The Poetical Works of David Macbeth Moir Edited by Thomas Aird: With A Memoir of the Author |
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| LINES IN
THE PARK OF KELBURN CASTLE. |
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 | The Poetical Works of David Macbeth Moir |  |
LINES IN THE PARK OF KELBURN CASTLE.
I.
Led on by April,—a refulgent eve,
With its soft west wind, and its mild white clouds,
Silently floating through the depths of blue.
The bird, from out the thicket, sends a gush
Of song, that heralds summer, and calls forth
The squirrel from its fungus-covered cave
In the old oak. Where do the conies sport?
Lo! from the shelter of yon flowering furze,
O'ermantling, like an aureate crown, the brow
Of the grey rock, with sudden bound, and stop
And start, the mother with her little ones,
Cropping the herbage in its tenderest green;
While overhead the elm, and oak, and ash,
Weave for the hundredth time their annual boughs,
Bright with their varied leaflets.
From yon secluded haunt, where hill from hill
Diverging leaves, in sequestration calm,
Screened from the biting east, securely roams
There, in wild gambol with its peers, on turf
Like emerald velvet, soft and smooth; and starts
Aside from the near waterfall, whose sheet
Winds foaming down the rocks precipitous,
Now seen, and now half-hidden by the trunks
Contorted, and the wide umbrageous boughs
Of time and tempest-nurtured woods. Away
From the sea-murmur ceaseless, up between
The green secluding hills, that hem it round
As 'twere with conscious love, stands Kelburn House,
With its grey turrets, in baronial state,
In the text, reference is made more to the situation of Kelburn Castle and its capabilities than either to its real antiquity, or to historical events connected with it. Its appearance under a fine April sunset, and the associations awakened by the surrounding scenery, were such as are there faintly delineated.
In a more concentrated form, (that of a square tower,) Castle Kelburn is, however, of very considerable antiquity, most of the present additions having been made by David, Earl of Glasgow. Richard Boyle, Dominus de Kaulburn, is mentioned in a transaction with Walter Cumyn in the reign of Alexander the Third, the hero of Largs; and Robert de Boyville of Kelburn, and Richard de Boyville of Ryesholm, were subscribers of the Ragiment Roll in 1296, both of which properties are to this day possessions of the family.
Kelburn Castle is thus noticed by old Pont:—“Kelburne Castell, a goodly building, veill planted, having werey beutifull orchards and gardens, and in one of them a spatious room adorned with a christalin fontane cutte all out of the living rocke. It belongs heritably to John Boll, laird thereof.”
A proud memento of the days when men
Thought but of war and safety. Stately pile
And lovely woods! not often have mine eyes
Gazed o'er a scene more picturesque, or more
Heart-touching in its beauty. Thou wert once
The guardian of these valleys, and the foe
Approaching heard, between himself and thee,
The fierce, down-thundering, mocking waterfall;
While, on thy battlements, in glittering mail,
The warder glided; and the sentinel,—
As neared the stranger horseman to thy gates,
And gave the pass-word, which no answer found,—
Plucked from his quiver the unerring shaft,
Which, from Kilwinning's spire, had oft brought down
The mock Papingo.
The Papingo is a bird less known to Sir William Jardine or to Mr James Wilson than to heraldry; and in the days when the bow and arrow were used in war throughout the whole of Europe, by several of the acts of the old Scotch Parliament, the young men of every parish were strictly commended, in spite of the Sir Andrew Agnews of their age, to practise archery, for an hour or two every Sunday, after divine service. When this custom fell into desuetude in almost every other quarter, archery appears to have remained even to our own day as a favourite recreation and accomplishment at Kilwinning, the most distinctive kind being the shooting at the Papingo, which is cut in wood, fixed in the end of a pole, and placed about a hundred and twenty feet high, on the steeple of the monastery, the archer who shoots it down being honoured with the title of Captain for the year. The laws and usages of the Company are known only by tradition prior to 1488, but from 1688 regular records have been kept. At this latter period a piece of plate was substituted for a sash, which had been the victor's reward from the former era. This sash, or benn, was a piece of taffeta or Persian, of different colours, chiefly red, green, white, and blue, and not less in value than £20 Scotch.
The festival of the Papingo is still annually held at Maybole, in the same county; and from a curious description of it in the history of the Somerville family, Sir Walter Scott acknowledges to have drawn the hint of the inimitable serio-comic descriptive scene in Old Mortality, wherein Goose Gobbie, in his negligé armour, runs full tilt at the Noah's ark carriage of Lady Margaret Bellenden, the unfailing remembrancer of King Charles the Second, of blessed memory.
