Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




But our soul sickens at all those dreams of blood! and fain would turn
away from fierce eye, cruel beak, and tearing talon--war-weapons of them
that delight in wounds and death--to the contemplation of creatures
whose characteristics are the love of solitude--shy gentleness of
manner--the tender devotion of mutual attachment--and, in field or
forest, a lifelong passion for peace.




CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

FOURTH CANTICLE.


Welcome then the RING-DOVE--the QUEST--or CUSHAT, for that is the very
bird we have had in our imagination. There is his full-length portrait,
stealthily sketched as the Solitary was sitting on a tree. You must
catch him napping, indeed, before he will allow you an opportunity of
colouring him on the spot from nature. It is not that he is more jealous
or suspicious of man's approach than other bird; for never shall we
suffer ourselves to believe that any tribe of the descendants of the
Dove that brought to the Ark the olive tidings of reappearing earth, can
in their hearts hate or fear the race of the children of man. But Nature
has made the Cushat a lover of the still forest-gloom; and therefore,
when his lonesome haunts are disturbed or intruded on, he flies to some
yet profounder, some more central solitude, and folds his wing in the
hermitage of a Yew, sown in the time of the ancient Britons.

It is the Stock-Dove, we believe, not the Ring-Dove, from whom are
descended all the varieties of the races of Doves. What tenderer praise
can we give them all, than that the Dove is the emblem of Innocence, and
that the name of innocence--not of frailty--is Woman? When Hamlet said
the reverse, he was thinking, you know, of the Queen--not of Ophelia. Is
not woman by nature chaste as the Dove--as the Dove faithful? Sitting
all alone with her babe in her bosom, is she not as a Dove devoted to
her own nest? Murmureth she not a pleasant welcome to her wearied
home-returned husband, even like the Dove among the woodlands when her
mate re-alights on the pine? Should her spouse be taken from her and
disappear, doth not her heart sometimes break, as they say it happens to
the Dove? But oftener far, findeth not the widow that her orphans are
still fed by her own hand, that is filled with good things by
Providence; till grown up, and able to shift for themselves, away they
go--just as the poor Dove lamenteth for her mate in the snare of the
fowler, yet feedeth her young continually through the whole day, till
away too go they--alas, in neither case, perhaps, ever more to return!

We dislike all favouritism, all foolish and capricious partiality for
particular bird or beast; but dear, old, sacred associations, will
_tell_ upon all one thinks or feels towards any place or person in this
world of ours, near or remote. God forbid we should criticise the
Cushat! We desire to speak of him as tenderly as of a friend buried in
our early youth. Too true it is, that often and oft, when schoolboys,
have we striven to steal upon him in his solitude, and to shoot him to
death. In morals, and in religion, it would be heterodox to deny that
the will is as the deed. Yet in cases of high and low-way robbery and
murder, there does seem, treating the subject not in philosophical but
popular style, to be some little difference between the two; at least we
hope so, for otherwise we can with difficulty imagine one person not
deserving to be ordered for execution, on Wednesday next, between the
hours of eight and nine ante-meridian. Happily, however, for our future
peace of mind, and not improbably for the whole confirmation of our
character, our Guardian Genius--(every boy has one constantly at his
side, both during school and play hours, though it must be confessed
sometimes a little remiss in his duty, for the nature even of angelical
beings is imperfect)--always so contrived it, that with all our cunning
we never could kill a Cushat. Many a long hour--indeed whole
Saturdays--have we lain perdue among broom and whins, the beautiful
green and yellow skirting of sweet Scotia's woods, watching his egress
or ingress, our gun ready cocked, and finger on trigger, that on the
flapping of his wings not a moment might be lost in bringing him to the
ground. But couch where we might, no Cushat ever came near our insidious
lair. Now and then a Magpie--birds who, by the by, when they suspect you
of any intention of shooting them, are as distant in their manners as
Cushats themselves, otherwise as impudent as Cockneys--would come,
hopping in continual tail-jerks, with his really beautiful plumage, if
one could bring oneself to think it so, and then sport the pensive
within twenty yards of the muzzle of Brown-Bess, impatient to let fly.
But our soul burned, our heart panted for a Cushat; and in that strong
fever-fit of passion, could we seek to slake our thirst for that wild
blood with the murder of a thievish eavesdropper of a Pye? The
Blackbird, too, often dropt out of the thicket into an open glade in the
hazel-shaws, and the distinctness of his yellow bill showed he was far
within shot-range. Yet, let us do ourselves justice, we never in all our
born days dreamt of shooting a Blackbird--him that scares away sadness
from the woodland twilight gloom, at morn or eve; whose anthem, even in
those dim days when Nature herself it might be well thought were
melancholy, forceth the firmament to ring with joy. Once "the snow-white
cony sought its evening meal," unconscious of our dangerous vicinity,
issuing with erected ears from the wood edge. That last was, we confess,
such a temptation to touch the trigger, that had we resisted it we must
have been either more or less than boy. We fired; and kicking up his
heels, doubtless in fright, but as it then seemed to us, during our
disappointment, much rather in frolic--nay, absolute derision--away
bounced Master Rabbit to his burrow, without one particle of soft
silvery wool on sward or bush, to bear witness to our unerring aim. As
if the branch on which he had been sitting were broken, away then went
the crashing Cushat through the intermingling sprays. The free flapping
of his wings was soon heard in the air above the tree-tops, and ere we
could recover from our almost bitter amazement, the creature was
murmuring to his mate on her shallow nest--a far-off murmur, solitary
and profound--to reach unto which, through the tangled mazes of the
forest, would have required a separate sense, instinct, or faculty,
which we did not possess. So, skulking out of our hiding-place, we made
no comment on the remark of homeward-plodding labourer, who had heard
the report, and now smelt the powder--"Cushats are geyan kittle birds to
kill"--but returned, with our shooting-bag as empty as our stomach, to
the Manse.

