Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

J >> John Wilson >> Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2




The great ornithologists and the true are the authorities that are
constantly correcting those errors of popular opinion about the fowls of
the air, which in every country, contrary to the evidence of the senses,
and in spite of observations that may be familiar to all, gain credence
with the weak and ignorant, and in process of time compose even a sort
of system of the vilest superstition. It would be a very curious inquiry
to trace the operation of the causes that, in different lands, have
produced with respect to birds national prejudices of admiration or
contempt, love or even hatred; and in doing so, we should have to open
up some strange views of the influence of imagination on the head and
heart. It may be remarked that an excuse will be generally found for
such fallacies in the very sources from which they spring; but no excuse
can be found--on the contrary, in every sentence the fool scribbles, a
glaring argument is shown in favour of his being put to a lingering and
cruel death--the fool who keeps gossiping every week in the year,
penny-a-line-wise, with a gawky face and a mawkish mind, about God's
creatures to whom reason has been denied, but instinct given, in order
that they may be happy on moor and mountain, in the hedge-roots and on
the tops of heaven-kissing trees--by the side of rills whose sweet low
voice gives no echo in the wild, and on the hollow thunder of seas on
which they sit in safety around the sinking ship, or from all her
shrieks flee away to some island and are at rest.

Turn to the true Ornithologist, and how beautiful, each in the
adaptation of its own structure to its own life, every bird that walks
the land, wades the water, or skims the air! In his pages, pictured by
pen or pencil, all is wondrous--as nature ever is to

"The quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on its own heart,"

even while gazing on the inferior creatures of that creation to which we
belong, and are linked in being's mysterious chain--till our breath,
like theirs, expire. All is wondrous--but nothing monstrous in his
delineations--for the more we know of nature in her infinite varieties,
her laws reveal themselves to us in more majestic simplicity, and we are
inspired with awe, solemn but sweet, by the incomprehensible, yet in
part comprehended, magnificence of Truth. The writings of such men are
the gospel of nature--and if the apocrypha be bound up along with
it--'tis well; for in it, too, there is felt to be inspiration--and
when, in good time, purified from error, the leaves all make but one
Bible.

Hark to the loud, clear, mellow, bold song of the BLACKBIRD. There he
flits along upon a strong wing, with his yellow bill visible in
distance, and disappears in the silent wood. Not long silent. It is a
spring-day in our imagination--his clay-wall nest holds his mate at the
foot of the Silver-fir, and he is now perched on its pinnacle. That
thrilling hymn will go vibrating down the stem till it reaches her
brooding breast. The whole vernal air is filled with the murmur and the
glitter of insects; but the blackbird's song is over all other symptoms
of love and life, and seems to call upon the leaves to unfold into
happiness. It is on that one Tree-top, conspicuous among many thousands
on the fine breast of wood--here and there, a pine mingling not unmeetly
with the prevailing oak--that the forest-minstrel sits in his
inspirations. The rock above is one which we have often climbed. There
lies the glorious Loch and all its islands--one dearer than the rest to
eye and imagination, with its old Religious House--year after year
crumbling away unheeded into more entire ruin. Far away, a sea of
mountains, with all their billowing summits distinct in the sky, and now
uncertain and changeful as the clouds. Yonder Castle stands well on the
peninsula among the trees which the herons inhabit. Those coppice-woods
on the other shore, stealing up to the heathery rocks and sprinkled
birches, are the haunts of the roe. That great glen, that stretches
sullenly away into the distant darkness, has been for ages the birth and
the death-place of the red-deer. The cry of an Eagle! There he hangs
poised in the sunlight, and now he flies off towards the sea. But again
the song of our BLACKBIRD rises like "a steam of rich distilled
perfumes," and our heart comes back to him upon the pinnacle of his own
Home-tree. The source of song is yet in the happy creature's heart--but
the song itself has subsided, like a rivulet that has been rejoicing in
a sudden shower among the hills; the bird drops down among the balmy
branches, and the other faint songs which that bold anthem had drowned,
are heard at a distance, and seem to encroach every moment on the
silence.

