I have felt as if by instinct. Hence, perhaps, my profound 82 THE APPRENTICE. esteem for them ; but hence, also, my want of sympathy with them. Had you yourself been other than a boy when our intimacy was first formed, I would not now, it is prob- able, be on my present terms with you. We met in an hour propitious to friendship. I could not feel myself in- ferior to the wayward, warm-hearted boy, who besought me so anxiously to become attached to him, who admired my bad drawings, and saw very superior sense in my simple disjointed remarks. Your force of character at the same time was shown in but mere boyish rebellion which one could laugh at ; your firmness was but obstinacy. You were a mere cub, though a lion-cub, a mere sapling, though sprung from the acorn." Such was the young man with whom Miller spent the greater part of his time on being relieved from the labors of his first year of apprenticeship. He read his poems to Ross, and showed him his drawings. Hugh had formed a high estimate of both, and the undercurrent of critical severity which invariably accompanied his friend's applause, though not strong enough to damp his ardor, was useful in giving precision to his ideas of himself. Ross had pen- etration enough to discern that a certain imaginative glow, which threw out objects, as it were, in aerial perspective, and cast over them a pleasing light of fancy or association, belonged to Miller. In their walks in the wood or by the shore, he encouraged Hugh to cultivate literature, applaud- ing " the wild vigor of his imagination," sfad hinting that his word-pictures of the moment revealed more of poetical genius than the formal productions either of his pencil or his pen. " There is in the vicinity of the town of Cro- inarty," writes Miller to Baird, giving him an illustration of the kind of imaginative fantasia with which he used to entertain his friend, " a beautiful, thickly- wooded dell, through the bottom of which there runs a small streamlet. MOONLIGHT FANCIES. 83 This dell was one of our favorite night haunts. In winter, when the trees are bare of foliage, the moonbeams, when the moon is at full, find their way to the water, though the steep banks on either side are lost in the shade. The ap- pearance when viewed from some of the overhanging thick- ets is exceedingly beautiful, and when contemplating it in the company of my friend, I have in the wild extravagance of fancy compared the little moonlight brook to, I know not how many different objects, to a pictured flash of pale lightning, to a stream of lava, to a rippling strip of the Aurora Borealis. I have termed the little dell a dark oblong mirror, and flie bright streamlet in its centre the reflection of the milky way. I have described the trunks of the trees and the stones which were relieved by the light from the shade behind, as fays and spectres by which the place was tenanted. I have even given a minute detail of the particular expression of their features and the peculi- arities of their attire." Ross' advice to Miller on the whole was as follows : "Your drawings have but little merit, nor can I regard them even as works of promise ; neither by any means do you .write good verses. And why, do you think, do I tell you so ? Only to direct your studies to their proper object. You draw ill, because nature never intended that you should do otherwise ; whereas you write ill only because you write seldom. You are possessed of talents which, with due culture, will enable you to attain no common command of the pen ; for you are an original thinker, your mind is richly imbued with poetry, and, though devoid of a musical ear, you have, from nature, something much better, that perception of the harmonies of language which is essential to the forma- tion of a good and elegant style." So far as I can judge, no critic in Europe could have more correctly estimated Miller's capacity at the time, or given him better advice. 84 THE APPRENTICE. A spectator, observing these lads, the one apprenticed to a mason, the other to a house-painter, would hardly have guessed the nature of their conversation. Had they been youths of aristocratic birth or university distinction, could their intercourse have been more completely that of gentle- men? We may note how steadily Hugh pushes forward what, without much conscious resolving on the subject, has become the purpose of his life, self-culture. With quiet persistence, undistracted by the commencement of lifelong toil as a mason, he cherishes the ambition of maturing his powers of thought and expression. Attesting, also, the radical nobleness of his character, and the high tone of the society in which he had lived, this circumstance is to be noted, that the ambition of making money never seized him. The big bells of Babylon dinning into all young ears, never more loudly than in our age, their invitation to make fortunes, had no persuasion for him. To extend the empire of his mind, to enrich and beautify the garden of his soul, this was what presented itself as a supreme object of ambi- tion to our Scottish boy of eighteen, with a mallet in his hand. CHAPTER III. CONON-SIDE A MANIAC FRIEND LIFE IN THE BARRACK WANDERINGS IN THE WOODS SCENERY OF CONON-SIDE AT HOME AGAIN. the spring of 1821 Miller resumed his labors. In the latter end of May, his master had finished the work contracted for in the district of Cromarty, and, as no more contracts were to be had, was compelled to descend from the position of master and seek employment as journeyman. The apprentice he had taken at the same time with Miller seized the opportunity of regaining his freedom, and setting up as journeyman on his own account ; and one might have thought that the wilful, headstrong lad, who had set his uncles and his schoolmas- ters at defiance, would have followed this example. But Hugh was no longer the turbulent school-boy of sixteen, and among the qualities which had ripened in the whole- some atmosphere of labor was a profound sense of justice. He continued to serve old David Wright, and proceeded with him to the banks of the Conon, a river which falls into the Cromarty Frith at its western extremity. On reaching Conon-side, they found that the scene of their occupation lay a few miles farther to the west, and for four weeks they were employed in building a jointure-house for the widow of a Highland proprietor. Miller describes the country around as " somewhat bare and drear y, a scene of bogs and moors, overlooked by a range of tame, heathy hills." 85 86 THE APPRENTICE. It was while here that he became acquainted with that remarkable maniac of whom he has left an account in the " Schools and Schoolmasters." Looking at midnight from the window in the loft in which he slept, he beheld a light moving among the ruins of an old chapel and the graves of the surrounding burial-ground. It was carried in the hand of the escaped maniac. He attracted her attention and secured her regard by interfering on her behalf when she was being chained down on the damp floor of her hut. Of a naturally powerful though completely disordered intel- lect, she had sagacity enough to discover that Miller was of a different strain from his fellow-masons, and entertained him with stories of the Highlands and anecdotes of her deceased brother, a preacher of reputation. She loved to discuss the most abstruse questions of metaphysical the- ology. That every human soul is immediately created by God, not transmitted from a human ancestor, she declared herself to be fully convinced ; but, then, how to account for the influence exerted on all souls by the fall? It would take a powerful theologian, sane or insane, to answer this question. Miller informed her that a great authority thought it might be "by way of natural concomitancy, as Estius will have it ; or, to speak as Dr. Reynolds doth, by way of ineffable resultancy and emanation." " As this," he adds, " was perfectly unintelligible, it seemed to satisfy my new friend." A singular pair on the black Ross-shire moor ! It is only, I suppose, in Scotland that masons' apprentices and female maniacs engage in abstruse meta- physical discussions. The jointure-house finished, Miller bids adieu to his mad friend, and returns to Conon-side. He is now, for the first time, introduced to the barrack or bothy life of a squad of masons. A description of the barrack and the scene it pre- sented on his first becoming one of its inmates occurs in THE BARRACK. 87 his letter to Baird. " I followed," he writes, " the horde into their barrack. It consisted of one large apartment. Along the wall, and across one of the gables, there was a range of beds rudely constructed of outside slab deals, and filled with straw, which bristled from beneath the blankets and from between the crevices of the frames in a manner much less neat than picturesque. At each bedside there were two chests, which served not only the purpose origi- nally intended, but also for chairs and tables. Suspended by ropes from the rafters above, there hung, at the height of a man's head from the ground, several bags filled with oat-meal, which by this contrivance was secured from the rats,- with which the place was infested. Along the gable furthest removed from the door there was a huge wood fire ; above it there were hung several small pots, enveloped in smoke, which, for lack of proper vent, after filling the whole barrack, escaped by the door. Before the fire there was a row of stones, each of which supported an oaten cake. The inmates, who exceeded twenty, had disposed of themselves in every possible manner. Some were lounging in the beds, others were seated on the chests. Two of them were dancing -on the floor to the whistling of a third. There was one employed in baking, another in making ready the bread. The chaos of sounds which reigned among them was much more complete than that which appalled their prototypes, the builders of Babel. There was the gabbling of Saxon, the sputtering of Gaelic, the humming of church music, the whistling of the musician, and the stamping of the dancers. Three of the pots on the fire began to boil together, and there was a cry for the cook. He came rush- ing forward, pushed the man engaged in baking from out his way with one hand, and, drawing the seat from under the one employed in making ready the bread with the other, he began to shout out, so as to drown their united voices, 88 THE APPRENTICE. * for meal and salt. Both were brought him, and in a few minutes he had completed his task." Wild companions, a wild lodging, and wild mode of life ; nor can much bodily comfort be associated with the idea of a diet whose sole variation is from oatmeal in porridge to oatmeal in cakes ; but Miller is not unhappy. He is now recognized as a good workman, and his frame is more capa- ble of labor than in the previous season. His spirit is buoyant, and full of gay, hopeful humor ; and his readiness to take and return a jest, together with his sprightliness and his obliging disposition, secure him the good-will of his companions. On the long summer evenings, when work is over, he can wander about the district, climbing its ridges of hill, exploring its ruins and natural curiosities, diving into the recesses of its woods, and following the course of its streams. He is still boy enough to enjoy the raspberries which grow in the woods, and the poetry of his nature finds aliment in the new and picturesque aspects of hill and plain which every eminence reveals to him. The district of Miller's sojourn at this time, dreary and bare though he calls it, is not without its pleasing and im- pressive features. Gaunt hills rise everywhere, warming at autumn, when the heather blooms, into solemn glow of purple, but for the greater part of the year presenting a surface of black-brown, fringed here and there with fir or plumed with birch. The gray crag pierces the moor, the gray mist trails wearily along the hill-summits. A marked feature of tne scenery is the gracefully drooping, delicately waving birch foliage, which stoops to the frequent water- course, or hangs tremulous over the surface of the lake, the white stems relieved against the russet heath, or vying with the whiter foam of the cascade. Over all towers the bald forehead of Ben Wyvis, a thousand feet above the highest of the encircling hills, and with a few white snow-gleams STRATHPEFFER. 89 lingering among its crags and comes even in the height of summer. Between the ridges and in the basins of the hills, the lakes are numerous, and from the higher elevations, as the eye looks through curtains of mist, opening and closing in majestic change, the broad flash of their golden mirrors, girdled by the ebon hills, is seen striking upwards with a resplendence never to be forgotten. The gentler aspects of the scenery appear, however, to have chiefly attracted Miller. *' Strathpeffer," he wrote to Baird, " one of the finest valleys in this part of the coun- try, lies within five miles of Conon-side. My walks occa- sionally extended to it ; and I still retain a vividly-pleasing recollection of its enchanting scenery, with the more pleas- ing features of the scenes through which I passed on my way to it. There is in its vicinity a beautiful little lake, which contains a wooded island. Along the banks of this lake I have sauntered for whole hours ; and from the green top of Knockferrol, one of the hills by which the valley is bounded, I have seen the sun sink behind Ben Wyvis, with- out once thinking that I was five miles from my place of residence." But he was not exclusively engaged on these occasions in view-hunting. " I have not even yet," he adds, " summed up the whole of my evening amusements. They were not all equally poetical. The country round Conon-side abounds with wild fruit, and I have feasted among fhe woods, during my long rambles, on gueens, rowans, rasp- berries, and blae-berries, with all the keenness of boyish appetite. The fruit furnished me with an ostensible object for my wanderings ; and when coinplimented by a romantic young girl, who had derived her notions of character from the reading of romances, on that disposition which led me to seek my pleasures in solitude, I could remark in reply that I was not more fond of solitude than of raspberries." 90 THE APPRENTICE. Thirty years afterwards, in the "Schools and School- masters," he refers to his walks by Conon-side in these terms : "I greatly enjoyed those evening walks. From Conon-side as a centre, a radius of six miles commands many objects of interest, Strathpeffer, with its mineral springs ; Castle Leod, with its ancient trees, among the rest one of the largest Spanish chestnuts in Scotland ; Knock- ferrol, with its vitrified fort ; the old tower of Fairburn ; the old, though somewhat modernized, tower of Kinkell ; the Brahan policies, with the old castle of the Seaforths ; the old castle of Kilcoy; and the Druidic circles of the moor of Redcastle My recollections of this rich tract of country, with its woods and towers, and noble river, seem as if bathed in the red light of gorgeous sun- sets." In a letter, otherwise unimportant, to William Ross, written, as I conclude, after he had returned to Cromarty for the winter, there occurs this reference to the same period : " When the task of the day was over, and I walked out amid the fields and woods to enjoy the cool of the evening, it was then that I was truly happy. Before me the Conon rolled her broad stream to the sea ; behind, I seemed shut up from all intercourse with mankind by a thick and gloomy wood, while the tower of Fairburn * and the blue hills behind it formed the distant landscape. Not a cloud rose upon the sky, not a salmon glided beneath me in the river, nor a leaf shook upon the alders that o'erhung the stream, but raised some poetic emotion in my breast." It was late in the year when he returned to Cromarty. Nearly a month of winter had passed. Ross was now re- siding in the cottage of his parents, on the northern side of * The accompanying drawing was executed by Miller a few years subsequently to the time when he worked in the vicinity of the old tower of Fairburn. IN CROMARTY AGAIN. 91 Cromarty Frith, and Miller lacked the stimulus of his liter- ary sympathy. u What remained of the season," he wrote to Baird, " together with the greater part of the ensuing spring, was spent in profitless indolence. I neither wrote verses nor drew pictures, but wandered during the day through the fields and woods, and among the rocks of the hill of Cromarty ; and my evenings were commonly spent either in the workshop of my Uncle James, where a few of the more intelligent mechanics of the place generally met, or in the company of a new acquaintance." This was the helpless cripple, described in the " Schools and Schoolmas- ters " as " poor lame Danie," who, with his old mother, occupied " a damp, underground room." Miller formed a friendship with the suffering boy, and took delight in alle- viating the tedium of his lingering illness. CHAPTER IV. RETURNS TO CONON-SIDE MAKES HIMSELF RESPECTED IN THE BARRACK COMPANIONS ATTEMPTS GEOMETRY AND ARCHITECTURE HARDSHIPS EXPERIMENT IN NECRO- MANCY DREAM THE BOTHY SYSTEM LITERARY REC- REATIONS TEDIUM END OF APPRENTICESHIP THE BLESSING OF LABOR PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY. HE working season of 1822 finds him again on Conon-side. He is now in the third year of his apprenticeship, and he feels that he has a position in the barrack. " I had determined," the words are from the letter to Baird, " early this season, to con- form to every practice of the barrack, and, as I was an apt pupil, I had in a short time become one of the freest, and not the least rude, of its inmates. I became an excellent baker, and one of the most skilful of cooks. I made won- derful advances in the art of practical joking, and my bon- mots were laughed at and repeated. There were none . of my companions who could foil me in wrestling, or who could leap within a foot of me ; and after having taken the slight liberty of knocking down a young fellow who in- sulted me, they all began to esteem me as a lad of spirit and promise." The foreman of the squad with which he worked appears to have exerted some influence upon his mind. " When a young man," writes Miller, " he had bent his excellent nat- ural parts to the study of his profession, and he became so 92 THE FOREMAN. 93 skilful in it as to be intrusted with the superintendence of a party of workmen while yet an apprentice. His early pro- ficiency was a subject of wonder to his less gifted compan- ions ; he was much gratified by their admiration, and acquired that appetite for praise which is of so general experience, and which in many instances becomes more keen the more it is supplied with food. He had too much sense to be open to the direct flatteries of other people, but he was not skilful in detecting his own ; and having at- tained, in the limited circle to which circumstances confined him, the fame of being talented, he set himself to acquire the reputation of being generous and warm-hearted ; and this, perhaps, for he was naturally of a cold temperament, from that singular weakness incident to human nature, which has so frequently the effect of making even men of reflection derive more pleasure from the praise of the quali- ties or talents of which they are destitute, than of those which they really possess. When treating his companions, he was rendered happy by believing they entertained an opinion of him similar to that with which he regarded him- self ; and that they would describe him to others as one whose head and heart were the warmest and clearest they had ever met with. A few years' experience of the world convinced him that his expectations were miserably un- founded. He saw, or at least thought he did, that every man he came in contact with had himself for his centre ; and, though unacquainted with the maxims of Rochefoucault, he concluded with that philosopher that the selfish principle is the spring of all human action. The consequence of this conclusion was a misanthropy of the most sincere and un- affected kind. So sincere was it that he made no profession of it ; unlike those silly, would-be misanthropes who, while they affect a hatred of their kind, take care to inform them 94 THE APPRENTICE. of that hatred, lest they should fail of attracting their notice." " I was advised by this man," proceeds Miller, " to study geometry and architecture. With the latter I had pre- viously been acquainted ; of the former I was entirely igno- rant. I had not even a single correct idea of it. The study of a few detached hours, though passed amid the dis- traction of a' barrack, made me master of the language peculiar to the science ; and I was then surprised to find how wide a province it opens to the mental powers, and to discover that what is termed mathematical skill means only an ability of reasoning on the forms and properties of lines and figures, acquired by good sense being patiently directed to their consideration. I perceived, however, that from prosecuting this study I could derive only amusement, and that, too, not of a kind the most congenial to my particular cast of mind. I had no ambition to rise by any of the pro- fessions in which it is necessary ; and I chose rather to ex- ercise the faculties proper to be employed in it in the wide field of nature and of human affairs, in tracing causes to their effects, and effects to their causes ; in classing to- gether things similar, and in marking the differences of things unlike. The study of architecture I found more amusing ; partly, I believe, because it tasked me less ; partly because it gratified my taste, and exercised my powers of invention. In geometry I saw that I could only follow the footsteps of others, and that I would be necessi- tated to pursue the beaten track for whole years- before I could reach that latest discovered extremity of it, beyond which there lies undiscovered, untrodden regions, in which it would be a delight to expatiate. Architecture, on the contrary, appeared to me a field of narrow boundaries. I could see at one glance both over it and beyond it. I have found that the grotesque cottage of a Highland peasant, HARDSHIP AND DEPRESSION. 95 the hut of a herd-boy, a cavern half veiled over with trail- ing plants, an opening in a wood, in short, a countless variety of objects of art and nature, supplied me with ideas which, though connected with it, had not become part of it." From mathematics, therefore, as previously from classics, Hugh Miller turned aside. The circumstance is perhaps to be regretted, and yet with the former reservation, that any severe and systematic course of study would have inter- fered with that natural and spontaneous development which inade him what he was. His apprenticeship had begun with trying experiences, and its termination was marked also by extremity of hard- ship. In the September of this year, 1822, his master ob- tained work as a contractor on a farm a few miles from Cromarty, and he and Miller bade adieu to Conon-side. A wall was to be built and a farmsteading to be repaired, and, as the season was advanced, and David Wright could afford to employ no labor in addition to his own and that of his apprentice, Miller and he worked from dawn until night- fall. Their work was of the most painful kind : " clay after day, with wet feet, in a water-logged ditch," laying stone upon stone, until the cuticle was worn away, and the fingers oozSd blood. In the " Schools and Schoolmasters," Miller describes the labor of this time as " torture." " How these poor hands of mine," he says, " burnt and beat at night at this time, as if an unhappy heart had been stationed in every finger ! and what cold chills used to run, sudden as electric shocks, through the feverish frame ! " His health was affected ; a dull, depressing pain weighed upon his chest, and there were symptoms of pectoral blood-spitting. He lost his spirits, and thought he was going to die. Of his state of mind at this time we have two illustra- tions, the one given in the " Schools and Schoolmasters," 96 THE APPRENTICE. the other in the letter to Baird. u Superstition," we quote from the published volume, " takes a strong hold of the mind in circumstances such as those in which I was at this time placed. One day, when on the top of a tall building, part of which we were throwing down to supply us with materials for our work, I raised up a broad slab of red micaceous sandstone, thin as a roofing slate, and exceed- ingly fragile, and, holding it out at arm's length, dropped it over the wall. I had been worse than usual all that morning, and much depressed; and, ere the .slab parted from my hand, I said, looking forward to but a few months of life, I shall break up like that sandstone slab, and . perish as little known. But the sandstone slab did not break up ; a sudden breeze blew it aslant as it fell ; it cleared the rough heap of stones below, where I had antici- pated it would have been shivered to fragments, and, light- ing on its edge, stuck upright, like a miniature obelisk, in the soft, green sward beyond. None of the philosophies or the logics would have sanctioned the inference which I im- mediately drew ; but that curious chapter in the history of human belief which treats of signs and omens abounds in such postulates and such conclusions. I at once inferred that recovery awaited me ; I was ' to live and riot die,' and felt lighter, during the few weeks I afterwards toile'd at this place, under the cheering influence of the conviction." In the letter to Baird there is no mention of this waking experiment, but he records the following dream : "I dreamed that I was walking alone, in an evening -of singu- lar beauty, over a low piece of marshy ground, which lies about half a mile to the north of the place where I wrought. On a bank which rises above the marsh there is a small burying-ground and the ruins of an old chapel. I dreamed that I arrived at the burying-ground, and that it was laid out in a manner the most exquisitely elegant. The tombs A DREAM. 97 were of beautiful and varied workmanship. They were of a style either chastely Grecian or gorgeously Gothic, and en wreathed and half hid by the flowers and foliage of beau- tiful shrubs which sprung up and clustered around them. There was a profusion of roses, mingled with delicate blue flowers of a species I never saw except in this dream. The old Gothic chapel seemed roofed with stone, and appeared as entire as the day it had been completed ; but, from the lichens and mosses with which it was covered, it looked more antique than almost any building I remember to have seen. The whole scene was relieved against a clear sky, which seemed bright and mellow as if the sun had set only a minute before. Suddenly, however, it became dark and lowering, a low breeze moaned through the tombs and bushes, and I began to feel the influence of a superstitious terror. I looked towards the chapel, and on its western gable I saw an antique-looking, singularly formed beam of bronze, which seemed to unite in itself the shapes of the hoar-hand of a clock and the gnomon of a dial. As I gazed on it, it turned slowly on its axis until it pointed at a spot on the sward below. It then remained stationary as before. My terror increased, the images of my dream became less distinct, and my last recollection before I awoke is of a wild night-scene, and of my floundering on in the darkness through the marsh below the bury ing-ground. A few weeks after the night of this dream, one of my paternal cousins, in the second degree, was seized by a fever of which he died. I attended his funeral, and found that the grave had been opened to receive his corpse on exactly the patch of sward to which the beam had turned." This dream he calls " a prophecy of contingency, one of those few dreams which, according to Bacon, men re- member and believe because they happen to hit, not one of the many which they deem idle and forget, because they 98 THE APPRENTICE. chance to miss." To us it is interesting as showing, espe- cially when taken in connection with the small experiment in necromancy previously related, how strongly, even at this early period, Hugh Miller's mental state was influenced by his physical condition. Brooding on early death by day, wandering among tombs in night-visions, his brain was rapidly approaching that degree of agitation at which will and intellect fall under the dominion of maniac Both in the " Schools and Schoolmasters," and in the let- ter to Baird, he dwells upon the wretched and dissolute life of the two or three (we have two in the earlier account and three in the later) farm-servants who occupied the same bothy with' himself and his master. In his twenty-seventh year Hugh Miller pronounced emphatic condemnation on the bothy system ; he returned to the subject when fifty, and it was to enforce his opinion by the experience of his life. " There were," he" writes to Baird, " two unmarried farm-servants who lodged with us in the barrack. They were both young men, and the life they were almost neces- sitated to lead was one of 'the most unfriendly possible to the formation of moral character. All clay they were em- ployed in the monotonous labors of the farm. Their even- ings, as they had no home, were spent either in neighboring houses, where young people similarly situated with them- selves were accustomed to meet, or in a small village, about a mile distant, where there was an ale-house. Their ordi- nary pleasures consisted in drinking, and amusements of a low and gross character ; their principal enjoyment they derived from what they termed a ball, and scarce a fort- night passed at this season without one being held at the village. It was commonly midnight before they returned to the barrack. The effects of this heartless course of life were apparent in their dispositions and conduct. They were bound by no ties of domestic affection ; and, though they were FARM-SERVANTS. 