Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




"Behind the cloud of death,
Once, I beheld a sun; a sun which gilt
That sable cloud, and turn'd it all to gold.
How the grave's alter'd! fathomless as hell!
A real hell to those who dream'd of heaven,
ANNIHILATION! How it yawns before me!
Next moment I may drop from thought, from sense,
The privilege of angels and of worms,
An outcast from existence! and this spirit,
This all-pervading, this all-conscious soul,
This particle of energy divine,
Which travels nature, flies from star to star,
And visits gods, and emulates their powers,
_For ever is extinguish'd._"

If intellect be, indeed, doomed utterly to perish, why may not we ask
God, in that deep despair which, in that case, must inevitably flow from
the consciousness of those powers with which He has at once blessed and
cursed us--why that intellect, whose final doom is death, and that final
doom within a moment, finds no thought that can satisfy it but that of
Life, and no idea in which its flight can be lost but that of Eternity?
If this earth were at once the soul's cradle and her tomb, why should
that cradle have been hung amid the stars, and that tomb illumined by
their eternal light? If, indeed, a child of the clay, was not this
earth, with all its plains, forests, mountains, and seas, capacious
enough for the dreams of that creature whose course was finally to be
extinguished in the darkness of its bosom? What had we to do with
planets, and suns, and spheres, "and all the dread magnificence of
heaven?" Were we framed merely that we might for a few years rejoice in
the beauty of the stars, as in that of the flowers beneath our feet? And
ought we to be grateful for those transitory glimpses of the heavens, as
for the fading splendour of the earth? But the heavens are not an idle
show, hung out for the gaze of that idle dreamer Man. They are the work
of the Eternal God, and He has given us power therein to read and to
understand His glory. It is not our eyes only that are dazzled by the
face of heaven--our souls can comprehend the laws by which that face is
overspread by its celestial smiles. The dwelling-place of our spirits is
already in the heavens. Well are we entitled to give names unto the
stars; for we know the moment of their rising and their setting, and
can be with them at every part of their shining journey through the
boundless ether. While generations of men have lived, died, and are
buried, the astronomer thinks of the golden orb that shone centuries ago
within the vision of man, and lifts up his eye undoubting, at the very
moment when it again comes glorious on its predicted return. Were the
Eternal Being to slacken the course of a planet, or increase even the
distance of the fixed stars, the decree would be soon known on earth.
Our ignorance is great, because so is our knowledge; for it is from the
mightiness and vastness of what we do know that we imagine the
illimitable unknown creation. And to whom has God made these
revelations? To a worm that next moment is to be in darkness? To a piece
of earth momentarily raised into breathing existence? To a soul
perishable as the telescope through which it looks into the gates of
heaven?

"Oh! star-eyed science, hast thou wander'd there
To waft us home--the message of despair?"

No; there is no despair in the gracious light of heaven. As we travel
through those orbs, we feel indeed that we have no power, but we feel
that we have mighty knowledge. We can create nothing, but we can dimly
understand all. It belongs to God only to _create_, but it is given to
man to _know_--and that knowledge is itself an assurance of immortality.

"Renounce St Evremont, and read St Paul.
Ere rapt by miracle, by reason wing'd,
His mounting mind made long abode in heaven.
This is freethinking, unconfined to parts,
To send the soul, on curious travel bent,
Through all the provinces of human thought:
To dart her flight through the whole sphere of man;
Of this vast universe to make the tour;
In each recess of space and time, at home;
Familiar with their wonders: diving deep;
And like a prince of boundless interests there,
Still most ambitious of the most remote;
To look on truth unbroken, and entire;
Truth in the system, the full orb; where truths,
By truths enlighten'd and sustain'd, afford
An archlike, strong foundation, to support
Th' incumbent weight of absolute, complete
Conviction: here, the more we press, we stand
More firm; who most examine, most believe.
Parts, like half-sentences, confound: the whole
Conveys the sense, and GOD is understood,
Who not in fragments writes to human race.
Read his whole volume, sceptic! then reply."