You say you greatly prefer the song of the THRUSH. Pray, why set such
delightful singers by the ears? We dislike the habit that very many
people have of trying everything by a scale. Nothing seems to them to be
good positively--only relatively. Now, it is true wisdom to be charmed
with what is charming, to live in it for the time being, and compare the
emotion with no former emotion whatever--unless it be unconsciously in
the working of an imagination set agoing by delight. Although,
therefore, we cannot say that we prefer the Thrush to the Blackbird, yet
we agree with you in thinking him a most delightful bird. Where a Thrush
is, we defy you to anticipate his song in the morning. He is indeed an
early riser. By the way, Chanticleer is far from being so. You hear him
crowing away from shortly after midnight, and, in your simplicity, may
suppose him to be up and strutting about the premises. Far from it;--he
is at that very moment perched in his polygamy, between two of his
fattest wives. The sultan will perhaps not stir a foot for several hours
to come; while all the time the Thrush, having long ago rubbed his eyes,
is on his topmost twig, broad awake, and charming the ear of dawn with
his beautiful vociferation. During mid-day he disappears, and is mute;
but again, at dewy even, as at dewy morn, he pours his pipe like a
prodigal, nor ceases sometimes when night has brought the moon and
stars.

Best beloved, and most beautiful of all Thrushes that ever broke from
the blue-spotted shell!--thou who, for five springs, hast "hung thy
procreant cradle" among the roses, and honeysuckles, and ivy, and
clematis that embower in bloom the lattice of our Cottage-study--how
farest thou now in the snow? Consider the whole place as your own, my
dear bird; and remember, that when the gardener's children sprinkle food
for you and yours all along your favourite haunts, that it is done by
our orders. And when all the earth is green again, and all the sky blue,
you will welcome us to our rural domicile, with light feet running
before us among the winter leaves, and then skim away to your new nest
in the old spot, then about to be somewhat more cheerful in the
undisturbing din of the human life within the flowery walls.

Nay--how can we forget what is for ever before our eyes! Blessed be
Thou--on thy shadowy bed, belonging equally to earth and heaven--O Isle!
who art called the Beautiful! and who of thyself canst make all the Lake
one floating Paradise--even were her shore-hills sylvan no
more--groveless the bases of all her remoter mountains--effaced that
loveliest splendour, sun-painted on their sky-piercing cliffs. And can
it be that we have forsaken Thee! Fairy-land and Love-land of our youth!
Hath imagination left our brain, and passion our heart, so that we can
bear banishment from Thee and yet endure life! Such loss not yet is
ours--witness these gushing tears. But Duty, "stern daughter of the
voice of God," dooms us to breathe our morning and evening orisons far
from hearing and sight of Thee, whose music and whose light continue
gladdening other ears and other eyes--as if ours had there never
listened--and never gazed. As if thy worshipper--and sun! moon! and
stars! he asks ye if he loved not you and your images--as if thy
worshipper--O Windermere! were--dead! And does duty dispense no reward
to them who sacrifice at her bidding what was once the very soul of
life? Yes! an exceeding great reward--ample as the heart's desire--for
contentment is borne of obedience--where no repinings are, the wings of
thought are imped beyond the power of the eagle's plumes; and happy are
we now--with the human smiles and voices we love even more than thine,
thou fairest region of nature! happier than when we rippled in our
pinnace through the billowy moonlight--than when we sat alone on the
mountain within the thunder-cloud.

Why do the songs of the Blackbird and Thrush make us think of the
songless STARLING? It matters not. We do think of him, and see him
too--a lovable bird, and his abode is majestic. What an object of wonder
and awe is an old Castle to a boyish imagination! Its height how
dreadful! up to whose mouldering edges his fear carries him, and hangs
him over the battlements! What beauty in those unapproachable wall
flowers, that cast a brightness on the old brown stones of the edifice,
and make the horror pleasing! That sound so far below, is the sound of a
stream the eye cannot reach--of a waterfall echoing for ever among the
black rocks and pools. The schoolboy knows but little of the history of
the old Castle--but that little is of war, and witchcraft, and
imprisonment, and bloodshed. The ghostly glimmer of antiquity appals
him--he visits the ruin only with a companion, and at midday. There and
then it was that we first saw a Starling. We heard something wild and
wonderful in their harsh scream, as they sat upon the edge of the
battlements, or flew out of the chinks and crannies. There were Martens
too, so different in their looks from the pretty
House-Swallows--Jack-daws clamouring afresh at every time we waved our
caps, or vainly slung a pebble towards their nests--and one grove of
elms, to whose top, much lower than the castle, came, ever and anon,
some noiseless Heron from the Muirs.

