Shut your eyes--suppose five months gone--and lo! BELLE ISLE in Autumn,

like a scene in another hemisphere of our globe. There is a slight frost

in the air, in the sky, on the lake, and mid-day is as still as

midnight. But, though still, it is cheerful; for close at hand Robin

Redbreast--God bless him!--is warbling on the copestone of that old barn

gable; and though Millar-Ground Bay is half a mile off, how distinct the

clank of the two oars like one, accompanying that large wood-boat on its

slow voyage from Ambleside to Bowness, the metropolitan port of the

Queen of the Lakes. The water has lost, you see, its summer sunniness,

yet it is as transparent as ever it was in summer; and how close

together seem, with their almost meeting shadows, the two opposite

shores! But we wish you to look at BELLE ISLE, though we ourselves are

almost afraid to do so, so transcendently glorious is the sight that we

know will disturb us with an emotion too deep to be endured.--Could you

not think that a splendid sunset had fallen down in fragments on the

Isle called Beautiful, and set it all ablaze! The woods are on fire, yet

they burn not; beauty subdues while it fosters the flame; and there, as

in a many-tented tabernacle, has Colour pitched his royal residence, and

reigns in glory beyond that of any Oriental king. What are all the

canopies, and balconies, and galleries of human state, all hung with

the richest drapery that ever the skill of Art, that Wizard, drew forth

in gorgeous folds from his enchanted loom, if ideally suspended in the

air of imagination beside the sun-and-storm-stained furniture of these

Palaces of Autumn, framed by the Spirit of the Season, of living and

dying umbrage, for his latest delight, ere he move in annual migration,

with all his Court, to some foreign clime far beyond the seas! No names

of trees are remembered--a glorious confusion comprehends in one the

whole leafy race--orange, and purple, and scarlet, and crimson, are all

seen to be there, and interfused through the silent splendour is aye

felt the presence of that terrestrial green, native and unextinguishable

in earth's bosom, as that celestial blue is that of the sky. That trance

goes by, and the spirit, gradually filled with a stiller delight, takes

down all those tents into pieces, and contemplates the encampment with

less of imagination, and with more of love. It knows and blesses each

one of those many glorious groves, each becoming, as it gazes, less and

less glorious, more and more beautiful; till memory revives all the

happiest and holiest hours of the Summer and the Spring, and re-peoples

the melancholy umbrage with a thousand visions of joy, that may return

never more! Images, it may be, of forms and faces now mouldering in the

dust! For as human hearts have felt, and all human lips have

declared--melancholy making poets of us all, ay, even prophets--till the

pensive air of Autumn has been filled with the music of elegiac and

foreboding hymns--as is the Race of Leaves--now old Homer speaks--so is

the Race of Men! Nor till time shall have an end, insensate will be any

creature endowed "with discourse of reason" to those mysterious

misgivings, alternating with triumphant aspirations more mysterious

still, when the Religion of Nature leans in awe on the Religion of God,

and we hear the voice of both in such strains as these--the earthly, in

its sadness, momentarily deadening the divine:--

"But when shall Spring visit the mouldering urn?

Oh! when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?"

SOLILOQUY ON THE SEASONS.

SECOND RHAPSODY.

Have we not been speaking of all the Seasons as belonging to the

masculine gender? They are generally, we believe, in this country,

painted in petticoats, apparently by bagmen, as may be daily seen in the

pretty prints that bedeck the paper-walls of the parlours of inns.

Spring is always there represented as a spanker in a blue symar, very

pertly exposing her budding breast, and her limbs from feet to fork, in

a style that must be very offensive to the mealy-mouthed members of that

shamefaced corporation, the Society for the Suppression of Vice. She

holds a flower between her finger and her thumb, crocus, violet, or

primrose; and though we verily believe she means no harm, she no doubt

does look rather leeringly upon you, like one of the frail sisterhood of

the Come-atables. Summer again is an enormous and monstrous mawsey, _in

puris naturalibus_, meant to image Musidora, or the Medicean, or rather

the Hottentot Venus.

"So stands the statue that enchants the world!"

She seems, at the very lightest, a good round half hundred heavier than

Spring; and, when you imagine her plunging into the pool, you think you

hear a porpus. May no Damon run away with her clothes, leaving behind in

exchange his heart! Gadflies are rife in the dogdays, and should one

"imparadise himself in form of that sweet flesh," there will be a cry in

the woods that will speedily bring to her assistance Pan and all his

Satyrs. Autumn is a motherly matron, evidently _enceinte_, and, like

Love and Charity, who probably are smiling on the opposite wall, she has

a brace of bouncing babies at her breast--in her right hand a formidable

sickle, like a Turkish scymitar--in her left an extraordinary utensil,

bearing, we believe, the heathenish appellation of cornucopia--on her

back a sheaf of wheat--and on her head a diadem--planted there by John

Barleycorn. She is a fearsome dear; as ugly a customer as a lonely man

would wish to encounter beneath the light of a September moon. On her

feet are bauchles--on her legs huggers--and the breadth of her soles,

and the thickness of her ankles, we leave to your own conjectures. Her

fine bust is conspicuous in an open laced boddice--and her huge hips are

set off to the biggest advantage, by a jacket that she seems to have

picked up by the wayside, after some jolly tar, on his return from a

long voyage, had there been performing his toilet, and, by getting rid

of certain encumbrances, enabled to pursue his inland journey with less

resemblance than before to a walking scarecrow. Winter is a withered old

beldam, too poor to keep a cat, hurkling on her hunkers over a feeble

fire of sticks, extinguished fast as it is beeted, with a fizz in the

melted snow which all around that unhoused wretchedness is indurated

with frost; while a blue pool close at hand is chained in iciness, and

an old stump, half buried in the drift. Poor old, miserable, cowering

crone! One cannot look at her without unconsciously putting one's hand

in his pocket, and fumbling for a tester. Yes, there is pathos in the

picture, especially while, on turning round your head, you behold a big

blockhead of a vulgar bagman, with his coat-tails over his arms, warming

his loathsome hideousness at a fire that would roast an ox.

Such are the Seasons! And though we have spoken of them, as mere critics

on art, somewhat superciliously, yet there is almost always no

inconsiderable merit in all prints, pictures, paintings, poems, or

prose-works, that--pardon our tautology--are popular with the people.

The emblematical figments now alluded to, have been the creations of

persons of genius, who had never had access to the works of the old

masters; so that, though the conception is good, the execution is, in

general, far from perfect. Yet many a time, when lying at our ease in a

Wayside Inn, stretched on three wooden chairs, with a little round

deal-table before us, well laden with oatmeal cakes and cheese and

butter, nor, you may be sure, without its "tappit hen"--have we after a

long day's journey--perhaps the longest day--

"Through moors and mosses many, O,"

regarded with no imaginative spirit--when Joseph and his brethren were

wanting--even such symbols of the Seasons as these--while arose to

gladden us many as fair an image as ever nature sent from her woods and

wildernesses to cheer the heart of her worshipper who, on his pilgrimage

to her loftiest shrines, and most majestic temples, spared not to stoop

his head below the lowest lintel, and held all men his equal who earned

by honest industry the scanty fare which they never ate without those

holy words of supplication and thanksgiving, "Give us this day our daily

bread!"

Our memory is a treasure-house of written and unwritten poetry--the

ingots, the gifts of the great bards, and the bars of bullion--much of

the coin our own--some of it borrowed mayhap, but always on good

security, and repaid with interest--a legal transaction, of which even a

not unwealthy man has no need to be ashamed--none of it stolen, nor yet

found where the Highlandman found the tongs. But our riches are like

those that encumbered the floor of the Sanctum of the Dey of Algiers,

not very tidily arranged; and we are frequently foiled in our efforts to

lay our hand, for immediate use or ornament, on a ducat or a diamond, a

pistole or a pearl, a sovereign, or only his crown. We feel ourselves at

this moment in that predicament, when trying to recollect the genders of

Thomson's "Seasons"--

"Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come,

And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,

While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower

Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend!"

That picture is indistinctly and obscurely beautiful to the imagination,

and there is not a syllable about sex--though "ethereal mildness," which

is an Impersonation, and hardly an Impersonation, must be, it is felt, a

Virgin Goddess, whom all the divinities that dwell between heaven and

earth must love. Never to our taste--but our taste is inferior to our

feeling and our genius--though you will seldom go far wrong even in

trusting it--never had a poem a more beautiful beginning. It is not

simple--nor ought it to be--it is rich, and even gorgeous--for the Bard

came to his subject full of inspiration; and as it was the inspiration,

here, not of profound thought, but of passionate emotion, it was right

that music at the very first moment should overflow the page, and that

it should be literally strewed with roses. An imperfect Impersonation is

often proof positive of the highest state of poetical enthusiasm. The

forms of nature undergo a half humanising process under the intensity of

our love, yet still retain the character of the insensate creation, thus

affecting us with a sweet, strange, almost bewildering, blended emotion

that scarcely belongs to either separately, but to both together clings

as to a phenomenon that only the eye of genius sees, because only the

soul of genius can give it a presence--though afterwards all eyes dimly

recognise it, on its being shown to them, as something more vivid than

their own faint experience, yet either kindred to it, or virtually one

and the same. Almost all human nature can, in some measure, understand

and feel the most exquisite and recondite image which only the rarest

genius could produce. Were it not so, great poets might break their

harps, and go drown themselves in Helicon.

"From brightening fields of ether fair disclosed,

Child of the Sun, refulgent SUMMER comes,

In pride of youth, and felt through Nature's depth:

He comes attended by the sultry hours,

And ever-fanning breezes, on his way;

While, from his ardent look, the turning Spring

Averts her blushful face, and earth, and skies,

All smiling, to his hot dominion leaves."

Here the Impersonation is stronger--and perhaps the superior strength

lies in the words "child of the Sun." And here in the words describing

Spring, she too is more of an Impersonation than in the other

passage--averting her blushful face from the Summer's ardent look. The

poet having made Summer masculine, very properly makes Spring feminine;

and 'tis a jewel of a picture--for ladies should always avert their

blushful faces from the ardent looks of gentlemen. Thomson, indeed,

elsewhere says of an enamoured youth overpowered by the loving looks of

his mistress,--

"From the keen gaze her lover turns away,

Full of the dear ecstatic power, and sick

With sighing languishment."

This, we have heard, from experienced persons of both sexes, is as

delicate as it is natural; but for our own simple and single selves, we

never remember having got sick on any such occasion. Much agitated, we

cannot deny--if we did, the most credulous would not credit us--much

agitated we have been, when our lady-love, not contented with fixing

upon us her dove-eyes, began billing and cooing in a style from which

the cushat might have taken a lesson with advantage, that she might the

better perform her innocent part on her first assignation with her

affianced in the pine-grove on St Valentine's day; but never in all our

long lives got we absolutely _sick_--nor even _squeamish_--never were we

obliged to turn away with our hand to our mouth--but, on the contrary,

we were commonly as brisk as a bee at a pot of honey; or, if that be too

luscious a simile, as brisk as that same wonderful insect murmuring for

a few moments round and round a rose-bush, and then settling himself

down seriously to work, as mute as a mouse, among the half-blown petals.