99 never apart, they seemed to have no other idea of friendship than that it was a matter of convenience which substituted the pleasures of society for the horrors of solitude. To a person of a degraded, selfish cast of mind it is misery to be alone ; and hence it will almost invariably be found that the more careless a common man becomes of his fellows, the less can he live without them. The lads were besides extremely ignorant ; they were of a gay, reckless disposi- tion, and, as they entertained no affection for their em- ployer, and had their moral feelings much blunted, the services they rendered him were profitless and inefficient, as those services generally are which are extorted by neces- sity, and regulated by only a dread of censure. I could not think without regret that they were yet to become hus- bands and the fathers of families ; and at this time I was first led to perceive that the large farm system has been as productive, at least, of moral evil as of physical good. By the discoveries in the art of agriculture to which it has led, the soil has been meliorated and rendered more produc- tive ; but what have been its effects upon men? So far as it has extended, it has substituted two classes of character which may be regarded as o'pposite extremes equally re- moved from the intermediate line of excellence, for a class which occupied the proper medium. It has given us, for a wise, moral, and religious peasantry, gentlemen-farmers and farm-servants, the latter, in too many instances, a class of debased helots of the character described ; the former a body of men too often marked (though certainly with many exceptions) by a union of the worst traits pecu- liar to the opposing classes of country gentlemen and merchants, the supercilious, overbearing manners of the one class ; the unfeeling, speculative spirit of the other." To the same effect is the latter statement of his views on the subject : " The deteriorating effect of the large farm 100 THE APPRENTICE. system," he wrote, " is inevitable. . . . Farm-servants, as a class, must be lower in the scale than the old tenant-far- mers, who wrought their little farms with their own hands ; but it is possible to elevate them far above the degraded level of the bothy ; and unless means be taken to check the spread of the ruinous process of brute-making which the sys- tem involves, the Scottish people will sink, to a certainty, in the agricultural districts, from being one of the most provident, intelligent, and moral in Europe, to be one of the most licentious, reckless, and ignorant." If two men ever lived who knew the Scottish people, and were able to give an intelligent opinion concerning them, these two men were Robert Burns and Hugh Miller ; and their joint authority in favor of the old system and against the new, viewed in relation to the capacity of each to pro- duce upright, independent, self-respecting men, will hardly be outweighed by the consideration that large farms, worked by men in bothies, send most meat to the London market. It may be hoped that such bothies as that in which Hugh Miller lived at this time are no longer to be found in Scot- land. The roof leaked ; the sides were "riddled with gaps and breaches ; " along the ridge, " it was open to the sky from gable to gable," " so that," he writes, " when I awak- ened in the night, I could tell what o'clock it was, without rising out of bed, by the stars which appeared through the opening." Even in this dismal place, however, he contrived to supply himself with the consolations of literature. From a wandering pedler he obtained the old Scottish poems of Gawin Douglas and William Dunbar, besides a collection of " Ancient Scottish Poems" from the MS. of George Ban- natyne. These books he " perused with great interest, ly- ing on the barrack floor, with the page spread out within a few inches of the fire." At last, even this resource failed him. The fuel used for warming the barrack became soaked IN THE BOTHY. 101 with rain, and could not produce a blaze by which it was possible to read. There was nothing for it but to stick doggedly to work, passing as many hours of the twenty-four in sleep as was practicable. He found that, by a little ju- dicious management, a great deal of sleep could be got into the twenty-four hours, and that sleep was not a bad make- shift in the absence* of livelier entertainments. " I re- stricted myself," he writes to Baird, " to two meals per da}^, that immediately after taking dinner I might go to bed ; and in a short time this new arrangement became such a mat- ter of habit that I commonly fell asleep every evening about six o'clock, and did not rise, sometimes not even awaken, until near eight next morning. Since this time I have been accustomed to decide whether I am happy, or the contrary (a query of difficulty when one measures one's circumstances by the standards of either hope or fear) , by a test extremely simple. I deem the balance to incline to the side of happi- ness when I prefer consciousness to unconsciousness, when I consider sleep merely a thing of necessity, instead of regarding it as a refuge from the tedium of waking inanity, or unpleasant occupation. The converse leads me to a con- trary conclusion." In the letter from which this is quoted he pronounces the spring and summer of the first year of his apprenticeship " the gloomiest seasons of his life ; " in the u Schools and Schoolmasters," the closing period is de- clared to have been " by far the gloomiest he ever spent." At both periods he suffered about as much as man can suffer ; but in the intermediate stages there were glimpses, nay, abiding gleams, of enjoyment. On the llth of November, 1822, his apprenticeship came to an end. He was now an accomplished workman, and perhaps in all his books there is no passage more weighty or valuable than that in which he gives his estimate of the importance of this fact, and impresses upon artisans the supreme neces- 102 THE APPRENTICE. sity of being masters of their trade. "It is not uninstruc- tive," he writes, " to observe how strangely the public are led at times to attach paramount importance to what is in reality only subordinately important, and to pass over the really paramount without thought or notice. The destiny in life of the skilled mechanic is much more influenced, for instance, by his second education that of his apprentice- ship than by his first, that of the school ; and yet it is to the education of the school that the importance is gener- ally regarded as attaching, and we never hear of the other. The careless, incompetent scholar has many opportuni- ties of recovering himself ; the careless, incompetent appren- tice, who either fails to serve out his regular time, or who, though he fulfils his term, is discharged an inferior work- man, has very few ; and, further, nothing can be more cer- tain than that inferiority as a workman bears much more disastrously on the condition of the mechanic than inferi- ority as a scholar. Unable to maintain his place among brother journeymen, or to render himself worthy of the aver- age wages of his craft, the ill-taught mechanic falls out of regular employment, subsists precariously for a time on occa- sional jobs, and either, forming idle habits, becomes a vaga- bond tramper, or, getting into the toils of some rapacious taskmaster, becomes an enslaved sweater. For one workman injured by neglect of his school education, there are scores ruined by neglect of their apprenticeship education. Three- fourths of the distress of the country's mechanics (of course not that of the unhappy class who have to compete with machinery), and nine-tenths of their vagabondism, will be found restricted to inferior workmen, who, like Hogarth's "careless apprentice/' neglected the opportunities of their second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer insight into this matter than most of pur modern edu- cationists." APPRENTICESHIP EDUCATION. ' 103 During his apprenticeship the character of Miller began to reveal the essential traits which we afterwards find in it. "Gloomy" many of its seasons were; the " gloomiest" of his life, at least until he became a literary celebrity and editor of a religious newspaper ; but both its gloom and its gladness went to the making and maturing of his character. The aching joint, the fevered pulse, the breast oppressed with pain, the eye swimming in bewildered trance of agony and exhaustion ; the meditative midnight hour, when his eye marked the stars as they crossed the rent in the roof ; the evening wanderings in woodland and by stream when sunset clothed in ruddy light the old tower on the crag, these constituted the true education of Hugh Miller. Henceforth we recognize him as the man he was, and are able to trace in his countenance those lines of for- titude and resolution which so strongly marked that of his father. He had won the first decisive victory of life, ear- nest of all other victories, the victory of reason and con- science over momentary inclination, of intelligent will over laggard indolence and lawless impulse. He had disciplined the wayward activity of boyhood into manly force. He had chastened rude strength into ordered energy. Blus- tering self-assertion, juvenile conceit, had given place to deliberate self-respect ; and that rebellious disposition which had perplexed his uncles and been the despair of his mother was calmed and concentrated into modesty, into self-command, into the gentleness of conscious power. The flawed and briAle iron had become steel. " Noble, upright, self-relying Toil/' he exclaims, with grand enthu- siasm, u who that knows thy solid worth and value would be ashamed of thy hard hands, and thy soiled vestments, and thy obscure tasks, thy humble cottage, and hard couch, and homely fare !" Not, however, to all men is toil an education and hard- 104 THE APPRENTICE. ship a blessing. Hugh Miller came to his apprenticeship fortified against evil and prepared for good by that train- ing in courage and truthfulness, in just thought and manly feeling, which he had unconsciously received in companion- ship with his uncles. Those gentlemen of nature's finest modelling were, though he knew it not, the examples by which he shaped himself. He acted on all occasions as he felt that Uncle James or Uncle Sandy would have acted in the circumstances. Nor can we err in affirming that the incidents and results of Miller's apprenticeship prove that there was a remarkable soundness in his original constitu- tion, a fund of natural health, moral and intellectual, of genial humor and of homely wisdom. How bravely he makes the most of adverse circumstances ! How cheerfully he accommodates himself to his situation ! How kindly are the relations he establishes between himself and his coarse and riotous associates ! There is nothing which he cannot assimilate and apply to his mental nutriment, and he is animated by a quiet, half-conscious, but steadfast ambition for self-culture. He has a deep-lying conviction of his ability to rise above the sphere in which he finds himself placed ; but he has already got firm hold of a very ancient philosophy of life, a philosophy which has been of use to wise men in every age ; and it has made him comparatively indifferent to what is called success. According to this philosophy, happiness is too subtle an essence to be pur- chased with gold, or to be dealt out wholesale to one class of men as distinguished from another f the rude fare of the peasant is as sweet to him as his dainties to the peer ; the honest pride which warms the heart of the capable artisan is as instinct with joy as the aristocrat's pride of rank or birth ; nature's face has a smile for all who will lovingly look into it ; and rising in the wofld may mean falling in all that makes life precious, character illustrious, man happy. BOOK III. THE JOURNEYMAN. 1 Here also is a man who can handle both pen and hammer like a man." CHAPTER I. FAVORABLE OPINIONS FROM OLD DAVID WRIGHT AND UNCLE JAMES FIRST WORK AS JOURNEYMAN AUNT JENNY'S COTTAGE SENDS POETICAL PIECES TO ROSS SELF-DE- LINEATION. returning to Cromarty, Miller soon regains his health, and things wear for him on the whole a pleasant aspect. Old f David Wright, who had occasionally been morose to his apprentice (his own distresses imperatively demanding that relief), now declares that, though unsecured to him by any written agreement, Hugh had been, "beyond comparison, more tractable and obedient than any indentured pupil he ever had." Uncle James, whose predictions of failure at work, as a natural sequel to failure at school, had contributed not a little to the support of Miller at the worst time, for it would be exquisitely gratifying to punish and to please Uncle James by one and the same course of action, does ample justice to the faithfulness, with which, from a mere sense of honor, he has completed his engagement, and owns that there is in him, after all, the making of a man. His first employment as a journeyman is characteristic. To seek remunerative employment to start in life for himself would be his natural impulse. But the better and homelier part of his nature has now ripened, and kind- ness of heart, one of his deepest qualities, proves stronger than the prompting of ambition. "Aunt Jenny," a sister 107 108 THE JOURNEYMAN. of his mother, who had long wished to have some dwelling which she could call her own, and in which her spinning- wheel and knitting-needles might supply her modest wants, had never surmounted the alarm occasioned by the prospect of paying rent. Hugh inherited a little piece of garden ground from his father. Part of this he now devotes to the purpose of building a cottage for Aunt Jenny. Money he has none, but the few pounds which his aunt has saved are enough to buy wood for the roof and to pay for carting the necessary stones and mortar, and he builds the cottage. The worthy aunt is saved from fear of rent for the remain- der of her days, and Hugh has his reward. The cottage is still to be seen in the village of Cromarty, bearing witness, while stone and lime endure, to the competence of Hugh Miller as a stone-mason, and to the simplicity, solidity, and kindliness of his character. It is in little circumstances like this that one learns infallibly what is in a man. When the scenes are arranged, the audience assembled, the atti- tude given, it is easy to act the generous part ; but the quiet heart-heroism, unseen by the world, unsurmised ven by itself, which makes Hugh Miller pause, on the threshold of life, to build a cottage for Aunt Jenny, cannot deceive us. This undertaking is completed in the spring of 1823, and the day has now come when employment must be sought in earnest. Some little time elapses two or three weeks at most during which he looks in vain. " I was a good deal depressed," he writes to Baird. " I was somewhat diffident of my skill as a workman ; and I felt too, very strongly, the force of that sentiment of Burns to which we are indebted for his excellent elegiac poem, ' Man is made to mourn.' 6 There is nothing,' said the poet, c that gives me a more mortifying picture of human life than a man seeking work.' " During the brief interval between the building of Aunt WRITES TO ROSS. 109 Jenny's cottage and his first engagement as a journeyman, he writes to William Ross, now in Edinburgh, and copies out for him a selection of his poems. The letter is not without interest from the enthusiasm of its affection for the friend to whom it is addressed. " I have long since promised you copies of all my little poetical pieces which you were so good-natured as to approve of, and I now send you them. I am too vain to forget how much you used to praise them ; but was it not as the productions of a half-taught boy that you did so? and if you loved them, was it not merely because they were written by your friend? I now see that many of them are extremely juvenile, and this could not have escaped you; but I dare say you did best in not telling me so. I would have been disheartened, and have, perhaps, stood still. And yet even now when I see many of their faults, like a true parent I love them notwithstanding ; but it is more for the sake of the association connected with them than for their own sakes. Some of them were composed among the rocks of my favorite hill when I played truant ; some of them in Marcus cave, when the boys who had chosen me for their leader were engaged, in picking shell-fish from the skerries for our dinner ; some of them in the workshed, some in the barrack. And thus, like the purse of Fortunatus, which was made of leather but produced gold, though not rich in themselves they are full of riches to me. They are redolent of the past and of you ; remember how I used to run to your closet with every piece the moment I had fin- ished it, that you might say something in its favor. You were the whole public for whom I wrote. You will not deem me paradoxical when I say that the pieces I send you are full of scenery and character, though poor in descrip- tion and manner, and rich in thought and sentiment, thoTigh meagre, perhaps, and commonplace. Your affection for me 110 THE JOURNEYMAN. will, I dare say, make them poetry to you too. Do you think I shall ever write what will be deemed poetry by anybody else? I deem my intimacy with you the most important affair of my life. I have enjoyed more from it than from anything else, and have been more improved by it than by all my books. Since you left me I have not advanced an inch ; have you no means of impelling me onward when at a distance? or is it necessary, as in Physics, that before communicating motion to me, we must come in contact ? " The poems are fluent and vivacious, but display little original power or depth of melody. The following lines, probably written among the woods of Conon during his apprenticeship, are not without a certain pensive sweetness and sincerity. THE DAYS THAT AEE GONE. " On the friends of my youth and the days that are gone, In the depth of the wild wood I ponder alone, And my heart by a sad gloomy spirit is moved When I view the fair scenes that in childhood I loved. Harsh roars the rough ocean, o'ercast is the sky, The voice of the wind passeth mournfully by ; Eor winter reigns wide ; * sure 'tis winter with me,' But a spring to my winter I never shall see ; For aught of earth's joys 'tis unmanly to moan, Yet bursts the sad sigh for the days that are gone. The fair flowers of summer have vanished away, The green shrub is witheredf and leafless the spray ; Yet memory, half- sad and half- sportive, still shows How bloomed the blue violet, how blossomed the rose. Say, shall not that memory as fondly retain Hold of joys I have proved as of charms I have seen? Yes Nature's fair scenes are more dear to this heart Than the trophies of love or the pageants of art, POEMS. Ill Yet more to this bosom those friends are endeared, By whom in life's dawn the gay moments were cheered ; More cherished, though darker "their memory shall be, Than that of the rose or the violet by me. Ye rocks, whose rough summits seem lost in the clouds, Ye fountains, ye caves, and ye dark waving woods, In the still voice of memory ye bid me to mourn For the joys and the years that must never return, The years ere the gay hopes of youth were laid low, Or hope half-despondent had wept o'er the blow, The joys, ere my knowledge of mankind began By proving the toils and the sorrows of man. Yet why should I sorrow? poor child of decay, Myself, like my pleasures, must vanish away, And life in the view of my spirit may seem The tossing confused of a feverish dream. Yes, life is a dream, a wild dream, where the will Striveth vainly the precepts of right to fulfil ; A dream where the dreamer to sorrow is tied ; A dream where proud reason but weakly can guide ; It controls not my spirit, despite of my will, The joys of the by-past are haunting me still. And oft when all bright on my night slumbers break The spirits of pleasures I prize when awake, When I seize them with gladness and revel in joy, Comes the beam of the morning my bliss to destroy ; Away on the light wings of slumber they fly, While their memory remains, and I languish and sigh. days of bright pleasure ! O days of delight ! From me ye forever have winged your flight. But the calm, pensive Muse still remains to beguile The day of dark thought, of affliction and toil ; By the gloom of the present the past to endear, By the joys of the by-past the present to cheer." In a poetical epistle to a friend, whom I take to be Eoss himself, we have a significant glimpse of Miller's feelings ' with respect to the lawlessness of his school-days : 112 THE JOURNEYMAN. " Oh ! well to thee are all those foibles known, Which to a stranger I would blush to own : For well you knew me when in youth I strayed ; When of untutored genius weakly vain, I spurned instruction with a vile disdain ; Yet dared to expect, unskilled in classic lore, To song's proud heights the untutored Muse would soar. Vain hope ! These rude, unpolished lines must show . How weak my thoughts, how harsh my numbers flow." It is a deeply characteristic trait that Hugh Miller should, as a school-boy, have been so conscious of his genius as to feel himself empowered to spurn instruction, and that, as an apprentice, a year or two after leaving school, he should have already convinced himself of the feeble vanity of the idea. Occasionally there is a vividness of conception in these pieces, which presents the individual figure or picture in outline so distinct, and colors so brilliant, that it flashes in clear visibility upon the eye^of the mind. The raven in the following sketch is as palpably bodied forth as Tennyson's wild hawk staring with his foot on the prey : " Foulest of the birds of heaven, O'er thee flaps the hungry raven ; Hark ! his loud and piercing cry, Pilgrim, hark ! that faint reply ; Soon, on yonder rocky shore, Shall he bathe his wing in gore, Bathe each wing, while dives his beak In a cold, wave-beaten cheek ; Cold, the fierce tides o'er it flowing ; Cold, though now with life 'tis glowing." A copy of verses, " written at the close of the year," is dated for us in two lines which occur in its most mournful passage : POEMS. 113 " Shall ill indeed no more annoy? Is life in truth a flowery plain ? Ah, wherefore look for coming joy When all the past is black with pain ? That strong-winged Spoiler oft I've seen Around that checkered circlet flee ; (For, lo ! this weary world has been These eighteen years a home to me.) Yes, I have seen him pass away Slow o'er misfortune's gloomy day, Stern joy seemed his when sorrow laid Her cold hand on the sufferer's head ; But ah ! when aught resembling peace For one short hour bade mourning cease, Like light's fleet ray he sped him on, And soon the tearless hour was gone. Still shall he fly, and joy and pain Shall mark this checkered life again, Till sorrow's soothing plaint be made All lonely o'er the nameless dead ; And all that Fate or Fortune gave, Be summed up o'er my tombless grave." Not altogether tombless ! The melancholy vein soon gives place to one of sprightlier flow, and perhaps more genuine feeling. Here is a rhymed contribution to that sad yet smiling philosophy of life to which allusion was lately made : " Let calm content, let placid rest, For the wild joys of fame suffice ; Nor grandeur, clothed in gorgeous vest, And tempting form, allure mine eyes ; But let the lowly Muse descend, "With fancied bliss to glad my view, And I shall hail her as a friend, And deem her dear delusions true, For life's a long, dark, feverish dream, And he does best who dreams it well ; Whose paths with fancied pleasures beam, Whose griefs no sign of woe can tell. 114 THE JOURNEYMAN. 'Tis madness to anticipate The dark-browed, angry storms of fate, Life of itself is hard to bear ; But wherefore drop the doubtful tear ? When gentle zephyrs fan the trees, And daisies bloom and roses blow ; Why sad because the wintry breeze Shall bring the bitter frost and snow ? " We may here take in the following somewhat high-flown account of himself, which served as preface to a second copy of his juvenile poems, with which he seems to have favored Ross : "CROMARTY, March 15, 1823. "DEAR WILLIE : 1823 would have sounded oddly seven years ago, about which tune we first got acquainted ; yet, by the natural course of things, it has become the present time, and the by-past years live only in the memory of the evil or good committed in them. In 1815 I was a thought- less, careless school-boy, who proved his spirit by playing truant three weeks in the four, and his genius by writing rhymes which pleased nobody but himself. In 1823, that same school-boy finds himself a journeyman mason, not quite so free from care, but as much addicted to rhyming as ever. But is this all ? Can he boast of no good effect pro- duced by the experience of a space of time which brings him from his thirteenth to his twentieth year? Has that time passed away in a manner useless to himself and unin- teresting to others? Not entirely so ; for, in that time, he got acquainted with William Ross ; in that time he changed the thoughtless hilarity of nature for the placid, tideless composure of sentiment ; and in that time the gay hopes of fortune and of fame which engaged him even in the simplest days of his childhood have changed into a less noble, SELF-ESTIMATE. 115 though not a less pleasing form. His happiness no longer depends upon the hope of the applause of others; not even upon the approbation of his friends ; he acts and he writes for himself. His own judgment is his critic, his own soul is the world to which he addresses himself ; but do not imagine that his own tongue sounds his own praise, which I am afraid, if I went on any longer in this strain, you might justly say." t c CHAPTER II. GAIRLOCH LETTERS DESCRIPTIVE OF HIS JOURNEY FROM CONON-SIDE AND OF GAIRLOCH SCENERY LOVE-POETRY THE CARTER OLD JOHN ERASER A DREAM MAG- NANIMOUS REVENGE GAIRLOCH LANDSCAPES BACK TO CROMARTY. BOUT midsummer work turns up, and Hugh starts again for Conon-side, whence he is ordered to Gairloch, on the western coast of Ross-shire. A month after his arrival he is confined to his bar- rack with a crushed foot, and takes his pen to write to a friend in Cromarty. There is one letter complete, and part of another. Readers will, perhaps, like to have these com- positions as they came from the pen of Miller in his twenty-first year : " GAIRLOCH, July, 1823. " You may expect a very long letter. I was so unlucky, two days ago, as to get my left foot crushed in a quarry by a huge stone, and I am now completely chained to my seat. My comrades are all out at work ; I have no books, and the hours pass away heavily enough ; but I have just set myself to try whether I cannot beguile them by conversing with you. You are sitting before me on a large, smooth stone, the only spare seat in the barrack (my own for I love to sit soft I have cushioned with a sod), and I have to tell you a long, gossiping story which, after all, is no story of my journey thither, and of what I have 116 LANDSCAPES. 117 been seeing and doing since I came. Draw your seat a little nearer me, that I may begin. " I came here about a month ago, after a delightful jour- ney of two days from Conon-side, from whence I have been dispatched by my employer, with another mason lad, and a comical fellow, a carter, to procure materials for the build- ing. Though the youngest of the party, I am intrusted with the charge of the others, in consideration of my great gravity and wonderful command of the pen ; but, as far as the carter is concerned, the charge is a truly woful one. He bullies, and swears, and steals-, and tells lies, and cares for nobody. I am stronger, however, and more active than he, and must give him a beating when I have recovered my lameness, to make my commission good. My comrade, the mason, and I have been living in a state of warfare with him ever since we came here. On the morning we set out from Conon-side he left us to drive his cart and went to Dingwall, where he loitered and got drunk ; we, in turn, after waiting for him for two long hours at the village of Con tin, drove away, leaving him to follow us on foot as he best might, for at least thirty miles ; and he has not yet forgiven us the trick. " You have never seen Contin, and so I must show it you. It is a beautiful Highland village, pleasantly situated on the sweep of a gentle declivity, which terminates behind the houses, on the banks of a river, and is covered a-top by the mansion-house and pleasure-grounds of Sir George McKenzie, of Coul, a gentleman not quite unknown in the literary world. Towards the north the gigantic Ben Wyvis lifts up his huge, burly head, like leviathan among the lesser inhabitants of the deep. There is a much smaller, but more beautiful, hill on the north-west, which rises out of the middle of a low valley, and is washed on two of its sides by the rivers Conon and Contin. It is of a pyramid- 118 THE JOURNEYMAN. ical shape, and so regularly formed that one might almost deem it a work of art, and regard it not as a little hill, but as an immense pyramid. Farther away, and on the oppo- site side of the valley, there is a range of steep, precip- itous mountains, barred with rock and speckled with birch, and varying in color, according to their distance, from brown to purple, and from purple to light-blue. In a cor- ner of the landscape, and at the base of one of these hills, though considerably elevated above the river, we see the old time-shattered tower of Fairburn, tall, gray, ghastly, and like a giant eremite musing in solitude. It is five stories in height, with only a single room on each floor, turreted at every angle, and irregularly perforated by narrow oblong windows and shot-holes. For the first cen- tury after its erection it is said to have been unfurnished with a door, and to have been climbed into by means of a ladder ; but when the times became quieter, and the pro- prietors more honest, they struck out for themselves the present entrance, a door scarcely five feet in height. The earlier McKenzies of Fairburn (a family now extinct) are famed in tradition as daring freebooters, and men of immense personal strength. I have heard my uncle say that the two strongest men in the allied army of Marlborough and Eugene were Munro, of Newmore, and McKenzie, of Fairburn. The one could raise a piece of ordnance to his breast, and the other to his knee, which no third man of eighty thousand could lift from the ground. But I forget my picture. See, there are the hills, steep, abrupt, jagged at their summit, and here and there streaked with snow. Two beautiful Highland streams wind through the plain below, which is partially covered with woods of birch and hazel, and dotted with little black cottages, while a line of large beeches and a snug little village occupy the foreground. LANDSCAPES. 