Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




That simile was conceived in the spirit of Dan Homer, but delivered in
that of Kit North. No matter. Like two such wolf-dogs are now Bob Howie
and the Mad Dominie--and the School like such silly sheep. Those other
hell-dogs are leaping in the rear--and to the eyes of fear and flight
each one of the Six seems more many-headed than Cerberus, while their
mouths kindle the frosty air into fire, and thunder-bolts pursue the
pell-mell of the panic.

Such and so imaginative is not only mental but corporeal fear. What
though it be but a Snowball bicker! The air is darkened--no, brightened
by the balls, as in many a curve they describe their airy flight--some
hard as stones--some soft as slush--some blae and drippy in the cold-hot
hand that launches them on the flying foe, and these are the
teazers--some almost transparent in the cerulean sky, and broken ere
they reach their aim, abortive "armamentaria coeli"--and some useless
from the first, and felt, as they leave the palm, to be fozier than the
foziest turnip, and unfit to bash a fly.

Far and wide, over hill, bank, and brae, are spread the flying School!
Squads of us, at sore sixes and sevens, are making for the frozen woods.
Alas! poor covert now in their naked leaflessness for the stricken deer!
Twos and threes in miserable plight floundering in drift-wreaths! And
here and there--woefullest sight of all--single boys distractedly
ettling at the sanctuaries of distant houses--with their heads all the
while insanely twisted back over their shoulders, and the glare of their
eyes fixed frightfully on the swift-footed Mad Dominie, till souse over
neck and ears, bubble and squeak, precipitated into traitorous pitfall,
and in a moment evanished from this upper world!

Disturbed crows fly away a short distance and alight silent,--the
magpies chatter pert even in alarm,--the lean kine, collected on the
lown sides of braes, wonder at the rippet--their horns moving, but not
their tails,--while the tempest-tamed bull--almost dull now as an
ox--gives a short sullen growl as he feebly paws the snow.

But who is he--the tall slender boy--slender, but sinewy--a wiry
chap--five feet eight on his stocking-soles--and on his stocking-soles
he stands--for the snow has sucked his shoes from his feet--that plants
himself like an oak sapling, rooted ankle-deep on a knoll, and there, a
juvenile Jupiter Stator, with voice and arm arrests the Flight, and
fiercely gesticulating vengeance on the insolent foe, recalls and
rallies the shattered School, that he may re-lead them to victory? The
phantom of a visionary dream! KIT NORTH HIMSELF--

"In life's morning march when his spirit was young."

And once on a day was that figure--ours! Then like a chamois-hunter of
the Alps! Now, alas! like--

"But be hush'd, my dark spirit--for wisdom condemns,
When the faint and the feeble deplore;
Be strong as a rock of the ocean that stems
A thousand wild waves on the shore.
Through the perils of chance and the scowl of disdain,
Let thy front be unalter'd, thy courage elate;
_Yea! even the name we have worshipp'd in vain_
Shall awake not a pang of remembrance again;
_To bear, is to conquer our fate!_"

Half a century is annihilated as if it had never been: it is as if young
Kit had become not old Kit--but were standing now as then front to
front, with but a rood of trampled snow between them, before the Mad
Dominie and Bob Howie--both the bravest of the brave in Snowball or
Stone bicker--in street, lane, or muir fight--hand to hand,
single-pitched with Black King Carey of the Gypsies--or in irregular
high-road row--two to twelve--with a gang of Irish horse-coupers from
the fair of Glasgow returning by Portpatrick to Donaghadee. 'Tis a
strange thing so distinctly to see One's Self as he looked of yore--to
lose one's present frail personal identity in that of the powerful past.
Or rather to admire One's Self as he _was_, without consciousness of the
mean vice of egotism, because of the pity almost bordering on contempt
with which One regards One's Self as he _is_, shrivelled up into a sort
of shrimp of a man--or blown out into a flounder.

