OLD MORTALITY.
No. 9.— EDITH BELLENDEN.
Despite of the loyalist aunt, and the Presbyterian uncle,
"How happily the days of Thalaba went by,"
when Henry Morton met Edith Bellenden in the green woods, nigh to the ancient and honoured tower, where his Majesty breakfasted. Marmontel says, somewhat irreverently, while speaking of love-making, "le bonheur lui même n’est pas grande chose, mais les avenues sont delicieuses," and he is so far right, that the earliest is the happiest time of that love, which is everywhere but on the lip. The cheek burns, the eye kindles, the step is lighter, and the voice softer, in that sweet time, when the conscious feelings have never ventured into words; it is like the feeling with which we listen to distant, yet exquisite, music; to speak were to break the lovely enchantment. Scott for once writes, not as if he had keenly observed, but as if he had deeply felt the charm to which he lends language. He had himself wandered beneath the shade of—
"The weeping birch, the lady of the woods,"
with some fair companion, on whose face he only gazed by stealth—whole mornings had past by the side of some early idol,
"The only place he coveted,
In all a world so wide."
They too, perhaps, had interchanged volumes; and here we cannot but say a word in favour of books as the best pioneers in these kind of campaigns. The favourite volume whose reading we commend, is inevitably connected with ourselves—it must bring to our image those lonely hours when the recurrence of an image has such influence—it invests that image with the associations of poetry and fiction, and thus redeems it from the common-place of ordinary life. There is also the sympathy of taste—and how much may be inferred from a passage pencilled originally for no other eyes but our own. Then, too, a book is the prettiest stepping stone to a correspondence; it seems such a simple thing to write a note of thanks, and so natural to add some slight remark on the author; and how often is the criticism of an author's sentiments but the expression of our own! Were we to choose the scene for love, it should certainly be in the country—a city casts its own care and anxieties on all who tread its busy streets. I have all my life been an indweller of the town, and I frankly confess, for a constant residence, I like it better than all the pastoral charms that ever made the morality of an essay, or gave grace to poetry; still there is that about the country to which the heart always turns with a feeling of freshness and renovation. The moonlight walk through the green wood, would come back upon the memory with a spell which would not belong to a lamp-lighted ramble. The green-leaf would give its freshness, the wild-flower its sweetness; on the ear would arise the murmur of the wind in the boughs—or the song of the brook singing like a child for very gladness. No wonder that Henry Morton was constant to Edith Bellenden. It may be doubted whether absence and distance be half such trials to love, as presence and possession. The remembrance of Edith Bellenden brought to the Scottish exile the scenes of his youth. Hopes long since departed, and some cherished to the last, were linked with her: she was the sweet tie that held him to his country—and his country is all-in-all to a Scotchman. It is a fact, that though a Scotchman be the most locomotive of individuals—there is scarcely a habitable part of the globe where he is not to be found—yet nothing ever weakens his attachment to his country. It is not the pride of the English, which mostly takes a "comfortable form," a grow-your-own mutton sort of complacency, silent, and reserved, as if there were a domestic decorum in it—warm and quiet as his own fireside; still less is it the vanity of the Frenchman, who looks upon the victories of the nation as matters of personal triumph, the grandeur of the Tuilleries as his own, and the great qualities of all the great men of France as reflected upon himself. The Scotchman's is a feeling altogether different; it is at once a deep steady friendship, and a blind enthusiastic love. He is little ready to admit those merits in another land, in which his own is deficient; he undervalues them, if he cannot altogether deny their existence; he holds them as superfluities. Something of the harsh, yet fine, outline of his native mountains, belongs to his moral structure; he makes few allowances, and though cautious of expressing his opinion, he has a calm rooted disdain for all customs and ideas which have not upon them the broad arrow of Scottish origin. His sense of right is strong within him; more based upon principle than impulse, it is usually an adhering guide through life. His religion is a stern reckoning with the frailties of mortality, and what he has of excitement belongs to his national poetry and music; it has but one fête in the year, and that is St. Andrew's Day. In no one narrative has Scott more forcibly embodied the peculiarities of his countrymen than in Old Mortality. The Covenanters could only have existed in Scotland, where enthusiasm takes the shape of obstinacy, not of excitement. We read with wonder what men in those days endured for conscience sake—hardships, suffering, loss of worldly goods, and even death, yet we wonder more when we find on what small things this rigid conscience turned—some worthless ceremony, some question of surplice and cassock, and men have given up life and living, rather than allow the hundredth psalm to peal from an organ within the walls of their church; still this severe discipline may have led to good, for we believe that in no religious establishment are the pure doctrines of our faith more visible than in the church of Scotland.