Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




After a time old buildings undergo no perceptible change, any more than
old trees; and after they have begun to feel the touch of decay, it is
long before they look melancholy; for while they continue to be used,
they cannot help looking cheerful, and even dilapidation is painful only
when felt to be lifeless. The house now in ruins, that we passed a few
hundred yards ago without your seeing it--we saw it with a sigh--among
some dark firs, just before we began to ascend the hill, was many years
ago inhabited by Miles Mackareth, a man of some substance, and
universally esteemed for his honest and pious character. His integrity,
however, wanted the grace of courteousness, and his religion was
somewhat gloomy and austere, while all the habits of his life were sad,
secluded, and solitary. His fireside was always decent, but never
cheerful--there the passing traveller partook of an ungrudging, but a
grave hospitality; and although neighbours dropping in unasked were
always treated as neighbours, yet seldom were they invited to pass an
evening below his roof, except upon the stated festivals of the seasons,
or some domestic event demanding sociality, according to the country
custom. Year after year the gloom deepened on his strong-marked
intellectual countenance; and his hair, once black as jet, became
untimely grey. Indeed, although little more than fifty years old, when
you saw his head uncovered, you would have taken him for a man
approaching to threescore and ten. His wife and only daughter, both
naturally of a cheerful disposition, grew every year more retired, till
at last they shunned society altogether, and were seldom seen but at
church. And now a vague rumour ran through the hamlets of the
neighbouring valleys, that he was scarcely in his right mind--that he
had been heard by shepherds on the hills talking to himself wild words,
and pacing up and down in a state of distraction. The family ceased to
attend divine worship, and as for some time the Sabbath had been the
only day they were visible, few or none now knew how they fared, and by
many they were nearly forgotten. Meanwhile, during the whole summer, the
miserable man haunted the loneliest places; and, to the terror of his
wife and daughter, who had lost all power over him, and durst not speak,
frequently passed whole days they knew not where, and came home, silent,
haggard, and ghastly, about midnight. His widow afterwards told that he
seldom slept, and never without dreadful dreams--that often he would sit
up all night in his bed, with his eyes fixed and staring on nothing, and
uttering ejaculations for mercy for all his sins.

What these sins were he never confessed--nor, as far as man may judge of
man, had he ever committed any act that needed to lie heavy on his
conscience. But his whole being, he said, was one black sin--and a
spirit had been sent to tell him, that his doom was to be with the
wicked through all the ages of eternity. That spirit, without form or
shadow--only a voice--seldom left his side day or night, go where he
would; but its most dreadful haunt was under a steep rock called
Blakerigg-scaur; and thither, in whatever direction he turned his face
on leaving his own door, he was led by an irresistible impulse, even as
a child is led by the hand. Tenderly and truly had he once loved his
wife and daughter, nor less because that love had been of few words, and
with a shade of sorrow. But now he looked on them almost as if they had
been strangers--except at times, when he started up, kissed them, and
wept. His whole soul was possessed by horrid fantasies, of which it was
itself object and victim; and it is probable that had he seen them both
lying dead, he would have left their corpses in the house, and taken his
way to the mountains. At last one night passed away and he came not. His
wife and daughter, who had not gone to bed, went to the nearest house
and told their tale. In an hour a hundred feet were traversing all the
loneliest places--till a hat was seen floating on Loughrigg-tarn, and
then all knew that the search was near an end. Drags were soon got from
the fishermen on Windermere, and a boat crossed and recrossed the tarn
on its miserable quest, till in an hour, during which wife and daughter
sat without speaking on a stone by the water-edge, the body came
floating to the surface, with its long silver hair. One single shriek
only, it is said, was heard, and from that shriek till three years
afterwards, his widow knew not that her husband was with the dead. On
the brink of that small sandy bay the body was laid down and cleansed of
the muddy weeds--his daughter's own hands assisting in the rueful
work--and she walked among the mourners, the day before the Sabbath,
when the funeral entered the little burial-ground of Langdale chapel,
and the congregation sung a Christian psalm over the grave of the
forgiven suicide.

