Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 1 (of 2)

LORD BYRON.

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

Lord Byron was, it appears, born in London, in lodgings in Holles-street, as his mother was on her way from France to Scotland. His mother, whose history and ill-starred marriage are well known through Moore's life of the poet, had accompanied her husband to France soon after their marriage, to avoid the swarm of claimants on her property, the creditors of her dissipated husband, which that marriage had brought upon her. The Byrons, who had inherited the estate of Newstead, in Nottinghamshire, since the reign of Henry VIII., when it was granted to Sir John Byron, generally called The Little Sir John Byron, had distinguished themselves greatly in the civil wars, but had of late years been much more conspicuous for their poverty and eccentricity. Commodore Byron, whose name will always be remembered from the narrative of the sufferings of himself and crew, in consequence of the wreck of the Wager, and who was still better known by the name of "Foul-weather Jack," from the singular fact that he never put to sea, even when holding the rank of admiral, and in command of the fleet for the protection of the West Indies, without encountering the most tempestuous weather, was his grandfather. His father, Captain Byron, appears to have been one of the most unprincipled and dissipated men of his day. He ran off with the wife of Lord Carmarthen to the Continent; and this, of course, leading to a divorce, he married Lady Carmarthen, and had by her one daughter, the present Hon. Augusta Leigh, the wife of Colonel Leigh. Lady Carmarthen did not live long; and covered with debt, and pursued by hungry creditors, Captain Byron looked out for some woman of fortune to victimize to his own comfort. This species of legalized robbery, that is, of selecting a simple and unsuspecting woman to plunder under the sanction of the laws, instead of running the hazard of hanging or transportation by the more vulgar method of highway robbery, house-breaking, or forgery, is one so fashionable, that a man like Captain Byron was not likely to boggle at it. Of all species of theft, it is the most dastardly and despicable, because it is performed under the sacred name of affection. The vampire who means to suck the blood of the selected victim, makes his approach with flatteries and vows of the deepest attachment, of the most eternal tenderness, and protection from the ills of life. He wins the heart of the confiding woman by the basest lies, and then deliberately proceeds to the altar to pronounce before the all-seeing God the same falsehood, "to love and comfort," and "cherish till death," the helpless creature that is binding herself for life to ruin and deception. One would think it were enough for a man to feel, as he stands thus before God and man, that he is a mere seeker of creature comforts and worldly honor while he is wedding a rich wife; but knowingly to have picked out his prey under the pretense of loving her above all of her sex, in order to hand over her estate to his creditors, to defray the scores of his gambling and licentiousness, that characterizes a monster of so revolting a kind, that nothing but the gradual corruption of society through the medium of conventionalism could save him from the expatriating execrations of his fellows. There are cases of peculiar aggravation of this kind, those where the property of the victim is almost wholly demanded for the liquidation of the demon-lover's debts, and the wife is left to instantaneous beggary. The marriage of Captain Byron was one very much of this kind. His wife's most convertible property, as bank shares, salmon fisheries, money securities, were hastily disposed of; then went the timber from her estates, then the estates themselves, all amounting to probably £30,000, leaving her a mere annuity of £123! The property gone to this mite, the harpy husband still hung upon her, and upbraided her with the want of further means to contribute to his reckless riot. With cash extorted from her now severe poverty, he at length luckily departed again for the Continent, and died at Valenciennes in 1791, when Byron was three years old.

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

there may be some excuse for him, drawn from hereditary taint. His father was not the solitary instance of irregularity, violent passions, and wastefulness. His great-uncle, to whose title and diminished property he succeeded, was of the like stamp. His violence had led to his wife's separation from him; he had killed his next neighbor, Mr. Chaworth, in a duel; he had shot his coachman; he had hewed down extensive plantations on his estate, with the avowed purpose of preventing his son's enjoyment of their profit, because he had offended him. This son, and also his grandson, died before him, and the wifeless and childless old lord had led a moody and solitary life in the decaying abbey of Newstead, which threatened to drop about his ears, feeding a heap of crickets on the hearth, and feared by the whole peasant population of the country round.

