Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




We are strongly inclined to agree with the Doctor in his panegyric on
breeches. True, that in the forenoons, especially if of a dark colour,
such as black, and worn with white, or even grey or bluish, stockings,
they are apt, in the present state of public taste, to stamp you a
schoolmaster, or a small grocer in full dress, or an exciseman going to
a ball. We could dispense too with the knee-buckles and plush
lining--though we allow the one might be ornamental and the other
useful. But what think you, gentle reader, of walking with a Pedometer?
A Pedometer is an instrument cunningly devised to tell you how far and
how fast you walk, and is, quoth the Doctor, a "perambulator in
miniature." The box containing the wheels is made of the size of a
watch-case, and goes into the breeches pocket, and by means of a string
and hook, fastened at the waistband or at the knee, the number of steps
a man takes, in his regular paces, are registered from the action of the
spring upon the internal wheel-work at every step, to the amount of
30,000. It is necessary, to ascertain the distance walked, that the
average length of one pace be precisely known, and that multiplied by
the number of steps registered on the dial-plate.

All this is very ingenious; and we know one tolerable pedestrian who is
also a Pedometrist. But no Pedometrician will ever make a fortune in a
mountainous island, like Great Britain, where pedestrianism is
indigenous to the soil. A good walker is as regular in his going as
clock-work. He has his different paces--three, three and a half--four,
four and a half--five, five and a half--six miles an hour--toe and heel.
A common watch, therefore, is to him, in the absence of milestones, as
good as a Pedometer, with this great and indisputable advantage, that a
common watch continues to go even after you have yourself stopped,
whereas, the moment you sit down on your oil-skin patch, why, your
Pedometer (which, indeed, from its name and construction, is not
unreasonable) immediately stands still. Neither, we believe, can you
accurately note the pulse of a friend in a fever by a Pedometer.

What pleasure on this earth transcends a breakfast after a twelve-mile
walk? Or is there in this sublunary scene a delight superior to the
gradual, dying-away, dreamy drowsiness that, at the close of a long
summer day's journey up hill and down dale, seals up the glimmering eyes
with honey-dew, and stretches out, under the loving hands of nourrice
Nature, the whole elongated animal economy, steeped in rest divine from
the organ of veneration to the point of the great toe, be it on a bed
of down, chaff, straw, or heather, in palace, hall, hotel, or hut? If in
an inn, nobody interferes with you in meddling officiousness; neither
landlord, bagman, waiter, chambermaid, boots;--you are left to yourself
without being neglected. Your bell may not be emulously answered by all
the menials on the establishment, but a smug or shock-headed drawer
appears in good time; and if mine host may not always dignify your
dinner by the deposition of the first dish, yet, influenced by the
rumour that soon spreads through the premises, he bows farewell at your
departure, with a shrewd suspicion that you are a nobleman in disguise.




SOLILOQUY ON THE SEASONS.

FIRST RHAPSODY.


No weather more pleasant than that of a mild WINTER day. So gracious the
season, that Hyems is like Ver--Januarius like Christopher North. Art
thou the Sun of whom Milton said,--

"Looks through the horizontal misty air,
Shorn of his beams,"

an image of disconsolate obscuration? Bright art thou as at meridian on
a June Sabbath; but effusing a more temperate lustre, not unfelt by the
sleeping though not insensate earth. She stirs in her sleep, and
murmurs--the mighty mother; and quiet as herself, though broad awake,
her old ally the ship-bearing sea. What though the woods be
leafless--they look as alive as when laden, with umbrage; and who can
tell what is going on now within the heart of that calm oak grove? The
fields laugh not now--but here and there they smile. If we see no
flowers we think of them--and less of the perished than of the unborn;
for regret is vain, and hope is blest; in peace there is the promise of
joy--and therefore in the silent pastures a perfect beauty how
restorative to man's troubled heart!

The Shortest Day in all the year--yet is it lovelier than the Longest.
Can that be the voice of birds? With the laverock's lyric our fancy
filled the sky--with the throstle's roundelay it awoke the wood. In the
air life is audible--circling unseen. Such serenity must be inhabited by
happiness. Ha! there thou art, our Familiar--the self-same Robin
Redbreast that pecked at our nursery window, and used to warble from the
gable of the school-house his sweet winter song!

