Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




Whether we were indeed all so witty as we thought ourselves--uncles,
aunts, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, cousins, and "the rest," it
might be presumptuous in us, who were considered by ourselves and a few
others not the least amusing of the whole set, at this distance of time
to decide--especially in the affirmative; but how the roof did ring with
sally, pun, retort, and repartee! Ay, with pun--a species of
impertinence for which we have therefore a kindness even to this day.
Had incomparable Thomas Hood had the good fortune to have been born a
cousin of ours, how with that fine fancy of his would he have shone at
those Christmas festivals, eclipsing us all! Our family, through all its
different branches, has ever been famous for bad voices, but good ears;
and we think we hear ourselves--all those uncles and aunts, nephews and
nieces, and cousins--singing now! Easy is it to "warble melody" as to
breathe air. But we hope harmony is the most difficult of all things to
people in general, for to us it was impossible; and what attempts ours
used to be at Seconds! Yet the most woeful failures were rapturously
encored; and ere the night was done we spoke with most extraordinary
voices indeed, every one hoarser than another, till at last, walking
home with a fair cousin, there was nothing left for it but a tender
glance of the eye--a tender pressure of the hand--for cousins are not
altogether sisters, and although partaking of that dearest character,
possess, it may be, some peculiar and appropriate charms of their own;
as didst thou, Emily the "Wild-cap!"--That _sobriquet_ all forgotten
now--for now thou art a matron, nay a Grandam, and troubled with an elf
fair and frolicsome as thou thyself wert of yore, when the gravest and
wisest withstood not the witchery of thy dancings, thy singings, and thy
showering smiles.

On rolled Suns and Seasons--the old died--the elderly became old--and
the young, one after another, were wafted joyously away on the wings of
hope, like birds almost as soon as they can fly ungratefully forsaking
their nests and the groves in whose safe shadow they first essayed their
pinions; or like pinnaces that, after having for a few days trimmed
their snow-white sails in the land-locked bay, close to whose shores of
silvery sand had grown the trees that furnished timber both for hull and
mast, slip their tiny cables on some summer-day, and gathering every
breeze that blows, go dancing over the waves in sunshine, and melt far
off into the main. Or, haply, some were like fair young trees,
transplanted during no favourable season, and never to take root in
another soil, but soon leaf and branch to wither beneath the tropic sun,
and die almost unheeded by those who knew not how beautiful they had
been beneath the dews and mists of their own native climate.

Vain images! and therefore chosen by fancy not too painfully to touch
the heart. For some hearts grow cold and forbidding with selfish
cares--some, warm as ever in their own generous glow, were touched by
the chill of Fortune's frowns, ever worst to bear when suddenly
succeeding her smiles--some, to rid themselves of painful regrets, took
refuge in forgetfulness, and closed their eyes to the past--duty
banished some abroad, and duty imprisoned others at home--estrangements
there were, at first unconscious and unintended, yet ere long, though
causeless, complete--changes were wrought insensibly, invisibly, even in
the innermost nature of those who being friends knew no guile, yet came
thereby at last to be friends no more--unrequited love broke some
bonds--requited love relaxed others--the death of one altered the
conditions of many--and so--year after year--the Christmas Meeting was
interrupted--deferred--till finally it ceased with one accord, unrenewed
and unrenewable. For when Some Things cease for a time--that time turns
out to be for ever.

Survivors of those happy circles! wherever ye be--should these imperfect
remembrances of days of old chance, in some thoughtful pause of life's
busy turmoil, for a moment to meet your eyes, let there be towards the
inditer a few throbs of revived affection in your hearts--for his,
though "absent long and distant far," has never been utterly forgetful
of the loves and friendships that charmed his youth. To be parted in
body is not to be estranged in spirit--and many a dream and many a
vision, sacred to nature's best affections, may pass before the mind of
one whose lips are silent. "Out of sight out of mind" is rather the
expression of a doubt--of a fear--than of a belief or a conviction. The
soul surely has eyes that can see the objects it loves, through all
intervening darkness--and of those more especially dear it keeps within
itself almost undimmed images, on which, when they know it not, think it
not, believe it not, it often loves to gaze, as on relics imperishable
as they are hallowed.