However, we are not now writing our Confessions--and what we wished to

say about this passage is, that in it the one sex is represented as

turning away the face from that of the other, which may be all natural

enough, though polite on the gentleman's part we can never call it; and,

had the female virgin done so, we cannot help thinking it would have

read better in poetry. But for Spring to avert _his_ blushful face from

the ardent looks of Summer, has on us the effect of making both Seasons

seem simpletons. Spring, in the character of "ethereal mildness," was

unquestionably a female; but here she is "unsexed from the crown to the

toe," and changed into an awkward hobbletehoy, who, having passed his

boyhood in the country, is a booby who blushes black at the gaze of his

own brother, and if brought into the company of the lasses, would not

fail to faint away in a fit, nor revive till his face felt a pitcherful

of cold water.

"Crown'd with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf,

While Autumn, nodding o'er the yellow plain,

Comes jovial on," &c.,

is, we think, bad. The Impersonation here is complete, and though the

sex of Autumn is not mentioned, it is manifestly meant to be male. So

far, there is nothing amiss either one way or another. But "nodding o'er

the yellow plain" is a mere statement of a fact in nature--and

descriptive of the growing and ripening or ripened harvest--whereas it

is applied here to Autumn, as a figure who "comes jovial on." This is

not obscurity--or indistinctness--which, as we have said before, is

often a great beauty in Impersonation; but it is an inconsistency and a

contradiction--and therefore indefensible on any ground either of

conception or expression.

"There are no such essential vices as this in the "Castle of

Indolence"--for by that time Thomson had subjected his inspiration to

thought--and his poetry, guided and guarded by philosophy, became

celestial as an angel's song.

"See, Winter comes, to rule the varied year,

Sullen and sad, with all his rising train,

Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme,

These! that exalt the soul to solemn thought,

And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms!

Congenial horrors, hail! with frequent foot,

Pleased have I, in my cheerful morn of life,

When nursed by careless Solitude I lived,

And sung of Nature with unceasing joy,

Pleased have I wander'd through your rough domain;

Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure;

Heard the winds roar, and the big torrents burst;

Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew'd

In the grim evening sky. Thus passed the time,

Till through the lucid chambers of the south

Look'd out the joyous Spring, look'd out, and smiled!"

Divine inspiration indeed! Poetry, that if read by the bedside of a

dying lover of nature, might

"Create a soul

Under the ribs of death!"

What in the name of goodness makes us suppose that a mean, and miserable

November day, even while we are thus Rhapsodising, is drizzling all

Edinburgh with the worst of all imaginable Scottish mists--an Easterly

Haur? We know that he infests all the year, but shows his poor spite in

its bleakest bitterness in March and in November. Earth and heaven are

not only not worth looking at in an Easterly Haur, but the Visible is

absolute wretchedness, and people wonder why they were born. The

visitation begins with a sort of characterless haze, waxing more and

more wetly obscure, till you know not whether it be rain, snow, or

sleet, that drenches your clothes in dampness, till you feel it in your

skin, then in your flesh, then in your bones, then in your marrow, and

then in your mind. Your blinking eyes have it too--and so, shut it as

you will, has your moping mouth. Yet the streets, though looking blue,

are not puddled, and the dead cat lies dry in the gutter. There is no

eavesdropping--no gushing of waterspouts. To say it rained would be no

breach of veracity, but a mere misstatement of a melancholy fact. The

truth is, that _the weather cannot rain_, but keeps spit, spit,

spitting, in a style sufficient to irritate Socrates--or even Moses

himself; and yet true, veritable, sincere, genuine, and authentic Rain

could not--or if he could would not--so thoroughly soak you and your

whole wardrobe, were you to allow him a day to do it, as that shabby

imitation of a tenth-rate shower, in about the time of a usual sized

sermon. So much cold and so much wet, with so little to show for it, is

a disgrace to the atmosphere, which it will take weeks of the sunniest

the weather can afford to wipe off. But the stores of sunniness which it

is in the power of Winter in this northern latitude to accumulate,

cannot be immense; and therefore we verily believe that it would be too

much to expect that it ever can make amends for the hideous horrors of

this Easterly Haur. The Cut-throat!

On such days suicides rush to judgment. That sin is mysterious as

insanity--their graves are unintelligible as the cells in Bedlam. Oh!

the brain and the heart of man! Therein is the only Hell. Small these

regions in space, and of narrow room--but haunted may they be with all

the Fiends and all the Furies. A few nerves transmit to the soul despair

or bliss. At the touch of something--whence and wherefore sent, who can

say--something that serenes or troubles, soothes or jars--she soars up

into life and light, just as you may have seen a dove suddenly cleave

the sunshine--or down she dives into death and darkness, like a shot

eagle tumbling into the sea!

Materialism! Immaterialism! Why should mortals, whom conscience tells

that they are immortals, bewildered and bewildering ponder upon the

dust! Do your duty to God and man, and fear not that, when that dust

dies, the spirit that breathed by it will live for ever. Feels not that

spirit its immortality in each sacred thought? When did ever religious

soul fear annihilation? Or shudder to think that, having once known, it

could ever forget God? Such forgetfulness is in the idea of eternal

death. Therefore is eternal death impossible to us who can hold

communion with our Maker. Our knowledge of Him--dim and remote though it

be--is a God-given pledge that He will redeem us from the doom of the

grave.

Let us then, and all our friends, believe, with Coleridge, in his

beautiful poem of the "Nightingale," that

"In Nature there is nothing melancholy,"

not even November. The disease of the body may cause disease in the

soul; yet not the less trust we in the mercy of the merciful--not the

less strive we to keep feeding and trimming that spiritual lamp which is

within us, even when it flickers feebly in the dampy gloom, like an

earthly lamp left in a vaulted sepulchre, about to die among the dead.

Heaven seems to have placed a power in our Will as mighty as it is

mysterious. Call it not Liberty, lest you should wax proud; call it not

Necessity, lest you should despair. But turn from the oracles of

man--still dim even in their clearest responses--to the Oracles of God,

which are never dark; or if so, but

"Dark with excessive bright"

to eyes not constantly accustomed to sustain the splendour. Bury all

your books, when you feel the night of scepticism gathering around

you--bury them all, powerful though you may have deemed their spells to

illuminate the unfathomable--open your Bible, and all the spiritual

world will be as bright as day.

The disease of the body may cause disease to the soul. Ay, madness. Some

rapture in the soul makes the brain numb, and thence sudden or lingering

death;--some rupture in the brain makes the soul insane, and thence life

worse than death, and haunted by horrors beyond what is dreamt of the

grave and all its corruption. Perhaps the line fullest of meaning that

ever was written, is--

"Mens sana in corpore sano."

When nature feels the flow of its vital blood pure and unimpeded, what

unutterable gladness bathes the spirit in that one feeling of--health!

Then the mere consciousness of existence is like that emotion which

Milton speaks of as breathed from the bowers of Paradise--

"Vernal delight and joy, able to drive

All sadness but despair"

It does more--for despair itself cannot prevail against it. What a dawn

of bliss rises upon us with the dawn of light, when our life is

healthful as the sun! Then

"It feels that it is greater than it knows."

God created the earth and the air beautiful through the senses; and at

the uplifting of a little lid, a whole flood of imagery is let in upon

the spirit, all of which becomes part of its very self, as if the

enjoying and the enjoyed were one. Health flies away like an angel, and

her absence disenchants the earth. What shadows then pass over the

ethereal surface of the spirit, from the breath of disordered

matter!--from the first scarcely-felt breath of despondency, to the last

scowling blackness of despair! Often men know not what power placed the

fatal fetters upon them--they see even that a link may be open, and that

one effort might fling off the bondage; but their souls are in slavery,

and will not be free. Till something like a fresh wind, or a sudden

sunbeam, comes across them, and in a moment their whole existence is

changed, and they see the very vanishing of their most dismal and

desperate dream.

"Somewhat too much of this"--so let us strike the chords to a merrier

measure--to a "livelier lilt"--as suits the variable spirit of our

Soliloquy. Be it observed, then, that the sole certain way of getting

rid of the blue devils, is to drown them in a shower-bath. You would not

suppose that we are subject to the blue devils? Yet we are sometimes

their very slave. When driven to it by their lash, every occupation,

which when free we resort to as pastime, becomes taskwork; nor will

these dogged masters suffer us to purchase emancipation with the

proceeds of the toil of our groaning genius. But whenever the worst

comes to the worst, and we almost wish to die so that we might escape

the galling pressure of our chains, we sport buff, and into the

shower-bath. Yet such is the weakness of poor human nature, that like a

criminal on the scaffold, shifting the signal kerchief from hand to

hand, much to the irritation of his excellency the hangman, one of the

most impatient of men--and more to the satisfaction of the crowd, the

most patient of men and women--we often stand shut up in that

sentry-looking canvass box, dexterously and sinistrously fingering the

string, perhaps for five shrinking, and shuddering, and _grueing_

minutes, ere we can summon up desperation to pull down upon ourselves

the rushing waterfall! Soon as the agony is over, we bounce out the

colour of beetroot, and survey ourselves in a five-foot mirror, with an

amazement that, on each successive exhibition, is still as fresh as when

we first experienced it,

"In life's morning march, when our spirits were young."

By-and-by we assume the similitude of an immense boiled lobster that has

leapt out of the pan--and then, seeming for a while to be an

emblematical or symbolical representation of the setting Sun, we sober

down into a faint pink, like that of the Morn, and finally subside into

our own permanent flesh-light, which, as we turn our back upon

ourselves, after the fashion of some of his majesty's ministers, reminds

us of that line in Cowper descriptive of the November Moon--

"Resplendent less, but of an ampler round!"

Like that of the eagle, our youth is renewed--we feel strong as the

horse in Homer--a divine glow permeates our being, as if it were the

subdued spiritual essence of caloric. An intense feeling of self--not

self-love, mind ye, and the farthest state imaginable in this wide world

from selfishness--elevates us far up above the clouds, into the loftiest

regions of the sunny blue, and we seem to breathe an atmosphere, of

which every glorious gulp is inspiration. Despondency is thrown to the

dogs. Despair appears in his true colours, a more grotesque idiot than

Grimaldi, and we treat him with a guffaw. All ante-bath difficulties

seem now--what they really are--facilities of which we are by far too

much elated to avail ourselves; dangers that used to appear appalling

are felt now to be lulling securities--obstacles, like mountains, lying

in our way of life as we walked towards the temple of Apollo or Plutus,

we smile at the idea of surmounting, so molehillish do they look, and we

kick them aside like an old footstool. Let the country ask us for a

scheme to pay off the national debt--_there she has it_; do you request

us to have the kindness to leap over the moon--here we go; excellent Mr

Blackwood has but to say the word, and a ready-made Leading Article is

in his hand, promotive of the sale of countless numbers of "my

Magazine," and of the happiness of countless numbers of mankind. We

feel--and the feeling proves the fact--as bold as Joshua the son of

Nun--as brave as David the son of Jesse--as wise as Solomon the son of

David--and as proud as Nebuchadnezzar the son of Nebopolazzar. We survey

our image in the mirror--and think of Adam. We put ourselves into the

posture of the Belvidere Apollo.