In company we are silent--in solitude we soliloquise. So dearly do we
love our own voice that we cannot bear to hear it mixed with that of
others--perhaps drowned; and then our bashfulness tongue-ties us in the
hush expectant of our "golden opinions," when all eyes are turned to the
speechless "old man eloquent," and you might hear a tangle dishevelling
itself in Neaera's hair. But all alone by ourselves, in the country,
among trees standing still among untrodden leaves--as now--how we do
speak! All thoughts--all feelings--desire utterance; left to themselves
they are not happy till they have evolved into words--winged words that
sometimes settle on the ground, like moths on flowers--sometimes seek
the sky, like eagles above the clouds.

No such soliloquies in written poetry as these of ours--the act of
composition is fatal as frost to their flow; yet composition there is at
such solitary times going on among the moods of the mind, as among the
clouds on a still but not airless sky, perpetual but imperceptible
transformations of the beautiful, obedient to the bidding of the spirit
of beauty.

Who but Him who made it knoweth aught of the Laws of Spirit? All of us
may know much of what is "wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best," in
obedience to them; but leaving the open day, we enter at once into
thickest night. Why at this moment do we see a spot once only visited by
us--unremembered for ever so many flights of black or bright winged
years--see it in fancy as it then was in nature, with the same dewdrops
on that wondrous myrtle beheld but on that morning--such a myrtle as no
other eyes beheld ever on this earth but ours, and the eyes of one now
in heaven?

Another year is about to die--and how wags the world? "What great events
are on the gale?" Go ask our statesmen. But their rule--their guidance
is but over the outer world, and almost powerless their folly or their
wisdom over the inner region in which we mortals live, and move, and
have our being, where the fall of a throne makes no more noise than that
of a leaf!

Thank Heaven! Summer and Autumn are both dead and buried at last, and
white lie the snow on their graves! Youth is the season of all sorts of
insolence, and therefore we can forgive and forget almost anything in
SPRING. He has always been a privileged personage; and we have no doubt
that he played his pranks even in Paradise. To-day, he meets you
unexpectedly on the hill-side; and was there ever a face in this world
so celestialised by smiles! All the features are framed of light. Gaze
into his eyes, and you feel that in the untroubled lustre there is
something more sublime than in the heights of the cloudless heavens, or
in the depths of the waveless seas. More sublime, because essentially
spiritual. There stands the young Angel, entranced in the conscious
mystery of his own beautiful and blessed being; and the earth becomes
all at once fit region for the sojourn of the Son of the Morning. So
might some great painter image the First-born of the Year, till nations
adored the picture.--To-morrow you repair, with hermit steps, to the
Mount of the Vision, and,

"Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,"

Spring clutches you by the hair with the fingers of frost; blashes a
storm of sleet in your face, and finishes, perhaps, by folding you in a
winding-sheet of snow, in which you would infallibly perish but for a
pocket-pistol of Glenlivet.--The day after to-morrow, you behold
him--Spring--walking along the firmament, sad, but not sullen--mournful,
but not miserable--disturbed, but not despairing--now coming out towards
you in a burst of light--and now fading away from you in a gathering of
gloom--even as one might figure in his imagination a fallen Angel. On
Thursday, confound you if you know what the deuce to make of his
Springship. There he is, stripped to the buff--playing at hide-and-seek,
hare-and-hound, with a queer crazy crony of his in a fur cap, swan-down
waistcoat, and hairy breeches, Lodbrog or Winter. You turn up the whites
of your eyes, and the browns of your hands in amazement, till the Two,
by way of change of pastime, cease their mutual vagaries, and, like a
couple of hawks diverting themselves with an owl, in conclusion buffet
you off the premises. You insert the occurrence, with suitable
reflections, in your Meteorological Diary, under the head--Spring.--On
Friday, nothing is seen of you but the blue tip of your nose, for you
are confined to bed by rheumatism, and nobody admitted to your sleepless
sanctum but your condoling Mawsey. 'Tis a pity. For never since the
flood-greened earth on her first resurrection morn laughed around
Ararat, spanned was she by such a Rainbow! By all that is various and
vanishing, the arch seems many miles broad, and many miles high, and all
creation to be gladly and gloriously gathered together without being
crowded--plains, woods, villages, towns, hills, and clouds, beneath the
pathway of Spring, once more an Angel--an unfallen Angel! While the
tinge that trembles into transcendent hues fading and
fluctuating--deepening and dying--now gone, as if for ever--and now back
again in an instant, as if breathing and alive--is felt, during all that
wavering visitation, to be of all sights the most evanescent, and yet
inspirative of a beauty-born belief, bright as the sun that flung the
image on the cloud--profound as the gloom it illumines--that it shone
and is shining there at the bidding of Him who inhabiteth eternity.--The
grim noon of Saturday, after a moaning morning, and one silent
intermediate lour of grave-like stillness, begins to gleam fitfully with
lightning like a maniac's eye; and is not that

"The sound
Of thunder heard remote?"

