Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




Thirty years ago--how short a time in national history--how long in that
of private sorrows!--all tongues were speaking of the death that there
befell; and to have seen the weeping, you would have thought that the
funeral could never have been forgotten. But stop now the shepherd on
the hill, and ask him who lived in that nook, and chance is he knows not
even their name, much less the story of their afflictions. It was
inhabited by Allan Fleming, his wife, and an only child, known
familiarly in her own small world by the name of LUCY OF THE FOLD. In
almost every district among the mountains, there is its peculiar
pride--some one creature to whom nature has been especially kind, and
whose personal beauty, sweetness of disposition, and felt superiority of
mind and manner, single her out, unconsciously, as an object of
attraction and praise, making her the May-day Queen of the unending
year. Such a darling was Lucy Fleming ere she had finished her
thirteenth year; and strangers, who had heard tell of her loveliness,
often dropt in, as if by accident, to see the Beauty of Rydal-mere. Her
parents rejoiced in their child; nor was there any reason why they
should dislike the expression of delight and wonder with which so many
regarded her. Shy was she as a woodland bird, but as fond too of her
nest; and when there was nothing near to disturb her, her life was
almost a perpetual hymn. From joy to sadness, and from sadness to joy;
from silence to song, and from song to silence; from stillness like that
of the butterfly on the flower, to motion like that of the same creature
wavering in the sunshine over the wood-top--was to Lucy as welcome a
change as the change of lights and shadows, breezes and calms, in the
mountain-country of her birth.

One summer day, a youthful stranger appeared at the door of the house,
and after an hour's stay, during which Lucy was from home, asked if they
would let him have lodging with them for a few months--a single room for
bed and books, and that he would take his meals with the family.
Enthusiastic boy! to him poetry had been the light of life, nor did ever
creature of poetry belong more entirely than he to the world of
imagination. He had come into the free mountain region from the
confinement of college walls, and his spirit expanded within him like a
rainbow. No eyes had he for realities--all nature was seen in the light
of genius--not a single object at sunrise and sunset the same. All was
beautiful within the circle of the green hill-tops, whether shrouded in
the soft mists or clearly outlined in a cloudless sky. Home, friends,
colleges, cities--all sunk away into oblivion, and HARRY HOWARD felt as
if wafted off on the wings of a spirit, and set down in a land beyond
the sea, foreign to all he had before experienced, yet in its perfect
and endless beauty appealing every hour more tenderly and strongly to a
spirit awakened to new power, and revelling in new emotion. In that
cottage he took up his abode. In a few weeks came a library of books in
all languages; and there was much wondering talk over all the
countryside about the mysterious young stranger who now lived at the
Fold.

Every day--and, when he chose to absent himself from his haunts among
the hills, every hour was Lucy before the young poet's eyes--and every
hour did her beauty wax more beautiful in his imagination. Who Mr Howard
was, or even if that were indeed his real name, no one knew; but none
doubted that he was of gentle birth, and all with whom he had ever
conversed in his elegant amenity, could have sworn that a youth so bland
and free, and with such a voice, and such eyes, would not have injured
the humblest of God's creatures, much less such a creature as Lucy of
the Fold. It was indeed even so--for, before the long summer days were
gone, he who had never had a sister, loved her even as if she had slept
on the same maternal bosom. Father or mother he now had none--indeed,
scarcely one near relation--although he was rich in this world's riches,
but in them poor in comparison with the noble endowments that nature had
lavished upon his mind. His guardians took little heed of the splendid
but wayward youth--and knew not now whither his fancies had carried him,
were it even to some savage land. Thus the Fold became to him the one
dearest roof under the roof of heaven. All the simple ongoings of that
humble home, love and imagination beautified into poetry; and all the
rough or coarser edges of lowly life were softened away in the light of
genius that transmuted everything on which it fell; while all the silent
intimations which nature gave there of her primal sympathies, in the hut
as fine and forceful as in the hall, showed to his excited spirit
pre-eminently lovely, and chained it to the hearth, around which was
read the morning and the evening prayer.

What wild schemes does not love imagine, and in the face of very
impossibility achieve! "I will take Lucy to myself, if it should be in
place of all the world. I will myself shed light over her being, till in
a new spring it shall be adorned with living flowers that fade not away,
perennial and self-renewed. In a few years the bright docile creature
will have the soul of a very angel--and then, before God and at His holy
altar, mine shall she become for ever--here and hereafter--in this
paradise of earth, and, if more celestial be, in the paradise of
heaven."