"Then view the Lord of the unerring bow,

The God of life, and poesy, and light,

The Sun in human arms array'd, and brow

All radiant from his triumph in the fight.

The shaft hath just been shot--the arrow bright

With an immortal vengeance; in his eye

And nostril beautiful disdain, and might

And majesty flash their full lightnings by,

Developing in that one glance the Deity."

Up four flight of stairs we fly--for the bath is in the double-sunk

story--ten steps at a bound--and in five minutes have devoured one

quartern loaf, six eggs, and a rizzar, washing all over with a

punch-bowl of congou and a tea-bowl of coffee.

"Enormous breakfast,

Wild without rule or art! Where nature plays

Her virgin fancies."

And then, leaning back on our Easy-chair, we perform an exploit beyond

the reach of Euclid--why, WE SQUARE THE CIRCLE, and to the utter

demolition of our admirable friend Sir David Brewster's diatribe, in a

late number of the _Quarterly Review_, on the indifference of Government

to men of science, chuckle over our nobly-won order K.C.C.B., Knight

Companion of the Cold Bath.

Many analogies between the seasons of the year and the seasons of life,

being natural, have been a frequent theme of poetry in all countries.

Had the gods made us poetical, we should now have poured forth, a few

exquisite illustrations of some that are very affecting and impressive.

It has, however, often been felt by us, that not a few of those one

meets with in the lamentations of whey-faced sentimentalists, are false

or fantastic, and do equal violence to all the seasons, both of the year

and of life. These gentry have been especially silly upon the similitude

of Old Age to Winter. Winter, in external nature, is not the season of

decay. An old tree, for example, in the very _dead_ of winter, as it is

figuratively called, though bare of leaves, is full of life. The sap,

indeed, has sunk down from his bole and branches--down into his toes or

roots. But there it is, ready, in due time, to reascend. Not so with an

old man--the present company always excepted;--his sap is not sunk down

to his toes, but much of it is gone clean out of the system--therefore,

individual natural objects in Winter are not analogically emblematical

of people stricken in years. Far less does the Winter itself of the

year, considered as a season, resemble the old age of life considered as

a season. To what peculiarities, pray, in the character and conduct of

aged gentlemen in general, do rain, sleet, hail, frost, ice, snow,

winds, blasts, storms, hurricanes, and occasional thunder and lightning,

bear analogy? We pause for a reply. Old men's heads, it is true, are

frequently white, though more frequently bald, and their blood is not so

hot as when they were springalds. But though there be no great harm in

likening a sprinkling of white hair on mine ancient's temples to the

appearance of the surface of the earth, flat or mountainous, after a

slight fall of snow--and indeed, in an impassioned state of mind, we

feel a moral beauty in such poetical expression as "sorrow shedding on

the head of youth its untimely snows"--yet the natural propriety of such

an image, so far from justifying the assertion of a general analogy

between Winter and Old Age, proves that the analogies between them are

in fact very few, and felt to be analogies at all, only when touched

upon very seldom, and very slightly, and, for the most part, very

vaguely--the truth being, that they scarcely exist at all in reality,

but have an existence given to them by the power of creative passion,

which often works like genius. Shakespeare knew this well--as he knew

everything else; and, accordingly, he gives us Seven Ages of Life--not

Four Seasons. But how finely does he sometimes, by the mere use of the

names of the Seasons of the Year, intensify to our imagination the

mental state to which they are for the moment felt to be analogous?--

"Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by the sun of York!"

That will do. The feeling he wished to inspire, is inspired; and the

further analogical images which follow add nothing to _our_ feeling,

though they show the strength and depth of _his_ into whose lips they

are put. A bungler would have bored us with ever so many ramifications

of the same idea, on one of which, in our weariness, we might have

wished him hanged by the neck till he was dead.

We are an Old Man, and though single not singular; yet, without vanity,

we think ourselves entitled to say, that we are no more like Winter, in

particular, than we are like Spring, Summer, or Autumn. The truth is,

that we are much less like any one of the Seasons, than we are like the

whole Set. Is not Spring sharp? So are we. Is not Spring snappish? So

are we. Is not Spring boisterous? So are we. Is not Spring "beautiful

exceedingly?" So are we. Is not Spring capricious? So are we. Is not

Spring, at times, the gladdest, gayest, gentlest, mildest, meekest,

modestest, softest, sweetest, and sunniest of all God's creatures that

steal along the face of the earth? So are we. So much for our

similitude--a staring and striking one--to Spring. But were you to stop

there, what an inadequate idea would you have of our character! For only

ask your senses, and they will tell you that we are much liker Summer.

Is not Summer often infernally hot? So are we. Is not Summer sometimes

cool as its own cucumbers? So are we. Does not Summer love the shade? So

do we. Is not Summer, nevertheless, somewhat "too much i' the sun?" So

are we. Is not Summer famous for its thunder and lightning? So are we.

Is not Summer, when he chooses, still, silent, and serene as a sleeping

seraph? And so too--when Christopher chooses--are not we? Though, with

keen remorse we confess it, that, when suddenly wakened, we are too

often more like a fury or a fiend--and that completes the likeness; for

all who know a Scottish Summer, with one voice exclaim--"So is he!" But

our portrait is but half-drawn; you know but a moiety of our character.

Is Autumn jovial?--ask Thomson--so are we. Is Autumn melancholy?--ask

Alison and Gillespie--so are we. Is Autumn bright?--ask the woods and

groves--so are we. Is Autumn rich?--ask the whole world--so are we. Does

Autumn rejoice in the yellow grain and the golden vintage, that, stored

up in his great Magazine of Nature, are lavishly thence dispensed to all

that hunger, and quench the thirst of the nations? So do we. After that,

no one can be so pur-and-bat-blind as not see that North is, in very

truth, Autumn's gracious self, rather than his Likeness or Eidolon.

But--

"Lo, Winter comes to rule th' inverted year!"

So do we,

"Sullen and sad, with all his rising train--

Vapours, and clouds, and storms!"

So are we. The great author of the "Seasons" says, that Winter and his

train

"Exalt the soul to solemn thought,

And heavenly musing!"

So do we. And, "lest aught less great should stamp us mortal," here we

conclude the comparison, dashed off in few lines by the hand of a great

master, and ask, Is not North, Winter? Thus, listener after our own

heart! thou feelest that we are imaged aright in all our attributes

neither by Spring, nor Summer, nor Autumn, nor Winter; but that the

character of Christopher is shadowed forth and reflected by the Entire

Year.

A FEW WORDS ON THOMSON.

Poetry, one might imagine, must be full of Snow-scenes. If so, they have

almost all dissolved--melted away from our memory--as the transiencies

in nature do which they coldly pictured. Thomson's "Winter," of course,

we do not include in our obliviousness--and from Cowper's "Task" we

might quote many a most picturesque Snow-piece. But have frost and snow

been done full justice to by them or any other of our poets? They have

been well spoken of by two--Southey and Coleridge--of whose most

poetical compositions respectively, "Thalaba" and the "Ancient Mariner,"

in some future volume we may dissert. Thomson's genius does not so often

delight us by exquisite minute touches in the description of nature as

that of Cowper. It loves to paint on a great scale, and to dash objects

off sweepingly by bold strokes--such, indeed, as have almost always

distinguished the mighty masters of the lyre and the rainbow. Cowper

sets nature before your eyes--Thomson before your imagination. Which do

you prefer? Both. Be assured that both poets had pored night and day

upon her--in all her aspects--and that she had revealed herself fully to

both. But they, in their religion, elected different modes of

worship--and both were worthy of the mighty mother. In one mood of mind

we love Cowper best, in another Thomson. Sometimes the Seasons are

almost a Task--and sometimes the Task is out of Season. There is

delightful distinctness in all the pictures of the Bard of

Olney--glorious gloom or glimmer in most of those of the Bard of Ednam.

Cowper paints trees--Thomson woods. Thomson paints, in a few wondrous

lines, rivers from source to sea, like the mighty Burrampooter--Cowper,

in many no very wondrous lines, brightens up one bend of a stream, or

awakens our fancy to the murmur of some single waterfall. But a truce to

antithesis--a deceptive style of criticism--and see how Thomson sings

of Snow. Why, in the following lines, as well as Christopher North in

his Soliloquy on the Seasons--

"The cherish'd fields

Put on their winter-robe of purest white.

'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts

Along the mazy current."

Nothing can be more vivid. 'Tis of the nature of an ocular spectrum.

Here is a touch like one of Cowper's. Note the beauty of the epithet

"brown," where all that is motionless is white--

"The foodless wilds

Pour forth their _brown_ inhabitants."

That one word proves the poet. Does it not?

The entire description from which these two sentences are selected by

memory--a critic you may always trust to--is admirable; except in one or

two places where Thomson seems to have striven to be strongly pathetic,

and where he seems to us to have overshot his mark, and to have ceased

to be perfectly natural. Thus--

"Drooping, the ox

Stands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demands

The fruit of all his toil."

The image of the ox is as good as possible. We see him, and could paint

him in oils. But, to our mind, the notion of his "demanding the fruit of

all his toils"--to which we freely acknowledge the worthy animal was

well entitled--sounds, as it is here expressed, rather fantastical. Call

it doubtful--for Jemmy was never utterly in the wrong in any sentiment.

Again--

"The bleating kind

Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth,

_With looks of dumb despair._"

The second line is perfect; but the Ettrick Shepherd agreed with us--one

night at Ambrose's--that the third was not quite right. Sheep, he agreed

with us, do not deliver themselves up to despair under any

circumstances; and here Thomson transferred what would have been his own

feeling in a corresponding condition, to animals who dreadlessly follow

their instincts. Thomson redeems himself in what immediately succeeds--

"Then, sad dispersed,

Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow."

For, as they disperse, they do look very sad--and no doubt are so; but

had they been in despair, they would not so readily, and constantly, and

uniformly, and successfully, have taken to the digging, but whole flocks

had perished.

You will not, we are confident, be angry with us for quoting a few lines

that occur soon after, and which are a noble example of the sweeping

style of description which, we said above, characterises the genius of

this sublime poet:--

"From the bellowing east,

In this dire season, oft the whirlwind's wing

Sweeps up the burden of whole wintry plains

At one wide waft, and o'er the hapless flocks,

Hid in the hollow of two neighbouring hills,

The billowy tempest whelms; till, upward urged,

The valley to a shining mountain swells,

Tipp'd with a wreath high-curling in the sky."

Well might the Bard, with such a snow-storm in his imagination, when

telling the shepherds to be kind to their helpless charge, addressed

them in language which, in an ordinary mood, would have been bombast.

