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466 PRÆTERITA-II
234. But my reason for quoting this piece of Guy Mannering here is to explain to the reader who cares to know it, the difference between the Scotch “mind” for “remember,” and any other phrase of any other tongue, applied to the act of memory.
In order that you may, in the Scottish sense, “mind” anything, first there must be something to “mind”-and then, the “mind” to mind it. In a thousand miles of iron railway, or railway train, there is nothing in one rod or bar to distinguish it from another. You can’t “mind” which sleeper is which. Nor, on the other hand, if you drive from Chillon to Vevay, asleep, can you “mind” the characteristics of the lake of Geneva. Meg could not have expected Bertram to “mind” at what corner of a street in Manchester-or in what ditch of the Isle of Dogs-anything had past directly bearing on his own fate. She expected him to “mind” only a beautiful scene, of perfect individual character, and she would not have expected him to “mind” even that, had she not known he had persevering sense and memorial powers of very high order.
Now it is the peculiar character of Scottish as distinct from all other scenery on a small scale in north Europe, to have these distinctively “mindable” features. One range of coteau by a French river is exactly like another; one turn of glen in the Black Forest is only the last turn re-turned; one sweep of Jura pasture and crag, the mere echo of the fields and crags of ten miles away. But in the whole course of Tweed, Teviot, Gala, Tay, Forth, and Clyde, there is perhaps scarcely a bend of ravine, or nook of valley, which would not be recognizable by its inhabitants from every other. And there is no other country in which the roots of memory are so entwined with the beauty of nature, instead of the pride of men; no other in which the song of “Auld lang syne” could have been written,-or Lady Nairne’s ballad of “The Auld House.”1
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1 [Hardly a ballad; the song may be found at p. 13 of Life and Songs of the Baroness Nairne (1869).]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
