Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




"Or all the dread magnificence of heaven."

What other region in all the world like that of the Lakes in the North
of England! And yet how the true lover of nature, while he carries along
with him its delightful character in his heart, and can so revive any
spot of especial beauty in his imagination, as that it shall seem in an
instant to be again before his very eyes, can deliver himself up, after
the lapse of a day, to the genius of some savage scene in the Highlands
of Scotland, rent and riven by the fury of some wild sea-loch! Not that
the regions do not resemble one another, but surely the prevailing
spirit of the one--not so of the other--is a spirit of joy and of peace.
Her mountains, invested, though they often be, in gloom--and we have
been more than once benighted during day, as a thunder-cloud thickened
the shadows that for ever sleep in the deepest dungeons of
Helvellyn--are yet--so it seems to us--such mountains as in nature ought
to belong to "merry England." They boldly meet the storms, and seen in
storms, you might think they loved the trouble; but pitch your tent
among them, and you will feel that theirs is a grandeur that is
congenial with the sunshine, and that their spirit fully rejoices in the
brightness of light. In clear weather, verdant from base to summit, how
majestic their repose! And as mists slowly withdraw themselves in
thickening folds up along their sides, the revelation made is still of
more and more of the beautiful--arable fields below--then coppice woods
studded with standard trees--enclosed pastures above and among the
woods--broad breasts of close-nibbled herbage here and there adorned by
rich dyed rocks, that do not break the expanse--till the whole veil has
disappeared, and, lo! the long lofty range, with its wavy line, rising
and sinking so softly in the blue serenity perhaps of an almost
cloudless sky. Yet though we have thus characterised the mountains by
what we have always felt to be the pervading spirit of the region,
chasms and ravines, and cliffs and precipices, are there; in some places
you see such assemblages as inspire the fear that quakes at the heart,
when suddenly struck in the solitude with a sense of the sublime; and
though we have called the mountains green--and during Spring and Summer,
in spite of frost or drought, they are green as emerald--yet in Autumn
they are many-coloured, and are girdled with a glow of variegated light,
that at sunset sometimes seems like fire kindled in the woods.

The larger Vales are all serene and cheerful, and among the sylvan
knolls with which their wide levels highly cultivated are interspersed,
cottages, single or in groups, are frequent, of an architecture always
admirably suited to the scenery, because in a style suggested not by
taste or fancy, which so often disfigure nature to produce the
picturesque, but resorted to for sake of the uses and conveniences of
in-door life, to weather-fend it in storms, and in calm to give it the
enjoyment of sunshine. Many of these dwellings are not what are properly
called cottages, but Statesmen's houses, of ample front, with their many
roofs, overshadowed by a stately grove, and inhabited by the same race
for many generations. All alike have their suitable gardens, and the
porches of the poorest are often clustered with roses; for everywhere
among these hills, even in minds the most rude and uncultivated, there
is a natural love of flowers. The villages, though somewhat too much
modernised in those days of improvement, and indeed not a few of them
with hardly any remains now of their original architecture--nothing old
about them but the church tower, perhaps the parsonage--are nevertheless
generally of a pleasing character, and accordant, if not with the great
features of nature, which are unchanged and unchangeable, with the
increased cultivation of the country, and the many villas and
ornamented cottages that have risen and are rising by every lake and
river side. Rivers indeed, properly so called, there are none among
these mountains; but every vale, great and small, has at all times its
pure and undefiled stream or rivulet; every hill has its hundreds of
evanescent rills, almost every one its own perennial torrent flowing
from spring, marsh, or tarn; and the whole region is often alive with
waterfalls, of many of which, in its exquisite loveliness, the scenery
is fit for fairy festivals--and of many, in its horrid gloom, for
gatherings of gnomes revisiting the glimpses of the moon from their
subterraneous prisons. One lake there is which has been called "wooded
Winandermere, the river lake;" and there is another--Ulswater--which you
might imagine to be a river too, and to have come flowing from afar: the
one excelling in isles, and bays, and promontories, serene and gentle
all, and perfectly beautiful; the other, matchless in its majesty of
cliff and mountain, and in its old forests, among whose hoary gloom is
for ever breaking out the green light of young generations, and
perpetual renovation triumphing over perpetual decay. Of the other
lakes--not river-like--the character may be imagined even from that we
have faintly described of the mountains:--almost every vale has its
lake, or a series of lakes--and though some of them have at times a
stern aspect, and have scenes to show almost of desolation, descending
sheer to the water's edge, or overhanging the depth that looks
profounder in the gloom, yet even these, to eyes and hearts familiar
with their spirit, wear a sweet smile which seldom passes away: witness
Wastwater--with its huge single mountains, and hugest of all the
mountains of England, Scawfell, with its terrific precipices--which, in
the accidents of storm, gloom, or mist, has seemed, to the lonely
passer-by, savage in the extreme--a howling or dreary wilderness--but in
its enduring character, is surrounded with all quiet pastoral imagery,
the deep glen in which it is imbedded being, in good truth, the abode of
Sabbath peace. That hugest mountain is indeed the centre from which all
the vales irregularly diverge; the whole circumjacent region may be
traversed in a week; and though no other district of equal extent
contains such variety of the sublime and beautiful, yet the beautiful is
so prevalent, that we feel its presence, even in places where it is
overpowered; and on leaving "The Lakes," our imagination is haunted and
possessed with images, not of dread, but of delight.