119 " A little beyond Contin, the road enters a birch wood, and forms the only object in view which reminds one of man. It is but a few years since it has been made ; I even saw in a little recess in the wood the ruins of two of the un wheeled carts^ (sledges rather) which were in use among the Highlanders here prior to its formation. We were met at the place by a company of men from Lochbroom, with their gray plaids, as the day was extremely warm, rolled up in a knapsack form on their shoulders, three of the party had folded up their breeches in the same bundle. They were all travelling towards Ferintosh to the sacrament. A little farther on the appearance of the country is extremely pleasant. On our right there rose a ridge of abrupt rocky hills, from the hanging cliffs of which the hazel and moun- tain ash shot out their gnarled and twisted trunks almost horizontally over the road ; on our left, a small but beauti- ful loch filled the bottom of the glen. After driving a few miles further we were presented with quite a different scene, a bleak, extended moor, through which a few slug- gish streams rather oozed than flowed, with here and there a dwarf oak or birch, the upper branches decayed and bleached white with the storms of winter. We saw at one place some very large and very old oak trees, one of them standing, the others fallen. The one which stands is about six feet in diameter, and is so entirely divested of its upper branches that it resembles a green spire, and so hollow at bottom that it reminded me of a large tar-barrel. A still bulkier tree lies doddered and leafless beside it, and not many yards away there is an immense heap of sawn timber, originally of an inferior quality, rotting on the ground, the property of some unfortunate speculatist. I thought at the time that I might have met with many things less characteristic of the past and present ages than the oak and the sawn wood. The one spoke of an age of barba- 120 THE JOURNEYMAN. rism, in which whole forests were either suffered to moulder in the soil which had produced them or removed by fire as positive incumbrances ; the other, of the days of projectors and bankruptcy. " The sun disappeared behind one of {he hills on our right when we were yet several miles from our stage, and the evening gave promise of a storm. The clouds thick- ened as the night advanced, and there came on a chill, drizzling rain. I had untied the bundle in which we had packed up our bed-clothes, and with a thick coverlet, which I raised on four pike handles, I was forming a tilt over the cart, when a sudden turn in the road brought us full in view of the solitary inn of Achnicion, and ere I had replaced the coverlet we had driven up to it. We found in it a cheer- ful fire and an obliging landlord, excellent things in them- selves, and particularly so in the midst of a desert ; and it did not detract from our pleasure to hear the rain pattering on the windows and the blast howling wildly over the roof. From the door of the inn I saw a dreary prospect of a bar- ren and mountainous country stretching away for several miles, and clothed in the black-gray tints of a stormy sum- mer evening. The hills were covered with wreaths of mist, which, ever and anon rolling into the valleys, brought with them a fresh deluge. And the sounds which predominated were well-nigh as dreary as the scene. There was the sul- len roar of a distant river, the louder and more rattling dash of a large stream which rushes over a rocky declivity beside the western gable of the inn, the howl of the wind, the pattering of the rain, and, heard at intervals, the dis- tant bark of a sheep-dog. The landlord of Achnicion is a kind, active old man of about seventy, his wife an indolent slattern of nineteen. The match was a love one, on at least one side, will you believe it? on the side of the JOURNEY TO GAIULOCH. 121 lady, who would have broken her heart, it is said, had not the old man married her. " We were awakened next morning by the carter storm- ing, in an adjoining room, at both us and the landlord, who strove to defend us ; and so terrible was the noise he made that every person in the inn gathered round the door to see what was the matter. He actually hoivled out the story of his wrongs and of his sufferings. He had been galled during his journey with a pair of bad shoes and a large bundle, and knocked up about seven miles short of the stage, where he had to beg lodgings for the night, having drunk all his money before leaving Dingwall. Furious as he was, however, we succeeded in pacifying him, partty by dint of threats, partly through the mediation of a few gills of whiskey ; and then set out with him on our journey. The morning somewhat resembled the preced- ing night. Large volumes of mist seemed sleeping on the distant hills, and the long, low moors that lie around Ach- nicion appeared more dismally bleak beneath the shadow of the thick, heavy clouds which brooded over them. " The weather cleared up as we proceeded. We had quitted the highway immediately on leaving the inn, and our path, which seemed to have been formed rather by the feet of animals than the hands of men, went winding for about seven miles through a brown, moory valley, whose tedious length was enlivened by a blue, oblong lake, beautiful in itself, but reflecting, like the mirror of a homely female, the tame and unlovely features that hung over it. At its upper end we found the ruins of a solitary cottage, the only vestige of man in the valley. We then began to descend into a deep, narrow glen or ravine, through which there runs a little prattling streamlet, the first we saw fall- ing towards the Atlantic. The hills rise to a great height on either hand, bare, rocky, striped into long furrows, 122 THE JOURNEYMAN. mottled over with debris and huge fragments of stone, and nearly destitute of even heather. The day had become clear and pleasant, but the voice of a bird was not to be heard in this dismal place, nor sheep nor goat to be seen among the cliffs. I wish my favorite John Bunyan had passed a night in it at the season when the heath-fires of the shepherds are flaming on the heights above, were it but to enable him to impart more tangibility to the hills which border the dark valley of the shadow of death. Through the gloomy vista of the ravine a little paradise seemed opening before us, a paradise like that which Mirza contemplated from the heights of Bagdad, of smooth water and green islands. ' There,' said my com- rade, ' is Loch Marie ; we have to sail over it for about fourteen miles, as there is no path on which we could bring the cart with the baggage ; but the horse and his master must push onward on foot/ The carter growled like an angry bear, but said nothing we could understand. Emerging from the ravine our road ran through a little moory plain, bordered with hills which seem to have at one time formed the shores of the lake. A few patches of corn and potatoes that, surrounded by the brown heath, re- minded me of openings in a dark sky, together with half-a- dozen miserable-looking cottages, a little larger than ant- hills, though not quite so regularly formed, showed us that this part of the country had its inhabitants. " We found out and bargained with the boatmen, left the carter and his horse to make the best of their way by land, and were soon sweeping over the surface of the lake. I have already fatigued you with description, but I must attempt one picture more. Imagine a smooth expanse of water stretching out before us for at least eighteen miles, and bordered on both sides by lofty mountains, abrupt, precipitous, and pressing on one another, like men in a LOCH MAKIE. 123 crowd. On the eastern shore they rise so suddenly from the water that the eye passes over them mile after mile without resting on a single spot where a boat might land ; on the west their bases are fringed by a broken, irregular plain, partially covered with a fir wood. At the higher end of the lake two mountains, loftier and more inaccessible than any of the others, shoot up on either hand as if to the middle sky, and we see large patches of snow still resting on their summits, gleaming like the banners of a fortress to tell us that they are strongholds held by the spirits of winter, and from whence they are to descend, a few months hence, to ravage the country below. From one of these mountains there descended two small streams, which, falling from rock to rock, leaped into the lake over the lower precipice, and, whitened into foam by the steepness of their course, reminded me, as they hurried through the long heath then in blossom, of strips of ermine on a cloak of purple. Towards the north the islands seem crowded together like a flock of water-fowl. They vary in character, some barren and heathy, others fertile and tufted with wood. On the largest, which is of the better and more pleasing description, and bears, by way of distinction, the name of the lake, there is an ancient bury ing-ground, and, as I have heard said, a Druid or Runic monument. I would fain have landed on it, but night was fast coming on, and, besides, my time was my employer's, not my own. " At the lower end of the lake we encountered a large boat full of people. A piper stood in the bows, and the wild notes of his bagpipe, softened by distance and multi- plied by the echoes of the mountains, formed a music that suited well with the character of the scene. c It is a wed- ding party,' said my comrade ; ' they are going to that white house which you see at the foot of the hill. I wish you understood Gaelic ; the boatmen are telling me strange 124 THE JOURNEYMAN. stories of the loch that I know would delight you. Do you see that little green island, that lies off about half a mile to the right ? The boldest Highlander in the country would hesitate to land there an hour after sunset. It is said to be haunted by wraiths and fairies, and every variety of land and water spirit. Directly in the middle of it there is a little lake, in the lake an island, and on the island a tree beneath which the Queen of the Fairies holds her court. What would you not give to see her ? ' Night came on be- fore we got landed ; and we lost sight of the lake while yet sailing over it. Is it not strange that with all its beauty it should be so little known ? I never heard nor met with so much as its name, until it opened upon me with all its islands, except once, in a copy of verses written by a gen- tleman of the parish of Cromarty, a Mr. Williamson. The voyage terminated about an hour after nightfall, our journey an hour after midnight. " Good-by. My companions are just coming in to din- ner. Shall we not have another tete-a-tete to-morrow ? " " GAIRLOCH, July, 1823. " 'Twas as well you didn't wait dinner with us yesterday ! We have quarrelled with the minister's wife, who, to avenge herself, magnanimously refuses to sell us any milk, and so our only food, in the material, at least, is oatmeal, prepare it as we may. The carter steals fish and potatoes, and con- trives to fare pretty well, but we who are honest come on badly enough. For my own part, however, I am not far from being happy, notwithstanding. Do look round, just for one minute, and see the sort of place in which a man can be happy. The sun is looking in at us through the holes in the roof, speckling the floor with bright patches, till it resembles a piece of calico. There are two windows in the apartment ; one of them filled up with turf and THE GAIRLOCH. 125 stone, the other occupied by an old, unglazed frame. The fire is placed against the rough, unplastered gable, into which we have stuck a pin, for suspending our pot over it ; the smoke finds its way out through the holes of the roof and the window. Our meal-sack hangs by a rope from one of the rafters, at the height of a man's head from the floor, our only means of preserving it from our thievish cohabit- ants, the rats. As for our furniture, 'tis altogether ad- mirable. The two large stones are the steadiest seats I ever sat on, though, perhaps, a little ponderous when we have occasion to shift them ; and the bed, which pray ob- serve, is perfectly unique. It is formed of a pair of the minister's harrows, with the spikes turned down, and cov- ered with an old door and a bunch of straw ; and as for culinary utensils, yonder is a wooden cog, and here a pot. We are a little extravagant, to be sure, in our household expenses, for times are somewhat hard ; but meal and salt, and every other item included, none of us have yet exceeded half a crown per week. You may now boast, like a true scholar, who looks only at the past, of Diogenes and his tub, and the comforts of philosophy. " The Gaiiioch, as you will find by consulting your map, is an arm of the sea on the western coast of Ross-shire. Its length is perhaps somewhat more than eight miles, its breadth varies from three to five. Where it opens towards the sea the water is deep, and clear of sunken rocks ; nearer its bottom there are several small islands. The shores, with the exception of two or three little sandy banks, are steep and rocky ; the surrounding country is Highland in the extreme. The manse, beside which I re- side, and at which I am employed, is situated on the north- ern shore, and about two hundred yards from the sea. There rises behind it a flat, moory hill, speckled with large, gray stones, and patches of corn, somewhat larger than 126 THE JOURNEYMAN. beds of onions, only not quite so regularly laid out. Far- ther away there is a little scattered village, composed of such hovels as one commonly finds in the remote Highlands, and containing from eighty to a hundred inhabitants, who are crofters and fishermen. It is a fact that the Highlander of the present day, and the Highlander of four hundred years ago, live in huts of exactly the same construction ; and their mode of agriculture here has been quite as sta- tionary. " I must enable you to form an estimate of it. The arable land is equally divided among all the families of the village; a long, brown moor which lies behind it affords pasture to their cattle, of which every one has an equal number, namely, two. The rents they pay the proprietor, and which they derive from the herring fishery, are of course also equal. There is neither horse nor plough in the vil- lage, a long, crook-handled kind of spade, termed a cass clirom, and the hoe, supplying the place of the latter, the Highlander himself, and more particularly his wife, that of the former; for here (shall I yenture the expression?), as in all semi-barbarous countries, the woman seems to be re- garded rather as the drudge than the companion of the man. It is the part of the husband to turn up the land and sow it ; the wife conveys the manure to it in a square creel with a slip bottom, tends the corn, reaps it, hoes the pota- toes, digs them up, and carries the whole home on her back. When bearing the creel she is also engaged in spinning with the distaff and spindle. I wish you but saw with what patience these poor females continue working thus, doubly employed, for the greater part of a long summer's day. I frequently let the mallet rest on the stone before me, as some one of them passes by, bent nearly double with the load she is carrying, yet busily engaged in stretching out and. turning the yarn with her right hand, and winding it 11 COURTING." 127 up with her left. Can you imagine a more primitive system "of agriculture, or wonder that I should be half inclined to imagine that, instead of having taken a journey of a few score miles to witness it, I had retraced for that purpose the flight of time for the last six centuries ? " I am now going to turn gossip, and to give you some stories of myself. I am a great egotist ; but how can I help it ? I have no second-hand narratives to relate, and of what I myself see I must tell you what I myself think. With all the .different members of the minister's family I have become acquainted in some degree or other. The minister himself occasionally honors me with a nod ; his wife, who has no particular quarrel with me, for 'twas not I who remarked that her milk ' smelt of the last week/ has once or twice had some little gossip with me. I am busily courting her three maids, who, though they have not a syl- lable of English amongst them, are very kindly teaching me Gaelic ; and from a young lady, the governess of her children, I have borrowed a few books. One of these, though published in Inverness about twelve years ago, I have not had the chance of seeing before. It is a small volume of poems by a Miss Campbell, then a young lady of seventeen. At even that early age she was a poetess, and rich in those sentiments and feelings which we deem so fascinating in the amiable and accomplished woman. Even though occasionally the girl peeps out in most of her pieces, I like them none the worse ; her puerilities, joined to no equivocal indications of a fine genius, leading one to enter- tain hopes of her future eminence ; and certainly, if her riper years have but fulfilled the promise which her earlier ones have given, she must be now a very superior person indeed. I feel much interested in her, and wish much to know what has become of her." Thus abruptly ends the narrative. Miller's jesting allu- 128 THE JOURNEYMAN. sion to the three inaids whom he was " courting," suggests the remark that his insensibility to female attractions in his youth contrasts strongly not only with the impassioned ad- miration of Burns for every beautiful face he ever saw, but with the susceptibility to woman's charms common to vivid and poetical natures. " Miss A ," one of his acquaint- ances at Gairloch, asked him to write a poem upon love. He set about it with as much composure of mind as if she had asked him to carve an inscription on a gravestone. Here are the four opening stanzas : " Though meanly favored by the Muse, Though scant of wit and time, On theme by Celtic maid supplied, I sit me down to rhyme. " But why should love demand my song; It breathed from Hammond's lyre, On Cowley's page its meteors flashed, On Moore's its wilder fire ; " While I, who never proved its bliss, Ne'er proved its restless smart ; Who have, though much the fair I prize, A free, unbleeding heart, " Can paint, alas ! with little skill, The joy which love inspires, Or tell of pangs I never proved, Of hopes or fond desires." On reading this, one begins to have misgivings as to the intensity of Miller's poetic fire. " All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame." POETICAL FACULTY. 129 thus Coleridge struck the key-note when his theme was love. " The greatest bliss that the tongue o' man can name," sang Hogg, with lilting, lark-like melody, giving his expe- rience on the subject. u I sit me down to rhyme," observes Miller, and, " though much the fair I prize, I am not dis- posed to exaggerate their good qualities." Miller does not, like Teufelsdrockh, find that his " feeling towards the queens of this earth " is " altogether unspeakable." Per- haps, however, his heart, though cold to the many, may prove responsive to one, and for him also there may bloom a paradise, " cheered by some fairest Eve." We shall see. Rhyming or reasoning, courting or cogitating, Hugh Mil- ler, during this season at Gairloch, is worth looking at. Not yet twenty-one, living in a hovel from which water, a foot deep, has been drained off to render it habitable, his food oatmeal without milk, his companions stone-masons, his employment manual labor, he bates no jot of hope or heart, but takes the whole with a frank effulgence of mirth, a rug- ged humor of character, which bears him victoriously through. It never strikes him that there is hardship in his own lot, but he has ready sympathy for the distresses of others. Might not some Scotch artist try to realize for us that picture, drawn by Miller of himself with so little thought of picturesque effect, when the pensive lad drops his mallet and looks at the Highland woman, bent nearly double with her burden, yet, as she wearily trudges past, working with both hands ? One can see the kind, grave, deep-thoughted face, the steadfast blue eyes moistening with compassion, the lip touched, perhaps, with a faint, mourn- ful smile of stoical, not cynical, acceptance of the sternness of fate. Miller's poetical faculty, though not powerfully stirred by the nymphs of Gairloch, and though more felicitous, now and subsequently, in prose than in verse, did not at this 130 THE JOURNEYMAN. time slumber. That picture of the old, gray tower of Fairburn, " like a giant eremite musing in solitude," is gen- uinely imaginative. His relations with the other inmates of the bothy are full of a strong, hearty, buoyant humor, which floods the rugged paths of life with sport. The doings of the carter, who " bullies, and swears, and steals, and tells lies, and cares for nobody," are manifestly pro- ductive of diversion more than distress. Miller, in fact, rather likes the man, though he feels that he will be im- proved *by a beating. The carter is clearly one of those favorites of nature who obey her promptings and receive her rewards. He " steals fish and potatoes," and makes himself comfortable, while his virtuous brethren do penance on oatmeal. Such a man appeals irresistibly to that in- stinct of fallen humanity which makes us admire successful personages like Drawcansir and Reynard the Fox. One of Miller's Gairloch fellow-workmen, who exerted a more important influence upon him, is described with some detail in the " Schools and Schoolmasters," but I have not found mention of him elsewhere. I refer to John Fraser, one of three brothers, who, if Mr. Darwin's theory is sound, were a variation of the human species adapted to found a race of superlative masons and stone-cutters, and to outlive and extirpate, by natural selection, all other masons and stone-cutters. Miller states, on the authority of " Mr. Kenneth Matheson, a gentleman well-known as a master- builder in the west of Scotland," that David Fraser, the most remarkable of the brothers, could do three times as much as an ordinary workman. John, even when advanced in life, could build against "two stout young fellows" and " keep a little ahead of them both." u I recognize old John," says Hugh Miller, " as one of not the least useful nor able of my many teachers ; " and the justice of the remark is attested by the admirably philosophic account which he DREAM. 131 gives of the lesson old John taught him. The secret of Eraser's power was that he saw " the finished piece of work," as it lay within the stone, and cut down upon the true figure at once, without repeating, like an ordinary workman, his lines and draughts. And is not this faculty of seeing with the mind's eye w r hat the hand has to execute, of conceiving the work as a whole, so that there shall be neither hurry nor delay in carrying it out, essentially the facult}^ by which a Hannibal or a Napoleon wins battles, a Dante or a Shakespeare writes poems, a Titian or a Turner paints masterpieces? Writing to Baird six years after this time, Miller relates the following dream, which belongs to the Gairloch season, and is omitted from " Schools and Schoolmasters." It is remarkable as containing a very definite prediction which proved incorrect. " About the middle of September, this year, I had a singular dream, the particulars of which re- tain even to this day as firm a hold of my memory as if they had been those of a real incident. I dreamed that my friend William Ross had died, and that I was watching the corpse in a large, darkened apartment. I felt sad and unhappy. Suddenly there appeared near the couch where the body lay an upright wreath of thin vapor, which grad- ually assumed the figure of my deceased friend. The face of the spectre was turned towards the body, and the robes of white in which it was dressed appeared, compared with the winding-sheet beside it, as a piece of cambric exposed to the rays of the sun would to another piece hung up in the shade. The figure turned round and I spoke to it ; but though, from the splendor of the dress it wore, and the placid expression of the face, which was of feminine beauty, I inferred it to be a spirit of heaven, by one of those incon- sistencies common in dreams, my question to it regarded the state of the damned. ' I know nothing,' it said, ' of 132 THE JOURNEYMAN. the damned.' ' Then describe to me,' I rejoined, ' the hap- piness of the blest.' The reply was strong and pointed : Live a good life, and in seven days, seven weeks, and seven years you shall know.' I must add that I have since thought much oftener of the prediction than of the advice." No particular incident of any kind appears to have taken place in the history of Miller at the time specified. The work at the manse completed, Miller removed, with two of his brother workmen, to a village in the neighbor- hood, to build a house for an innkeeper. Their lodging here was as bad as at the place they left. One half of a large cellar used for storing salt, of which half had been pulled down to furnish materials for the proposed building, was their barrack. They hung mats across the open end, through which the wind blew cold at night, awakening them sometimes by dashing the rain in their faces. Their fare was improved by a supply of excellent milk, and the inn- keeper made a point of inviting them to dine with him on Sunday. "He was a loquacious little man, full of him- self, and desirous of being reckoned a wit," but without capacity to play the part. Miller, less talkative than his fellow- workmen, was supposed by mine host to be available as a butt, and was made the object of sundry small witti- cisms. " He took this in good part for a while, but one day he retorted upon his entertainer and reduced him to silence. The consequence was, that he was excluded from the invi- tation next Sunday, and left to regale himself on oatmeal and milk in the solitude of the barrack. He took his revenge in a way gratifying at once to his pride and his kindliness. One of the favored workmen had bargained with the innkeeper to give the latter a hammer and trowel, but, after receiving the money for the articles, had played him false. " I was informed of the circumstance," says Miller to Baird, " when on the eve of setting out for the LANDSCAPE. 133 low country ; and taking my hammer and trowel from my bundle, I presented them to the innkeeper's wife, alleg- ing, when she urged me to set a price on them, that they were a very inadequate return for her husband's kindness to me during the two first weeks of our acquaintance." It was a mode of revenge to which neither Uncle James nor Uncle Sandy could have taken exception. Before quitting the Gairloch scene we may take this final picture of one of its landscapes : u There is a steep, high hill, rather more than a mile from the manse of Gairloch, to the summit of which I frequently extended my walks. The view which the eye commands from thence is of a character wilder and more sublime than can be either rightly imag- ined or described. Towards the east and south there spreads a wide savage prospect of rugged mountains, towering the one over the other from the foreground to the horizon, and varying in color, in proportion to the distance, from the darkest russet to the faintest purple. They are divided by deep, gloomy ravines that seem the clefts and fissures of a shattered and ruined planet ; and their sum- mits are either indented into rough naked crags, or whitened over with unwasting snows, forming fit thrones upon which the spirits of winter might repose, each in a separate insulated tef ritory , and from whence they might defy the milder seasons as they passed below. To the north and west the scene is of a different description ; it presents a rocky indented shore, and a wide sea speckled over with islands. On both sides, however, though the features are dissimilar, the expression is the same. Scarcely more of the works of man appear visible in the whole wide circum- ference than appeared to the gaze of Noah, when he first stood on the summit of Mount Ararat, and contemplated the wreck of the deluge. " It was on a beautiful evening in the month of June 184 THE JOURNEYMAN. that I first climbed the steep side of this hill and rested on its summit. I was much impressed by the wide extent and sublime grandeur of the sceme. Part of the eastern skirt of the Atlantic was spread out beneath me, mottled with the Hebrides. In one glance I had a view of Longa, .Skye, Lewis, Harris, Rona, Eaza, and several other islands with whose names .1 was unacquainted. The sky and sea were both colored with the same warm hue of sunset, and appeared as if blended together ; while the islands which lay on the verge of the horizon seemed dense purple clouds, which, though motionless in the calm, the first sea-breeze might sweep away. Towards the south my eye was caught by two gigantic mountains, which, as if emulous of each other, towered above the rest, like the contending chiefs of a divided people ; while towards the east I beheld a scene of terrible ruin and sublime disorder, mountain piled upon mountain, and ravine intersecting ravine. All my faculties of reason and imagination seemed at first as if frustrated and held down by some superior power ; the magnitude of the scene oppressed me ; I felt as if in the presence of the Spirit of the Universe ; and the apology of the Jewish spies recurred to me, ' We were as grasshoppers before them.' " This was written when Miller was twentyseven. It is remarkable for the absence of all geological allusion, and for the strong human element in the imagery. When he had lived for another quarter of a century he again described the scene, and the pencil is now in the firm hand of a master. But so completely has the geological interest taken possession of him that he throws it back into a period prior to that at which it exerted any powerful influ- ence upon his mind, and makes the imaginative boy of twenty look through the eyes of the scientific man of fifty. Here is the scene as he rendered it for the last time : THE LANDSCAPE AGAIN. 