Ruins! Among all the external objects of imagination, surely they are
most affecting! Some sumptuous edifice of a former age, still standing
in its undecayed strength, has undoubtedly a great command over us, from
the ages that have flowed over it; but the mouldering edifice which
Nature has begun to win to herself, and to dissolve into her own bosom,
is far more touching to the heart, and more awakening to the spirit. It
is beautiful in its decay--not merely because green leaves, and wild
flowers, and creeping mosses soften its rugged frowns, but because they
have sown themselves on the decay of greatness; they are monitors to our
fancy, like the flowers on a grave, of the untroubled rest of the dead.
Battlements riven by the hand of time, and cloistered arches reft and
rent, speak to us of the warfare and of the piety of our ancestors, of
the pride of their might, and the consolations of their sorrow: they
revive dim shadows of departed life, evoked from the land of
forgetfulness; but they touch us more deeply when the brightness which
the sun flings on the broken arches, and the warbling of birds that are
nestled in the chambers of princes, and the moaning of winds through the
crevices of towers, round which the surges of war were shattered and
driven back, lay those phantoms again to rest in their silent bed, and
show us, in the monuments of human life and power, the visible footsteps
of Time and Oblivion coming on in their everlasting and irresistible
career, to sweep down our perishable race, and to reduce all the forms
of our momentary being into the undistinguishable elements of their
original nothing.

What is there below the skies like the place of mighty and departed
cities? the vanishing or vanished capitals of renowned empires? There is
no other such desolation. The solitudes of nature may be wild and drear,
but they are not like the solitude from which human glory is swept away.
The overthrow or decay of mighty human power is, of all thoughts that
can enter the mind, the most overwhelming. The whole imagination is at
once stirred by the prostration of that, round which so many high
associations have been collected for so many ages. Beauty seems born but
to perish, and its fragility is seen and felt to be inherent in it by a
law of its being. But power gives stability, as it were, to human
thought, and we forget our own perishable nature in the spectacle of
some abiding and enduring greatness. Our own little span of years--our
own confined region of space--are lost in the endurance and far-spread
dominion of some mighty state, and we feel as if we partook of its
deep-set and triumphant strength. When, therefore, a great and ancient
empire falls into pieces, or when fragments of its power are heard rent
asunder, like column after column disparting from some noble edifice, in
sad conviction, we feel as if all the cities of men were built on
foundations beneath which the earthquake sleeps. The same doom seems to
be imminent over all the other kingdoms that still stand; and in the
midst of such changes, and decays, and overthrows--or as we read of
them of old--we look, under such emotions, on all power as
foundationless, and in our wide imagination embrace empires covered only
with the ruins of their desolation. Yet such is the pride of the human
spirit, that it often unconsciously, under the influence of such
imagination, strives to hide from itself the utter nothingness of its
mightiest works. And when all its glories are visibly crumbling into
dust, it creates some imaginary power to overthrow the fabrics of human
greatness--and thus attempts to derive a kind of mournful triumph even
in its very fall. Thus, when nations have faded away in their sins and
vices, rotten at the heart and palsied in all their limbs, we strive not
to think of that sad internal decay, but imagine some mighty power
smiting empires and cutting short the records of mortal magnificence.
Thus Fate and Destiny are said in our imagination to lay our glories
low. Thus, even, the calm and silent air of Oblivion has been thought of
as an unsparing Power. Time, too, though in moral sadness wisely called
a shadow, has been clothed with terrific attributes, and the sweep of
his scythe has shorn the towery diadem of cities. Thus the mere sigh in
which we expire, has been changed into active power--and all the nations
have with one voice called out "Death!" And while mankind have sunk, and
fallen, and disappeared in the helplessness of their own mortal being,
we have still spoken of powers arrayed against them--powers that are in
good truth only another name for their own weaknesses. Thus imagination
is for ever fighting against truth--and even when humbled, her visions
are sublime--conscious even amongst saddest ruin of her own immortality.

Higher and higher than ever rose the tower of Belus, uplifted by
ecstasy, soars the LARK, the lyrical poet of the sky. Listen, listen!
and the more remote the bird the louder seems his hymn in heaven. He
seems, in such altitude, to have left the earth for ever, and to have
forgotten his lowly nest. The primroses and the daisies, and all the
sweet hill-flowers, must be unremembered in that lofty region of light.
But just as the Lark is lost--he and his song together--as if his
orisons had been accepted--both are seen and heard fondly wavering
earthwards, and in a little while he is walking with his graceful crest
contented along the furrows of the brairded corn, or on the clover lea
that in man's memory has not felt the ploughshare; or after a pause, in
which he seems dallying with a home-sick passion, drooping down like one
dead, beside his mate in her shallow nest.

