CHRISTMAS DREAMS.

How graciously provided are all the subdivisions of Time, diversifying

the dream of human life! And why should moralists mourn over the

mutability that gives the chief charm to all that passes so transitorily

before our eyes!--leaving image upon image in the waters of memory, that

can bear being stirred without being disturbed, and contain steadier and

steadier reflections as they seem to repose on an unfathomable

depth!--the years, the months, the weeks, the days, the nights, the

hours, the minutes, the moments, each in itself a different living, and

peopled, and haunted world. One life is a thousand lives, and each

individual, as he fully renews the past, reappears in a thousand

characters; yet all of them bearing a mysterious identity not to be

misunderstood, and all of them, while every passion has been shifting

and ceasing, and reascending into power, still under the dominion of the

same Conscience, that feels and knows it is from God.

Who will complain of the shortness of human life, that can re-travel all

the windings, and wanderings, and mazes that his feet have trodden since

the farthest back hour at which memory pauses, baffled and blindfolded,

as she vainly tries to penetrate and illumine the palpable, the

impervious darkness that shrouds the few first years of our inscrutable

being? Long, long, long ago seems it to be indeed, when we now remember

it, the Time we first pulled the primroses on the sunny braes, wondering

in our first blissful emotions of beauty at the leaves with a softness

all their own--a yellowness nowhere else so vivid--"the bright

consummate flower" so starlike to our awakened imagination among the

lowly grass--lovely indeed to our admiring eyes as any one of all the

stars that, in their turn, did seem themselves like flowers in the blue

fields of heaven! Long, long, long ago, the time when we danced hand in

hand with our golden-haired sister! Long, long, long ago, the day on

which she died--the hour, so far more dismal than any hour that can now

darken us on this earth, when her coffin descended slowly, slowly into

the horrid clay, and we were borne death-like, and wishing to die, out

of the churchyard, that, from that moment, we thought we could enter

never more! What a multitudinous being must ours have been, when, before

our boyhood was gone, we could have forgotten her buried face! or at the

dream of it, dashed off a tear, and away, with a bounding heart, in the

midst of a cloud of playmates, breaking into fragments on the hill-side,

and hurrying round the shores of those wild moorland lochs, in vain hope

to surprise the heron that slowly uplifted his blue bulk, and floated

away, regardless of our shouts, to the old castle woods. It is all like

a reminiscence of some other state of existence.

Then, after all the joys and sorrows of those few years, which we now

call transitory, but which our BOYHOOD felt as if they would be

endless--as if they would endure for ever--arose upon us the glorious

dawning of another new life--YOUTH--with its insupportable sunshine, and

its agitating storms. Transitory, too, we now know, and well deserving

the same name of dream. But while it lasted, long, various, and

agonising; as, unable to sustain the eyes that first revealed to us the

light of love, we hurried away from the parting hour, and, looking up to

moon and stars, invocated in sacred oaths, hugged the very heavens to

our heart. Yet life had not then nearly reached its meridian, journeying

up the sunbright firmament. How long hung it there exulting, when "it

flamed on the forehead of the noontide sky!" Let not the Time be

computed by the lights and shadows of the years, but by the innumerable

array of visionary thoughts, that kept deploying as if from one eternity

into another--now in dark sullen masses, now in long array, brightened

as if with spear-points and standards, and moving along through chasm,

abyss, and forest, and over the summits of the highest mountains, to the

sound of ethereal music, now warlike and tempestuous--now, as "from

flutes and soft recorders" accompanying not pæans of victory but hymns

of peace. That Life, too, seems, now that it is gone, to have been of a

thousand years. Is it gone? Its skirts are yet hovering on the horizon.

And is there yet another Life destined for us? That Life which men fear

to face--Age, Old Age! Four dreams within a dream--and _where_ to awake?

