Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




Having taken a lingering farewell of Rydal-mere, and of the new
Chapel-tower, that seems among the groves already to be an antique, we
may either sink down to the stream that flows out of Grassmere and
connects the two lakes, crossing a wooden bridge, and then joining the
new road that sweeps along to the Village, or we may keep up on the face
of the hill, and by a terrace-path reach the Loughrigg-road, a few
hundred yards above Tail-end, a pretty cottage-ornee which you will
observe crowning a wooded eminence, and looking cheerfully abroad over
all the vale. There is one Mount in particular, whence we see to
advantage the delightful panorama--encircling mountains--Grassmere Lake
far down below your feet, with its one green pastoral isle, sylvan
shores, and emerald meadows--huts and houses sprinkled up and down in
all directions--the village partly embowered in groves, and partly open
below the shadow of large single trees--and the Church-tower, almost
always a fine feature in the scenery of the north of England, standing
in stately simplicity among the clustering tenements, nor dwindled even
by the great height of the hills.

It is pleasant to lose sight entirely of a beautiful scene, and to plod
along for a few hundred yards in almost objectless shadow. Our
conceptions and feelings are bright and strong from the nearness of
their objects, yet the dream is somewhat different from the reality. All
at once, at a turning of the road, the splendour reappears like an
unfurled banner, and the heart leaps in the joy of the senses. This sort
of enjoyment comes upon you before you reach the Village of Grassmere
from the point of vision above described, and a stranger sometimes is
apt to doubt if it be really the same Lake--that one island, and those
few promontories, shifting into such varied combinations with the
varying mountain-ridges and ranges, that show top over top in
bewildering succession, and give hints of other valleys beyond, and of
Tarns rarely visited, among the moorland wastes. A single long dim
shadow, falling across the water, alters the whole physiognomy of the
scene--nor less a single bright streak of sunshine, brightening up some
feature formerly hidden, and giving animation and expression to the
whole face of the Lake.

About a short mile from the Village Inn, you will pass by without seeing
it--unless warned not to do so--one of the most singularly beautiful
habitations in the world. It belongs to a gentleman of the name of
Barber, and, we believe, has been almost entirely built by him--the
original hut on which his taste has worked having been a mere shell. The
spirit of the place seems to us to be that of Shadowy Silence. Its
bounds are small; but it is an indivisible part of a hill-side so secret
and sylvan, that it might be the haunt of the roe. You hear the tinkle
of a rill, invisible among the hazels--a bird sings or flutters--a bee
hums his way through the bewildering wood--but no louder sound. Some
fine old forest-trees extend widely their cool and glimmering shade; and
a few stumps or armless trunks, whose bulk is increased by a load of ivy
that hides the hollow wherein the owls have their domicile, give an air
of antiquity to the spot, that, but for other accompaniments, would
almost be melancholy. As it is, the scene has a pensive character. As
yet you have seen no house, and wonder whither the gravel-walks are to
conduct you, winding fancifully and fantastically through the
smooth-shaven lawn, bestrewed by a few large leaves of the
horse-chestnut or sycamore. But there are clustered verandas where the
nightingale might woo the rose, and lattice-windows reaching from eaves
to ground-sill, so sheltered that they might stand open in storm and
rain, and tall circular chimneys, shaped almost like the stems of the
trees that overshadow the roof irregular, and over all a gleam of blue
sky and a few motionless clouds. The noisy world ceases to be, and the
tranquil heart, delighted with the sweet seclusion, breathes, "Oh! that
this were my cell, and that I were a hermit!"

But you soon see that the proprietor is not a hermit; for everywhere you
discern unostentatious traces of that elegance and refinement that
belong to social and cultivated life; nothing rude and rough-hewn, yet
nothing prim and precise. Snails and spiders are taught to keep their
own places; and among the flowers of that hanging garden on a sunny
slope, not a weed is to be seen, for weeds are beautiful only by the
wayside, in the matting of hedge-roots, by the mossy stone, and the
brink of the well in the brae--and are offensive only when they intrude
into society above their own rank, and where they have the air and
accent of aliens. By pretty pebbled steps of stairs you mount up from
platform to platform of the sloping woodland banks--the prospect
widening as you ascend, till from a bridge that spans a leaping rivulet,
you behold in full blow all Grassmere Vale, Village, Church-tower, and
Lake, the whole of the mountains, and a noble arch of sky, the
circumference of that little world of peace.

