Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




Dearly do we love the young--yea, the young of all animals--the young
swallows twittering from their straw-built shed--the young lambs
bleating on the lea--the young bees, God bless them! on their first
flight away off to the heather--the young butterflies, who, born in the
morning, will die of old age ere night--the young salmon-fry glorying in
the gravel at the first feeling of their fins--the young adders basking,
ere they can bite, in the sun, as yet unconscious, like sucking
satirists, of their stings--young pigs, pretty dears! all a-squeak with
their curled tails after prolific grumphie--young lions and tigers,
charming cubs! like very Christian children nuzzling in their nurse's
breast--young devils, ere Satan has sent them to Sin, who keeps a
fashionable boarding-school in Hades, and sends up into the world
above-ground only her finished scholars.

Oh! lad of the lightsome forehead! Thou art smiling at Us; and for the
sake of our own Past we enjoy thy Present, and pardon the contumely with
which thou silently insultest our thin grey hairs. Just such another
"were we at Ravensburg." "_Carpe Diem_" was then our motto, as now it is
yours; "no fear that dinner cool," for we fed then, as you feed now, on
flowers and fruits of Eden. We lived then under the reign of the Seven
Senses; Imagination was Prime Minister, and Reason, as Lord-Chancellor,
had the keeping of the Royal Conscience; and they were kings, not
tyrants--we subjects, not slaves. Supercilious as thou art, Puer, art
thou as well read in Greek as we were at thy flowering age? Come close
that we may whisper in thine ear--while we lean our left shoulder on
thine--our right on the Crutch. The time will come when thou wilt be, O
Son of the Morning! even like unto the shadow by thy side! Was he not
once a mountaineer? If he be a vainglorious boaster, give him the lie,
Ben-y-glo and thy brotherhood--ye who so often heard our shouts mixed
with the red-deer's belling--tossed back in exultation by Echo,
Omnipresent Auditress on youth's golden hills.

Know, all ye Neophytes, that three lovely Sisters often visit the old
man's solitude--Memory, Imagination, Hope. It would be hard to say which
is the most beautiful. Memory has deep, dark, quiet eyes, and when she
closes their light, the long eyelashes lie like shadows on her pensive
cheeks, that smile faintly as if the dreamer were half asleep--a
visionary slumber, which sometimes the dewdrop melting on the leaf will
break, sometimes not the thunder-peal with all its echoes. Imagination
is a brighter and bolder Beauty, with large lamping eyes of uncertain
colour, as if fluctuating with rainbow light, and with features fine as
those which Grecian genius gave to the Muses in the Parian Marble, yet
in their daring delicacy defined like the face of Apollo. As for
Hope--divinest of the divine--Collins, in one long line of light, has
painted the picture of the angel,--

"And Hope enchanted smiled, and waved her golden hair."

All our great prose-writers owe the glory of their power to our great
poets. Even Hobbes translated Homer as well--that is as ill--as
Thucidydes; the Epic in his prime after eighty; the History in his youth
at forty; and it is fearful to dream what the brainful and heartless
metaphysician would have been, had he never heard of the Iliad and the
Odyssey. What is the greatest of prose-writers in comparison with a
great poet? Nay--we shall not be deterred by the fear of
self-contradiction (see our "Stroll to Grassmere") from asking who is a
great prose-writer? We cannot name one; they all sink in Shakespeare.
Campbell finely asks and answers--

"Without the smile from partial beauty won,
Oh! what were man? a world without a sun."

Suppose the world without poetry--how absurd would seem the Sun! Strip
the word "phenomena" of its poetical meaning, and forthwith the whole
human race, "moving about in worlds _realised_," would lose their powers
of speech. But, thank Heaven! we are Makers all. Inhabiting, we verily
believe, a real, and substantial, and palpable outer world, which
nevertheless shall one day perish like a scroll, we build our bowers of
joy in the Apparent, and lie down to rest in a drapery of Dreams.

Thus we often love to dream our silent way even through the noisy world.
And dreamers are with dreamers spiritually, though in the body apart;
nor wandering at will think they whence they come, or whither they are
going, assured by delight that they will reach their journey's end--like
a bee, that in many a musical gyration goes humming round men's heads
and tree-tops, aimlessly curious in his joy, yet knowing instinctively
the straight line that intersects all those airy circles, leading to and
fro between his hive in the garden and the honey-dew on the heather
hills.