Thus two summers and two winters wheeled away into the past; and in the
change, imperceptible from day to day, but glorious at last, wrought on
Lucy's nature by communication with one so prodigally endowed, scarcely
could her parents believe it was their same child, except that she was
dutiful as before, as affectionate, and as fond of all the familiar
objects, dead or living, round and about her birthplace. She had now
grown to woman's stature--tall, though she scarcely seemed so except
when among her playmates; and in her maturing loveliness, fulfilling,
and far more than fulfilling, the fair promise of her childhood. Never
once had the young stranger--stranger no more--spoken to daughter,
father, or mother, of his love. Indeed, for all that he felt towards
Lucy there must have been some other word than love. Tenderness, which
was almost pity--an affection that was often sad--wonder at her
surpassing beauty, nor less at her unconsciousness of its
power--admiration of her spiritual qualities, that ever rose up to meet
instruction as if already formed--and that heart-throbbing that stirs
the blood of youth when the innocent eyes it loves are beaming in the
twilight through smiles or through tears,--these, and a thousand other
feelings, and above all, the creative faculty of a poet's soul, now
constituted his very being when Lucy was in presence, nor forsook him
when he was alone among the mountains.

At last it was known through the country that Mr Howard--the stranger,
the scholar, the poet, the elegant gentleman, of whom nobody knew much,
but whom everybody loved, and whose father must at the least have been a
lord, was going--in a year or less--to marry the daughter of Allan
Fleming--Lucy of the Fold. O, grief and shame to the parents--if still
living--of the noble Boy! O, sorrow for himself when his passion
dies--when the dream is dissolved--and when, in place of the angel of
light who now moves before him, he sees only a child of earth, lowly
born, and long rudely bred--a being only fair as many others are fair,
sister in her simplicity to maidens no less pleasing than she, and
partaking of many weaknesses, frailties, and faults now unknown to
herself in her happiness, and to him in his love! Was there no one to
rescue them from such a fate--from a few months of imaginary bliss, and
from many years of real bale? How could such a man as Allan Fleming be
so infatuated as sell his child to fickle youth, who would soon desert
her broken-hearted? Yet kind thoughts, wishes, hopes, and beliefs
prevailed; nor were there wanting stories of the olden time, of
low-born maidens married to youths of high estate, and raised from hut
to hall, becoming mothers of a lordly line of sons, that were
counsellors to Kings and Princes.

In Spring, Mr Howard went away for a few months--it was said to the
great city--and on his return at midsummer, Lucy was to be his bride.
They parted with a few peaceful tears, and though absent were still
together. And now a letter came, saying that before another Sabbath he
would be at the Fold. A few fields in Easdale, long mortgaged beyond
their fee-simple by the hard-working statesman from whom they
reluctantly were passing away, had meanwhile been purchased by Mr
Howard, and in that cottage they were to abide, till they had built for
themselves a house a little further up the side of the sylvan hill,
below the shadow of Helm-crag. Lucy saw the Sabbath of his return and
its golden sun, but it was in her mind's eye only; for ere it was to
descend behind the hills, she was not to be among the number of living
things.

Up Forest-Ullswater the youth had come by the light of the setting sun;
and as he crossed the mountains to Grassmere by the majestic pass of the
Hawse, still as every new star arose in heaven, with it arose as
lustrous a new emotion from the bosom of his betrothed. The midnight
hour had been fixed for his return to the Fold; and as he reached the
cliffs above White-moss, according to agreement a light was burning in
the low window, the very planet of love. It seemed to shed a bright
serenity over all the vale, and the moon-glittering waters of Rydal-mere
were as an image of life, pure, lonely, undisturbed, and at the pensive
hour how profound! "Blessing and praise be to the gracious God! who
framed my spirit so to delight in His beautiful and glorious
creation--blessing and praise to the Holy One, for the boon of my Lucy's
innocent and religious love!" Prayers crowded fast into his soul, and
tears of joy fell from his eyes, as he stood at the threshold, almost
afraid, in the trembling of life-deep affection, to meet her first
embrace.

