Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




Forgive these friendly interrogatories. Perhaps you are weather-wiser
than ourselves; yet for not a few years we bore the name of "The Man of
the Mountains;" and, though no great linguists, we hope that we know
somewhat more than the vocabulary of the languages of calm and storm.
Remember that we are now at Ambleside--and one week's residence there
may let you into some of the secrets of the unsteady Cabinet of St
Cloud.

One advice we give you, and by following it you cannot fail to be happy
at Ambleside, and everywhere else. Whatever the weather be, love,
admire, and delight in it, and vow that you would not change it for the
atmosphere of a dream. If it be close, hot, oppressive, be thankful for
the faint air that comes down fitfully from cliff and chasm, or the
breeze that ever and anon gushes from stream and lake. If the heavens
are filled with sunshine, and you feel the vanity of parasols, how cool
the sylvan shade for ever moistened by the murmurs of that fairy
waterfall! Should it blow great guns, cannot you take shelter in yonder
magnificent fort, whose hanging battlements are warded even from the
thunder-bolt by the dense umbrage of unviolated woods?
Rain--rain--rain--an even-down pour of rain, that forces upon you
visions of Noah and his ark, and the top of Mount Ararat--still, we
beseech you, be happy. It cannot last long at that rate; the thing is
impossible. Even this very afternoon will the rainbow span the blue
entrance into Rydal's woody vale, as if to hail the westering sun on
his approach to the mountains--and a hundred hill-born torrents will be
seen flashing out of the upfolding mists. What a delightful dazzle on
the light-stricken river! Each meadow shames the lustre of the emerald;
and the soul wishes not for language to speak the pomp and prodigality
of colours that Heaven now rejoices to lavish on the grove-girdled
Fairfield, who has just tossed off the clouds from his rocky crest.

You will not imagine, from anything we have ever said, that we are
enemies to early rising. Now and then, what purer bliss than to embrace
the new-wakened Morn, just as she is rising from her dewy bed! At such
hour, we feel as if there were neither physical nor moral evil in the
world. The united power of peace, innocence, and beauty subdues
everything to itself, and life is love.

Forgive us, loveliest of Mornings! for having overslept the assignation
hour, and allowed thee to remain all by thyself in the solitude,
wondering why thy worshipper could prefer to thy presence the fairest
phantoms that ever visited a dream. And thou hast forgiven us--for not
clouds of displeasure these that have settled on thy forehead: the
unreproaching light of thy countenance is upon us--a loving murmur
steals into our heart from thine--and pure as a child's, daughter of
Heaven! is thy breath.

In the spirit of that invocation we look around us, and as the idea of
morning dies, sufficient for our happiness is "the light of common
day"--the imagery of common earth. There has been rain during the
night--enough, and no more, to enliven nature--the mists are ascending
composedly with promise of gentle weather--and the sun, so mild that we
can look him in the face with unwinking eyes, gives assurance that as he
has risen so will he reign, and so will he set in peace.

Yet we cannot help thinking it somewhat remarkable, that, to the best of
our memory, never once were we the very first out into the dawn. We say
nothing of birds--for they, with their sweet jargoning, anticipate it,
and from their bed on the bough feel the forerunning warmth of the
sunrise; neither do we allude to hares, for they are "hirpling hame," to
sleep away the light hours, open-eyed, in the briery quarry in the
centre of the trackless wood. Even cows and horses we can excuse being
up before us, for they have bivouacked; and the latter, as they often
sleep standing, are naturally somnambulists. Weasels, too, we can pardon
for running across the road before us, and as they reach the
hole-in-the-wall, showing by their clear eyes that they have been awake
for hours, and have probably breakfasted on leveret. We have no spite at
chanticleer, nor the hooting owls against whom he is so lustily crowing
hours before the orient; nor do we care although we know that is not the
first sudden plunge of the tyrant trout into the insect cloud already
hovering over the tarn. But we confess that it is a little mortifying to
our pride of time and place, to meet an old beggar-woman, who from the
dust on her tattered brogues has evidently marched miles from her last
night's wayside howf, and who holds out her withered palm for charity,
at an hour when a cripple of fourscore might have been supposed sleeping
on her pallet of straw. A pedlar, too, who has got through a portion of
the Excursion before the sun has illumed the mountain-tops, is
mortifying, with his piled pack and ellwand. There, as we are a
Christian, is Ned Hurd, landing a pike on the margin of the Reed-pool,
on his way from Hayswater, where he has been all night angling, till his
creel is as heavy as a sermon; and a little further on, comes issuing
like a Dryad's daughter, from the gate in the lane, sweet little Alice
Elleray, with a basket dangling beneath her arm, going in her orphan
beauty to gather, in their season, wild strawberries or violets in the
woods.