At dead of night--and it is now dead of night--how the heart quakes on a

sudden at the silent resurrection of buried thoughts! Perhaps the

sunshine of some one single Sabbath of more exceeding holiness comes

first glimmering, and then brightening upon us, with the very same

sanctity that filled all the air at the tolling of the kirk-bell, when

all the parish was hushed, and the voice of streams heard more

distinctly among the banks and braes. Then, all at once, a thunderstorm,

that many years before, or many years after, drove us, when walking

alone over the mountains, into a shieling, will seem to succeed; and we

behold the same threatening aspect of the heavens that then quailed our

beating hearts, and frowned down our eyelids before the lightning began

to flash, and the black rain to deluge all the glens. No need now for

any effort of thought. The images rise of themselves--independently of

our volition--as if another being, studying the working of our minds,

conjured up the phantasmagoria before us who are beholding it with love,

wonder, and fear. Darkness and silence have a power of sorcery over the

past; the soul has then, too, often restored to it feelings and thoughts

that it had lost, and is made to know that nothing it once experiences

ever perishes, but that all things spiritual possess a principle of

immortal life.

Why linger on the shadowy wall some of those phantasmagoria--returning

after they have disappeared--and reluctant to pass away into their

former oblivion? Why shoot others athwart the gloom, quick as spectral

figures seen hurrying among mountains during a great storm? Why do some

glare and threaten--why others fade away with a melancholy smile? Why

_that one_--a Figure all in white, and with white roses in her

hair--come forward through the haze, beautifying into distincter form

and face, till her pale beseeching hands almost touch our neck--and

then, in a moment, it is as nothing?

But now the room is disenchanted--and feebly our lamp is glimmering,

about to leave us to the light of the moon and stars. There it is

trimmed again--and the sudden increase of lustre cheers the heart within

us like a festal strain. And To-Morrow--To-Morrow is Merry Christmas;

and when its night descends there will be mirth and music, and the

light sound of the merry-twinkling feet within these now so melancholy

walls--and sleep, now reigning over all the house save this one room,

will be banished far over the sea--and morning will be reluctant to

allow her light to break up the innocent orgies.

Were every Christmas of which we have been present at the celebration,

painted according to nature--what a Gallery of Pictures! True that a

sameness would pervade them all--but only that kind of sameness that

pervades the nocturnal heavens. One clear night always is, to common

eyes, just like another; for what hath any night to show but one moon

and some stars--a blue vault, with here a few braided, and there a few

castellated, clouds? Yet no two nights ever bore more than a family

resemblance to each other before the studious and instructed eye of him

who has long communed with Nature, and is familiar with every smile and

frown on her changeful, but not capricious, countenance. Even so with

the Annual Festivals of the heart. Then our thoughts are the stars that

illumine those skies--and on ourselves it depends whether they shall be

black as Erebus, or brighter than Aurora.

"Thoughts! that like spirits trackless come and go"--

is a fine line of Charles Lloyd's. But no bird skims, no arrow pierces

the air, without producing some change in the Universe, which will last

to the day of doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor

irrecoverable by Nature's law is any consciousness, however ghostlike;

though many a one, even the most blissful, never does return, but seems

to be buried among the dead. But they are not dead--but only sleep;

though to us who recall them not, they are as they had never been, and

we, wretched ingrates, let them lie for ever in oblivion! How passing

sweet when of their own accord they arise to greet us in our

solitude?--as a friend who, having sailed away to a foreign land in our

youth, has been thought to have died many long years ago, may suddenly

stand before us, with face still familiar and name reviving in a moment,

and all that he once was to us brought from utter forgetfulness close

upon our heart.