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

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

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

LACHIN-Y-GAIR.

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

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

and marched away without helping him—did not these proceed from the same mind? Did not the puns of Hood, and the sober ballad of Eugene Aram, and the Song of the Shirt, proceed from one and the same mind? Did not John Gilpin and the loftiest strains of pious poetry proceed from that of Cowper? Did not Chatterton write equally Sly Dick and the tragedy of Ella? In fact, we might run through the whole circuit of poetic and prose literature, and show that the moods of our minds are as various and changeable as those of external nature. The very gravest, the most steadfast of us, have our transitions from sad to gay, from frivolous to the highest tone of the highest purpose, with a rapidity that seems to belong to the most changeful of us. There is, in fact, no such chameleon, no such kaleidoscope as the human mind. Light and shadow pass over us, and communicate their lusters or their glooms. Facts give us a turn up or down, and the images of our brain present new and ever new arrangements. But in all this change there is no mere chance, far less confusion; every movement depends on a fixed principle. Perhaps there have been few men in whom circumstances—circumstances of physical organization, of life, and education—cherished and made habitual so many varied moods as in Lord Byron. Thrown at a very early age into the bosom of a beautiful and solitary nature, he imbibed a profound and sincere love of nature and solitude. Sent early to public schools to battle his way among boys of his own age, and with a personal defect which often subjected him to raillery, his native spirit made him bristle up and show fight, as he did afterward with his reviewers. Raised to rank and wealth, and, spite of his crooked foot, endowed with, in all other respects, a very fine person, he was led to plunge into the dissipations of young men of his class, and he thus acquired a tone of libertinism that ever afterward, under the same circumstances, was sure to show itself. Led by his quick sense of right and wrong, and by his shrewd insight into character, to despise priestcraft and political despotism, and spurred on by the spirit of the time, especially abroad where he traveled, he imbibed a spirit of skepticism and radicalism as principles. From these causes, he soon began to exhibit the most opposite phases of character. In solitude and nature he was religious in his tone—in society, a scoffer; in solitude he was pensive, and even sentimental—in society he was convivial, fond of practical jokes, satirical. He wrote like a radical, and spoke like an aristocrat. In him Childe Harold and Don Juan, the sublime and the ludicrous, the noble and the mean, the sarcastic and the tender, the voluptuous and beautifully spiritual, the pious and the impious, were all embodied. He was all these by turns, and in all, for the moment, most sincere. Like an instrument of many strings, each had its peculiar tone, and answered faithfully to the external impulse. Multifarious as were his moods, you might in any given circumstances have predicated which of these would prevail. There would be no sensuality in the face of the Alps, there would be no sublimity in the city saloon. If he had to speak in the House of Lords, his speech, by the spirit of antagonism, would assuredly be radical; did he come into contact with the actual mob, he would case himself in the hauteur of the aristocrat. With nature, he was ashamed of men, and his doings and sayings among them; with men, he was ashamed of nature and poetry. He would laugh at his own flights of sentiment. He was a many-sided monster, showing now sublime and now grotesque, but with a feeling in the depths of his soul that he ought to be something greater than he was or dared to be.

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

Beyond this the coast becomes more and more what is called iron-bound, and the rocks—probably of trap or whinstone—as you advance northward, stand up in the sea, black and curdled as it were, and worn into caverns and perpendicular indentures exactly as you see them in Bewick's wood-cuts. Stepping then on land at Aberdeen, how agreeable is the change! The city, built all of a gray and lustrous granite, has a look of cleanness and neatness almost inconceivable. Since the days of Byron's boyhood great must have been the changes. The main streets are all evidently new; and on advancing into the great street which traverses almost the whole length of the city, Union-street, a mile in length and seventy feet wide, you are struck with a pleasant surprise. The width and extent, the handsome yet plain buildings of clean granite, and the fine public buildings visible in different directions, are far more than you expected in a town so far north.[32] On the river you find an imposing assemblage of ships; you find the Marischal College now built in a very graceful style; and a market-house, I suppose in extent, convenience of arrangement, and supply, inferior to none in the kingdom. The olden streets, such as were in existence in Byron's time, are much more like what you would have looked for, of a narrower and more ordinary character.