We have sometimes been asked, whether the North of England or the
Highlands of Scotland should be visited first; but, simple as the
question seems, it is really one which it is impossible to answer;
though we suspect it would equally puzzle Scotchman or Englishman to
give a sufficient reason for his wishing to see any part of any other
country before he had seen what was best worth seeing in his own. His
own country ought to be, and generally is, dearest to every man. There,
if nothing forbid, he should not only begin his study of nature, but
continue his education in her school, wherever it may happen to be
situated, till he has taken his first degree. We believe that the love
of nature is strong in the hearts of the inhabitants of our Island. And
how wide and profound may that knowledge of nature be, which the loving
heart has acquired, without having studied her anywhere but within the
Four Seas! The impulses that make us desire to widen the circle of our
observation, are all impulses of delight and love; and it would be
strange indeed, did they not move us, first of all, towards whatever is
most beautiful belonging to our own land. Were it otherwise, it would
seem as if the heart were faithless to the home-affections, out of
which, in their strength, spring all others that are good; and it is
essential, we do not doubt, to the full growth of the Love of Country,
that we should all have our earliest imaginative delights associated
with our native soil. Such associations will for ever keep it loveliest
to our eyes; nor is it possible that we can ever as perfectly understand
the character of any other; but we can afterwards transfer and transfuse
our feelings in imagination kindled by our own will; and the beauty,
born before our eyes, among the banks and braes of our childhood, and
then believed to be but there, and nothing like it anywhere else in all
the world, becomes a golden light, "whose home is everywhere," which if
we do not darken it, will shine unshadowed in the dreariest places, till
"the desert blossom like the rose."

For our own parts, before we beheld one of "the beautiful fields of
England," we had walked all Scotland thorough, and had seen many a
secret place, which now, in the confusion of our crowded memory, seem
often to shift their uncertain ground; but still, wherever they
glimmeringly reappear, invested with the same heavenly light in which,
long ago, they took possession of our soul. And now, that we are almost
as familiar with the fair sister-land, and love her almost as well as
Scotland's self, not all the charms in which she is arrayed, and they
are at once graceful and glorious, have ever for a day withdrawn our
deeper dreams from the regions where,

"In life's morning march, when our spirit was young,"

unaccompanied but by our own shadow in the wilderness, we first heard
the belling of the red-deer and the eagle's cry.

