The fact is, there can be no reliable character which has not its basis in these strong qualities.  The beautiful must ever rest in the arms of the sublime.  The gentle needs the strong to sustain it, as much as the rock flowers need rocks to grow on, or yonder ivy the rugged wall which it embraces.  When we are admiring these things, therefore, we are only admiring some sparkles and glimmers of that which is divine, and so coming nearer to Him in whom all fulness dwells.

After admiring at a distance, we strolled through the ruins themselves.  Do you remember, in the Lady of the Lake, where the exiled Douglas, recalling to his daughter the images of his former splendor, says,—­

  “When Blantyre hymned, her holiest lays,
  And Bothwell’s walls flung back the praise”?

These lines came forcibly to my mind, when I saw the mouldering ruins of Blantyre priory rising exactly opposite to the castle, on the other side of the Clyde.

The banks of the River Clyde, where we walked, were thick set with Portuguese laurel, which I have before mentioned as similar to our rhododendron.  I here noticed a fact with regard to the ivy which had often puzzled me; and that is, the different shapes of its leaves in the different stages of its growth.  The young ivy has this leaf; but when it has become more than a century old every trace and indentation melts away, and it assumes this form, which I found afterwards to be the invariable shape of all the oldest ivy, in all the ruins of Europe which I explored.

This ivy, like the spider, takes hold with her hands in kings’ palaces, as every twig is furnished with innumerable little clinging fingers, by which it draws itself close, as it were, to the very heart of the old rough stone.

Its clinging and beautiful tenacity has given rise to an abundance of conceits about fidelity, friendship, and woman’s love, which have become commonplace simply from their appropriateness.  It might, also, symbolize that higher love, unconquerable and unconquered, which has embraced this ruined world from age to age, silently spreading its green over the rents and fissures of our fallen nature, giving “beauty for ashes, and garments of praise for the spirit of heaviness.”

There is a modern mansion, where the present proprietor of the estate lives.  It was with an emotion partaking of the sorrowful, that we heard that the Douglas line, as such, was extinct, and that the estate had passed to distant connections.  I was told that the present Lord Douglas is a peaceful clergyman, quite a different character from old Archibald the Grim.