Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




"And Britain sadden'd at the long delay!"

when, whew! to dash the dismal predictions of foolish and false
prophets, came rustling from all the airts, far, far and wide over the
rain-drenched kingdom, the great armament of the Autumnal Winds! Groaned
the grain, as in sudden resurrection it lifted up its head, and knew
that again the Sun was in Heaven. Death became life; and the hearts of
the husbandmen sang aloud for joy. Like Turks, the reapers brandished
their sickles in the breezy light, and every field glittered with
Christian crescents. Auld wives and bits o' weans mingled on the
rig--kilted to the knees, like the comely cummers, and the handsome
hizzies, and the lo'esome lassies wi' their silken snoods--among the
heather-legged Highlandmen, and the bandy Irishers, brawny all, and with
hook, scythe, or flail, inferior to none of the children of men. The
scene lies in Scotland--but now, too, is England "Merry England"
indeed, and outside passengers on a thousand coaches see stooks rising
like stacks, and far and wide, over the tree-speckled champaign, rejoice
in the sun-given promise of a glorious harvest-home. Intervenes the rest
of two sunny Sabbaths sent to dry the brows of labour, and give the last
ripeness to the overladen stalks that, top-heavy with aliment, fall over
in their yellowy whiteness into the fast reaper's hands. Few fields
now--but here and there one thin and greenish, of cold, unclean, or
stony soil--are waving in the shadowy winds; for all are cleared, but
some stooked stubbles from which the stooks are fast disappearing, as
the huge wains seem to halt for a moment, impeded by the gates they
hide, and then, crested perhaps with laughing boys and girls,

"Down the rough slope the ponderous waggon rings,"

no--not rings--for Beattie, in that admirable line, lets us hear a cart
going out empty in the morning--but with a _cheerful dull_ sound,
ploughing along the black soil, _the clean dirt_ almost up to the
axletree, and then, as the wheels, rimmed you might always think with
silver, reach the road, macadamised till it acts like a railway, how
glides along downhill the moving mountain! And see now, the growing
Stack glittering with a charge of pitchforks! The trams fly up from
Dobbin's back, and a shoal of sheaves overflows the mire. Up they go,
tossed from sinewy arms like feathers, and the Stack grows before your
eyes, fairly proportioned as a beehive, without line or measure, but
shaped by the look and the feel, true almost as the spring instinct of
the nest-building bird. And are we not heartily ashamed of ourselves,
amidst this general din of working mirthfulness, for having, but an hour
ago, abused the jovial and generous Autumn, and thanked Heaven that he
was dead? Let us retire into the barn with Shoosy, and hide our blushes.

Comparisons are odoriferous, and therefore for one paragraph let us
compare AUTUMN with SPRING. Suppose ourselves sitting beneath THE
SYCAMORE of Windermere! Poets call Spring Green-Mantle--and true it is
that the groundwork of his garb is green--even like that of the proud
peacock's changeful neck, when the creature treads in the circle of his
own splendour, and the scholar who may have forgotten his classics, has
yet a dream of Juno and of her watchful Argus with his hundred, his
thousand eyes. But the coat of Spring, like that of Joseph, is a coat of
many colours. Call it patch-work if you choose,

"And be yourself the great sublime you draw."