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

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

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

The view from the bridge itself down into the river is striking. I suppose it must be forty or fifty feet from its center to the water, yet a man living close by told me that he once saw a sailor leap from it for a wager. The bridge is remarkably strongly built. It is said to have been built in the time of Bruce, yet it has by no means a very ancient look, and being of solid granite, is not very likely to fulfill the prophecy of its fall. Yet Mr. Chambers, in his "Picture of Scotland," says this superstition has not always been confined to children, for our late Earl of Aberdeen, who was an only son, and rode a favorite horse, which was "a mare's ae foal," always dismounted on approaching this bridge, and used to have his horse led over at a little distance after him. The people near do not now seem to partake of it. "Fall!" say they; "ay, when the rocks on which it is based fall!" It is, in fact, like a solid piece of rock itself; and is in possession of funds, left in 1605 by Sir Alexander Hay, which, though then only producing five-and-forty shillings a year, have so accumulated that they are not only amply sufficient to maintain it in repair, but have built the new brig. At each end of the bridge you see several large iron rings in the wall. These, I was told, were to secure ropes or chains to, from which to suspend scaffolding for the repair of the bridge on the outside. Every care is thus taken of it. "She is verra rich, is the auld brig," said the man before mentioned. "She has been verra useful in her time, for before the new brig was built she was the only means of getting to the north country—there was no fording the river. And the new brig has been built wi' her money, ay, every sixpence of it, gran' brig as the new on' is, with her five granite arches; and the auld brig gives £100 a year to take care of her too. But she's verra well off in the world yet, for all that; she has plenty left for herself." Thus do they talk of the auld brig as if she were a wealthy old lady. If, however, any one should pay her a visit from New Aberdeen, I would counsel him to go by the old road for its picturesque effect, but to be careful to inquire the road in Old Aberdeen down to the brig, for it is particularly obscure. He must ask, too, for "The Auld Brig o' Don," for the name of the brig of Balgounie seems known to few of the younger generation.

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

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

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

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

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

Ballater, though a neat village now, did not exist when Byron was here. There were a few cottages for the use of visitors, near the other side of the present bridge, but those who came to drink the waters generally located themselves in farm-houses as near as they could to "the wells," which are two miles down the opposite bank of the Dee. Mrs. Byron chose her summer residence in one of the most thoroughly-secluded and out-of-the-world spots which it was possible to find, perhaps, in the whole island. It lies four miles below Ballater, on the same side of the river as the spring, that is, two miles beyond "the wells," as they call them, some chalybeate springs which issue from the hills, and which now bring many people to Ballater in summer. You proceed to them along the feet of the hills, and at the feet, also, of a dark pine wood. The river is below you; above you are these mountain forests, and the way lies sometimes through the wood. Under beeches which shade the way, there are benches set at intervals, so that a more charming walk, with the noble mountain views opposite to you, can not well be conceived. At about two miles on the road, after passing under stupendous dark cliffs that show themselves above the craggy and steep forest, you find a couple of rows of houses, and here are the waters issuing out of pipes into stone basins. Going still forward, you come out upon the wild moorlands. Above you, on the right hand, rise the desolate hills; below, on the left, wanders on the Dee, amid its birch woods; and the valley is one of those scenes of chaotic beauty, which perhaps the Highlands only show. It is a sea of heath-clad little hills, sprinkled with the light green birch-trees, and here and there a dark Scotch fir. It is a fairy land of purple beauty, such as seems to belong to old romance, and where the people of old romance might be met without wonder. And through all goes the sound of the river like a distant ocean. Those who have been in the Highlands know and recollect such scenes, so carpeted with the crimson heather, so beautified with the light-hued, fairy birch woods. Still the way leads on till you come down to the Dee, where it makes a wide and splendid sweep deep below the bank on which you are, and then you wonder where can be Bellatrich, the house you seek, for you see no house at all! In the birch wood, however, you now discern one white cottage, and that must be it. No! To that cottage I went, and out came a woman with spectacles on and her Bible open in her hand. I asked if she could tell me where Bellatrich was, and I expected her to say "Here!" but she replied, in a low, quiet voice, "I will show you, for it is not easy to find." And so on we went for another quarter of a mile, when, coming to a little hidden valley running at right angles from the river up into the moorlands, she showed me a smoke rising above the trees, and told me there I should find the house.

