There stand the houses he has built--visible, tangible, delectable;
concrete proofs that he is no mere visionary.
And yet we may be sure the more frigid society of Edina still looks
askance on this dreamer in stone and fresco; for after all Edinburgh, as
Professor Blaekie said, is an "East-windy, west-endy city." Cold and
stately, it sits on its height with something of the austere mournfulness
of a ruined capital. But we did not concern ourselves about the legal and
scholastic quarters, the Professor and I. We penetrated into inhabited
interiors in the Closes, meeting strange female ruins on staircases, or
bonny housewives in bed-sitting-rooms, in one of which a sick husband lay
apologetically abed. And when even the Professor was forced at last to
take refuge from the driving rain, it was in John Knox's house that we
ensconced ourselves--the grim, unlovely house of the great Calvinist, the
doorway of which fanatically baptised me in a positive waterfall, and in
whose dark rooms, as the buxom care-taker declared in explaining the
presence of an empty cage, no bird could live. It is not only in its
Closes, methought, that Scotland needs regen eration. Many a spiritual
blind-alley has still to receive sunshine and air, "sweetness and light.
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