We cannot patronise the practice of walking in large parties of ten or a
score, ram-stam and helter-skelter, on to the front-green or gravel-walk
of any private nobleman's or gentleman's house, to enjoy, from a
commanding station, an extensive or picturesque view of the circumjacent
country. It is too much in the style of the Free and Easy. The family
within, sitting perhaps at dinner with the windows open, or sewing and
reading in a cool dishabille, cannot like to be stared in upon by so
many curious and inquisitive pupils all a-hunt for prospects; nor were
these rose-bushes planted there for public use, nor that cherry-tree in
vain netted against the blackbirds. Not but that a party may now and
then excusably enough pretend to lose their way in a strange country;
and looking around them in well-assumed bewilderment, bow hesitatingly
and respectfully to maid or matron at door or window, and, with a
thousand apologies, lingeringly offer to retire by the avenue gate, on
the other side of the spacious lawn, that terrace-like hangs over vale,
lake, and river. But to avoid all possible imputation of impertinence,
follow you our example, and make all such incursions by break of day. We
hold that, for a couple of hours before and after sunrise, all the earth
is common property. Nobody surely would think for a moment of looking
black on any number of freebooting lakers coming full sail up the
avenue, right against the front, at four o'clock in the morning? At that
hour, even the poet would grant them the privilege of the arbour where
he sits when inspired, and writing for immortality. He feels conscious
that he ought to have been in bed; and hastens, on such occasions, to
apologise for his intrusion on strangers availing themselves of the
rights and privileges of the Dawn.

Leaving Ivy-cottage, then, and its yet unbreathing chimneys, turn in at
the first gate to your right (if it be not built up, in which case leap
the wall), and find your way the best you can through among old
pollarded and ivied ash-trees, intermingled with yews, and over knolly
ground, brier-woven, and here and there whitened with the jagged thorn,
till you reach, through a slate-stile, a wide gravel walk, shaded by
pine-trees, and open on the one side to an orchard. Proceed--and little
more than a hundred steps will land you on the front of Rydal-mount, the
house of the great Poet of the Lakes. Mr Wordsworth is not at home, but
away to cloudland in his little boat so like the crescent moon. But do
not by too much eloquence awaken the family, or scare the silence, or
frighten "the innocent brightness of the new-born day." We hate all
sentimentalism; but we bid you, in his own words,

"With gentle hand
Touch, for there is a spirit in the leaves."

From a quaint platform of evergreens you see a blue gleam of Windermere
over the grove-tops--close at hand are Rydal-hall and its ancient
woods--right opposite the Loughrigg-fells, ferny, rocky, and sylvan, but
the chief breadth of breast pastoral--and to the right Rydal-mere,
seen, and scarcely seen, through embowering trees, and mountain-masses
bathed in the morning light, and the white-wreathed mists for a little
while longer shrouding their summits. A lately erected private chapel
lifts its little tower from below, surrounded by a green, on which there
are yet no graves--nor do we know if it be intended for a place of
burial. A few houses are sleeping beyond the chapel by the river-side;
and the people beginning to set them in order, here and there a pillar
of smoke ascends into the air, giving cheerfulness and animation to the
scene.

The Lake-Poets! ay, their day is come. The lakes are worthy of the
poets, and the poets of the lakes. That poets should love and live among
lakes, once seemed most absurd to critics whose domiciles were on the
Nor-Loch, in which there was not sufficient water for a tolerable
quagmire. Edinburgh Castle is a noble rock--so are the Salisbury Craigs
noble craigs--and Arthur's seat a noble lion couchant, who, were he to
leap down on Auld Reekie, would break her backbone and bury her in the
Cowgate. But place them by Pavey-ark, or Red-scaur, or the glamour of
Glaramara, and they would look about as magnificent as an upset pack of
cards. Who, pray, are the Nor-Loch poets? Not the Minstrel--he holds by
the tenure of the Tweed. Not Campbell--"he heard in dreams the music of
the Clyde." Not Joanna Baillie--her inspiration was nursed on the
Calder's sylvan banks and the moors of Strathaven. Stream-loving Coila
nurtured Burns; and the Shepherd's grave is close to the cot in which he
was born--within hearing of the Ettrick's mournful voice on its way to
meet the Yarrow. Skiddaw overshadows, and Greta freshens the bower of
him who framed,

"Of Thalaba, the wild and wondrous song."

Here the woods, mountains, and waters of Rydal imparadise the abode of
the wisest of nature's bards, with whom poetry is religion. And where
was he ever so happy as in that region, he who created "Christabelle,"
"beautiful exceedingly;" and sent the "Auncient Mariner" on the wildest
of all voyagings, and brought him back with the ghastliest of all crews,
and the strangest of all curses that ever haunted crime?