Circumscribed as are the boundaries of this place, yet the grounds are
so artfully, while one thinks so artlessly, laid out, that, wandering
through their labyrinthine recesses, you might believe yourself in an
extensive wilderness. Here you come out upon a green open glade (you see
by the sun-dial it is past seven o'clock)--there the arms of an immense
tree overshadow what is in itself a scene--yonder you have an alley that
serpentises into gloom and obscurity--and from that cliff you doubtless
would see over the tree-tops into the outer and airy world. With all its
natural beauties is intermingled an agreeable quaintness, that shows the
owner has occasionally been working in the spirit of fancy, almost
caprice; the tool-house in the garden is not without its ornaments--the
barn seems habitable, and the byre has somewhat the appearance of a
chapel. You see at once that the man who lives here, instead of being
sick of the world, is attached to all elegant socialities and amities;
that he uses silver cups instead of maple bowls, shows his scallop-shell
among other curiosities in his cabinet, and will treat the passing
pilgrim with pure water from the spring, if he insists upon that
beverage, but will first offer him a glass of the yellow cowslip-wine,
the cooling claret, or the sparkling champagne.

Perhaps we are all beginning to get a little hungry, but it is too soon
to breakfast; so, leaving the village of Grassmere on the right, keep
your eye on Helm-crag, while we are finding, without seeking, our way up
Easdale. Easdale is an arm of Grassmere, and in the words of Mr Green
the artist, "it is in places profusely wooded, and charmingly
sequestered among the mountains." Here you may hunt the waterfalls, in
rainy weather easily run down, but difficult of detection in a drought.
Several pretty rustic bridges cross and recross the main stream and its
tributaries; the cottages, in nook and on hill-side, are among the most
picturesque and engaging in the whole country; the vale widens into
spacious and noble meadow-grounds, on which might suitably stand the
mansion of any nobleman in England--as you near its head, everything
gets wild and broken, with a slight touch of dreariness, and by no very
difficult ascent we might reach Easdale-tarn in less than an hour's
walking from Grassmere--a lonely and impressive scene, and the haunt of
the angler almost as frequently as of the shepherd.

How far can we enjoy the beauty of external nature under a sharp
appetite for breakfast or dinner? On our imagination the effect of
hunger is somewhat singular. We no longer regard sheep, for instance, as
the fleecy or the bleating flock. Their wool or their baaing is nothing
to us--we think of necks, and jigots, and saddles of mutton; and even
the lamb frisking on the sunny bank is eaten by us in the shape of
steaks and fry. If it is in the morning, we see no part of the cow but
her udder, distilling richest milkiness. Instead of ascending to heaven
on the smoke of a cottage chimney, we put our arms round the column, and
descend on the lid of the great pan preparing the family breakfast.
Every interesting object in the landscape seems edible--our mouth waters
all over the vale--as the village clock tolls eight, we involuntarily
say grace, and Price on the Picturesque gives way to Meg Dods's Cookery.

Mrs Bell of the Red Lion Inn, Grassmere, can give a breakfast with any
woman in England. She bakes incomparable bread--firm, close, compact,
and white, thin-crusted, and admirably raised. Her yeast always works
well. What butter! Before it a primrose must hide its unyellowed head.
Then jam of the finest quality, goose, rasp, and strawberry! and as the
jam is, so are her jellies. Hens cackle that the eggs are fresh--and
these shrimps were scraping the sand last night in the Whitehaven sea.
What glorious bannocks of barley-meal! Crisp wheaten cakes, too, no
thicker than a wafer. Do not, our good sir, appropriate that cut of
pickled salmon; it is heavier than it looks, and will weigh about four
pounds. One might live a thousand years, yet never weary of such
mutton-ham. Virgin honey, indeed! Let us hope that the bees were not
smothered, but by some gracious disciple of Bonar or Huber decoyed from
a full hive into an empty one, with half the summer and all the autumn
before them to build and saturate their new Comb-Palace. No bad thing
is a cold pigeon-pie, especially of cushats. To hear them cooing in the
centre of a wood is one thing, and to see them lying at the bottom of a
pie is another--which is the better, depends entirely on time, place,
and circumstance. Well, a beef-steak at breakfast is rather
startling--but let us try a bit with these fine ingenuous youthful
potatoes, from a light sandy soil on a warm slope. Next to the country
clergy, smugglers are the most spiritual of characters; and we verily
believe that to be "sma' still." Our dear sir--you are in orders, we
believe--will you have the goodness to return thanks? Yes, now you may
ring the bell for the bill. Moderate indeed! With a day's work before
one, there is nothing like the deep broad basis of breakfast.




