Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




But over the doom of one true Lover of Nature let us shed a flood of
rueful tears; for at what tale shall mortal man weep, if not at the tale
of youthful genius and virtue shrouded suddenly in a winding-sheet
wreathed of snow by the pitiless tempest! Elate in the joy of solitude,
he hurried like a fast-travelling shadow into the silence of the frozen
mountains, all beautifully encrusted with pearls, and jewels, and
diamonds, beneath the resplendent night-heavens. The din of populous
cities had long stunned his brain, and his soul had sickened in the
presence of the money-hunting eyes of selfish men, all madly pursuing
their multifarious machinations in the great mart of commerce. The very
sheeted masts of ships, bearing the flags of foreign countries, in all
their pomp and beauty sailing homeward or outward-bound, had become
hateful to his spirit--for what were they but the floating enginery of
Mammon? Truth, integrity, honour, were all recklessly sacrificed to gain
by the friends he loved and had respected most--sacrificed without shame
and without remorse--repentance being with them a repentance only over
ill-laid schemes of villany--plans for the ruination of widows and
orphans, blasted in the bud of their iniquity. The brother of his bosom
made him a bankrupt--and for a year the jointure of his widow-mother was
unpaid. But she died before the second Christmas--and he was left alone
in the world. Poor indeed he was, but not a beggar. A legacy came to him
from a distant relation--almost the only one of his name--who died
abroad. Small as it was, it was enough to live on--and his enthusiastic
spirit gathering joy from distress, vowed to dedicate itself in some
profound solitude to the love of Nature, and the study of her Great
Laws. He bade an eternal farewell to cities at the dead of midnight,
beside his mother's grave, scarcely distinguishable among the thousand
flat stones, sunk, or sinking into the wide churchyard, along which a
great thoroughfare of life roared like the sea. And now, for the first
time, his sorrow flung from him like a useless garment, he found himself
alone among the Cumbrian mountains, and impelled in strong idolatry
almost to kneel down and worship the divine beauty of the moon, and
"stars that are the poetry of heaven."

Not uninstructed was the wanderer in the lore that links the human heart
to the gracious form and aspects of the Mighty Mother. In early youth he
had been intended for the Church, and subsequent years of ungrateful and
ungenial toils had not extinguished the fine scholarship that native
aptitude for learning had acquired in the humble school of the village
in which he was born. He had been ripe for College when the sudden death
of his father, who had long been at the head of a great mercantile
concern, imposed it upon him, as a sacred duty owed to his mother and
his sisters, to embark in trade. Not otherwise could he hope ever to
retrieve their fortunes--and for ten years for their sake he was a
slave, till ruin set him free. Now he was master of his own destiny--and
sought some humble hut in that magnificent scenery, where he might pass
a blameless life, and among earth's purest joys prepare his soul for
heaven. Many such humble huts had he seen during that one bold, bright,
beautiful spring winter-day. Each wreath of smoke from the breathing
chimneys, while the huts themselves seemed hardly awakened from sleep in
the morning-calm, led his imagination up into the profound peace of the
sky. In any one of those dwellings, peeping from sheltered dells, or
perched on wind-swept eminences, could he have taken up his abode, and
sat down contented at the board of their simple inmates. But in the very
delirium of a new bliss, the day faded before him--twilight looked
lovelier than dream-land in the reflected glimmer of the snow--and thus
had midnight found him, in a place so utterly lonesome in its remoteness
from all habitations, that even in summer no stranger sought it without
the guidance of some shepherd familiar with the many bewildering passes
that stretched away in all directions through among the mountains to
distant vales. No more fear or thought had he of being lost in the
wilderness, than the ring-dove that flies from forest to forest in the
winter season, and, without the aid even of vision, trusts to the
instinctive wafting of her wings through the paths of ether.

As he continued gazing on the heavens, the moon all at once lost
something of her brightness--the stars seemed fewer in number--and the
lustre of the rest as by mist obscured. The blue ethereal frame grew
discoloured with streaks of red and yellow--and a sort of dim darkness
deepened and deepened on the air, while the mountains appeared higher,
and at the same time further off, as if he had been transported in a
dream to another region of the earth. A sound was heard, made up of
far-mustering winds, echoes from caves, swinging of trees, and the
murmur as of a great lake or sea beginning to break on the shore. A few
flakes of snow touched his face, and the air grew cold. A clear tarn had
a few minutes before glittered with moonbeams, but now it had
disappeared. Sleet came thicker and faster, and ere long it was a storm
of snow. "O God! my last hour is come!" and scarcely did he hear his own
voice in the roaring tempest.