"Shepherds," says he, "baffle the raging year!" How? Why merely by

filling their pens with food. But the whirlwind was up--

"Far off its coming _groan'd_,"

and the poet was inspired. Had he not been so, he had not cried, "Baffle

the raging year;" and if you be not so, you will think it a most absurd

expression.

Did you ever see water beginning to change itself into ice? Yes. Then

try to describe the sight. Success in that trial will prove you a poet.

People do not prove themselves poets only by writing long poems. A

line--two words--may show that they are the Muse's sons. How exquisitely

does Burns picture to our eyes moonlight water undergoing an ice-change!

"The chilly frost beneath the silver beam,

Crept, gently crusting o'er the glittering stream!"

Thomson does it with an almost finer spirit of perception--or

conception--or memory--or whatever else you choose to call it; for our

part, we call it genius--

"An icy gale, oft shifting, o'er the pool

_Breathes a blue film_, and in its mid career

Arrests the bickering stream."

And afterwards, having frozen the entire stream into a "crystal

pavement," how strongly doth he conclude thus--

"_The whole imprison'd river growls below._"

Here, again, 'tis pleasant to see the peculiar genius of Cowper

contrasted with that of Thomson. The gentle Cowper delighting, for the

most part, in tranquil images--for his life was passed amidst tranquil

nature; the enthusiastic Thomson, more pleased with images of power.

Cowper says--

"On the flood,

Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight

Lies undissolved, _while silently beneath,

And unperceived, the current steals away_."

How many thousand times the lines we are now going to quote have been

quoted, nobody can tell; but we quote them once more for the purpose of

asking you, if you think that any one poet of this age could have

written them--could have chilled one's very blood with such intense

feeling of cold! Not one.

"In these fell regions, in Arzina caught,

_And to the stony deep his idle ship

Immediate seal'd_, he with his hapless crew,

Each full exerted at his several task,

_Froze into statues; to the cordage glued

The sailor, and the pilot to the helm!_"

The oftener--the more we read the "Winter"--especially the last two or

three hundred lines--the angrier is our wonder with Wordsworth for

asserting that Thomson owed the national popularity that his "Winter"

immediately won, to his "commonplace sentimentalities, and his vicious

style!" Yet true it is, that he was sometimes guilty of both; and, but

for his transcendent genius, they might have obscured the lustre of his

fame. But such sins are not very frequent in the "Seasons," and were all

committed in the glow of that fine and bold enthusiasm, which to his

imagination arrayed all things, and all words, in a light that seemed to

him at the time to be poetry--though sometimes it was but "false

glitter." Admitting, then, that sometimes the style of the "Seasons" is

somewhat too florid, we must not criticise single and separate passages,

without holding in mind the character of the poet's genius and his

inspirations. He luxuriates--he revels--he wantons--at once with an

imaginative and a sensuous delight in nature. Besides, he was but young;

and his great work was his first. He had not philosophised his poetical

language, as Wordsworth himself has done, after long years of

profoundest study of the laws of thought and speech. But in such study,

while much is gained, may not something be lost? And is there not a

charm in the free, flowing, chartered libertinism of the diction and

versification of the "Seasons"--above all, in the closing strains of the

"Winter," and in the whole of the "Hymn," which inspires a delight and

wonder seldom breathed upon us--glorious poem, on the whole, as it

is--from the more measured march of the "Excursion?"

All those children of the Pensive Public who have been much at school,

know Thomson's description of the wolves among the Alps, Apennines, and

Pyrenees,

"Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave!

Burning for blood, bony and gaunt and grim!" &c.

The first fifteen lines are equal to anything in the whole range of

English descriptive poetry; but the last ten are positively bad. Here

they are:--

"The godlike face of man avails him nought!

Even beauty, force divine! at whose bright glance

The generous lion stands in soften'd gaze,

Now bleeds, a hapless undistinguish'd prey.

But if, apprised of the severe attack,

The country be shut up, lured by the scent,

On churchyard drear (inhuman to relate!)

The disappointed prowlers fall, and dig

The shrouded body from the grave; o'er which,

Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Wild beasts do not like the look of the human eye--they think us ugly

customers--and sometimes stand shilly-shallying in our presence, in an

awkward but alarming attitude, of hunger mixed with fear. A single wolf

seldom or never attacks a man. He cannot stand the face. But a person

would need to have a godlike face indeed to terrify therewith an army of

wolves some thousand strong. It would be the height of presumption in

any man, though beautiful as Moore thought Byron, to attempt it. If so,

then

"The godlike face of man avails him nought,"

is, under the circumstances, ludicrous. Still more so is the trash about

"beauty, force divine!" It is too much to expect of an army of wolves

some thousand strong, "and hungry as the grave," that they should all

fall down on their knees before a sweet morsel of flesh and blood,

merely because the young lady was so beautiful that she might have sat

to Sir Thomas Lawrence for a frontispiece to Mr Watts's "Souvenir." 'Tis

all stuff, too, about the generous lion standing in softened gaze at

beauty's bright glance. True, he has been known to look with a certain

sort of soft surliness upon a pretty Caffre girl, and to walk past

without eating her--but simply because, an hour or two before, he had

dined on a Hottentot Venus. The secret lay not in his heart, but in his

stomach. Still the notion is a popular one, and how exquisitely has

Spenser changed it into the divinest poetry in the character of the

attendant lion of

"Heavenly Una, with her milk-white lamb!"

But Thomson, so far from making poetry of it in this passage, has

vulgarised and blurred by it the natural and inevitable emotion of

terror and pity. Famished wolves _howking_ up the dead is a dreadful

image--but "_inhuman to relate_," is not an expression heavily laden

with meaning; and the sudden, abrupt, violent, and, as we feel,

unnatural introduction of ideas purely superstitious, at the close, is

revolting, and miserably mars the terrible _truth_.

"Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Why, pray, are the shades foul, and the ghosts only frightened? And

wherein lies the specific difference between a shade and a ghost?

Besides, if the ghosts were frightened, which they had good reason to

be, why were not they off? We have frequently read of their wandering

far from home, on occasions when they had no such excellent excuse to

offer. This line, therefore, we have taken the liberty to erase from our

pocket-copy of the "Seasons"--and to draw a few keelavine strokes over

the rest of the passage--beginning with "man's godlike face."

Go read, then, the opening of "Winter," and acknowledge that, of all

climates and all countries, there are none within any of the zones of

the earth that will bear a moment's comparison with those of Scotland.

Forget the people if you can, and think only of the region. The lovely

Lowlands undulating away into the glorious Highlands--the spirit of

sublimity and the spirit of beauty one and the same, as it blends them

in indissoluble union. Bury us alive in the dungeon's

gloom--incommunicable with the light of day as the grave--it could not

seal our eyes to the sight of Scotland. We should see it still by rising

or by setting suns. Whatever blessed scene we chose to call on would

become an instant apparition. Nor in that thick-ribbed vault would our

eyes be deaf to her rivers and her seas. We should say our prayers to

their music, and to the voice of the thunder on a hundred hills. We

stand now in no need of senses. They are waxing dim--but our spirit may

continue to brighten long as the light of love is allowed to dwell

therein, thence proceeding over nature like a victorious morn.

There are many beautiful passages in the poets about RAIN; but who ever

sang its advent so passionately as in these strains?--

"The effusive south

Warms the wide air, and o'er the void of heaven

Breathes the big clouds with vernal showers distent.

At first a dusky wreath they seem to rise,

Scarce staining ether; but by swift degrees,

In heaps on heaps, the doubling vapour sails

Along the loaded sky, and mingling deep

Sits on th' horizon round a settled gloom:

Not such as wintry storms on mortals shed,

Oppressing life; but lovely, gentle, kind,

And full of every hope and every joy,

The wish of nature. Gradual sinks the breeze

Into a perfect calm, that not a breath

Is heard to quiver through the closing woods,

Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves

Of aspen tall. Th' uncurling floods diffused

In glassy breadth, seem through delusive lapse

Forgetful of their course. 'Tis silence all

And pleasing expectation. Herds and flocks

Drop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eye

The falling verdure!"

All that follows is, you know, as good--better it cannot be--till we

come to the close, the perfection of poetry, and then sally out into the

shower, and join the hymn of earth to heaven--

"The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard

By such as wander through the forest walks,

Beneath th' umbrageous multitude of leaves.

But who can hold the shade, while heaven descends

In universal bounty, shedding herbs,

And fruits, and flowers, on Nature's ample lap?

Swift Fancy fired anticipates their growth;

And, while the milky nutriment distils,

Beholds the kindling country colour round."

Thomson, they say, was too fond of epithets. Not he, indeed. Strike out

one of the many there--and your sconce shall feel the crutch. A poet

less conversant with nature would have feared to say, "sits on the

horizon round _a settled gloom_," or rather, he would not have seen or

thought it was a settled gloom; and, therefore, he could not have said--

----"But lovely, gentle, kind,

And full of every hope and every joy,

_The wish of Nature._"

Leigh Hunt--most vivid of poets, and most cordial of critics--somewhere

finely speaks of a ghastly line in a poem of Keats'--

"Riding to Florence with the murder'd man;"

that is, the man about to be murdered--imagination conceiving as one,

doom and death. Equally great are the words--

"Herds and flocks

Drop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eye

The falling verdure."

The verdure is seen in the shower--to be the very shower--by the poet at

least--perhaps by the cattle, in their thirsty hunger forgetful of the

brown ground, and swallowing the dropping herbage. The birds had not

been so sorely distressed by the drought as the beasts, and therefore

the poet speaks of them, not as relieved from misery, but as visited

with gladness--

"Hush'd in short suspense,

The plumy people streak their wings with oil,

To throw the lucid moisture trickling off,

And wait th' approaching sign, to strike, at once,

Into the general choir."

Then, and not till then, the _humane_ poet bethinks him of the insensate

earth--insensate not; for beast and bird being satisfied, and lowing and

singing in their gratitude, so do the places of their habitation yearn

for the blessing--

"E'en mountains, vales,

And forests, seem impatient, to demand

The promised sweetness."

The _religious_ Poet then speaks for his kind--and says devoutly--

"Man superior walks

Amid the glad creation, musing praise,

And looking lively gratitude."

In that mood he is justified to feast his fancy with images of the

beauty as well as the bounty of nature; and genius in one line has

concentrated them all--

"Beholds the kindling country colour round."

'Tis "an a' day's rain"--and "the well-showered earth is deep-enriched

with vegetable life." And what kind of an evening? We have seen many

such--and every succeeding one more beautiful, more glorious to our eyes

than another--because of these words in which the beauty and the glory

of one and all are enshrined--

"Till, in the western sky, the downward sun

Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush

Of broken clouds, gay-shifting to his beam.

The rapid radiance, instantaneous, strikes

Th' illumined mountain, through the forest streams,

Shakes on the floods, and in a yellow mist,

Far smoking o'er th' interminable plain,

In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems.

Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around.