Some people look on nature with a milliner's or a mantua-maker's
eye--arraying her in furbelows and flounces. But use your own eyes and
ours, and from beneath THE SYCAMORE let us two, sitting together in
amity, look lovingly on the SPRING. Felt ever your heart before, with
such an emotion of harmonious beauty, the exquisitely delicate
distinctions of character among the lovely tribes of trees! That is
BELLE ISLE. Earliest to salute the vernal rainbow, with a glow of green
gentle as its own, is the lake-loving ALDER, whose home, too, is by the
flowings of all the streams. Just one degree fainter in its hue--or
shall we rather say brighter--for we feel the difference without knowing
in what it lies--stands, by the Alder's rounded softness, the spiral
LARCH, all hung over its limber sprays, were you near enough to admire
them, with cones of the Tyrian dye. That stem, white as silver, and
smooth as silk, seen so straight in the green sylvan light, and there
airily overarching the coppice with lambent tresses, such as fancy might
picture for the mermaid's hair, pleasant as is her life on that
Fortunate Isle, is yet said by us, who vainly attribute our own sadness
to unsorrowing things--to belong to a Tree that _weeps_,--though a
weight of joy it is, and of exceeding gladness, that thus depresses the
BIRCH'S pendent beauty, till it droops--as we think--like that of a
being overcome with grief! Seen standing all along by themselves, with
something of a foreign air, and an exotic expression, yet not unwelcome
or obtrusive among our indigenous fair forest-trees, twinkling to the
touch of every wandering wind, and restless even amidst what seemeth now
to be everlasting rest, we cannot choose but admire that somewhat darker
grove of columnar Lombardy POPLARS. How comes it that some SYCAMORES so
much sooner than others salute the Spring? Yonder are some but budding,
as if yet the frost lay on the honey-dew that protects the beamy germs.
There are others warming into expansion, half-budded and half-leaved,
with a various light of colour visible in that sun-glint distinctly from
afar. And in that nook of the still sunnier south, trending eastward, a
few are almost in their full summer foliage, and soon will the bees be
swarming among their flowers. A HORSE CHESTNUT has a grand oriental air,
and like a satrap uplifts his green banner yellowing in the light--that
shows he belongs to the line of the Prophet. ELMS are then most
magnificent--witness Christ-Church walk--when they hang over head in
heaven like the chancel of a cathedral. Yet here, too, are the
august--and methinks "a dim religious light" is in that vault of
branches just vivifying to the Spring, and though almost bare, tinged
with a coming hue that ere long will be majestic brightness. Those old
OAKS seem sullen in the sunshine, and slow to put forth their power,
like the Spirit of the Land they emblem. But they, too, are relaxing
from their wonted sternness--soon will that faint green be a glorious
yellow; and while the gold-laden boughs stoop boldly to the storms with
which they love to dally, bounds not the heart of every Briton to the
music of his national anthem,

"Rule, Britannia,
Britannia rules the waves!"

The ASH is a manly tree, but "dreigh and dour" in the leafing; and
yonder stands an Ash-grove like a forest of ships with bare poles in the
docks of Liverpool. Yet like the town of Kilkenny

"It shines well where it stands;"

and the bare grey-blue of the branches, apart but not repulsive, like
some cunning discord in music, deepens the harmony of the Isle of
Groves. Contrast is one of the finest of all the laws of association, as
every philosopher, poet, and peasant kens. At this moment, it brings, by
the bonds of beauty, though many glades intervene, close beside that
pale grey-blue leafless Ash-Clump, that bright black-green PINE Clan,
whose "leaf fadeth never," a glorious Scottish tartan triumphing in the
English woods. Though many glades intervene, we said; for thou seest
that BELLE ISLE is not all one various flush of wood, but bedropt all
over--bedropt and besprinkled with grass-gems, some cloud-shadowed, some
tree-shaded, some mist-bedimmed, and some luminous as small soil-suns,
on which as the eye alights, it feels soothed and strengthened, and
gifted with a profounder power to see into the mystery of the beauty of
nature. But what are those living Hills of snow, or of some substance
purer in its brightness even than any snow that fades in one night on
the mountain-top! Trees are they--fruit-trees--The WILD CHERRY, that
grows stately and widespreading even as the monarch of the wood--and can
that be a load of blossoms! Fairer never grew before poet's eye of old
in the fabled Hesperides. See how what we call snow brightens into
pink--yet still the whole glory is white, and fadeth not away the purity
of the balmy snow-blush. Ay, balmy as the bliss breathing from virgin
lips, when, moving in the beauty left by her morning prayers, a glad
fond daughter steals towards him on the feet of light, and as his arms
open to receive and return the blessing, lays her innocence with smiles
that are almost tears, within her father's bosom.

"As when to those who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabaean odours from the spicy shore
Of Araby the Blest; with such delay
Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league,
Cheer'd with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles."