On earth wind there is none--not so much as a breath. But there is a
strong wind in heaven--for see how that huge cloud-city, a night within
a day, comes moving on along the hidden mountain-tops, and hangs over
the loch all at once black as pitch, except that here and there a sort
of sullen purple heaves upon the long slow swell, and here and there
along the shores--how caused we know not--are seen, but heard not, the
white melancholy breakers! Is no one smitten blind? No! Thank God! But
ere the thanksgiving has been worded, an airquake has split asunder the
cloud-city, the night within the day, and all its towers and temples are
disordered along the firmament, to a sound that might waken the dead.
Where are ye, ye echo-hunters, that grudge not to purchase gunpowder
explosions on Lowood bowling-green at four shillings the blast? See!
there are our artillerymen stalking from battery to battery--all hung up
aloft facing the west--or "each standing by his gun" with lighted match,
moving or motionless, Shadow-figures, and all clothed in black-blue
uniform, with blood-red facings portentously glancing in the sun, as he
strives to struggle into heaven. The Generalissimo of all the forces,
who is he but--Spring?--Hand in hand with Spring, Sabbath descends from
heaven unto earth; and are not their feet beautiful on the mountains?
Small as is the voice of that tinkling bell from that humble spire,
overtopped by its coeval trees, yet is it heard in the heart of
infinitude. So is the bleating of these silly sheep on the braes--and
so is that voice of psalms, all at once rising so spirit-like, as if the
very kirk were animated, and singing a joyous song in the wilderness to
the ear of the Most High. For all things are under his care--those that,
as we dream, have no life--the flowers, and the herbs, and the
trees--those that some dim scripture seems to say, when they die,
utterly perish--and those that all bright scripture, whether written in
the book of God, or the book of Nature, declares will live for ever!

If such be the character and conduct of Spring during one week, wilt
thou not forget and forgive--with us--much occasional conduct on his
part that appears not only inexplicable, but incomprehensible? But we
cannot extend the same indulgence to Summer and to Autumn. SUMMER is a
season come to the years of discretion, and ought to conduct himself
like a staid, sober, sensible, middle-aged man, not past, but passing,
his prime. Now, Summer, we are sorry to say it, often behaves in a way
to make his best friends ashamed of him--in a way absolutely disgraceful
to a person of his time of life. Having picked a quarrel with the
Sun--his benefactor, nay, his father--what else could he expect but that
that enlightened Christian would altogether withhold his countenance
from so undutiful and ungrateful a child, and leave him to travel along
the mire and beneath the clouds? For some weeks Summer was sulky--and
sullenly scorned to shed a tear. His eyes were like ice. By-and-by, like
a great school-boy, he began to whine and whimper--and when he found
that would not do, he blubbered like the booby of the lowest form. Still
the Sun would not look on him--or if he did, 'twas with a sudden and
short half-smile half-scowl that froze the ingrate's blood. At last the
Summer grew contrite, and the Sun forgiving, the one burst out into a
flood of tears, the other into a flood of light. In simple words, the
Summer wept and the Sun smiled--and for one broken month there was a
perpetual alternation of rain and radiance! How beautiful is penitence!
How beautiful forgiveness! For one week the Summer was restored to his
pristine peace and old luxuriance, and the desert blossomed like the
rose.

