inspiration in the scenery alone, we shall assuredly fail to find it there. I presume the usual feeling of those who begin in adult years their personal acquaintance with this pastoral country is disappointment, more or less distinctly felt and acknowledged. Wordsworth's exquisite Yarrow Visited undoubtedly conveys a truthful picture of the disenchantment which actual contemplation of the scenery is apt to produce in the minds of those who have formed their preconceived impressions from poetry and romance. When Washington Irving was taken up by Scott to a commanding height around which all the borderland lay extended, he could not conceal his mortification. 'I saw,' he says, 'a great part of the Border Country spread out before me, and gazed about me for a time with mute surprise, I may almost say with disappointment. I beheld a mere succession of grey waving hills, line beyond line, as far as my eye could reach, monotonous in their aspect, and so destitute of trees, that one could almost see a stout fly walking along their profile; and far-famed Tweed appeared a naked stream, flowing between bare hills, without a tree or thicket on its banks.'

The casual traveller to this region usually finds at least three fundamental faults with it-featurelessness, treelessness, and monotony. To him it is a smooth bare sweep of bushless hills, rising ridge beyond ridge, interminable in their continuity of tame outline and oppressive in their sameness of colour.

For my own part, I have never been able to understand the charge of want of feature. True, the hills do not mount into crests or peaks, nor are their sides abundantly gashed with ravines, or roughened with many crags and precipices. Yet, of feature, and most expressive feature, every one of them is full. Nowhere else in Scotland can the exquisite modelling of flowing curves in hill forms, due partly to the

contours of underlying solid rock, and partly to the lines assumed by accumulating detritus, be so conspicuously seen. These characters are not obtrusive, indeed, but perhaps on that very ground they afford a keener pleasure to the eye that has been trained to detect them.

With regard to the charge of treelessness, it should be borne in mind, I think, by those who make it that trees have their appointed places in landscape, where they are altogether admirable, but that there are other places where their presence in any number is felt to be inappropriate. Much, of course, depends upon personal taste and habit in such matters. To my own eye, for example, the hills in Rhineland, so densely wooded to the top that not a single feature of them can be seen, are examples of the abuse of trees in landscape. It would be intolerable so to bury up the beauty of the Border hills. All that a true lover of that region will allow is a straggling copse of pensive birks, creeping upward from the valley, or nestling green in some shady streamwatered dell on the bare hill-side. To imagine that we should improve the look of the landscape there by large plantations of timber, would be about as natural as to believe that we should add to the grace of the Apollo Belvedere by putting him into a greatcoat.

The so-called monotony of these softly undulating hills constitutes, I do not doubt, one main element in the peculiar fascination which they have always exercised upon minds of a poetic cast. From the sky-line on either side, gentle but boldly drawn curves of bent-covered moorland sweep down into the grassy meadow on the floor of the valley. These are architectural forms of the hill-slopes, and remain distinct at all seasons of the year. But their beauty and impressiveness vary from month to month, almost from hour to hour. For the most part they are aglow with colour, now purple

with heather-blooms, now bright-green with bracken, now yellow with golden bent, now deepening into orange and russet as the early frosts of autumn lay their fingers on the ferns. And these colours are suffused, as it were, over the slopes, like a thin enamel, that never conceals the modulations of their form. In winter, when the ground is covered with snow, the endless diversity and grace of the curves stand out in naked beauty and offer to the student of hill-forms an admirable lesson. I cherish, as a lifelong possession, the recollection of the winter aspect of these uplands when I was snowed-up for a week under the hospitable roof of old Tibbie Shiels at St. Mary's.

The long sweeping lines of form and colour, which would be utterly lost under a covering of trees, plunge down into the flat meadows of the valley through which a clear stream is ever murmuring. We wander down the valley, and find other similar streams emerging from narrower valleys, on either hand, where still the same forms of slope and ridge rise against the sky. The very barrenness of the landscape becomes itself a charm, allowing the soft gentle outlines of the hills to have full play upon the fancy. There is a tender grace in the landscape that is offended by the protrusion of no harsh feature, no abrupt crag or yawning ravine. Moreover a pleasing loneliness broods over it all, which, in the case of sterner scenery, becomes oppressive and almost insupportable. The silence is broken fitfully by the breeze as it bears back the murmur of the distant brook, or by the curlew screaming from the nearer hill. The very sounds of the valley-the plaintive cadence of the river, and the low sad sough of the wind along the slopes-combine to produce that tone of melancholy which seems so characteristic and so inseparable from these pastoral valleys.

But who can wander by Yarrow or Ettrick without feeling

that the strange witchery with which the scenery fascinates us, springs mainly from what can neither be seen nor heard -from the human associations that have consecrated every spot within its borders. No one can feel this more deeply and gratefully than I. And yet am I none the less convinced that these human associations, in so far as they are the offspring of poetic imagination, owe far more than is generally recognised to the peculiar physical features of the region in which they took their birth, and which, indeed, often suggested as well as coloured them. To the influence of the scenery, amid which the deeds of daring were done, and the tales of love were told, the ballads and songs owe much of the distinguishing qualities of the border minstrelsy. The recognition of this influence, however, will in no way lessen the pleasure with which, indulging in dreamy thoughts of the past, we linger by Gala and Tweed, Ettrick and Yarrow, with their castles, and peels, and chapels, lonely and grey, and the traditions that seem to cling with a living power to every ruin and hillside. And though, sharing in Wordsworth's experience, we may see but not by sight alone,' and allow a ray of fancy' to mingle with all our seeing, we come back to these bare hills and quiet green valleys ever with fresh delight, and find that as we grow older they seem to grow greener, and to enter with a renewed sympathy into the musings of the hour.1

1 To the reader who has not wandered through these uplands in sunshine and storm, I cannot hope to convey an adequate idea of their fascination. Besides the interesting passage in the Life of Scott above referred to, and Wordsworth's delightful poems of Yarrow Unvisited and Yarrow Visited, many admirable descriptions of the scenery of these regions will be found in Scott's novels, as, for instance, in St. Ronan's Well, The Abbot, and The Bride of Lammermuir.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SOUTHERN TABLE-LAND AND ITS VALLEYS

FROM what was stated in Chapter VII. regarding the levelling down of the convoluted and fractured rocks of the Highlands into a great plain or base-level of erosion, the reader will have no difficulty in recognising, from the broad similarity of structure, that the same process must have been at work upon what are now the uplands of the southern counties. The lesson of vast denudation, taught by every Highland mountain-top, is brought home to us not less vividly there. A casual scrutiny suffices to make it clear that these long flat summits, instead of being made by the broad surfaces. of horizontal strata, have been in reality planed down upon the upturned edges of contorted greywackes and shales. In crossing a smooth hill-top among these uplands, we pass over bed after bed, tilted on end, crumpled, inverted, broken; yet the whole complex mass has been shorn away to a common level. By prolonging the truncated arches of the rocks, some idea may be formed of how vast an amount of material must have been worn away, and how entirely the surface of these high grounds has been fashioned by denudation (see Sections II., III. on the Geological Map). The cutting of such a great undulating plain out of hard rock was