The Snowball bicker owns an armistice--and Kit North--that is, we of the
olden and the golden time--advance into the debatable ground between the
two armies, with a frozen branch in our hand as a flag of truce. The Mad
Dominie loved us, because then-a-days--bating and barring the cock and
the squint of his eye--we were like himself a poet, and while a goose
might continue standing on one leg, could have composed one jolly act of
a tragedy, or book of an epic, while Bob--God bless him!--to guard us
from scathe would have risked his life against a whole craal of tinkers.
With open arms they come forward to receive us; but our blood is up--and
we are jealous of the honour of the School, which has received a stain
which must be wiped out in blood. From what mixed motives act boys and
men in the deeds deemed most heroic, and worthy of the meed of
everlasting fame! Even so is it now with us--when sternly eyeing the
other Six, and then respectfully the Mad Dominie, we challenge--not at
long bowls--but toe to toe, at the scratch on the snow, with the naked
mawlies, the brawny boy with the red shock-head, the villain with the
carrots, who, by moonlight nights,

"Round the stacks with the lasses at bogles to play,"

had dared to stand between us and the ladye of our love. Off fly our
jackets and stocks--it is not a day for buff--and at it like bull-dogs.
Twice before had we fought him--at our own option--over the bonnet; for
'twas a sturdy villain, and famous for the cross-buttock. But now, after
the first close, in which we lose the fall--with straight right-handers
we keep him at off-fighting--and that was a gush of blood from his
smeller. "How do you like that, Ben?" Giving his head, with a mad rush,
he makes a plunge with his heavy left--for he was ker-handed--at our
stomach. But a dip of our right elbow caught the blow, to the loud
admiration of Bob Howie--and even the Mad Dominie, the umpire, could not
choose but smile. Like lightning, our left returns between the
ogles--and Ben bites the snow. Three cheers from the School--and, lifted
on the knee of his second, James Maxwell Wallace, since signalised at
Waterloo, and now a knighted colonel of horse, "he grins horribly a
ghastly smile," and is brought up staggering to the scratch. We know
that we have him--and ask considerately, "what he means by winking?" And
now we play around him,

"Just like unto a trundling mop,
Or a wild-goose at play."

He is brought down now to our own weight--then nine stone jimp--his
eyes are getting momently more and more pig-like--water-logged, like
those of Queen Bleary, whose stone image lies in the echoing aisle of
the old Abbey Church of Paisley--and bat-blind, he hits past our head
and body, like an awkward hand at the flail, when drunk, thrashing corn.
Another hit on the smeller, and a stinger on the throat-apple--and down
he sinks like a poppy--deaf to the call of "time"--and victory smiles
upon us from the bright blue skies. "Hurra--hurra--hurra! Christopher
for ever!" and perched aloft, astride on the shoulders of Bob Howie--he,
the Invincible, gallops with us all over the field, followed by the
shouting School, exulting that Ben the Bully has at last met with an
overthrow. We exact an oath that he will never again meddle with Meg
Whitelaw--shake hands cordially, and

"Off to some other game we all together flew."

And so ended the famous Snowball Bicker of Pedmount, now immortalised in
our Prose-Poem.

Some men, it is sarcastically said, are boys all life-long, and carry
with them their puerility to the grave. 'Twould be well for the world
were there in it more such men. By way of proving their manhood, we have
heard grown-up people abuse their own boyhood--forgetting what our great
Philosophical Poet--after Milton and Dryden--has told them, that

"The boy is father of the man,"

and thus libelling the author of their existence. A poor boy indeed must
he have been, who submitted to misery when the sun was new in heaven.
Did he hate or despise the flowers around his feet, congratulating him
on being young like themselves? the stars, young always, though Heaven
only knows how many million years old, every night sparkling in
happiness which they manifestly wished him to share? Did he indeed in
his heart believe that the moon, in spite of her shining midnight face,
was made of green cheese? Not only are the foundations dug and laid in
boyhood, of all the knowledge and the feelings of our prime, but the
ground-flat too built, and often the second story of the entire
superstructure, from the windows of which, the soul looking out, beholds
nature in her state, and leaps down, unafraid of a fall on the green or
white bosom of earth, to join with hymns the front of the procession.
The soul afterwards perfects her palace--building up tier after tier of
all imaginable orders of architecture--till the shadowy roof, gleaming
with golden cupolas, like the cloud-region of the setting sun, set the
heavens ablaze.

Gaze up on the highest idea--gaze down on the profoundest emotion--and
you will know and feel in a moment that it is not a new birth. You
become a devout believer in the Pythagorean and Platonic doctrine of
metempsychosis and reminiscence, and are awed by the mysterious
consciousness of the thought "BEFORE!" Try then to fix its date, and
back travels your soul, now groping its way in utter darkness, and now
in darkness visible--now launching along lines of steady lustre, such as
the moon throws on the broad bosoms of starry lakes--now dazzled by
sudden contrast--

"Blind with excess of light!"