Of all birds to whom is given dominion over the air, the Lark alone lets
loose the power that is in his wings only for the expression of love and
gratitude. The eagle sweeps in passion of hunger--poised in the sky his
ken is searching for prey on sea or sward--his flight is ever animated
by destruction. The dove seems still to be escaping from something that
pursues--afraid of enemies even in the dangerless solitudes where the
old forests repose in primeval peace. The heron, high over houseless
moors, seems at dusk fearful in her laborious flight, and weariedly
gathers her long wings on the tree-top, as if thankful that day is done,
and night again ready with its rest. "The blackening trains o' craws to
their repose" is an image that affects the heart of "mortal man who
liveth here by toil," through sympathy with creatures partaking with him
a common lot. The swallow, for ever on the wing, and wheeling fitfully
before fancy's eyes in element adapted for perpetual pastime, is flying
but to feed--for lack of insects prepares to forsake the land of its
nativity, and yearns for the blast to bear it across the sea. Thou
alone, O Lark! hast wings given thee that thou mayest be perfectly
happy--none other bird but thou can at once soar and sing--and
heavenward thou seemest to be borne, not more by those twinkling pinions
than by the ever-varying, ever-deepening melody effusing from thy heart.

How imagination unifies! then most intensive when working with and in
the heart. Who thinks, when profoundly listening with his eyes shut to
the warbling air, that there is another lark in creation? _The_
lark--sole as the season--or the rainbow. We can fancy he sings to charm
our own particular ear--to please us descends into silence--for our
sakes erects his crest as he walks confidingly near our feet. Not till
the dream-circle, of which ourselves are the centre, dissolves or
subsides, do the fairest sights and sweetest sounds in nature lose their
relationship to us the beholder and hearer, and relapse into the common
property of all our kind. To self appertains the whole sensuous as well
as the whole spiritual world. Egoism is the creator of all beauty and
all bliss, of all hope and of all faith. Even thus doth imagination
unify Sabbath worship. All our beloved Scotland is to the devout breast
on that day one House of God. Each congregation--however far
apart--hears but one hymn--sympathy with all is an all-comprehensive
self--and Christian love of our brethren is evolved from the conviction
that we have ourselves a soul to be saved or lost.

Yet, methinks, imagination loveth just as well to pursue an opposite
process, and to furnish food to the heart in separate picture after
separate picture, one and all imbued not with the same but congenial
sentiment, and therefore succeeding one another at her will, be her will
intimated by mild bidding or imperial command. In such mood imagination,
in still series, visions a thousand parish-kirks, each with its own
characteristic localities, Sabbath-sanctified; distributes the beauty of
that hallowed day in allotments all over the happy land--so that in one
Sabbath there are a thousand Sabbaths.

Keep carolling, then, all together, ye countless Larks, till heaven is
one hymn! Imagination thinks she sees each particular field that sends
up its own singer to the sky--the spot of each particular nest. And of
the many hearts all over loveliest Scotland in the sweet vernal season
a-listening your lays, she is with the quiet beatings of the happy, with
the tumult in them that would wish to break! The little maiden by the
well in the brae-side above the cottage, with the Bible on her knees,
left in tendance of an infant--the palsied crone placed safely in the
sunshine till after service--the sickly student meditating in the shade,
and somewhat sadly thinking that these spring flowers are the last his
eyes may see--lovers walking together on the Sabbath before their
marriage to the house of God--life-wearied wanderers without a
home--remorseful men touched by the innocent happiness they cannot help
hearing in heaven--the sceptic--the unbeliever--the atheist to whom
"hope comes not that comes to all." What different meanings to such
different auditors hath the same music at the same moment filling the
same sky!

Does the Lark ever sing in winter? Ay, sometimes January is visited with
a May-day hour; and in the genial glimpse, though the earth be yet barer
than the sky, the Lark, mute for months, feels called on by the sun to
sing, not so near to heaven's gate, and a shorter than vernal lyric, or
during that sweetest season when neither he nor you can say whether it
is summer or but spring. Unmated yet, nor of mate solicitous, in pure
joy of heart he cannot refrain from ascent and song; but the snow-clouds
look cold, and ere he has mounted as high again as the church-spire, the
aimless impulse dies, and he comes wavering down silently to the yet
unprimrosed brae.