All hail! rising beautiful and magnificent through the mists of
morning--ye Woods, Groves, Towers, and Temples, overshadowing that
famous Stream beloved by all the Muses! Through this midnight
hush--methinks we hear faint and far-off sacred music--

"Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise!"

How steeped now in the stillness of moonlight are all those pale,
pillared Churches, Courts and Cloisters, Shrines and Altars, with here
and there a Statue standing in the shade, or Monument sacred to the
memory of the pious--the immortal dead. Some great clock is striking
from one of many domes--from the majestic Tower of St Mary Magdalen--and
in the deepened hush that follows the solemn sound, the mingling waters
of the Cherwell and the Isis soften the severe silence of the holy
night.

Remote from kindred, and from all the friendships that were the native
growth of the fair fields where our boyhood and our youth had roamed and
meditated and dreamed, those were indeed years of high and lofty mood
which held us in converse with the shades of great Poets and Sages of
old in Rhedicyna's hallowed groves, still, serene, and solemn, as that
Attic Academe where divine Plato, with all Hybla on his lips, discoursed
such excellent music that his life seemed to the imagination
spiritualised--a dim reminiscence of some former state of being. How
sank then the Christmas Service of that beautiful Liturgy into our
hearts! Not faithless we to the simple worship that our forefathers had
loved; but Conscience told us there was no apostasy in the feelings that
rose within us when that deep organ began to blow, that choir of
youthful voices so sweetly to join the diapason,--our eyes fixed all the
while on that divine Picture over the Altar, of our Saviour

"Bearing his cross up rueful Calvary."

The City of Palaces disappears--and in the setting sunlight we behold
mountains of soft crimson snow! The sun hath set, and even more
beautiful are the bright-starred nights of winter, than summer in all
its glories beneath the broad moons of June. Through the woods of
Windermere, from cottage to cottage, by coppice-pathways winding up to
dwellings among the hill-rocks where the birch-trees cease to grow--

"Nodding their heads, before us go,
The merry minstrelsy."

They sing a salutation at every door, familiarly naming old and young by
their Christian names; and the eyes that look upward from the vales to
the hanging huts among the plats and cliffs, see the shadows of the
dancers ever and anon crossing the light of the star-like window, and
the merry music is heard like an echo dwelling in the sky. Across those
humble thresholds often did we on Christmas-week nights of
yore--wandering through our solitary sylvan haunts, under the branches
of trees within whose hollow trunk the squirrel slept--venture in,
unasked perhaps, but not unwelcome, and, in the kindly spirit of the
season, did our best to merrify the Festival by tale or song. And now
that we behold them not, are all those woods, and cliffs, and rivers,
and tarns, and lakes, as beautiful as when they softened and brightened
beneath our living eyes, half-creating, as they gazed, the very world
they worshipped? And are all those hearths as bright as of yore, without
the shadow of our figure? And the roofs, do they ring as mirthfully,
though our voice be forgotten? We hang over Westmoreland, an
unobserved--but observant star. Mountains, hills, rocks, knolls, vales,
woods, groves, single trees, dwellings--all asleep! O Lakes! but ye are,
indeed, by far too beautiful! O fortunate Isles! too fair for human
habitation, fit abode for the Blest! It will not hide itself--it will
not sink into the earth--it will rise; and risen, it will stand steady
with its shadow in the overpowering moonlight, that ONE TREE! that ONE
HOUSE!--and well might the sight of ye two together--were it
harder--break our heart. But hard at all it is not--therefore it is but
crushed.

Can it be that there we are utterly forgotten! No star hanging higher
than the Andes in heaven--but sole-sitting at midnight in a small
chamber--a melancholy man are we--and there seems a smile of
consolation, O Wordsworth! on thy sacred Bust.

Alas! how many heavenly days, "seeming immortal in their depth of rest,"
have died and been forgotten! Treacherous and ungrateful is our memory
even of bliss that overflowed our being as light our habitation. Our
spirit's deepest intercommunion with nature has no place in her
records--blanks are there that ought to have been painted with
imperishable imagery, and steeped in sentiment fresh as the morning on
life's golden hills. Yet there is mercy in this dispensation--for who
can bear to behold the light of bliss re-arising from the past on the
ghastlier gloom of present misery? The phantoms that will not come when
we call on them to comfort us, are too often at our side when in our
anguish we could almost pray that they might be reburied in oblivion.
Such hauntings as these are not as if they were visionary--they come and
go like forms and shapes still imbued with life. Shall we vainly stretch
out our arms to embrace and hold them fast, or as vainly seek to
intrench ourselves by thoughts of this world against their visitation?
The soul in its sickness knows not whether it be the duty of love to
resign itself to indifference or to despair. Shall it enjoy life, they
being dead! Shall we the survivors, for yet a little while, walk in
other companionship out into the day, and let the sunbeams settle on
their heads as they used to do, or cover them with dust and ashes, and
show to those in heaven that love for them is now best expressed by
remorse and penitence!

