Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




Why then turn but to such deathbed, if indeed religion, and not
superstition, described that scene--as that of Voltaire? Or even of
Rousseau, whose dying eyes sought, in the last passion, the sight of the
green earth, and the blue skies, and the sun shining so brightly, when
all within the brain of his worshipper was fast growing dimmer and more
dim--when all the unsatisfied spirit, that scarcely hoped a future life,
knew not how it could ever take farewell of the present with tenderness
enough, and enough of yearning and craving after its disappearing
beauty, and when as if the whole earth were at that moment beloved even
as his small peculiar birthplace--

"Et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos."

The Christian poet, in his humane wisdom, will, for instruction's sake
of his fellow-men, and for the discovery and the revealment of
ever-sacred truth, keep aloof from such death-beds as these, or take his
awful stand beside them to drop the perplexed and pensive tear. For we
know not what it is that we either hear or see; and holy Conscience,
hearing through a confused sound, and seeing through an obscure light,
fears to condemn, when perhaps she ought only to pity--to judge another,
when perhaps it is her duty but to use that inward eye for her own
delinquencies. He, then, who designs to benefit his kind by strains of
high instruction, will turn from the deathbed of the famous Wit, whose
brilliant fancy hath waxed dim as that of the clown--whose malignant
heart is quaking beneath the Power it had so long derided, with terrors
over which his hated Christian triumphs--and whose intellect, once so
perspicacious that it could see but too well the motes that are in the
sun, the specks and stains that are in the flowing robe of nature
herself--prone, in miserable contradiction to its better being, to turn
them as proofs against the power and goodness of the Holy One who
inhabiteth eternity--is now palsy-stricken as that of an idiot, and
knows not even the sound of the name of its once vain and proud
possessor--when crowded theatres had risen up with one rustle to honour,
and then, with deafening acclamations,

"Raised a mortal to the skies!"

There he is--it matters not now whether on down or straw--stretched,
already a skeleton, and gnashing--may it be in senselessness, for
otherwise what pangs are these!--gnashing his teeth, within lips once so
eloquent, now white with foam and slaver; and the whole mouth, of yore
so musical, grinning ghastly like the fleshless face of fear-painted
death! Is that Voltaire? He who, with wit, thought to shear the Son of
God of all His beams?--with wit, to loosen the dreadful fastenings of
the Cross?--with wit, to scoff at Him who hung thereon, while the blood
and water came from the wound in His blessed side?--with wit, to drive
away those Shadows of Angels, that were said to have rolled off the
stone from the mouth of the sepulchre of the resurrection?--with wit, to
deride the ineffable glory of transfigured Godhead on the Mount, and the
sweet and solemn semblance of the Man Jesus in the garden?--with wit, to
darken all the decrees of Providence?--and with wit,

"To shut the gates of Mercy on mankind?"

Nor yet will the Christian poet long dwell in his religious strains,
though awhile he may linger there, "and from his eyelids wipe the tears
that sacred pity hath engendered," beside the dying couch of Jean Jaques
Rousseau--a couch of turf beneath trees--for he was ever a lover of
Nature, though he loved all things living or dead as madmen love. His
soul, while most spiritual, was sensual still, and with tendrils of
flesh and blood embraced--even as it did embrace the balm-breathing form
of voluptuous woman--the very phantoms of his most etherealised
imagination. Vice stained all his virtues--as roses are seen, in some
certain soils, and beneath some certain skies, always to be blighted,
and their fairest petals to bear on them something like blots of blood.
Over the surface of the mirror of his mind, which reflected so much of
the imagery of man and nature, there was still, here and there, on the
centre or round the edges, rust-spots, that gave back no image, and
marred the proportions of the beauty and the grandeur that yet shone
over the rest of the circle set in the rich carved gold. His disturbed,
and distracted, and defeated friendships, that all vanished in insane
suspicions, and seemed to leave his soul as well satisfied in its fierce
or gloomy void, as when it was filled with airy and glittering visions,
are all gone for ever now. Those many thoughts and feelings--so
melancholy, yet still fair, and lovely, and beautiful--which, like
bright birds encaged, with ruffled and drooping wings, once so apt to
soar, and their music mute, that used to make the wide woods to wring,
were confined within the wires of his jealous heart--have now all flown
away, and are at rest! Who sits beside the wild and wondrous genius,
whose ravings entrance the world? Who wipes the death-sweat from that
capacious forehead, once filled with such a multitude of disordered but
aspiring fancies? Who, that his beloved air of heaven may kiss and cool
it for the last time, lays open the covering that hides the marble
sallowness of Rousseau's sin-and-sorrow-haunted breast? One of Nature's
least-gifted children--to whose eyes nor earth nor heaven ever beamed
with beauty--to whose heart were known but the meanest charities of
nature; yet mean as they were, how much better in such an hour than all
his imaginings most magnificent! For had he not suffered his own
offspring to pass away from his eyes, even like the wood-shadows, only
less beloved and less regretted? And in the very midst of the
prodigality of love and passion, which he had poured out over the
creations of his ever-distempered fancy, let his living children, his
own flesh and blood, disappear as paupers in a chance-governed world? A
world in which neither parental nor filial love were more than the names
of nonentities--Father, Son, Daughter, Child, but empty syllables, which
philosophy heeded not--or rather loved them in their emptiness, but
despised, hated, or feared them, when for a moment they seemed pregnant
with a meaning from heaven, and each in its holy utterance signifying
God!