Full swell the woods; their every music wakes,

Mix'd in wild concert with the warbling brooks

Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills,

And hollow lows responsive from the vales,

Whence, blending all, the sweeten'd zephyr springs.

Meantime, refracted from yon eastern cloud,

Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow

Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds

In fair proportion, running from the red

To where the violet fades into the sky."

How do you like our recitation of that surpassing strain? Every shade of

feeling should have its shade of sound--every pause its silence. But

these must all come and go, untaught, unbidden, from the fulness of the

heart. Then indeed, and not till then, can words be said to be set to

music--_to a celestial sing-song_.

The mighty Minstrel recited old Ballads with a warlike march of sound

that made one's heart leap, while his usually sweet smile was drawn in,

and disappeared among the glooms that sternly gathered about his

lowering brows, and gave his whole aspect a most heroic character. Rude

verses, that from ordinary lips would have been almost meaningless, from

his came inspired with passion. Sir Philip Sidney, who said that "Chevy

Chase" roused him like the sound of a trumpet, had he heard Sir Walter

Scott recite it, would have gone distracted. Yet the "best judges" said

he murdered his own poetry--we say about as much as Homer. Wordsworth

recites his own Poetry (catch him reciting any other)

magnificently--while his eyes seem blind to all outward objects, like

those of a somnambulist. Coleridge was the sweetest of sing-songers--and

his silver voice "warbled melody." Next to theirs, we believe our own

recitation of Poetry to be the most impressive heard in modern times,

though we cannot deny that the leathern-eared have pronounced it

detestable, and the long-eared ludicrous; their delight being in what is

called Elocution, as it is taught by player-folk.

O friendly reader of these our Recreations! thou needst not to be

told--yet in love let us tell thee--that there are a thousand ways of

dealing in description with Nature, so as to make her poetical; but

sentiment there always must be, else it is stark nought. You may infuse

the sentiment by a single touch--by a ray of light no thicker, nor one

thousandth part so thick, as the finest needle ever silk-threaded by

lady's finger; or you may dance it in with a flutter of sunbeams; or you

may splash it in as with a gorgeous cloud-stain stolen from sunset; or

you may bathe it in with a shred of the rainbow. Perhaps the highest

power of all possessed by the sons of song, is to breathe it in with the

breath, to let it slip in with the light of the common day!

Then some poets there are, who show you a scene all of a sudden, by

means of a few magical words--just as if you opened your eyes at their

bidding--and in place of a blank, a world. Others, again, as good and as

great, create their world gradually before your eyes, for the delight of

your soul, that loves to gaze on the growing glory; but delight is lost

in wonder, and you know that they, too, are warlocks. Some heap image

upon image, piles of imagery on piles of imagery, as if they were

ransacking and robbing, and red-reavering earth, sea, and sky; yet all

things there are consentaneous with one grand design, which, when

consummated, is a Whole that seems to typify the universe. Others give

you but fragments--but such as awaken imaginations of beauty and of

power transcendent, like that famous Torso. And some show you Nature

glimmering beneath a veil which, nunlike, she has religiously taken; and

then call not Nature ideal only in that holy twilight, for then it is

that she is spiritual, and we who belong to her feel that we shall live

for ever.

Thus--and in other wondrous ways--the great poets are the great

painters, and so are they the great musicians. But how they are so, some

other time may we tell; suffice it now to say, that as we listen to the

mighty masters--"sole or responsive to each other's voice"--

"Now, 'tis like all instruments,

Now like a lonely lute;

And now 'tis like an angel's song

That bids the heavens be mute!"

Why will so many myriads of men and women, denied by nature "the vision

and the faculty divine," persist in the delusion that they are

poetising, while they are but versifying "this bright and breathing

world?" They see truly not even the outward objects of sight. But of all

the rare affinities and relationships in Nature, visible or audible to

Fine-ear-and-Far-eye the Poet, not a whisper--not a glimpse have they

ever heard or seen, any more than had they been born deaf-blind.

They paint a landscape, but nothing "prates of their whereabouts," while

they were sitting on a tripod, with their paper on their knees,

drawing--their breath. For, in the front ground is a castle, against

which, if you offer to stir a step, you infallibly break your head,

unless providentially stopped by that extraordinary vegetable-looking

substance, perhaps a tree, growing bolt upright out of an intermediate

stone, that has wedged itself in long after there had ceased to be even

standing-room in that strange theatre of nature. But down from "the

swelling instep of a mountain's foot," that has protruded itself through

a wood, while the body of the mountain prudently remains in the extreme

distance, descends on you, ere you have recovered from your unexpected

encounter with the old Roman cement, an unconscionable cataract. There

stands a deer or goat, or rather some beast with horns, "strictly

anonymous," placed for effect, contrary to all cause, in a place where

it seems as uncertain how he got in as it is certain that he never can

get out till he becomes a hippogriff.

The true poet, again, has such potent eyes, that when he lets down the

lids, he sees just as well, perhaps better than when they were up; for

in that deep, earnest, inward gaze, the fluctuating sea of scenery

subsides into a settled calm, where all is harmony as well as

beauty--order as well as peace. What though he have been fated, through

youth and manhood, to dwell in city smoke? His childhood--his

boyhood--were overhung with trees, and through its heart went the murmur

of waters. Then it is, we verily believe, that in all poets, is filled

with images up to the brim, Imagination's treasury. Genius, growing, and

grown up to maturity, is still a prodigal. But he draws on the Bank of

Youth. His bills, whether at a short or long date, are never

dishonoured; nay, made payable at sight, they are as good as gold. Nor

cares that Bank for a run, made even in a panic, for besides bars and

billets, and wedges and blocks of gold, there are, unappreciable beyond

the riches which against a time of trouble

"The Sultaun hides in his ancestral tombs,"

jewels and diamonds sufficient

"To ransom great kings from captivity."

We sometimes think that the power of painting Nature to the life,

whether in her real or ideal beauty (both belong to _life_,) is seldom

evolved to its utmost, until the mind possessing it is withdrawn in the

body from all rural _environment_. It has not been so with Wordsworth,

but it was so with Milton. The descriptive poetry in "Comus" is indeed

rich as rich may be, but certainly not so great, perhaps not so

beautiful, as that in "Paradise Lost."

It would seem to be so with all of us, small as well as great; and were

_we_--Christopher North--to compose a poem on Loch Skene, two thousand

feet or so above the level of the sea, and some miles from a house, we

should desire to do so in a metropolitan cellar. Desire springs from

separation. The spirit seeks to unite itself to the beauty it loves, the

grandeur it admires, the sublimity it almost fears; and all these being

o'er the hills and far away, or on the hills cloud-hidden, why it--the

spirit--makes itself wings--or rather wings grow up of themselves in its

passion, and naturewards it flies like a dove or an eagle. People

looking at us believe us present, but they never were so far mistaken in

their lives; for in the Seamew are we sailing with the tide through the

moonshine on Loch Etive--or hanging o'er that gulf of peril on the bosom

of Skyroura.

We are sitting now in a dusky den--with our eyes shut--but we see the

whole Highlands. Our Highland Mountains are of the best possible

magnitude--ranging between two and four thousand feet high--and then in

what multitudes! The more familiar you become with them, the mightier

they appear--and you feel that it is all sheer folly to seek to dwindle

or dwarf them, by comparing them as they rise before your eyes with your

imagination of Mont Blanc and those eternal glaciers. If you can bring

them under your command, you are indeed a sovereign--and have a noble

set of subjects. In some weather they are of any height you choose to

put them--say thirty thousand feet--in other states of the atmosphere

you think you could walk over their summits and down into the region

beyond in an hour. Try. We have seen Cruachan, during a whole black day,

swollen into such enormous bulk, that Loch Awe looked like but a sullen

river at his base, her woods bushes, and Kilchurn no bigger than a

cottage. The whole visible scene was but he and his shadow. They seemed

to make the day black, rather than the day to make them so--and at

nightfall he took wider and loftier possession of the sky--the clouds

congregated round without hiding his summit, on which seemed to twinkle,

like earth-lighted fires, a few uncertain stars. Rain drives you into a

shieling--and you sit there for an hour or two in eloquent confabulation

with the herdsman, your English against his Gaelic. Out of the door you

creep--and gaze in astonishment on a new world. The mist is slowly

rolling up and away in long lines of clouds, preserving, perhaps, a

beautiful regularity on their ascension and evanescence, and between

them

"Tier above tier, a wooded theatre

Of stateliest view,"

or cliff galleries with strange stone-images sitting up aloft; and yet

your eyes have not reached the summits, nor will they reach them, till

all that vapoury ten-mile-long mass dissolve, or be scattered, and then

you start to see them, as if therein had been but their bases, THE

MOUNTAINS, with here and there a peak illumined, reposing in the blue

serene that smiles as if all the while it had been above reach of the

storm.

The power of Egoism accompanies us into solitude; nay, is even more

life-pervading there than in the hum of men. There the stocks and stones

are more impressible than those we sometimes stumble on in human

society, and, moulded at our will, take what shape we choose to give

them; the trees follow our footsteps, though our lips be mute, and we

may have left at home our fiddle--more potent we in our actuality than

the fabled Orpheus. Be hushed, ye streams, and listen unto Christopher!

Be chained, ye clouds, and attentive unto North! And at our bidding

silent the cataract on the cliff--the thunder on the sky. The sea

beholds us on the shore--and his one huge frown transformed into a

multitudinous smile, he turns flowing affections towards us along the

golden sands--and in a fluctuating hindrance of lovely foam-wreaths

envelopes our feet!

To return to Thomson. Wordsworth labours to prove, in one of his

"postliminious prefaces," that the true spirit of "The Seasons," till

long after their publication, was neither felt nor understood. In the

conduct of his argument he does not shine. That the poem was at once

admired he is forced to admit; but then, according to him, the

admiration was false and hollow--it was regarded but with that wonder

which is the "natural product of ignorance." After having observed that,

excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or

two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period

intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and "The

Seasons" does not contain a single new image of external nature, he

proceeds to call the once well-known verses of Dryden in the "Indian

Emperor," descriptive of the hush of night, "vague, bombastic, and

senseless," and Pope's celebrated translation of the moonlight scene in

the "Iliad," altogether "absurd,"--and then, without ever once dreaming

of any necessity of showing them to be so, or even, if he had succeeded

in doing so, of the utter illogicality of any argument drawn from their

failure to establish the point he is hammering at, he all at once says,

with the most astounding assumption, "_having shown_ that much of what

his [Thomson's] biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact,

have been blind wonderment--how is the rest to be accounted for?"