Sometimes we have fears about our memory--that it is decaying; for,
lately, many ordinary yet interesting occurrences and events, which we
regarded at the time with pain or pleasure, have been slipping away
almost into oblivion, and have often alarmed us of a sudden by their
return, not to any act of recollection, but of themselves, sometimes
wretchedly out of place and season, the mournful obtruding upon the
merry, and worse, the merry upon the mournful--confusion, by no fault of
ours, of piteous and of gladsome faces--tears where smiles were a duty
as well as a delight, and smiles where nature demanded, and religion
hallowed, a sacrifice of tears.

For a good many years we have been tied to town in winter by fetters as
fine as frostwork filigree, which we could not break without destroying
a whole world of endearment. That seems an obscure image; but it means
what the Germans would call in English--our winter environment. We are
imprisoned in a net of our own weaving--an invisible net; yet we can see
it when we choose--just as a bird can see, when he chooses, the wires of
his cage, that are invisible in his happiness, as he keeps hopping and
fluttering about all day long, or haply dreaming on his perch with his
poll under his plumes--as free in confinement as if let loose into the
boundless sky. That seems an obscure image too; but we mean, in truth,
the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is; and we have
improved on that idea, for we have built our own--and are prisoner,
turnkey, and jailer all in one, and 'tis noiseless as the house of
sleep. Or what if we declare that Christopher North is a king in his
palace, with no subjects but his own thoughts--his rule peaceful over
those lights and shadows--and undisputed to reign over them his right
divine.

The opening year in a town, now, answers in all things to our heart's
desire. How beautiful the smoky air! The clouds have a homely look as
they hang over the happy families of houses, and seem as if they loved
their birthplace; all unlike those heartless clouds that keep
_stravaiging_ over mountain-tops, and have no domicile in the sky! Poets
speak of living rocks, but what is their life to that of houses? Who
ever saw a rock with eyes--that is, with windows? Stone-blind all, and
stone-deaf, and with hearts of stone; whereas who ever saw a house
without eyes--that is, windows? Our own is an Argus; yet the good old
Conservative grudges not the assessed taxes--his optics are as cheerful
as the day that lends them light, and they love to salute the setting
sun, as if a hundred beacons, level above level, were kindled along a
mountain side. He might safely be pronounced a madman who preferred an
avenue of trees to a street. Why, trees have no chimneys; and, were you
to kindle a fire in the hollow of an oak, you would soon be as dead as a
Druid. It won't do to talk to us of sap, and the circulation of sap. A
grove in winter, bole and branch--leaves it has none--is as dry as a
volume of sermons. But a street, or a square, is full of "vital sparks
of heavenly flame" as a volume of poetry, and the heart's blood
circulates through the system like rosy wine.

But a truce to comparisons; for we are beginning to feel contrition for
our crime against the country, and, with humbled head and heart, we
beseech you to pardon us--ye rocks of Pavey-Ark, the pillared palaces of
the storms--ye clouds, now wreathing a diadem for the forehead of
Helvellyn--ye trees, that hang the shadows of your undying beauty over
the "one perfect chrysolite" of blessed Windermere!

Our meaning is transparent now as the hand of an apparition waving peace
and goodwill to all dwellers in the land of dreams. In plainer but not
simpler words (for words are like flowers, often rich in their
simplicity--witness the Lily, and Solomon's Song)--Christian people all,
we wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New-Year, in town or in
country--or in ships at sea.