STROLL TO GRASSMERE.

SECOND SAUNTER.


It is yet only ten o'clock--and what a multitude of thoughts and
feelings, sights and sounds, lights and shadows, have been ours since
sunrise! Had we been in bed, all would have remained unfelt and unknown.
But, to be sure, one dream might have been worth them all. Dreams,
however, when they are over, are gone, be they of bliss or bale, heaven
or the shades. No one weeps over a dream. With such tears no one would
sympathise. Give us reality, "the sober certainty of waking bliss," and
to it memory shall cling. Let the object of our sorrow belong to the
living world, and, transient though it be, its power may be immortal.
Away then, as of little worth, all the unsubstantial and wavering world
of dreams, and in their place give us the very humblest humanities, so
much the better if enjoyed in some beautiful scene of nature like this,
where all is steadfast but the clouds, whose very being is change, and
the flow of waters that have been in motion since the Flood.

Ha! a splendid equipage with a coronet. And out steps, handed by her
elated husband, a high-born beautiful and graceful bride. They are
making a tour of the Lakes, and the honeymoon hath not yet filled her
horns. If there be indeed such a thing as happiness on this earth, here
it is--youth, elegance, health, rank, riches, and love--all united in
ties that death alone can sunder. How they hang towards each other--the
blissful pair! Blind in their passion to all the scenery they came to
admire, or beholding it but by fits and snatches, with eyes that can see
only one object. She hath already learnt to forget father and mother,
and sister and brother, and all the young creatures like herself--every
one--that shared the pastimes and the confidence of her virgin
youthhood. With her, as with Genevieve--

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame!"

And will this holy state of the spirit endure? No--it will fade, and
fade, and fade away, so imperceptibly, so unconsciously (so like the
shortening of the long summer-days, that lose minute after minute of the
light, till again we hear the yellow leaves rustling in autumnal
twilight), that the heart within that snow-drifted bosom will know not
how great has been the change, till at last it shall be told the truth,
and know that all mortal emotion, however paradisiacal, is born to die.

Fain would we believe that forebodings like these are, on all such
occasions, whispered by a blind and ignorant misanthropy, and that of
wedded life it may generally be said,

"O, happy state, where souls together draw,
Where love is liberty, and nature law!"

What profound powers of affection, grief, pity, sympathy, delight, and
religion belong, by its constitution, to the frame of every human soul!
And if the courses of life have not greatly thwarted the divine
dispensations of nature, will they not all rise into genial play within
bosoms consecrated to each other's happiness, till comes between them
the cold hand of death? It would seem that everything fair and good must
flourish under that holy necessity--everything foul and bad fade away;
and that no quarrel or unkindness could ever be between pilgrims
travelling together through time to eternity, whether their path lead
through an Eden or a waste. Habit itself comes with humble hearts to be
gracious and benign; they who have once loved, will not, for that very
reason, cease to love; memory shall brighten when hope decays; and if
the present be not now so blissful, so thrilling, so steeped in rapture
as it was in the golden prime, yet shall it without repining suffice to
them whose thoughts borrow unconsciously sweet comforts from the past
and future, and have been taught by mutual cares and sorrows to indulge
tempered expectations of the best earthly felicity. And is it not so?
How much tranquillity and contentment in human homes! Calm onflowings of
life shaded in domestic privacy, and seen but at times coming out into
the open light! What brave patience under poverty! What beautiful
resignation in grief! Riches take wings to themselves and flee away--yet
without and within the door there is the decency of a changed, not an
unhappy lot--The clouds of adversity darken men's characters even as if
they were the shadows of dishonour, but conscience quails not in the
gloom--The well out of which humility hath her daily drink, is nearly
dried up to the very spring, but she upbraideth not Heaven--Children,
those flowers that make the hovel's earthen floor delightful as the
glades of Paradise, wither in a day, but there is holy comfort in the
mother's tears; nor are the groans of the father altogether without
relief--for they have gone whither they came, and are blooming now in
the bowers of heaven.