No great moral or religious lesson can well be drawn, or say rather so
well, from such anomalous deathbeds, as from those of common
unbelievers. To show, in all its divine power, the blessedness of the
Christian's faith, it must be compared, rather than contrasted, with the
faith of the best and wisest of Deists. The ascendancy of the heavenly
over the earthly will then be apparent--as apparent as the superior
lustre of a star to that of a lighted-up window in the night. For above
all other things in which the Christian is happier than the Deist--with
the latter, the life beyond the grave is but a dark hope--to the former,
"immortality has been brought to light by the Gospel." That difference
embraces the whole spirit. It may be less felt--less seen when life is
quick and strong; for this earth alone has much and many things to
embrace and enchain our being--but in death the difference is as between
night and day.

* * * * *

NOTE.--In the later editions of "The Omnipresence of the Deity," the
passage animadverted on in the preceding chapter has been altered as
follows:--

"Lo! there, in yonder spectre-haunted room,
What sightless demons horrified the gloom,
When pale and shivering, and bedew'd with fear,
The dying Sceptic felt his hour draw near!
Ere the last throes with anguish lined his cheek,
He yell'd for mercy with a hollow shriek,
Mutter'd some accents of unmeaning prayer,
Lock'd his white lips--let God the rest declare.
Go, child of Darkness! see a Christian die;
No horror pales his lip, or dims his eye;
No fiend-shaped phantoms of destruction start
The hope Religion pillows on his heart,
When with a falt'ring hand he waves adieu
To hearts as tender as their tears are true;
Meek as an infant to the mother's breast
Turns, fondly longing for its wonted rest,
So to our God the yielding soul retires,
And in one sigh of sainted peace expires."




CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

FIRST CANTICLE.


The present Age, which, after all, is a very pretty and pleasant one, is
feelingly alive and widely awake to the manifold delights and advantages
with which the study of Natural History swarms, and especially that
branch of it which unfolds the character and habits, physical, moral,
and intellectual, of those most interesting and admirable
creatures--Birds. It is familiar not only with the shape and colour of
beak, bill, claw, talon, and plume, but with the purposes for which they
are designed, and with the instincts which guide their use in the
beautiful economy of all-gracious Nature. We remember the time when the
very word Ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed
company; when a naturalist was looked on as a sort of out-of-the-way but
amiable monster. Now, one seldom meets with man, woman, or child, who
does not know a hawk from a handsaw, or even, to adopt the more learned
reading, from a heron-shew; a black swan is no longer erroneously
considered a _rara avis_ any more than a black sheep; while the Glasgow
Gander himself, no longer apocryphal, has taken his place in the
national creed, belief in his existence being merely blended with wonder
at his magnitude, and some surprise perhaps among the scientific that he
should be as yet the sole specimen of that enormous Anser.