A Happy New-Year!--Ah! ere this ARIA, sung _sotto voce_, reach your ears
(eyes are ears, and ears eyes), the week of all weeks will be over and
gone, and the New-Year will seem growing out of the old year's
ashes!--for the year is your only Phoenix. But what with time to do
has a wish--a hope--a prayer! Their power is in the Spirit that gives
them birth. And what is Spirit but the well-head of thoughts and
feelings flowing and overflowing all life, yet leaving the well-head
full of water as ever--so lucid, that on your gazing intently into its
depths, it seems to become a large soft spiritual eye, reflecting the
heavens and the earth; and no one knows what the heavens and the earth
are, till he has seen them there--for that God made the heavens and the
earth we feel from that beautiful revelation--and where feeling is not,
knowledge is dead, and a blank the universe. Love is life. The unloving
merely breathe. A single sweet beat of the heart is token of something
spiritual that will be with us again in Paradise. "O, bliss and beauty!
are these our feelings"--thought we once in a dream--"all circling in
the sunshine--fair-plumed in a flight of doves!" The vision kept sailing
on the sky--"to and fro for our delight"--no sound on their wings more
than on their breasts; and they melted away in light as if they were
composed of light--and in the hush we heard high-up and far-off
music--as of an angel's song.

That was a dream of the mysterious night; but now we are broad
awake--and see no emblematical phantoms, but the mere sights of the
common day. But sufficient for the day is the beauty thereof--and it
inspires us with affection for all beneath the skies. Will the whole
world, then, promise henceforth to love us?--and we promise henceforth
to love the whole world.

It seems the easiest of all easy things to be kind and good--and then it
is so pleasant! "Self-love and social are the same," beyond all
question; and in that lies the nobility of our nature. The intensest
feeling of self is that of belonging to a brotherhood. All selves then
know they have duties which are in truth loves--and loves are
joys--whether breathed in silence, or uttered in words, or embodied in
actions; and if they filled all life, then all life would be good--and
heaven would be no more than a better earth. And how may all men go to
heaven? By making themselves a heaven on earth, and thus preparing their
spirits to breathe empyreal air when they have dropped the dust. And how
may they make for themselves a heaven on earth? By building up a happy
HOME FOR THE HEART. Much, but not all--oh! not nearly all--is in the
site. But it must be within the precincts of the holy ground--and within
hearing of the waters of life.

Pleasures of Imagination! Pleasures of Memory! Pleasures of Hope! All
three most delightful poems; yet all the thoughts and all the feelings
that inspired them--etherealised--will not make--FAITH! "The day-spring
from on high hath visited us!" Blessed is he who feels that line--nor
need his heart die within him, were a voice to be heard at midnight
saying--"This New-Year's day shall be thy last!"

One voice--one young voice--all by its sweet, sad, solitary self,
singing to us a Christmas Hymn! Listening to that music is like looking
at the sky with all its stars.

Was it a spirit?

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk unseen,
Sole or responsive to each other's voice,
Hymning their great Creator."

No, the singer, like ourselves, is mortal; and in that thought, to our
hearts, lies the pathos of her prayers. The angels, veiling their faces
with their wings, sing in their bliss hallelujahs round the throne of
heaven; but she--a poor child of clay, with her face veiled but with the
shades of humility and contrition, while

"Some natural tears she drops, but wipes them soon,"--

sings, in her sorrow, supplications to be suffered to see afar-off its
everlasting gates--opening not surely for her own sake--for all of woman
born are sinful--and even she in what love calls her innocence feels
that her fallen being does of itself deserve but to die. The hymn is
fading away, liker and liker an echo, and our spirit having lost it in
the distance, returns back holier to the heart-hush of home.

The million hunger and thirst after the stronger and darker passions;
nothing will go down with them but _the intense_. They are
intolerant--or careless--or even ashamed of those emotions and
affections that compose the blessing of our daily life, and give its
lustre to the fire on the hearth of every Christian household. Yet, for
all that, they are inexperienced in those same stronger and darker
passions of which they prate, and know nothing of the import of those
pictures of them painted, with background of gloom and foreground of
fire, in the works of the truly great masters. The disturbed spirit of
such delineations is far beyond the reaches of their souls; and they
mistake their own senseless stupor for solemn awe--or their own mere
physical excitement for the enthusiasm of imagination soaring through
the storm on the wings of intellect. There are such things in "Satan's
Invisible World Displayed" in poetry, as strong and dark passions; and
they who are acquainted with their origin and end call them _bad_
passions; but the good passions are not dark, but bright--and they are
strong too, stronger than death or the grave.

