Down thro’ the Northlands
Come the White Brothers,
One clad in foam
And one mailed in water--
Foam white as bear-felt,
Water like coat of mail.
_Snow is the Song of Me_,
Singeth the one;
_Silence the Breath of Me_,
Whispers the other.
So sings a Swedish poet, a lineal descendant of one of the Saga-men
whose songs the vikings carried to the ends of the world of that day.
The song is called ‘The Sons of the North Wind,’ and the allusion is
to an old ballad-saga common in one form or another throughout all the
countries of both the Gall and the Gael ... from Finland to the last of
the island-kingdoms between Ultima Thule and the Gaelic West. The White
Brothers are familiar indeed, though with us they come oftener clothed
with beauty than with terror, with strange and beautiful new life
rather than with the solemnity and dread aspect of death.
Among the Gaelic hills we have a prose variant of ‘The Sons of the
North Wind,’ which I suppose is still told to children by the fireglow
on winter evenings, as, when a child, the present writer was told
it and retold it by the fireglow on many a winter evening when the
crackling fall of icicles from fir-sprays near the window could be
heard, or the sudden shuffle of snow in the declivities of the steep
glen hard-by. The story is generally told as a tale, but sometimes the
teller chants it as a _duan_ or poem. For it is more a poem than a
prose narrative on the lips of Gaelic speakers.
The North Wind had three sons. These Sons of the North Wind were
called White-Feet and White-Wings and White-Hands. When White-Feet
and White-Wings and White-Hands first came into our world from the
invisible palaces, they were so beautiful that many mortals died from
beholding them, while others dared not look, but fled affrighted
into woods or obscure places. So when these three sons of the
Great Chieftain saw that they were too radiant for the eyes of the
earth-bound they receded beyond the gates of the sunset, and took
counsel with the Allfather. When, through the gates of dawn, they came
again they were no longer visible to men, nor, in all the long grey
reaches of the years, has any since been seen of mortal eyes. How are
they known, these Sons of the North Wind? They were known of old, they
are known still, only by the white feet of one treading the waves of
the sea; and by the white rustle and sheen of a myriad tiny plumes as
the other unfolds great pinions above hills and valleys, woodlands and
garths, and the homes of men; and by the white silence of dream that
the third lays upon moving waters, and the windless boughs of trees,
upon the reed by the silent loch, upon the grass by the silent tarn,
upon the bracken by the unfalling hill-stream hanging like a scarf
among the rock and mountain-ash. We know them no more by their ancient
names or in their immortal body, but only thus by the radiance of their
passing, and we call them the Polar Wind, and Snow, and Ice.
It is at this season, in all northern lands, that the miracle of the
snow-change, the new beauty of the snow-world, is transcendent. Truly,
it is miraculous, that change: that new world, what a revelation it
is, showing us the familiar as we have never known it or have of it
but a dreamlike remembrance, showing it to us at times as we can
hardly conceive it. To the continual element of surprise much has to
be attributed, in our country at least. In lands like Scandinavia and
Russia the periodicity and uniformity of the snow-raiment of earth
take much from this element of surprise. Hardly have the inhabitants
grown used to the greenness of grass and sprouting grain and fluttering
leaf, after the long months of a silent whiteness become dreadful as
a shroud, when a grey pall is spun out of the east once more and out
of the north comes the wind of death, and the leaf is gone away on the
polar air, the grain is gathered or withered, the sere grass fades like
wintry grey-green seas fading into continual foam.
Not so with us, who have those visitors, who can be so dread even here,
for so short a time. The dark sword-thrust of the ice, compelling
moving waters to silence and the blue rigour of steel, may reign
for weeks in the Anglian fen-lands. Dense mantles of snow may cover
the hills of the north for months, and the foreheads of Nevis and
Schiehallion be white from the autumnal equinox till cuckoo-cry: for
weeks the hill-fox and the mountain-hare may not drink at the frozen
tarns, the moor-pastures may be lost to deer and sheep, and only the
ptarmigan survive in the waste white places: for a week or two the
boughs of the oak and chestnut, the plumes of the spruce and hemlock,
the tresses of the larch and birch, may bend with the unmelting
snowfall. But, at the worst, it is never long before a wind out of
the south, or from the wet mouth of the west, breathes upon the fens,
and the silence is become a faint stir, a whisper, a rustle; till
the moveless steel is become a film, to be gathered some noon, like
May-dew from the thickets, the autumn-frost from the whin and gorse.
It is never long till the _meh-ing_ of the sheep is again a sweet
lamentation upon the hill-pastures, or till the fox dusts the last
snow from his root-roof in the wintry glen, or till the jay screams in
the woodlands as from fir-plume and oak-bough slip or fall with heavy
thump their unloosened burthens. True, the Sons of the North Wind,
as in the Highland West and North we know so well and often to such
bitter cost, may come to us with suddenness of tempest, raging in their
mysterious wrath, and may long endure, trampling upon life, as, in the
old legend, the gigantic phantom-men of the Northern Lights trample
the souls of the dead condemned to Ifurin, the Gaelic hell. Every year
there is sorrow upon some strath, grief in the glens, lamentation by
hillside and moor. From the Ord of Sutherland to Land’s End there may
be a tale of disaster. Snow-drift, snow-storm, snow-fog may paralyse
communications and bring deep anxiety or irremediable grief to an
incalculable number. Yet, we must admit that even our severest winter
is but a fierce reminder of times long past for us, the times of
the mail-coach, the rude cart, the mountain-pony, that the worst we
ever have is tolerable beside the bleak wretchedness of Pomerania,
the frightful cold of Esthonia, the death-in-life of Muscovy--to say
nothing of lands still more wild and remote.