My Father's House! How it is ringing like a grove in spring, with the

din of creatures happier, a thousand times happier, than all the birds

on earth. It is the Christmas Holidays--Christmas Day itself--Christmas

Night--and Joy in every bosom intensifies Love. Never before were we

brothers and sisters so dear to one another--never before had our hearts

so yearned towards the authors of our being--our blissful being! There

they sit--silent in all that outcry--composed in all that

disarray--still in all that tumult; yet, as one or other flying imp

sweeps round the chair, a father's hand will playfully strive to catch a

prisoner--a mother's gentler touch on some sylph's disordered symar be

felt almost as a reproof, and for a moment slacken the fairy-flight. One

old game treads on the heels of another--twenty within the hour--and

many a new game never heard of before nor since, struck out by the

collision of kindred spirits in their glee, the transitory fancies of

genius inventive through very delight. Then, all at once, there is a

hush, profound as ever falls on some little plat within a forest when

the moon drops behind the mountain, and the small green-robed People of

Peace at once cease their pastime, and evanish. For She--the

Silver-Tongued--is about to sing an old ballad, words and air alike

hundreds of years old--and sing she doth, while tears begin to fall,

with a voice too mournfully beautiful long to breathe below--and, ere

another Christmas shall have come with the falling snows, doomed to be

mute on earth--but to be hymning in Heaven.

Of that House--to our eyes the fairest of earthly dwellings--with its

old ivied turrets, and orchard-garden bright alike with fruit and with

flowers, not one stone remains. The very brook that washed its

foundations has vanished along with them--and a crowd of other

buildings, wholly without character, has long stood where here a single

tree, and there a grove, did once render so lovely that small demesne;

which, how could we, who thought it the very heart of Paradise, even for

one moment have believed was one day to be blotted out of being, and we

ourselves--then so linked in love that the band which bound us all

together was, in its gentle pressure, felt not nor understood--to be

scattered far and abroad, like so many leaves that after one wild

parting rustle are separated by roaring wind-eddies, and brought

together no more! The old Abbey--it still survives; and there, in that

corner of the burial-ground, below that part of the wall which was

least in ruins, and which we often climbed to reach the flowers and

nests--there, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, lie the Loved and

Venerated--for whom, even now that so many grief-deadening years have

fled, we feel, in this holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to

have ceased to weep--so seldom to have remembered!--And then, with a

powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief, the

floods we all wept together--at no long interval--on those pale and

placid faces as they lay, most beautiful and most dreadful to behold, in

their coffins.

We believe that there is genius in all childhood. But the creative joy

that makes it great in its simplicity dies a natural death or is killed,

and genius dies with it. In favoured spirits, neither few nor many, the

joy and the might survive; for you must know that unless it be

accompanied with imagination, memory is cold and lifeless. The forms it

brings before us must be inspired with beauty--that is, with affection

or passion. All minds, even the dullest, remember the days of their

youth; but all cannot bring back the indescribable brightness of that

blessed season. They who would know what they once were, must not merely

recollect, but they must imagine, the hills and valleys--if any such

there were--in which their childhood played, the torrents, the

waterfalls, the lakes, the heather, the rocks, the heaven's imperial

dome, the raven floating only a little lower than the eagle in the sky.

To imagine what he then heard and saw, he must imagine his own nature.

He must collect from many vanished hours the power of his untamed heart,

and he must, perhaps, transfuse also something of his maturer mind into

these dreams of his former being, thus linking the past with the present

by a continuous chain, which, though often invisible, is never broken.

So is it too with the calmer affections that have grown within the

shelter of a roof. We do not merely remember, we imagine our father's

house, the fireside, all his features then most living, now dead and

buried; the very manner of his smile, every tone of his voice. We must

combine with all the passionate and plastic power of imagination the

spirit of a thousand happy hours into one moment; and we must invest

with all that we ever felt to be venerable such an image as alone can

satisfy our filial hearts. It is thus that imagination, which first

aided the growth of all our holiest and happiest affections, can

preserve them to us unimpaired--

"For she can give us back the dead,

Even in the loveliest looks they wore."

Then came a New Series of Christmases, celebrated one year in this

family, another year in that--none present but those whom Charles Lamb

the Delightful calleth the "old familiar faces;" something in all

features, and all tones of voice, and all manners, betokening origin

from one root--relations all, happy, and with no reason either to be

ashamed or proud of their neither high nor humble birth--their lot being

cast within that pleasant realm, "the Golden Mean," where the dwellings

are connecting-links between the hut and the hall--fair edifices

resembling manse or mansion-house, according as the atmosphere expands

or contracts their dimensions--in which Competence is next-door

neighbour to Wealth, and both of them within the daily walk of

Contentment.