Sweet orphan of Wood-edge! what would many a childless pair give for a
creature one-half so beautiful as thou, to break the stillness of a home
that wants but one blessing to make it perfectly happy! Yet there are
few or none to lay a hand on that golden head, or leave a kiss upon its
ringlets. The father of Alice Elleray was a wild and reckless youth,
and, going to the wars, died in a foreign land. Her mother soon faded
away of a broken heart;--and who was to care for the orphan child of the
forgotten friendless? An old pauper who lives in that hut, scarcely
distinguishable from the shielings of the charcoal-burners, was glad to
take her from the parish for a weekly mite that helps to eke out her own
subsistence. For two or three years the child was felt a burden by the
solitary widow; but ere she had reached her fifth summer, Alice Elleray
never left the hut without darkness seeming to overshadow it--never
entered the door without bringing the sunshine. Where can the small,
lonely creature have heard so many tunes, and airs, and snatches of old
songs--as if some fairy bird had taught her melodies of fairyland? She
is now in her tenth year, nor an idler in her solitude. Do you wish for
a flowery bracelet for the neck of a chosen one, whose perfumes may
mingle with the bosom-balm of her virgin beauty? The orphan of Wood-edge
will wreath it of blossoms cropt before the sun hath melted the dew on
leaf or petal. Will you be for carrying away with you to the far-off
city some pretty little sylvan toy, to remind you of Ambleside and
Rydal, and other beautiful names of beautiful localities near the lucid
waters of Windermere? Then, Lady! purchase, at little cost, from the
fair basket-maker, an ornament for your parlour, that will not disgrace
its fanciful furniture, and, as you sit at your dreamy needlework, will
recall the green forest glades of Brathy or Calgarth. Industrious
creature! each day is to thee, in thy simplicity, an entire life. All
thoughts, all feelings, arise and die in peace between sunrise and
sunset. What carest thou for being an orphan! knowing, as thou well
dost, that God is thy father and thy mother, and that a prayer to Him
brings health, food, and sleep to the innocent.

Letting drop a curtsy, taught by Nature, the mother of the Graces, Alice
Elleray, the orphan of Wood-edge, without waiting to be twice bidden,
trills, as if from a silver pipe, a wild, bird-like warble, that in its
cheerfulness has now and then a melancholy fall, and, at the close of
the song, hers are the only eyes that are not dimmed with the haze of
tears. Then away she glides with a thankful smile, and dancing over the
greensward, like an uncertain sunbeam, lays the treasure, won by her
beauty, her skill, and her industry, on the lap of her old guardian, who
blesses her with the uplifting of withered hands.

Meanwhile, we request you to walk away with us up to Stockgill-force.
There has been a new series of dry weather, to be sure; but to our
liking, a waterfall is best in a rainless summer. After a flood, the
noise is beyond all endurance. You get stunned and stupified till your
head splits. Then you may open your mouth like a barn-door--we are
speaking to you, sir--and roar into a friend's ear all in vain a remark
on the cataract. To him you are a dumb man. In two minutes you are as
completely drenched in spray as if you had fallen out of a boat--and
descend to dinner with a toothache that keeps you in starvation in the
presence of provender sufficient for a whole bench of bishops. In dry
weather, on the contrary, the waterfall is in moderation; and instead of
tumbling over the cliff in a perpetual peal of thunder, why, it slides
and slidders merrily and musically away down the green shelving rocks,
and sinks into repose in many a dim or lucid pool, amidst whose
foam-bells is playing or asleep the fearless Naiad. Deuce a headache
have you--speak in a whisper, and not a syllable of your excellent
observation is lost; your coat is dry, except that a few dewdrops have
been shook over you from the branches stirred by the sudden wing-clap of
the cushat--and as for toothache interfering with dinner, you eat as if
your tusks had been just sharpened, and would not scruple to discuss
nuts, upper-and-lower-jaw-work fashion, against the best crackers in the
county. And all this comes of looking at Stockgill-force, or any other
waterfall, in dry weather, after a few refreshing and fertilising
showers that make the tributary rills to murmur, and set at work a
thousand additional feeders to every Lake.

