However, one does do at Rome as the Romans do, and fishes for salmon in Tweed when the nets are off in October, when the yellowing leaves begin to fall, and when that beautiful reach of wooded valley from Elibank to the meeting of Tweed and Ettrick is in the height of its autumnal charm. Why has Yarrow been so much more besung than Tweed, in spite of the greater stream’s far greater and more varied loveliness? The fatal duel in the Dowie Dens of Yarrow and the lamented drowning of Willie there have given the stream its ‘pastoral melancholy,’ and engaged Wordsworth in the renown of the water. For the poetry of Tweed we have chiefly, after Scott, to thank Mr. Stoddart, its loyal minstrel. “Dearer than all these to me,” he says about our other valleys, “is sylvan Tweed.”
Let ither anglers choose their ain,
And ither waters tak’ the
lead
O’ Hieland streams we covet
nane,
But gie to us the bonny Tweed;
And gie to us the cheerfu’
burn,
That steals into its valley fair,
The streamlets that, at ilka turn,
Sae saftly meet and mingle there.
He kept his promise, given in the following verse:
And I, when to breathe is a labour,
and joy
Forgets me, and life is no longer
the boy,
On the labouring staff, and the
tremorous knee,
Will wander, bright river, to thee!
Life is always “the boy” when one is beside the Tweed. Times change, and we change, for the worse. But the river changes little. Still he courses through the keen and narrow rocks beneath the bridge of Yair.
From Yair, which hills so closely
bind,
Scarce can the Tweed his passage
find,
Though much he fret, and chafe,
and toil,
Till all his eddying currents boil.
Still the water loiters by the long boat-pool of Yair, as though loath to leave the drooping boughs of the elms. Still it courses with a deep eddy through the Elm Wheel, and ripples under Fernilea, where the author of the “Flowers of the Forest” lived in that now mouldering and roofless hall, with the peaked turrets. Still Neidpath is fair, Neidpath of the unhappy maid, and still we mark the tiny burn at Ashiesteil, how in November,
Murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen,
Through bush and briar, no longer
green,
An angry brook, it sweeps the glade,
Brawls over rock and wild cascade,
And foaming brown, with doubled
speed,
Hurries its waters to the Tweed.
Still the old tower of Elibank is black and strong in ruin; Elibank, the home of that Muckle Mou’d Meg, who made Harden after all a better bride than he would have found in the hanging ash-tree of her father. These are unaltered, mainly, since Scott saw them last, and little altered is the homely house of Ashiesteil, where he had been so happy. And we, too, feel but little change among those scenes of long ago, those best-beloved haunts of boyhood, where we have had so many good days and bad, days of rising trout and success; days of failure, and even of half-drowning.