In those days there was some difficulty, if not a little danger, in
getting in among some of the noblest regions of our Alps. They could not
be traversed without strong personal exertion; and a solitary pedestrian
excursion through the Grampians was seldom achieved without a few
incidents that might almost have been called adventures. It is very
different now; yet the _Genius Loci_, though tamed, is not subdued; and
they who would become acquainted with the heart of the Highlands, will
have need of some endurance still, and must care nothing about the
condition of earth or sky. Formerly, it was not possible to survey more
than a district or division in a single season, except to those
unenviable persons who had no other pursuit but that of amusement, and
waged a weary war with time. The industrious dwellers in cities, who
sought those solitudes, for a while to relieve their hearts from worldly
anxieties, and gratify that love of nature which is inextinguishable in
every bosom that in youth has beat with its noble inspirations, were
contented with a week or two of such intercommunion with the spirit of
the mountains, and thus continued to extend their acquaintance with the
glorious wildernesses, visit after visit, for years. Now the whole
Highlands, western and northern, may be commanded in a month. Not that
any one who knows what they are, will imagine that they can be exhausted
in a lifetime. The man does not live who knows all worth knowing there;
and were they who made the Trigonometrical Survey to be questioned on
their experiences, they would be found ignorant of thousands of sights,
any one of which would be worth a journey for its own sake. But now
steam has bridged the Great Glen, and connected the two seas.
Salt-water lochs the most remote and inaccessible, it has brought within
reach of a summer-day's voyage. In a week a joyous company can gather
all the mainland shores, leaving not one magnificent bay uncircled; and,
having rounded St Kilda and

"the Hebride Isles,
Placed far amid the melancholy main,"

and heard the pealing anthem of waves in the cave-cathedral of Staffa,
may bless the bells of St Mungo's tolling on the first Sabbath.
Thousands and tens of thousands, who, but for those smoking sea-horses,
had never been beyond view of the city spires, have seen sights which,
though passing by almost like dreams, are not like dreams forgotten, but
revive of themselves in memory and imagination; and, when the heart is
weary with the work of the hand, quicken its pulses with a sudden
pleasure that is felt like a renovation of youth.

All through the interior, too, how many hundreds of miles of roads now
intersect regions not long ago deemed impracticable!--firm on the fen,
in safety flung across the chasm--and winding smoothly amidst
shatterings of rocks, round the huge mountain bases, and down the glens
once felt as if interminable, now travelled almost with the speed of the
raven's wing!

In the Highlands now, there is no _Terra Incognita_. But there are many
places yet well worth seeing, which it is not easy for all men to find,
and to which every man must be his own guide. It is somewhat of a
selfish feeling, indeed, but the pride is not a mean one, with which the
solitary pedestrian sits down to contemplate some strange, or wild, or
savage scene, or some view of surpassing sweetness and serenity, so far
removed from the track of men that he can well believe for a time that
his eyes have been the first to behold it, and that for them alone it
has now become a visible revelation. The memory of such places is
sometimes kept as a secret which we would not communicate but to a
congenial friend. They are hallowed by those mysterious "thoughts that,
like phantoms, trackless come and go;" no words can tell another how to
find his way thither; and were we ourselves to seek to return, we should
have to trust to some consciousness mysterious as the instinct of a
bird that carries it through the blind night to the place of its desire.

It is well to have in our mind the conception of a route: but without
being utterly departed from--nay, without ceasing to control us within
certain bounds--it admits of almost any degrees of deviation. We have
known persons apparently travelling for pleasure, who were afraid to
turn a few miles to the right or the left, for fear of subjecting
themselves to the reproach of their own conscience for infirmity of
purpose. They had "chalked out a route," and acted as if they had sworn
a solemn oath to follow it. This is to be a slave among the boundless
dominions of nature, where all are free. As the wind bloweth wherever it
listeth, so move the moods of men's minds, when there is nought to
shackle them, and when the burden of their cares has been dropt, that
for a while they may walk on air, and feel that they too have wings.

"A voice calls on me from the mountain depths,
And it must be obeyed."

The voice was our own--and yet though but a whisper from the heart, it
seemed to come from the front of yon distant precipice--sweet and wild
as an echo.

On rising at dawn in the shieling, why think, much less determine, where
at night we are to lay down our head? Let this be our thought:

"Among the hills a hundred homes have I;
My table in the wilderness is spread;
In these lone spots one honest smile can buy
Plain fare, warm welcome, and a rushy bed."

If we obey any powers external to our own minds, let them be the powers
of Nature--the rains, the winds, the atmosphere, sun moon, and stars. We
must keep a look-out--

"To see the deep fermenting tempest brew'd,
In the grim evening sky;"

that next day we may cross the red rivers by bridges, not by fords; and
if they roll along unbridged, that we may set our face to the mountain,
and wind our way round his shoulder by sheep-tracks, unwet with the
heather, till we behold some great strath, which we had not visited but
for that storm, with its dark blue river streaked with golden
light,--for its source is in a loch among the Eastern Range; and there,
during the silent hours, heather, bracken, and greensward rejoiced in
the trembling dews.