Ha! Matutine Roses!--budding, half-blown, consummate--you are, indeed,
in irresistible blush! We shall not say which of you we love best--_she
knows it_; but we see there is no hope to-day for the old man--for you
are all paired--and he must trudge it _solus_, in capacity of
Guide-General of the Forces. What! the nymphs are going to pony it? And
you intend, you selfish fellows, that we shall hold all the reins
whenever the spirit moveth you to deviate from bridle-path, to clamber
cliff for a bird's-eye view, or dive into dells for some rare plant?
Well, well--there is a tradition, that once we were young ourselves; and
so redolent of youth are these hills, that we are more than half
inclined to believe it--so blush and titter, and laugh and look down, ye
innocent wicked ones, each with her squire by her palfrey's mane, while
good old Christopher, like a true guide, keeps hobbling in the rear on
his Crutch. Holla there!--to the right of our friend Mr Benson's
smithy--and to Rothay-bridge. Turn in at a gate to the right hand,
which, twenty to one, you will find open, that the cattle may take an
occasional promenade along the turnpike, and cool their palates with a
little ditch grass, and saunter along by Millar-bridge and Foxgill on to
Pelter-bridge, and, if you please, to Rydal-mere. Thus, and thus only,
is seen the vale of Ambleside; and what a vale of grove, and glade, and
stream, and cliff, and cottage, and villa, and grassfield, and garden,
and orchard, and--But not another word, for you would forthwith compare
our description with the reality, and seeing it faint and feeble, would
toss it into the Rothay, and laugh as the Vol. plumped over a waterfall!

The sylvan--or say rather the forest scenery--(for there is to us an
indescribable difference between these two words)--of Rydal-park, was,
in memory of living men, magnificent, and it still contains a treasure
of old trees. Lady Diana's white pea-fowl, sitting on the limbs of that
huge old tree like creatures newly alighted from the Isles of Paradise!
all undisturbed by the waterfalls, which, as you keep gazing on the
long-depending plumage illumining the forest gloom, seem indeed to lose
their sound, and to partake the peace of that resplendent show--each
splendour a wondrous Bird! For they stretch themselves all up, with
their graceful crests, o'ercanopied by the umbrage draperied as from a
throne. And never surely were seen in this daylight world such
unterrestrial creatures--though come from afar, all happy as at home in
the Fairies' Oak.

By all means ride away into these woods, and lose yourself for half an
hour among the cooing of cushats, and the shrill shriek of startled
blackbirds, and the rustle of the harmless slow-worm among the last
year's red beech-leaves. No very great harm in a kiss under the shadow
of an oak (oh fie!) while the magpie chatters angrily at safe distance,
and the more innocent squirrel peeps down upon you from a bough of the
canopy, and, hoisting his tail, glides into the obscurity of the
loftiest umbrage. You still continue to see and hear; but the sight is a
glimmer, and the sound a hum, as if the forest-glade were swarming with
bees, from the ground-flowers to the herons' nests. Refreshed by your
dream of Dryads, follow a lonesome din that issues from a pile of wooded
cliffs, and you are led to a Waterfall. Five minutes are enough for
taking an impression, if your mind be of the right material, and you
carry it away with you further down the Forest. Such a torrent will not
reach the lake without disporting itself into many little cataracts; and
saw ye ever such a fairy one as that flowing through below an ivied
bridge into a circular basin overshadowed by the uncertain twilight of
many checkering branches, and washing the rook-base of a Hermitage, in
which a sin-sickened or pleasure-palled man might, before his hairs were
grey, forget all the gratifications and all the guilt of the noisy
world?

You are now all standing together in a group beside Ivy-cottage, the
river gliding below its wooden bridge from Rydal-mere. It is a perfect
model of such architecture--breathing the very spirit of Westmoreland.
The public road, skirted by its front paling, does not in the least
degree injure its character of privacy and retirement; so we think at
this dewy hour of prime, when the gossamer meets our faces, extended
from the honey-suckled slate-porch to the trees on the other side of the
turnpike. And see how the multitude of low-hanging roofs and gable-ends,
and dovecot-looking windows, steal away up a green and shrubberied
acclivity, and terminating in wooded rocks that seem part of the
building, in the uniting richness of ivy, lichens, moss-roses, broom,
and sweet-brier, murmuring with birds and bees, busy near hive and nest!
It would be extremely pleasant to breakfast in that deep-windowed room
on the ground-floor, on cream and barley cakes, eggs, coffee, and
dry-toast, with a little mutton-ham not too severely salted, and at the
conclusion, a nut-shell of Glenlivet or Cognac. But, Lord preserve ye!
it is not yet six o'clock in the morning; and what Christian kettle
simmereth before seven? Yes, my sweet Harriet, that sketch does you
credit, and it is far from being very unlike the original. Rather too
many chimneys by about half-a-dozen; and where did you find that steeple
immediately over the window marked "Dairy?" The pigs are somewhat too
sumptuously lodged in that elegant sty, and the hen-roost might
accommodate a phoenix. But the features of the chief porch are very
happily hit off--you have caught the very attic spirit of the roof--and
some of the windows may be justly said to be staring
likenesses.--Ivy-cottage is slipped into our portfolio, and we shall
compare it, on our return to Scotland, with Buchanan Lodge.