Men have died in dungeons--and their skeletons been found long years
afterwards lying on the stone floor, in postures that told through what
hideous agonies they had passed into the world of spirits. But no eye
saw, no ear heard, and the prison-visitor gathers up, as he shudders,
but a dim conviction of some long horror from the bones. One day in
spring--long after the snows were melted--except here and there a patch
like a flock of sheep on some sunless exposure--a huge Raven rose
heavily, as if gorged with prey, before the feet of a shepherd, who,
going forward to the spot where the bird had been feeding, beheld a
rotting corpse! A dog, itself almost a skeleton, was lying near, and
began to whine at his approach. On its collar was the name of its
master--a name unknown in that part of the country--and weeks elapsed
before any person could be heard of that could tell the history of the
sufferer. A stranger came and went--taking the faithful creature with
him that had so long watched by the dead--but long before his arrival
the remains had been interred; and you may see the grave, a little way
on from the south gate, on your right hand as you enter, not many yards
from the Great Yew-Tree in the churchyard of----, not far from the foot
of Ullswater.

Gentle reader! we have given you two versions of the same story--and
pray, which do you like the best? The first is the most funny, the
second the most affecting. We have observed that the critics are not
decided on the question of our merits as a writer; some maintaining that
we are strongest in humour--others, that our power is in pathos. The
judicious declare that our forte lies in both--in the two united, or
alternating with each other. "But is it not quite shocking," exclaims
some scribbler who has been knouted in Ebony, "to hear so very serious
an affair as the death of a Quaker in the snow among mountains, treated
with such heartless levity? The man who wrote that description, sir, of
the Ordinary of the Red Tarn Club, would not scruple to commit murder!"
Why, if killing a scribbler be murder, the writer of that--this--article
confesses that he has more than once committed that capital crime. But
no intelligent jury, taking into consideration the law as well as the
fact--and it is often their duty to do so, let high authorities say what
they will--would for a moment hesitate, in any of the cases alluded to,
to bring in a verdict of "Justifiable homicide." The gentleman or lady
who has honoured us so far with perusal, knows enough of human life, and
of their own hearts, to know also that there is no other subject which
men of genius--and who ever denied that we are men of genius?--have been
accustomed to view in so many ludicrous lights as this same subject of
death; and the reason is at once obvious--yet _recherche_--videlicet,
Death is, in itself and all that belongs to it, such a sad, cold, wild,
dreary, dismal, distracting, and dreadful thing, that at times men
talking about it cannot choose but laugh!

Too-hoo--too-hoo--too-whit-too-hoo!--we have got among the OWLS.
Venerable personages, in truth, they are--perfect Solomons! The
spectator, as in most cases of very solemn characters, feels himself at
first strongly disposed to commit the gross indecorum of bursting out
a-laughing in their face. One does not see the absolute necessity either
of man or bird looking at all times so unaccountably wise. Why will an
Owl persist in his stare? Why will a Bishop never lay aside his wig?

People ignorant of Ornithology will stare like the Bird of Wisdom
himself on being told that an OWL is an Eagle. Yet, bating a little
inaccuracy, it is so. Eagles, kites, hawks, and owls, all belong to the
genus Falco. We hear a great deal too much in poetry of the moping Owl,
the melancholy Owl, the boding Owl, whereas he neither mopes nor bodes,
and is no more melancholy than becomes a gentleman. We also hear of the
Owl being addicted to spirituous liquors; and hence the expression, as
drunk as an Owl. All this is mere Whig personality, the Owl being a Tory
of the old school, and a friend of the ancient establishments of church
and state. Nay, the same political party, although certainly the most
shortsighted of God's creatures, taunt the Owl with being blind. As
blind as an Owl, is a libel in frequent use out of ornithological
society. Shut up Lord Jeffrey himself in a hay-barn with a well-built
mow, and ask him in the darkness to catch you a few mice, and he will
tell you whether or not the Owl be blind. This would be just as fair as
to expect the Owl to see, like Lord Jeffrey, through a case in the
Parliament House during daylight. Nay, we once heard a writer in Taylor
and Hessey call the Owl stupid, he himself having longer ears than any
species of Owl extant. What is the positive character of the Owl may
perhaps appear by-and-by; but we have seen that, describing his
character by negations, we may say that he resembles Napoleon Buonaparte
much more than Joseph Hume or Alderman Wood. He is not moping--not
boding--not melancholy--not a drunkard--not blind--not stupid; as much
as it would be prudent to say of any man, whether editor or contributor,
in her Majesty's dominions.