What can it be that now recalls to our remembrance a few lines of Esop,
the delightful old Fabulist, the Merry and Wise, who set our souls
a-thinking and our hearts a-feeling in boyhood, by moral lessons read to
them in almost every incident befalling in life's common walks--solemn
as Simonides in this his sole surviving elegiac strain?

"What weary woe, what endless strife
Bring'st thou to mortal men, O Life!
Each hour they draw their breath.
Alas! the wretches all despair
To flee the ills they cannot bear,
But through the gates of Death.

And yet how beautiful art Thou
On Earth and Sea--and on the brow
Of starry Heaven! The Night
Sends forth the moon Thee to adorn;
And thee to glorify the Morn
Restores the Orb of Light.

Yet all is full of Pain and Dread;
Bedrench'd in tears for ever shed;
The darkness render'd worse
By gleams of joy--and if by Heaven
A Blessing seemeth to be given,
It changes to a curse."

Even in our paraphrase are not these lines very impressive? In the
original they are much more solemn. They are not querulous, yet full of
lamentation. We see in them not a weak spirit quarrelling with fate, but
a strong spirit subdued by a sense of the conditions on which life has
been given; conditions against which it is vain to contend, to which it
is hard to submit, but which may yet be borne by a will deriving
strength from necessity, and in itself noble by nature. Nor, dark as the
doctrine is, can we say it is false. Intellect and Imagination may from
doleful experiences have too much generalised their inductions, so as to
seem to themselves to have established the Law of Misery as the Law of
Life. But perhaps it is only thus that the Truth can be made available
to man, as it regards the necessity of Endurance. All is not
wretchedness; but the soul seeks to support itself by the belief that it
is really so. Holding that creed, it has no excuse for itself, if at any
time it is stung to madness by misery, or grovels in the dust in a
passion of grief; none, if at any time it delivers itself wholly up,
abandoning itself to joy, and acts as if it trusted to the permanence
of any blessing under the law of Mutability. The Poet, in the hour of
profound emotion, declares that every blessing sent from heaven is a
Nemesis. That oracular response inspires awe. A salutary fear is kept
alive in the foolish by such sayings of the wise. Even to us--now--they
sound like a knell. Religion has instructed Philosophy; and for Fate we
substitute God. But all men feel that the foundations of Faith are laid
in the dark depths of their being, and that all human happiness is
mysteriously allied with pain and sorrow. The most perfect bliss is ever
awful, as if we enjoyed it under the shadow of some great and gracious
wing that would not long be detained from heaven.

It is not for ordinary minds to attempt giving utterance to such
simplicities. On their tongues truths become truisms. Sentiments, that
seem always fresh, falling from the lips of moral wisdom, are stale in
the mouths of men uninitiated in the greater mysteries. Genius colours
common words with an impressive light, that makes them moral to all
eyes--breathes into them an affecting music, that steals into all hearts
like a revelation and a religion. They become memorable. They pass, as
maxims, from generation to generation; and all because the divinity that
is in every man's bosom responds to the truthful strain it had of yore
itself inspired. Just so with the men we meet on our life-journey. One
man is impressive in all his looks and words, on all serious or solemn
occasions; and we carry away with us moral impressions from his eyes or
lips. Another man says the same things, or nearly so, and perhaps with
more fervour, and his locks are silver. But we forget his person in an
hour; nor does his voice ever haunt our solitude.
Simonides--Solon--Esop!--why do such lines of theirs as those assure us
they were Sages? The same sentiments are the staple of many a sermon
that has soothed sinners into snoring sleep.

Men take refuge even in ocular deception from despair. Over buried
beauty, that once glowed with the same passion that consumes themselves,
they build a white marble tomb, or a green grass grave, and forget much
they ought to remember--all profounder thoughts--while gazing on the
epitaph of letters or flowers. 'Tis a vision to their senses, with which
Imagination would fain seek to delude Love. And 'tis well that the
deception prospers; for what if Love could bid the burial-ground give
up or disclose its dead? Or if Love's eyes saw through dust as through
air? What if this planet--which men call Earth--were at all times seen
and felt to be a cemetery circling round the sun that feeds it with
death, and not a globe of green animated with life--even as the dewdrop
on the rose's leaf is animated with millions of invisible creatures,
wantoning in bliss born of the sunshine and the vernal prime.