In the silence, sobs and sighs, and one or two long deep groans! Then in
another moment, he saw, through the open door of the room where Lucy
used to sleep, several figures moving to and fro in the light, and one
figure upon its knees--who else could it be but her father! Unnoticed he
became one of the pale-faced company--and there he beheld her on her
bed, mute and motionless, her face covered with a deplorable
beauty--eyes closed, and her hands clasped upon her breast! "Dead, dead,
dead!" muttered in his ringing ears a voice from the tombs, and he fell
down in the midst of them with great violence upon the floor.

Encircled with arms that lay round him softer and silkier far than
flower-wreaths on the neck of a child who has laid him down from play,
was he when he awoke from that fit--lying even on his own maiden's bed,
and within her very bosom, that beat yet, although soon about to beat no
more. At that blest awakening moment, he might have thought he saw the
first glimpse of light of the morning after his marriage-day; for her
face was turned towards his breast, and with her faint breathings he
felt the touch of tears. Not tears alone now bedimmed those eyes, for
tears he could have kissed away; but the blue lids were heavy with
something that was not slumber--the orbs themselves were scarcely
visible--and her voice--it was gone, to be heard never again, till in
the choir of white-robed spirits that sing at the right hand of God.

Yet no one doubted that she knew him--him who had dropt down, like a
superior being, from another sphere, on the innocence of her simple
childhood--had taught her to know so much of her own soul--to love her
parents with a profounder and more holy love--to see, in characters more
divine, Heaven's promises of forgiveness to every contrite heart--and a
life of perfect blessedness beyond death and the grave. A smile that
shone over her face the moment that she had been brought to know that he
had come at last, and was nigh at hand--and that never left it while her
bosom moved--no--not for all the three days and nights that he continued
to sit beside the corpse, when father and mother were forgetting their
cares in sleep--that smile told all who stood around, watching her
departure, neighbour, friend, priest, parent, and him the suddenly
distracted and desolate, that in the very moment of expiration she knew
him well, and was recommending him and his afflictions to the pity of
One who died to save sinners.

Three days and three nights, we have said, did he sit beside her who so
soon was to have been his bride; and come or go who would into the room,
he saw them not--his sight was fixed on the winding-sheet, eyeing it,
without a single tear, from feet to forehead, and sometimes looking up
to heaven. As men forgotten in dungeons have lived miserably long
without food, so did he--and so he would have done, on and on to the
most far-off funeral day. From that one chair, close to the bedside, he
never rose. Night after night, when all the vale was hushed, he never
slept. Through one of the midnights there had been a great thunderstorm,
the lightning smiting a cliff close to the cottage; but it seemed that
he heard it not--and during the floods of next day, to him the roaring
vale was silent. On the morning of the funeral, the old people--for now
they seemed to be old--wept to see him sitting still beside their dead
child; for each of the few remaining hours had now its own sad office,
and a man had come to nail down the coffin. Three black specks suddenly
alighted on the face of the corpse--and then off--and on--and away--and
returning--was heard the buzzing of large flies, attracted by beauty in
its corruption. "Ha--ha!" starting up, he cried in horror--"What birds
of prey are these, whom Satan has sent to devour the corpse?" He became
stricken with a sort of palsy--and, being led out to the open air, was
laid down, seemingly as dead as her within, on the green daisied turf,
where, beneath the shadow of the sycamore, they had so often sat,
building up beautiful visions of a long blissful life.

The company assembled--but not before his eyes--the bier was lifted up
and moved away down the sylvan slope, and away round the head of the
Lake, and over the wooden bridge, accompanied, here and there, as it
passed the wayside houses on the road to Grassmere, by the sound of
psalms--but he saw--he heard not;--when the last sound of the spade
rebounded from the smooth arch of the grave, he was not by--but all the
while he was lying where they left him, with one or two pitying dalesmen
at his head and feet. When he awoke again and rose up, the cottage of
the Fold was as if she had never been born--for she had vanished for
ever and aye, and her sixteen years' smiling life was all extinguished
in the dust.