135 " How exquisitely the sun sets in a clear, calm, summer evening over the blue Hebrides ! Within less than a mile of our barrack there rose a tall hill, whose bold summit commanded all the Western Isles, from Sleat in Skye, to the Butt of the Lewis. To the south lay the trap islands ; to the north and west the gneiss ones. They formed, how- ever, seen from this hill, one great group, which, just as the sun had sunk, and sea and sky were so equally bathed in gold as to exhibit on the horizon no dividing line, seemed in their transparent purple, darker or lighter according to the distance, a group of lovely clouds, that, though move- less in the. calm, the first light breeze might sweep away. Even the flat promontories of sandstone, which, like out- stretched arms, enclosed the outer reaches of the foreground, promontories edged with low red cliffs, and covered with brown heath, used to borrow at these times, from the soft yellow bean\, a beauty not their own. Amid the inequalities of the gneiss region within, a region more broken and precipitous, but of humbler altitude, than the great gneiss tract of the midland Highlands, the chequered light and shade lay, as the sun declined, in strongly con- trasted patches, that betrayed the abrupt inequalities of the ground, and bore, when all around was warm-tinted and bright, a hue of cold neutral gray ; while immediately over and beyond this rough, sombre base, there rose two noble pyramids of red sandstone, about two thousand feet in height, that used to flare to the setting-sun in bright crim- son, and whose nearly horizontal strata, deeply scored along the lines, like courses of ashlar in an ancient wall, added to the mural effect communicated by their bare fronts and steep, rectilinear outlines. These tall pyramids form the terminal members, towards the south, of an extraor- dinary group of sandstone hills, of denudation unique in the British Islands, which extends from the northern boundary 136 THE JOURNEYMAN. of Assynt to near Applecross. But though I formed at this time my first acquaintance with the group, it was not until many years after that I had an opportunity of determining the relations of their component beds to each other, and to the fundamental rocks of the country." The winter of 1823 was spent, as usual, in Cromarty. William Eoss was in Edinburgh, and Miller had no friend of his own age with whom he cared much to associate. He seems to hate been in a trivial mood, and to have made business of amusement. " There was," he says, " a little mischievous boy of about ten years of age w r hom I chose as a companion for lack of a better. He was spirited and sen- sible for his years, and deemed me a very superior kind of playfellow. I taught him how to climb and leap and wres- tle, how to build bridges and rig ships, and how to make baskets and rush caps. I told him stories, and lent him books, and showed him how to act plays, and lighted fires with him in the caves of the hill of Cromarty, and, in short, went on in such a manner that my acquaintance began to shake their own heads and to question the sound- ness of mine. My Uncle James, who used sturdily to assert, in the face of all opposing evidence, that my powers of mind averaged rather above than below the common standard, seriously told me about this time th*at if I would not act more in the manner of other people, he would defend me no longer." / CHAPTER III. COMES OF AGE SETS SAIL FOR EDINBURGH PARTING RE- FLECTIONS MORNING ON THE MORAY FRITH FIRST SIGHT OF EDINBURGH ABSENT FROM CHURCH FOR FIVE SUN- DAYS AND U A FEW MORE" HOLYROOD, CHARLES II.'S STATUE, EFFIGY OF KNOX, THE COLLEGE, FERGUSON'S GRAVE, DR. McCRIE THE PANORAMA, THE THEATRE. 'ILLER is now to enter upon a scene in all respects new, new in temptation, new in r\7) JV V instruction, new in companionship. He ex- changes the rustic murmur of Cromarty and the solitudes of Gairloch for the sights and agitations of the metropolis of Scotland. He has acquired an accurate knowledge of the character and circumstances of the Scot- tish Highlander ; he is to bring his faculty of observation to bear upon the inhabitants of the Lowlands. In both instances his observation is as yet almost entirely confined to the working-class. In the autumn of 1823 he comes of age, and is therefore competent to exercise rights of proprietorship over a wretched tenement on the Coal-hill of Leith, which has been a constant source of loss and annoyance to his mother from the time of his father's death. His own wish, and that of his friends, now is, that he may be able to dispose of it, and, with a view to investigating the affair on the spot, he sails from Cromarty for Leith in the spring of 1824. I have before me a manuscript containing " Descriptive Letters," 137 138 THE JOURNEYMAN. written by him to his uncles in the course of the summer. It enables us to trace his course from the moment of his stepping aboard ship until the series abruptly terminates with part of a letter written in the last clays of the year. As might have been surmised from the affection and gentle- ness of his disposition, he thinks more at first of the home he is leaving than of the new world into which he is to enter. " LEITH, 4th June, 1824. " The ship in which I was a passenger left Cromarty upon Sunday forenoon ; and, as the day was warm and pleasant, I remained upon deck till evening, with my eyes stead- fastly fixed upon the land I had so lately left. Every moment it was lessening and growing more indistinct ; but fancy strengthened my powers of vision, and in a half-sad, half-sportive mood, I was marking out every spot which in the by-past had been the scene of my juvenile sports or pleasures. There, thought I, looking toward the hill of Cromarty, will some of my friends be stationed with their eyes fixed upon the departing vessel, and though she appear but a small, an almost imperceptible speck, yet will they deem her an object of greater interest than any of the scenes the eye commands from that eminence. The thought was tender and pleasing. There was something in it that told me of the affection of the friends I was leaving, and of the coldness of those with whom I was soon to mingle. But perhaps 'twill be for the better ; that coldness may rouse the sleeping energies of my character, and when I find my- self as if alone in the world, instead of resting upon the exertions of others, I shall learn to depend on my own. Such were the thoughts with which I beguiled the time, Till the gray mists of eve arose, and wrapt My native hills in dark and formless gloom. VOYAGE TO LEITH. 139 " Scarcely had the sun risen when, curious to know in what part of the Moray Frith we now were, I rose and went upon deck. . . The sun hung on the verge of the horizon, and illuminated that part of the water which seemed to lie beneath with a splendor not less dazzling than its own. A solitary porpoise was tumbling around our vessel in un- wieldy sport. A " killing" of sea-gulls at a little distance were screaming over their morning banquet ; while, at in- tervals, an overgrown seal raised his round black head above the waves and gazed upon us with a long and very curious stare. Upon the north I perceived the land stretching from Tarbat-ness to Jobn-o'-Groats, while upon the south and east, at about three miles' distance, rose the bold, rocky, and romantic shores of Moray and Banff. Tower and town, hill and promontory, in their turns engaged my attention, and after having, in the course of the day, passed Portsoy, Banff, Macduff, and Fraserburgh, I again sought my bed, and spent this night, as I had done the preceding, in calm and refreshing sleep. "Two days of our voyage had passed pleasantly, but upon the morning of the third" I was surprised and somewhat disheartened when, upon getting on deck, I perceived noth- ing but a dark rolling sea, and a dense cloud of mist closing upon the vessel upon every side. . . Often as I paced the narrow space the deck afforded me did I behold in fancy the scenes I was soon to visit, and as often was that fancy carried back to picture the regrets and joys of home. But that you may better know what my thoughts were, I insert the copy of a short, I should rather say unfinished, poem I composed that morning. It will show you what ideas I had formed of Edinburgh, and how little the hope of its pleas- ures appeared when compared with the well-proved joys of the home I had left : 140 THE JOURNEYMAN. " Thou mayst boast, O Edina, thou home of delight, For thy gallants are gay, and thy ladies are bright, August is thy palace, thy castle, sublime, Has braved the rude dints of fire, battle, and time. " Thou mayst boast, O Edina, thou famM abode Of the wise and the learned, of the great and the good, Thou mayst boast of thy worthies, mayst boast of thy towejs, Thy halls and thy temples, thy grots and thy bowers. " Yet lovelier by far and more dear to this heart Than all your gay trophies of labor and art, Is the home of my fathers, the much-loved land, Of the dauntless of heart and the mighty of hand. " 'Tis there the gray bones of my fathers are laid, 'Twas there that my life's sunny friendships were made, And till death chills my bosom and closes my e'e, These friends and that land shall be dear unto me." " The weather was still extremely thick, and, though my eyes were earnestly fixed in that direction, I could see but little of Edinburgh. Once indeed I saw the chimneys of the new town appearing through the mist, like the shocks of a field newly reaped, and several times the rugged summit of Arthur's Seat came full in sight, as if passing through the dark cloud which obscured its base. These were but tran- sient glimpses, but of the town of Leith I had a full and distinct view. A young lad, one of the passengers, was pointing out to me the harbor, docks, and public buildings, and between the amusement his remarks afforded me and the pleasure I took in looking at the vessels we passed and repassed in the roadstead, an hour or two flew away very agreeably. " By a signal from the shore we were made to understand that the water in the channel had risen to a requisite height. The vessel's head was immediately turned that way, and EDINBURGH. 141 in a few minutes I found myself in the town of Leith, my head dizzied with the confused cries of watermen and car- ters, and my thoughts scattered by a multiplicity of objects, any of which I might have thought curious, but all of which only tended to confuse." This, it must be admitted, is a rather commonplace epis- tle, and the verses are so poor that an apology may seem necessary for presenting them to the reader. But here we have at least the lad Miller in his habit as he lived, with no gleam from the after-time to disturb the artless unconscious- ness of modest, simple-hearted youth. Both in his letter to Baird and in the " Schools and Schoolmasters " there are elaborate pictures of his first sight of Edinburgh ; but what first impressed him in the scene the emergence of the chimneys of the new town and the summit of Arthur's Seat, from the mist always reappears. It is well, also, tore- member that the bareness in the record of his impressions which meets us in these contemporary letters on Edinburgh, may arise partly from his inexperience in composition, and partly from the restraints imposed upon epistolary corre- spondence in days long antecedent to the introduction of the penny post. We m&y believe that it was not merely in the autobiographic retrospect that he " felt as if he were ap- proaching a great magical city like some of those in the 4 Arabian Nights ' that was even more intensely poetical than nature itself ; " and that reminiscences of Ramsay and Ferguson, Smollett's "Humphrey Clinker" and Scott's " Marmion," heightened the interest with which he looked through the canopy of mist upon the spires and roofs of Ed- inburgh. The great city to one who had never seen a larger town than Inverness it was very great threw him at first out of all his habitudes. He frankly confesses, " though conscious that by so doing he will lay himself open to rner- 142 THE JOURNEYMAN. ited censure," that on the first four Sundays after his arrival he absented himself from church and " strolled through the streets of Leith and Edinburgh ; " that the fifth was occu- pied in scaling Arthur's Seat and viewing the city and ad- jacent country from its summit; and that u a few more" were passed in the company of some townsmen of his own, who, " Cameronian-like, preferred the open air to a church." The impressions formed in this leisurely survey of Edin- burgh are described at some length to his uncles, and they set before us the Hugh Miller of twenty-one, with a dis- tinctness so vivid and a simplicity so naive, that we feel still more strongly than before how completely the profound reflective vein of the autobiography prevents us from real- izing what the writer was at the various stages of his career. The fervor of his nationality is one of the first things which attracts our notice. " Holyrood House," he says, " I viewed with the same emotion which a pilgrim feels when prostrating himself before the shrine of a favorite saint. With this building, long before I saw it, I had connected associations of a high and venerable character, but I was not prepared for the sudden, the spontaneous burst of en- thusiasm, which rose from my very soul when I stood front- ing the gateway and saw the arms of Scotland, as if it was still an independent kingdom, frowning in the gray stone, and directly above them the crown of her ancient kings. It was no time to sum up the advantages which we derive from the union, the very thought of it was revolting, and I looked upon the sentinel who paced before the door as one who had no business there. I have often heard of classic and of holy ground ; to me the space upon which this pile stands is both. But why need I say so ? To you, or to any other Scotsman acquainted with the history of his country, and proud (as most of us are) of the fame of her ancient grandeur, it must appear the same. Under the STATUE OF CHARLES II. 143 piazza which runs round the inner court I walked for a con- siderable time, and was not a little struck with the death- like stillness, a stillness interrupted by nothing except the measured footfall of the sentry ." He is much disappointed with the High Street, having been led by something he had read in the works of Smollett to fancy that it was " one of the finest in Europe." He looks with great contempt upon the equestrian statue of Charles II. in Parliament House Square. " This lascivious and dissipated monarch," he says, " is attired in the garb of an ancient Roman ; and, by his appearance, a person un- acquainted with the history of his reign might suppose him to have been a sapient and warlike prince, dauntless in the field and wise in the council. . . . . . When I first saw the statue, I could not help quoting a few lines from Thomson's ' Liberty,' which will appear to you as it did to me, the character of Charles the Second faithfully drawn, maugre the inscription and the Roman dress : " ' By dangerous softness long he mined his way. By subtle arts, dissimulation deep, By sharing what corruption showered profuse, By breathing wide the gay lascivious plague, And pleasing manners suited to deceive, A pensioned king, Against his country bribed by Gallic gold.' " The natural and unaffected manner in which Miller alludes to Smollett and Thomson is not without significance. How completely this young mason is already a literary character ! After describing his impressions on the effigy of Charles II., he proceeds in a very different spirit to refer to another and less pretentious effigy then visible in Edinburgh. " At the lower end of High Street " these are his words " is 144 THE JOURNEYMAN. a house, from a window of which, in the earlier days of the Reformation, John Knox frequently used to preach. To pre- serve the memory of this, in a small niche, a bust of the illustrious Reformer appears, as if still holding forth to the people, At his right hand, in low relief, a circle represent- ing the sun, upon which the name of God is inscribed in Greek, Latin, and English, appears as if emerging from a thick cloud. The sculpture of the whole was rude when at its best, and the wasting hand of Time has rendered it still more uncouth ; nevertheless, some person, doubtless of more zeal than judgment, has got the bust painted, and surrounded it with a tawdry pulpit. I need hardly tell you that these ill-judged alterations have given it a carica- tured appearance ; and yet I felt more impressed when looking at it from the very spot upon which some of the original's auditors stood, than I did when standing before the horse and man of Parliament Square : for, with a feel- ing which perhaps the venerable Reformer would have censured, as savoring too much of the idolatry he abol- ished, I uncovered my head and bowed very low to his effigy." His estimate of Edinburgh College is high, and the terms in which it is couched prove that he had already acquired some technical knowledge of architecture. " The College in my opinion is the finest building in Edinburgh, either taken in its parts or as a whole. It forms a square, the exterior of which displays all the chaste simplicity of the Doric order, and the interior the lighter graces of the Ionic and Corinthian." He visits the burying-'grounds of the city : here is an inter- esting note. " I have seen the grave of poor Ferguson, and the plain stone placed at its head by his brother in misfor- tune and genius, Robert Burns. I felt much affected when standing above the sod which covers the mortal remains of DR. McCRIE. 145 the young poet, and could have dropped a tear to his memory and to the memory of his still greater successor, but I was not Shanclean enough to command one. You know I never could weep except when insulted and stung to the heart by those whose unkindness I could not or would not resent, and then the tears I dropped were those of grief, rage, hatred, in short, the offspring of any passion except tenderness." This is a touch of self-portraiture worth whole chapters of retrospective delineation. In another of these letters, dated 10th October, 1824, and addressed to his Uncle James, we meet with the following careful sketch of Dr. McCrie. " I had long wished to hear a discourse from Dr. McCrie, the elegant historian of Knox and Melville, but it was some time before I found out his meeting-house. At length I discovered it, and, being obligingly sliown to a seat by one of his elders, I sat with some little portion of impatience till the doctor made his appearance. The laudable end to which he has dedicated his great talents in rescuing from unmerited contumely the memory of our venerable Reformer had long prepossessed me in his favor, and this prepossession his appearance was well calculated to confirm. In age and figure I know not where to point out any one who more resembles him than your- self. His countenance is pale and expressive, and his fore- head deeply marked with the lines of thought ; the spare- ness of his habit reminded me of long study and deep research, and his demeanor, at once humble and dignified, finished the portrait. You may doubt when I tell you that the discourse he that day delivered was one of the best I ever heard that my partiality blinded me to its defects. This was not the case ; for, though partial to the doctor, it was his superior talents that made me so, and had his discourse been of that dull, commonplace kind which I have often heard in a church that shall be nameless, my 146 THE JOURNEYMAN. disappointment would have been great in proportion to my expectation. I need not tell you that, as an historian, Dr. McCrie ranks very high. At a time when every witling thought himself licensed to ridicule the firmness or denounce the boldness of the Reformers of our religion, the doctor stood forth in their defence, and, endowed with powers equal to the task, dispersed the dark cloud of obloquy in which partial or designing men had enveloped their names. If we consider him as a preacher, he will appear in a light as favorable. His manner is calm yet impressive, and his sentiments (always beautiful, and ofttimes highly original) are conveyed in language strong and nervous, yet at the same time plain and simple. In short, Dean Swift's defini- tion of a good style, ' proper words in their proper places,' can be very well exemplified in his. I have now heard him several times. One Sunday his voice, which is not naturally strong, was nearly drowned by loud and continued cough- ing, which arose from every corner of the church. For some time he went on without any seeming embarrassment, but just when in the middle of an important argument made a full stop. In a moment every eye was fixed upon the doctor, and such was the silence caused by this atten- tion that for the space of a minute you might have heard a pin fall. c I see, my brethren, you can all be quiet enough when I am quiet/ was his mild and somewhat humorous reproof, and such was its effect that, for the remainder of the day, he received very little interruption. There was something in this little incident that gave me much pleas- ure. I thought it told more truly of the discernment and good temper of the doctor than even his discourse did, beautiful and instructive as that was." Very little is added to this in the " Schools and School- masters." There is indeed a quiet accuracy in the portrait, which shows that Miller was beginning to find his hand as THE PANORAMA. 147 a master of English prose. The pale complexion and ex- pressive features, the deep thought-written lines of the fore- head, the spare habit, the humble yet dignified demeanor, which appear in the sketch of the mason lad from Cromarty, bring Dr. McCrie visibly before us. The doctor was in- deed a notable figure in the Edinburgh of that time. He exercised a profound influence upon the intellectual society of Scotland, and left behind him at least one work, the biography of Knox, which has an imperishable place in the literature of Europe. Connected ecclesiastically ; with a very small religious denomination, he rose by a natural and effortless ascent, through the force of his solitary genius, until he found his level among the most eminent men of his time. Miller, long afterwards, finely compared him, in relation to the co-religionists which clustered round him, to a village church rearing its tower amid a group of cottages. But it was not only to burying-grounds and churches that Miller betook himself during his residence in the neigh- borhood of Edinburgh. In our last extracts he has ap- peared somewhat in the light of a philosopher and critic, but we are reminded, as we accompany him to the pano- rama, that he has not yet thrown off the boy. It was rather hard in the autobiographer of fifty to omit all notice of the event chronicled in the following animated sentences : "Upon the earthen mound where the good people of Edinburgh see shows and sights of all descriptions, from the smoking baboon to the giant of seven feet and a half, stands a circular wooden building, which in size and appear- ance reminds the reader of Gulliver's travels of the wash- ing tub of Brobdignag. In this building all the pano- ramic scenery which is painted in or brought to Edinburgh is exhibited. The battle of Trafalgar, together with a series of scenes representing the Emperor of France, from 148 THE JOURNEYMAN. the skirmish of Genappe till his death in the solitary island of St. Helena, was, when I came here, the subject of exhibi- tion. Of this species of entertainment I had formed no idea, and willing to fill up the blank which a name unac- companied with an idea leaves in the mind, and perhaps not a little urged by a natural fondness for sights of the amusing description, I left my work one evening about an hour sooner than usual, called upon my friend, Will Ross, as I passed his way, and accompanied by him made directly for the panorama. We were ushered into a darkened gal- lery, the sides and ceiling of which were covered with green cloth. Our eyes were immediately turned towards an opening about thirty feet in width, through which, by a striking illusion, we perceived the ocean stretching out for many leagues before us, and upon it the British fleet, com- manded by Nelson and Collingwood, bearing down, a dou- ble line, upon the enemy, who at a little distance, in the form of a crescent, seemed to await their coming. Not even in a camera obscura have I seen anything so natural. The sun seemed beaming upon the water ; the British pendant was unfolding to the wind ; the vessels appeared as if gently heaving to the swell, while upon their decks all was bustle and activity. The marines were loading their mus- kets ; the seamen were employed about the great guns ; some of the officers were busied in giving orders, and others with great anxiety were looking through their glasses as if to catch every movement of the enemy. In truth, the de- ception was so complete that, forgetting the ground upon which I stood, I fancied myself just on the eve of a great battle, and felt my mind impressed with that indescribable emotion which, in the reality of such a circumstance, the young soldier always feels. This scene was soon changed, and in its place another represented which displayed all the terrible confusion of the engagement. The first only BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR. 149 showed us* the cloud that concealed the storm ; here it was represented as if bursting in its full fury. It was the deck of the ' Victory,' as it appeared at the moment Nelson received his death wound. You will have some idea of the size of the picture when I tell you that there were above two hundred figures, all as large as life, at once under my eye. In the middle of these was Nelson ; the sword was falling from his hand ; his features were distorted as if by sudden and acute pain ; and the pale, cadaverous hue of his countenance betokened speedy dissolution. The attention of the figures nearest him seemed to be entirely engrossed by his iiill ; an anxious expression of the countenance or a sud- den turn of the head showed that those at a greater dis- tance had some faint perception of what had happened, while others in the outskirts of the picture were busied in working the guns, or in supplying those who wrought them with ammunition. A few paces from Nelson, a young^)fficer w*is etigerly pointing out to a marine the main-top of one of the vessels with which the ' Victory ' was engaged, from which the fatal bullet was supposed to have come, and he. with great deliberation, was levelling his musket in that direction. The third scene was of a terrific descrip- tion. It represented the battle as if drawing near its close. In the foreground was the ' Redoubtable/ a French ship of the line, on fire. The flames were bursting out furi- ously from window and gun-port, tinging the waves below with a red and fiery glare. Some of the crew were seen throwing themselves overboard ; while others, with de- spair depicted on their countenances, were clinging to the vessel's sides as if uncertain which death to choose. The fourth and last scene was of a calm, but, though it repre- sented the hour of victory, of a gloomy character. In the distance a few of the fugitive vessels were seen giving their broadside and crowding on every sail to expedite their 150 THE JOURNEYMAN. flight. In the foreground all was desolation. Dismasted and shattered vessels, huge fragments of rigging to which a few shivering wretches still clung, and a sun again shin- ing through a clearing atmosphere on the madness and the misery of man, made this scene, like the last of a tragedy, by far the saddest." From the panorama he turns to the theatre. Much of his reading, he says, had been of a description approved by Uncle James, but he had read more plays and novels than would have been sanctioned by that stern moralist. He cannot see that they have done him much harm, and, sure enough, " no small portion of the pleasure he had experi- enced in this world had been derived from them." He will not, however, undertake to defend this species of reading ; he means only to introduce the remark that, being largely acquainted with plays and novels, and possessing a fancy naturally strong, he had formed too high an idea .of theatri- cal representation, and, when he saw the theatre, was dis- appointed. " When reading," he says, " the plays of Shakespeare or of Otway, of Eowe or of Addison, I saw with the mind's eye their heroes not as actors, but as men ; and the scenes they described brought to my view not the painted scenes of the stage, but the real face of nature, in the same manner that a beautiful portrait gives us the idea of a real person, not of a mask. But when I saw men who neither in appearance nor reality came up to the idea I had formed of the characters they represented, I rated them in the bitterness of my soul as mere pretenders who could not act their part upon the stage so well as common men do the parts assigned them in the great drama of life." He appears to have grown ashamed in a few years of the boyish delight with which he gazed upon the panorama. In the letter to Baird, he passes over his visit with the single remark, u I was more pleased with the panorama DISAPPOINTED WITH THE STAGE. 