Are we sermonising overmuch in this our L'ENVOY to these our misnamed
RECREATIONS? Even a sermon is not always useless; the few concluding
sentences are sometimes luminous, like stars rising on a dull twilight;
the little flower that attracted Park's eyes when he was fainting in the
desert, was to him beauteous as the rose of Sharon; there is solemnity
in the shadow of quiet trees on a noisy road; a churchyard may be felt
even in a village fair; a face of sorrow passes by us in our gaiety,
neither unfelt nor unremembered in its uncomplaining calm; and sweet
from some still house in the city stir is

"The voice of psalms, the simple song of praise."

We daresay you are a very modest person; but we are all given to
self-glorification, private men and public, individuals and nations; and
every one Era and Ego has been prouder than another of its respective
achievements. To hear the Present Generation speak, such an elderly
gentleman as the Past Generation begins to suspect that his personal
origin lies hid in the darkness of antiquity; and worse--that he is of
the Pechs. Now, we offer to back the Past Generation against the Present
Generation, at any feat the Present Generation chooses, and give the
long odds. Say Poetry. Well, we bring to the scratch a few
champions--such as, Beattie, Cowper, Crabbe, Rogers, Bowles, Burns,
Baillie, Campbell, Graham, Montgomery, Scott, Southey, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Hunt, Hogg, Shelley, Keates, Pollok, Cunningham, Bloomfield,
Clare, and _risum teneatis amici_--Ourselves.

"All with waistcoats of red and breeches of blue,
And mighty long tails that come swingeing through."

And at sight of the cavalcade--for each poet is on his Pegasus--the
champions of the Present Generation, accoutred in corduroy kilts and
top-boots, and on animals which, "well do we know, but dare not name,"
wheel to the right-about with "one dismal universal bray," brandishing
their wooden sabres, till, frenzied by their own trumpeters, they charge
madly a palisade in their own rear, and as dismounted cavalry make good
their retreat. This in their strategies is called a drawn battle.

Heroes, alive or dead, of the Past Generation, we bid you hail!
Exceeding happiness to have been born among such Births--to have lived
among such Lives--to be buried among such Graves. O great glory to have
seen such Stars rising one after another larger and more lustrous--at
times, when dilated with delight, more like Moons than Stars--like
Seraphs hovering over the earth they loved, though seeming so high up in
heaven!

To whom now may the young enthusiast turn as to Beings of the same kind
with himself, but of a higher order, and therefore with a love that
fears no sin in its idolatry? The young enthusiast may turn to some of
the living, but he will think more of others who are gone. The dead know
not of his love, and he can hold no communion with the grave. But Poets
never die--immortal in their works, the Library is the world of spirits;
there they dwell, the same as in the flesh, when by meditation most
cleansed and purified--yet with some holy change it seems--a change not
in them but in us, who are stilled by the stillness, and attribute
something supernatural to the Living Dead.

Since first this Golden Pen of ours--given us by One who meant it but
for a memorial--began, many years ago, to let drop on paper a few
careless words, what quires so distained--some pages, let us hope, with
durable ink--have accumulated on our hands! Some haughty ones have
chosen to say rather, how many leaves have been wafted away to wither?
But not a few of the gifted--near and afar--have called on us with other
voices--reminding us that long ago we were elected, on sight of our
credentials--not indeed without a few black balls--into the Brotherhood.
The shelf marked with our initials exhibits some half-dozen volumes
only, and has room for scores. It may not be easily found in that vast
Library; but, humble member as we are, we feel it now to be a point of
honour to make an occasional contribution to the Club. So here is the
FIRST SERIES of what we have chosen to call our RECREATIONS. There have
been much recasting and remoulding--many alterations, believed by us to
have been wrought with no unskilful spirit of change--cruel, we confess,
to our feelings, rejections of numerous lucubrations to their father
dear--and if we may use such words, not a few new creations, in the same
_genial_ spirit in which we worked of old--not always unrewarded by
sympathy, which is better than praise.