We really have no patience with people who persist in all manner of
misconceptions regarding the character of birds. Birds often appear to
such persons, judging from, of, and by themselves, to be in mind and
manners the reverse of their real character. They judge the inner bird
by outward circumstances inaccurately observed. There is the owl. How
little do the people of England know of him--even of him the barn-door
and domestic owl--yea, even at this day--we had almost said the Poets!
Shakespeare, of course, and his freres, knew him to be a merry
fellow--quite a madcap--and so do now all the Lakers. But Cowper had his
doubts about it; and Gray, as every schoolboy knows, speaks of him like
an old wife. The force of folly can go no further, than to imagine an
owl complaining to the moon of being disturbed by people walking in a
country churchyard. And among all our present bardlings, the owl is
supposed to be constantly on the eve of suicide. If it were really so,
he ought in a Christian country to be pitied, not pelted, as he is sure
to be when accidentally seen in sunlight--for melancholy is a
misfortune, especially when hereditary and constitutional, as it is
popularly believed to be in the Black-billed Bubo, and certainly was in
Dr Johnson. In young masters and misses we can pardon any childishness;
but we cannot pardon the antipathy to the owl entertained by the manly
minds of grown-up English clodhoppers, ploughmen, and threshers. They
keep terriers to kill rats and mice in barns, and they shoot the owls,
any one of whom we would cheerfully back against the famous Billy. "The
very commonest observation teaches us," says the author of the "Gardens
of the Menagerie," "that they are in reality the best and most efficient
protectors of our cornfields and granaries from the devastating pillage
of the swarms of mice and other small _rodents_." Nay, by their constant
destruction of these petty but dangerous enemies, the owls, he says,
"earn an unquestionable title to be regarded as among the _most active
of the friends of man_; a title which only one or two among them
occasionally forfeit by their aggressions on the defenceless poultry."
Roger or Dolly beholds him in the act of murdering a duckling, and, like
other light-headed, giddy, unthinking creatures, they forget all the
service he has done the farm, the parish, and the state; he is shot _in
the act_, and nailed, wide-extended in cruel spread-eagle, on the
barn-door. Others again call him dull and shortsighted--nay, go the
length of asserting that he is stupid--as stupid as an owl. Why, our
excellent fellow, when you have the tithe of the talent of the common
owl, and know half as well how to use it, you may claim the medal.

