THE LAND OF LORNE.*

IT is impossible to feel quite alone in the West Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Four shadows evermore haunt you on sea and on shore, and intensify the " glamour" of dreamy loch, or weird mountain-pass, of ruined castle or lonely cairn. Ossian, St. Columba, Samuel Johnson, and Walter Scott are omnipresent lords of the Isles, and they prophesy, or discourse, or sing to you with such fascinating persistency that you seem at times to slip altogether out of your personal identity, and to be able only to see with their eyes, to hear with their ears, to think their thoughts, and live their very lives. You become a pagan warrior with Ossian, and stoutly question the damnatory clauses of the creed of St. Patrick ; you catch the ardour of the great apostle of Iona, and plunge with him into the roaring surf as he is setting out on one of his missionary voyages from the " illustrious island ;" you are seriously rebuking James Boswell for his carouse of the previous evening,—the epistle for the day (as the biographer of Johnson is careful to inform us), ominous with the words,

Be not drunk with wine," giving special sting to your lecture ; or you are landing in Skye with Sir Walter and repeating to your- self the famous Latin lines of the pilgrim from Bolt Court—not to speak of the inevitable music of the Lord of the Isles which sings itself through and through your soul from Ardtornish in the Sound of Mull, away up to the " dread " Loch Coruisk in Skye, and back by Staffs and Iona. And as if this domination were not enough, here comes a brother bard of Walter Scott, Mr. Robert Buchanan, with his bewitching book, the Land of Lorne, to asso- ciate himself for all time with our inmost emotions whenever we shall think of the isles of the West Highlands, amid the dust and roar of the city, or whenever we shall again repeat our former wanderings amid the hills and seas which have received the two- fold consecration of saintliness and song.

Mr. Buchanan has no mercy on you. We had been try- ing to forget an experience in the Sound of Mull which befell us not very long ago, and had in part succeeded, when this voyager in the braggart, storm-tempting, baby-like Tern awoke all the fires of memory and imagination, and caused us to pass again a night on the deep. We had resolved to give

• The Land of Lorne, including the Cruise of the Tern toj the Outer Hebrides. By Robert Buchanan. 2 vols. London: Chapman and HalL

the salmon and trout a day's respite in Mull, and we secured a sufficient boat with a brace of Highlanders to carry us to Ardtor- nish. The outward voyage was delicious, and we ran before the wind all the way. But returning,—well l suffice it to say that the greeting we received on reaohing terra firma at midnight was simply this, spoken by one of an assembled multitude, " Weel, we just thocht ye war gain' to be drouned." As we write, the pen seems to give place to the tiller, the blackness of the stormy night is around us ; it is all we can do, as that big wave comes tumbling on our starboard, to keep the boat's head to the wind ; two islands are in front of us, but where exactly we cannot tell ; the lights on shore and the dimly seen heights are horribly deceptive, but on we go, with rushing wind, and lurching boat, and aching arm, until at last the man in the bow calls out, " I'm thinkin' she'll do noo," and we find ourselves in calmer water, though we have still carefully to crawl and feel our way to the landing jetty.

Mr. Buchanan is wholly responsible for causing us to live again through the perils of that night, but still we can forgive him. Nay, more, we must heartily thank him for these two volumes, which contain the raciest, the freshest, the most nature-like and life-like sketches of the Highlands and the Highlanders we have ever read.

The "Land of Lorne," properly so called, is that district of Argyleshire which one can behold unrolled, as in a map, when standing on one of the high hills, which overlook Oban. To the east towers Ben Cruacban in supreme height and beauty, cutting the grey sky with his two red and rocky cones ; westward, straight across the Firth of Lorne, is the island of Mull, with its wondrous trap caves, its Ross, or promontory of granite, its fairy nooks of culture and ravishing picturesqueness, such as Glen Forsa, and Torloisk, its lofty Ben Mor, and its fresh- water lakes, Frisa and Ba, the former in the most anti-Malthusian condition of crowded trout population, and the latter, with its environment of steep green hills, a dreamlike water-world for the poet, but a glorious expanse, too, for a fair fight with a twenty- pound salmon. Northward rolls the great firth itself, with the green flat island of Lismore, extended at the feet of the mountain region of Morven, the waters creeping inwards, forming, first, the long narrow arm of Loch Etive, which stretches many miles inland, past the base of Cruachan, and secondly, the winding basin of Loch Creran, which separates Lorne from Glencoe.