"Why do the birds sing on Sunday?" said once a little boy to us--and we
answered him in a lyrical ballad, which we have lost. But although the
birds certainly do sing on Sunday--behaviour that with our small gentle
Calvinist, who dearly loved them, caused some doubts of their being so
innocent as during the week-days they appeared to be--we cannot set
down their fault to the score of ignorance. Is it in the holy
superstition of the world-wearied heart that man believes the inferior
creatures to be conscious of the calm of the Sabbath, and that they know
it to be the day of our rest? Or is it that we transfer the feeling of
our inward calm to all the goings-on of Nature, and thus imbue them with
a character of reposing sanctity, existing only in our own spirits? Both
solutions are true. The instincts of those creatures we know only in
their symptoms and their effects, in the wonderful range of action over
which they reign. Of the instincts themselves--as feelings or ideas--we
know not anything, nor ever can know; for an impassable gulf separates
the nature of those that may be to perish, from ours that are to live
for ever. But their power of memory, we must believe, is not only
capable of minutest retention, but also stretches back to afar--and some
power or other they do possess, that gathers up the past experience into
rules of conduct that guide them in their solitary or gregarious life.
Why, therefore, should not the birds of Scotland know the Sabbath-day?
On that day the Water-Ouzel is never disturbed by angler among the
murmurs of his own waterfall; and, as he flits down the banks and braes
of the burn, he sees no motion, he hears no sound about the cottage that
is the boundary of his furthest flight--for "the dizzying mill-wheel
rests." The merry-nodding rooks, that in spring-time keep following the
very heels of the ploughman--may they not know it to be Sabbath, when
all the horses are standing idle in the field, or taking a gallop by
themselves round the head-rig? Quick of hearing are birds--one and
all--and in every action of their lives are obedient to sounds. May they
not, then--do they not connect a feeling of perfect safety with the
tinkle of the small kirk-bell? The very jay himself is not shy of people
on their way to worship. The magpie, that never sits more than a minute
at a time in the same place on a Saturday, will on the Sabbath remain on
the kirkyard wall with all the composure of a dove. The whole feathered
creation know our hours of sleep. They awake before us; and ere the
earliest labourer has said his prayers, have not the woods and valleys
been ringing with their hymns? Why, therefore, may not they, who know,
each week-day, the hour of our lying down and our rising up, know also
the day of our general rest? The animals whose lot is labour, shall
they not know it? Yes; the horse on that day sleeps in shade or sunshine
without fear of being disturbed--his neck forgets the galling collar,
"and there are forty feeding like one," all well knowing that their
fresh meal on the tender herbage will not be broken in upon before the
dews of next morning, ushering in a new day to them of toil or travel.

