got into me.
Thank you so very much dear Paloma Pascual.
A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to avariety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the other are
but pleasant infidelities. Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity except
upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of
piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among
ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great
continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to
be something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a
foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country,and, whether we hail from
the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready- made affection
joins us in the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one
Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not
among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or
Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's errors.
And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us,
something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.
Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
inescrutable. There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its
rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its insight
places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands;
its quaint,gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the
wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I don't even know if I
desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice
sing out "Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no beauty
under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can
repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think I would
rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried
among good Scots clods. I will say it farly, it grows on me with every
year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. When I
forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!
The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You may pay for it
in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn
the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to
drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against
society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been
born, for instance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer;
the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the
rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer
around our hearts. An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow,
upon Chimborazo, and neither of them care;
but when a Scotch winegrower told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.
"From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
and we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides".
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters (1883)
No comments:
Post a Comment