Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1879 - Edinburgh

26 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.
homely, with their gables and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and running mill-streams;
there were corners that smelt like the end of the country garden where I spent my Aprils ; and
the people stood to gossip at their doors, as they might have done in Colinton or Cramond.
In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate this haunting flavour of the country.
The last elm is dead in Elm Row ; and the villas and the workmen's quarters spread apace on
all the borders of the city. We can cut down the trees ; we can bury the grass under dead
paving-stones ; we can drive brisk streets through all our sleepy quarters ; and we may forget
the stories and the playgrounds of our boyhood. But we have some possessions that not even
the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills,
unless it be a cataclysm of nature which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle itself and lay all her
florid structures in the dust. And as long as we have the hills and the Firth, we have a
famous heritage to leave our children. Our windows, at no expense to us, are most artfully
stained to represent a landscape. And when the Spring comes round, and the hawthorn begins
to flower, and the meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of our streets, the
country hill-tops find out a young man's eyes, and set his heart beating for travel and pure air.