But back let it travel, as best or worst it may, through and amidst eras
after eras of the wan or radiant past; yet never, except for some sweet
instant of delusion, breaking dewdrop-like at a touch or a breath,
during all that perilous pilgrimage--and perilous must it be, haunted by
so many ghosts--never may it reach the shrine it seeks--the fountain
from which first flowed that feeling whose origin seems to have been out
of the world of time--dare we say--in eternity!




CHRISTMAS DREAMS.


How graciously provided are all the subdivisions of Time, diversifying
the dream of human life! And why should moralists mourn over the
mutability that gives the chief charm to all that passes so transitorily
before our eyes!--leaving image upon image in the waters of memory, that
can bear being stirred without being disturbed, and contain steadier and
steadier reflections as they seem to repose on an unfathomable
depth!--the years, the months, the weeks, the days, the nights, the
hours, the minutes, the moments, each in itself a different living, and
peopled, and haunted world. One life is a thousand lives, and each
individual, as he fully renews the past, reappears in a thousand
characters; yet all of them bearing a mysterious identity not to be
misunderstood, and all of them, while every passion has been shifting
and ceasing, and reascending into power, still under the dominion of the
same Conscience, that feels and knows it is from God.

Who will complain of the shortness of human life, that can re-travel all
the windings, and wanderings, and mazes that his feet have trodden since
the farthest back hour at which memory pauses, baffled and blindfolded,
as she vainly tries to penetrate and illumine the palpable, the
impervious darkness that shrouds the few first years of our inscrutable
being? Long, long, long ago seems it to be indeed, when we now remember
it, the Time we first pulled the primroses on the sunny braes, wondering
in our first blissful emotions of beauty at the leaves with a softness
all their own--a yellowness nowhere else so vivid--"the bright
consummate flower" so starlike to our awakened imagination among the
lowly grass--lovely indeed to our admiring eyes as any one of all the
stars that, in their turn, did seem themselves like flowers in the blue
fields of heaven! Long, long, long ago, the time when we danced hand in
hand with our golden-haired sister! Long, long, long ago, the day on
which she died--the hour, so far more dismal than any hour that can now
darken us on this earth, when her coffin descended slowly, slowly into
the horrid clay, and we were borne death-like, and wishing to die, out
of the churchyard, that, from that moment, we thought we could enter
never more! What a multitudinous being must ours have been, when, before
our boyhood was gone, we could have forgotten her buried face! or at the
dream of it, dashed off a tear, and away, with a bounding heart, in the
midst of a cloud of playmates, breaking into fragments on the hill-side,
and hurrying round the shores of those wild moorland lochs, in vain hope
to surprise the heron that slowly uplifted his blue bulk, and floated
away, regardless of our shouts, to the old castle woods. It is all like
a reminiscence of some other state of existence.

Then, after all the joys and sorrows of those few years, which we now
call transitory, but which our BOYHOOD felt as if they would be
endless--as if they would endure for ever--arose upon us the glorious
dawning of another new life--YOUTH--with its insupportable sunshine, and
its agitating storms. Transitory, too, we now know, and well deserving
the same name of dream. But while it lasted, long, various, and
agonising; as, unable to sustain the eyes that first revealed to us the
light of love, we hurried away from the parting hour, and, looking up to
moon and stars, invocated in sacred oaths, hugged the very heavens to
our heart. Yet life had not then nearly reached its meridian, journeying
up the sunbright firmament. How long hung it there exulting, when "it
flamed on the forehead of the noontide sky!" Let not the Time be
computed by the lights and shadows of the years, but by the innumerable
array of visionary thoughts, that kept deploying as if from one eternity
into another--now in dark sullen masses, now in long array, brightened
as if with spear-points and standards, and moving along through chasm,
abyss, and forest, and over the summits of the highest mountains, to the
sound of ethereal music, now warlike and tempestuous--now, as "from
flutes and soft recorders" accompanying not paeans of victory but hymns
of peace. That Life, too, seems, now that it is gone, to have been of a
thousand years. Is it gone? Its skirts are yet hovering on the horizon.
And is there yet another Life destined for us? That Life which men fear
to face--Age, Old Age! Four dreams within a dream--and _where_ to awake?

