Читать книгу The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor онлайн

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These young travellers had been diligent readers, and, when the steamer hurried them over the lake, the appearance of Ben Lomond and Ben Voirlich, of “Bull’s Rock,” and Rob Roy’s Cave, of Inversnaid and Glen Falloch, called up the shades of the Campbells, Macgregors, Malcolms, Rothesays, Macfarlanes, Macphersons; making each beach and rock along Loch Lomond a feature of romantic interest.

With youthful enthusiasm, Bayard clambered to the rugged top of Ben Lomond, having waded through deep morass and thorny thicket, to reach it, and, from that lookout, gazed around on the peaks of lesser mountains, down upon the sweet Lomond lake, away to the oceans on either side of Scotland, discerning the smoke over Glasgow, the dark plains of Ayr, and, but for a mist, the embattled towers of Stirling and Edinburgh. After a short stop, he descended with his old companions, and a new one (he was constantly finding new friends), along the slippery, stony slopes; and, after a dinner of oatmeal cakes and milk at a cottage near the base, trudged and waded on through that wild tract of woodland and swamp to Loch Katrine. There was the home of poetry. The great forests, through which the Clan-Alpine horns had echoed, the dense forest, through which the scarfs and bows did gleam in the old days of the Highland clans, had disappeared. The blossoming heather and bare rocks made a sorry substitute. But to Bayard, whose life was set to poetry, who had so often studied and declaimed of Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu, and who had often dreamed of the Ellen’s Isle, and the gathering clans, as Walter Scott described them, it must have been an enchanted spot. One may recite and analyze for half a century that poem, and may flatter himself that he has detected all its beauty, and understands all its historic references; but one hour on Loch Katrine is worth more than all that. There the reader lives the poem, and it is a part of his being ever more. Bayard felt compensated there for all the sufferings, by sea and by land, which he had experienced. He gazed fondly upon the glassy, land-locked water; he studied closely the features, manners, and songs of the Highland boatmen, those descendants of the old clans; he sketched, with the keenest interest, Ben Ann, Ben Venue, the gate of the Trosachs, and the curved lines of the sandy shore, and he awoke the echoes at the Goblin’s Gave and Beal-nam-bo. Rich experiences! In such does the youth develop fast into a cultured manhood.