Reverse the picture--and tremble for the fate of those whom God hath
made one, and whom no one man must put asunder. In common natures, what
hot and sensual passions, whose gratification ends in indifference,
disgust, loathing, or hatred! What a power of misery, from fretting to
madness, lies in that mean but mighty word--Temper! The face, to whose
meek beauty smiles seemed native during the days of virgin love, shows
now but a sneer, a scowl, a frown, or a glare of scorn. The shape of
those features is still fine--the eye of the gazelle--the Grecian nose
and forehead--the ivory teeth, so small and regular--and thin line of
ruby lips breathing Circassian luxury--the snow-drifts of the bosom
still heave there--a lovelier waist Apollo never encircled stepping from
the chariot of the sun--nor limbs more graceful did ever Diana veil
beneath the shadows of Mount Latmos. But she is a fiend--a devil
incarnate, and the sovereign beauty of three counties has made your
house a hell.

But suppose that you have had the sense and sagacity to marry a homely
wife--or one comely at the best--nay, even that you have sought to
secure your peace by admitted ugliness--or wedded a woman whom all
tongues call--plain; then may an insurance-ticket, indeed, flame like
the sun in miniature on the front of your house--but what Joint-Stock
Company can undertake to repay the loss incurred by the perpetual
singeing of the smouldering flames of strife, that blaze up without
warning at bed and board, and keep you in an everlasting alarm of fire?
We defy you to utter the most glaring truth that shall not be instantly
contradicted. The most rational proposals for a day or hour of pleasure,
at home or abroad, are on the nail negatived as absurd. If you dine at
home every day for a month, she wonders why nobody asks you out, and
fears you take no trouble to make yourself agreeable. If you dine from
home one day in a month, then are you charged with being addicted to
tavern-clubs. Children are perpetual bones of contention--there is
hatred and sorrow in house-bills--rent and taxes are productive of
endless grievances; and although education be an excellent thing--indeed
quite a fortune in itself--especially to a poor Scotsman going to
England, where all the people are barbarous--yet is it irritatingly
expensive when a great Northern Nursery sends out its hordes, and gawky
hoydens and hobbletehoys are getting themselves accomplished in the
foreign languages, music, drawing, geography, the use of the globes, and
the dumb-bells.

"Let observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru,"

(two bad lines, by the way, though written by Dr Johnson)--and
observation will find the literature of all countries filled with
sarcasms against the marriage-life. Our old Scottish songs and ballads
especially, delight in representing it as a state of ludicrous misery
and discomfort. There is little or no talk of horns--the dilemma of
English wit; but every individual moment of every individual minute, of
every individual hour of every individual day, and so on, has its
peculiar, appropriate, characteristic, and incurable wretchedness. Yet
the delightful thing is, that in spite of all this jeering and gibing,
and grinning and hissing, and pointing with the finger--marrying and
giving in marriage, births and christenings, continue their career of
prosperity; and the legitimate population doubles itself somewhere about
every thirty-five years. Single houses rise out of the earth--double
houses become villages--villages towns--towns cities--and our Metropolis
is itself a world!

While the lyrical poetry of Scotland is thus rife with reproach against
wedlock, it is equally rife with panegyric on the tender passion that
leads into its toils. In one page you shudder in a cold sweat over the
mean miseries of the poor "gudeman;" in the next you see, unconscious of
the same approaching destiny, the enamoured youth lying on his Mary's
bosom beneath the milk-white thorn. The pastoral pipe is tuned under a
fate that hurries on all living creatures to love; and not one lawful
embrace is shunned from any other fears than those which of themselves
spring up in the poor man's thoughtful heart. The wicked betray, and the
weak fall--bitter tears are shed at midnight from eyes once bright as
the day--fair faces never smile again, and many a hut has its broken
heart--hope comes and goes, finally vanquishing, or yielding to
despair--crowned passion dies the sated death, or, with increase of
appetite, grows by what it feeds on--wide, but unseen, over all the
regions of the land, are cheated hopes, vain desires, gnawing jealousy,
dispirited fear, and swarthy-souled revenge--beseechings, seductions,
suicides, and insanities--and all, all spring from the root of Love; yet
all the nations of the earth call the Tree blest, and long as time
endures, will continue to flock thither panting to devour the fruitage,
of which every other golden globe is poison and death.