Weeks and months passed on, and still there was a vacant wildness in his
eyes, and a mortal ghastliness all over his face, inexpressive of a
reasonable soul. It scarcely seemed that he knew where he was, or in
what part of the earth, yet, when left by himself, he never sought to
move beyond the boundaries of the Fold. During the first faint
glimmerings of returning reason, he would utter her name, over and over
many times, with a mournful voice, but still he knew not that she was
dead--then he began to caution them all to tread softly, for that sleep
had fallen upon her, and her fever in its blessed balm might abate--then
with groans too affecting to be borne by those who heard them, he would
ask why, since she was dead, God had the cruelty to keep him, her
husband, in life; and finally, and last of all, he imagined himself in
Grassmere Churchyard, and clasping a little mound on the green, which it
was evident he thought was her grave, he wept over it for hours and
hours, and kissed it, and placed a stone at its head, and sometimes all
at once broke out into fits of laughter, till the hideous fainting-fits
returned, and after long convulsions left him lying as if stone-dead. As
for his bodily frame, when Lucy's father lifted it up in his arms,
little heavier was it than a bundle of withered fern. Nobody supposed
that one so miserably attenuated and ghost-like could for many days be
alive--yet not till the earth had thrice revolved round the sun did that
body die, and then it was buried far away from the Fold, the banks of
Rydal-water, and the sweet mountains of Westmoreland; for after passing
like a shadow through many foreign lands, he ceased his pilgrimage in
Palestine, even beneath the shadow of Mount Sion, and was laid, with a
lock of hair--which, from the place it held, strangers knew to have
belonged to one dearly beloved--close to his heart, on which it had lain
so long, and was to moulder away in darkness together, by Christian
hands and in a Christian sepulchre.




L'ENVOY.


Periodical literature is a type of many of the most beautiful things and
interesting events in nature; or say, rather, that _they_ are types of
_it_--the Flowers and the Stars. As to Flowers, they are the prettiest
periodicals ever published in folio--the leaves are wire-wove and
hot-pressed by Nature's self; their circulation is wide over all the
land; from castle to cottage they are regularly taken in; as old age
bends over them, his youth is renewed; and you see childhood poring upon
them pressed close to its very bosom. Some of them are ephemeral--their
contents are exhaled between the rising and setting sun. Once a-week
others break through their green, pink, or crimson cover; and how
delightful, on the seventh day, smiles in the sunshine the Sabbath
Flower--a Sunday publication perused without blame by the most
religious--even before morning prayer! Each month, indeed, throughout
the whole year, has its own Flower periodical. Some are annual, some
biennial, some triennial, and there are perennials that seem to live for
ever--and yet are still periodical--though our love will not allow us to
know when they die, and phoenix-like reappear from their own ashes. So
much for Flowers--typifying or typified;--leaves emblematical of
pages--buds of binding--dew-veils of covers--and the wafting away of
bloom and fragrance like the dissemination of fine feelings, bright
fancies, and winged thoughts.

The Flowers are the periodicals of the earth--the Stars are the
periodicals of heaven. With what unfailing regularity do the numbers
issue forth! Hesperus and Lucifer! ye are one concern. The Pole-star is
studied by all nations. How popular the poetry of the Moon! On what
subject does not the Sun throw light? No fear of hurting your eyes by
reading that fine clear large type on that softened page. As you turn
them over, one blue, another yellow, and another green, all are alike
delightful to the pupil, dear as the very apple of his eye. Yes, the
great Periodical Press of heaven is unceasingly at work--night and day;
the only free power all over the world--'tis indeed like the air we
breathe--if we have it not, we die.

Look, then, at all paper periodicals with pleasure, for sake of the
Flowers and the Stars. Suppose them all extinct, and life would be like
a flowerless earth, a starless heaven. We should soon forget the
Seasons. The periodicals of the External would soon all lose their
meaning, were there no longer any periodicals of the Internal. These are
the lights and shadows of life, merrily dancing or gravely stealing over
the dial; remembrancers of the past--teachers of the present--prophets
of the future hours. Were they all dead, Spring would in vain renew her
promise--wearisome would be the interminable summer days--the fruits of
autumn tasteless--the winter ingle blink mournfully round the hearth.
What are the blessed Seasons themselves, in nature and in Thomson, but
periodicals of a larger growth? We should doubt the goodness of that
man's heart, who loved not the periodical literature of earth and
sky--who would not weep to see one of its flowers wither--one of its
stars fall--one beauty die on its humble bed--one glory drop from its
lofty sphere. Let them bloom and burn on--flowers in which there is no
poison, stars in which there is no disease--whose blossoms are all
sweet, and whose rays are all sanative--both alike steeped in dew, and
both, to the fine ear of nature's worshipper, bathed in music.

