Thursday, 21st.  We took cars for Aberdeen.  The appropriation of old historical names to railroad stations often reminds me of Hood’s whimsical lines on a possible railroad in the Holy Land.  Think of having Bannockburn shouted by the station master, as the train runs whistling up to a small station house.  Nothing to be seen there but broad, silent meadows, through which the burn wimples its way.  Here was the very Marathon of Scotland.  I suppose we know more about it from the “Scots wha ha’ wi’ Wallace bled,” than we do from history; yet the real scene, as narrated by the historian, has a moral grandeur in it.

The chronicler tells us, that when on this occasion the Scots formed their line of battle, and a venerable abbot passed along, holding up the cross before them, the whole army fell upon their knees.

“These Scots will not fight,” said Edward, who was reconnoitring at a distance.  “See! they are all on their knees now to beg for mercy.”

“They kneel,” said a lord who stood by, “but it is to God alone; trust me, those men will win or die.”

The bold lyric of Burns is but an inspired kind of version of the real address which Bruce is said to have made to his followers; and whoever reads it will see that its power lies not in appeal to brute force, but to the highest elements of our nature, the love of justice, the sense of honor, and to disinterestedness, self-sacrifice, courage unto death.

These things will live and form high and imperishable elements of our nature, when mankind have learned to develop them in other spheres than that of physical force.  Burns’s lyric, therefore, has in it an element which may rouse the heart to noble endurance and devotion, even when the world shall learn war no more.

We passed through the town of Stirling, whose castle, magnificently seated on a rocky throne, looks right worthy to have been the seat of Scotland’s court, as it was for many years.  It brought to our minds all the last scenes of the Lady of the Lake, which are laid here with a minuteness of local description and allusion characteristic of Scott.

According to our guide book, one might find there the visible counterpart of every thing which he has woven into his beautiful fiction—­“the Lady’s Rock, which rang to the applause of the multitude;” “the Franciscan steeple, which pealed the merry festival;” “the sad and fatal mound,” apostrophized by Douglas,—­

  “That oft has heard the death-axe sound
  As on the noblest of the land,
  Fell the stern headsman’s bloody hand;”—­

the room in the castle, where “a Douglas by his sovereign bled;” and not far off the ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey.  One could not but think of the old days Scott has described.

  “The castle gates were open flung,
  The quivering drawbridge rocked and rung,
  And echoed loud the flinty street
  Beneath the coursers’ clattering feet,
  As slowly down the steep descent
  Fair Scotland’s king and nobles went,
  While all along the crowded way
  Was jubilee and loud huzza.”