At dead of night--and it is now dead of night--how the heart quakes on a
sudden at the silent resurrection of buried thoughts! Perhaps the
sunshine of some one single Sabbath of more exceeding holiness comes
first glimmering, and then brightening upon us, with the very same
sanctity that filled all the air at the tolling of the kirk-bell, when
all the parish was hushed, and the voice of streams heard more
distinctly among the banks and braes. Then, all at once, a thunderstorm,
that many years before, or many years after, drove us, when walking
alone over the mountains, into a shieling, will seem to succeed; and we
behold the same threatening aspect of the heavens that then quailed our
beating hearts, and frowned down our eyelids before the lightning began
to flash, and the black rain to deluge all the glens. No need now for
any effort of thought. The images rise of themselves--independently of
our volition--as if another being, studying the working of our minds,
conjured up the phantasmagoria before us who are beholding it with love,
wonder, and fear. Darkness and silence have a power of sorcery over the
past; the soul has then, too, often restored to it feelings and thoughts
that it had lost, and is made to know that nothing it once experiences
ever perishes, but that all things spiritual possess a principle of
immortal life.

Why linger on the shadowy wall some of those phantasmagoria--returning
after they have disappeared--and reluctant to pass away into their
former oblivion? Why shoot others athwart the gloom, quick as spectral
figures seen hurrying among mountains during a great storm? Why do some
glare and threaten--why others fade away with a melancholy smile? Why
_that one_--a Figure all in white, and with white roses in her
hair--come forward through the haze, beautifying into distincter form
and face, till her pale beseeching hands almost touch our neck--and
then, in a moment, it is as nothing?

But now the room is disenchanted--and feebly our lamp is glimmering,
about to leave us to the light of the moon and stars. There it is
trimmed again--and the sudden increase of lustre cheers the heart within
us like a festal strain. And To-Morrow--To-Morrow is Merry Christmas;
and when its night descends there will be mirth and music, and the
light sound of the merry-twinkling feet within these now so melancholy
walls--and sleep, now reigning over all the house save this one room,
will be banished far over the sea--and morning will be reluctant to
allow her light to break up the innocent orgies.

Were every Christmas of which we have been present at the celebration,
painted according to nature--what a Gallery of Pictures! True that a
sameness would pervade them all--but only that kind of sameness that
pervades the nocturnal heavens. One clear night always is, to common
eyes, just like another; for what hath any night to show but one moon
and some stars--a blue vault, with here a few braided, and there a few
castellated, clouds? Yet no two nights ever bore more than a family
resemblance to each other before the studious and instructed eye of him
who has long communed with Nature, and is familiar with every smile and
frown on her changeful, but not capricious, countenance. Even so with
the Annual Festivals of the heart. Then our thoughts are the stars that
illumine those skies--and on ourselves it depends whether they shall be
black as Erebus, or brighter than Aurora.

"Thoughts! that like spirits trackless come and go"--

is a fine line of Charles Lloyd's. But no bird skims, no arrow pierces
the air, without producing some change in the Universe, which will last
to the day of doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor
irrecoverable by Nature's law is any consciousness, however ghostlike;
though many a one, even the most blissful, never does return, but seems
to be buried among the dead. But they are not dead--but only sleep;
though to us who recall them not, they are as they had never been, and
we, wretched ingrates, let them lie for ever in oblivion! How passing
sweet when of their own accord they arise to greet us in our
solitude?--as a friend who, having sailed away to a foreign land in our
youth, has been thought to have died many long years ago, may suddenly
stand before us, with face still familiar and name reviving in a moment,
and all that he once was to us brought from utter forgetfulness close
upon our heart.

My Father's House! How it is ringing like a grove in spring, with the
din of creatures happier, a thousand times happier, than all the birds
on earth. It is the Christmas Holidays--Christmas Day itself--Christmas
Night--and Joy in every bosom intensifies Love. Never before were we
brothers and sisters so dear to one another--never before had our hearts
so yearned towards the authors of our being--our blissful being! There
they sit--silent in all that outcry--composed in all that
disarray--still in all that tumult; yet, as one or other flying imp
sweeps round the chair, a father's hand will playfully strive to catch a
prisoner--a mother's gentler touch on some sylph's disordered symar be
felt almost as a reproof, and for a moment slacken the fairy-flight. One
old game treads on the heels of another--twenty within the hour--and
many a new game never heard of before nor since, struck out by the
collision of kindred spirits in their glee, the transitory fancies of
genius inventive through very delight. Then, all at once, there is a
hush, profound as ever falls on some little plat within a forest when
the moon drops behind the mountain, and the small green-robed People of
Peace at once cease their pastime, and evanish. For She--the
Silver-Tongued--is about to sing an old ballad, words and air alike
hundreds of years old--and sing she doth, while tears begin to fall,
with a voice too mournfully beautiful long to breathe below--and, ere
another Christmas shall have come with the falling snows, doomed to be
mute on earth--but to be hymning in Heaven.