And here was the place to which Byron's mother used to retire in the summer months from Aberdeen with her boy. The valley is divided by a wild brook hidden among green alders, and its slopes are hung with the native birch and a few oaks. At the upper end stands a farm-house, but this is new, and the farmer, to show me the house in which Byron lived, took me into his farm-yard. The house Mrs. Byron inhabited is now a barn, or sort of hayloft rather, in his yard. It was exactly one of the one-storied, long Highland huts, and is now included in the quadrangle of his farm-yard; but the bed in which Byron used to lie is still there. It is one of the deal, cupboard sort of beds that are common in Highland huts. There it stands among his straw. He says many people come to see the place, and several have tried to buy the bed from him, but that he should think it quite a shame to sell it.

Imagine, then, Mrs. Byron living here upward of forty years ago, and Byron a boy of about ten years of age; soon after which he left for England, to be converted out of a poor Highland boy into a lord. There was probably another hut or so near, as there is now, but that was all. The house they lived in was but a hut itself. There was no Ballater then. That has sprung up under the management of Mr. Farquarson, the laird of Ballater. There was only the water issuing from the moorland rocks, and no house at it, but those few huts near Ballater Bridge, where Lords Panmure and Kennedy, and some of their jovial companions, notorious up here, used to come and to drink the waters, in order to remedy their drinking too much whisky. There was no carriage road then. There was no cultivated meadow. All was moorland, and woods, and wild mountains. There was a rude road at the margin of the river, but so stony that no carriage could exist upon it. Nay, this present farmer says that when he came to live here, within these ten years, there was no road into this little hidden valley. There was no bridge over the brook, but they went through amid the great stones, and that without taking any trouble to put them aside. There was no garden, and there was no field. Around rose, as they do now, dark moorland mountains, and the little black-faced sheep, and the black cattle roamed over the boggy, heathery, and birch-scattered valley, as they do still, except within the little circle of cultivation that the present tenant has made.

What a place for a civilized woman and her only son! How he got so far around as he did is to me a miracle. He got up the valley quite to Braemar, and there was no carriage road thither! There was no turnpike road from Aberdeen further than to Banchory, half way to Ballater, forty-six years ago, and that then made, was the first turnpike road in Aberdeenshire. So a gentleman of Aberdeen assured me. Further, all was a mere track, in which a horse could go. Yet the boy Byron, with his lame feet, and very lame he was, according to those who knew him, and plenty of such remain, rambled all about this wild region. The passion with which he traversed those scenes is expressed in his poem to Mary Duff, the equally-beloved object of his boyish heart.

That he was intensely happy here, the poetry and memories of his whole life testify. That he must have strolled far and wide, and, as he says, with his dog for his guide, is no doubt true; but, lame as he was, it appears little less than miraculous. "I mind him weel," said a shepherd still living in the valley near the farm; "he was just such a boy as yon," pointing to a boy of eleven or twelve, "and used to play about wi' us here. His feet were both turned in, and he used to lift one over the other as he walked; and when he ran he would sometimes catch one against the other, and tumble over neck and heels. We heard that in England he had got his feet straightened."