Of all Poets that ever lived Wordsworth has been at once the most
truthful and the most idealising; external nature from him has received
a soul, and becomes our teacher; while he has so filled our minds with
images from her, that every mood finds some fine affinities there, and
thus we all hang for sustenance and delight on the bosom of our mighty
Mother. We believe that there are many who have an eye for Nature, and
even a sense of the beautiful, without any very profound feeling; and to
them Wordsworth's finest descriptive passages seem often languid or
diffuse, and not to present to their eyes any distinct picture. Perhaps
sometimes this objection may be just; but to paint to the eye is easier
than to the imagination--and Wordsworth, taking it for granted that
people can now see and hear, desires to make them feel and understand;
of his pupil it must not be said,

"A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more;"

the poet gives the something more till we start at the disclosure as at
a lovely apparition--yet an apparition of beauty not foreign to the
flower, but exhaling from its petals, which till that moment seemed to
us but an ordinary bunch of leaves. In these lines is a humbler example
of how recondite may be the spirit of beauty in any most familiar thing
belonging to the kingdom of nature; one higher far--but of the same
kind--is couched in two immortal verses--

"To me the humblest flower that blows, can give
Thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears."

In what would the poet differ from the worthy man of prose, if his
imagination possessed not a beautifying and transmuting power over the
objects of the inanimate world? Nay, even the naked truth itself is seen
clearly but by poetic eyes; and were a sumph all at once to become a
poet, he would all at once be stark-staring mad. Yonder ass licking his
lips at a thistle, sees but water for him to drink in Windermere a-glow
with the golden lights of setting suns. The ostler or the boots at
Lowood-inn takes a somewhat higher flight, and for a moment, pausing
with curry-comb or blacking-brush in his suspended hand, calls on Sally
Chambermaid for gracious sake to look at Pull-wyke. The waiter, who has
cultivated his taste from conversation with Lakers, learns their
phraseology, and declares the sunset to be exceedingly handsome. The
Laker, who sometimes has a soul, feels it rise within him as the rim of
the orb disappears in the glow of softened fire. The artist compliments
Nature, by likening her evening glories to a picture of Claud
Lorraine--while the poet feels the sense sublime

"Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

Compare any one page, or any twenty pages, with the character given of
Wordsworth's poetry in the obsolete criticism that sought to send it to
oblivion. The poet now sits on his throne in the blue serene--and no
voice from below dares deny his supremacy in his own calm dominions. And
was it of him, whom devout imagination, dreaming of ages to come, now
sees, placed in his immortality between Milton and Spenser, that the
whole land once rang with ridicule, while her wise men wiped their eyes
"of tears that sacred _pity_ had engendered," and then relieved their
hearts by joining in the laughter "of the universal British nation?" All
the ineffable absurdities of the bard are now embodied in Seven
Volumes--the sense of the ridiculous still survives among us--our men of
wit and power are not all dead--we have yet our satirists, great and
small--editors in thousands, and contributors in tens of thousands--yet
not a whisper is heard to breathe detraction from the genius of the
high-priest of nature; while the voice of the awakened and enlightened
land declares it to be divine--using towards him not the language merely
of admiration but of reverence--of love and gratitude due to the
benefactor of humanity, who has purified its passions by loftiest
thoughts and noblest sentiments, stilling their turbulence by the same
processes that magnify their power, and showing how the soul, in ebb and
flow, and when its tide is at full, may be at once as strong and as
serene as the sea.

There are few pictures painted by him merely for the pleasure of the
eye, or even the imagination, though all the pictures he ever painted
are beautiful to both; they have all a moral meaning--many a meaning
more than moral--and his poetry can be comprehended, in its full scope
and spirit, but by those who feel the sublimity of these four lines in
his "Ode to Duty,"--

"Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."

Is thy life disturbed by guilty or sinful passions? Have they gained a
mastery of thee--and art thou indeed their slave? Then the poetry of
Wordsworth must be to thee

"As is a picture to a blind man's eye;"

or if thine eyes yet see the light in which it is enveloped, and thy
heart yet feels the beauty it reveals, in spite of the clouds that
overhang and the storms that trouble them, that beauty will be
unbearable, till regret become remorse, and remorse penitence, and
penitence restore thee to those intuitions of the truth that illumine
his sacred pages, and thou knowest and feelest once more that

"The primal duties shine aloft--like stars,"

that life's best pleasures grow like flowers all around and beneath thy
feet.