Of that House--to our eyes the fairest of earthly dwellings--with its
old ivied turrets, and orchard-garden bright alike with fruit and with
flowers, not one stone remains. The very brook that washed its
foundations has vanished along with them--and a crowd of other
buildings, wholly without character, has long stood where here a single
tree, and there a grove, did once render so lovely that small demesne;
which, how could we, who thought it the very heart of Paradise, even for
one moment have believed was one day to be blotted out of being, and we
ourselves--then so linked in love that the band which bound us all
together was, in its gentle pressure, felt not nor understood--to be
scattered far and abroad, like so many leaves that after one wild
parting rustle are separated by roaring wind-eddies, and brought
together no more! The old Abbey--it still survives; and there, in that
corner of the burial-ground, below that part of the wall which was
least in ruins, and which we often climbed to reach the flowers and
nests--there, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, lie the Loved and
Venerated--for whom, even now that so many grief-deadening years have
fled, we feel, in this holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to
have ceased to weep--so seldom to have remembered!--And then, with a
powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief, the
floods we all wept together--at no long interval--on those pale and
placid faces as they lay, most beautiful and most dreadful to behold, in
their coffins.

We believe that there is genius in all childhood. But the creative joy
that makes it great in its simplicity dies a natural death or is killed,
and genius dies with it. In favoured spirits, neither few nor many, the
joy and the might survive; for you must know that unless it be
accompanied with imagination, memory is cold and lifeless. The forms it
brings before us must be inspired with beauty--that is, with affection
or passion. All minds, even the dullest, remember the days of their
youth; but all cannot bring back the indescribable brightness of that
blessed season. They who would know what they once were, must not merely
recollect, but they must imagine, the hills and valleys--if any such
there were--in which their childhood played, the torrents, the
waterfalls, the lakes, the heather, the rocks, the heaven's imperial
dome, the raven floating only a little lower than the eagle in the sky.
To imagine what he then heard and saw, he must imagine his own nature.
He must collect from many vanished hours the power of his untamed heart,
and he must, perhaps, transfuse also something of his maturer mind into
these dreams of his former being, thus linking the past with the present
by a continuous chain, which, though often invisible, is never broken.
So is it too with the calmer affections that have grown within the
shelter of a roof. We do not merely remember, we imagine our father's
house, the fireside, all his features then most living, now dead and
buried; the very manner of his smile, every tone of his voice. We must
combine with all the passionate and plastic power of imagination the
spirit of a thousand happy hours into one moment; and we must invest
with all that we ever felt to be venerable such an image as alone can
satisfy our filial hearts. It is thus that imagination, which first
aided the growth of all our holiest and happiest affections, can
preserve them to us unimpaired--

"For she can give us back the dead,
Even in the loveliest looks they wore."

Then came a New Series of Christmases, celebrated one year in this
family, another year in that--none present but those whom Charles Lamb
the Delightful calleth the "old familiar faces;" something in all
features, and all tones of voice, and all manners, betokening origin
from one root--relations all, happy, and with no reason either to be
ashamed or proud of their neither high nor humble birth--their lot being
cast within that pleasant realm, "the Golden Mean," where the dwellings
are connecting-links between the hut and the hall--fair edifices
resembling manse or mansion-house, according as the atmosphere expands
or contracts their dimensions--in which Competence is next-door
neighbour to Wealth, and both of them within the daily walk of
Contentment.

Merry Christmases they were indeed--one Lady always presiding, with a
figure that once had been the stateliest among the stately, but then
somewhat bent, without being bowed down, beneath an easy weight of most
venerable years. Sweet was her tremulous voice to all her
grandchildren's ears. Nor did those solemn eyes, bedimmed into a
pathetic beauty, in any degree restrain the glee that sparkled in orbs
that had as yet shed not many tears, but tears of joy or pity. Dearly
she loved all those mortal creatures whom she was soon about to leave;
but she sat in sunshine even within the shadow of death; and the "voice
that called her home" had so long been whispering in her ear, that its
accents had become dear to her, and consolatory every word that was
heard in the silence, as from another world.

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