_"Having shown"!!!_ Why, he has shown nothing but his own arrogance in

supposing that his mere _ipse dixit_ will be taken by the whole world as

proof that Dryden and Pope had not the use of their eyes. "Strange to

think of an enthusiast," he says (alluding to the passage in Pope's

translation of the "Iliad"), "as may have been the case with thousands,

reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having

his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their

_absurdity_!" We are no enthusiasts--we are far too old for that folly;

but we have eyes in our head, though sometimes rather dim and motey, and

as good eyes, too, as Mr Wordsworth, and we often have recited--and hope

often will recite them again--Pope's exquisite lines, not only without

any "suspicion of their absurdity," but with the conviction of a most

devout belief that, with some little vagueness perhaps, and repetition,

and a word here and there that might be altered for the better, the

description is most beautiful. But grant it miserable--grant all Mr

Wordsworth has so dictatorially uttered--and what then? Though

descriptive poetry did not flourish during the period between "Paradise

Lost" and "The Seasons," nevertheless, did not mankind enjoy the use of

their seven senses? Could they not see and hear without the aid of those

oculists and aurists, the poets? Were all the shepherds and

agriculturists of England and Scotland blind and deaf to all the sights

and sounds of nature, and all the gentlemen and ladies too, from the

king and queen upon the throne, to the lowest of their subjects? Very

like a whale! Causes there were why poetry flowed during that era in

another channel than that of the description of natural scenery; and if

it flowed too little in that channel then--which is true--equally is it

true that it flows now in it too much--especially among the poets of the

Lake School, to the neglect, not of sentiments and affections--for there

they excel--but of strong direct human passion applied to the stir and

tumult--of which the interest is profound and eternal--of all the great

affairs of human life. But though the descriptive poets during the

period between Milton and Thomson were few and indifferent, no reason is

there in this world for imagining, with Mr Wordsworth, that men had

forgotten both the heavens and the earth. They had not--nor was the

wonder with which they must have regarded the great shows of nature, the

"natural product of ignorance," then, any more than it is now, or ever

was during a civilised age. If we be right in saying so--then neither

could the admiration which "The Seasons," on the first appearance of

that glorious poem, excited, be said, with any truth, to have been but a

"wonder, the natural product of ignorance."

Mr Wordsworth having thus signally failed in his attempt to show that

"much of what Thomson's biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in

fact, have been blind wonderment," let us accompany him in his equally

futile efforts to show "how the rest is to be accounted for." He

attempts to do so after this fashion: "Thomson was fortunate in the very

title of his poem, which seemed to bring it home to the prepared

sympathies of every one; in the next place, notwithstanding his high

powers, he writes a vicious style; and his false ornaments are exactly

of that kind which would be most likely to strike the undiscerning. He

likewise abounds with sentimental commonplaces, that, from the manner in

which they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. In any

well-used copy of 'The Seasons,' the book generally opens of itself with

the Rhapsody on Love, or with one of the stories, perhaps of Damon and

Musidora. These also are prominent in our Collections of Extracts, and

are the parts of his work which, after all, were probably most efficient

in first recommending the author to general notice."

Thomson, in one sense, _was fortunate_ in the _title_ of his poem. But a

great poet like Wordsworth might--nay, ought to have chosen another

word--or have given of that word a loftier explanation, when applied to

Thomson's _choice_ of the Seasons for the subject of his immortal poem.

Genius made that choice--not fortune. The "Seasons" are not merely the

"_title_" of his poem--they are his poem, and his poem is the Seasons.

But how, pray, can Thomson be said to have been _fortunate_ in the

_title_ or the subject either of his poem, in the sense that Mr

Wordsworth means? Why, according to him, people knew little, and cared

less, about the Seasons. "The art of seeing had in some measure been

learned!" That he allows--but that was all--and that all is but

little--and surely far from being enough to have disposed people in

general to listen to the strains of a poet who painted nature in all her

moods, and under all her aspects. Thomson, then, we say, was either most

_unfortunate_ in the title of his poem, or there was not with the many

that indifference to, and ignorance of natural scenery, on which Mr

Wordsworth so strenuously insists as part, or rather whole, of his

preceding argument.

The title, Mr Wordsworth says, seemed "to bring the poem home to the

_prepared sympathies_ of every one!" What! to the prepared sympathies of

those who had merely, in some measure, learned the "art of seeing," and

who had "paid," as he says in another sentence, "little accurate

attention to the appearances of nature!" Never did the weakest mind ever

fall into grosser contradictions than does here one of the strongest, in

vainly labouring to bolster up a silly assertion, which he has

desperately ventured on from a most mistaken conceit that it was

necessary to account for the kind of reception which his own poetry had

met with from the present age. The truth is, that had Mr Wordsworth

known, when he indited these luckless and helpless sentences, that his

own poetry was, in the best sense of the word, a thousand times more

popular than he supposed it to be--and Heaven be praised, for the honour

of the age, it was and is so!--never had they been written, nor had he

here and elsewhere laboured to prove that in proportion as poetry is

bad, or rather as it is no poetry at all, is it, has been, and always

will be, more and more popular in the age contemporary with the writer.

That Thomson, in "The Seasons," _sometimes_ writes a _vicious style_,

may be true; but it is not true that he _often_ does so. His style has

its faults, no doubt, and some of them inextricably interwoven with the

web of his composition. It is a dangerous style to imitate--especially

to dunces. But its _virtue is divine_; and that _divine virtue_, even in

this low world of ours, wins admiration more surely and widely than

_earthly vice_--be it in words, thoughts, feelings, or actions--is a

creed that we will not relinquish at the beck or bidding even of the

great author of "The Excursion."

That many did--do--and will admire the bad or indifferent passages in

"The Seasons"--won by their false glitter or commonplace sentimentalism,

is no doubt true: but the delight, though as intense as perhaps it may

be foolish, with which boys and virgins, woman-mantuamakers and

man-milliners, and "the rest," peruse the Rhapsody on Love--one passage

of which we ventured to be facetious on in our Soliloquy on the

Seasons--and hang over the picture of Musidora undressing, while Damon

watches the process of disrobement, panting behind a tree, will never

account for the admiration with which the whole world hailed the

"Winter," the first published of "The Seasons;" during which, Thomson

had not the barbarity to plunge any young lady naked into the cold bath,

nor the ignorance to represent, during such cold weather, any young lady

turning her lover sick by the ardour of her looks, and the vehemence of

her whole enamoured deportment. The time never was--nor could have

been--when such passages were generally esteemed the glory of the poem.

Indeed, independently of its own gross absurdity, the assertion is at

total variance with that other assertion, equally absurd, that people

admired most in the poem what they least understood; for the Rhapsody on

Love is certainly very intelligible, nor does there seem much mystery in

Musidora going into the water to wash and cool herself on a hot day. Is

it not melancholy, then, to hear such a man as Mr Wordsworth,

earnestly, and even somewhat angrily, trying to prove that "these are

the parts of the work which, after all, were probably most efficient in

first recommending the author to general notice?"

With respect to the "sentimental commonplaces with which Thomson

abounds," no doubt they were and are popular; and many of them deserve

to be so, for they are on a level with the usual current of human

feeling, and many of them are eminently beautiful. Thomson had not the

philosophical genius of Wordsworth, but he had a warm human heart, and

its generous feelings overflow all his poem. These are not the most

poetical parts of "The Seasons," certainly, where such effusions

prevail; but still, so far from being either _vicious_ or _worthless_,

they have often a virtue and a worth that must be felt by all the

children of men. There is something not very credible in the situation

of the parties in the story of the "lovely young Lavinia," for example,

and much of the sentiment is commonplace enough; but will Mr Wordsworth

say--in support of his theory, that the worst poetry is always at first

(and at last too, it would seem, from the pleasure with which that tale

is still read by all simple minds) the most popular--that that story is

a bad one? It is a very beautiful one.

Mr Wordsworth, in all his argumentation, is so blinded by his

determination to see everything in but one light, and that a most

mistaken one, that he is insensible to the conclusion to which it all

leads, or rather, which is involved in it. Why, according to him, _even

now_, when people have not only learned the "art of seeing"--a blessing

for which they can never be too thankful--but when descriptive poetry

has long flourished far beyond its palmiest state in any other era of

our literature, still are we poor common mortals who admire "The

Seasons," just as deaf and blind now, or nearly so, to their real

merits--allowed to be transcendent--as our unhappy forefathers were when

that poem first appeared, "a glorious apparition." The Rhapsody on Love,

and Damon and Musidora, are still, according to him, its chief

attraction--its false ornaments--and its sentimental commonplaces--such

as those, we presume, on the benefits of early rising, and,

"Oh! little think the gay licentious proud!"

What a nest of ninnies must people in general be in Mr Wordsworth's

eyes! And is "The Excursion" not to be placed by the side of "Paradise

Lost," till the Millennium?

Such is the _reasoning (!)_ of one of the first of our English poets,

against not only the people of Britain, but mankind. One other sentence

there is which we had forgotten--but now remember--which is to help us

to distinguish, in the case of the reception "The Seasons" met with,

between "wonder and legitimate admiration!" "The subject of the work is

the changes produced in the appearances of nature by the revolution of

the year; _and, undertaking to write in verse, Thomson pledged himself

to treat his subject as became a poet_!" How original and profound!

Thomson redeemed his pledge; and that great pawnbroker, the public,

returned to him his poem at the end of a year and a day. Now, what is

the "mighty stream of tendency" of that remark? Were the public, or the

people, or the world, gulled by this unheard-of pledge of Thomson, to

regard his work with that "wonder which is the natural product of

ignorance!" If they were so in his case, why not in every other? All

poets pledge themselves to be poetical, but too many of them are

wretchedly prosaic--die and are buried, or what is worse, protract a

miserable existence, in spite of their sentimental commonplaces, false

ornaments, and a vicious style. But Thomson, in spite of all these,

leapt at once into a glorious life, and a still more glorious

immortality.

There is no mystery in the matter. Thomson--a great poet--poured his

genius over a subject of universal interest; and "The Seasons" from that

hour to this--then, now, and for ever--have been, are, and will be

loved, and admired by all the world. All over Scotland "The Seasons" is

a household book. Let the taste and feeling shown by the Collectors of

Elegant Extracts be poor as possible; yet Thomson's countrymen, high and

low, rich and poor, have all along not only gloried in his illustrious

fame, but have made a very manual of his great work. It lies in many

thousand cottages. We have ourselves seen it in the shepherd's shieling,

and in the woodsman's bower--small, yellow-leaved, tatter'd, mean,

miserable, calf-skin-bound, smoked, _stinking_ copies--let us not fear

to utter the word, ugly but true--yet perused, pored, and pondered over

by those humble dwellers, by the winter ingle or on the summer brae,

perhaps with as enlightened--certainly with as imagination-overmastering

a delight as ever enchained the spirits of the high-born and

highly-taught to their splendid copies lying on richly-carved tables,

and bound in crimson silk or velvet, in which the genius of painting

strives to embody that of poetry, and the printer's art to lend its

beauty to the very shape of the words in which the bard's immortal

spirit is enshrined. "The art of seeing" has flourished for many

centuries in Scotland. Men, women, and children, all look up to her

loveful blue or wrathful black skies, with a weather-wisdom that keeps

growing from the cradle to the grave. Say not that 'tis alone

"The poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind

Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind!"