Shut your eyes--suppose five months gone--and lo! BELLE ISLE in Autumn,
like a scene in another hemisphere of our globe. There is a slight frost
in the air, in the sky, on the lake, and mid-day is as still as
midnight. But, though still, it is cheerful; for close at hand Robin
Redbreast--God bless him!--is warbling on the copestone of that old barn
gable; and though Millar-Ground Bay is half a mile off, how distinct the
clank of the two oars like one, accompanying that large wood-boat on its
slow voyage from Ambleside to Bowness, the metropolitan port of the
Queen of the Lakes. The water has lost, you see, its summer sunniness,
yet it is as transparent as ever it was in summer; and how close
together seem, with their almost meeting shadows, the two opposite
shores! But we wish you to look at BELLE ISLE, though we ourselves are
almost afraid to do so, so transcendently glorious is the sight that we
know will disturb us with an emotion too deep to be endured.--Could you
not think that a splendid sunset had fallen down in fragments on the
Isle called Beautiful, and set it all ablaze! The woods are on fire, yet
they burn not; beauty subdues while it fosters the flame; and there, as
in a many-tented tabernacle, has Colour pitched his royal residence, and
reigns in glory beyond that of any Oriental king. What are all the
canopies, and balconies, and galleries of human state, all hung with
the richest drapery that ever the skill of Art, that Wizard, drew forth
in gorgeous folds from his enchanted loom, if ideally suspended in the
air of imagination beside the sun-and-storm-stained furniture of these
Palaces of Autumn, framed by the Spirit of the Season, of living and
dying umbrage, for his latest delight, ere he move in annual migration,
with all his Court, to some foreign clime far beyond the seas! No names
of trees are remembered--a glorious confusion comprehends in one the
whole leafy race--orange, and purple, and scarlet, and crimson, are all
seen to be there, and interfused through the silent splendour is aye
felt the presence of that terrestrial green, native and unextinguishable
in earth's bosom, as that celestial blue is that of the sky. That trance
goes by, and the spirit, gradually filled with a stiller delight, takes
down all those tents into pieces, and contemplates the encampment with
less of imagination, and with more of love. It knows and blesses each
one of those many glorious groves, each becoming, as it gazes, less and
less glorious, more and more beautiful; till memory revives all the
happiest and holiest hours of the Summer and the Spring, and re-peoples
the melancholy umbrage with a thousand visions of joy, that may return
never more! Images, it may be, of forms and faces now mouldering in the
dust! For as human hearts have felt, and all human lips have
declared--melancholy making poets of us all, ay, even prophets--till the
pensive air of Autumn has been filled with the music of elegiac and
foreboding hymns--as is the Race of Leaves--now old Homer speaks--so is
the Race of Men! Nor till time shall have an end, insensate will be any
creature endowed "with discourse of reason" to those mysterious
misgivings, alternating with triumphant aspirations more mysterious
still, when the Religion of Nature leans in awe on the Religion of God,
and we hear the voice of both in such strains as these--the earthly, in
its sadness, momentarily deadening the divine:--

"But when shall Spring visit the mouldering urn?
Oh! when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?"




SOLILOQUY ON THE SEASONS.

SECOND RHAPSODY.


Have we not been speaking of all the Seasons as belonging to the
masculine gender? They are generally, we believe, in this country,
painted in petticoats, apparently by bagmen, as may be daily seen in the
pretty prints that bedeck the paper-walls of the parlours of inns.
Spring is always there represented as a spanker in a blue symar, very
pertly exposing her budding breast, and her limbs from feet to fork, in
a style that must be very offensive to the mealy-mouthed members of that
shamefaced corporation, the Society for the Suppression of Vice. She
holds a flower between her finger and her thumb, crocus, violet, or
primrose; and though we verily believe she means no harm, she no doubt
does look rather leeringly upon you, like one of the frail sisterhood of
the Come-atables. Summer again is an enormous and monstrous mawsey, _in
puris naturalibus_, meant to image Musidora, or the Medicean, or rather
the Hottentot Venus.

"So stands the statue that enchants the world!"