So much for our belief in the knowledge, instinctive or from a sort of
reason, possessed by the creatures of the inferior creation of the
heaven-appointed Sabbath to man and beast. But it is also true that we
transfer our inward feelings to their outward condition, and with our
religious spirit imbue all the ongoings of animated and even inanimated
life. There is always a shade of melancholy, a tinge of pensiveness, a
touch of pathos, in all profound rest. Perhaps because it is so much in
contrast with the turmoil of our ordinary being. Perhaps because the
soul, when undisturbed, will, from the impulse of its own divine nature,
have high, solemn, and awful thoughts. In such state, it transmutes all
things into a show of sympathy with itself. The church-spire, rising
high above the smoke and stir of a town, when struck by the sun-fire,
seems, on a market-day, a tall building in the air, that may serve as a
guide to people from a distance flocking into the bazaars. The same
church-spire, were its loud-tongued bell to call from aloft on the
gathering multitude below, to celebrate the anniversary of some great
victory, Waterloo or Trafalgar, would appear to stretch up its stature
triumphantly into the sky--so much the more triumphantly, if the
standard of England were floating from its upper battlements. But to the
devout eye of faith, doth it not seem to express its own character, when
on the Sabbath it performs no other office than to point to heaven?

So much for the second solution. But independently of both, no wonder
that all nature seems to rest on the Sabbath; for it doth rest--all of
it, at least, that appertains to man and his condition. If the Fourth
Commandment be kept--at rest is all the household--and all the fields
round it are at rest. Calm flows the current of human life, on that
gracious day, throughout all the glens and valleys of Scotland, as a
stream that wimples in the morning sunshine, freshened but not flooded
with the soft-falling rain of a summer night. The spiral smoke-wreath
above the cottage is not calmer than the motion within. True, that the
wood warblers do not cease their songs; but the louder they sing, the
deeper is the stillness. And what perfect blessedness, when it is only
joy that is astir in rest!

Loud-flapping Cushat! it was thou that inspiredst these solemn fancies;
and we have only to wish thee, for thy part contributed to our
Recreations, now that the acorns of autumn must be well-nigh consumed,
many a plentiful repast, amid the multitude of thy now congregated
comrades, in the cleared stubble lands--as severe weather advances, and
the ground becomes covered with snow, regales undisturbed by fowler, on
the tops of turnip, rape, and other cruciform plants, which all of thy
race affect so passionately--and soft blow the sea-breezes on thy
unruffled plumage, when thou takest thy winter's walk with kindred
myriads on the shelly shore, and for a season minglest with gull and
seamew--apart every tribe, one from the other, in the province of its
own peculiar instinct--yet all mysteriously taught to feed or sleep
together within the roar or margin of the main.

Sole-sitting Cushat! We see thee through the yew-tree's shade, on some
day of the olden time, but when or where we remember not--for what has
place or time to do with the vision of a dream? That we see thee is all
we know, and that serenely beautiful thou art! Most pleasant is it to
dream, and to know we dream! By sweet volition we keep ourselves half
asleep and half awake; and all our visions of thought, as they go
swimming along, partake at once of reality and imagination. Fiction and
truth--clouds, shadows, phantoms and phantasms--ether, sunshine,
substantial forms and sounds that have a being, blending together in a
scene created by us, and partly impressed upon us, and which one motion
of the head on the pillow may dissolve, or deepen into more oppressive
delight! In some such dreaming state of mind are we now; and, gentle
reader, if thou art broad awake, lay aside the visionary volume, or read
a little longer, and likely enough is it that thou too mayest fall half
asleep. If so, let thy drowsy eyes still pursue the glimmering
paragraphs--and wafted away wilt thou feel thyself to be into the heart
of a Highland forest, that knows no bounds but those of the uncertain
sky.

Away from our remembrance fades the noisy world of men into a silent
glimmer--and now it is all no more than a mere faint thought.
On--on--on! through briery brake--matted thicket--grassy
glade--On--on--on! further into the Forest! What a confusion of huge
stones, rocks, knolls, all tumbled together into a chaos--not without
its stern and sterile beauty! Still are there, above, blue glimpses of
the sky--deep though the umbrage be, and wide-flung the arms of the
oaks, and of pines in their native wilderness gigantic as oaks, and
extending as broad a shadow. Now the firmament has vanished--and all is
twilight. Immense stems, "in number without number
numberless,"--bewildering eye and soul--all
still--silent--steadfast--and so would they be in a storm. For what
storm--let it rage aloft as it might, till the surface of the forest
toss and roar like the sea--could force its path through these many
million trunks? The thunder-stone might split that giant there--how
vast! how magnificent!--but the brother by his side would not tremble;
and the sound--in the awful width of the silence--what more would it be
than that of the woodpecker alarming the insects of one particular tree!