Renounce St Evremont! Ay, and many a Deistical writer of high repute now
in the world. But how came they by the truths they did know? Not by the
work of their own unassisted faculties--for they lived in a Christian
country; they had already been imbued with many high and holy beliefs,
of which--had they willed it--they could never have got rid; and to the
very last the light which they, in their pride, believed to have
emanated from the inner shrine--the penetralia of Philosophy--came from
the temples of the living God. They walked all their lives long---
though they knew it not, or strived to forget it--in the light of
revelation, which, though often darkened to men's eyes by clouds from
earth, was still shining strong in heaven. Had the New Testament never
been--think ye that men in their pride, though

"Poor sons of a day,"

could have discerned the necessity of framing for themselves a _religion
of humility_? No. As by pride we are told the angels fell--so by pride
man, after his miserable fall, strove to lift up his helpless being from
the dust; and though trailing himself, soul and body, along the soiling
earth, and glorying in his own corruption, sought to eternise here his
very sins by naming the stars of heaven after heroes, conquerors,
murderers, violators of the mandates of the Maker whom they had
forgotten, or whose attributes they had debased by their own foul
imaginations. They believed themselves, in the delusion of their own
idolatries, to be "Lords of the world and Demigods of Fame," while they
were the slaves of their own sins and their own sinful Deities. Should
we have been wiser in our generation than they, but for the Bible? If in
moral speculation we hear but little--too little--of the confession of
what it owes to the Christian religion--in all the Philosophy,
nevertheless, that is pure and of good report, we _see_ that "the
dayspring from on high has visited it." In all philosophic inquiry there
is, perhaps, a tendency to the soul's exaltation of itself--which the
spirit and genius of Christianity subdues. It is not sufficient to say
that a natural sense of our own infirmities will do so--for seldom
indeed have Deists been lowly-minded. They have talked proudly of
humility. Compare their moral meditations with those of our great
divines. Their thoughts and feelings are of the "earth earthy;" but when
we listen to those others, we feel that their lore has been God-given.

"It is as if an angel shook his wings."

Thus has Christianity glorified Philosophy; its celestial purity is now
the air in which intellect breathes. In the liberty and equality of that
religion, the soul of the highest Philosopher dare not offend that of
the humblest peasant. Nay, it sometimes stands rebuked before it--and
the lowly dweller in the hut, or the shieling on the mountain-side, or
in the forest, could abash the proudest son of Science, by pointing to
the Sermon of our Saviour on the Mount--and saying, "I see my duties to
man and God _here_!" The religious establishments of Christianity,
therefore, have done more not only to support the life of virtue, but to
show all its springs and sources, than all the works of all the
Philosophers who have ever expounded its principles or its practice.

Ha! what has brought thee hither, thou wide-antlered king of the
red-deer of Braemar, from the spacious desert of thy hills of storm? Ere
now we have beheld thee, or one stately as thee, gazing abroad, from a
rock over the heather, to all the points of heaven, and soon as our
figure was seen far below, leading the van of the flight thou went'st
haughtily away into the wilderness. But now thou glidest softly and
slowly through the gloom--no watchfulness, no anxiety in thy large
beaming eyes; and, kneeling among the hoary mosses, layest thyself down
in unknown fellowship with one of those human creatures, a glance of
whose eye, a murmur of whose voice, would send thee belling through the
forest, terrified by the flash or sound that bespoke a hostile nature
wont to pursue thy race unto death.--The hunter is upon
thee--away--away! Sudden as a shooting-star up springs the red-deer, and
in the gloom as suddenly is lost.

On--on--on! further into the Forest!--and now a noise as of "thunder
heard remote." Waterfalls--hundreds of waterfalls sounding for
ever--here--there--everywhere--among the remoter woods. Northwards one
fierce torrent dashes through the centre--but no villages--only a few
woodmen's shielings will appear on its banks; for it is a torrent of
precipices, where the shrubs that hang midway from the cleft are out of
the reach of the spray of its cataracts, even when the red Garroch is in
flood.

Many hours have we been in the wilderness, and our heart yearns again
for the cheerful dwellings of men. Sweet infant streamlet, that flows by
our feet without a murmur, so shallow are yet thy waters--wilt
thou--short as hitherto has been thy journeying--wilt thou be our guide
out into the green valleys and the blue heaven, and the sight once more
of the bright sunshine and the fair fleecy clouds? No other clue to the
labyrinth do we seek but that small, thin, pure, transparent thread of
silver, which neither bush nor brier will break, and which will wind
without entanglement round the roots of the old trees, and the bases of
the shaggy rocks. As if glad to escape from its savage birthplace, the
small rivulet now gives utterance to a song; and sliding down shelving
rocks, so low in their mossy verdure as hardly to deserve that name,
glides along the almost level lawns, here and there disclosing a little
hermit flower. No danger now of its being imbibed wholly by the thirsty
earth; for it has a channel and banks of its own--and there is a
waterfall! Thenceforwards the rivulet never loses its merry voice--and
in an hour it is a torrent. What beautiful symptoms now of its approach
to the edge of the Forest! Wandering lights and whispering airs are here
visitants--and there the blue eye of a wild violet looking up from the
ground! The glades are more frequent--more frequent open spaces cleared
by the woodman's axe--and the antique Oak-Tree all alone by itself,
itself a grove. The torrent may be called noble now; and that deep blue
atmosphere--or say rather, that glimmer of purple air--lies over the
Strath in which a great River rolls along to the Sea.

