Note 33 — PART II.—1818–1822

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.”