The chief cause of this advancement of knowledge in one of its most
delightful departments, has been the gradual extension of its study from
stale books written by men, to that book ever fresh from the hand of
God. And the second--another yet the same--has been the gradual change
wrought by a philosophical spirit in the observation, delineation, and
arrangement of the facts and laws with which the science is conversant,
and which it exhibits in the most perfect harmony and order. Neophytes
now range for themselves, according to their capacities and
opportunities, the fields, woods, rivers, lakes, and seas; and
proficients, no longer confining themselves to mere nomenclature, enrich
their works with anecdotes and traits of character, which, without
departure from truth, have imbued bird-biography with the double charm
of reality and romance.

Compare the intensity and truth of any natural knowledge insensibly
acquired by observation in very early youth, with that corresponding to
it picked up in later life from books! In fact, the habit of
distinguishing between things as different, or of similar forms,
colours, and characters, formed in infancy, and childhood, and boyhood,
in a free intercourse and communion with Nature, while we are merely
seeking and finding the divine joy of novelty and beauty, perpetually
occurring before our eyes in all her haunts, may be made the foundation
of an accuracy of judgment of inappreciable value as an intellectual
endowment. So entirely is this true, that we know many observant
persons--that is, observant in all things intimately related with their
own pursuits, and with the experience of their own early education--who,
with all the pains they could take in after life, have never been able
to distinguish by name, when they saw them, above half-a-dozen, if so
many, of our British singing-birds; while as to knowing them by their
song, that is wholly beyond the reach of their uninstructed ear, and a
shilfa chants to them like a yellow yoldrin. On seeing a small bird
peeping out of a hole in the eaves, and especially on hearing him
chatter, they shrewdly suspect him to be a sparrow, though it does not
by any means follow that their suspicions are always verified; and
though, when sitting with her white breast so lovely out of the "auld
clay bigging" in the window-corner, he cannot mistake Mistress Swallow,
yet when flitting in fly-search over the stream, and ever and anon
dipping her wing-tips in the lucid coolness, 'tis an equal chance that
he misnames her Miss Marten.

What constant caution is necessary during the naturalist's perusal even
of the very best books! From the very best we can only obtain knowledge
at second-hand, and this, like a story circulated among village gossips,
is more apt to gain in falsehood than in truth, as it passes from one to
another; but in field-study we go at once to the fountain-head, and
obtain our facts pure and unalloyed by the theories and opinions of
previous observers. Hence it is that the utility of books becomes
obvious. You witness with your own eyes some puzzling, perplexing,
strange, and unaccountable--fact; twenty different statements of it have
been given by twenty different ornithologists; you consult them all, and
getting a hint from one, and a hint from another, here a glimmer of
light to be followed, and there a gloom of darkness to be avoided--why,
who knows but that in the end you do yourself solve the mystery, and
absolutely become not only happy but illustrious? People sitting in
their own parlour with their feet on the fender, or in the sanctum of
some museum, staring at stuffed specimens, imagine themselves
naturalists; and in their presumptuous and insolent ignorance, which is
often total, scorn the wisdom of the wanderers of the woods, who have
for many studious and solitary years been making themselves familiar
with all the beautiful mysteries of instinctive life. Take two boys, and
set them respectively to pursue the two plans of study. How puzzled and
perplexed will be the one who pores over the "interminable terms" of a
system in books, having meanwhile no access to, or communion with
nature! The poor wretch is to be pitied--nor is he anything else than a
slave. But the young naturalist who takes his first lessons in the
fields, observing the unrivalled scene which creation everywhere
displays, is perpetually studying in the power of delight and wonder,
and laying up knowledge which can be derived from no other source. The
rich boy is to be envied, nor is he anything else than a king. The one
sits bewildered among words, the other walks enlightened among things;
the one has not even the shadow, the other more than the substance--the
very essence and life of knowledge; and at twelve years old he may be a
better naturalist than ever the mere bookworm will be, were he to
outlive old Tommy Balmer.

In education--late or early--for heaven's sake let us never separate
things and words! They are married in nature; and what God hath put
together let no man put asunder--'tis a fatal divorce. Without things,
words accumulated by misery in the memory, had far better die than drag
out an useless existence in the dark; without words, their stay and
support, things unaccountably disappear out of the store-house, and may
be for ever lost. But bind a thing with a word, a strange link, stronger
than any steel, and softer than any silk, and the captive remains for
ever happy in its bright prison-house. On this principle, it is indeed
surprising at how early an age children can be instructed in the most
interesting parts of natural history--ay, even a babe in arms. Remember
Coleridge's beautiful lines to the Nightingale:--

"That strain again!
Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe,
Who, capable of no articulate sound,
Mars all things with his imitative lisp,
How he would place his hand beside his ear,
His little hand, the small forefinger up,
And bid us listen! _and I deem it wise
To make him Nature's child_."