Poor wretch that we are!--to us the uncompanioned silence of the
solitude hath become terrible. More dreadful is it than the silence of
the tomb; for there, often arise responses to the unuttered soliloquies
of the pensive heart. But this is as the silence, not of Time, but of
Eternity. No burial heaps--no mounds--no cairns! It is not as if man had
perished here, and been forgotten; but as if this were a world in which
there had been neither living nor dying. Too utter is the solitariness
even for the ghosts of dead! For they are thought to haunt the
burial-places of what once was their bodies--the chamber where the
spirit breathed its final farewell--the spot of its transitory love and
delight, or of its sin and sorrow--to gaze with troubled tenderness on
the eyes that once they worshipped--with cold ear to drink the music of
the voices long ago adored; and in all their permitted visitations, to
express, if but by the beckoning of the shadow of a hand, some
unextinguishable longing after the converse of the upper world, even
within the gates of the grave.

A change comes over us. Deep and still as is the solitude, we are
relieved of our awe, and out of the forest-gloom arise images of beauty
that come and go, gliding as on wings, or, statue-like, stand in the
glades, like the sylvan deities to whom of old belonged, by birthright,
all the regions of the woods. On--on--on!--further into the Forest!--and
let the awe of imagination be still further tempered by the delight
breathed even from any one of the lovely names sweet-sounding through
the famous fables of antiquity. Dryad, Hamadryad! Faunus!
Sylvanus!--Now, alas! ye are but names, and no more! Great Pan himself
is dead, or here he would set up his reign. But what right has such a
dreamer to dream of the dethroned deities of Greece? The language they
spoke is not his language; yet the words of the great poets who sang of
gods and demigods, are beautiful in their silent meanings as they meet
his adoring eyes; and, mighty Lyrists! has he not often floated down the
temple-crowned and altar-shaded rivers of your great Choral Odes?

On--on--on!--further into the Forest!--unless, indeed, thou dreadest
that the limbs that bear on thy fleshy tabernacle may fail, and the
body, left to itself, sink down and die. Ha! such fears thou laughest to
scorn; for from youth upwards thou hast dallied with the wild and
perilous: and what but the chill delight in which thou hast so often
shivered in threatening solitude brought thee here! These dens are not
dungeons, nor are we a thrall. Yet if dungeons they must be called--and
they are deep, and dark, and grim--ten thousand gates hath this great
prison-house, and wide open are they all. So on--on--on!--further into
the Forest! But who shall ascend to its summit? Eagles and dreams. Round
its base we go, rejoicing in the new-found day, and once more cheered
and charmed with the music of birds. Say whence came, ye scientific
world-makers, these vast blocks of granite? Was it fire or water, think
ye, that hung in air the semblance of yon Gothic cathedral, without
nave, or chancel, or aisle--a mass of solid rock? Yet it looks like the
abode of Echoes; and haply when there is thunder, rolls out its
lengthening shadow of sound to the ear of the solitary shepherd afar off
on Cairngorm.

On--on--on!--further into the Forest! Now on all sides leagues of
ancient trees surround us, and we are safe as in the grave from the
persecuting love or hatred of friends or foes. The sun shall not find us
by day, nor the moon by night. Were our life forfeited to what are
called the laws, how could the laws discover the criminal? How could
they drag us from the impenetrable gloom of this sylvan sanctuary? And
if here we chose to perish by suicide or natural death--and famine is a
natural death--what eye would ever look on our bones? Raving all; but so
it often is with us in severest solitude--our dreams will be hideous
with sin and death.

Hideous, said we, with sin and death? Thoughts that came flying against
us like vultures, like vultures have disappeared, disappointed of their
prey, and afraid to fix their talons in a thing alive. Hither--by some
secret and sacred impulse within the soul, that often knoweth not the
sovereign virtue of its own great desires--have we been led as into a
penitentiary, where, before the altar of nature, we may lay down the
burden of guilt or remorse, and walk out of the Forest a heaven-pardoned
man. What guilt?--O my soul! canst thou think of Him who inhabiteth
eternity, and ask what guilt? What remorse?--For the dereliction of duty
every day since thou received'st from Heaven the understanding of good
and of evil. All our past existence gathers up into one dread
conviction, that every man that is born of woman is a sinner, and worthy
of everlasting death. Yet with the same dread conviction is interfused a
knowledge, clear as the consciousness of present being, that the soul
will live for ever. What was the meaning, O my soul! of all those
transitory joys and griefs--of all those fears, hopes, loves, that so
shook, each in its own fleeting season, the very foundations on which
thy being in this life is laid? Anger, wrath, hatred, pride, and
ambition--what are they all but so many shapes of sin coeval with thy
birth? That sudden entrance of heaven's light into the Forest, was like
the opening of the eye of God! And our spirit stands ashamed of its
nakedness, because of the foulness and pollution of sin. But the awful
thoughts that have travelled through its chambers have ventilated,
swept, and cleansed them--and let us break away from beneath the weight
of confession.

