HOLIDAYS ON HIGH LANDS.•
THE rambles which Mr. Macmillan describes in this pleasant volume led him to the summits of several Highland mountains, to the fjords and fjelds of Norway, and to the Hospice of the Great St. Bernard. Professing all the time to be only in search of Alpine plants, putting himself forward as a mere humble botanist, Mr. Macmillan is really a sharp observer of everything that comes in his way. His is not the " leaden eye that loves the ground." It is perfectly true that he does look out for specimens of flowers, and that he can tell us an immense deal about botany in a most attractive way. Even those who know nothing of flowers except their names, and only know their names because they are long and unintelligible, will be interested in Mr. Macmillan's details, while those who love flowers without understanding them will find a new light dawn from his pages. But there is much more in his book than this. Ile sketches scenery with a vividness and a power that brings not only the broad features of the landscape, but its minor tints and subdued harmonies, before us. While he is on the Highland mountains he confines himself chiefly to nature. He is alter- nately a botanical and a geological lecturer, turning every now and then from the objects at his feet to the more distant views of plain and mountain range, and from the earth to the sky. Strange as the confession may seem, he admits that he was once beguiled from the task of gathering moss by the sight of a mag- nificent sunset. Once, too, he is betrayed into an avowal that he has often felt as if he would willingly give up all his knowledge of the structure and history of certain obscure botanical specimens, in exchange for the childish wonder with which he formerly regarded them. " We men," he adds, and though it may be true of many, it is not true of Mr. Macmillan, " have outgrown the flower and all its mystical loveliness." Such a complaint is sufficiently answered by the book itself. It is quite impossible for us to feel that
"Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour is the grass, of glory in the flower," when we find that some of the most familiar plants are charged • Holidays on High Lands; or, Rambles and Incidents in Search of Alpine Plants. By Bev. Hugh Macmillan. London: Macmillan. 1869. with the highest destiny. In his earlier days, Mr. Macmillan could not trace the submerged chain of islands or ridge of hills which ran from the south-west of Ireland to the north of Spain, as he now can by the help of the common flower known as London pride. When he trod on his native heather he did not know that the range of the heath tribe was eminently Atlantic or Western, that it abounded on the European side of the Ural Mountains, but disappeared suddenly on their eastern declivity, and that while it was entirely absent from the whole of Northern Asia to the shores of the Pacific, it was found along a comparatively nar- row line drawn from the north of Norway, along the west coast of Europe and Africa, down to the Cape of Good Hope. To our minds, there is much more in such facts as these to excite wonder, than there is in legends about the blood of martyred saints being transmuted into lichens.
When Mr. Macmillan leaves his native land for Norway and the Great St. Bernard, he becomes as genial a traveller as he was hitherto a pleasing instructor. The science to which he is devoted is still kept in view, and becomes, as it were, the centre of all his observations, but his range of vision is extended. He takes in the daily incidents of travel, the humours of his fellow-tourists, the manners and customs of the natives. At the Great St. Bernard, for instance, he points a striking contrast between the tolerance of the monks and the bigotry of some of their visitors. A week before Mr. Macmillan's visit to the Hospice an English clergyman happened to be there on a Sunday, and as there were several of his country- men there, he asked leave to read the Anglican service to them in the refectory. His request " was not only granted with the utmost cordiality, but the chapel itself was offered to him for the purpose." How such charity as this was repaid by some of the guests appears from what Mr. Macmillan himself witnessed. The monks make no charge for their hospitality, and a good many travellers will not contribute in any way towards the expenses of the establish- ment. "There was one Scotchman present," writes Mr. Macmillan, " who carried out his sound Protestant principles at the expense of the poor monks. He was a very thin, wiry man, but he ate an enormous supper and breakfast. He drank a bottle of wine at each meal, and helped himself most largely to everything on the table. He took what would have sufficed for four ordinary men, and, to our intense dis- gust, he rubbed down his stomach complacently in the morning ere departing, and said, in the hearing of all, that he had made up his mind to put nothing in the alms-box, lest he should coun- tenance popery." We may charitably hope that this bigotry was assumed as a cloak for meanness. Yet we cannot be too sure of that. The two very often go together, and are always ready to combine when there is a question of money. If one could dive into the breasts of those Middlesex magistrates who refuse Roman Catholic prisoners the services of their Church, meanness might perhaps be found there as well as bigotry. Mr. Macmillan may well have felt ashamed of his countryman who availed himself thus of gratuitous hospitality. But is there not a kindred spirit in the exclusiveness of those great landed proprietors who are censured far too gently for shutting out tourists and savants from the wildest scenery in Scotland ? The divine right of grouse can hardly be stronger than the divine right of intolerance. Again, Mr. Macmillan justly reproves those who run through Norway, expecting to find there all the comforts of Switzerland, and who fill the day-books with complaints that