In our boyish days, we never felt that the Spring had really come till
the clear-singing Lark went careering before our gladdened eyes away up
to heaven. Then all the earth wore a vernal look, and the ringing sky
said, "Winter is over and gone." As we roamed, on a holiday, over the
wide pastoral moors, to angle in the lochs and pools, unless the day
were very cloudy the song of some lark or other was still warbling
aloft, and made a part of our happiness. The creature could not have
been more joyful in the skies than we were on the greensward. We, too,
had our wings, and flew through our holiday. Thou soul of glee! who
still leddest our flight in all our pastimes--representative child of
Erin!--wildest of the wild--brightest of the bright--boldest of the
bold!--the lark-loved vales in their stillness were no home for thee.
The green glens of ocean, created by swelling and subsiding storms, or
by calms around thy ship transformed into immeasurable plains, they
filled thy fancy with images dominant over the memories of the steadfast
earth. The petterel and the halcyon were the birds the sailor loved, and
he forgot the songs of the inland woods in the moanings that haunt the
very heart of the tumultuous sea. Of that ship nothing was ever known
but that she perished. He, too, the grave and thoughtful English boy,
whose exquisite scholarship we all so enthusiastically admired, without
one single particle of hopeless envy--and who accompanied us on all our
wildest expeditions, rather from affection to his playmates than any
love of their sports--he who, timid and unadventurous as he seemed to
be, yet rescued little Marian of the Brae from a drowning death when so
many grown-up men stood aloof in selfish fear--gone, too, for ever art
thou, our beloved Edward Harrington! and, after a few brilliant years in
the Oriental clime,

----"on Hoogley's banks afar,
Looks down on thy lone tomb the Evening Star."

How genius shone o'er thy fine features, yet how pale thou ever wast;
thou who sat'st then by the Sailor's side, and listened to his sallies
with a mournful smile--friend! dearest to our soul! loving us far better
than we deserved; for though faultless thou, yet tolerant of all our
frailties--and in those days of hope from thy lips how elevating was
praise! Yet how seldom do we think of thee! For months--years--not at
all--not once--sometimes not even when by some chance we hear your name!
It meets our eyes written on books that once belonged to you and that
you gave us--and yet of yourself it recalls no image. Yet we sank down
to the floor on hearing thou wast dead--ungrateful to thy memory for
many years we were not--but it faded away till we forgot thee utterly,
except when sleep showed thy grave!

Methinks we hear the song of the GREY LINTIE, the darling bird of
Scotland. None other is more tenderly sung of in our old ballads. When
the simple and fervent love-poets of our pastoral times first applied to
the maiden the words, "my bonnie burdie," they must have been thinking
of the Grey Lintie--its plumage ungaudy and soberly pure--its shape
elegant yet unobtrusive--and its song various without any effort--now
rich, gay, sprightly, but never rude nor riotous--now tender, almost
mournful, but never gloomy or desponding. So, too, are all its habits,
endearing and delightful. It is social, yet not averse to solitude,
singing often in groups, and as often by itself in the furze brake, or
on the briery knoll. You often find the lintie's nest in the most
solitary places--in some small self-sown clump of trees by the brink of
a wild hill-stream, or on the tangled edge of a forest; and just as
often you find it in the hedgerow of the cottage garden, or in a bower
within, or even in an old gooseberry bush that has grown into a sort of
tree.

One wild and beautiful place we well remember--ay, the very bush, in
which we first found a grey lintie's nest--for in our parish, from some
cause or other, it was rather a rarish bird. That far-away day is as
distinct as the present NOW. Imagine, friend, first, a little well
surrounded with wild cresses on the moor; something like a rivulet flows
from it, or rather you see a deep tinge of verdure, the line of which,
you believe, must be produced by the oozing moisture--you follow it, and
by-and-by there is a descent palpable to your feet--then you find
yourself between low broomy knolls, that, heightening every step, become
ere long banks, and braes, and hills. You are surprised now to see a
stream, and look round for its source--and there seem now to be a
hundred small sources in fissures and springs on every side--you hear
the murmurs of its course over beds of sand and gravel--and hark, a
waterfall! A tree or two begins to shake its tresses on the horizon--a
birch or a rowan. You get ready your angle--and by the time you have
panniered three dozen, you are at a wooden bridge--you fish the pool
above it with the delicate dexterity of a Boaz, capture the monarch of
the flood, and on lifting your eyes from his starry side as he gasps his
last on the silvery shore, you behold a Cottage, at one gable-end an
ash, at the other a sycamore, and standing perhaps at the lonely door, a
maiden like a fairy or an angel.

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