In Scriptural language, loftier even than that, the same imagery is

applied to the sights seen by the true believer. Who is it "that maketh

the clouds His chariot?" The Scottish peasantry--Highland and

Lowland--look much and often on nature thus; and they live in the heart

of the knowledge and of the religion of nature. Therefore do they love

Thomson as an inspired bard--only a little lower than the Prophets. In

like manner have the people of Scotland--from time immemorial--enjoyed

the use of their ears. Even persons somewhat hard of hearing, are not

deaf to her waterfalls. In the sublime invocation to Winter, which we

have quoted--we hear Thomson recording his own worship of nature in his

boyish days, when he roamed among the hills of his father's parish, far

away from the manse. In those strange and stormy delights did not

thousands of thousands of the Scottish boyhood familiarly live among the

mists and snows? Of all that number he alone had the genius to "here

eternise on earth" his joy--but many millions have had souls to join

religiously in the hymns he chanted. Yea, his native land, with one

mighty voice, has for upwards of a century responded,

"These, as they change, Almighty Father, these

Are but the varied God!"

THE SNOWBALL BICKER OF PEDMOUNT.

Beautiful as Snow yet is to our eyes, even through our spectacles, how

grey it looks beside that which used to come with the long winters that

glorified the earth in our youth, till the white lustre was more

delightful even than the green--and we prayed that the fine fleecy

flakes might never cease falling waveringly from the veil of the sky! No

sooner comes the winter now, than it is away again to one of the Poles.

Then, it was a year in itself--a whole life. We remember slides a

quarter of a mile long, on level meadows; and some not less steep, down

the sides of hills that to us were mountains. No boy can slide on one

leg now--not a single shoe seems to have sparables. The florid style of

skating shows that that fine art is degenerating; and we look in vain

for the grand simplicity of the masters that spread-eagled in the age of

its perfection. A change has come over the spirit of the curler's dream.

They seem to our ears indeed to have "quat their roaring play." The cry

of "swoop-swoop" is heard still--but a faint, feeble, and unimpassioned

cry, compared with that which used, on the Mearns Brother-Loch, to make

the welkin ring, and for a moment to startle the moon and stars--those

in the sky, as well as those below the ice--till again the tumult

subsided--and all the host of heaven above and beneath became serene as

a world of dreams. Is it not even so, Shepherd? What is a rink now on a

pond in Duddingston policy, to the rinks that rang and roared of old on

the Loch o' the Lowes, when every stone circled in a halo of spray,

seemed instinct with spirit to obey, along all its flight, the voice of

him that launched it on its unerring aim, and sometimes, in spite of his

awkward skillessness, when the fate of the game hung on his own single

crank, went cannonading through all obstacles, till it fell asleep,

like a beauty as it was, just as it kissed the Tee!

Again we see--again we sit in the Snow-house, built by us boys out of a

drift in the minister's glebe, a drift--judging by the steeple, which

was sixty--about twenty feet high--and purer than any marble. The roof

was all strewed with diamonds, which frost saved from the sun. The porch

of the palace was pillared--and the character of the building outside

was, without any servile imitation--for we worked in the glow of

original genius, and none of us had then ever seen itself or its

picture--wonderfully like the Parthenon. Entering, you found yourself in

a superb hall, lighted up--not with gas, for up to that era gas had not

been used except in Pandemonium--but with a vast multitude of farthing

candles, each in a turnip stuck into the wall--while a chandelier of

frozen snow-branches pendent from the roof set that presence-chamber in

a blaze. On a throne at the upper end sat young Christopher North--then

the king of boys, as now of men--and proud were his subjects to do him

homage. In niches all around the sidewalls were couches covered with

hare, rabbit, foumart, and fox's skins--furnished by these animals slain

by us in the woods and among the rocks of that sylvan and moorland

parish--the regal Torus alone being spread with the dun-deer's hide from

Lochiel Forest in Lochaber. Then old airs were sung--in sweet single

voice--or in full chorus that startled the wandering night traveller on

his way to the lone Kings-well; and then in the intermediate hush, old

tales were told "of goblin, ghost, or fairy," or of Wallace Wight at the

Barns of Ayr or the Brig o' Stirling--or, a glorious outlaw, harbouring

in caves among the Cartlane Craigs--or of Robert Bruce the Deliverer, on

his shelty cleaving in twain the skull of Bohun the English knight, on

his thundering war-steed, armed cap-à-pie, while the King of Scotland

had nothing on his unconquered head but his plain golden crown. Tales of

the Snow-house! Had we but the genius to recall you to life in undying

song!

Nor was our frozen hall at times uncheered by the smiles of beauty. With

those smiles was heard the harmless love-whisper, and the harmless kiss

of love; for the cottages poured forth their little lasses in

flower-like bands, nor did their parents fear to trust them in the fairy

frozen palace, where Christopher was king. Sometimes the old people

themselves came to see the wonders of the lamp, and on a snow-table

stood a huge bowl--not of snow--steaming with nectar that made Hyems

smile as he hung his beard over the fragrant vapour. Nay, the minister

himself--with his mother and sister--was with us in our fantastic

festivities, and gave to the architecture of our palace his wondering

praise. Then Andrew Lyndsey, the blind Paisley musician, a Latin

scholar, who knew where Cremona stood, struck up on his famous fiddle

jig or strathspey--and the swept floor, in a moment, was alive with a

confused flight of foursome reels, each begun and ended with kisses, and

maddened by many a whoop and yell--so like savages were we in our glee,

dancing at the marriage of some island king!

Countless years have fled since that Snow-palace melted away--and of all

who danced there, how many are now alive! Pshaw! as many probably as

then danced anywhere else. It would never do to live for ever--let us

then live well and wisely; and when death comes--from that sleep how

blessed to awake! in a region where is no frost--no snow--but the sun of

eternal life.

Mercy on us! what a hubbub!--Can the harriers be hunting in such a

snowfall as this, and is poor pussy in view before the whole murderous

pack, opening in full cry on her haunches? Why--Imagination, thou art an

ass, and thy long ears at all times greedy of deception! 'Tis but a

country Schoolhouse pouring forth its long-imprisoned stream of life as

in a sudden sunny thaw, the Mad Master flying in the van of his

helter-skelter scholars, and the whole yelling mass precipitated, many

of them headlong, among the snow. Well do we know the fire-eyed Poet

pedagogue, who, more outrageous than Apollo, has "ravished all the

Nine." Ode, elegy, epic, tragedy, or farce--all come alike to him; and

of all the bards we have ever known--and the sum total cannot be under a

thousand--he alone, judging from the cock and the squint of his eye,

labours under the blessing or the curse--we wot not whilk it be--of

perpetual inspiration. A rare eye, too, is his at the setting of a

springe for woodcocks, or tracking a maukin on the snow. Not a daredevil

in the school that durst follow the indentations of his toes and fingers

up the wall of the old castle, to the holes just below the battlements,

to thrust his arm up to the elbows harrying the starlings' nests. The

corbies ken the shape of his shoulders, as craftily he threads the wood;

and let them build their domicile as high as the swinging twigs will

bear its weight, agile as squirrel, and as foumart ferocious, up speels,

by the height undizzied, the dreadless Dominie; and should there be

fledged or puddock-haired young ones among the wool, whirling with

guttural cawings down a hundred feet descent, on the hard rooty ground

floor from which springs pine, oak, or ash, driven out is the life, with

a squelsh and a squash, from the worthless carrion. At swimming we

should not boggle to back him for the trifle of a cool hundred against

the best survivor among those water-serpents, Mr Turner, Dr Bedale,

Lieutenant Ekenhead, Lord Byron, Leander, and Ourselves--while, with the

steel shiners on his soles, into what a set of ninnies in their ring

would he not reduce the Edinburgh Skating Club?

Saw ye ever a Snowball Bicker? Never! Then look there with all the eyes

in your head--only beware of a bash on the bridge of your nose, a bash

that shall dye the snow with your virgin blood. The Poet-pedagogue,

_alias_ the Mad Dominie, with Bob Howie as his Second in Command, has

chosen the Six stoutest striplings for his troop, and, at the head of

that Sacred Band, offers battle to Us at the head of the whole School.

Nor does that formidable force decline the combat. War levels all

foolish distinctions of scholarship. Booby is Dux now, and Dux

Booby--and the obscure dunce is changed into an illustrious hero.

"The combat deepens--on, ye brave,

Who rush to glory or the grave!

Wave, Nitton, all thy banners wave,

And charge with all thy schoolery!"

Down from the mount on which it had been drawn up in battle array, in

solid square comes the School army, with shouts that might waken the

dead, and inspire with the breath of life the nostrils of the great

Snow-giant built up at the end of yonder avenue, and indurated by last

night's frost. But there lies a fresh fall--and a better day for a

bicker never rose flakily from the yellow East. Far out of distance, and

prodigal of powder lying three feet deep on the flats, and heaped up in

drifts to tree and chimney-top, the tirailleurs, flung out in front,

commence the conflict by a shower of balls that, from the bosom of the

yet untrodden snow between the two battles, makes spin like spray the

shining surface. Then falling back on the main body, they find their

places in the front rank, and the whole mottled mass, grey, blue, and

scarlet, moves onwards o'er the whiteness, a moment ere they close,

"Calm as the breeze, but dreadful as the storm!"

"Let fly," cries a clear voice--and the snowball storm hurtles through

the sky. Just then the valley-mouth blew sleety in the faces of the

foe--their eyes, as if darkened with snuff or salt, blinked

bat-like--and with erring aim flew their feckless return to that shower

of frosty fire. Incessant is the silent cannonade of the resistless

School--silent but when shouts proclaim the fall or flight of some

doughty champion in the adverse legion.

See--see--the Sacred Band are broken! The cravens take ignominiously to

flight--and the Mad Dominie and Bob Howie alone are left to bear the

brunt of battle. A dreadful brotherhood! But the bashing balls are

showered upon them right and left from scores of catapultic arms--and

the day is going sore against them, though they fight less like men than

devils. Hurra! the Dominie's down, and Bob staggers. "Guards, up and at

them!" "A simultaneous charge of cocks, hens, and earocks!" No sooner

said than done. Bob Howie is buried--and the whole School is trampling

on its Master!

"Oh, for a blast of that dread horn,

On Fontarabian echoes borne,

That to King Charles did come,

When Rowland brave and Olivier,

And every paladin and peer,

On Roncesvalles died!"

The smothered ban of Bob, and the stifled denunciations of the Dominie,

have echoed o'er the hill, and,

"Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,"

the runaways, shaking the snows of panic from their pows,

"Like dewdrops from the lion's mane,"

come rushing to the rescue. Two of the Six tremble and turn. The high

heroic scorn of their former selves urges four to renew the charge, and

the sound of their feet on the snow is like that of an earthquake. What

bashes on bloody noses! What bungings-up of eyes! Of lips what

slittings! Red is many a spittle! And as the coughing urchin groans, and

claps his hand to his mouth, distained is the snowball that drops

unlaunched at his feet. The School are broken--their hearts die within

them--and--can we trust our blasted eyes?--the white livers show the

white feather, and fly! O shame! O sorrow! O sin! they turn their backs

and fly! Disgraced are the mothers that bore them--and "happy in my

mind," wives and widows, "were ye that died," undoomed to hear the

tidings of this wretched overthrow! Heavens and earth! sixty are flying

before Six!--and half of sixty--oh! that we should record it!--_are

pretending to be dead!!_ Would indeed that the snow were their

winding-sheet, so that it might but hide our dishonour!