For kindness shown when kindness was most needed--for sympathy and
affection--yea, love itself--for grief and pity not misplaced, though
bestowed in a mistaken belief of our condition, forlorn indeed, but not
wholly forlorn--for solace and encouragement sent to us from afar, from
cities and solitudes, and from beyond seas and oceans, from brethren who
never saw our face, and never may see it, we owe a debt of everlasting
gratitude; and life itself must leave our heart, that beats not now as
it used to beat, but with dismal trepidation, before it forget, or cease
to remember as clearly as now it hears them, every one of the many words
that came sweetly and solemnly to us from the Great and Good. Joy and
sorrow make up the lot of our mortal estate, and by sympathy with them,
we acknowledge our brotherhood with all our kind. We do far more. The
strength that is untasked, lends itself to divide the load under which
another is bowed; and the calamity that lies on the heads of men is
lightened, while those who at the time are not called to bear, are yet
willing to involve themselves in the sorrow of a brother. So soothed by
such sympathy may a poor mortal be, that the wretch almost upbraids
himself for transient gleams of gladness, as if he were false to the
sorrow which he sighs to think he ought to have cherished more sacredly
within his miserable heart.

One word embraces all these pages of ours--Memorials. Friends are lost
to us by removal--for then even the dearest are often utterly forgotten.
But let something that once was theirs suddenly meet our eyes, and in a
moment, returning from the region of the rising or the setting sun, the
friend of our youth seems at our side, unchanged his voice and his
smile; or dearer to our eyes than ever, because of some affecting
change wrought on face and figure by climate and by years. Let it be but
his name written with his own hand on the title-page of a book; or a few
syllables on the margin of a favourite passage which long ago we may
have read together, "when life itself was new," and poetry overflowed
the whole world; or a lock of _her_ hair in whose eyes we first knew the
meaning of the word "depth." And if death hath stretched out the absence
into the dim arms of eternity--and removed the distance away into that
bourne from which no traveller returns--the absence and the distance of
her on whose forehead once hung the relic we adore--what heart may abide
the beauty of the ghost that doth sometimes at midnight appear at our
sleepless bed, and with pale uplifted arms waft over us at once a
blessing and a farewell!

Why so sad a word--_Farewell_? We should not weep in wishing welfare,
nor sully felicity with tears. But we do weep because evil lies lurking
in wait over all the earth for the innocent and the good, the happy and
the beautiful; and, when guarded no more by our eyes, it seems as if the
demon would leap out upon his prey. Or is it because we are so selfish
that we cannot bear the thought of losing the sight of the happiness of
a beloved object, and are troubled with a strange jealousy of beings
unknown to us, and for ever to be unknown, about to be taken into the
very heart, perhaps, of the friend from whom we are parting, and to whom
in that fear we give almost a sullen farewell? Or does the shadow of
death pass over us while we stand for the last time together on the
sea-shore, and see the ship with all her sails about to voyage away to
the uttermost parts of the earth? Or do we shudder at the thought of
mutability in all created things--and know that ere a few suns shall
have brightened the path of the swift vessel on the sea, we shall be
dimly remembered--at last forgotten--and all those days, months, and
years that once seemed eternal, swallowed up in everlasting oblivion?

With us all ambitious desires some years ago expired. Far rather would
we read than write nowadays--far rather than read, sit with shut eyes
and no book in the room--far rather than so sit, walk about alone
anywhere

"Beneath the umbrage deep
That shades the silent world of memory."

Shall we live? or "like beasts and common people die?" There is
something harsh and grating in the collocation of these words of the
"Melancholy Cowley;" yet he meant no harm, for he was a kind, good
creature as ever was born, and a true genius. He there has expressed
concisely, but too abruptly, the mere fact of their falling alike and
together into oblivion. Far better Gray's exquisite words,

"On some fond breast the parting soul relies!"

The reliance is firm and sure; the "fond breast" is faithful to its
trust, and dying, transmits it to another; till after two or three
transmissions--holy all, but fainter and dimmer--the pious tradition
dies, and all memorial of the love and the delight, the pity and the
sorrow, is swallowed up in vacant night.

Posthumous Fame! Proud words--yet may they be uttered in a humble
spirit. The common lot of man is, after death--oblivion. Yet genius,
however small its sphere, if conversant with the conditions of the human
heart, may vivify with indestructible life some happy delineations, that
shall continue to be held dear by successive sorrowers in this vale of
tears. If the _name_ of the delineator continue to have something sacred
in its sound--obscure to the many as it may be, or non-existent--the
hope of such posthumous fame is sufficient to one who overrates not his
own endowments. And as the hope has its root in love and sympathy, he
who by his writings has inspired towards himself when in life, some of
these feelings in the hearts of not a few who never saw his face, seems
to be justified in believing that even after final obliteration of _Hic
jacet_ from his tombstone, his memory will be regarded with something of
the same affection in his REMAINS.