Merry Christmases they were indeed--one Lady always presiding, with a

figure that once had been the stateliest among the stately, but then

somewhat bent, without being bowed down, beneath an easy weight of most

venerable years. Sweet was her tremulous voice to all her

grandchildren's ears. Nor did those solemn eyes, bedimmed into a

pathetic beauty, in any degree restrain the glee that sparkled in orbs

that had as yet shed not many tears, but tears of joy or pity. Dearly

she loved all those mortal creatures whom she was soon about to leave;

but she sat in sunshine even within the shadow of death; and the "voice

that called her home" had so long been whispering in her ear, that its

accents had become dear to her, and consolatory every word that was

heard in the silence, as from another world.

Whether we were indeed all so witty as we thought ourselves--uncles,

aunts, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, cousins, and "the rest," it

might be presumptuous in us, who were considered by ourselves and a few

others not the least amusing of the whole set, at this distance of time

to decide--especially in the affirmative; but how the roof did ring with

sally, pun, retort, and repartee! Ay, with pun--a species of

impertinence for which we have therefore a kindness even to this day.

Had incomparable Thomas Hood had the good fortune to have been born a

cousin of ours, how with that fine fancy of his would he have shone at

those Christmas festivals, eclipsing us all! Our family, through all its

different branches, has ever been famous for bad voices, but good ears;

and we think we hear ourselves--all those uncles and aunts, nephews and

nieces, and cousins--singing now! Easy is it to "warble melody" as to

breathe air. But we hope harmony is the most difficult of all things to

people in general, for to us it was impossible; and what attempts ours

used to be at Seconds! Yet the most woeful failures were rapturously

encored; and ere the night was done we spoke with most extraordinary

voices indeed, every one hoarser than another, till at last, walking

home with a fair cousin, there was nothing left for it but a tender

glance of the eye--a tender pressure of the hand--for cousins are not

altogether sisters, and although partaking of that dearest character,

possess, it may be, some peculiar and appropriate charms of their own;

as didst thou, Emily the "Wild-cap!"--That _sobriquet_ all forgotten

now--for now thou art a matron, nay a Grandam, and troubled with an elf

fair and frolicsome as thou thyself wert of yore, when the gravest and

wisest withstood not the witchery of thy dancings, thy singings, and thy

showering smiles.

On rolled Suns and Seasons--the old died--the elderly became old--and

the young, one after another, were wafted joyously away on the wings of

hope, like birds almost as soon as they can fly ungratefully forsaking

their nests and the groves in whose safe shadow they first essayed their

pinions; or like pinnaces that, after having for a few days trimmed

their snow-white sails in the land-locked bay, close to whose shores of

silvery sand had grown the trees that furnished timber both for hull and

mast, slip their tiny cables on some summer-day, and gathering every

breeze that blows, go dancing over the waves in sunshine, and melt far

off into the main. Or, haply, some were like fair young trees,

transplanted during no favourable season, and never to take root in

another soil, but soon leaf and branch to wither beneath the tropic sun,

and die almost unheeded by those who knew not how beautiful they had

been beneath the dews and mists of their own native climate.

Vain images! and therefore chosen by fancy not too painfully to touch

the heart. For some hearts grow cold and forbidding with selfish

cares--some, warm as ever in their own generous glow, were touched by

the chill of Fortune's frowns, ever worst to bear when suddenly

succeeding her smiles--some, to rid themselves of painful regrets, took

refuge in forgetfulness, and closed their eyes to the past--duty

banished some abroad, and duty imprisoned others at home--estrangements

there were, at first unconscious and unintended, yet ere long, though

causeless, complete--changes were wrought insensibly, invisibly, even in

the innermost nature of those who being friends knew no guile, yet came

thereby at last to be friends no more--unrequited love broke some

bonds--requited love relaxed others--the death of one altered the

conditions of many--and so--year after year--the Christmas Meeting was

interrupted--deferred--till finally it ceased with one accord, unrenewed

and unrenewable. For when Some Things cease for a time--that time turns

out to be for ever.