Nothing in all nature more beautiful than the boundary of a great
Highland Forest. Masses of rocks thrown together in magnificent
confusion, many of them lichened and weather-stained with colours
gorgeous as the eyed plumage of the peacock, the lustre of the rainbow,
or the barred and clouded glories of setting suns--some towering aloft
with trees sown in the crevices by bird or breeze, and checkering the
blue sky--others bare, black, abrupt, grim as volcanoes, and shattered
as if by the lightning-stroke. Yet interspersed, places of perfect
peace--circles among the tall heather, or taller lady-fern, smoothed
into velvet, it is there easy to believe, by Fairies' feet--rocks where
the undisturbed linnet hangs her nest among the blooming briers, all
floating with dew-draperies of honeysuckle alive with bees--glades green
as emerald, where lie the lambs in tempered sunshine, or haply a lovely
doe reposes with her fawn; and further down, where the fields half
belong to the mountain and half to the strath, the smoke of hidden
huts--a log-bridge flung across the torrent--a hanging-garden, and a
little broomy knoll, with a few laughing children at play, almost as
wild-looking as the wanderers of the woods!

Turn your eyes, if you can, from that lovely wilderness, and behold down
along a mile-broad Strath, fed by a thousand torrents, floweth the
noblest of Scotia's rivers, the strong-sweeping Spey! Let Imagination
launch her canoe, and be thou a solitary steersman--for need is none of
oar or sail; keep the middle course while all the groves go by, and ere
the sun has sunk behind yon golden mountains--nay, mountains they are
not, but a transitory pomp of clouds--thou mayest list the roaring, and
behold the foaming of the Sea.

Was there ever such a descriptive dream of a coloured engraving of the
Cushat, Quest, or Ring-Dove, dreamt before? Poor worn-out and glimmering
candle!--whose wick of light and life in a few more flickerings will be
no more--what a contrast dost thou present with thyself of eight hours
ago! Then, truly, wert thou a shining light, and high aloft in the
room-gloaming burned thy clear crest like a star--during its midnight
silence, a _memento mori_ of which our spirit was not afraid. Now thou
art dying--dying--dead! Our cell is in darkness. But methinks we see
another--a purer--a clearer light--one more directly from Heaven. We
touch but a spring in a wooden shutter--and lo! the full blaze of day.
Oh! why should we mortal beings dread that night-prison--the Grave?




DR KITCHINER.

FIRST COURSE.


It greatly grieved us to think that Dr Kitchiner should have died before
our numerous avocations had allowed us an opportunity of dining with
him, and subjecting to the test-act of our experienced palate his claims
to immortality as a Cook and a Christian. The Doctor had, we know, a
dread of Us--not altogether unalloyed by delight; and on the dinner to
Us, which he had meditated for nearly a quarter of a century, he knew
and felt must have hung his reputation with posterity--his posthumous
fame. We understand that there is an unfinished sketch of that Dinner
among the Doctor's papers, and that the design is magnificent. Yet,
perhaps, it is better for his glory that Kitchiner should have died
without attempting to embody in forms the Idea of that Dinner. It might
have been a failure. How liable to imperfection the _materiel_ on which
he would have had to work! How defective the instruments!
Yes--yes!--happier far was it for the good old man that he should have
fallen asleep with the undimmed idea of that unattempted Dinner in his
imagination, than, vainly contending with the physical evil inherent in
matter, have detected the Bishop's foot in the first course, and died of
a broken heart!

"Travelling," it is remarked by our poor dear dead Doctor in his
"Traveller's Oracle," "is a recreation to be recommended, especially to
those whose employments are sedentary--who are engaged in abstract
studies--whose minds have been sunk in a state of morbid melancholy by
hypochondriasis, or, by what is worst of all, a lack of domestic
felicity. Nature, however, will not suffer any sudden transition; and
therefore it is improper for people accustomed to a sedentary life to
undertake suddenly a journey, during which they will be exposed to long
and violent jolting. The case here is the same as if one accustomed to
drink water should, all at once, begin to drink wine."

