Quotes by R. B. Cunninghame Graham

“No one doubts that eventually the Matabele will be conquered, and that our flag will wave triumphantly over the remnant of them in the same way it waves triumphantly over the workhouse pauper and the sailors' poor whore in the east end of London. Let it wave on over an empire reaching from north to south, from east to west, wave over every island, hitherto ungrabbed, on every sterile desert and fever-haunted swamp as yet unclaimed, over the sealer amid the icebergs, stripping the fur from the live seal, on purpose to oblige a lady; over the abandoned transport camel, perishing of thirst in the Sudan: and still keep waving over Leicester Square, where music halls at night belch out crowds of stout imperialists.””

“Of all the towns of the department of Bolivar, Cartegena is the most picturesque. Not only is it the most old-world town of the department, but of the whole Republic and perhaps of the whole continent of South America... [it] was once the place of meeting of the great Plate fleet, that took the silver gathered together from all the mines of the New World, across the sea to Spain. Many a time the British and French corsairs hung off and on, just out of sight of land, to attack with varying degrees of success.””

“The matter slipped my memory, under the pressure of dressing and undressing, taking railway tickets, missing trains, attending churches, theatres, reading speeches and share lists, talking of art and science with others to the full as ignorant of both as myself, and in the exercise of the futilities during the course of which we find one day our hair is grey, our teeth decaying, and death near at hand.””

“Still I maintain that in the Scotland of to-day there yet remain some types which differ from the types set forth by Kailyard novelists. Of course I know that virtue which has long left London and the South still lingers about Ecclefechan, I know a Scotsman is a grave sententious man, oppressed with the difficulty of the jargon he is bound to speak, and weighed down by the sense of being a North Briton. I know he prays to Mr. Gladstone and Jehovah, time about, finds his amusement in comparing preachers, can read and write, buys newspapers, tells stories about ministers, and generally deports himself in a manner which would land a weaker man in idiocy within a fortnight.””

“Ye ken, man laird, while I just dive richt to the bottom o a linn, and set doon there; ye'd think it was the inside o the Fairy Hill. Trooties, ye ken, and saumon, and they awfu pike, a comin round ye, and they bits o water weeds, waggin aboot like lairch trees in the blast. I mind ae time I stoppit doon nigh aboot half an hour. Maybe no just sae much, ye ken, but time gaes awfu quick when ye're at the bottom o a linn.””

“Right at the summit of the pass it lies, nothing above it but the sky. On every side the billowing heather-clad hills engirdle it about. Flat stones encircle it, and on its surface water spiders walk. Red persicaria, with its wax-like stalks and ragged leaves, grows by its edge. Below it stretches out a vast brown moss, honeycombed here and there with black peat hags., and a dark lake spreads out, ringed on one side by moss, and on the other set like a jewel in a pine wood, with a white stretch of silver sand. On it are islands with great sycamores and chestnuts, stag-headed but still vigorous, and round their shores the bulrushes keep watch like sentinels. Mists rise from the moss and lake and creep about the corries of the hills, blending the woods and rocks into steamy chaos, vast and unfathomable, through which a little burn unseen, but musical, runs tinkling through the stones. So at the little the well lies open to the sky, too high for the lake mists to touch it, as it looks up at the stars.””

“Highlanders, driving their "creagh" toward Balquhidder, passed, their moccasin-clad feet leaving as little impress on the mist as they had left in life upon the tussocks of bent-grass. They urged the shadowy cattle with the ponts of their Lochaber axes; and last of all, wrapped in his plaid, his thick hair curling close about his hard-lined features, passed one I knew at once by his great length of arm and red beard, on which the damp hung in a frosty dew, just as it hung upon the coats of the West Highland kyloes that he drove before him on the rode. Though for two hundred years he had slept well in the lone graveyard of the deserted church beside Loch Voil, he seemed to know the road as perfectly as he had known it in his old foraying days. As he passed he moved his target forward and his hand stole to his sword, as if he recognised one of his ancient foes. Then he was swallowed up by the same mist that had protected him so often in his life.””

“The shapes I seemed to see - or saw, for if a man sees visions with the interior sight he sees them, fo himself at least, as surely as if he saw them with the outward eye - loomed lofty and gigantic, and peopled once again Menteith with riders, as it was peopled in the past. The shadowy and ill-starred earls, their armour always a decade out of fashion, and now and then surmounted by a Highland bonnet set with an eagle's feather, giving them the air half of the Saxon half of the Kelt, their horses lank and ill-groomed, their followers talking in shrill Gaelic seemed to defile along the road. Their blood was redder than the King's, their purses lighter than an empty bean-pod after harvest, and still they had an air of pride, but all looked "fey", as if misfortune had set its seal upon their race.””

“Fell opportunity that has so often turned saints into sinners could have had no place upon the rocky islet in the lake. The voices of the sisters singing in the choir must have been scarce distinguishable from the lapping of the wavelets on the beach, or blending with them, made up a harmony, as if nature and man were joining in a pantheistic hymn. Nuns may have lived upon the Island with, or without vocation, have eaten out their hearts with longing for their lost world, or, like the Saint of Avila, in mystic ecstasy have striven to be one with the celestial spouse. All this may well have been, but the dim sisterhood has left no record of its passage upon earth, except the name Inch Cailleach, beautiful in its liquid likeness to the sound of the murmuring waves, and the wind sighing in the brackens and the bents.””