On the morning of the battle of Bothwell Bridge, that sore defeat to the
Covenanters—so vigorously described by Scott in his “Old Mortality”—Mr.
John Cameron, minister at Lochhead in Kintyre, fell into a fit of melancholy, so
that Mr. Morison, of his elders, observing him through his chamber door, sore
weeping and wringing his hands, knocked until he opened to him. Then he asked
what was the matter? Were his wife and children well? “Little matter for them,”
he answered; “our friends at Bothwell are gone.” Mr. Morison told him it might
be a mistake, and the offcome of his gloomy thoughts: “No, no,” said he, “I see
them flying as clearly as I see the wall.” As near as they could calculate by the
accounts they afterwards obtained, this incident at the Lochhead of Kintyre was
contemporaneous with the flight of the Covenanters at Bothwell.
Munro, the Scotch soldier of fortune, who bore himself so gallantly in the wars
of Gustavus Adolphus, tells a story of a vision that was seen by a soldier of his
company on the morning of the storm of Stralsund in 1628. One Murdo
Macleod, born in Assen, a soldier of tall stature and valiant courage, being
sleeping on his watch, awoke at break of day, and “jogged” two of his comrades
lying by him, much to their indignation at his “stirring them.” He replied:
“Before long, you shall be otherwise stirred.” A soldier called Allan Tough, a
Lochaber man, recommending his soul to GOD, asked him what he had seen:
“That you shall never behold your country again.” The other replied, the loss
was but small, if the rest of the company were well. He answered: “No, for there
was great hurt and dearth of many very near.” The other again asked, what
others he had seen who would perish. He then told by name sundry of his
comrades who would be killed. The other asked, what would become of himself.
Eventually, he described by their clothes all the officers who would be hurt. “A
pretty quick boy near by,” asked him, what would become of the Major (that is,
Munro himself?) “He would be shot, but not deadly,” was the answer,—and so it
proved.
A good deal is said of this Taisch, or “Second Sight,” in Dr. Johnson’s “Journey
to the Hebrides,” and some striking anecdotes are told. It was just the thing to
interest his moody temperament, with its terrible dread of death and its longing
to lift the curtain that hides from us the Unseen. He seems, however, to have
been unable to convince himself of the actual existence of such a power; all the
evidence he could collect failed to advance his curiosity to conviction, so that he
could not believe, while remaining willing to believe. To use the noble words of
Goethe, nobly rendered by Coleridge:
“As the sun,