Already, at the early time of which we speak, something of this work had been begun. There were gaps in the high forest where it lay well to the sun: little clearings marked by the ridge and furrow of a rude agriculture. Here and there a baron’s lonely tower raised its grey horn on high, sheltering a troop of men-at-arms who made it their business to guard the land in war, and in peace to rid it of the savage forest-creatures that hindered the hind and herd in their labour and their hope. In the main valleys more than one great monastery was rising, or already built, by the waters of Tweed and Teviot. The inmates of these religious houses took their share in the whole duty of peaceful Scottish men by following trades at home or superintending the labours of an army of hinds who broke in and made profitable the wide abbey lands scattered here and there over many a lowland county. All was energy, action, and progress: a form of life which left but little room for the enterprises of the mind, the conflicts and conquests which can alone be known and won in the world of thought within. These conditions we know to have reared and trained generations of men well fitted to follow the pursuits of hardy and active life, yet they cannot have been so constraining as to hinder the birth of some at least who possessed an altogether different temper of mind and body. The lowland Scots were even then of a mixed race: the ancestry which tends more than any other to the production of life-eddies, where thought rather than activity naturally forms and dwells, while the current of the main stream sweeps past in its ordinary course. Grant the appearance of such natures here and there in these early times, and it is easy to see much in the only life then possible that was fit to foster their natural tendencies. The deep woodlands were not only scenes of labour where sturdy arms found constant employment, they were homes of mystery in which the young imagination loved to dwell; peopling them with half-human shapes more graceful than their stateliest trees, and half-brutal monsters more terrible than the fiercest wolf or bear. The distant sun and stars were more than a heavenly horologe set to mark the hours for labour or vigil, they were an unexplored scene of wonder which patient and brooding thought alone could reach and interpret. The trivial flight and annual return of birds, tracing like the wild geese a mysterious wedge against the sky of winter, gave more than a signal for the chase, which was all that ordinary men saw in it. To these finer natures it brought the awakening which those know who have learned to ask the mighty questions—Why? Whence? and Whither? demands which will not be denied till they have touched the heights and fathomed the depths of human life itself. _Our life is a bird_, said one in these early ages, _which flies by night, and, entering lighted hall at one end, swiftly passeth out at the other.