Therefore ask we the Summer's pardon for thanking Heaven that he was
dead. Would that he were alive again, and buried not for ever beneath
the yellow forest leaves! O thou first, faint, fair, finest tinge of
dawning Light that streaks the still-sleeping yet just-waking face of
the morn, Light and no-Light, a shadowy Something, that as we gaze is
felt to be growing into an emotion that must be either Innocence or
Beauty, or both blending together into devotion before Deity, once more
duly visible in the divine colouring that forebodes another day to
mortal life--before Thee what holy bliss to kneel upon the greensward in
some forest glade, while every leaf is a-tremble with dewdrops, and the
happy little birds are beginning to twitter, yet motionless among the
boughs--before Thee to kneel as at a shrine, and breathe deeper and
deeper--as the lustre waxeth purer and purer, brighter and more bright,
till range after range arise of crimson clouds in altitude sublime, and
breast above breast expands of yellow woods softly glittering in their
far-spread magnificence--then what holy bliss to breathe deeper and
deeper unto Him who holds in the hollow of his hand the heavens and the
earth, our high but most humble orisons! But now it is Day, and broad
awake seems the whole joyful world. The clouds--lustrous no more--are
all anchored on the sky, white as fleets waiting for the wind. Time is
not felt--and one might dream that the Day was to endure for ever. Yet
the great river rolls on in the light--and why will he leave those
lovely inland woods for the naked shores? Why--responds some
voice--hurry we on our own lives--impetuous and passionate far more than
he with all his cataracts--as if anxious to forsake the regions of the
upper day for the dim place from which we yet recoil in fear--the dim
place which imagination sometimes seems to see even through the
sunshine, beyond the bourne of this our unintelligible being, stretching
sea-like into a still more mysterious night! Long as a Midsummer Day is,
it has gone by like a Heron's flight. The sun is setting!--and let him
set without being scribbled upon by Christopher North. We took a
pen-and-ink sketch of him in a "Day on Windermere." Poor nature is much
to be pitied among painters and poets. They are perpetually falling into

"Such perusal of her face
As they would draw it."

And often must she be sick of the Curious Impertinents. But a Curious
Impertinent are not we--if ever there was one beneath the skies, a
devout worshipper of Nature; and though we often seem to heed not her
shrine--it stands in our imagination, like a temple in a perpetual
Sabbath.

It was poetically and piously said by the Ettrick Shepherd, at a Noctes,
that there is no such thing in nature as bad weather. Take Summer, which
early in our soliloquy we abused in good set terms. Its weather was
broken, but not bad; and much various beauty and sublimity is involved
in the epithet "broken," when applied to the "season of the year."
Commonplace people, especially town-dwellers, who _flit_ into the
country for a few months, have a silly and absurd idea of Summer, which
all the atmospherical phenomena fail to drive out of their foolish
fancies. They insist on its remaining with us for half a year at least,
and on its being dressed in its Sunday's best every day in the week as
long as they continue in country quarters. The Sun must rise, like a
labourer, at the very earliest hour, shine all day, and go to bed late,
else they treat him contumeliously, and declare that he is not worth his
meat. Should he retire occasionally behind a cloud, which it seems most
natural and reasonable for one to do who lives so much in the public
eye, why, a whole watering-place, uplifting a face of dissatisfied
expostulation to heaven, exclaims, "Where is the Sun? Are we never to
have any Sun?" They also insist that there shall be no rain of more than
an hour's duration in the daytime, but that it shall all fall by night.
Yet when the Sun does exert himself, as if at their bidding, and is
shining, as he supposes, to their heart's content, up go a hundred green
parasols in his face, enough to startle the celestial steeds in his
chariot. A _broken_ summer for us. Now and then a few continuous
days--perhaps a whole week--but, if that be denied, now and then,

"Like angels' visits, few and far between,"

one single Day--blue-spread over heaven, green-spread over earth--no
cloud above, no shade below, save that dove-coloured marble lying
motionless like the mansions of peace, and that pensive gloom that falls
from some old castle or venerable wood--the stillness of a sleeping joy,
to our heart profounder than that of death, in the air, in the sky, and
resting on our mighty mother's undisturbed breast--no lowing on the
hills, no bleating on the braes--the rivers almost silent as lochs, and
the lochs, just visible in their aerial purity, floating dream-like
between earth and sky, imbued with the beauty of both, and seeming to
belong to either, as the heart melts to human tenderness, or beyond all
mortal loves the imagination soars! Such days seem now to us--as memory
and imagination half restore and half create the past into such weather
as may have shone over the bridal morn of our first parents in
Paradise--to have been frequent--nay, to have lasted all the Summer
long--when our boyhood was bright from the hands of God. Each of those
days was in itself a life! Yet all those sunny lives melted into one
Summer--and all those Summers formed one continuous bliss. Storms and
snows vanished out of our ideal year; and then morning, noon, and night,
wherever we breathed, we _felt_, what now we but _know_, the inmost
meaning of that profound verse of Virgil the Divine--

"Devenere locos laetos, et amoena vireta
Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas.
Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit
Purpureo: solemque suum, sua sidera norunt."