Southwards the view is blocked up by a range of green, though unshapely hills ; but beyond these the sea-board of Lorne is ex- tended, with numberless outlying islets, as far as Loch Crinan.

The tract of country thus indicated is only some fifteen miles in breadth, and forty-five in length ; but, as Mr. Buchanan adds, "is a marvellous land, a scene of beauty ever changing, and giving fresh cause for wonder and joy."

Mr. Buchanan has looked at Lorne with true spiritual vision, ander all aspects, and in all seasons, and we are sorely tempted to linger with him over its spring tenderness, its summer glory, its autumn splendours, and its winter sublimity. It is thus he writes of the succession of the seasons :-

"When the winds of March have blown themselves faint, and the April heaven has ceased weeping, there comes a rich sunny day, and all at once the cuckoo is heard telling his name to all the hills. There never was such a place for cuckoos in the world. The cry arises from every tuft of wood, from every hill-side, from every projecting crag.. .

0 blithe new comer, I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice !

Then, as if at a given signal, the trout leaps a foot into the air from the glassy loch, the buds of the water-lily float to the surface, the lambs bleat from the green and heathery slopes, the rooks caw from the distant rookery, the cock-grouse screams from the distant hill-top, and the blackthorn begins to blossom over the nit-brown pools of the burn. Pleasant days follow of high white clouds and fresh winds whose wings are full of warm dew About this time more rain falls, pre liminary to a burst of true summer weather, and innumerable glow-worms light their lamps in the marshes. At last the golden days come. Day after day the sky is cloudless and blue, the mountain lake sinks lower and lower, till it seems about to dry up entirely. The mountain brooks dwindle to mere silver threads for the water-ousel to fly by." [Mr. Buchanan seems to know, as by a kind of second sight, all the haunts and the habits of all the birds of the North, from the skimming swallow to the great eagle or wild goose, after which latter he gives us the record of a " chase " which is one of the most exciting bits of sporting narra- tive we ever read.] " Then afar off, with every red vein distinct in the burning light, without a drop of vapour to moisten his scorching crags, stands Ben Ornachan. By this time the hills are assuming their glory ; the mysterious bracken has shot up all in a night, to cover them with a green carpet between the knolls of the heather, the lichen is pencilling the crags with most delicate silver, purple, and gold, and in all the valleys there are stretches of light yellow corn and deep green patches of foliage. The corncrake has come, and his cry fills the valleys. Walking on the edge of the corn you put up the partridges, fourteen cheepers the size of a thrush, and the old pair to lead them. From the edge of the peat-bog the old cock-grouse rises, and if you are sharp' [remember Mr. Buchanan is very near-sighted, and, as in his great

endeavour after a seal in the Hebrides, finds his spectacles, which want frequent wiping, from a man propelling himself through a spongy marsh in the severest horizontal attitude, to keep himself well out of the view of his hoped-for prize, a pair of distressing auxiliaries] " you may see the young following the old hen through the deep heather close by. The snipe drums in the marsh ; the hawk, having brought out his young among the crags of Kerrara, is hovering still as stone over the edge of the hill. Then, perchance, just at the end of July, there is a gale from the south, blowing for two days, black as Erebus with cloud and rain ; then going up into the north-west, and blowing for one day with little or no rain, and dying away at last with a cold puff from the north. All at once, as it were, the sharp sound of firing is heard from bill to hill.

It is the 12th of August. Henceforth, for two months at least, there are broiling days, interspersed with storms and showers, and the firing continues more or less from dawn to sunset."

But late autumn comes in Lorne, and it is thus that Mr. Buchanan pictures it :-

" The tint of the hills is getting deeper and richer, and by October, when the beech leaf yellows, and the oak leaf reddens, the dint purples and deep greens of the heather are perfect. Of all seasons in Lorne the late autumn is the most beautiful. The sea has a deeper hue, the sky a mellower light. There are long days of northerly wind, when every crag looks perfect, wrought in gray and gold, and silvered with moss, when the high clouds turn luminous at size edges, when a thin film of hoar- frost gleams over the grass and heather, when the light burns rosy and faint over all the hills, from Morven to Cruachan. for hours before the sun goes down. Out of the ditch at the roadside flaps the mallard, as you pass in the gloaming ; and standing by the side of the small moun- tain loch, you see the teal rise, wheel thrice, and settle. The hills are desolate, for the sheep are being smeared. There is a feeling of frost in the air, and Ben Ornachan has a crown of snow."