Look, we beseech you, at the Mad Dominie! like Hector issuing from the

gates of Troy, and driving back the Greeks to their ships; or

rather--hear, spirit of Homer!--like some great, shaggy, outlandish

wolf-dog, that hath swum ashore from some strange wreck, and, after a

fortnight's famine on the bare sea-cliffs, been driven by the hunger

that gnaws his stomach like a cancer, and the thirst-fever that can only

be slaked in blood, to venture prowling for prey up the vale, till,

snuffing the scent of a flock of sheep, after some grim tiger-like

creeping on his belly, he springs at last, with huge long spangs, on the

woolly people, with bull-like growlings quailing their poor harmless

hearts, and then fast throttling them, one after another--till, as it

might seem rather in wantonness of rage than in empty pangs, he lies

down at last in the midst of all the murdered carcasses, licking the

blood off his flews and paws--and then, looking and listening round with

his red turbid eyes, and sharp-pointed ears savagely erect, conscious of

crime and fearful of punishment, soon as he sees and hears that all the

coast is clear and still, again gloatingly fastens his tusks behind the

ears, and then eats into the kidneys of the fattest of the flock, till,

sated with gore and tallow, he sneaks stealthily into the wood, and

coiling himself up all his wiry length--now no longer lank, but swollen

and knotted like that of a deer-devouring snake--he falls suddenly

asleep, and re-banquets in a dream of murder.

That simile was conceived in the spirit of Dan Homer, but delivered in

that of Kit North. No matter. Like two such wolf-dogs are now Bob Howie

and the Mad Dominie--and the School like such silly sheep. Those other

hell-dogs are leaping in the rear--and to the eyes of fear and flight

each one of the Six seems more many-headed than Cerberus, while their

mouths kindle the frosty air into fire, and thunder-bolts pursue the

pell-mell of the panic.

Such and so imaginative is not only mental but corporeal fear. What

though it be but a Snowball bicker! The air is darkened--no, brightened

by the balls, as in many a curve they describe their airy flight--some

hard as stones--some soft as slush--some blae and drippy in the cold-hot

hand that launches them on the flying foe, and these are the

teazers--some almost transparent in the cerulean sky, and broken ere

they reach their aim, abortive "armamentaria coeli"--and some useless

from the first, and felt, as they leave the palm, to be fozier than the

foziest turnip, and unfit to bash a fly.

Far and wide, over hill, bank, and brae, are spread the flying School!

Squads of us, at sore sixes and sevens, are making for the frozen woods.

Alas! poor covert now in their naked leaflessness for the stricken deer!

Twos and threes in miserable plight floundering in drift-wreaths! And

here and there--woefullest sight of all--single boys distractedly

ettling at the sanctuaries of distant houses--with their heads all the

while insanely twisted back over their shoulders, and the glare of their

eyes fixed frightfully on the swift-footed Mad Dominie, till souse over

neck and ears, bubble and squeak, precipitated into traitorous pitfall,

and in a moment evanished from this upper world!

Disturbed crows fly away a short distance and alight silent,--the

magpies chatter pert even in alarm,--the lean kine, collected on the

lown sides of braes, wonder at the rippet--their horns moving, but not

their tails,--while the tempest-tamed bull--almost dull now as an

ox--gives a short sullen growl as he feebly paws the snow.

But who is he--the tall slender boy--slender, but sinewy--a wiry

chap--five feet eight on his stocking-soles--and on his stocking-soles

he stands--for the snow has sucked his shoes from his feet--that plants

himself like an oak sapling, rooted ankle-deep on a knoll, and there, a

juvenile Jupiter Stator, with voice and arm arrests the Flight, and

fiercely gesticulating vengeance on the insolent foe, recalls and

rallies the shattered School, that he may re-lead them to victory? The

phantom of a visionary dream! KIT NORTH HIMSELF--

"In life's morning march when his spirit was young."

And once on a day was that figure--ours! Then like a chamois-hunter of

the Alps! Now, alas! like--

"But be hush'd, my dark spirit--for wisdom condemns,

When the faint and the feeble deplore;

Be strong as a rock of the ocean that stems

A thousand wild waves on the shore.

Through the perils of chance and the scowl of disdain,

Let thy front be unalter'd, thy courage elate;

_Yea! even the name we have worshipp'd in vain_

Shall awake not a pang of remembrance again;

_To bear, is to conquer our fate!_"

Half a century is annihilated as if it had never been: it is as if young

Kit had become not old Kit--but were standing now as then front to

front, with but a rood of trampled snow between them, before the Mad

Dominie and Bob Howie--both the bravest of the brave in Snowball or

Stone bicker--in street, lane, or muir fight--hand to hand,

single-pitched with Black King Carey of the Gypsies--or in irregular

high-road row--two to twelve--with a gang of Irish horse-coupers from

the fair of Glasgow returning by Portpatrick to Donaghadee. 'Tis a

strange thing so distinctly to see One's Self as he looked of yore--to

lose one's present frail personal identity in that of the powerful past.

Or rather to admire One's Self as he _was_, without consciousness of the

mean vice of egotism, because of the pity almost bordering on contempt

with which One regards One's Self as he _is_, shrivelled up into a sort

of shrimp of a man--or blown out into a flounder.

The Snowball bicker owns an armistice--and Kit North--that is, we of the

olden and the golden time--advance into the debatable ground between the

two armies, with a frozen branch in our hand as a flag of truce. The Mad

Dominie loved us, because then-a-days--bating and barring the cock and

the squint of his eye--we were like himself a poet, and while a goose

might continue standing on one leg, could have composed one jolly act of

a tragedy, or book of an epic, while Bob--God bless him!--to guard us

from scathe would have risked his life against a whole craal of tinkers.

With open arms they come forward to receive us; but our blood is up--and

we are jealous of the honour of the School, which has received a stain

which must be wiped out in blood. From what mixed motives act boys and

men in the deeds deemed most heroic, and worthy of the meed of

everlasting fame! Even so is it now with us--when sternly eyeing the

other Six, and then respectfully the Mad Dominie, we challenge--not at

long bowls--but toe to toe, at the scratch on the snow, with the naked

mawlies, the brawny boy with the red shock-head, the villain with the

carrots, who, by moonlight nights,

"Round the stacks with the lasses at bogles to play,"

had dared to stand between us and the ladye of our love. Off fly our

jackets and stocks--it is not a day for buff--and at it like bull-dogs.

Twice before had we fought him--at our own option--over the bonnet; for

'twas a sturdy villain, and famous for the cross-buttock. But now, after

the first close, in which we lose the fall--with straight right-handers

we keep him at off-fighting--and that was a gush of blood from his

smeller. "How do you like that, Ben?" Giving his head, with a mad rush,

he makes a plunge with his heavy left--for he was ker-handed--at our

stomach. But a dip of our right elbow caught the blow, to the loud

admiration of Bob Howie--and even the Mad Dominie, the umpire, could not

choose but smile. Like lightning, our left returns between the

ogles--and Ben bites the snow. Three cheers from the School--and, lifted

on the knee of his second, James Maxwell Wallace, since signalised at

Waterloo, and now a knighted colonel of horse, "he grins horribly a

ghastly smile," and is brought up staggering to the scratch. We know

that we have him--and ask considerately, "what he means by winking?" And

now we play around him,

"Just like unto a trundling mop,

Or a wild-goose at play."

He is brought down now to our own weight--then nine stone jimp--his

eyes are getting momently more and more pig-like--water-logged, like

those of Queen Bleary, whose stone image lies in the echoing aisle of

the old Abbey Church of Paisley--and bat-blind, he hits past our head

and body, like an awkward hand at the flail, when drunk, thrashing corn.

Another hit on the smeller, and a stinger on the throat-apple--and down

he sinks like a poppy--deaf to the call of "time"--and victory smiles

upon us from the bright blue skies. "Hurra--hurra--hurra! Christopher

for ever!" and perched aloft, astride on the shoulders of Bob Howie--he,

the Invincible, gallops with us all over the field, followed by the

shouting School, exulting that Ben the Bully has at last met with an

overthrow. We exact an oath that he will never again meddle with Meg

Whitelaw--shake hands cordially, and

"Off to some other game we all together flew."

And so ended the famous Snowball Bicker of Pedmount, now immortalised in

our Prose-Poem.

Some men, it is sarcastically said, are boys all life-long, and carry

with them their puerility to the grave. 'Twould be well for the world

were there in it more such men. By way of proving their manhood, we have

heard grown-up people abuse their own boyhood--forgetting what our great

Philosophical Poet--after Milton and Dryden--has told them, that

"The boy is father of the man,"

and thus libelling the author of their existence. A poor boy indeed must

he have been, who submitted to misery when the sun was new in heaven.

Did he hate or despise the flowers around his feet, congratulating him

on being young like themselves? the stars, young always, though Heaven

only knows how many million years old, every night sparkling in

happiness which they manifestly wished him to share? Did he indeed in

his heart believe that the moon, in spite of her shining midnight face,

was made of green cheese? Not only are the foundations dug and laid in

boyhood, of all the knowledge and the feelings of our prime, but the

ground-flat too built, and often the second story of the entire

superstructure, from the windows of which, the soul looking out, beholds

nature in her state, and leaps down, unafraid of a fall on the green or

white bosom of earth, to join with hymns the front of the procession.

The soul afterwards perfects her palace--building up tier after tier of

all imaginable orders of architecture--till the shadowy roof, gleaming

with golden cupolas, like the cloud-region of the setting sun, set the

heavens ablaze.

Gaze up on the highest idea--gaze down on the profoundest emotion--and

you will know and feel in a moment that it is not a new birth. You

become a devout believer in the Pythagorean and Platonic doctrine of

metempsychosis and reminiscence, and are awed by the mysterious

consciousness of the thought "BEFORE!" Try then to fix its date, and

back travels your soul, now groping its way in utter darkness, and now

in darkness visible--now launching along lines of steady lustre, such as

the moon throws on the broad bosoms of starry lakes--now dazzled by

sudden contrast--

"Blind with excess of light!"

But back let it travel, as best or worst it may, through and amidst eras

after eras of the wan or radiant past; yet never, except for some sweet

instant of delusion, breaking dewdrop-like at a touch or a breath,

during all that perilous pilgrimage--and perilous must it be, haunted by

so many ghosts--never may it reach the shrine it seeks--the fountain

from which first flowed that feeling whose origin seems to have been out

of the world of time--dare we say--in eternity!