they can't get toothpicks. People must be prepared to rough it to some extent in a country where there are no public convey- ances, and where inns are kept open by law rather than as a speculation. The expenses of Norwegian travel are, as Mr. Mac- millan truly observes, moderate in the extreme, ten shillings a day being an ample allowance. But Mr. Macmillan must have been ex- ceptionally fortunate in finding the larder well supplied with salmon, trout, beefsteaks, and eggs. Even in a place which Murray has not
visited the table was loaded with fish, flesh, and fowl, and this is so contrary to our own experience, that we can only account for it by personal considerations. There must be something so cheerful and genial in Mr. Macmillan's appearance as to unlock the hearts and larders of Norwegian innkeepers, while the sight or a reviewer chills them, and makes them stow away all their provisions. The description of the Skjeggedal-foss, a fall which, as Mr. Macmillan informs us, is not mentioned in Murray, adds a new sight to Norway, and will assist the tourists of this summer to a fresh attraction. This fall is in the Hardanger district, and is reached by a more difficult path than that which leads to the Wiring-foss. At least this is the impression conveyed by the following paragraph :— " We had now reached the highest point of the ascent, and were con- gratulating ourselves that all danger and cause of fear to weak nerves were past, when we came to a staircase that beat all structures of the kind I have ever seen. It descended for about twelve yards at an angle of some fifty-five degrees, and consisted of rough, irregular steps pro- jecting an inch or two beyond each other. On the one side was a lofty wall of rock, dripping wet, and covered with bright green mosses and gelatinous masses of vegetable growth, so that there was very little bold for the hands, while on the other there was a sheer precipice, and far below a raging torrent falling into a hideously black lion; and from this danger there was nothing, not even the slightest handrail, to give one a feeling of security. It was a place to try the nerves even of a member of the Alpine Club. We crawled down, clinging to every pro- jection with tooth and nail, the calves of our legs all the time trembling like a jelly. When we got safely to the bottom, we thought that we had accomplished a feat to be proud of all our days, but our vanity received a severe shock when the guide, looking back upon the stair- case, said in the most matter-of-fact voice, 'De/ er and plods for hesten' (That is a bad place for horses). After all, we had only done what a quadruped was in the habit of doing ; though how a great long creature like a horse could manage to come down this break-nook place, with nothing to cling to, was a puzzle which I cannot yet understand. I can only say that I should like to see him at it."
The way to the Voring-foss is arduous enough, but at least it can be ridden. The cliff you have to scale, picking your way among fallen boulders, and looking up every now and then to the beetling crags above which seem to shut in the world, is, after all, not more formidable than the bridleroads in Madeira. On reaching the top you pass over a spongy moor towards an ever-rising cloud, and a roar that grows louder and louder. We do not gather with certainty from this book whether Mr. Macmillan visited the Voring-foss, but if he did, he failed to get the best view of it, and he hardly does it justice :— " The spectacle is indeed grand beyond description ; but it labours under the great disadvantage that it cannot be seen from below. I believe that ona or two daring eragsrnen succeeded in getting pretty near the foot of it ; but their view of the waterfall was greatly ob- structed by a projecting rock. The ordinary tourist sees it from the edge of a great precipice at a considerable height above the top of the falL Keeping a, firm hold of the guide's hand—if you have sufficient nerve and ara not oppressed with giddiness—you can bend your body half over, and look down into the awful abyss filled with seething waters and blinding mists. A vision of a great white mass of foam falling, minute after minute, pausing as it were at intervals in mid-air, but still falling down, down, far out of sight into the bowels of the earth, with a roar that seems to shake the rocks to their foundations, is caught dur- ing the frenzied gaze, and photographed upon the memory for ever. Woe betide the unhappy tourist who is seized by nightmare the first
time he goes to sleep after having stood on this giddy height !"
The only satisfactory view of the fall is to be had by crossing the river a little way above, and making your way to a sort of curve or bay in the rock directly facing the fall, and nearly level with it. From this point you have, indeed, a magnificent sight. Whether the fall be really 900 feet, or only 500 as some recent sceptics contend, the straight, solid, seething column plunges down like the pillar of cloud which guided Israel, so close to the rock that it seems to be hollowing itself a funnel, save where a projecting ledge throws off a heavy fold of foam from the side, and makes it lap over the body of the fall, or where at the bottom the fall itself is lost in smoke and writhing vapours. Had Mr. Macmillan seen the Voring-foss from this side, he might have been more ready to pronounce on the comparative merits of that fall and the one he discovered. As we preceded him by some seven or eight years, we do not suppose we heard even the name of the Skjeggedal-foss, and certainly hearing the name would no more assist us to form a conception of the fall than to realize the letters which make up so appalling a word. We can, however, assure Mr. Macmillan that he who has only seen the Voring-foss from its left side has not seen it. When Mr. Macmillan next goes to Norway, as we hope he will, he must remember this advice, and when he writes more Holidays on High Lands (which is not so much a matter of hope as of urgent entreaty), he must show that he has profited by it.
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