How such a boy could get about there, over the rough heath and up the distant mountains, is strange enough. We do not hear that he had any pony, and there were only his mother or the maid to accompany him. Mrs. Byron, by all accounts, was not well-fitted for much walking, far less climbing up hills; yet it is quite certain that he rambled far and wide, and, it is most probable, alone. Loch na Garr, Morven, and Culbleen are the grand features of the mountain scenery, and it is evident that the wild and beautiful solitudes of the Dee-side, and the mountains around, had made a deep and indelible impression on his imagination. It is just the scenery to awake the poet, where the soul and the organization of the poet exist. The deep solitude; the stern mountains, with all their changes of storm and sunshine, now blazing and burning out in all the brightness of a clear sun, now softly beaming beneath the slanting light of evening, and now black as midnight beneath a gloomy sky, looking awfully forth from their sable and yet transparent veil of shadow. These, and the sound of waters, and the mild beauty of the low, heath-clad hills and soft glens, where the birch hangs its weeping and fragrant branches over the lovely harebell and the secret nest of the grouse, were the imagery which surrounded the boy Byron during the summer months; and the boy "was father to the man," seeking out ever afterward, from land to land, all that was lovely and sublime in nature.

But he was now called upon to say,

and the scene changed to England; solitude to cities; poverty to fortune; and the nameless obscurity of the juvenile mountain wanderer to title and unimagined fame.

Before, however, quitting this favorite scene of the early life of Byron, which he never again visited, I must notice it under the aspect which it happened to present to me from the particular time of my arrival. It was on the 18th of August, just one week after the commencement of the grouse-shooting season, and every inn on the road was crowded with sportsmen and their servants. Lord Castlereagh, on his way to his shooting-ground in Braemar, was my next neighbor on the mail from Aberdeen; and his wide acquaintance with the sports of various countries, the capercailzie and bear-shooting of the north of Europe, in particular of Russia, made his descriptions of them, as well as of the deer-shooting of Braemar—his particular sport—very interesting. But the weather of that wet summer was at this time outrageously rainy, and from every wayside inn the lugubrious faces of sportsmen were visible. As we drew up at the village of Banchory, the window was thronged with livery-servants, and a gentleman at an open upper window, eyeing anxiously the showery clouds hanging upon the hills, caught sight of Lord Castlereagh, and called out, in a tone of momentary animation quickly relapsing into melancholy, "Ha, Cass! are you there? Here I have been these four days, and nothing but this confounded rain. Not a foot have I yet been able to set upon the heath. There are six of us."

"Who is that who addresses you so familiarly?"

"Oh! it is Sir John Guest!" Poor Sir John! What a purgatory!

On went the coach. At Ballater again thronged was the door with livery-servants; the rain was falling in torrents; there were nine shooting gentlemen in the house, not one of whom could stir out. After taking luncheon, Lord Castlereagh went with the mail to Braemar, and I, with expanded umbrella, issued forth to explore the neighborhood as well as I might, but was speedily driven back again by the deluging rains, which made every highway an actual river. The next day was Sunday, and the sun rose with a beauty and warmth which seemed to say, "Gentlemen sportsmen, you shall at least have fair weather for church." A more glorious day never was sent down over mountain and moorland; and few are the scenes on which fine summer weather confers a greater beauty than on those around Ballater. Along these fine valleys, the country people, all health and animation, in cordial conversation streamed along to and fro from church. I climbed the dark moorland hills, where the wild flocks scudded away at the presence of a stranger, and the grouse rose up in whole coveys, with a startling whirr and strange cries, and gazed down into the vales on the most lovely little homesteads, on their crimson heathery knolls, amid their beautiful little woodlands of birch. Above arose on every side the solemn and dreary bulks of Loch na Garr, Morven, and Culbleen. It was a day and a scene among a thousand. Night fell; morning again—rose Monday morning! Hundreds of anxious sportsmen throughout the Highlands, and thousands of their anxious attendants, eager for a chance for the hills—