Smile away then, with all thy most irresistible blandishments, thou
young and happy Bride! What business have we to prophesy bedimming tears
to those resplendent eyes? or that the talisman of that witching smile
can ever lose its magic? Are not the high-born daughters of England also
the high-souled? And have not honour and virtue, and charity and
religion, guarded for centuries the lofty line of thy pure and
unpolluted blood? Joyful, therefore, mayst thou be, as the dove in the
sunshine on the Tower-top--and as the dove serene, when she sitteth on
her nest within the yew-tree's gloom, far within the wood!

Passing from our episode, let us say that we are too well acquainted
with your taste, feeling, and judgment, to tell you on what objects to
gaze or glance, in such a scene as the vale and village of Grassmere. Of
yourselves you will find out the nooks and corners from which the pretty
white-washed and flowering cottages do most picturesquely combine with
each other, and with the hills, and groves, and old church-tower.
Without our guiding hand will you ascend knoll and eminence, be there
pathway or no pathway, and discover for yourselves new Lake-Landscapes.
Led by your own sweet and idle, chaste and noble fancies, you will
disappear, single, or in pairs and parties, into little woody
wildernesses, where you will see nothing but ground-flowers and a
glimmering contiguity of shade. Solitude sometimes, you know, is best
society, and short retirement urges sweet return. Various travels or
voyages of discovery may be undertaken, and their grand object attained
in little more than an hour. The sudden whirr of a cushat is an
incident, or the leaping of a lamb among the broom. In the quiet of
nature, matchless seems the music of the milkmaid's song--and of the
hearty laugh of the haymakers, crossing the meadow in rows, how sweet
the cheerful echo from Helm-crag! Grassmere appears by far the most
beautiful place in all the Lake-country. You buy a field--build a
cottage--and in imagination lie (for they are too short to enable you to
sit) beneath the shadow of your own trees!

In an English village--highland or lowland--seldom is there any spot so
beautiful as the churchyard. That of Grassmere is especially so, with
the pensive shadows of the old church-tower settling over its cheerful
graves. Ay, its cheerful graves! Startle not at the word as too
strong--for the pigeons are cooing in the belfry, the stream is
murmuring round the mossy churchyard wall, a few lambs are lying on the
mounds, and flowers laughing in the sunshine over the cells of the dead.
But hark! the bell tolls--one--one--one--a funeral knell, speaking not
of time, but of eternity! To-day there is to be a burial--and close to
the wall of the Tower you see the new-dug grave.

Hush! The sound of singing voices in yonder wood, deadened by the weight
of umbrage! Now it issues forth into the clear air, and now all is
silence--but the pause speaks of death. Again the melancholy swell
ascends the sky--and then comes slowly along the funeral procession, the
coffin borne aloft, and the mourners all in white; for it is a virgin
who is carried to her last home. Let every head be reverently uncovered
while the psalm enters the gate, and the bier is borne for holy rites
along the chancel of the church, and laid down close to the altar. A
smothered sobbing disturbeth not the service--'tis a human spirit
breathing in accordance with the divine. Mortals weeping for the
immortal--Earth's passions cleaving to one who is now in heaven.

Was she one flower of many, and singled out by death's unsparing finger
from a wreath of beauty, whose remaining blossoms seem now to have lost
all their fragrance and all their brightness? Or was she the sole
delight of her greyhaired parents' eyes, and is the voice of joy
extinguished in their low-roofed home for ever? Had her loveliness been
beloved, and had her innocent hopes anticipated the bridal-day, nor her
heart, whose beatings were numbered, ever feared that narrow bed? All
that we know is her name and age--you see them glittering on her
coffin--"Anabella Irvine, aged xix years"!

The day seems something dim, now that we are all on our way back to
Ambleside; and although the clouds are neither heavier nor more numerous
than before, somehow or other the sun is a little obscured. We must not
indulge too long in a mournful mood--yet let us all sit down under the
shadow of this grove of sycamores, overshadowing this reedy bay of
Rydal-mere, and listen to a Tale of Tears.

Many a tame tradition, embalmed in a few pathetic verses, lives for
ages, while the memory of the most affecting incidents, to which genius
has allied no general emotion, fades like the mist, and leaves
heart-rending griefs undeplored. Elegies and dirges might indeed have
well been sung amidst the green ruins of yonder Cottage, that looks now
almost like a fallen wall--at best, the remnants of a cattle-shed shaken
down by the storm.

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