These men did not consider that “the leprosy lies deep within,” and that when human nature is denied beautiful idols, it will go after ugly ones.  There has been just as unspiritual a resting in coarse, bare, and disagreeable adjuncts of religion, as in beautiful and agreeable ones; men have worshipped Juggernaut as pertinaciously as they have Venus or the Graces; so that the good divine might better have aimed a sermon at the heart than an axe at the altar.

We lingered a long time around here, and could scarcely tear ourselves away.  We paced up and down under the old trees, looking off on the waters of the Don, listening to the waving branches, and falling into a dreamy state of mind, thought what if it were six hundred years ago! and we were pious simple hearted old abbots!  What a fine place that would be to walk up and down at eventide or on a Sabbath morning, reciting the penitential psalms, or reading St. Augustine!

I cannot get over the feeling, that the souls of the dead do somehow connect themselves with the places of their former habitation, and that the hush and thrill of spirit, which we feel in them, may be owing to the overshadowing presence of the invisible.  St. Paul says, “We are compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses.”  How can they be witnesses, if they cannot see and be cognizant?

We left the place by a winding walk, to go to the famous bridge of Balgounie, another dream-land affair, not far from here.  It is a single gray stone arch, apparently cut from solid rock, that spans the brown rippling waters, where wild, overhanging banks, shadowy trees, and dipping wild flowers, all conspire to make a romantic picture.  This bridge, with the river and scenery, were poetic items that went, with other things, to form the sensitive mind of Byron, who lived here in his earlier days.  He has some lines about it:—­

  “As ‘auld lang syne’ brings Scotland, one and all,
    Scotch, plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills and clear streams,
  The Dee, the Don, Balgounie’s brig’s black wall,
    All my boy-feelings, all my gentler dreams,
  Of what I then dreamt clothed in their own pall,
    Like Banquo’s offspring,—­floating past me seems
  My childhood, in this childishness of mind: 
    I care not—­’tis a glimpse of ‘auld lang syne.’”

This old bridge has a prophecy connected with it, which was repeated to us, and you shall have it literatim:—­

  “Brig of Balgounie, black’s your wa’,
  Wi’ a wife’s ae son, and a mare’s a foal,
  Doon ye shall fa’!”

The bridge was built in the time of Robert Bruce, by one Bishop Cheyne, of whom all that I know is, that he evidently had a good eye for the picturesque.

After this we went to visit King’s College.  The tower of it is surmounted by a massive stone crown, which forms a very singular feature in every view of Aberdeen, and is said to be a perfectly unique specimen of architecture.  This King’s College is very old, being founded also by a bishop, as far back as the fifteenth century.  It has an exquisitely carved roof, and carved oaken seats.  We went through the library, the hall, and the museum.  Certainly, the old, dark architecture of these universities must tend to form a different style of mind from our plain matter-of-fact college buildings.