The eagles, kites, and hawks, hunt by day. The Owl is the Nimrod of the
Night. Then, like one who shall be nameless, he sails about seeking
those whom he may devour. To do him justice, he has a truly ghost-like
head and shoulders of his own. What horror to the "small birds rejoicing
in spring's leafy bowers," fast-locked we were going to say in each
other's arms, but sitting side by side in the same cosy nuptial nest, to
be startled out of their love-dreams by the great lamp-eyed, beaked face
of a horrible monster with horns, picked out of feathered bed, and
wafted off in one bunch, within talons, to pacify a set of hissing, and
snappish, and shapeless powder-puffs, in the loophole of a barn? In a
house where a cat is kept, mice are much to be pitied. They are so
infatuated with the smell of a respectable larder, that to leave the
premises, they confess, is impossible. Yet every hour--nay, every minute
of their lives--must they be in the fear of being leaped out upon by
four velvet paws--and devoured with kisses from a whiskered mouth, and a
throat full of that incomprehensible music--a purr. Life, on such terms,
seems to us anything but desirable. But the truth is, that mice in the
fields are not a whit better off. Owls are cats with wings. Skimming
along the grass tops, they stop in a momentary hover, let drop a talon,
and away with Mus, his wife, and small family of blind children. It is
the white, or yellow, or barn, or church, or Screech-Owl, or
Gilley-Owlet, that behaves in this way; and he makes no bones of a
mouse, uniformly swallowing him alive. Our friend, we suspect, though no
drunkard, is somewhat of a glutton. In one thing we agree with him, that
there is no sort of harm in a heavy supper. There, however, we are
guilty of some confusion of ideas; for what to us, who rise in the
morning, seems a supper, is to him who gets up at evening twilight, a
breakfast. We therefore agree with him in thinking that there is no sort
of harm in a heavy breakfast. After having passed a pleasant night in
eating and flirting, he goes to bed betimes about four o'clock in the
morning; and, as Bewick observes, makes a blowing hissing noise,
resembling the snoring of a man. Indeed nothing can be more diverting to
a person annoyed by blue devils, than to look at a white Owl and his
wife asleep. With their heads gently inclined towards each other, there
they keep snoring away like any Christian couple. Should the one make a
pause, the other that instant awakes, and, fearing something may be
wrong with his spouse, opens a pair of glimmering winking eyes, and
inspects the adjacent physiognomy with the scrutinising stare of a
village apothecary. If all be right, the concert is resumed, the snore
sometimes degenerating into a sort of snivel, and the snivel into a
blowing hiss. First time we heard this noise was in a churchyard when we
were mere boys, having ventured in after dark to catch the minister's
colt for a gallop over to the parish capital, where there was a
dancing-school ball. There had been a nest of Owls in some hole in the
spire; but we never doubted for a moment that the noise of snoring,
blowing, hissing, and snapping proceeded from a testy old gentleman that
had been buried that forenoon, and had come alive again a day after the
fair. Had we reasoned the matter a little, we must soon have convinced
ourselves that there was no ground for alarm to us at least; for the
noise was like that of some one half stifled, and little likely to heave
up from above him a six-feet-deep load of earth--to say nothing of the
improbability of his being able to unscrew the coffin from the inside.
Be that as it may, we cleared about a dozen of decent tombstones at
three jumps--the fourth took us over a wall five feet high within and
about fifteen without, and landed us, with a squash, in a
cabbage-garden, enclosed on the other three sides by a house and a
holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash
to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude,
thrust out a long duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and swore to
blow out our brains if we did not instantly surrender ourselves, and
deliver up the corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name, which he knew
as well as his own. He was deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his
patterero till we had laid down the corpse. He swore that he saw the
sack in the moonlight. This was a horse-cloth with which we had intended
to saddle the "cowt," and that had remained, during the supernatural
agency under which we laboured, clutched unconsciously and convulsively
in our grasp. Long was it ere Davie Donald would see us in our true
light--but at length he drew on his Kilmarnock nightcap, and coming out
with a bouet, let us through the trance and out of the front door,
thoroughly convinced, till we read Bewick, that old Southfield was not
dead, although in a very bad way indeed. Let this be a lesson to
schoolboys not to neglect the science of natural history, and to study
the character of the White Owl.

OWLS--both White and common Brown, are not only useful in a mountainous
country, but highly ornamental. How serenely beautiful their noiseless
flight; a flake of snow is not winnowed through the air more
softly-silent! Gliding along the dark shadows of a wood, how spiritual
the motion--how like the thought of a dream! And then, during the hushed
midnight hours, how jocund the whoop and hollo from the heart of a
sycamore--grey rock, or ivied Tower! How the Owls of Windermere must
laugh at the silly Lakers, that under the garish eye of day, enveloped
in clouds of dust, whirl along in rattling post-shays in pursuit of the
picturesque! Why, the least imaginative Owl that ever hunted mice by
moonlight on the banks of Windermere, must know the character of its
scenery better than any poetaster that ever dined on char at Bowness or
Lowood. The long quivering lines of light illumining some sylvan
isle--the evening-star shining from the water to its counterpart in the
sky--the glorious phenomenon of the double moon--the night-colours of
the woods--and, once in the three years perhaps, that loveliest and most
lustrous of celestial forms, the lunar rainbow--all these and many more
beauteous and magnificent sights are familiar to the Owls of Windermere.
And who know half so well as they do the echoes of Furness, and
Applethwaite, and Loughrigg, and Landale, all the way on to Dungeon-Gill
and Pavey-Ark, Scawfell and the Great Gable, and that sea of mountains,
of which every wave has a name? Midnight--when asleep so still and
silent--seems inspired with the joyous spirit of the Owls in their
revelry--and answers to their mirth and merriment through all her
clouds. The Moping Owl, indeed!--the Boding Owl, forsooth!--the
Melancholy Owl, you blockhead!--why, they are the most
cheerful--joy-portending--and exulting of God's creatures! Their flow of
animal spirits is incessant--crowing-cocks are a joke to them--blue
devils are to them unknown--not one hypochondriac in a thousand
barns--and the Man-in-the-Moon acknowledges that he never heard one of
them utter a complaint.