Gallantry forbids, but Truth demands to say, that young ladies are but
indifferent sketchers. The dear creatures have no notion of perspective.
At flower-painting and embroidery, they are pretty fair hands, but they
make sad work among waterfalls and ruins. Notwithstanding, it is
pleasant to hang over them, seated on stone or stool, drawing from
nature; and now and then to help them in with a horse or a hermit. It is
a difficult, almost an impossible thing--that foreshortening. The most
speculative genius is often at a loss to conjecture the species of a
human being foreshortened by a young lady. The hanging Tower at Pisa is,
we believe, some thirty feet or so off the perpendicular, and there is
one at Caerphilly about seventeen; but these are nothing to the castles
in the air we have seen built by the touch of a female magician; nor is
it an unusual thing with artists of the fair sex to order their plumed
chivalry to gallop down precipices considerably steeper than a house, on
animals apparently produced between the tiger and the bonassus. When
they have succeeded in getting something like the appearance of water
between what may be conjectured banks, they are not very particular
about its running occasionally up-hill; and it is interesting to see a
stream stealing quietly below trees in gradual ascension, till,
disappearing for a few minutes over one summit, it comes thundering down
another, in the shape of a waterfall, on the head of an elderly
gentleman, unsuspectingly reading Mr Wordsworth's "Excursion," perhaps,
in the foreground. Nevertheless, we repeat, that it is delightful to
hang over one of the dear creatures, seated on stone or stool, drawing
from nature; for whatever may be the pencil's skill, the eye may behold
the glimpse of a vision whose beauty shall be remembered when even
Windermere herself has for a while faded into oblivion.

On such excursions there are sure to occur a few enviable adventures.
First, the girths get wrong, and, without allowing your beloved virgin
to alight, you spend more time than is absolutely necessary in arranging
them; nor can you help admiring the attitude into which the graceful
creature is forced to draw up her delicate limbs, that her fairy feet
may not be in the way to impede your services. By-and-by a calf--which
you hope will be allowed to grow up into a cow--stretching up her curved
red back from behind a wall, startles John Darby, albeit unused to the
starting mood, and you leap four yards to the timely assistance of the
fair shrieker, tenderly pressing her bridle-hand as you find the rein
that has not been lost, and wonder what has become of the whip that
never existed. A little further on, a bridgeless stream crosses the
road--a dangerous-looking ford indeed--a foot deep at the very least,
and scorning wet feet, as they ought to be scorned, you almost carry,
serene in danger, your affianced bride (or she is in a fair way of
becoming so) in your arms off the saddle, nor relinquish the delightful
clasp till all risk is at an end, some hundred yards on, along the
velvet herbage. Next stream you come to has indeed a bridge--but then
what a bridge! A long, coggly, cracked slate-stone, whose unsteady
clatter would make the soberest steed jump over the moon. You beseech
the timid girl to sit fast, and she almost leans down to your breast as
you press to meet the blessed burden, and to prevent the steady old
stager from leaping over the battlements. But now the chasm on each side
of the narrow path is so tremendous, that she must dismount, after due
disentanglement, from that awkward, old-fashioned crutch and pummel, and
from a stirrup, into which a little foot, when it has once crept like a
mouse, finds itself caught as in a trap of singular construction, and
difficult to open for releasement. You feel that all you love in the
world is indeed fully, freshly, and warmly in your arms, nor can you
bear to set the treasure down on the rough stony road, but look round,
and round, and round, for a soft spot, which you finally prophesy at
some distance up the hill, whitherwards, in spite of pouting Yea and
Nay, you persist in carrying her whose head is ere long to lie in your
tranquil bosom.

