The substance of the paper must have been retained in Carlyle’s
memory, for he described to me once with extraordinary vividness
his first sight of the Vale of Yarrow as he struck it in one
of his walks to Annandale. It was a beautiful day, and he had
come upon a height looking down upon the stony stream and its
classic valley. As he stood and gazed, with something in his mind
of Wordsworth’s salutation, “And this is Yarrow!”, up from the
valley there came a peculiar, repeated, rhythmical sound, as of
_clink_—_clink_—_clink_, for which he could not
account. All was solitary and quiet otherwise, but still the
_clink_—_clink_—_clink_ rose to his ear. At last, some
way off, he saw a man with a cart standing in the bed of the stream,
and lifting stone after stone from it, which he threw into the cart.
He could then watch the gesture of each cast of a stone in among the
rest, and note the interval before the _clink_ reached him.—The
Yarrow songs were familiar to Carlyle; and among the many scraps of
old verse which he was fond of quoting or humming to himself in his
later years I observed this in particular:—
“But Minstrel Burn cannot assuage
His grief while life endureth,
To see the changes of this age,
Which fleeting time procureth;
For mony a place stands in hard case
Where joy was wont beforrow,
With Humes that dwelt on Leader braes,
And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow.”
Footnote 34:
See the article _Some Fifty Years Ago_ in Fraser’s
Magazine for June 1879, by Mr. Allingham, then Editor of the Magazine.
Footnote 35:
Dr. Hill Burton’s Reminiscences of Professor Wilson, published in
_Wilson’s Life_ by Mrs. Gordon, ii. 25.
Footnote 36:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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