Nor are we not privileged to cherish a better feeling than pride in the
belief, or rather knowledge, that WE have helped to diffuse Wordsworth's
poetry not only over this Island, but the furthest dependencies of the
British empire, and throughout the United States of America. Many
thousands have owed to us their emancipation from the prejudices against
it, under which they had wilfully remained ignorant of it during many
years; and we have instructed as many more, whose hearts were free, how
to look on it with those eyes of love which alone can discover the
Beautiful. Communications have been made to us from across the Atlantic,
and from the heart of India--from the Occident and the Orient--thanking
us for having vindicated and extended the fame of the best of our
living bards, till the name of Wordsworth has become a household word on
the banks of the Mississippi and the Ganges. It would have been so had
we never lived, _but not so soon_; and many a noble nature has
worshipped his genius, as displayed in our pages, not in fragments but
in perfect poems, accompanied with our comments, who had no means in
those distant regions of possessing his volumes, whereas Maga flies on
wings to the uttermost parts of the earth.

As for our own dear Scotland--for whose sake, with all her faults, the
light of day is sweet to our eyes--twenty years ago there were not
twenty copies--we question if there were ten--of the "Lyrical Ballads"
in all the land of the mountain and the flood. Now Wordsworth is studied
all Scotland over--and Scotland is proud and happy to know, from his
Memorials of the Tours he has made through her brown heaths and shaggy
woods, that the Bard's heart overflows with kindness towards her
children--that his songs have celebrated the simple and heroic character
of her olden times, nor left unhonoured the virtues that yet survive in
her national character. All her generous youth regard him now as a great
Poet; and we have been more affected than we should choose to confess,
by the grateful acknowledgment of many a gifted spirit, that to us it
was owing that they had opened their eyes and their hearts to the
ineffable beauty of that poetry in which they had, under our
instructions, found not a vain visionary delight, but a strength and
succour and consolation, breathed as from a shrine in the silence and
solitude of nature, in which stood their father's hut, sanctifying their
humble birthplace with pious thoughts that made the very weekdays to
them like Sabbaths--nor on the evening of the Sabbath might they not
blamelessly be blended with those breathed from the Bible, enlarging
their souls to religion by those meditative moods which such pure poetry
inspires, and by those habits of reflection which its study forms, when
pursued under the influence of thoughtful peace.

Why, if it were not for that everlasting--we beg pardon--immortal
Wordsworth--the LAKES, and all that belong to them, would be our
own--_jure divino_--for we are the heir-apparent to the

"Sole King of rocky Cumberland."

But Wordsworth never will--never can die; and so we are in danger of
being cheated out of our due dominion. We cannot think this fatherly
treatment of such a son--and yet in our loftiest moods of filial
reverence we have heard ourselves exclaiming, while

"The Cataract of Lodore
Peal'd to our orisons,"

O King! live for ever!

Therefore, with the fear of "The Excursion" before our eyes, we took to
prose--to numerous prose--ay, though we say it that should not say it,
to prose as numerous as any verse--and showed such scenes

"As savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew."

Here an English Lake--there a Scottish loch--till Turner grew jealous,
and Thomson flung his brush at one of his own unfinished mountains--when
lo! a miracle! Creative of grandeur in his very despair, he stood
astonished at the cliff that came prerupt from his canvass, and
christened itself "the Eagle's Eyrie," as it _frowned serenely_ upon the
sea, maddening in a foamy circle at its inaccessible feet.

Only in such prose as ours can the heart pour forth its effusions like a
strong spring discharging ever so many gallons in a minute, either into
pipes that conduct it through some great Metropolitan city, or into a
water-course that soon becomes a rivulet, then a stream, then a river,
then a lake, and then a sea. Would Fancy luxuriate? Then let her expand
wings of prose. In verse, however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged,
and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let
the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and
deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of
the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous
of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There
is room and power of ascension for any quantity of ballast--fling it
out, and up she goes! Let some gas escape, and she descends far more
gingerly than Mrs Graham and his Serene Highness; the grapnel catches a
stile, and she steps "like a dreadless angel unpursued" once more upon
_terra firma_, and may then celebrate her aerial voyage, if she choose,
in an Ode which will be sure near the end to rise--into prose.