How we come to love the Birds of Bewick, and White, and the two Wilsons,
and Montague, and Mudie, and Knapp, and Selby, and Swainson, and
Audubon, and many others familiar with their haunts and habits, their
affections and their passions, till we feel that they are indeed our
fellow-creatures, and part of one wise and wonderful system! If there be
sermons in stones, what think ye of the hymns and psalms, matin and
vesper, of the lark, who at heaven's gate sings--of the wren, who pipes
her thanksgivings as the slant sunbeam shoots athwart the mossy portal
of the cave, in whose fretted roof she builds her nest above the
waterfall! In cave-roof? Yea--we have seen it so--just beneath the
cornice. But most frequently we have detected her procreant cradle on
old mossy stump, mouldering walls or living rock--sometimes in cleft of
yew-tree or hawthorn--for hang the globe with its imperceptible orifice
in the sunshine or the storm, and St. Catharine sits within heedless of
the outer world, counting her beads with her sensitive breast that
broods in bliss over the priceless pearls.

Ay, the men we have named, and many other blameless idolaters of Nature,
have worshipped her in a truly religious spirit, and have taught us
their religion. All our great poets have loved the _Minnesingers_ of the
woods--Thomson, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, as dearly as Spenser, and
Shakespeare, and Milton. From the inarticulate language of the groves,
they have inhaled the enthusiasm that inspired some of the finest of
their own immortal strains. "Lonely wanderer of Nature" must every poet
be--and though often self-wrapt his wanderings through a spiritual world
of his own, yet as some fair flower silently asks his eye to look on it,
some glad bird his ear solicits with a song, how intense is then his
perception--his emotion how profound--while his spirit is thus appealed
to, through all its human sensibilities, by the beauty and the joy
perpetual even in the most solitary places!

Our moral being owes deep obligation to all who assist us to study
nature aright; for believe us, it is high and rare knowledge to know and
to have the true and full use of our eyes. Millions go to the grave in
old age without ever having learned it; they were just beginning,
perhaps, to acquire it when they sighed to think that "they who look out
of the windows were darkened;" and that, while they had been instructed
how to look, sad shadows had fallen on the whole face of Nature, and
that the time for those intuitions was gone for ever. But the science of
seeing has now found favour in our eyes; and blessings be with them who
can discover, discern, and describe the least as the greatest of
Nature's works--who can see as distinctly the finger of God in the
lustre of the humming-bird murmuring round a rose-bush, as in that of
the star of Jove shining sole in heaven.

Take up now almost any book you may on any branch of Natural History,
and instead of the endless, dry details of imaginary systems and
classifications, in which the ludicrous littlenesses of man's vain
ingenuity used to be set up as a sort of symbolical scheme of revelation
of the sublime varieties of the inferior--as we choose to call
it--creation of God, you find high attempts in an humble spirit rather
to illustrate tendencies, and uses, and harmonies, and order, and
design. With some glorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the
day gone by showed us a science that was but a skeleton--little but dry
bones; with some inglorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the
day that is now, have been desirous to show us a living, breathing, and
moving body--to explain, as far as they might, its mechanism and its
spirit. Ere another century elapse, how familiar may men be with all the
families of the flowers of the field, and the birds of the air, with
all the interdependencies of their characters and their kindreds,
perhaps even with the mystery of that instinct which now is seen working
wonders, not only beyond the power of reason to comprehend, but of
imagination to conceive!

How deeply enshrouded are felt to be the mysteries of Nature, when,
thousands of years after Aristotle, we hear Audubon confess his utter
ignorance of what migrations and non-migrations mean--that 'tis hard to
understand why such general laws as these should be--though their benign
operation is beautifully seen in the happiness provided alike for
all--whether they reside in their own comparatively small localities,
nor ever wish to leave them--or at stated seasons instinctively fly away
over thousands of miles, to drop down and settle for a while on some
spot adapted to their necessities, of which they had prescience afar
off, though seemingly wafted thither like leaves upon the wind! Verily,
as great a mystery is that Natural Religion by the theist studied in
woods and on mountains and by sea-shores, as that Revelation which
philosophers will not believe because they do not understand--"the
blinded bigot's scorn" deriding man's highest and holiest
happiness--Faith!