One cannot say, here is snow at its loveliest, here is ice in a
unique beauty. Frozen lochs by moonlight, frozen fens under the pale
azure of cloudless noons, dark winding rivers, lifeless seemingly in
the grip of frost, traversed by starshine under overhanging boughs,
lagoons where the dark-blue or steel-blue ice mirrors the drifting
cloud or the flying skater, village-ponds, canals, the water-ways of
towns and cities, in all, in each, the radiant miracle is evident.
Like moonshine, this beauty of ice or snow may be omnipresent. If it
inhabits the wilderness, it is fulfilled also in the streets of cities.
Who has not looked out on the sordid thoroughfares of a town, and
seen the poor ignoble disarray of chimney-tops and slated roofs and
crude angles and ornamentations take on a new and entrancing aspect,
so that even the untidy shops and tawdry dwellings assume a crown
of loveliness, and the long, dull, perspectives of monotonous roads
might be the trampled avenues about the gates of fairyland? The most
sordid hamlet in the dreariest manufacturing-region may, suddenly,
awake to a dawn so wonderful in what it reveals that the villagers
might well believe, as in the old folk-tale, that Christ had passed
that way in the night and left the world white and husht, stainlessly
pure. But, of course, we have each of us our preferences. Some love
best to see the long swelling reaches of ploughed lands covered with
new fallen snow not too heavy to hide the wave-like procession of the
hidden furrows. Some love best to look on wide interminable wolds, a
solitude of unbroken whiteness, without even the shadow of a cloud or
the half-light of a grey sky: some, upon familiar pastures now changed
as though in the night the fields had receded into the earth and the
fields of another world had silently sunk into their place: some,
upon mountain-slopes, on whose vast walls the shadows of wheeling
hawks and curlews pass like pale blue scimetars: some, on woodlands,
where from the topmost elm-bough to the lowest fir-plume or outspread
bough of cedar the immaculate soft burthens miraculously suspend. For
myself--after the supreme loveliness of snowy mountain-ranges at dawn
or sunset or moon-glow--I am most entranced by snow in a pine-forest.
The more so if, as in one my mind recreates for me as I write, there
are glades where I can come to a rock whence an over-leaning white
hill may be seen as though falling out of heaven, with white mountains
beyond, white shoulders lapsing on white shoulders, white peaks rising
beyond white peaks, white crests fading into further snowy crests, and,
nearer, it may be, glens sinking into glens, no longer a sombre green,
but as though stilled avalanches awaiting a magician’s unloosening
spell. Once, just there, in just such a place, I saw a wonderful sight.
The January frosts had gone, and February had come in with the soft
sighing of a wind out of the south. The snows faded like morning-mists.
But after three days the north wind came again in the night. At dawn
it veered, and a light snow fell once more, then thick and moist and
flaky, and by noon had changed to rain. But an hour or so later the
polar breath once more came over the brows of the hills, and with
midwinter intensity. The rain was frozen on every bough, on every
branch, on every spray, on every twig, on every leaf, on every frond of
bracken, on every spire of reed, on every blade of grass. The world had
become cased in shining ice, crystalline, exquisite in radiant beauty,
ineffable, as in a trance, the ecstasy of the Unknown Dreamer. At
sundown the vast orb of blood-red flame sank over the glens and burned
among the aisles of the forest. Looking at the ice-mailed wilderness
of bole and bough and branch between me and the sun I saw a forest
of living fire, wherein, as a wind stirred and threw sudden shadows,
phantoms of flame moved to and fro, or stood, terrible children of
light, as though entranced, as though listening, as though looking on
Life or on Death. When at last the flame was all gathered up out of
the west, and an aura of faint rose hung under the first glittering
stars, an extraordinary ocean of yellow spread from the horizons
serrated with immense mauve peninsulas and long narrow grass-green
lagoons. But the mass of the western firmament was yellow, from the
orange-yellow of lichen and the orange-red of the dandelion to the
faint vanishing yellows of cowslip and primrose. How lovely then were
the trees which had been set on fire by the unconsuming flames of the
sunset: what a fairyland, now, of delicate amber and translucent topaz.
What mysterious colonnades, what avenues of lovely light! And then,
later, to turn, and see the chill grey-blue ice-bound trees behind one
filling slowly with moonshine, as the immensity of ocean fills, wave
after wave, at moonrise, when a cloud is slowly uplifted by mysterious
withdrawing airs! Then, truly, was Dreamland no longer a phantasy of
sleep, but a loveliness so great that, like deep music, there could
be no words wherewith to measure it, but only the breathless unspoken
speech of the soul upon whom has fallen the secret dews.