Ivy-cottage, you see, is the domicile of gentlemen and lady folk; but
look through yonder dispersion, and in a minute or two your eyes will
see distinctly, in spite of the trees, a _bona fide_ farmhouse,
inhabited by a family whose head is at once an agriculturist, a
shepherd, and a woodsman. A Westmoreland cottage has scarcely any
resemblance to a Scottish one. A Scottish cottage (in the Lowlands) has
rarely any picturesque beauty in itself--a narrow oblong, with steep
thatched roof, and an ear-like chimney at each of the two gable-ends.
Many of the Westmoreland cottages would seem, to an ignorant observer,
to have been originally built on a model conceived by the finest
poetical genius. In the first place, they are almost always built
precisely where they ought to be, had the builder's prime object been to
beautify the dale; at least, so we have often felt in moods, when
perhaps our emotions were unconsciously soothed into complacency by the
spirit of the scene. Where the sedgy brink of the lake or tarn circles
into a lone bay, with a low hill of coppice-wood on one side, and a few
tall pines on the other, no--it is a grove of sycamores--there, about a
hundred yards from the water, and about ten above its ordinary level,
peeps out from its cheerful seclusion that prettiest of all
hamlets--Braithwaite-fold. The hill behind is scarcely sylvan--yet it
has many hazels--a few bushes--here and there a holly--and why or
wherefore, who can now tell, a grove of enormous yews. There is sweet
pasturage among the rocks, and as you may suppose it a spring-day, mild
without much sunshine, there is a bleating of lambs, a twitter of small
birds, and the deep coo of the stock-dove. A wreath of smoke is always a
feature of such a scene in description; but here there is now none, for
probably the whole household are at work in the open air, and the fire,
since fuel is not to be wasted, has been wisely suffered to expire on
the hearth. No. There is a volume of smoke, as if the chimney were in
flame--a tumultuous cloud pours aloft, straggling and broken, through
the broad slate stones that defend the mouth of the vomitory from every
blast. The matron within is doubtless about to prepare breakfast, and
last year's rotten pea-sticks have soon heated the capacious grid-iron.
Let the smoke-wreath melt away at its leisure, and do you admire, along
with us, the infinite variety of all those little shelving and sloping
roofs. To feel the full force of the peculiar beauty of these antique
tenements, you must understand their domestic economy. If ignorant of
that, you can have no conception of the meaning of any one thing you
see--roofs, eaves, chimneys, beams, props, doors, hovels, and sheds, and
hanging staircase, being all huddled together, as you think, in
unintelligible confusion; whereas they are all precisely what and where
they ought to be, and have had their colours painted, forms shaped, and
places allotted by wind and weather, and the perpetually but pleasantly
felt necessities Of the natural condition of mountaineers.

Dear, dear is the thatch to the eyes of a son of Caledonia, for he may
remember the house in which he was born; but what thatch was ever so
beautiful as that slate from the quarry of the White-moss? Each
one--no--not each one--but almost each one--of these little overhanging
roofs seems to have been slated, or repaired at least, in its own
separate season, so various is the lustre of lichens that bathes the
whole, as richly as ever rock was bathed fronting the sun on the
mountain's brow. Here and there is seen some small window, before
unobserved, curtained perhaps--for the statesman, and the statesman's
wife, and the statesman's daughters, have a taste--a taste inspired by
domestic happiness, which, seeking simply comfort, unconsciously creates
beauty, and whatever its homely hand touches, that it adorns. There
would seem to be many fireplaces in Braithwaite-fold, from such a number
of chimney-pillars, each rising up to a different altitude from a
different base, round as the bole of a tree--and elegant, as if shaped
by Vitruvius. To us, we confess, there is nothing offensive in the most
glaring white rough-cast that ever changed a cottage into a patch of
sunny snow. Yet here that greyish-tempered unobtrusive hue does
certainly blend to perfection with roof, rock, and sky. Every instrument
is in tune. Not even in sylvan glade, nor among the mountain rocks, did
wanderer's eyes ever behold a porch of meeting tree-stems, or reclining
cliffs, more gracefully festooned than the porch from which now issues
one of the fairest of Westmeria's daughters. With one arm crossed before
her eyes in a sudden burst of sunshine, with the other Ellinor Inman
waves to her little brother and sisters among the bark-peelers in the
Rydal woods. The graceful signal is repeated till seen, and in a few
minutes a boat steals twinkling from the opposite side of the lake, each
tug of the youthful rowers distinctly heard through the hollow of the
vale. A singing voice rises and ceases--as if the singer were watching
the echo--and is not now the picture complete?

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