But the streams of
Scotland are incomparable in themselves - or I am only the more
Scottish to suppose so - and their sound and colour dwell for ever
in the memory. How often and willingly do I not look again in
fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling
in its Lynn; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn
that pours and sulks in the den behind Kingussie! I think shame to
leave out one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too
long if I remembered all; only I may not forget Allan Water, nor
birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its pollutions,
that Water of Leith of the many and well-named mills - Bell's
Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn of
pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless
trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed
from Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss
under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a
rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then
kidnapped in its infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of
the sea-beholding city in the plain. From many points in the moss
you may see at one glance its whole course and that of all its
tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its
corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be breathed;
Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent cantons on
a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it would seem
to the in-expert, in superfluity) upon these upland sheepwalks; a
bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river; it would
take it an appreciable time to fill your morning bath; for the most
part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the
sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain GENIUS LOCI, I
am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the
nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my
pen, I would gladly carry the reader along with me.
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