Had the Doctor been alive, we should have asked him what he meant by
"long and violent jolting?" Jolting is now absolutely unknown in
England, and it is of England the Doctor speaks. No doubt, some
occasional jolting might still be discovered among the lanes and
cross-roads; but, though violent, it could not be long: and we defy the
most sedentary gentleman living to be more so, when sitting in an
easy-chair by his parlour fireside, than in a cushioned carriage
spinning along the turnpike. But for the trees and hedgerows all
galloping by, he would never know that he was himself in motion. The
truth is, that no gentleman can be said, nowadays, to lead a sedentary
life, who is not constantly travelling before the insensible touch of
M'Adam. Look at the first twenty people that come towering by on the
roof of a Highflier or a Defiance. What can be more sedentary? Only look
at that elderly gentleman with the wig, evidently a parson, jammed in
between a brace of buxom virgins on their way down to Doncaster races.
Could he be more sedentary, during the psalm, in his own pulpit?

We must object, too, to the illustration of wine and water. Let no man
who has been so unfortunate as to be accustomed to drink water, be
afraid all at once to begin to drink wine. Let him, without fear or
trembling, boldly fill bumpers to the Throne--the Navy--and the Army.
These three bumpers will have made him a new man. We have no objection
whatever to his drinking, in animated succession, the Apotheosis of the
Whigs--the Angler's delight--the cause of Liberty all over the
World--Christopher North--Maga the Immortal.--"Nature will not suffer
any sudden transition!" Will she not? Look at our water-drinker now! His
very own mother could not know him--he has lost all resemblance to his
twin-brother, from whom, two short hours ago, you could not have
distinguished him but for a slight scar on his brow--so completely is
his apparent personal identity lost, that it would be impossible for him
to establish an _alibi_. He sees a figure in the mirror above the
chimney-piece, but has not the slightest suspicion that the rosy-faced
Bacchanal is himself, the water-drinker; but then he takes care to
imitate the manual exercise of the phantom--lifting his glass to his
lips at the very same moment, as if they were both moved by one soul.

The Doctor then wisely remarks, that it is "impossible to lay down any
rule by which to regulate the number of miles a man may journey in a
day, or to prescribe the precise number of ounces he ought to eat; but
that nature has given us a very excellent guide in a sense of lassitude,
which is as unerring in exercise as the sense of satiety is in eating."

We say the Doctor wisely remarks, yet not altogether wisely; for the
rule does not seem to hold always good either in exercise or in eating.
What more common than to feel oneself very much fatigued--quite done up
as it were, and unwilling to stir hand or foot. Up goes a lark in
heaven--tira-lira--or suddenly the breezes blow among the clouds, who
forthwith all begin campaigning in the sky, or, quick as lightning, the
sunshine in a moment resuscitates a drowned day--or tripping along, all
by her happy self, to the sweet accompaniment of her joy-varied songs,
the woodman's daughter passes by on her way, with a basket in her hand,
to her father in the forest, who has already laid down his axe on the
meridian shadow darkening one side of the straight stem of an oak,
beneath whose grove might be drawn up five-score of plumed chivalry!
Where is your "sense of lassitude now, nature's unerring guide in
exercise?" You spring up from the mossy wayside bank, and renewed both
in mind and body, "rejoicing in Nature's joy," you continue to pass over
houseless moors, by small, single, solitary, straw-roofed huts, through
villages gathered round Stone Cross, Elm Grove, or old Monastic Tower,
till, unwearied in lith and limb, you see sunset beautifying all the
west, and drop in, perhaps, among the hush of the Cottar's Saturday
Night--for it is in sweet Scotland we are walking in our dream--and know
not, till we have stretched ourselves on a bed of rushes or of heather,
that "kind Nature's sweet restorer balmy sleep," is yet among the number
of our bosom friends--alas! daily diminishing beneath fate or fortune,
the sweeping scythe-stroke of death, or the whisper of some one poor,
puny, idle, and unmeaning word!

Then, as to "the sense of satiety in eating." It is produced in us by
three platefuls of hotch-potch--and, to the eyes of an ordinary
observer, our dinner would seem to be at an end. But no--strictly
speaking, it is just going to begin. About an hour ago did we, standing
on the very beautiful bridge of Perth, see that identical salmon, with
his back-fin just visible above the translucent tide, arrowing up the
Tay, bold as a bridegroom, and nothing doubting that he should spend his
honeymoon among the gravel-beds of Kinnaird or Moulinearn, or the rocky
sofas of the Tummel, or the green marble couches of the Tilt. What has
become now of "the sense of satiety in eating?" John--the
castors!--mustard--vinegar--cayenne--catchup--pease and potatoes, with a
very little butter--the biscuit called "rusk"--and the memory of the
hotch-potch is as that of Babylon the Great. That any gigot of mutton,
exquisite though much of the five-year-old blackfaced must assuredly be,
can, with any rational hopes of success, contend against a haunch of
venison, will be asserted by no devout lover of truth. Try the two by
alternate platefuls, and you will uniformly find that you leave off
after the venison. That "sense of satiety in eating," of which Dr
Kitchiner speaks, was produced by the Tay salmon devoured above--but of
all the transitory feelings of us transitory creatures on our transit
through this transitory world, in which the Doctor asserts nature will
not suffer any sudden transitions, the most transitory ever experienced
by us is "the sense of satiety in eating." Therefore, we have now seen
it for a moment existing on the disappearance of the hotch-potch--dying
on the appearance of the Tay salmon--once more noticeable as the last
plate of the noble fish melted away--extinguished suddenly by the vision
of the venison--again felt for an instant, and but for an instant--for a
brace and a half of as fine grouse as ever expanded their voluptuous
bosoms to be devoured by hungry love! Sense of satiety in eating indeed!
If you please, my dear friend, one of the backs--pungent with the most
palate-piercing, stomach-stirring, heart-warming, soul-exalting of all
tastes--the wild bitter-sweet.