She seems, at the very lightest, a good round half hundred heavier than
Spring; and, when you imagine her plunging into the pool, you think you
hear a porpus. May no Damon run away with her clothes, leaving behind in
exchange his heart! Gadflies are rife in the dogdays, and should one
"imparadise himself in form of that sweet flesh," there will be a cry in
the woods that will speedily bring to her assistance Pan and all his
Satyrs. Autumn is a motherly matron, evidently _enceinte_, and, like
Love and Charity, who probably are smiling on the opposite wall, she has
a brace of bouncing babies at her breast--in her right hand a formidable
sickle, like a Turkish scymitar--in her left an extraordinary utensil,
bearing, we believe, the heathenish appellation of cornucopia--on her
back a sheaf of wheat--and on her head a diadem--planted there by John
Barleycorn. She is a fearsome dear; as ugly a customer as a lonely man
would wish to encounter beneath the light of a September moon. On her
feet are bauchles--on her legs huggers--and the breadth of her soles,
and the thickness of her ankles, we leave to your own conjectures. Her
fine bust is conspicuous in an open laced boddice--and her huge hips are
set off to the biggest advantage, by a jacket that she seems to have
picked up by the wayside, after some jolly tar, on his return from a
long voyage, had there been performing his toilet, and, by getting rid
of certain encumbrances, enabled to pursue his inland journey with less
resemblance than before to a walking scarecrow. Winter is a withered old
beldam, too poor to keep a cat, hurkling on her hunkers over a feeble
fire of sticks, extinguished fast as it is beeted, with a fizz in the
melted snow which all around that unhoused wretchedness is indurated
with frost; while a blue pool close at hand is chained in iciness, and
an old stump, half buried in the drift. Poor old, miserable, cowering
crone! One cannot look at her without unconsciously putting one's hand
in his pocket, and fumbling for a tester. Yes, there is pathos in the
picture, especially while, on turning round your head, you behold a big
blockhead of a vulgar bagman, with his coat-tails over his arms, warming
his loathsome hideousness at a fire that would roast an ox.

Such are the Seasons! And though we have spoken of them, as mere critics
on art, somewhat superciliously, yet there is almost always no
inconsiderable merit in all prints, pictures, paintings, poems, or
prose-works, that--pardon our tautology--are popular with the people.
The emblematical figments now alluded to, have been the creations of
persons of genius, who had never had access to the works of the old
masters; so that, though the conception is good, the execution is, in
general, far from perfect. Yet many a time, when lying at our ease in a
Wayside Inn, stretched on three wooden chairs, with a little round
deal-table before us, well laden with oatmeal cakes and cheese and
butter, nor, you may be sure, without its "tappit hen"--have we after a
long day's journey--perhaps the longest day--

"Through moors and mosses many, O,"

regarded with no imaginative spirit--when Joseph and his brethren were
wanting--even such symbols of the Seasons as these--while arose to
gladden us many as fair an image as ever nature sent from her woods and
wildernesses to cheer the heart of her worshipper who, on his pilgrimage
to her loftiest shrines, and most majestic temples, spared not to stoop
his head below the lowest lintel, and held all men his equal who earned
by honest industry the scanty fare which they never ate without those
holy words of supplication and thanksgiving, "Give us this day our daily
bread!"

Our memory is a treasure-house of written and unwritten poetry--the
ingots, the gifts of the great bards, and the bars of bullion--much of
the coin our own--some of it borrowed mayhap, but always on good
security, and repaid with interest--a legal transaction, of which even a
not unwealthy man has no need to be ashamed--none of it stolen, nor yet
found where the Highlandman found the tongs. But our riches are like
those that encumbered the floor of the Sanctum of the Dey of Algiers,
not very tidily arranged; and we are frequently foiled in our efforts to
lay our hand, for immediate use or ornament, on a ducat or a diamond, a
pistole or a pearl, a sovereign, or only his crown. We feel ourselves at
this moment in that predicament, when trying to recollect the genders of
Thomson's "Seasons"--

"Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come,
And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,
While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower
Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend!"

That picture is indistinctly and obscurely beautiful to the imagination,
and there is not a syllable about sex--though "ethereal mildness," which
is an Impersonation, and hardly an Impersonation, must be, it is felt, a
Virgin Goddess, whom all the divinities that dwell between heaven and
earth must love. Never to our taste--but our taste is inferior to our
feeling and our genius--though you will seldom go far wrong even in
trusting it--never had a poem a more beautiful beginning. It is not
simple--nor ought it to be--it is rich, and even gorgeous--for the Bard
came to his subject full of inspiration; and as it was the inspiration,
here, not of profound thought, but of passionate emotion, it was right
that music at the very first moment should overflow the page, and that
it should be literally strewed with roses. An imperfect Impersonation is
often proof positive of the highest state of poetical enthusiasm. The
forms of nature undergo a half humanising process under the intensity of
our love, yet still retain the character of the insensate creation, thus
affecting us with a sweet, strange, almost bewildering, blended emotion
that scarcely belongs to either separately, but to both together clings
as to a phenomenon that only the eye of genius sees, because only the
soul of genius can give it a presence--though afterwards all eyes dimly
recognise it, on its being shown to them, as something more vivid than
their own faint experience, yet either kindred to it, or virtually one
and the same. Almost all human nature can, in some measure, understand
and feel the most exquisite and recondite image which only the rarest
genius could produce. Were it not so, great poets might break their
harps, and go drown themselves in Helicon.