Winter falls round " the Wanderer," for thus does Mr. Buchanan choose to designate himself all through these charm- ing volumes, and the following is his rendering of the snow time, with its death-like stillness and death-like beauty in Lorne :—

" How wondrous look the hills in their white robes ! The round, red ball of the sun looks through the frosty steam. The far-off firth gleams faint and ghostly with a sense of mysterious distance. The mountain loch is a sheet of blue, whereon you may disport from morn till night in perfect solitude, with the hills white on all sides, save where the broken snow shows the red-rusted leaves of the withered bracken. A death-like stillness and a death-like beauty reign every- where, and few living things are discernible, save the hare plunging heavily out of her form in the snow, or the rabbit scuttling off in a snowy spray, or the small birds piping disconsolate on the trees and dykes. Then Peter, the lame rook" [and this is a delicious morsel to be recommended to all concerned in the administration of charity] "brings three or four of his wild relations to the back door of the White House " [" the Wanderer's," above Oban], " and they stand aloof, with their heads cocked on one side, while he explains their position, and suggests that they, being hard-working rooks, who never stooped to beg when a living could be got in the fields, well deserve to be assisted. Then comes the thaw. As the sun rises, the sunny sides of the hill are seen marked with great black stains and winding veins, and there is a sound in the air as of many waters. The mountain brook leaps swollen over the still clinging ice, the loch rises a foot above its frozen crust, and a damp steam rises into the air. The wind goes round to the west, great vapours blow over from the Atlantic, and there are violent storms."

We have selected the above passages not as "elegant extracts," but to induce our readers to betake themselves immediately to the perusal of Mr. Buchanan's book ; and one thing we venture to predict, that having once opened it, they will find a fascination in it—the fascination of pure genius—which will hold them spell- bound until they finish it. They will, moreover, be surprised to find on recalling the successive pages how much solid and per- manently interesting matter Mr. Buchanan has contrived to compress within so narrow a compass. From the northern extremity of the Crinan Canal away to the Long Island and Skye, Mr. Buchanan went sounding on his often very dim and very perilous way. First, in a yacht of time tons— affectionately called by the neighbours " the Coffin "—he navi- gated the hazardous waters which lie between Crinan and Tober- mory, and in his narrative he has made our heart and brain throb wildly by the almost painful realistic power he possesses either in reproducing scenes familiar to us as our own study, or the hair-

breadth 'scapes of his tiny craft. But as some of the readers of the Spectator will remember, the Tern was a mere toy—only

seven tons burthen—a thing to be blown into the air by a sudden squall, or made an easy mouthful of by any respectable billow. In this slender structure four precious souls adventured into the wild seas of the Hebrides,—Hamish Shaw, the pilot, a native of doubtful nerve, with delicious humour dubbed the Viking, the cook, a lady fair, and the " Wanderer " himself. All the party returned in safety to Oban, but the marvel is that any one of them survived to tell the story of the cruise. But besides the tale of thrilling adventure, which is given in prose that is fresh and various as the western winds and sea, Mr. Buchanan writes of men and things as only he could write who unites in himself the inspiration of the poet, the ardour of the philanthropist, the science of an accomplished naturalist, and the experience of a successful sportsman.

To not a few among us the portraiture of the inhabitants of the lone island of Canna, for instance, will read like a revelation —their unworldliness, their laziness, their superstition, their dreamy, kindly, gentle, hospitable ways :—and turning to the mighty Cuchullin hills and Loch Coruisk in Skye, we are awed into solemnity, as Mr. Buchanan in alternate prose and verse dis- courses to us of their sublime, almost terrible aspect, and interprets for us their geological history. We wish we had room to speak of the Saga of King Haw, or of the author's own exquisite tale, " Eiradh of Canna," but our space is near- ing its limits. We must not, however, omit to mention that this Land of Lorne has been presented as a wedding present to the Queen's daughter, who has elected to ally herself with the future lord of the Lorne country. The work, in fact, is dedicated to the Princess Louise and Marchioness of Lorne ; and we cannot but think that Mr. Buchanan's bitter lecture to the Duke of Argyle, whether justified or no, is out of place.