All human beings who know how to reap

"The harvest of a quiet eye,
That broods and sleeps on its own heart,"

feel, by the touch, the flowers of affection in every handful of beauty
they gather up from those fortunate fields on which shines, for ever
through all seasons, the sun of life. How soft the leaves! and, as they
meet the eye, how fair! Framed, so might it seem, of green dew
consolidated into fragrance. Nor do they fade when gently taken from
their stalk on its native bed. They flourish for ever if you bruise them
not--sensitive indeed; and, if you are so forgetful as to treat them
rashly, like those of the plant that bears that name, they shrink, and
seem to shrivel for a time--growing pale, as if upbraiding your
harshness; but cherished, they are seen to be all of

"Immortal amaranth, the tree that grows
Fast by the throne of God;"

for the seeds have fallen from heaven to earth, and for eighteen hundred
years have been spreading themselves over all soils fit for their
reception--and what soil is not fit? Even fit are stony places, and
places full of thorns. For they will live and grow there in spite of
such obstruction--and among rank and matted weeds will often be seen
peering out like primroses gladdening the desert.

That voice again--"One of old Scotland's songs, so sad and slow!" Her
heart is now blamelessly with things of earth. "Sad and slow!" and most
purely sweet. Almost mournful although it be, it breathes of
happiness--for the joy dearest to the soul has ever a faint tinge of
grief. O innocent enchantress! thou encirclest us with a wavering haze
of beautiful imagery, by the spell of that voice awakening after a mood
of awe, but for thy own delight. From the long dim tracts of the past
come strangely blended recognitions of woe and bliss, undistinguishable
now to our own heart--nor knows that heart if it be a dream of
imagination or of memory. Yet why should we wonder? In our happiest
hours there may have been something in common with our most
sorrowful--some shade of sadness cast over them by a passing cloud, that
now allies them in retrospect with the sombre spirit of grief; and in
our unhappiest hours there may have been gleams of gladness, that seem
now to give the return the calm character of peace. Do not all thoughts
and feelings, almost all events, seem to resemble each other--when they
are dreamt of as all past? All receive a sort of sanctification in the
stillness of the time that has gone by--just like the human being whom
they adorned or degraded--when they, too, are at last buried together in
the bosom of the same earth.

Perhaps none among us ever wrote verses of any worth, who had not been,
more or less, readers of our old ballads. All our poets have been
so--and even Wordsworth would not have been the veritable and only
Wordsworth, had he not in boyhood pored--oh, the miser!--over Percy's
"Reliques." From the highest to the humblest, they have all drunk from
those silver springs. Shepherds and herdsmen and woodsmen have been the
masters of the mighty--their strains have, like the voice of a solitary
lute, inspired a power of sadness into the hearts of great poets that
gave their genius to be prevalent over all tears, or with a power of
sublimity that gave it dominion over all terror, like the sound of a
trumpet. "The Babes in the Wood!" "Chevy Chace!" Men become women while
they weep--

"Or start up heroes from the glorious strain."

Sing then "The Dirge," my Margaret, to the Old Man, "so tender and so
true" to the spirit of those old ballads, which we might think were
written by Pity's self.


DIRGE.

"O dig a grave, and dig it deep,
Where I and my true love may sleep!
We'll dig a grave, and dig it deep,
Where thou and thy true love shall sleep!

And let it be five fathom low,
Where winter winds may never blow!--
And it shall be five fathom low,
Where winter winds shall never blow!

And let it be on yonder hill,
Where grows the mountain daffodil!--
And it shall be on yonder hill,
Where grows the mountain daffodil!

And plant it round with holy briers,
To fright away the fairy fires!--
We'll plant it round with holy briers!
To fright away the fairy fires!

And set it round with celandine,
And nodding heads of columbine!--
We'll set it round with celandine,
And nodding heads of columbine!

And let the ruddock build his nest
Just above my true love's breast!--
The ruddock he shall build his nest
Just above thy true love's breast!

And warble his sweet wintry song
O'er our dwelling all day long!
And he shall warble his sweet song
O'er your dwelling all day long.

Now, tender friends, my garments take,
And lay me out for Jesus' sake!
And we will now thy garments take,
And lay thee out for Jesus' sake!

And lay me by my true love's side,
That I may be a faithful bride!--
We'll lay thee by thy true love's side,
That thou may'st be a faithful bride!"

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