"From brightening fields of ether fair disclosed,
Child of the Sun, refulgent SUMMER comes,
In pride of youth, and felt through Nature's depth:
He comes attended by the sultry hours,
And ever-fanning breezes, on his way;
While, from his ardent look, the turning Spring
Averts her blushful face, and earth, and skies,
All smiling, to his hot dominion leaves."

Here the Impersonation is stronger--and perhaps the superior strength
lies in the words "child of the Sun." And here in the words describing
Spring, she too is more of an Impersonation than in the other
passage--averting her blushful face from the Summer's ardent look. The
poet having made Summer masculine, very properly makes Spring feminine;
and 'tis a jewel of a picture--for ladies should always avert their
blushful faces from the ardent looks of gentlemen. Thomson, indeed,
elsewhere says of an enamoured youth overpowered by the loving looks of
his mistress,--

"From the keen gaze her lover turns away,
Full of the dear ecstatic power, and sick
With sighing languishment."

This, we have heard, from experienced persons of both sexes, is as
delicate as it is natural; but for our own simple and single selves, we
never remember having got sick on any such occasion. Much agitated, we
cannot deny--if we did, the most credulous would not credit us--much
agitated we have been, when our lady-love, not contented with fixing
upon us her dove-eyes, began billing and cooing in a style from which
the cushat might have taken a lesson with advantage, that she might the
better perform her innocent part on her first assignation with her
affianced in the pine-grove on St Valentine's day; but never in all our
long lives got we absolutely _sick_--nor even _squeamish_--never were we
obliged to turn away with our hand to our mouth--but, on the contrary,
we were commonly as brisk as a bee at a pot of honey; or, if that be too
luscious a simile, as brisk as that same wonderful insect murmuring for
a few moments round and round a rose-bush, and then settling himself
down seriously to work, as mute as a mouse, among the half-blown petals.
However, we are not now writing our Confessions--and what we wished to
say about this passage is, that in it the one sex is represented as
turning away the face from that of the other, which may be all natural
enough, though polite on the gentleman's part we can never call it; and,
had the female virgin done so, we cannot help thinking it would have
read better in poetry. But for Spring to avert _his_ blushful face from
the ardent looks of Summer, has on us the effect of making both Seasons
seem simpletons. Spring, in the character of "ethereal mildness," was
unquestionably a female; but here she is "unsexed from the crown to the
toe," and changed into an awkward hobbletehoy, who, having passed his
boyhood in the country, is a booby who blushes black at the gaze of his
own brother, and if brought into the company of the lasses, would not
fail to faint away in a fit, nor revive till his face felt a pitcherful
of cold water.

"Crown'd with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf,
While Autumn, nodding o'er the yellow plain,
Comes jovial on," &c.,

is, we think, bad. The Impersonation here is complete, and though the
sex of Autumn is not mentioned, it is manifestly meant to be male. So
far, there is nothing amiss either one way or another. But "nodding o'er
the yellow plain" is a mere statement of a fact in nature--and
descriptive of the growing and ripening or ripened harvest--whereas it
is applied here to Autumn, as a figure who "comes jovial on." This is
not obscurity--or indistinctness--which, as we have said before, is
often a great beauty in Impersonation; but it is an inconsistency and a
contradiction--and therefore indefensible on any ground either of
conception or expression.

"There are no such essential vices as this in the "Castle of
Indolence"--for by that time Thomson had subjected his inspiration to
thought--and his poetry, guided and guarded by philosophy, became
celestial as an angel's song.

"See, Winter comes, to rule the varied year,
Sullen and sad, with all his rising train,
Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme,
These! that exalt the soul to solemn thought,
And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms!
Congenial horrors, hail! with frequent foot,
Pleased have I, in my cheerful morn of life,
When nursed by careless Solitude I lived,
And sung of Nature with unceasing joy,
Pleased have I wander'd through your rough domain;
Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure;
Heard the winds roar, and the big torrents burst;
Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew'd
In the grim evening sky. Thus passed the time,
Till through the lucid chambers of the south
Look'd out the joyous Spring, look'd out, and smiled!"

Divine inspiration indeed! Poetry, that if read by the bedside of a
dying lover of nature, might

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