Few--no such days as those seem now ever to be born. Sometimes we indeed
gaze through the face into the heart of the sky, and for a moment feel
that the ancient glory of the heavens has returned on our dream of life.
But to the perfect beatitude of the skies there comes from the soul
within us a mournful response, that betokens some wide and deep--some
everlasting change. Joy is not now what joy was of yore; like a fine
diamond with a flaw is now Imagination's eye; other motes than those
that float through ether cross between its orb and the sun; the "fine
gold has become dim," with which morning and evening of old embossed the
skies; the dewdrops are not now the pearls once they were, left on

"Flowers, and weeds as beautiful as flowers,"

by angels' and by fairies' wings; knowledge, custom, experience, fate,
fortune, error, vice, and sin, have dulled, and darkened, and deadened
all things; and the soul, unable to bring over the Present the ineffable
bliss and beauty of the Past, almost swoons to think what a ghastly
thunder-gloom may by Providence be reserved for the Future!

Nay--nay--things are not altogether so bad with us as this
strain--sincere though it be as a stream from the sacred
mountains--might seem to declare. We can yet enjoy a _broken_ Summer. It
would do your heart good to see us hobbling with our crutch along the
Highland hills, _sans_ great-coat or umbrella, in a summer-shower,
aiblins cap in hand that our hair may grow, up to the knees in the bonny
blooming heather, or clambering, like an old goat, among the cliffs.
Nothing so good for gout or rheumatism as to get wet through, while the
thermometer keeps ranging between 60 deg. and 70 deg., three times a-day. What
refreshment in the very sound--Soaking! Old bones wax dry--nerves
numb--sinews stiff--flesh frail--and there is a sad drawback on the
Whole Duty of Man. But a sweet, soft, sou'-wester blows "caller" on our
craziness, and all our pores instinctively open their mouths at the
approach of rain. Look but at those dozen downward showers, all denizens
of heaven; how black, and blue, and bright they in their glee are
streaming, and gleaming athwart the sunny mountain-gloom, while ever as
they descend on earth, lift up the streams along the wilderness louder
and louder a choral song. Look now at the heather--and smile whenever
henceforth you hear people talk of _purple_. You have been wont to call
a gold guinea or a sovereign _yellow_--but if you have got one in your
pocket, place it on your palm, and in the light of that broom is it not
a _dirty brown_? You have an emerald ring on your finger--but how grey
it looks beside the _green_ of those brackens, that pasture, that wood!
Purple, yellow, and green, you have now seen, sir, for the first time in
your life. Widening and widening over your head, all the while you have
been gazing on the heather, the broom, the bracken, the pastures, and
the woods, have the eternal heavens been preparing for you a vision of
the sacred _Blue_. Is not that an Indigo Divine? Or, if you scorn that
mercantile and manufacturing image, steal that blue from the sky, and
let the lady of your love tinge but her eyelids with one touch, and a
saintlier beauty will be in her upward looks as she beseeches Heaven to
bless thee in her prayers! Set slowly--slowly--slowly--O Sun of Suns! as
may be allowed by the laws of Nature. For not long after Thou hast sunk
behind those mountains into the sea, will that celestial ROSY-RED be
tabernacled in the heavens!

Meanwhile, three of the dozen showers have so soaked and steeped our old
crazy carcass in refreshment, and restoration, and renewal of youth,
that we should not be surprised were we to outlive that raven croaking
in pure _gaiete du coeur_ on the cliff. Threescore and ten years!
Poo--'tis a pitiful span! At a hundred we shall cut capers--for twenty
years more keep to the Highland fling--and at the close of other twenty,
jig it into the grave to that matchless strathspey, the Reel of
Tullochgorum!

Having thus made our peace with last Summer, can we allow the Sun to go
down on our wrath towards the AUTUMN, whose back we yet see on the
horizon, before he turn about to bow adieu to our hemisphere? Hollo! I
meet us half-way in yonder immense field of potatoes, our worthy Season,
and among these peacemakers, the Mealies and the Waxies, shall we two
smoke together the calumet or cigar of reconciliation. The floods fell,
and the folk feared famine. The people whined over the smut in wheat,
and pored pale on the Monthly Agricultural Report. Grain grew greener
and greener--reapers stood at the crosses of villages, towns, and
cities, passing from one to another comfortless quaichs of sma' yill,
with their straw-bound sickles hanging idle across their shoulders, and
with unhired-looking faces, as ragged a company as if you were to dream
of a Symposium of Scarecrows. Alarmed imagination beheld harvest
treading on the heels of Christmas,

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