Conscience! Speak not of weak and fantastic fears--of abject
superstitions--and of all that wild brood of dreams that have for ages
been laws to whole nations; though we might speak of them--and, without
violation of the spirit of true philosophy, call upon them to bear
testimony to the truth. But think of the calm, purified, enlightened,
and elevated conscience of the highest natures--from which objectless
fear has been excluded--and which hears, in its stillness, the eternal
voice of God. What calm celestial joy fills all the being of a good man,
when conscience tells him he is obeying God's law! What dismal fear and
sudden remorse assail him, whenever he swerves but one single step out
of the right path that is shining before his feet! It is not a mere
selfish terror--it is not the dread of punishment only that appals
him--for, on the contrary, he can calmly look on the punishment which he
knows his guilt has incurred, and almost desires that it should be
inflicted, that the incensed power may be appeased. It is the
consciousness of offence that is unendurable--not the fear of consequent
suffering; it is the degradation of sin that his soul deplores--it is
the guilt which he would expiate, if possible, in torments; it is the
united sense of wrong, sin, guilt, degradation, shame, and remorse, that
renders a moment's pang of the conscience more terrible to the good than
years of any other punishment--and it thus is the power of the human
soul to render its whole life miserable by its very love of that virtue
which it has fatally violated. This is a passion which the soul could
not suffer--unless it were immortal. Reason, so powerful in the highest
minds, would escape from the vain delusion; but it is in the highest
minds where reason is most subjected to this awful power--they would
seek reconcilement with offended Heaven by the loss of all the happiness
that earth ever yielded--and would rejoice to pour out their heart's
blood if it could wipe away from the conscience the stain of one deep
transgression! These are not the high-wrought and delusive states of
mind of religious enthusiasts, passing away with the bodily agitation of
the dreamer; but they are the feelings of the loftiest of men's
sons--and when the troubled spirit has escaped from their burden, or
found strength to support it, the conviction of their reasonableness and
of their awful reality remains; nor can it be removed from the minds of
the wise and virtuous, without the obliteration from the tablets of
memory of all the moral judgments which conscience has there recorded.

It is melancholy to think that even in our own day, a philosopher, and
one of high name too, should have spoken slightingly of the universal
desire of immortality, as no argument at all in proof of it, because
arising inevitably from the regret with which all men must regard the
relinquishment of this life. By thus speaking of the desire as a
delusion necessarily accompanying the constitution of mind which it has
pleased the Deity to bestow on us, such reasoners but darken the mystery
both of man and of Providence. But this desire of immortality is not of
the kind they say it is, nor does it partake, in any degree, of the
character of a blind and weak feeling of regret at merely leaving this
present life. "I would not live alway," is a feeling which all men
understand--but who can endure the momentary thought of annihilation?
Thousands, and tens of thousands--awful a thing as it is to die--are
willing to do so--"passing through nature to eternity"--nay, when the
last hour comes, death almost always finds his victim ready, if not
resigned. To leave earth, and all the light both of the sun and of the
soul, is a sad thought to us all--transient as are human smiles, we
cannot bear to see them no more--and there is a beauty that binds us to
life in the tears of tenderness that the dying man sees gushing for his
sake. But between that regret for departing loves and affections, and
all the gorgeous or beautiful shows of this earth--between that love and
the dread of annihilation, there is no connection. The soul can bear to
part with all it loves--the soft voice--the kindling smile--the starting
tear--and the profoundest sighs of all by whom it is beloved; but it
cannot bear to part with its existence. It cannot even believe the
possibility of that which yet it may darkly dread. Its loves--its
passions--its joys--its agonies are _not itself_. They may perish, but
it is imperishable. Strip it of all it has seen, touched, enjoyed, or
suffered--still it seems to survive; bury all it knew, or could know in
the grave--but itself cannot be trodden down into the corruption. It
sees nothing like itself in what perishes, except in dim analogies that
vanish before its last profound self-meditation--and though it parts
with its mortal weeds at last, as with a garment, its life is felt at
last to be something not even in contrast with the death of the body,
but to flow on like a flood, that we believe continues still to flow
after it has entered into the unseen solitude of some boundless desert.

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