Pomposo never reads Magazine poetry--nor, we presume, ever looks at a
field or wayside flower. He studies only the standard authors. He walks
only in gardens with high brick walls--and then admires only at a hint
from the head-gardener. Pomposo does not know that many of the finest
poems of our day first appeared in magazines--or, worse still, in
newspapers; and that in our periodicals, daily and weekly, equally with
the monthlies and quarterlies, is to be found the best criticism of
poetry anywhere extant, superior far, in that unpretending form, to
nine-tenths of the learned lucubrations of Germany--though some of it,
too, is good--almost as one's heart could desire. What is the
circulation even of a popular volume of verses--if any such there
be--to that of a number of Maga? Hundreds of thousands at home peruse it
before it is a week old--as many abroad ere the moon has thrice renewed
her horns; and the Series ceases not--regular as the Seasons that make
up the perfect year. Our periodical literature--say of it what you
will--gives light to the heads and heat to the hearts of millions of our
race. The greatest and best men of the age have not disdained to belong
to the brotherhood; and thus the hovel holds what must not be missing in
the hall--the furniture of the cot is the same as that of the
palace--and duke and ditcher read their lessons from the same page.

Good people have said, and it would be misanthropical to disbelieve or
discredit their judgment, that our Prose is original--nay, has created a
new era in the history of Periodical Literature. Only think of that,
Christopher, and up with your Tail like a Peacock! Why, there is some
comfort in that reflection, while we sit rubbing our withered hands up
and down on these shrivelled shanks. Our feet are on the fender, and
that fire is felt on our face; but we verily believe our ice-cold shanks
would not shrink from the application of the red-hot poker. Peter has a
notion that but for that red-hot poker the fire would go out; so to
humour him we let it remain in the ribs, and occasionally brandish it
round our head in moments of enthusiasm when the Crutch looks tame, and
the Knout a silken leash for Italian Greyhound.

Old Simonides--old Mimnermus--old Theognis--old Solon-old Anacreon--old
Sophocles--old Pindar--old Hesiod--old Homer--and old Methuselah! What
mean we by the word _old_? All these men are old in three lights--they
lived to a raven age--long long ago--and we heard tell of them in our
youth. Their glory dawned on us in a dream of life's golden prime--and
far away seems now that dawn, as if in another world beyond a million
seas! In that use of the word "old," far from us is all thought of
dotage or decay. Old are those great personages as the stars are old; a
heaven there is in which are seen shining, for ever young, all the most
ancient spiritual "orbs of Song."

In our delight, too, we love to speak of old Venus and of old Cupid--of
old Eve and of old Cleopatra--of old Helen and of old Dalilah; yea, of
old Psyche, though her aerial wings are as rainbow bright as the first
hour she waved them in the eye of the youthful Sun.

How full of endearment "old boy!"--"old girl!" "Old Christopher
North!"--"old Maga!" To our simplest sayings age seems to give a
consecration which youth reveres. And why may not our hand, withered
somewhat though it be, but yet unpalsied, point out aloft to heedless
eyes single light or constellation, or lily by herself or in groups
unsuspected along the waysides of our mortal pilgrimage?

Age like ours is even more lovable than venerable; and, thinking on
ourselves, were we a young woman, we should assuredly marry an old man.
Indeed, no man ought to marry before thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty;
and, were it not that life is so short, soon enough at threescore and
ten. At seventy you are sager than ever, though scarcely so strong. You
and life love each other as well as ever; yet 'tis unpleasant, when
sailing on Windermere or Lochlomond with your bride, to observe the Man
in the Honeymoon looking at you with a congratulatory grin of
condolence, to fear that the old villain will smile over your grave in
the Season of Kirns and Harvest Homes, when the fiddle is heard in every
farmhouse, and the bagpipes are lowing like cattle on a thousand hills.
Fain would he insure his life on the Tipperary Tables. But the enamoured
annuitant is haunted with visions of his own Funeral deploying in a long
line of chariots--one at the head of all armed with scythes--through the
city, into the wide gates of the Greyfriars. Lovely is his bride in
white, nor less so his widow in black--more so in grey, portentous of a
great change. Sad, too, to the Sage the thought of leaving his
first-born as yet unborn--or if born, haply an elfish Creature with a
precocious countenance, looking as if he had begun life with borrowing
ten years at least from his own father--auld-farrant as a Fairy, and
gash as the Last of the Lairds.

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