There is no such climate for all kinds of beauty and grandeur, as the
climate of the Highlands. Here and there you meet with an old shepherd
or herdsman, who has beguiled himself into a belief, in spite of many a
night's unforeseen imprisonment in the mists, that he can presage its
changes from fair to foul, and can tell the hour when the
long-threatening thunder will begin to mutter. The weather-wise have
often perished in their plaids. Yet among a thousand uncertain symptoms,
there are a few certain, which the ranger will do well to study, and he
will often exult on the mountain to feel that "knowledge is power." Many
a glorious hour has been won from the tempest by him before whose
instructed eye--beyond the gloom that wide around blackened all the
purple heather--"far off its coming shone." Leagues of continuous
magnificence have gradually unveiled themselves on either side to him,
as he has slowly paced, midway between, along the banks of the River of
Waterfalls; having been assured by the light struggling through the
mist, that it would not be long till there was a break-up of all that
ghastly dreariment, and that the sun would call on him to come forth
from his cave of shelter, and behold in all its pride the Glen
affronting the sea.

Some Tourists--as they call themselves--are provided with map and
compass; and we hope they find them of avail in extremities, though we
fear few such understand their use. No map can tell--except very
vaguely--how the aspect of the localities, looked at on its lines, is
likely to be affected by sun-rise, meridian, or sun-set. Yet, true it
is, that every region has its own happy hours, which the fortunate often
find unawares, and know them at once to be so the moment they lift up
their eyes. At such times, while "our hearts rejoice in Nature's joy,"
we feel the presence of a spirit that brings out the essential character
of the place, be it of beauty or of grandeur. Harmonious as music is
then the composition of colours and of forms. It becomes a perfect
picture in memory, more and more idealised by imagination, every moment
the veil is withdrawn before it; its aerial lineaments never fade; yet
they too, though their being be but in the soul, are mellowed by the
touch, of time--and every glimpse of such a vision, the longer we live,
and the more we suffer, seems suffused with a mournful light, as if seen
through tears.

It would serve no good purpose, supposing we had the power, to analyse
the composition of that scenery, which in the aggregate so moves even
the most sluggish faculties, as to make "the dullest wight a poet." It
rises before the mind in imagination, as it does before the eyes in
nature; and we can no more speak of it than look at it, but--as a whole.
We can indeed fix our mental or our visual gaze on scene after scene to
the exclusion of all beside, and picture it even in words that shall be
more than shadows. But how shall any succession of such pictures,
however clear and complete, give an idea of that picture which
comprehends them all, and infinite as are its manifestations,
nevertheless is imbued with one spirit?

Try to forget that in the Highlands there are any Lochs. Then the sole
power is that of the Mountains. We speak of a sea of mountains; but that
image has never more than momentary possession of us, because, but for a
moment, in nature it has no truth. Tumultuary movements envelope them;
but they themselves are for ever steadfast and for ever still. Their
power is that of an enduring calm no storms can disturb--and is often
felt to be more majestical, the more furious are the storms. As the
tempest-driven clouds are franticly hurrying to and fro, how serene the
summits in the sky! Or if they be hidden, how peaceful the glimpses of
some great mountain's breast! They disregard the hurricane that goes
crashing through their old woods; the cloud-thunder disturbs not them
any more than that of their own cataracts, and the lightnings play for
their pastime. All minds under any excitation, more or less personify
mountains. When much moved, that natural process affects all our
feelings, as the language of passion awakened by such objects vividly
declares; and then we do assuredly conceive of mountains as endued with
life--however dim and vague the conception may be--and feel their
character in their very names. Utterly strip our ideas of them of all
that is attached to them as impersonations, and their power is gone. But
while we are creatures of imagination as well as of reason, will those
monarchs remain invested with the purple and seated on thrones.