Yet in thy quietude not desolate,
Down from thy verdant throne, upon the sea,
Which glitters like a sheet of molten gold,
Thou lookest thus, at eventide, while sets,
In opal and in amethystine hues,
The day o'er distant Arran, with its peaks
Sky-piercing, yet o'erclad with winter's snows
In desolate grandeur; and the cottaged fields
Of nearer Bute smile in their vernal green,
A picture of repose. High overhead
The gull, far-shrieking, through yon stern ravine
Of wild, rude rocks, where brawls the mountain stream,
Wings to the sea, and seeks, beyond its foams,
Its own precipitous cliff upon the coast
Of fair and fertile Cumbrae; while the rook,
Conscious of coming eventide, forsakes
The leafing woods, and round the chimneyed roofs
Caws as he wheels, alights, and then anon
Renews his circling flight in clamorous joy.
II.
Mountains that face bald Arran! though the sunNow, with the ruddy lights of eventide,
Gilds every pastoral summit on which Peace,
Like a descended angel, sits enthroned,
Forth gazing on a scene as beautiful
As Nature e'er outspread for mortal eye;
And but the voice of distant waterfall
Sings lullaby to bird and beast, and wings
Of insects murmurous, multitudinous,
And weave their elfin dance,—another time
And other tones were yours, when on each peak
At hand, and through Argyle and Lanark shires,
Startling black midnight, flared the beacon lights,
And when from out the west the castled steep
Of Broadwick reddened with responsive blaze.
An allusion is here made to the signal-light in the vicinity of Turnberry Castle, the ancient seat of the Earls of Carrick, the maternal ancestors of Bruce, by which the hero of Bannockburn was induced to enter Scotland; and which, though at first a source of disappointment, was the precursor of a series of successes, which terminated in the independence of his native country.
The whole circumstances are minutely described by Barbour, (Bruce, book iv. canto 1,) and with more than his wonted spirit and vivacity. So fine are his introductory lines, that Sir Walter Scott seems to think that they served as a model for the style of Gawain Douglas.
More beautiful, however, by far is the description in the fifth canto of the Lord of the Isles, stanza xiii.
“South and by west the armada bore,And near at length the Carrick shore;
As less and less the distance grows,
High and more high the beacon rose;
The light, that seemed a twinkling star.
Now blazed portentous, fierce, and far.
Dark-red the heaven above it glowed,
Dark-red the sea beneath it flowed,
Red rose the rocks on ocean's brim,
In blood-red light her islets swim;
Wild scream the dazzled sea-fowl gave,” &c.
A night was that of doubt and of suspense,
Of danger and of daring, in the which
The fate of Scotland in the balance hung
Trembling, and up and down wavered the scales;
But Hope grew brighter with the rising sun,
And Dawn looked out, to see upon the shore
The Bruce's standard floating on the gale,
A call to freedom!—barks from every isle
Pouring with clumps of spears!—from every dell
The throng of mail-clad men!—vassal and lord,
With ponderous curtal-axe, and broadsword keen,
Banner and bow; while, overhead, afar
And near, the bugles rang amid the rocks,
Echoing in wild reverberation shrill,
And scaring from his heathery lair the deer,
The osprey from his island cliff of rest.
III.
But not alone by that fierce trumpet-call,Through grove and glen, on mount and pastoral hill,
The brute and bird were roused—by it again,
And by the signal blaze upon the hills,
And by the circling of the fiery cross,
With swelling hearts and loud acclaim they heard
The summons, saw the signal, and cast off
With indignation in the dust the weeds
Of their inglorious thraldom. Every hearth
Wiped the red rust from its ancestral sword,
And sent it forth avenging to the field
In brightness—but with Freedom to be sheathed!
Yea, while the mother and the sister mourned,
And while the maiden, half-despairingly,
Wept for her love, who might return no more,
The grey-haired father, leaning on his staff,
Infirm, felt for a moment to his heart
The youthful fire return, and inly mourned
That he could do no more—no more than send
A blessing after his young gallant boy,
Armed for the battles of his native land,
Nor wished him back, unless with Freedom won!
IV.
To olden times my reveries have roamed—While twilight hangs above her silver star,
Which in the waveless deep reflected shines—
Have roamed to glory and war, and the fierce days
Of Scotland's renovation, when the Bruce
Beheld the sun of Bannockburn go down,
And wept for gladness that the land was free!
Fitful and fair, yet clouded with a haze,
As 'twere the mantle of uncertainty—
The veil of doubt—to memory awakes
(For but its flashing points to us remain)
Was half romance; and were it not that yet,
In stream, and crag, and isle, and crumbling walls
Of keep and castle, still remains to us
Physical proof that history is no mere
Hallucination, oftentimes the mind
(So different is the present from the past)
Would deem its pageant an illusion all.
V.
Arran, and Bute, and Cumbrae, and ye peaksGlowing like sapphires in the utmost west,
Sweet scenes of beauty and peace, farewell! The eyes
But of a passing visitor are mine
On you. Before this radiant eve, enshrined
For ever in my inmost soul, ye were
Known but in name; but now ye are mine own,
One of the pictures which fond memory,
In musing phantasy, will oft-times love
To conjure up, gleaning, amid the stir
And strife of multitudes, as 'twere repose,
By dwelling on the tranquil and serene!
| The Poetical Works of David Macbeth Moir | |