From the crest of the road you see all the Border hills, the
Maiden Paps, the Eildons cloven in three, the Dunion, the Windburg, and
so to the distant Cheviots, and Smailholm Tower, where Scott lay when a
child, and clapped his hands at the flashes of the lightning, _haud sine
Dis animosus infans_, like Horace.
From the crest of the hill you follow Dr. Brown into the valley of
Yarrow, and the deep black pools, now called the "dowie dens," and so,
"through the pomp of cultivated nature," as Wordsworth says, to the
railway at Selkirk, passing the plain where Janet won back Tamlane from
the queen of the fairies. All this country was familiar to Dr. Brown,
and on one of the last occasions when I met him, he was living at
Hollylea, on the Tweed, just above Ashestiel, Scott's home while he was
happy and prosperous, before he had the unhappy thought of building
Abbotsford. At the time I speak of, Dr. Brown had long ceased to write,
and his health suffered from attacks of melancholy, in which the world
seemed very dark to him. I have been allowed to read some letters which
he wrote in one of these intervals of depression. With his habitual
unselfishness, he kept his melancholy to himself, and, though he did not
care for society at such times, he said nothing of his own condition that
could distress his correspondent. In the last year of his life,
everything around him seemed to brighten: he was unusually well, he even
returned to his literary work, and saw his last volume of collected
essays through the press.
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