151 than with the theatre." His account of his theatrical ex- periences contains, indications of the extent of his dramatic reading. " I several times attended the theatre, but I did not derive from theatrical representation half the pleasure I had anticipated. I had read a great many plays of the different English authors from the days of Shakespeare down to those of Cumberland and Sheridan. I had perused, too, translations of Terence and Moliere. My acquaint- ance with this department of literature was perhaps prema- ture ; for I perused most of these works at too early an age to appreciate their merits as compositions, or to draw com- parisons between their dramatis personal and the people of the world. The impression, however, which the more strik- ing scenes and characters had left on my imagination was ineffaceably vivid. Most of the scenes were identified in my mind with the beautiful scenes of the hill of Cromarty. The cliff of Dover, even in Shakespeare, could not surpass in grandeur of feature the rock of the Apple-yardie, a rugged, hoary, perpendicular precipice, nearly 'three hun- dred feet in height, crested by a dark wood, skirted by a foaming sea, partially mantled with ivy, caverned at its base, and continually lifting up its voice in hollow echoes as if holding converse with the waves that toil be- neath it, or the innumerable flocks of sea-birds that scream around it. The Jacques of my imagination moralized in a solitary opening in the thicket above, from which a long vista that pentrates into the recesses of the wood, and becomes narrower and darker in the distance, is seen to terminate in a small circular opening which, when the evening sun rests on the hill behind, may remind one of the beacon of a lighthouse. I found it the easiest thing imaginable to convert the cavern in which I had been once imprisoned into the cave of Belarius ; and an old vault in a ruinous chapel dedicated to St. Regulus, and nearly buried 152 THE JOURNEYMAN. among the woods of the hill, furnished me with a proper tomb for the Capulets. The other scenes were of as suita- ble a character ; and the figures with which I peopled them were as strongly, though in some instances more whimsi- cally, defined. I conceived of Caliban as a monster that scarcely less resembled a huge beetle than a human crea- ture, and that walked erect and on all fours b}^ turns. The witches of Macbeth appeared to me in the forms of some of the most disagreeable-looking old women in the country, not, however, in their living aspects, but in those which I fancied their corpses would have assumed, should they, after being committed to the grave, be possessed by evil spirits. The ideas of female grace and elegance which I connected with the heroines of Shakespeare, and the lady of the Mask of Comus, w^ere mostly derived from a beauti- ful painting in Cromarty House, a copy of G-uido's famous Aurora, which, when a boy, I have contemplated for hours together. It was in consequence of my having acquired such ideas as these of the characters and scenes of dramatic poetry that I was now displeased with both actors and the stage. The stage I regarded as merely a little area floored with fir deal and surrounded by painted sheets ; the actors as a company of indifferent-looking people who could bear no comparison with either the ideal dramatis personce of my imagination, or the real characters whom I had seen acting their parts in the great drama of life. On the evening I first sat in the Theatre Royal of Edinburgh, I felt as if, after having admired an exquisite portrait, which the art of the painter had almost awakened into life, I should be asked whether I could not recognize the original of it in an inanimate imao'e of wax." CHAPTER IV. NIDDRIE BLACKGUARD WORKMEN MILLER PREJUDICED BY THEM AGAINST THEIR CLASS HIS OPINIONS ON TRADES' UNIONS THE " BOATMAN'S TALE " RETURNS TO CROMARTY. Itt QjJH' 'ILLEB, soon found employment in his trade. The scene of his labor during his residence near Edinburgh was the village of Niddrie, where he was one of a company of workmen engaged in building an addition to Niddrie House. To give ourselves a vivid idea of the locality, exactly as it impressed itself upon him at the time, we cannot do better than avail ourselves of his own description, which we find in a letter to Uncle Alexander, dated 15th December, 1824 : " We shall, if you please, ascend the highest pinnacle of Niddrie House, and from thence survey the country. As far as the eye can reach in an east or southerly direction, a low, unvaried flat presents itself, gradually rising, as it re- cedes from the sight, into low, swelling hills, and falling with a sweep as gradual towards the Frith of Forth, which from this elevation appears in all its extent, glittering with many sails. Upon the north and west the face of the coun- try is of a bolder character. Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags upon the one hand, and the blue, heathy Pentland hills upon the other, will remind us of the beautiful and picturesque scenery which surrounds our native town. 153 154 THE JOURNEYMAN. To the grounds about Niddrie my work gives me access. Often, in the fine summer evenings, have I sauntered through its fields and woods, alone, but not solitary, watch- ing the last beam of the sun as it tinged with a purple hue the Pentland hills, or as it streamed on the roofless walls and dismantled turrets of Craigmillar Castle. . . . Nid- drie House is a large, irregular building, bearing date in one part 1636, and in another not yet finished. The modern addition will, when the winter storms of a few years have soiled the natural hue of the stone and rounded the angular mouldings, appear by far the most antique, as it is executed in the heaviest style of the Saxon Gothic. The large, mul- lioned windows are crowned with rich labels, and the walls deeply indented with moulded embrasures. Octagon turrets rising above the roof project from every corner, and instead of those large stacks of chimneys which disfigure many modern houses, here every one has its own airy column, con- nected at top to the rest by a star-like cope. When fin- ished, you might suppose this building, from its antique appearance and secluded situation, to have been some nun- nery founded by that church-endowing monarch, David I. Adjoining the house is a large garden, which, from its irreg- ular and partial cultivation, differs very little in appearance from the surrounding pleasure-grounds. In that corner of it which liqs nearest the north-west gable of the house is a vault in which the Wauchopes of Niddrie, time immemorial, have been interred. Its front is screened by a huge bush of ivy, which, overshading the door and twining about a sepulchral urn that rests directly above, gives the whole a gloomy yet picturesque appearance. Death does not move the bodies of the proprietors of Niddrie far from the house which sheltered them when living ; the dead Laird in his vault is not thirty feet distant from the living one in his bedchamber. Bounding the other extremity of the garden NIDDRIE. 155 is a bury ing-ground, in which the humbler inhabitants of the country and village adjacent find their last resting- place. It is a solitary spot, embosomed in wood, and at a considerable distance from any house. These circumstances, which in the north country would make a burying-ground after nightfall the supposed haunt of restless spirits, here affords the violator of sepulchres opportunity to tear from its grave the newly deposited body, and to convey it to some of the dissecting-rooms about Edinburgh. Such is the barbarous audacity of these wretches, that they frequently break and overturn monuments which lie in their way ; and, without any desire of concealing their depredations, leave the violated graves half open, and scatter around them, as if in derision, the cerements that wrapped the body. I hope I am not bloodthirsty, yet I think I could level a mus- ket at the villain who robbed the tomb of the body of one of my relatives, with as much composure, and with as little compunction, as I would feel in taking aim at a wooden target. " The house, or rather cottage, in which I at present lodge stands upon the side of the Dalkeith road. It is sheltered on the north and west by the Niddrie woods, and on the east fronts a wide though not diversified prospect of corn-fields and farm-steadings. From the -door at night, through a long, wooded avenue, I see the Inchkeith light twinkling in the distance, like a star rising out of the sea." Thus does he nourish a youth hardly sublime, yet not without its genially fostering elements and influences ; sauntering among the leafy woods, watching the sunset as it streams along the broad valley from the west, and deep- ens into purple the green-blue of the Pentlands, looking through the wooded avenue until the Inchkeith light flashes out above the darkening sea. " Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus, " alone," as he puts it, " but not soli- 156 THE JOURNEYMAN. tary," he communes with his own heart, ponders on men and things, and lays up fact after fact, conclusion after con- clusion, in a memory which, from his sixth year, appears to have lost not one gleaning of his experience. With the peace and beauty of nature around him, and Edinburgh at hand, his circumstances might at first sight be pronounced favorable. There was, however, a very important drawback. It was a serious misfortune for Miller, and one which left deep traces of its injurious influence upon his mind, that the men in company with whom he worked at Niddrie were, for the most part, dissolute and worthless. Nor were the excep- tions of a kind likely to inspire him with any enthusiasm for the order to which he provisionally belonged. They were men of strong religious sentiments, but narrow intel- lects, unable, save by the silent eloquence of their moral superiority to the rest of the squad, to make any impression either upon him or upon their comrades. The others were as bad specimens of their class as it is possible to conceive. Selfish and wilful as spoiled children, brutishly sensual, flip- pantly, because ignorantly, infidel, habitually profane, they showed Miller how base a thing a working-man can be, and to his dying day his opinion of working-men retained the stamp which it received in the society of these reprobates. Owing to the building mania, which was at its height at this time, they had abundance of work and high wages ; but they were mean enough to be jealous of the workmen from the North, and Miller found himself exposed to the thou- sand nameless vexations which spiteful cunning can suggest to mechanics wishing to subject a comrade to humiliation. It is often necessary for a stone-cutter, in order to have the block which he hews placed conveniently for the chisel and mallet, to be assisted by his fellow-workmen. This cus- tomary civility was refused to Miller, whose pride prevented WORTHLESS FELLOW-WORKMEN. 157 him from begging a favor, or complaining of its being tac- itly refused. The ablest, and, except himself and the reli- gious workmen, the best in the squad, was a young man whom he calls " Cha." He was the " recognized hero " of the band, and his heart seems to have smote him on account of the base combination against a stranger. He put an end to it by stepping out one day to assist Miller, when he was being left to roll up to his block-bench a stone of the size which two or three commonly united to place. Even Cha, however, was not merely a blackguard, but, in all that relates to moral sanity and self-respecting manhood, a fool. Like the majority of his fellows, he celebrated the fortnightly payment of wages by two or three days of drunkenness and debauchery. He was leader in the follow- ing feat, the account of which I extract from the letter to Baird, as one or two of its traits are omitted from the autobiography : " On a Saturday evening three of the Nid- tlrie workmen, after having received a fortnight's wages, which in all amounted to more than six pounds, went to Edinburgh, and there spent the night in a house of bad fame. Next morning they hired a coach, and, accompanied by three women of the town, set out for Roslin on a jaunt of pleasure. They came back to Edinburgh in the evening, passed the night as they had done the preceding one, and returned to Niddrie on Monday without a single shilling." Such was Cha, and to his taking the lead in expeditions of this kind he appears to have in large measure owed his repu- tation for cleverness and spirit. The revolting exploit just mentioned was spoken of with enthusiasm in the shed, and the workmen regaled each other for days after with accounts of similar feats which they had executed, or of which they had heard. " I was told," proceeds Miller, " of an Edin- burgh mechanic, a mason, who on the death of a relative received a legacy of about eighty pounds. He was no 158 THE JOURNEYMAN. sooner paid the money than he carried home his tool-chest, and shoved it under his bed. He then commenced a new course of life. He bought an elegant suit of clothes, hired a hackney-coach by the week, attended all the fashionable amusements of the place, and regularly, once in the day, called in his carriage on his brother- workmen. In six weeks the whole of his money was expended. He then took out his tool-chest from under his bed, and returned to his for- mer employment." This fellow seems to have had a trace of humor in him. At first hated as an intruder, and ridiculed as a High- lander, Miller, being found to be not only capable of hold- ing on his own path, but superior in the valued accomplish- ments of swimming, leaping, running, and wrestling, rose into something like popularity among his fellow- workmen. It was impossible, however, that between him and them there could be any communion ; and, tacitly accepting these sixteen masons of Mddrie as representatives of their class, he acquired a profound distrust, sharpened and embittered by contempt, for workmen in general. It cannot be denied that, so far as these unfortunates were concerned, he gave working-men a fair trial, and looked candidly and boldly into their ways and habits. He permitted himself to be carried along in the stream when the masons of the district turned out on strike, and he forced himself to endure one or two drear}^ hours in accompanying them to the foul sub- terranean haunt where they enjoyed the sport of badger- baiting. Everything he beheld in the character and con- duct of these workmen offended his higher nature. They were too far below him to exert any such influence as might have tempted him to a fellowship with them. In an atmos- phere of profanity, sensuality, and the most coarse and sor- did selfishness, he continued an Apollo among neat-herds, pure, proud, and lofty-minded. 159 As was to have been expected, the strike in which these masons engaged seemed to him unreasonable, and we need not doubt that his view of the matter was correct. In point of fact, there was no redeeming feature in his experience of working-men during his residence at Niddrie to modify the sternly unfavorable opinion which he formed of the class. He concluded that they were incurably disqualified for pro- moting their true interests by combination. He declared against trades' unions, and from this decision he never swerved. Finding that William Ross was not only member of a house-painters' union, but one of the officials of the society, he told his friend that his union would never benefit the house-painters as a class, and advised him to resign his clerkship. He gives us in the autobiography the argument which he addressed to Ross, and as it was substantially the argument he continued to urge against trades' unions to the end of his life, it is as well to quote it here : " There is a want," he said, " of true leadership among our operatives in these combinations. It is the wilder spirits that dictate the conditions ; "and, pitching their demands high, they begin usually by enforcing acquiescence among their com- panions. They are tyrants to their fellows ere they come into collision with their masters, and have thus an enemy ii\ the camp, not unwilling to take advantage of their sea- sons of weakness, and prepared to rejoice, though secretly, mayhap, in their defeats and reverses. And further, their discomfiture will be always quite certain enough when sea- sons of depression come, from the circumstance that, fixing their terms in prosperous times, they will fix them with ref- erence rather to their present power of enforcing them, than to that medium line of fair and equal adjustment on which a conscientious man could plant his foot and make a firm stand. Men such as you, able and ready to work in behalf of these combinations, will of course get the work to do ; 160 THE JOURNEYMAN. but you will have little or no power given you in their direction ; the direction will be apparently in the hands of a few fluent gabbers; and yet even they will not be the actual directors ; they will be but the exponents and voices of the general mediocre sentiment and inferior sense of the mass as a whole, and acceptable only so long as they give utterance to that ; and so, .ultimately, exceedingly little will be won in this way for working-men. It is well that they should be allowed to combine, seeing that combination is permitted to those who employ them ; but until the ma- jority of our working-men of the south become very differ- ent from what they now are, greatly wiser and greatly better, there will be more lost than gained by their com- binations. According to the circumstances of the time and season, the current will be at one period running in their favor against the masters, and at another in favor of the masters against them ; there will be a continual ebb and flow, like that of the sea, but no general advance ; and the sooner that the like of you and I get out of the rough con- flict and jostle of the tideway, and set ourselves to labor apart on our own internal resources, it will be all the better for us." Of the reasoning by which his correspondent attempted to rebut these arguments we have no sample, but Ross, though modest and diffident to excess, was not convinced, and retained his place in the union. Of the force of Miller's statements, so far as they go, there can be no doubt ; the question is whether his inference is not based on too narrow an induction of facts. That cacklers were generally the leaders of the unions at the time he wrote, and that they are too often the leaders now, may be admitted. But he seems to assume that there is a natural necessity in this state of things, and to conclude that no schooling by expe- rience will suffice to teach working-men that the leader- TRADES' UNIONS. 161 ship of the wise man is better than the leadership of the fool. Stump-oratorical leadership has been proved long ere now to be no necessity in the organizations of working-men. The charge of tyrannically repressing individual energy may still be brought against unions ; but it is an established fact that these associations have been the means of keeping tens of thousands of families out of the workhouse, and have dis- pensed to tens of thousands of workmen comforts and necessities in time of illness. Nearly twenty years have elapsed since Miller wrote his autobiography, and perhaps none of our institutions have partaken more largely in the general improvement which has characterized that period than trades' unions. It is not impossible that, with the comprehensive information before him which has been fur- nished by the Committee appointed to inquire into the subject by the Social Science Association, and by the Royal Commission which investigated the question in the summer of 1867, he would have divested himself more fully than he ever did of the evil impression made upon his mind by the abject squad in which he had the lamentable misfortune to work at Niddrie. Be this as it may, his nature, purified and elevated by the influences of his training, remained uncontaminated by the baseness of his companions. Retaining his erect human attitude, he breathed freely and without hurt in this Grotto of Dogs, while the canine creatures perished. He had, besides, the society not only of William Ross, whose friend- ship and converse were a perpetual solace to him, but of a cousin and a few other rational persons. And the trees were leafy, the skies were blue, the white clouds over the Pentlands radiant in their stainlessness, and, when the wind raged in the wood behind the cottage at midnight, he could dream that it was the roll of the surge among the crags beside his beloved Cromarty. While his fellow-work- 162 THE JOURNEYMAN. men in the shed indulged in clumsy jest or obscene tattle, he could " croon" to himself the " Boatman's Tale," getting into shape during these weeks. The poem will not rank high as a work of art, but there were a few at that time in Edinburgh, Scott, Jeffrey, and Wilson in that number, who would have heard with interest that it had been composed by a mason lad of twenty-one, who, in the very moments of composition, held mallet and chisel in a shed at Niddrie. The first two parts were written here, the remaining three at Cromarty. We shall glance at the poem. The "Boatman's Tale" is varied in scene and incident, but the gist of the story is that Walter Hogg, a seafaring man, beheld a vision of fiendish creatures who predicted his death ; that this death took place as announced, with appro- priate circumstances of horror and terror, and that the ghost of Walter appeared to his friend and informed him that the demons, spite of their happy guess, were beings of no great potency, and that he was in a state of blessedness. The following stanzas are evidently a version of the episode of the apparition in " Jack Grant's Tale " : " Oh ! all was dark as dungeon gloom : Still louder swelled the roar That rushed above, and howled behind, And dashed and raged before, When gleamed a light, shadeless and bright, On cordage, mast, and oar. " Now mock me not ; our stern upon I saw a lady stand ; A waxen taper, straight and tall, She held in either hand ; Her lightly-flowing garb appeared Of shining silvery green, Her face was calmly pale, her eyes Were stars of dazzling sheen. THE BOATMAN'S TALE. 163 " High rose our bows ; when passed the wave, Again as low they fell ; Yet all unmoved that lady stood ; No sailor man, of flesh and blood, Had kept her berth so well." The scene of the apparition of Walter was also on ship- board, but the vessel had evidently never been on the stocks at Cromarty 01* elsewhere : " Her sails were white as summer cloud, Her mast a boreal ray, A fiery star bedecked her prow, Begemmed with light her stern below The circling eddies play. " Now mark me : on her silver deck Unharmed did Walter stand ; And on each side, and round behind, There watched a seraph band. " The rainbow of the shower ye've seen, The dazzling sun ye see : Oh ! orbs and hues of heaven alone To the good may likened be, AY hen they doff their garb of fragile clay To bathe in eternity. "And lovely was the smile that dwelt On Walter's placid face ; 'Twas but 'twere vain to strive to tell, For words can ne'er express The beauty of that sinless smile Of perfect happiness." On the subject of the demons which had appeared to him when on earth, the ghost becomes homiletic : " Thou sure hast read in Heaven's own book (Oh, search that volume well !) 164 THE JOURNEYMAN. How that of old the seraph tribes Grew proud and did rebel ; And how that from the height of heaven To deepest woe they fell. " Of these the band whose dark presage Did sore my heart dismay ; Yet harmless in the lonely wood And in the storm are they. But ah ! right fearful, though scarce feared, When in man's heart they stay. " Oh, dread them when the wanton smiles, And when the bowl is set ; Oh, dread them when thy heart is glad, And when thy cheeks are wet. " But if on Heaven thy trust be laid, To fear thou dost not well, For stronger is one Christian man Than all the fiends of hell." The two last lines really do credit to the mason lad. One can imagine him giving a vigorous stroke or two with his mallet as he " crooned " them out. The influence of Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner " and of Hogg's " Queen's Wake" are traceable in the " Boatman's Tale." After working two seasons at Niddrie, Miller returned to Cromarty. The voyage was long, and in its course he com- posed the verses which are quoted in the autobiography as u Written at Sea." His uncles, his cousin George, and other friends and relatives, welcomed him on the beach. CHAPTER V. THE STONE-CUTTER'S DISEASE LINES TO SISTER JEANIE K I .NEWS HIS FRIENDSHIP WITH SWANSON AND CORRESPONDS WITH ROSS WHITES AN ODE ON GREECE AND OFFERS IT TO THE " SCOTSMAN." m 'ILLER returned from Edinburgh in unbroken spirits. Whatever the drawbacks of his Edin- burgh sojourn, he had never ceased to be happy, and his mood, as we learn from an expression used in a letter to William Ross, had commonly been that of exuberant gayety. But one circumstance con- nected with his work while at Edinburgh now comes into view, to which it is impossible to refer without mournful- ness. While the young journeyman, so brave of spirit, so modestly content with his exile from the society he was fitted to adorn, was cutting blocks into pillars in the shed at Niddrie, the seeds of painful and ineradicable disease were being sown in his constitution. The hardships of his apprenticeship had brought him to the gates of death, and although he seemed to have recovered his strength, it is probable that his lungs were of less than average vigor when he entered as a journeyman upon the occupation of stone-hewing. In two seasons he became so deeply affected with "the stone-cutter's malady," that he had to choose between throwing himself loose for a season from his em- ployment and certain death. "So general," he says, " is the affection, that few of our Edinburgh stone-cutters pass 165 166 THE JOURNEYMAN. their fortieth }^ear unscathed, and not one out of every fifty of their number ever reaches his forty-fifth." For the first month or two after his return to Cromarty, he deemed it probable that his illness had gone too far for recovery. "I still remember" these are his words " the rather pensive than sad feeling with which I used to contemplate, at this time, an early death, and the intense love of nature that drew me, day after day, to the beautiful scenery which surrounds my native town, and which I loved all the more from the consciousness that my eyes might so soon close upon it forever." It was at this time that he composed the lines " To Jeanie." The little girl of five, to whom he addressed them, was his mother's eldest daughter by her second marriage. With that gentleness which ever characterized him, he made friends with Jeanie, and led her by the hand in his quiet walks. The lines are* in the Scot- tish dialect, of which Miller was never such a master as Burns. They are not distinguished l)y power or originality, but are interesting as a reflex of his mood at the time, and breathe the closing stanzas especially an unaffected and artless pathos : 11 Though to thee a spring shall rise, An' scenes as fair salute thine eyes ; An' though, through many a cludless day, My winsome Jean shall be heartsome and gay ; " He wha grasps thy little hand Nae langer at thy side shall stand, Nor o'er the flower-besprinkled brae Lead thee the lownest an' the bonniest way. " Dost thou see yon yard sae green, Spreckled wi' many a mossy stane ? A few short weeks o' pain shall fly, An' asleep in that bed shall thy puir brither lie. JOHN SWANSON. 