But what say ye to an Owl, not only like an eagle in plumage, but equal
to the largest eagle in size--and therefore named, from the King of
Birds, the EAGLE OWL. Mr Selby! you have done justice to the monarch of
the Bubos. We hold ourselves to be persons of tolerable courage, as the
world goes--but we could not answer for ourselves showing fight with
such a customer, were he to waylay us by night in a wood. In comparison,
Jack Thurtell looked harmless. No--that bold, bright-eyed murderer, with
Horns on his head like those on Michael Angelo's statue of Moses, would
never have had the cruel cowardice to cut the weasand, and smash out the
brains of such a miserable wretch as Weare! True, he is fond of
blood--and where's the harm in that? It is his nature. But if there be
any truth in the science of Physiognomy--and be that of Phrenology what
it will, most assuredly there is truth in it--the original of that Owl,
for whose portrait the world is indebted to Mr Selby, and Sir Thomas
Lawrence never painted a finer one of Prince or Potentate of any Holy or
Unholy Alliance, must have despised Probert from the very bottom of his
heart. No prudent Eagle but would be exceedingly desirous of keeping on
good terms with him--devilish shy, i' faith, of giving him any offence
by the least hauteur of manner, or the slightest violation of etiquette.
An Owl of this character and calibre is not afraid to show his horns at
mid-day on the mountain. The Fox is not over and above fond of him--and
his claws can kill a cub at a blow. The Doe sees the monster sitting on
the back of her fawn, and, maternal instinct overcome by horror, bounds
into the brake, and leaves the pretty creature to its fate. Thank
Heaven, he is, in Great Britain, a rare bird! Tempest-driven across the
Northern Ocean from his native forests in Russia, an occasional visitant
he "frightens this isle from its propriety," and causes a hideous
screaming through every wood he haunts. Some years ago, one was killed
in the upland moors in the county of Durham--and, of course, paid a
visit to Mr Bullock's Museum. Eagle-like in all its habits, it builds
its nest on high rocks--sometimes on the loftiest trees--and seldom lays
more than two eggs. One is one more than enough--and we who fly by night
trust never to fall in with a live specimen of the Strix-Bubo of
Linnaeus.

But largest and loveliest of all the silent night-gliders--the SNOWY
OWL! Gentle reader--if you long to see his picture, we have told you
where it may be found;--and in the College Museum, within a glass vase
on the central table in the Palace of Stuffed Birds, you may admire his
outward very self--the semblance of the Owl he was when he used to eye
the moon shining over the Northern Sea:--but if you would see the noble
and beautiful Creature himself, in all his living glory, you must seek
him through the long summer twilight among the Orkney or the Shetland
Isles. The Snowy Owl dearly loves the snow--and there is, we believe, a
tradition among them, that their first ancestor and ancestress rose up
together from a melting snow-wreath on the very last day of a Greenland
winter, when all at once the bright fields reappear. The race still
inhabits that frozen coast--being common, indeed, through all the
regions of the Arctic Circle. It is numerous on the shores of Hudson's
Bay, in Norway, Sweden, and Lapland--but in the temperate parts of
Europe and America "rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno."

We defy all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe; and what
countless cross-legged fractional parts of men--who, like the beings of
whom they are constituents, are thought to double their numbers every
thirty years--must not the four quarters of the earth, in their present
advanced state of civilisation, contain!--we defy, we say, all the
tailors on the face of the habitable globe to construct such a surtout
as that of the Snowy Owl, covering him, with equal luxury and comfort,
in summer's heat and winter's cold. The elements, in all their freezing
fury, cannot reach the body of the bird through that beautiful
down-mail. Well guarded are the opening of those great eyes. Neither the
driving dust, nor the searching sleet, nor the sharp frozen snow-stour,
give him the ophthalmia. Gutta Serena is to him unknown--no Snowy Owl
was ever couched for cataract--no need has he for an oculist, should he
live an hundred years; and were they to attempt any operation on his
lens or iris, how he would hoot at Alexander and Wardrope!

Night, doubtless, is the usual season of his prey; but he does not shun
the day, and is sometimes seen hovering unhurt in the sunshine. The red
or black grouse flies as if pursued by a ghost; but the Snowy Owl,
little slower than the eagle, in dreadful silence overtakes his flight,
and then death is sudden and sure. Hawking is, or was, a noble
pastime--and we have now prevented our eyes from glancing at
Jer-falcon, Peregrine, or Goshawk; but Owling, we do not doubt, would be
noways inferior sport; and were it to become prevalent in modern times,
as Hawking was in times of old, why, each lady, as Venus already fair,
with an Owl on her wrist, would look as wise as Minerva.

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