But the Doctor returns to the subject of travelling--and fatigue. "When
one begins," he says, "to be low-spirited and dejected, to yawn often
and be drowsy, when the appetite is impaired, when the smallest movement
occasions a fluttering of the pulse, when the mouth becomes dry, and is
sensible of a bitter taste, _seek refreshment and repose_, if you wish
to PREVENT ILLNESS, already beginning to take place." Why, our dear
Doctor, illness in such a deplorable case as this, is just about to end,
and death is beginning to take place. Thank Heaven, it is a condition to
which we do not remember having very nearly approximated! Who ever saw
us yawn? or drowsy? or with our appetite impaired, except on the
withdrawal of the table-cloth? or low-spirited, but when the Glenlivet
was at ebb? Who dare declare that he ever saw our mouth dry? or sensible
of a bitter taste, since we gave over munching rowans? Put your ringer
on our wrist, at any moment you choose, from June to January, from
January to June, and by its pulsation you may rectify Harrison's or
Kendal's chronometer.

But the Doctor proceeds--"By raising the temperature of my room to about
65 deg., a broth diet, and taking a tea-spoonful of Epsom salts in half a
pint of warm water, and repeating it every half-hour till it moves the
bowels twice or thrice, and retiring to rest an hour or two sooner than
usual, I have often very speedily got rid of colds, &c."

Why, there may be no great harm in acting as above; although we should
far rather recommend a screed of the Epsoms. A tea-spoonful of Epsom
salts in half a pint of warm water, reminds one, somehow or other, of
Tims. A small matter works a Cockney. It is not so easy--and that the
Cockneys well know--to move the bowels of old Christopher North. We do
not believe that a tea-spoonful of anything in this world would have any
serious effect on old "Ironsides." We should have no hesitation in
backing him against so much corrosive sublimate. He would dine out on
the day he had bolted that quantity of arsenic;--and would, we verily
believe, rise triumphant from a tea-spoonful of Prussic acid.

We could mention a thousand cures for "colds, et cetera," more
efficacious than a broth diet, a warm room, a tea-spoonful of Epsom
salts, or early roosting. What say you, our dear Dean, to half-a-dozen
tumblers of hot toddy? Your share of a brown jug to the same amount? Or
an equal quantity, in its gradual decrease revealing deeper and deeper
still the romantic Welsh scenery of the Devil's Punch-Bowl? _Adde tot_
small-bearded oysters, all redolent of the salt-sea foam, and worthy, as
they stud the Ambrosial brodd, to be licked off all at once by the
lambent tongue of Neptune. That antiquated calumny against the
character of toasted cheese--that, forsooth, it is indigestible--has
been trampled under the march of mind; and therefore, you may tuck in a
pound of double Gloucester. Other patients, labouring under catarrh,
may, very possibly, prefer the roasted how-towdy--or the green goose
from his first stubble-field--or why not, by way of a little variety, a
roasted maukin, midway between hare and leveret, tempting as maiden
between woman and girl, or, as the Eastern poet says, between a frock
and a gown? Go to bed--no need of warming-pans--about a quarter before
one;--you will not hear that small hour strike--you will sleep sound
till sunrise, sound as the Black Stone at Scone, on which the Kings of
Scotland were crowned of old. And if you contrive to carry a cold about
you next day, you deserve to be sent to Coventry by all sensible
people--and may, if you choose, begin taking, with Tims, a tea-spoonful
of Epsom salts in a half-pint of warm water every half-hour, till it
moves your bowels twice or thrice; but if you do, be your sex, politics,
or religion what they may, never shall ye be suffered to contribute even
a bit of Balaam to the Magazine.

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