167 " Then thy mither's tears awhile May chide thy joy an' damp thy smile ; But sune ilk grief shall wear awa', And I'll be forgotten by ane an' by a*. " Dinna think the thought is sad ; Life vexed me aft, but this mak's glad; When cauld my heart and closed my e'e, Bonny shall the dreams o' my slumbers be." But he is young, and though his lungs have been perma- nently and incurably injured, the energy of his constitu- tion, aided by repose and by peace of mind, is sufficient for the present to conquer the disease. With returning health return his interest in life and his intellectual ambition. He renews his friendship with John Swanson, who had recently abandoned a growing business in Cromarty with a view to devoting himself to the work of the Christian ministry in connection with the Church of Scotland, and opens a corre- spondence with William Ross. Swanson who, six years previously, had been one of his most intimate friends, he finds improved in all respects. John had thrown off a habit of sarcasm which formerly disguised his kindness of heart, and " his judgment," says Miller to Baird, " had attained a strength and niceness of edge which I had not before found equalled." In a few hours after they met, the friends were more closely knit in the bonds of amity than they had ever been. ' ' After parting with him for the even- ing," says Miller again, "my spirits were so exhilarated that I felt as if intoxicated." While he worked as a stone-cutter, Swanson had been preparing himself by a regular education for the duties of a learned profession. "I found my friend," writes Miller, " to be one of the few persons who become wise in propor- tion as they grow learned." He adds the following charac- teristic estimate of the effect of formal culture upon a cer- 168 THE JOURNEYMAN. tain order of minds : " My acquaintance with men of education, though not very extensive, is yet sufficiently so to convince me that the people whose capacities average between mediocrity and the lower extreme of intellect are rather injured than benefited by being made scholars. Men of this kind, when bred up to a common mechanical profes- sion, are generally quiet and unpretending, useful to society and possessed of an almost instinctive knowledge of those rules of conduct, an attention to which makes easy the pas- sage through life. As scholars, however, they frequently bear a character much the reverse of this. I have met with such newly set loose from college, and have taken an inventory of their intellectual stock : A smattering of Greek and Latin ; an affected admiration of writings whose merits they have neither taste nor judgment to appreciate ; a few confused philosophical notions ; a few broken ideas, the imperfect transcripts, not of things, but of other ideas ; an ability of conveying trite thoughts in common language ; a pride that gloats enraptured over these attainments ; and a sincere contempt for the class of people whom they deem the ignorant. Parnell's beautiful description of a lake when perfectly calm and when ruffled by a pebble illustrates happily the minds of men of true and of fictitious learning. The sensoriums of the former are mirrors of the universe ; those of the latter present only scenes of broken fragments." Swanson, like most young men of abilitj^ who study in the Scottish colleges, was an eager metaphysician, immersed in the study of Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Reid. On the lighter departments of literature he looked with indifference, tempered by disdain. Miller's pursuits and preferences were of precisely the opposite character. He was addicted to poetry, and thought metaphysics dry and displeasing. " In a few months, however, he (Swanson) had become an admirer of the elegances of composition, and I (Miller) of WILLIAM ROSS. 169 metaphysical acuteness. He perused the ' Paradise Lost ' of Milton with astonishment, I the Essays of Hume with admiration." Strongly contrasted with the vigorous, practical Swan- son, is Miller's other friend, of whom we have already heard so much, William Ross. If in any one of his early asso- ciates there was a ray of genius, it was in this hapless youth. What he wanted was at bottom nothing else but health. He blamed himself, and his friends blamed him, for indolence ; but it was not indolence, it was the lassitude of failing life, the weariness of approaching death, that pal- sied his energies. Keen and clear in his intellectual per- ceptions, he had a half-consciousness of this, but he did not know it well enough to silence his self-upbraidings. He told Miller that he, Ross, lacked the stamina which would one day raise his friend above the crowd, and regarded his own efforts with melancholy contempt. But for the sympa- thetic tenderness of Hugh's nature, there could have been no friendship between him and Ross ; the men were very different. "I need not remind you," writes Hugh, from Cromarty, in May, 1825, " that, tliough ever desirous of each other's company, we were not always very happy together. There was so much whim on the one side, and so little philosophy on the other, the one was so low- spirited, the other so madly-spirited, that not husband and wife (and that is saying a good deal) could agree worse together." Miller felt the genuine worth of Ross, appreciated his fine qualities, and with a beautiful assiduity of friendship strove to woo him from his listlessness and his depression. The poor fellow struggled fitfully, but in vain. " O Indo- lence ! " Ross exclaims in one of his letters, "thou demon who hast ever had such power over me (never more than now), accept the heartiest, bitterest curses of thy victim. 170 THE JOURNEYMAN. Unnerved by thy baneful influences, I have loitered in the dark valley of obscurity until the day of life is far spent ; until clouds have arisen and obscured the bright vistas through which I once hoped my path would lie. I am even losing the little ground I have gained. I am sliding back- wards. The want of natural abilities, the want of a proper education, the want of a rational confidence, each of these throw rough, steep obstacles in the path of many a poor sojourner ; but when thou, O fiend ! seizest the will and makest it thine own, we struggle no longer against these obstacles. No ! we sit down at thy feet and merely think of them. But why address the fiend ? " In a more pensive mood, he contrasts his own situation with that of Miller : " I can scarce say I desire anything. Here I live as an exile, without a friend or a scene near me that I love, without anything to wish or enjoy. How grateful ought you to be to the great Benefactor who has placed you in a situ- ation so truly delightful ! I can in imagination picture you at work on the chapel brae, where everything around you is so still, so fresh, so beautiful. I can see green woods and yellow fields ; a little, quiet town at a convenient dis- tance, with the blue waves half encircling it, and the blue hills peeping over it. Did I say I had sunk into such an apathy as to be too indifferent to desire anything ? If so, I have spoken amiss, for there are things which I can still desire. Did I say you ought to be grateful to the Giver of . all good? Alas ! discontented, restless thing that I am, I have much cause for being grateful also.'" He has a deep affection for Miller, and a pride in his friend. " You com- plain, my friend, of melancholy. Had I such a heart as yours, I think I could be happy even in grief. It is of a gentler and more delicate cast than I had imagined, and I am glad of it." Occasionally Ross introduces a similitude so apt and so WILLIAM ROSS. 171 beautiful that we feel keenly how real, how fine, if slender, was his vein of genius. Remarking that all who knew him think well of him, he proceeds, with his usual self-deprecia- tion, to account for the fact : " All these men only see me in part, and (for such is the nature of all earthly things, when viewed from a distance) what they do see of me ap- pears other than what it is. The clouds which so gloriously encircle the setting sun, and whose beauty in description no comparison can heighten, are but wreaths of watery vapor ; and the distant hill, though its azure hue vies in depth and beauty with that of the cloudless firmament, is a mass of rock and earth, half covered with a stunted vegetation. What am I in reality ? What is my heart ? A cold, vicious thing, devoid of energy, affection, and peace." This is a far deeper thought than Thomson's about the enchantment of distance. Mr. Ruskin expands what is essentially the same idea as the poor consumptive house-painter's into one of the most eloquent passages in his works ; * but the ap- * " Are not all natural things, it maybe asked, as lovely near as far away? Nay, not so. Look at the clouds, and watch the delicate sculpture of their alabaster sides, and the rounded lustre of their magnificent rolling. They were meant to be beheld far away ; they were shaped for their place, high above your head ; approach them, and they fuse into vague mists, or whirl away in fierce fragments of thunderous vapor. Look at the crest of the Alp, from the far-away plains over which its light is cast, whence human souls have com- munion with it by their myriads. The cbild looks up to it in the dawn, and the husbandman in the burden and heat of the day, and the old man in the going down of the sun, and it is to them all as the celestial city on the world's horizon ; dyed with the depth of heaven, and clothed with the calm of eternity. There was it set, for holy dominion, by Him who marked for the sun his journey, and bade the moon know her going down. It was built for its place in the far-off sky ; approach it, and, as the sound of the voice s of man dies away about its foundation, and the tide of human life, shattered upon the vast aerial shore, is at last met by the Eternal ' Here shall thy waves 172 THE JOURNEYMAN. propriate and beautiful application of it to the judgment of human character belongs to Ross alone. Still finer, perhaps, is the following : " The virtuous man has not only the approbation of others, but his own. It is said by philosophers that the air we breathe would be a most oppressive burden to us did it not penetrate the pores of our bodies, and, by filling every cavity within, render us unconscious to the weight which presses from without. Thus the self-approbation of the virtuous man renders the approbation of others an invigorating, refreshing thing ; but without it (I speak from experience) the voice of praise appears a cruel irony, a weight which bends the con- sciously unworthy soul to the very dust." Poor fellow ! He was so good and so gifted that all who knew him loved and admired him ; and so gentle-hearted, so modest, and self-accusing, that even their admiration gave him pain. In the same letter we have a glimpse of the country about Perth : " The scenery about Perth is exquisitely beautiful. The day upon which I first came within sight of it was calm and pleasant, and, then in its decline, was clothing the woods, hills, and fields with a yellow light. The Tay, speckled with boats and small vessels, like a vein of silver winded through the landscape. The distant town, half mixing with an azure cloud which rested above it, seemed (to use the words of my favorite poet) " A town of fairy-land, a thing of earth and sky," while the aerial hue of the distant hills spake of the skill of nature's painting, a hue evidently intended to sort with, be stayed,' the glory of its aspect fades into blanched fearfulness ; its purple walls are rent into grisly rocks, its silver fretwork sad- dened into wasting snow ; the storm-brands of ages are on its breast, the ashes of its own ruin lie solemnly on its white raiment." Stones of Venice. ODE ON GREECE. 173 to melt into the hues of the firmament. The sun lingered a while on the top of his hill, as if admiring the scene, and then sunk beneath it. For a time the golden clouds, like the ministers of a good king deceased, strove to be what he had been ; but the attempt was above their power ; they languished, and the scene became duller and blacker, until at length the gray mantle of evening was spread over it." Are there not tones and touches here of what Mr. Carlyle calls nature's " masterpiece and darling, the poetic soul"? That such a soul should have been placed amid the desolate circumstances of William Ross hopelessly poor, hope- lessly ill suggests some of the deepest questionings in the stern mystery of human life. It was in September of 1826 that Hugh Miller made his first attempt to address his countrymen in the columns of a newspaper. He wrote an " Ode on Greece," and commis- sioned William Ross to hand it into the office of the " Scots- man." A note was at the same time addressed to the editor. " The enclosed Ode," writes Hugh, with the anx- ious dignity of the young author, " was written at a time when the cause of the Greeks appeared desperate, by one who has looked upon their glorious struggle for indepen- dence with a wish and a sigh. Had his powers of mind equalled his feelings in strength or vivacity, his poem would rouse like the blast of a trumpet ; but, alas ! you will soon perceive that it displays little of the art perhaps little of the spirit of the poet. He who can only court the Muses in the few intervals of rest which a laborious occupation affords, must be indeed fortunate if he prove a favored suitor." The " Ode " is hardly above the average standard of juvenile compositions, though here and there a vigorous note breaks through, echoed from Byron. The poet has no mercy on the doctrine of non-intervention, and addresses his own country in tones of haughty rebuke. 174 THE JOURNEYMAN. " Alas for Greece ! but not alone For wretched Greece the tears shall flow ; Adorned by glory's brightest zone, Her fame shall soothe her woe. But thou. proud home of wealth, for thee Heavy the patriot's heart must be. Say, dark of spirit, hast thou sold The souls of men for sordid gold, And plied each art of niggard trade "When hapless patriots toiled and bled, And filled thy coffers o'er the dead? " He exhorts Greece to bestir herself, and is very angry with the Turks. " Rouse thee, O Greece ! a fearful sign Is pictured on the awful sky ; Ruin awaits the Moslem line, Mahomet's faith shall die ! The falchion cleaves the turbaned head, The Koran's darkened page is torn, And Turkey's streams are rolling red With blood of the unborn. Alas for hapless Greece ! again The dark clouds gather round her head ; Her Byron's lyre was swept in vain, In vain her children bled. But vengeance loads the coming gale, And ere the tyrant grasps the rod, His soul shall shrink, his strength shall fail, Beneath the brand of God ! " How this trumpet-blast might have influenced the Greeks we cannot tell. The editor of the " Scotsman" proved a Trojan on the occasion, and Miller's Ode was returned upon his hands. Not long after, Hugh refers to the subject in a letter to Boss, and bravely decides that the piece might not have SELF-SEVERITY. 175 been worth publishing after all. " Perhaps " he thus ex- presses his philosophical resignation "my Ode was ill- timed ; perhaps its merits are of so doubtful a kind that no one except nr^self can discover them ; perhaps but I have said enough. Why should I be a seeker after fame ? Fame is not happiness ; it is not virtue. Bad men enjoy it ; wretched men attain it. It rewarded the deeds of Lrostra- tus as largely as those of Leonidas." With equal judi- ciousness and self-severity, he touches upon his efforts in the way of mental improvement. "It is the remark of a celebrated writer that without long and serious application no man, however great his natural abilities, can attain the art of writing correctly. At one time I flattered myself with the hope of becoming a correct writer ; and, with the intention of applying myself sedulously to the study of the English language, I collected several works that treated of grammar and composition. Besides these helps I also calculated upon the assistance of my friend, John Swanson. But though repeatedly warned by experience, I did not calculate upon that volatility of mind which I have ever found as difficult to fix upon any Single object, whatever may be its importance, as to fix quicksilver on an inclined plane ; and now I can look back upon my half attempt at becoming an English scholar, just as I can upon every other speculation in which I have been engaged. I see a fine foundation laid, but no superstructure. I still propose, however, to become a correct writer, but it must be in the manner in which Cowley became a grammarian. That ingenious poet, speaking of himself, says : ' I was so much an enemy to all constraint, that my masters could never prevail on me, by any persuasion or encouragement, to learn without book the common rules of grammar, in which they dispensed with me alone, because they found I 176 THE JOURNEYMAN. made a shift to do the usual exercise out of my own read- ing and observation.' " In a letter written about the same time, we have sundry remarks" on literary subjects. " You ask me whether I now read Byron or Ovid. I reply in the affirmative. I do read every work of ability that falls in my way, whatever the opinions or intentions of their authors were ; but in reading these works I always strive to keep in view certain leading truths, which serve as tests to discover and separate soph- istry from argument, and as lights to dissipate those shades of obliquity which are cast over virtue, both by its artful enemies and injudicious friends. At the birth of our Sa- viour, the shrine of Apollo and Delphi spake no longer with its mysterious organs of what was, or of what was to come. He who was the truth had come into the world, and every oracle of lies had become dumb. At His death, the veil of the temple was rent in twain, and truth was no longer a mystery. Thus, by His power, that which was false, and that which was true, became alike evident. The Gospels are still in our hands, and they, like Him of whom they speak, silence falsehood and discover truth. He who takes up the writings of Byron, Ovid, or Moore, or any of the many writings of those men who have so fearfully misap- plied the talents which God gave them, will, if impressed with a deep sense of the true religion, run no risk of being allured and led astray by the blandishments of vice. But what can induce, it may be asked, a man of religious prin- ciple to peruse a volume in which he must, of necessity, come in contact with the allurements of vice ; in which all that he loves will be made to appear in its least lovely form, all that he hates or has to fear in its most engaging and dangerous ? To this I would reply that it is no very hon- orable safety which is procured by flight. Why should a man who stands upon the advantage ground of truth and READS HUME, BYRON, ETC. 177 virtue yield to the emissaries of vice and error ? May he not, as did Gideon the son of Joash, descend into the camp of these Midianites, and listen to the ominous visions which perplex them, or examine the unsocial sophistries upon which they have founded their systems, or expose the futil- ity of the vain beliefs upon which they have founded their hopes? But, to speak in plainer language, 'there are many advantages which may be derived from a real philosophical perusal of the writings of these men. Many of them were endowed with extraordinary talents, were the friends of civil liberty, and excelled in the art of reasoning and of writing well. I cannot read the Essays of Hume, without seeing the necessity of entrenching myself behind the bul- warks of Christianity. All those outworks which are raised in every direction around these bulwarks, some of them by mistaken good, and others by designing bad men, must be forsaken ; for I find I have to do with a foe who can lay bare the designs and demolish the sophistries of the de- signing priest, who can crush at one blow the boasted illu- minations of the enthusiast and fanatic. But when I retire within the citadel of Christianity, I see from it the ingenious philosopher becoming a sophist, the powerful warrior as- sailing a rock of adamant with a battering ram of straw . . . The ' Don Juan ' of Byron is an extraordinary poem, in my opinion ten times more so than the ' Hudibras ' of Butler. It displays a thorough knowledge of human char- acter, of the crimes and frailties of mankind." "Feb. 20. Since I conversed with you I have toiled and played, I have ate and drank, walked and slept ; I have been happy and indifferent, and no, not sad. And now I am again with my friend ; draw then your chair a little nearer, and I shall tell you of my toils and amuse- ments. I have been quarrying at Navity shore stones for a house, which my cousin Robert Ross is going to build. 178 THE JOURNEYMAN. and with my uncles and cousins have brought home several boat-loads of them. You remember Navity, with its rough, bold shore, steep precipices and sloping braes, so I need not tell you that there are few places where he who labors is so ready to forget that labor is a curse. Nor need I tell you how pleasant I found it to sweep on the calm wave in a fine frosty morning, past the rude bays and steep prom- ontories of the Gallow Hill, or how grand and awful the wide caverns, rugged precipices, and wooded brow of that hill appeared when our boat crept round its shores, heavy laden in a clear moonshine night." His amusements are principally verse-making and solitary walks. He proceeds to describe one of the latter. " I left the house about four o'clock in the evening, passed along the shore, climbed the rock at the dropping cave, descended again, and in half an hour from my setting out found myself at the Doocot Cave. I have attempted a description of this cave and the sur- rounding scenery in my ' Tale of Youth.' I next -struck a light, kindled my torch, and proceeded to explore the cavern. Its depth is a hundred and fifty feet, its. height varies from eighteen to twenty. Its sides are incrusted by a beautiful white stone, resembling marble, and formed by springs of a petrifying quality which ooze through its roof, while its floor is composed of a damp, mouldy earth, strewn over with fragments of rock. In a clear day, from the height and straightness of the cavern, the light penetrates to its inmost recess, but as yester evening was dull and cloudy, fifty feet from its entrance was dark as midnight ; even the rays of my torch seemed lost in the gloom. As I proceeded, however, and as the sides of the cavern ap- proached each other, arid its roof lowered, the light ap- peared to gather strength. When I had gained the extreme end, I tied my torch to a pillar of stone which depended like an icicle from the roof, and then groped my way back THE DOOCOT CAVE. 179 to its entrance, from whence I contemplated the scene. Have you not observed in a stormy night, when the sky is covered with clouds, how bright and clear the stars which look down through a small opening appear ? Only imagine these clouds darker, and one solitary star looking through them brighter than you have ever seen cloud or star, and you will have some idea of the appearance which the Doo- cot Cave presented when my torch twinkled in its deepest recess." CHAPTER VI. POEMS ADDRESSED TO ROSS - SERIOUS THOUGHTS - CORRE- SPONDENCE WITH SWANSON - FREAKISH HUMOR - DE- SCENDS INTO THE TOMB OF THE URQUHARTS - IS CATE- CHIZED BY MR. STEWART - WRITING IN THE OPEN AIR - A PROSELYTIZING BORE - CORRESPONDENCE ON RELIGION. of Miller's early poems are addressed to Wil- liam Ross, the one entitled an Ode, the other an Epistle. Neither is of importance, but in the Epis- tle, written in the Scottish dialect, occur the follow- ing lines, part of an enumeration of the joys of wealth : " The power o' aiding honest men Should be itseP a heaven o' pleasure." These, I think, are worthy of Burns. The Epistle is sad throughout. It is Miller's design, as he informs Ross in prose, to give him a " faithful picture" of his mind " when overcast by those clouds of constitu- tional melancholy that obscure it so often." " The lover's joy, the star o' fame, The Muse, the bliss that waits upon her, The ray that gilds the warrior's name, The tags and toys o' boastful honor, Are shades that on the calm, smooth wave Shine bonny as the northern streamer ; But they fade and die when the wild blasts rave, And leave to woe the wakened dreamer. 180 POEMS ADDRESSED TO ROSS. 181 " There reigned a king in ancient time, The wisest ever swayed a sceptre ; His deep, sly saws, and songs sublime, Shine bright on the fair page o' Scripture. And he, the wyliest sure o' men, For bliss tried ilka scheme o' living, But he found at length his labors vain, And life a scene o' crime and grieving." Light, however, breaks through. In a tone of earnestness which contrasts strongly with his references to religion in his earlier productions, prose or verse, he exclaims : " Hark! wherefore bursts that rapturous swell? Why are the night's dark shadows riven? * A Saviour sought the depths o' hell, That such as thee might rise to heaven.' " My cares, my hopes, my wishes climb To reach that Friend who reigns above me ; Truth's best perfection dwells in him, .And he has sworn to aid and love me." The composition of these stanzas is connected with a revolution which has been silently transacting itself in the mind and character of Hugh Miller, and which will come under our notice as we review his correspondence of this period with John Swanson. We have seen that from his childhood he had displayed a fine natural disposition ; that he was fearless, unselfish, affectionate. Of the baser passions, avarice and cruelty, he never exhibited a trace ; and of that less ignoble passion which has frequently coexisted with high and generous at- tributes of character, but which has frequently also, as in Mirabeau, Burns, and Byron, made wreck of the palaces of the soul, he was singularly destitute. The extrava- gances of his boyhood, the pranks of a wild, free, gipsy- 182 THE JOURNEYMAN. ing life, reaching their climax of wickedness in robbery of an orchard and rebellion against an uncle, would not be regarded even by a morose school of moralists as portend- ing a vicious manhood. The lessons which he received from Uncle James and Uncle Sandy had sunk deep into his heart, even when he chafed under their inculcation ; and while he passed through the severely salutary discipline of his apprenticeship, his feelings towards those admirable men had gradually settled into a profound and filial regard. As we mark him, therefore, among his comrades of the bothy and the shed, we are struck by the moral nobleness, the virgin purity, which constantly attend him, and which render him undeniable by the foulness amid which he moves. But religion had not become the supreme influence in his mind ; he was still he knew it himself, and his friends knew it " in the camp of the unconverted." We saw that, on returning from Edinburgh, he renewed his acquaintance with John Swanson, and that the closest friendship was soon established between them. Swanson, as we said, had recently thrown up a growing business in Cromarty, had resolved to become a preacher of the gospel, and had proceeded, shortly after the renewal of his intimacy with Miller, to Aberdeen, in order to pursue his studies. His robust and healthful nature was aglow with the impas- sioned ardor of first faith and first love. " Oh ! " he ex- claims to Miller, in a letter dated Aberdeen, July, 1825, " I pant after that time when I may be fully assured that you are travelling towards Zion ! Oh, there is much encour- agement held out to us in the Scriptures to come to Christ ! His love, how amazing ! The subject has an effect on my feelings ; but if I would speak of it, I feel my tongue tied. Angels cannot do justice to his love ; how infinitely short, then, must we come ! How forcible does that expression appear to those who have considered it aright : ' It passeth CORRESPONDS WITH SWANSON. 183 knowledge ' ! I cannot bid him God-speed who would deny His willingness to save us. No ! the more I consider the subject, the more am I persuaded that he delighteth in mercy ! " There was doubtless an answer to this from Miller, but I have not found it. In Sept., 1825, Swanson again writes, and still, apparently in response to hesitation exhibited, or objections started, by his correspondent, insists upon the plenitude of the divine mercy. " He is described as hold- ing out His hands all day long to a rebellious and gainsaying people, and shall we impiously dare to say that He is unwil- ling to receive any? 'Tis true there are mysterious doc- trines in the Bible; 'tis true, election, etc., are spoken of; but, if I know aught of the spirit of the Scriptures, these were never meant to keep a returning sinner back from God. Indeed, I presume we often mistake this very doctrine. It appears to me not as intended for our use before conver- sion, but after it. It seems to me given for the support and consolation of the saints, and not as a question for the re- turning penitent. We never hear of the apostles making use of such expressions as these to an inquirer : ' It may be you are not elected. It may be, though you tell us you believe, you are deceived.' But we find them asking this question, ' Dost thou believe ? ' Believe what ? That Jesus is the Christ. And I ask you, my dear Hugh, dost thou believe ? Do you believe that he lived ? that he was the Sent of God ? that he died to save sinners ? I know that thou believest. Well, is your life and conversation corre- sponding to this belief? Do you pray ? read the Scriptures ? obey the injunctions of Christ ? " Miller, however, is shy of coming to close quarters. In a letter of 18th November he takes a sportive tone, and chats lightly on miscellaneous matters. Here is a jotting which may be read with interest. Rummaging, one evening, 184 THE JOURNEYMAN. among his papers, he comes upon the uncompleted manu- script of the " Boatman's Tale." He seizes it. " Off we went," he proceeds, u and in the twinkle of an eye arrived at Marquis shore. Daily did my fires smoke in the cave there until I had completed my tale. By the way, I found your fire-box extremely useful. Marquis cave has ever since my childhood been a favorite haunt of mine. If the romantic scenery of the great world has an effect of mould- ing the fancies of the little one, I know no place where with better success that species of poetry which I have attempted in my tale may be studied. I would send your favorite Pope to write verses in some august palace, .where his eye might rove over the chaste ornaments of architecture, or rest upon gay statues and gorgeous thrones. I would place Milton on the blue summit of Etna. When the sun laughed upon the world which stretched beneath his feet, I would fancy him enjoying its beauties. When an earthquake made hills tremble and destroyed cities, or when some furious storm dashed upon the base of his throne, I could imagine him elate in the midst of horror and death, mingling his song with the music of the tempest. To my master, Cole- ridge, I will dispose of Marquis cave. There, on the rude mass of granite, which I have rolled from the beach, let him sit and enjoy the fire I have kindled. There let him listen to the roar of the ocean as it beats against the rocks, or to the blast roaring above his head through shattered crags and ragged furze ; and when his mind is filled with the wild images which on every hand present themselves, let him sing of bewildered mariners and wretched spirits. Are you not tired? I am sure I am. My spirits are wretchedly low at present, and I write bombast because unable to write anything better." But Swanson is in a mood far too earnest to be pleased with Miller's light humor, and he gently rebukes the levity CORRESPONDS WITH SWANSON. 