In such imaginative moods as these must every one be, far more
frequently than he is conscious of, and in far higher degrees, who, with
a cultivated mind and a heart open to the influences of nature, finds
himself, it matters not whether for the first or the hundredth time, in
the Highlands. We fancy the Neophyte wandering, all by himself, on the
"Longest Day;" rejoicing to think that the light will not fail him, when
at last the sun must go down, for that a starry gloaming will continue
its gentle reign till morn. He thinks but of what he sees, and that
is--the mountains. All memories of any other world but that which
encloses him with its still sublimities, are not excluded merely, but
obliterated: his whole being is there! And now he stands on table-land,
and with his eyes sweeps the horizon, bewildered for a while, for it
seems chaos all. But soon the mighty masses begin arranging themselves
into order; the confusion insensibly subsides as he comprehends more and
more of their magnificent combinations; he discovers centres round which
are associated altitudes towering afar off; and finally, he feels, and
blesses himself on his felicity, that his good genius has placed him on
the very centre of those wondrous assemblages altogether, from which
alone he could command an empire of realities, more glorious far than
was ever empire of dreams.

It is a cloudy, but not a stormy day; the clouds occupy but portions of
the sky,--and are they all in slow motion together, or are they all at
rest? Huge shadows stalking along the earth, tell that there are changes
going on in heaven; but to the upward gaze, all seems hanging there in
the same repose; and with the same soft illumination the sun to continue
shining, a concentration rather than an orb of light. All above is
beautiful, and the clouds themselves are like celestial mountains; but
the eye forsakes them, though it sees them still, and more quietly now
it moves along the pageantry below that endures for ever--till chained
on a sudden by that range of cliffs. 'Tis along them that the giant
shadows are stalking--but now they have passed by--and the long line of
precipice seems to come forward in the light. To look down from the
brink might be terrible--to look up from the base would be sublime--but
fronting the eye thus, horrid though it be, the sight is most beautiful;
for weather-stains, and mosses, and lichens, and flowering
plants--conspicuous most the broom and the heather--and shrubs that,
among their leaves of light, have no need of flowers--and hollies, and
birks, and hazels, and many a slender tree beside with pensile tresses,
besprinkle all the cliffs, that in no gloom could ever lose their
lustre; but now the day though not bright is fair, and brings out the
whole beauty of the precipice--call it the hanging garden of the
wilderness.

The Highlands have been said to be a gloomy region, and worse gloom than
theirs might well be borne, if not unfrequently illumined with such
sights as these; but that is not the character of the mountains, though
the purple light in which, for usual, they are so richly steeped, is
often for a season tamed, or for a short while extinguished, while a
strange night-like day lets fall over them all a something like a
shroud. Such days we have seen--but now in fancy we are with the
pilgrim, and see preparation making for a sun-set. It is drawing towards
evening, and the clouds that have all this time been moving, though we
knew it not, have assuredly settled now, and taken up their rest. The
sun has gone down, and all that unspeakable glory has left the sky.
Evening has come and gone without our knowing that she had been here;
but there is no gloom on any place in the whole of this vast wilderness,
and the mountains, as they wax dimmer and dimmer, look as if they were
surrendering themselves to a repose like sleep. Day had no voice here
audible to human ear--but night is murmuring--and gentle though the
murmur be, it filleth the great void, and we imagine that ever and anon
it awakens echoes. And now it is darker than we thought, for lo! one
soft-burning star! And we see that there are many stars; but not theirs
the light that begins again to reveal object after object as gradually
as they had disappeared; the moon is about to rise--is rising--has
arisen--has taken her place high in heaven; and as the glorious world
again expands around us, faintly tinged, clearly illumined, softly
shadowed, and deeply begloomed, we say within our hearts,

"How beautiful is night!"

There are many such table-lands as the one we have now been imagining,
and it requires but a slight acquaintance with the country to conjecture
rightly where they lie. Independently of the panoramas they display,
they are in themselves always impressive; perhaps a bare level that
shows but bleached bent, and scatterings of stones, with here and there
an unaccountable rock; or hundreds of fairy greensward knolls, fringed
with tiny forests of fern that have almost displaced the heather; or a
wild withered moor or moss intersected with pits dug not by men's hands;
and, strange to see! a huge log lying half exposed, and as if blackened
by fire. High as such places are, on one of them a young gorcock was
stricken down by a hawk close to our feet. Indeed, hawks seem to haunt
such places, and we have rarely crossed one of them, without either
seeing the creature's stealthy flight, or hearing, whether he be alarmed
or preying, his ever-angry cry.

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