REMARKS

ON THE

SCENERY OF THE HIGHLANDS.




REMARKS

ON THE

SCENERY OF THE HIGHLANDS.


[Professor Wilson's "Remarks on the Scenery of the Highlands" were
first published as a Preface to _Swan's Select Views of the Lakes
of Scotland_, 2d edition, 1836. They were not included originally
in the "Recreations of Christopher North;" but the harmony of their
tone and spirit seemed to recommend them as an appropriate sequel
to that work; and accordingly they are now reprinted as such. The
thanks of the Editor and Publishers of Professor Wilson's writings
are due to the Messrs Fullarton, the proprietors of "Swan's Views,"
for the liberal manner in which they have placed this valuable
article at their disposal.]

* * * * *

In no other country does nature exhibit herself in more various forms of
beauty and sublimity, than in the North of England and the Highlands of
Scotland. This is acknowledged by all who, having studied their
character, and become familiar with the feelings it inspires, have
compared the effects produced on their minds by our own mountainous
regions, with what they have experienced among the scenery of the Alps.
There, indeed, all objects are on so vast a scale, that we are for a
while astonished as we gaze on the gigantic; and all other emotions are
sunk in an overwhelming sense of awe that prostrates the imagination.
But on recovering from its subjection to the prodigious, that faculty
everywhere recognises in those mighty mountains of dark forests,
glittering glaciers, and regions of eternal snow--infinite all--the
power and dominion of the Sublime. True that all these are but
materials for the mind to work on, and that to its creative energy
nature owes much of that grandeur which seems to be inherent in her own
forms; yet surely she in herself is great, and there is a regality
belonging of divine right to such a monarch as Mont Blanc.

Those are the very regions of sublimity, and if brought into immediate
comparison with them in their immense magnitude, the most magnificent
scenery of our own country would no doubt seem to lose its character of
greatness. But such is not the process of the imagination in her
intercourse with Nature. To her sufficient for the day is the good
thereof; and on each new glorious sight being shown to her eyes, she
employs her God-given power to magnify or irradiate what she beholds,
without diminishing or obscuring what she remembers. Thus, to her all
things in nature hold their own due place, and retain for ever their own
due impressions, aggrandised and beautified by mutual reaction in those
visionary worlds, which by a thought she can create, and which as they
arise are all shadowy representations of realities--new compositions in
which the image of the earth we tread is reflected fairer or greater
than any realities, but not therefore less, but more true to the spirit
of nature. It is thus that Poets and Painters at once obey and control
their own inspirations. They visit all the regions of the earth, but to
love, admire, and adore; and the greatest of them all, native to our
soil, from their travel or sojourn in foreign lands, have always brought
home a clearer insight into the character of the scenery of their own, a
profounder affection for it all, and a higher power of imaging its
attributes in colours or in words. In our poetry, more than in any
other, nature sees herself reflected in a magic mirror; and though many
a various show passes processionally along its lustre, displaying the
scenery of "lands and seas, whatever clime the sun's bright circle
warms," among them all there are none more delightful or elevating to
behold, than those which genius, inspired by love, has framed of the
imagery, which in all her pomp and prodigality heaven has been pleased
to shower, through all seasons, on our own beautiful island. It is not
for us to say whether our native Painters, or the "old masters," have
shown the greatest genius in landscape; but if the palm must be yielded
to them whose works have been consecrated by a reverence, as often,
perhaps, superstitious as religious, we do not fear to say that their
superiority is not to be attributed in any degree to the scenery on
which they exercised the art its beauty had inspired. Whatever may be
the associations connected with the subjects of their landscapes--and we
know not why they should be higher or holier than those belonging to
innumerable places in our own land--assuredly in themselves they are not
more interesting or impressive; nay, though none who have shared with us
the spirit of the few imperfect sentences we have now written, will, for
a moment, suppose us capable of instituting an invidious comparison
between our own scenery and that of any other country, why should we
hesitate to assert that our own storm-loving Northern Isle is equally
rich in all kinds of beauty as the sunny South, and richer far in all
kinds of grandeur, whether we regard the forms or colouring of
nature--earth, sea, or air,--

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