185 of this letter. It "yielded" him, he frankly says, " some degree of disappointment." He returns at once to his point, and puts the direct question, " Have you made your peace with God ? " Hugh can now fence no longer. He confesses that he had been prevented from responding to his friend's appeals by a " backward, mistrustful pride and bashfulness." In simple-hearted reliance on the friendliness of a correspondent who justified the confidence reposed in him, he gives an account of himself. " At times I have tried to pray. At times I have even thought that these prayers were not in vain. I have striven to humble my proud spirit by reflecting on my foolishness, my misery and guilt. I have thought to be reconciled to that God who, in his awful justice, has doomed the sinner to destruction, yet who, in his infinite mercy, has found out a way of redemp- tion ; but I am an unsteady and a wavering creature, nurs- ing in my foolishness vain hopes, blinded by vain affec- tions ; in short, one who, though he may have his minutes of conviction and contrition, is altogether enamored of the things of this world, and a contemner of the cross." The letter in which this passage occurs is dated Decem- ber, 1825. About this time Swanson becomes so absorbed in his studies that he finds it impossible to devote time to correspondence, and he writes Miller briefly, on the 14th of January, 1826, to that effect. "~Go on, my dear Hugh," he says, in reference to the chief subject on which they had exchanged thoughts, " go on, and the Lord himself will bless you. If you are not under the teaching of the Spirit of God, I am deceived, and if I do not find you soon estab- lished in the way of happiness, peace, and life, I shall be miserably disappointed." One cannot help remarking, by the way, that this cor- respondence is creditable to these young friends. " How," exclaims Miller in one of his letters, " can I repay you for 186 THE JOURNEYMAN. that deep, that generous interest which you take in my spiritual concerns ! How can I make a suitable return for a friendship which, unlike the cold, selfish attachments of earth, approaches, in its nature and affectionate disinterest- edness, to the love of heaven? Perhaps I say too much, I am certain you will think so, but with a heart so full a wiser man could hardly say less." Modest, noble, kind- hearted Hugh ! How. many would have resented Swansoii's interference in affairs which jealous pride and sensitive independence might so plausibly allege to lie solely between a man and his Maker ! From the meanness of such pride and the bitterness of such independence, Miller's true heart guards him well. He is deeply grateful. Swanson, for his part, thrilling with joy in the possession of the pearl of price, yearns to share the treasure with his friend, and to seal their friendship with the seal of immortality. Pleased, perhaps, for the moment, that his correspond- ence with Swanson should take a less earnest turn, Miller recurs, in his next letter, to his vein of light, miscellaneous writing. On the 26th of February he gives his friend an account of a solitary excursion undertaken by him, some weeks previously, to the Dropping Cave. The day was tempestuous. u Availing myself," he writes, " of the moment when a huge wave in retiring left the beach uncov- ered, I sprung forward and gained the cave. There I seated myself on the very rock where, as tradition informs us, the naked, gray-bearded man, a few nights before a shipwreck, seats himself and looks mournfully on the sea. Shakespeare says something very severe of the man who does not love music ; my ear is wretchedly dull, but as there are three kinds of music which have the power of rais- ing nry passions, I hope I am not obnoxious to his anathe- ma. The first of these is the rolling of artillery, especially when the sound, prolonged by echo, returns upon the ear IN THE DROPPING CAVE. 187 three or four times, each time fainter and more hollow. The second is the pealing of thunder. This is the most sublime of all sounds. I never hear it without feeling that, though a little and weak creature, I am not meaner nor more inconsiderable, when, laid in the balance with Him whose voice is then lifted up, than are the mighty ones of the earth, who, in their rage, their sport, or to make them- selves a name, desolate kingdoms or raise pyramids. The third is that combination of wild sounds which, in a tem- pest, pleases yet stuns the ear. In the Dropping Cave, like a solitary Triton divested of his shell, I was listening to such a concert, a concert of the elements ; and my mind, as if sympathizing with the winds and waves, was overcast by a mist of wild thoughts, which arose and passed away even as did the gray clouds which at that time hurried over the face of the heavens. I sung verses of war-songs. I repeated, or rather shouted out, pieces of poetry descriptive of battles or tempests, or, turning to the recesses of the cavern, I challenged the spectre by which it is haunted to come forward that we might hold converse together. You see how well your friend can act the madman when under the guidance of imagination, yet, volatile as my mind is, I do not envy the gravity of the men over whose judgments fancy never triumphs." This wild and buoyant humor was not, however, constant with him. "You seem," he writes, "to have been in low spirits. Are you also subject to those strange rises and falls of spirit which, without any assignable cause, make your humble servant happy, miserable, and mad by turns ? I wish the college session over, and you fairly settled at your mother's fireside. I am really vexed on seeing you determined on killing yourself. Is he not as much a suicide who swallows death in the form of a mathematical problem, as he who takes an ounce of opium ? The latter is certainly 188 THE JOURNEYMAN. the easiest way of getting out of the world, there is no pedantry in it." Affecting words, when read in connection with the history of Miller's closing years ! How little did he think, while rejoicing in the freedom of the hill-side and the sea-shore, and warning his friend with gentle earnest- ness not to overtask his brain, that he should himself yield to the terrible temptation, and pay the penalty with his life ! " Happy and miserable and mad by turns : " the expression is striking and strange. The strutting and declamation of this visit to the Drop- ping Cave are not the sole illustration we have of an extravagant and freakish humor indulged by Miller in this period of his life, tolerdbiles ineptice, the trifling of a pow- erful mind which has not yet found its work. Some years later, in February, 1830, he details to a correspondent the particulars of an attempt made by him to u create incident" by descending into the vaulted tomb of the Urquharts, in the ancient burying-ground adjoining the ruinous chapel of St. Regulus or St. Rule in the neighborhood of Cromarty. " A few weeks ago," he writes, " upon a dark and stormy night, I procured a tinder-box, three torches, and a small quantity of fuel, and went to the old chapel of St. Rule. I descended to the ruinous vault, struck a light, lighted the torches, and placed them at equal distances against the gable wall. The light rendered visible a scene, which, heightened by association, was of no tame or common character. The floor below was strewn over with fragments of hewn stone, gray with lichens, or green with moss, and in the interstices there were brown, discolored fragments of human bones. From the crevices in the wall there sprung a few weeds which had pined throughout the sum- mer for the fresh air and the sunshine, but now, as they were beyond the reach of the frost and the cold, they were green and rank, and spread their tiny branches over the IN THE VAULT OF THE URQUHARTS. 189 rough, damp stones, like silk foliage on a ground of gray worsted. The arched roof above is covered over with a whitish stalactitical matter, and stained with the damps which have oozed from the soil over it. From the light of the torches it assumed a pale, shroud-like, death-like appearance. The square opening above seemed a chasm of darkness ; and the recesses of the vault furthest from the light were enveloped in so dismal a twilight that I could almost have fancied that the whiter masses of stone or building, which stood out like rude columns from the darker wall, were some of the old tenants of the place, who had risen to inquire after the cause of my intrusion. The sounds which were conveyed to me in this place formed a music worthy of such a hall. The night, I have said, was stormy. The rain was heard to patter on the flat stones above, the wind roared terribly through the trees with which the burying-ground is enclosed ; and the stream which runs through the neighboring ravine, the bottom of which is many yards lower than that of the vault, joined its hoarse dash with the roar of the wind and the pattering of the rain. In order that I might vary the scene, I piled up a little rude altar on the floor, and kindled a fire on it. The wind above prevented the smoke from rising ; the atmosphere of the vault became dense and cloudy ; the three torches on the wall appeared from the halo with which each of them was encircled three mock suns ; and the features of the scene, which were before characteristic of the wild and the ghastly, were now shrouded ' in the dun hues of earthquake and eclipse,' and assumed the terrible. From above, the mouth of the vault appeared, through the darkness, like the crater of a volcano." Such were the "pleasures of the imagination" in which young Miller could at all times find more enjoyment than in any society, except that of his most esteemed friends. It 190 THE JOURNEYMAN. may be interesting to view Mm for a moment in a more subdued aspect. It is, or was, the custom in the parishes of Scotland for the pastor at stated intervals to publicly examine the members of the congregation in the West- minster Assembly's Catechism. It appears to have become the practice to catechise working-men and their children, but not to offend the sensibilities of the richer heads of families by putting them through the ordeal in presence of the congregation. Miller at least thought that Mr. Stewart, his pastor, of whom he subsequently learned to entertain a different opinion from his present, displayed " something very like cowardice " in his choice of persons to be exam- ined. " Our betters" he says " (forgive me the use of this meanest of all Scotticisms), can, by attending the diets of catechism, which are held in church, be either instructed or made merry at our expense." Neither in the way of merri- ment, however, nor in the way of instruction, could much be derived from the appearance of Miller, which he thus chronicles: "I was catechised to-day (Feb. 30, 1826), by Mr. Stewart. It is an unpleasant thing to stand exposed point-blank to the gaze of two or three hundred people, each man more provokingly keen-eyed, than the other. Had you seen me standing before the minister this day, as conspicuous as Saul among the people, my face changing from crimson to pale and from pale to crimson by turns, you must either have pitied my confusion or laughed at it. I will strive to recollect the questions which were asked me and the words with which I answered them. ' Who is the Spirit ? ' ' The Third Person of the Trinity.' ' Is he a per- son ? ' ' He is termed so.' ' Yes, he is. Do you recollect any particular passages of Scripture which show him as a distinct person ? ? Here I was silent. c I thought, from your readiness in answering me my two first questions, that you would answer me this one too. In what form did the IS CATECHISED IN CHURCH. 191 Spirit appear at the baptism of our Saviour?' 'In the form of a clove.' ' Yes. The Spirit, then, is a person, not a mere influence proceeding from the Father and Son, as some believe. In what manner were we baptized ? ' ' With water, iu the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit.' ' Yes. The Holy Ghost is a person. What is the work or province of the Father? ' ' He created all things, and from him all things proceed.' ' You speak of him as the Creator. I desire to know what share he has in the redemption of sinners ? ' ' He sent the Son.' ' Yes. What did the Son do ? ' ' He died for us.' ' And what was the work of the Spirit ? ' ' He applies Christ.' Here he spoke a good deal which I forget, and concluded by desiring me to sit down. I did so most willingly, for my legs were trembling beneath me." He gives a more satisfactory account of himself to his cousin, William Munro, in a letter dated 1st of May. " I in n writing at this moment in the open air, under the shade of a honeysuckle. The sun is peeping through its leaves, and casting upon my paper spangles of a bright hue and strangely fantastic form. As I look upon them I cannot avoid recognizing a picture of my own mind. It is thus its lights and shadows blend together. A little cloud has passed over the sun, and my page has become dark and sombre ; and is it not thus that my fair hopes and gay imaginings ofttimes pass away, and leave behind them a cloud of darkness ? " This picture may be somewhat high- wrought, as Miller had announced to William Ross his intention to send his cousin " a fine sentimental letter, resembling that of a boarding-school miss." On the 19th of August he writes to Swanson, and his correspondence touches again upon matters of importance. The town of Cromarty was at this time the residence of a Baptist gentleman of decided views and proselytizing ten- 192 THE JOURNEYMAN. dencies. He appears to have considered the poetical mason a desirable acquisition for his church. " A few days ago," writes Miller, " when at work in the old chapel burying- ground, I was favored by a visit from Mr. M , the Bap- tist. He and I had a long conversation together. Our subject was the" peculiar tenets of his sect, and (if you allow me the expression) the opposing ones of mine. It was he who attacked, and I who did not defend ; but I leaned most manfully upon my arms and looked on. And what did I see, do you ask? Why, I saw much of the strength and of the weakness of his cause, and much of his strength and weakness as an individual. I am pretty certain he saw none of mine. In his opinion concerning Church government I agree entirely with him. But this is no change of mine ; for long since, when angered by the unjust encroachments on civil liberty of proud Churchmen, men to whom, in describing, Hume and Voltaire have done justice, I was led to examine the ground upon which they had founded their pretensions, and saw it to be a forced mass, uncemented except with the blood of persecution or by the unsolid sophistry of the schools. But though, by an inference seemingly reasonable, I see a connection subsist- ing between the baptism of Mr. M and the apostolic form of Church government, I can also see that upon this connection, discovered by this seemingly reasonable infer- ence from Scripture, not by Scripture itself, can Baptists alone build. This, when I consider the fallacy of several Scripture inferences which appear as reasonable, I think an unsolid foundation. I could prove by an inference deduced from Scripture data that the mental and bodily sufferings of one man could not in justice be accepted as an atonement for the crimes of another. Where would inferences seem- ingly reasonable, deduced from the doctrine of predestina- tion, lead us ? To impiety the most horrible. I need not remind you of Carlyle's inferences, or of some others which A BAPTIST. 193 you will find in the writings of Kairnes and Hume. This may not be argument ; but where, suffer me to ask, is a doctrine upon the knowledge of which man's salvation de- pends, which is not fairly stated in Scripture, repeated oftener than once, and viewed in a variety of lights? Then let me be shown where He who spake as man never spake, or any of his servants, the apostles, has, or have said, c Baptize not your children, but suffer themselves to come forward, when awakened by the Spirit, to be baptized/ show me this, or a passage of like meaning, and I will be- come a Baptist.* During the course of our conversation I perceived in some of Mr. M 's remarks traces of that foul spirit which can, like the harpies who settled upon the viands of JEneas, perch upon the soundest creeds. Will you believe that he dared tell me that a good Christian pas- tor of the Church of Scotland did more harm to the true Church than a mere hireling? How, think you, did he prove this ? ' The good man,' said he, ' through a mistaken zeal, supports the impure Church of which he is a member, and thus unwittingly does evil ; the hireling, on the other hand, by disgusting the sensible and well-inclined, hastens its downfall, and thus unwittingly does good.' What think you of this ? For my own part, I will just remark that it * It is interesting to see how another eminent Pedobaptist put tho onus probandi of this question entirely on the other side : " If I should inform any one," says Coleridge, " that I had called at a friend's house, but had found nobody at home, the family having all gone to the play; and if he, on the strength of this information, should take occasion to asperse my friend's wife for unmotherly conduct, in taking an infant six months old to a crowded theatre, would you allow him to press on the words nobody ' and 4 all the family ' in justification of the slander? Would you not tell him, that the words were to be interpreted by the nature of the subject, the purpose of the speaker, and their ordinary acceptation, and that he must, or might, have known that infants of that age would not be admitted into the theatre ? Exactly so, with regard to the words, he and all Ms household. Had baptism of infants at that early period of the Gospel been a known practice, or had this been previously demonstrated, then indeed the argument, that in all probability there were infants or young children in so large a family, would be no otherwise objectionable than as being superfluous, and as sort of anti-climax in logic. But if the words are cited a the proof, it would be a clear petitio principiij though there had been nothing else against it. But when we turn back to the Scriptures preceding the narrative, and find repentance and belief demanded as the terms and in- dispensable conditions of Baptism, then the case above imagined applies in its-full force." Vol.Lf p. 335, Saml. Taylor Coleridge's "Complete Works." Am. Pub. I9i THE JOURNEYMAN. strengthens by experience an opinion I have long held. It is, that in the field of religious controversy the rankest and most poisonous weeds do spring. What a wretched thing is it that a man, in his zeal for truth, should run himself headlong into error ; that in his haste to establish a few doubtful notions belonging to the head, he should starve the good, and indulge the evil, feelings of the heart ! " So Hugh Miller, the lay champion of the Free Church, was in his twenty-fourth year of the same opinion " con- cerning Church government " with the Baptists ! Does this imply that he was at that time a Voluntary ? I know not. His sentiments on the subject of religious controversy are also noteworthy. Were they modified by his subsequent experience of ecclesiastical discussion? I think not. To Miller's letter of the 19th of August, Swanson replies on the 29th of the same month. Passing hastily over mat- ters of minor importance, he comes to what lies nearest his heart. " I have experienced here great kindness among my Christian friends. Oh that I could with confidence rank you among the number ! I cannot think that you are aware how near you are to my heart. Blessed be God that Christ is still nearer ! I pray and hope that you will one day be one with me in him. I wait but for your confession to recognize you as a brother. . . . My dear Hugh, my metaphysical speculations are entirely exploded (oh, let me never cease to pray that I may be preserved from again setting up blind reason as a God to worship ; thousands have perished at his shrine; why was I not left?), and, since exploded, I have learnt to take the word of God simply as I find it, and the consequence is peace and joy, I long much to see you. Oh, will you not accept of Christ ? You believe the truth of God. See, then, the freeness and fulness of the gospel offer made to you. Believe the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life in his Son ; believe this, and all shall be well." BASHFULNESS. 195 On the 2d of September, almost as soon, therefore, as he can have received Swanson's letter, Miller replies to it. He declares himself " exhausted, dull, lazy, sick, melancholy," and quite unable to write an interesting letter. For his reluctance to write there is, he confesses, another cause. " I feel that, after your earnest and affectionate exhortation, it would be something worse than unfriendly of me not to unbosom myself before you ; yet what have I to confess ? Were I an unbeliever, though I would assur edly lose my friend by confessing myself one, still that con- fession would be made. I would scorn to hold the affec- tions of any one by appearing what I am not. Or if, on the other hand, I were a Christian in the true sense of the word, I hope I would have courage enough to avow my pro- fession, not only to you or to those from whom I could expect nothing except kindness, but even to the proudest and boldest scorner. But what profession can the luke- warm Laodicean make ? the man who, one moment, is as assured of the truth of the gospel of Christ as he is of his own existence, and who, in another, regards the whole scheme of redemption as a cunningly devised fable. It will not do ! I am not afc present collected enough to give you a faithful account of what is my religious belief ; I will just say that, as far as the head is concerned, my creed is a sound one, but alas for the heart ! " The remainder of the letter accords well with this profes- sion of indifference, or at least of vacillation and vicissi- tude, in spiritual affairs. He speaks of other matters, and bewails his bashfulness in society. " In that proper assur- ance which is opposed to bashfulness," he says, " there is scarce a young girl in the country who is not my superior." Pie knows that this is a weakness, but declares that he can- not help it. " In one of Shenstone's larger poems," he pro- ceeds, u there is an exquisite description of a bashful man when in company ; and were it not that he is represented 196 THE JOURNEYMAN. as possessed of talent and virtue, I would lay my hand on the page, and say, this is a portrait of II M . " * But ill-starred sense, nor gay nor loud, Steals soft on tiptoe through the crowd, Conveys his meagre form between, And slides like pervious air unseen, Contracts his known tenuity As though 'twere ev'n a crime to be, Nor ev'n permits his eyes to stray To win acquaintance in their way. In company, so mean his air, You scarce are conscious he is there, Till from some nook, like sharpened steel, Occurs his face's thin profile, Still seeming from the gazer's eye Like Venus newly bathed to fly. Disused to speak, he tries his skill, Speaks coldly and succeeds but ill, His pensive manner dulness deemed, His modesty reserve esteemed, His wit unknown, his learning vain, He wins not one of all the train.' " Swanson receives this letter on the 5th of September. He answers it the same day. He implores his friend to get rid of the melancholy which preys upon his mind by a " full, free, and simple acceptation of the gospel. Pardon me, my dear friend," he adds, " when I say that I fear you have religious opinions not derived from the Bible. Read it as if you never heard a word concerning it before." On the 30th of September Miller writes again : "I am still employed on the chapel brae in hewing a second tombstone for Colonel G . That spot is now beginning to lose its charms ; every breeze which passes over it carries a shower of withered leaves upon its wings ; the herbage is assuming a sallow hue, and I stand alone in the midst of desolation, in all except sublimity of feeling the prototype of Camp- bell's last man. I do not know whether I am advancing in GRAVE THOUGHTS. 197 wisdom as in years (I rather suspect not) , but somehow the thought of death often presses upon me in these days. I look upon the little' hillocks which are laid above men and women and children, the traits of whose features are pictured in my memory, and when by its aid I conjure up their forms when, gay and restless, they followed the busi- nesses or the pleasures of life, and then when, in the eye of the imagination, I behold them stretched in the dark coffin, cold, and black, and mouldy, without form or motion, I pause and ask, What is this Death, this mighty Death, that turns mirth to sadness, that unnerves the arm of the strong and pales the cheek of the beautiful? " I remember to have seen, many years ago, old Eben, the sexton, digging a grave. He raised a coffin, which, though much decayed, was still entire, and placed it on the earth he had thrown out. I was a mere boy at the time, and out of a foolish curiosity, when his back was turned, I raised with the edge of his spade the lid of the coffin. The appearance of the mouldering remains which it contained, nothing can erase from my memory. I see them even now before me, in all their sad and disgusting deformity, and still when I hear or read of the empire of death, of the wrecks of death, or of the change which death works on the human frame, imagination immediately reverts to a long, black skeleton, clothed over with a mouldy earth to which, in some places, the rotten grave-clothes are attached. This is a disgusting image, but it is not a useless one, for when, thinking of death, I bare my arm and look at the blue veins shining through the transparent skin, when I look and think that the day may not, cannot, be far distant when it shall become as black and as mouldy as that of the skeleton, I start, for there is something in the contrast which removes all the accumulation of commonplace which the habit of hearing and speaking at second hand of death hath cast upon that awful thing. 193 THE JOURNEYMAN. " But what is the fruit, you will ask, of these cogitations? Follow me a little farther and you shall see. If the soul be a mere quality affixed to matter, which shall die when that matter is changed from animate into inanimate, then, though the thought of the havoc which death works on the human frame tends to lower the pride of the haughty, it is not a harassing one to the philosopher. Life is full of evil and unhappiness ; death is a state of rest. When the tyrant Edward invaded this country ; when Wallace, its bravest defender, was betrayed and slain ; when the car- nage of Flodden filled Scotland with mourning, or the de- feat of Pinkie with fear, I was neither sad, nor angry, nor afraid, for I was not called into existence until twenty-four years ago. And in a few years after this, if the soul be not immortal, I shall again have passed (if I may use the expression) into a state of non-existence, and though my mouldering remains may raise horror in the breasts of the living, the vacuum which once existed shall not sympathize with them. But that the soul is immortal, if it be the same wise God that created the heavens and earth who formed man, I must believe ; and if that soul, after it has departed from its fleshly nook, is to be punished or rewarded accord- ing to the deeds done in the body, this I also must and shall believe ; then death becomes not the herald of rest, but the messenger of judgment. Thus far unassisted rea- son can go. Socrates went still further, for, when other philosophers were raving of an absurd, because unattaina- ble, virtue, by the possession of which men were to be made happy both in this world and the next, he taught of the evil that dwelleth in the human heart, and of the help which cometh from God. But it is to the pages of Revela- tion we must turn, if it be our desire to learn with certainty how to prepare for death by making the Judge our friend. " You have often urged me with a friendly zeal, both in speech and by writing, to forsake sin and turn to God. SWANSON TO MILLER. 