We must not now go a bird-nesting, but first time we do we shall put
Bishop Mant's "Months" in our pocket. The good Bishop--who must have
been an indefatigable bird-nester in his boyhood--though we answer for
him that he never stole but one egg out of four, and left undisturbed
the callow young--treats of those beauteous and wondrous structures in a
style that might make Professor Rennie jealous, who has written like a
Vitruvius on the architecture of birds. He expatiates with uncontrolled
delight on the unwearied activity of the architects, who, without any
apprenticeship to the trade, are journeymen, nay, master-builders, the
first spring of their full-fledged lives; with no other tools but a
bill, unless we count their claws, which however seem, and that only in
some kinds, to be used but in carrying materials. With their breasts and
whole bodies, indeed, most of them round off the soft insides of their
procreant cradles, till they fit each brooding bunch of feathers to a
hairbreadth, as it sits close and low on eggs or eyeless young, a
_leetle_ higher raised up above their gaping babies, as they wax from
downy infancy into plumier childhood, which they do how swiftly! and
how soon have they flown! You look some sunny morning into the bush, and
the abode in which they seemed so _cosy_ the day before is utterly
forsaken by the joyous ingrates--now feebly fluttering in the narrow
grove, to them a wide world teeming with delight and wonder--to be
thought of never more. With all the various materials used by them in
building their different domiciles, the Bishop is as familiar as with
the sole material of his own wig--though, by the by, last time we had
the pleasure of seeing and sitting by him, he wore his own hair--"but
that not much;" for, like our own, his sconce was bald, and, like it,
showed the organ of constructiveness as fully developed as Christopher
or a Chaffinch. He is perfectly well acquainted, too, with all the
diversities of their modes of building--their orders of
architecture--and eke with all those of situation chosen by the
kinds--whether seemingly simple, in cunning that deceives by a show of
carelessness and heedlessness of notice, or with craft of concealment
that baffles the most searching eye--hanging their beloved secret in
gloom not impervious to sun and air--or, trustful in man's love of his
own home, affixing the nest beneath the eaves, or in the flowers of the
lattice, kept shut for their sakes, or half-opened by fair hands of
virgins whose eyes gladden with heart-born brightness as each morning
they mark the growing beauty of the brood, till they smile to see one
almost as large as its parent sitting on the rim of the nest, when all
at once it hops over, and, as it flutters away like a leaf, seems
surprised that it can fly!

Yet there are still a few wretched quacks among us whom we may some day
perhaps drive down into the dirt. There are idiots who will not even
suffer sheep, cows, horses, and dogs, to escape the disgusting
perversions of their anile anecdotage--who, by all manner of drivelling
lies, libel even the common domestic fowl, and impair the reputation of
the bantam. Newspapers are sometimes so infested by the trivial trash,
that in the nostrils of a naturalist they smell on the breakfast-table
like rotten eggs; and there are absolutely volumes of the slaver bound
in linen, and lettered with the names of the expectorators on the
outside, resembling annuals--we almost fear with prints. In such hands,
the ass loses his natural attributes, and takes the character of his
owner; and as the anecdote-monger is seen astride on his cuddy, you
wonder what may be the meaning of the apparition, for we defy you to
distinguish the one donk from the other, the rider from the ridden,
except by the more inexpressive countenance of the one, and the ears of
the other in uncomputed longitude dangling or erect.

We can bear this libellous gossip least patiently of all with birds. If
a ninny have some stories about a wonderful goose, let him out with
them, and then waddle away with his fat friend into the stackyard--where
they may take sweet counsel together in the "fause-house." Let him, with
open mouth and grozet eyes, say what he chooses of "Pretty Poll," as she
clings in her cage, by beak or claws, to stick or wire, and in her
naughty vocabulary let him hear the impassioned eloquence of an Aspasia
inspiring a Pericles. But, unless his crown itch for the Crutch, let him
spare the linnet on the briery bush among the broom--the laverock on the
dewy braird or in the rosy cloud--the swan on her shadow--the eagle in
his eyrie, in the sun, or at sea.

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