Prose, we believe, is destined to drive what is called Poetry out of the
world. Here is a fair challenge. Let any Poet send us a poem of five
hundred lines--blanks or not--on any subject; and we shall write on that
subject a passage of the same number of words in prose; and the Editors
of the Quarterly, Edinburgh, and Westminster, shall decide which
deserves the prize. Milton was woefully wrong in speaking of "prose or
numerous verse." Prose is a million times more numerous than verse. Then
prose improves the more poetical it becomes; but verse, the moment it
becomes prosaic, goes to the dogs. Then, the connecting links between
two fine passages in verse, it is enjoined, shall be as little like
verse as possible; nay, whole passages, critics say, should be of that
sort; and why, pray, not prose at once? Why clip the King's English, or
the Emperor's German, or the Sublime Porte's Turkish, into bits of dull
jingle--pretending to be verses merely because of the proper number of
syllables--some of them imprisoned perhaps in parentheses, where they
sit helplessly protruding the bare soles of their feet, like folks that
have got muzzy, in the stocks?

Wordsworth says well, that the language of common people, when giving
utterance to passionate emotions, is highly figurative; and hence he
concludes not so well fit for a lyrical ballad. Their volubility is
great, nor few their flowers of speech. But who ever heard them, but by
the merest accident, spout verses? Rhyme do they never--the utmost they
reach is occasional blanks. But their prose! Ye gods! how they do talk!
The washerwoman absolutely froths like her own tub; and you never dream
of asking her "how she is off for soap?" Paradise Lost! The Excursion!
The Task indeed! No man of woman born, no woman by man begotten, ever
yet in his or her senses spoke like the authors of those poems. Hamlet,
in his sublimest moods, speaks in prose--Lady Macbeth talks prose in her
sleep--and so it should be printed. "Out damned spot!" are three words
of prose; and who that beheld Siddons wringing her hands to wash them of
murder, did not feel that they were the most dreadful ever extorted by
remorse from guilt?

A green old age is the most loving season of life, for almost all the
other passions are then dead or dying--or the mind, no more at the mercy
of a troubled heart, compares the little pleasure their gratification
can ever yield now with what it could at any time long ago, and lets
them rest. Envy is the worst disturber or embitterer of man's declining
years; but it does not deserve the name of a passion--and is a disease,
not of the poor in spirit--for they are blessed--but of the mean, and
then they indeed are cursed. For our own parts, we know Envy but as we
have studied it in others--and never felt it except towards the wise and
good; and then 'twas a longing desire to be like them--painful only when
we thought that might never be, and that all our loftiest aspirations
might be in vain. Our envy of Genius is of a nature so noble, that it
knows no happiness like that of guarding from mildew the laurels on the
brows of the Muses' Sons. What a dear kind soul of a critic is old
Christopher North! Watering the flowers of poetry, and removing the
weeds that might choke them--letting in the sunshine upon them, and
fencing them from the blast--proclaiming where the gardens grow, and
leading boys and virgins into the pleasant alleys--teaching hearts to
love and eyes to see their beauty, and classifying, by the attributes it
has pleased nature to bestow on the various orders, the plants of
Paradise--This is our occupation--and the happiness of witnessing them
all growing in the light of admiration is our reward.

Finding our way back as we choose to Ivy-cottage, we cross the wooden
bridge, and away along the western shore of Rydal-mere. Hence you see
the mountains in magnificent composition, and craggy coppices with
intervening green fields shelving down to the lake margin. It is a small
lake, not much more than a mile round, and of a very peculiar character.
One memorable cottage only, as far as we remember, peeps on its shore
from a grove of sycamores, a statesman's pleasant dwelling; and there
are the ruins of another on a slope near the upper end, the circle of
the garden still visible. Everything has a quiet but wildish pastoral
and sylvan look, and the bleating of sheep fills the hollow of the
hills. The lake has a reedy inlet and outlet, and the angler thinks of
pike when he looks upon such harbours. There is a single boat-house,
where the Lady of the Hall has a padlocked and painted barge for
pleasure parties; and the heronry on the high pine-trees of the only
island connects the scene with the ancient park of Rydal, whose oak
woods, though thinned and decayed, still preserve the majestic and
venerable character of antiquity and baronial state.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.