199 Your letters and conversations have had an effect, I wish I could add the desired one. I give some of my time to the study of the Scriptures, and have become perhaps nearly as well acquainted as the mere theorist can be with the scheme of redemption. Nay, more, I pray. But the day- beam has not yet, I am afraid, dawned upon me, the light vouchsafed is not a clear and steady one like the beam of the morning ; it is rather like the reflection of lightning in a dark night, a momentary glimpse suc- ceeded by an hour of gloom. My prevailing disposition is evil, and though I have oftener than once experienced a feeling strange indeed to the human heart, a feeling of love to God, the cares of the world and the allurements of pleasure draw away my affections, and the old man is again put on. . "The town clock has struck the hour of twelve, so, for the present, adieu ! " Swanson replies on the 9th of October. The speculative part of Miller's letter he passes by, and fixes on the state- ment that he had begun to pray. "Have you. indeed, then," he exclaims, " set your face towards Zion? Have you indeed begun to call upon the name of the Lord? Feeble as your beginnings may be, can you doubt that he will hear you ? Can you dare ? Would you wish to draw back ? . . . . You have now closed with Christ, and, closing with him, I trust closed more fully (if that were possible ; and it was) with me. Oh, it is sweet to join heart and hand and to put them thus joined into the hand of Christ ! . . . . O Hugh, I have not a single com- plaint to make ; my cup is running over ! With regard to the manner in which God will dispose of me, I am, at present, quite ignorant. I have no prospect, and no earthly friend who, while he would wish to do anything for me, has it in his power. Before the end of this session I believe I shall be without a shilling, and I have no hand to 200 THE JOURNEYMAN. look to. No hand, did I say ? Nay, I have the hand of Om- nipotence to look to, and he will aid me. Oh, it is sweet to depend on him for everything coming directly from him ! " A month elapses before Hugh replies, and his answer* has none of the warmth of feeling for which we might have looked. " After perusing your last letter," he writes, " I sat down to tell you that I was not a little alarmed by your recognizing me as a Christian brother ; I then stated my grounds of alarm ; and, willing to furnish you with a kind of data by which you would be enabled to judge of the spiritual state of your friend, I recommenced a historical detail of the fluctuating opinions of my mind for the last seven years. But I now see that a narrative so long, and in which I will require to be so careful of error, will en- gross more of my time than I can conveniently devote to it at present." The " historical detail," here referred to, in so far as it appears to have ever been written down, is contained in an unfinished letter, dated October, 1826. It is a somewhat rough, though not a careless, sketch, and, from the ex- pressions just quoted, a doubt may be reasonably enter- tained whether Miller considered it, even in the part which he completed, perfectly accurate. What is more to be regretted, it was never finished. The dark side of his spiritual history is portrayed in what he wrote, but the bright side and the transition between the dark and the bright continue unrevealed. The want, it is true, can, in all essential respects, be supplied from other letters, or from passages in his works. There is no ground for doubt as to the conclusion, theoretic or practical, at which he arrived. But a delineation by himself of his spiritual ex- perience at this crisis of his religious history would have had a nice verisimilitude which no description by another hand can attain. It is important to observe that he takes the tone of one describing a process which has reached its HISTORY OF HIS MIND. 201 issue ; he believes himself to have " a changed heart," and he aims at explaining to his friend how the change took place. Every subsequent year of Miller's life bore testi- mony that, on this point, he was not mistaken. Here is what remains of the " historical detail : " " I know not in what words to confess that your last let- ter, friendly and affection-breathing as it was, alarmed and in some degree rendered me unhappy. You recognize, you address me as a Christian brother ; and, when I look within and see how doubtful the signs of a radical change of heart are, when I see how little there is to justify even the lim- ited profession I made when I last addressed you by writ- ing, I tremble lest you are throwing away your affections on a deceiver who is now even less worthy of your friend- ship than when he confessed himself a stranger to Christ. But why tremble on this account? If I am a deceiver, I am not a wilful one ; for the hypocrite only trembles when detected or on the verge of detection, and if, by mistaking an excited imagination for a changed heart, I deceive both my friend and myself, I am surely rather unfortunate than guilty. " I have for some time had the intention of writing for your perusal a history of my mind, with its various and varying opinions for the last seven years. For this I have more than one reason. I would wish, by showing 3^011 what I am and what I have been, to furnish you with data from whence you might draw whatever conclusion your judg- ment or experience warranted. I would wish to give you a faithful picture of my mind, and thus add to your knowl- edge of human nature by casting light on the only point with which you are not already acquainted as well or better than myself. I would also wish, by calling to recollection, and then examining, the vague and foolish opinions that once formed my belief, to prevent the Tempter from reign- 202 THE JOURNEYMAN. ing over me a second time by laws whose injustice I have discovered, or shaking me by quibbles of whose insolidity I have had experience. " I believe I may term my education a religious one. I was examined in the Catechism by my uncles every Sabbath night, and forced to attend regularly at church. This, you will say, is a poor definition of the words religious educa- tion, but in nine cases out of ten it is all that is meant by them. As I advanced into the latter years of boyhood I became impatient of this restraint, and, after many struggles, in which I showed a fierceness and desperation of character worthy of the liberty for which I strove, I be- came, as some of my friends satirically termed me, a lad of my own will. As a lad of my own will, I was a Sab- bath-breaker, and a robber of orchards ; and, as strange, foolish thoughts, passages of Scripture, and questions on the subject of religion would at times either flash upon my recollection or rise in my mind, just for the sake of peace, I also became an atheist. A boy atheist is surely a strange and uncommon character. I was one in reality, for, pos- sessed of a strong memory, which my uncles and an early taste for reading had stored with religious sentiments and stories of religious men, I was compelled, as I have already said, for peace' sake, either to do that which was right, or, by denying the truth of the Bible, to set every action, good or bad, on the same level, and I had chosen the latter as the more free and pleasing way. My mind, as you will see in the sequel of my story, long retained the bent which it at this time acquired ; but my actions, restrained by a ris- ing pride, by notions of honor, perhaps by a conscience which, though fast asleep, had its dreams, became less rep- rehensible. I became what the world calls honest ; and, from a dislike of drink and noisy- company, had all along preserved a habit of sobriety, but to every other vice to "HOW TO LIVE/' 203 which a young man of sixteen is exposed, I was addicted. You are aware that, much earlier than this, I composed pieces in rhyme, which 1 called poems. One of the drawers of my desk is filled with copies of these youthful effusions, which I preserve both for the sake of the recollections at- tached to them, and for the history I can trace in them of the growth of my mind and its varying opinions. The short piece I here insert, with a few subsequent alterations, was written in my sixteenth year. You will see in it, con- fused with a good deal of mythologic nonsense, a con- fession of the school of morals to which I then belonged. What is said of wine and Bacchus, you are to recollect, is mere imitation : 1 'HOW TO LIVE. " Oh, free as air, light as the wind, Let us spend Life's years away, To coming evil wisely blind, Still be glad when glad we may. For what is philosophic lore, "What the schoolmen's boasted rules ? Go, sound it loud as ocean's roar, The cloak of knaves, the boast of fools. " Bright wine and love shall banish care, Pleasure all our thoughts employ ; Let Bacchus be our god of prayer, Bacchus and the Paphian boy. Let mirthful Momus, laughing, still O'er our harmless feasts preside, And lovely* nymphs be there to fill The cup to dry, grave lips denied. " Thus years shall pass when age steals on, Ere the last joys of life are gone ; Jocund, let us rise and say Sweet has passed life's stormy day. And when Time strides gravely in, To warn us that our sands have run, 204 THE JOURNEYMAN. " Gay, ere fails our latest breath, Let our song be, ' Welcome Death.' "When life, save pain, can nothing give, When wine disgusts, and cold is love, Rather than live in pain and fear, Welcome the shroud, the grave, the bier ! " " About a year after I had written this piece, I had sev- eral argumentative conversations with my cousin G. on the subject of religion. I boldly and impiously declared to him that I considered it as a cheat, and when he began to support his opinions, which were directly the reverse of mine, by Scripture quotations, I told him that I considered the Bible and Alcoran as of equal authority. I made use of some other imprudent and impious expressions at that time, which I still remember, and now heartily regret. G. was so much scandalized at what he then heard, that he threatened to inform my uncles and other friends, nay, more, every one who was in the least acquainted with me, of my scepticism. This alarmed me, for I had wisdom enough to see that, though the c religious ' be no numerous or formi- dable body, the prejudiced are ; and that men who were no better Christians than myself would look upon the professed atheist with horror and detestation. Notwithstanding his threat, he was silent on the subject of our conversations, but the recollection of it, and the anticipation of its conse- quences, had the effect of making me so prudent, that is, so hypocritical, that whenever religion became a subject of conversation in any company of which I formed one, I gave a passive assent to whatever was said in its favor. " About the end of the year 1820 I had a fearful dream, which, for the time, had the effect of converting me into a kind of believer, a believer of I knew not what. I dreamed I was wandering through a solitary and desert country ; that I was alone, restless, and unhappy. All at A DREAM. 205 once the skies became dark and overcast, and a gloom like that of a stormy winter's evening seemed to settle over the face of nature. By one of those changes so common in dreams, the country appeared no longer unpeopled ; but the figures I saw were so dark, so indistinct, so silent, that in my terror I regarded them not as men, but spirits who were wandering about in unhappiness until the time came in which they were to reanimate the bodies in which they once dwelt. A fearful presentiment arose in my mind that the day of judgment was at hand ; I felt the petrifying influence of despair pervade every faculty, yet, though my agony was extreme, I could neither weep nor pray. In a little time the clouds began to disperse, and through a clear, blue opening I perceived a large, cloudy scroll spread on the face of the heavens, which, with a flickering, undulating motion, at one moment resembled a dark, sulphureous flame, and at another reminded me of a banner waving in the wind. I fixed my eyes upon it in fear and astonish- ment, and perceived that in its centre a few dark characters were inscribed. I strove to decipher them, but could not. In a few seconds, however, the coloring of the scroll deep- ened gradually, as the hues of the rainbow increase from dimness to brilliancy. I read its startling motto, ' Take warning ! ' and awoke. My mind was dreadfully agitated. The sweat, which, during my dream, had flowed from every pore, was cooled upon my brow, but my heart was still burning. In my terror I vowed that, for the future, I would be no longer a sinner, and I began to pray ; but my prayers were addressed, not to the God of the Christian, but to the God of the heathen philosopher. I was awakened to a painful consciousness of sin. I had heard that God was merciful, and on the strength of that attribute I addressed myself to him ; but alas ! I did not know that his justice is as infinite as his mercy, and that no sinner can be accepted 206 THE JOURNEYMAN. by him unless he appeal to the sufferings and righteous- ness of that Saviour whom his sins have pierced. " The recollection of my dream haunted me for about ten days, during which time I prayed. A natural bashfulness withheld me from making any show of sanctity, but my heart was very proud of its newly acquired purity, and I regarded myself as a much better man than many of my acquaintances. But the foundation on which my hopes were raised was not one of sand, a sandy foundation would have served me until the day of the tempest, whereas the thin vapor upon which I had built sunk of itself without being once assailed. Suffice it to say that, as my fears sub- sided and my pride increased, my prayers became more and more a matter of form, until at length they ceased alto- gether, and except that I believed in the being of a God, and continued to see a beauty in moral virtue, I became, in thought and feeling and action, the same man I had for^ merly been. " In the working season of the two following years I wrought and resided at Conon-side, a gentleman's seat and farmsteadings, situated on a bank of the Elver Conon, near where it falls into the Cromarty Frith. When there, there was no one for whose good opinion I cared a pin within twenty miles of me, so I felt myself at liberty to do or say whatever I thought proper. In a short time I be- came a favorite with my brother workmen. " He is a good- natured, honest, knowing fellow," they would say, "but desperately careless of Church." This was just the char- acter I wished to bear ; as for Church attendance, I thought it rather a dubious virtue. Indeed, I had seen too much of the prejudices of mankind, and knew too little of true Christianity, to think otherwise. " When at Conon-side, I had an opportunity of studying several characters of the grave, serious cast, but the knowl- HISTORY OF HIS MIND. 207 edge of them which I acquired there did me no good. One, a Mr. M , was a man of a grave, taciturn humor, whose definition of the word ' Christian ' would be, as I appre- hended, ' a hearer of the gospel for Mr. McDonald's sake.' He was exceeding reserved and unsocial in his manners, and little loved by his fellow- workmen. Once or twice I have seen him grow very angry when some parts of the conduct of his favorite preacher were censured, censured, too, as I thought, with reason. There was another of the workmen with whom I wrought, who was of the grave, serious cast. He contributed quarterly to the support of the Bible So- ciety, was regular in his attendance at church, and reproved swearing or indecent language every time he chanced to hear it among his companions. But it did not escape my observation that this man was so censorious that not even his brother saint, Mr. M , was exempted from the sever- ity of his animadversions, and so proud of his purity of life that the errors and misconduct of others afforded him pleasure. Perhaps he regarded them as foils to the virtues he possessed. " Besides these two there were some others who made a profession of religion with whom I became partially ac- quainted ; but the tenor of their lives was ill qualified to impress my mind with a high opinion of the sanctifying influences of Christianity. One was a hard, austere man, of obtuse feelings, who seemed determined, whatever he thought of the world to come, to make the most he could of the present ; a second was silly and weak ; and a third was what I termed a Sabbath Christian, that is, one who attends church, calls the preacher precious man, can tell a great many of the strange legends of the Scottish Church, and reprobates the poor wretches who prefer common sense to fanaticism. And are these men Christians ? thought I. I have often heard divines bid that part of their congrega- 208 THE JOURNEYMAN. tions which they termed men of the world look at the life of the Christian, and grow convinced of the power and truth of Christianity by that example which is superior to precept. I have obeyed them. I have observed his actions, and through these actions have striven to discover his mo- tives, and what have I found? In good truth, the philoso- pher who sees clearly that he who believes and he who does not believe, only differ in that the one practises the grave and the other the gay vices of humanity, may well laugh at the pretensions of these divines, and tell them that they either speak of they know not what, or wilfully deceive be- cause it is their interest to do so. " I remember one Sunday, after my companions had gone to church, and I remained behind, as was my custom, that, to pass away the time, I took a solitary walk in the woods of Conon-side. The day was pleasant, but, from a kind of nervous melancholy which hangs pretty often on my spirits, and is, as I believe, constitutional, I could not enjoy it. I felt quite unhappy, and after having had recourse to every species of wonted amusement, sat down on a green knoll, in despair of enjoying solitude for that day. A train of the darkest thoughts began to rise and pass through my mind. I looked upon what I had done in the past, I thought of the unhappiness of the present, I formed surmises of the future. There was a voice from within which incessantly whispered in my ear, ' You are doing wrong ! you are doing wrong ! and how then can you expect pleasure ? ' and so miserable did I feel from these cogitations and these ques- tionings, that I started from my seat, and strove to dissi- pate them by strong bodily exertion. In a few hours after, my spirits had regained their usual tone, and I could look back upon what I had felt, and say, ' Have I experienced what men call an awakened conscience? What, then, is conscience ? The breast of the murderer and the dishonor- SOUL-STRIVINGS. 209 able, mean man may well be the haunts of remorse ; but surely, with one who neither does nor wishes any man ill, conscience is but the ashes of early prejudices raked to- gether by a disordered imagination.' " In the latter end of the autumn of this year (1822) I wrought and resided at Pointzfield for several weeks. My constitution is naturally delicate, and by building in stormy weather on a wet, marshy spot of ground, I caught a severe cold, which hung about me for several weeks ; I felt my strength wasting away ; my breast became the seat of a dull, oppressive pain, and, imagining I was becoming con- sumptive, I began seriously to think of death. So assured was I at this time of approaching dissolution that even through the perspective of hope I could only look forward on a few short months of life, and, as I could not bring my- self to doubt of a separate existence of soul or of a judg- ment according to deeds done in the body, I began seriously to think of a preparation for death. But how was this prep- aration to be made? I knew prayer to be the only lan- guage by which the sinner could intercede with the Deity for pardon ; but then experience had shown me how unable I was of myself to bring my mind into the frame of devo- tion, or to preserve that frame unchanged when it was produced by fear, disgust, and the mingling dictates of reason. At length I bethought me of an expedient which I hoped would preserve me from that falling off or apostatiz- ing, of which I had experience two years before ; for, awakening the sincere fervency of feeling which my expe- dient was to render lasting, I had before me the fear of death. For the three previous years, when I had freely and seriously pledged my word in a matter of importance, to any of my brother men, I had a pride of rigidly adhering to it. From this I concluded that, were I to pledge my- self to God by oath, I would have a restraining bond upon 210 THE JOURNEYMAN. me strong enough to preserve me for the future from known sin. I would thus be shut up by every principle of honor to serve God, of loving him I had no idea. I made and took my vow to be I knew not what, called God to witness it, and for a few following days persisted in praying twice a day. But prayer soon became an irksome duty ; proud thoughts over which I had no control, and strong desires that would not be repressed by a few light words, came rushing on my mind in a mingled torrent, and swept before them every vain resolve. To add to their strength my health began to amend, and it not only appeared an im- practicable, but even a foolish, thing to strive any longer to be religious. " I passed the winter of this year and the spring of the following one at home, and there became acquainted with an old companion of my uncles. He had resided at Edin- burgh for many years, and, though a clever, was neither a steady nor respectable man, but for the sake of becoming acquainted with his character, which was eccentric in the extreme, I courted his company and conversation. At Edinburgh he had been a member of one of those deistical clubs so common in large towns ; and, by a natural quick- ness, and from the habit of speaking at their meetings, had acquired the faculty of arguing extempore with a good deal of skill. My uncles, whose principles and opinions were in almost every particular the reverse of his, impressed by early recollections, still continued attached to him, but, as might be expected, frequently attacked opinions which he was by no means slow to defend. The doctrine of predes- tination, that hobby-horse of disputants, was brought fre- quently on the carpet, as was also the doctrine of universal, as opposed to partial, redemption. At first I merely listened to these verbal controversies, but seeing that my uncles, though well-grounded in the doctrines of Chris- A DEISTICAL FRIEND. 211 tianity, were ill-qualified to answer every objection raised against it by a veteran quibbler, out of a desire of assisting them, I set myself to examine the different bearings of the doctrines they defended. Predestination first engaged me. I read all that is said of it in Scripture, drew conclusions from the prescience of God, and from Plato's Dialogues of Socrates, and some other philosophic writers, and endeav- ored to produce data from whence to show that predestina- tion is not a doctrine peculiar to revealed religion. I had long looked upon controversial divinity as the worst kind of nonsense ; and since my argumentative conversation with my cousin G. had entertained an antipathy against verbal controversy of every kind ; this, added to a hesitat- ing manner of speech, and a consciousness of an inability to preserve my ideas from becoming confused when I waxed warm on any subject, after all my preparation, withheld me from attacking my brother deist. " Had any one told me at that time that I was in reality brother in belief to a deist, I would have complained of injustice. In fact, my opinions were so wavering that, with a due regard to truth, I could not tell what I did or did not believe. I saw there were two schools of deism, the high and the low. Epicurus of the ancient philosophers and Hume of the modern, men who, while they remained sceptical on the subject of future rewards and punishments, and of the Providence of God, cherished virtue for its own sake, both by example and precept, I regarded as members of the first ; while I looked upon the brood of half-bred wits, who, with Paine at their head, battled with religion because it gave a deeper and stronger sanction to the laws of morality, as the masters of the second. The leaders of the former I considered to be good, wise men (indeed, I am still readier to regret their defects than censure them), while the whole body which composed the latter I regarded 212 THE JOURNEYMAN. as a band of conspirators against all that is good or noble in human nature. I looked upon the Edinburgh deist as a pupil of the school last described ; indeed, the irregularity of the life he led lent this opinion a strong sanction. " The more I thought and read, the more wavering and unsettled my opinions became. I began to see that the precepts inculcated by the Christian faith are equal if not superior in purity to those taught in the school of philoso- phy ; but then the strange, mysterious doctrines which mingled with these precepts had in them something repul- sive. I could believe in many things which I did not under- stand ; but how could I believe in things evidently not beyond the reach of reason, but directly opposed to it ? I could believe that man is either a free agent, or chained down by the decrees of God to a predestined line of con- duct ; but how could I believe that he was at once free and the child of necessity? And yet the contradiction (as it appeared) seemed to me to be the doctrine of the Bible. " I regarded the main doctrine of Christianity as one of those which lie not beyond the reach of reason, but, as I have said, are directly opposed to it. How, thought I, can one man who is a criminal be pardoned and rewarded because another who is none has, after meriting reward, been pun- ished ? How can it be said that he who thus pardons the guilty and punishes the innocent is not only just, but that he even does this that he may become just and merciful ? It appeared still more strange than even this that the only way of becoming virtuous was, not by doing good and vir- tuous deeds, but by believing that Christ's death was an atonement for sin, and his merits a fund of righteousness for which they who thus believed were to be rewarded. Certainly, thought I, if the Christian religion be not a true one, it is not a cunningly devised fable ; for its mysteries are either not far enough removed from the examination of DOCTRINES OF CHRISTIANITY. 213 the rational faculties, or too directly opposed to the conclu- sions which they must necessarily form. The mystery of the Trinity I regarded as an exception to this ; the nature of God is so little known to man that I could neither believe nor doubt it." In this abrupt and unsatisfactory manner the document ends. It will appear in the sequel that evidence exists in other quarters, enabling us to trace the essential facts of Miller's spiritual history. CHAPTER VII. POVERTY, HONORABLE AND DISHONORABLE FIRST IMPRES- SIONS OF THE REV. MR. STEWART LOOKS INTO HIS FATHER'S BIBLE THE SELFISH THEORY OF MORALS NEW-YEAR'S-DAY MUSINGS IMPORTANT COMMENT UPON AND ADDITION TO THESE TEN DAYS AFTERWARDS THE CHANGE EFFECTED IN HIS SPIRITUAL STATE. NE or two threads of our biographical narrative have slipped through our hands, and it will be necessary to gather them up before proceeding with the delineation of Miller's religious experi- ence. Swanson, as we saw, alluded to his prospects of pecuniary support, and exulted in his trust in God. This was in October. In November Miller replied. " You tell me that you are becoming (like myself) very poor, but you also inform me that you are very happy. I know by expe- rience that simple, unambitious poverty and happiness are not such enemies as is generally imagined ; but, oh, how I detest the mean, cringing poverty that prompts a man of God's forming to cast himself in the dust before his brother man ; that compels him to smile at the stupid, cruel jibe that wounds him ; that teaches his knee to bend and ties his tongue. This is poverty of spirit. I merely detest it ; but I cannot think of those mean insults which, coming from the little great, make poverty truly bitter, without wishing for the return of the earliest days of barbarism. My master in the rudest stage of society would have, at least, two of 2U MR. STEWART. ' 215 nature's advantages, he would be brave and strong ; but, in its present state, he may be at once an idiot, coward, and knave." Swanson had asked for information about the Rev. Mr. Stewart. The account of his relations with his parish- ioners, and the estimate of his character, which Miller gives in reply, are very different from what he would subsequently have written. " When, after leaving Edinburgh, I returned to this place, I scarce met one of my old acquaintances who did not tell me of the extraordinaiy parts and merits of their new minister. He was so humble, said his admir- ers, that he did not, like many foolish parsons, speak of the priesthood as a body of good, perfect men, who were sorely toiling to convert vile lay sinners, no, when he spoke of sinners, he said You and I. His sermons, too, with all the solidity of orthodox}^ itself, were so interesting and eloquent that no one could sleep in his church. The very reserve of his character was praised ; it was bashful- ness ; it was modesty. This general opinion has now given place to another as general. His humility, it is said, was affected, for his reserve is not that of bashfulness, but of pride. No one gives less to the poor, or is fonder of money. His very sermons are now different from what they were once, they still display talent, but they are cold and unanimated, and ill-calculated to rouse or comfort his hear- ers. These two contrary opinions were and are those enter- tained by the middle class of Mr. Stewart's parishioners ; do not imagine, however, that either of them in every par- ticular was or is mine. I know too little of his character as- a man to say whether he be generous or niggardly, proud or humble ; but, as a minister, I believe I may dare decide of his merits. His sermons are the offspring of natural talent polished by learning. Few men understand better what subjects are susceptible of that eloquence which at 216 THE JOURNEYMAN. once engages the understandings, imaginations, and hearts of men. His views of a subject are generally clear, and his styl'e, though apparently unstudied, is pure and express- ive. But, on the other hand, he is an unequal, ofttimes a careless, preacher. His sermons were such as I have de- scribed only for the first ten or twelve months after he received the presentation to this parish. At particular seasons, such as the time of a sacrament, he still exerts himself, and I am cheered by flashes of that spirit the blaze of which once delighted me ; but his common, every- day discourses are dry and doctrinal. They address them- selves to