Survivors of those happy circles! wherever ye be--should these imperfect

remembrances of days of old chance, in some thoughtful pause of life's

busy turmoil, for a moment to meet your eyes, let there be towards the

inditer a few throbs of revived affection in your hearts--for his,

though "absent long and distant far," has never been utterly forgetful

of the loves and friendships that charmed his youth. To be parted in

body is not to be estranged in spirit--and many a dream and many a

vision, sacred to nature's best affections, may pass before the mind of

one whose lips are silent. "Out of sight out of mind" is rather the

expression of a doubt--of a fear--than of a belief or a conviction. The

soul surely has eyes that can see the objects it loves, through all

intervening darkness--and of those more especially dear it keeps within

itself almost undimmed images, on which, when they know it not, think it

not, believe it not, it often loves to gaze, as on relics imperishable

as they are hallowed.

All hail! rising beautiful and magnificent through the mists of

morning--ye Woods, Groves, Towers, and Temples, overshadowing that

famous Stream beloved by all the Muses! Through this midnight

hush--methinks we hear faint and far-off sacred music--

"Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,

The pealing anthem swells the note of praise!"

How steeped now in the stillness of moonlight are all those pale,

pillared Churches, Courts and Cloisters, Shrines and Altars, with here

and there a Statue standing in the shade, or Monument sacred to the

memory of the pious--the immortal dead. Some great clock is striking

from one of many domes--from the majestic Tower of St Mary Magdalen--and

in the deepened hush that follows the solemn sound, the mingling waters

of the Cherwell and the Isis soften the severe silence of the holy

night.

Remote from kindred, and from all the friendships that were the native

growth of the fair fields where our boyhood and our youth had roamed and

meditated and dreamed, those were indeed years of high and lofty mood

which held us in converse with the shades of great Poets and Sages of

old in Rhedicyna's hallowed groves, still, serene, and solemn, as that

Attic Academe where divine Plato, with all Hybla on his lips, discoursed

such excellent music that his life seemed to the imagination

spiritualised--a dim reminiscence of some former state of being. How

sank then the Christmas Service of that beautiful Liturgy into our

hearts! Not faithless we to the simple worship that our forefathers had

loved; but Conscience told us there was no apostasy in the feelings that

rose within us when that deep organ began to blow, that choir of

youthful voices so sweetly to join the diapason,--our eyes fixed all the

while on that divine Picture over the Altar, of our Saviour

"Bearing his cross up rueful Calvary."

The City of Palaces disappears--and in the setting sunlight we behold

mountains of soft crimson snow! The sun hath set, and even more

beautiful are the bright-starred nights of winter, than summer in all

its glories beneath the broad moons of June. Through the woods of

Windermere, from cottage to cottage, by coppice-pathways winding up to

dwellings among the hill-rocks where the birch-trees cease to grow--

"Nodding their heads, before us go,

The merry minstrelsy."

They sing a salutation at every door, familiarly naming old and young by

their Christian names; and the eyes that look upward from the vales to

the hanging huts among the plats and cliffs, see the shadows of the

dancers ever and anon crossing the light of the star-like window, and

the merry music is heard like an echo dwelling in the sky. Across those

humble thresholds often did we on Christmas-week nights of

yore--wandering through our solitary sylvan haunts, under the branches

of trees within whose hollow trunk the squirrel slept--venture in,

unasked perhaps, but not unwelcome, and, in the kindly spirit of the

season, did our best to merrify the Festival by tale or song. And now

that we behold them not, are all those woods, and cliffs, and rivers,

and tarns, and lakes, as beautiful as when they softened and brightened

beneath our living eyes, half-creating, as they gazed, the very world

they worshipped? And are all those hearths as bright as of yore, without

the shadow of our figure? And the roofs, do they ring as mirthfully,

though our voice be forgotten? We hang over Westmoreland, an

unobserved--but observant star. Mountains, hills, rocks, knolls, vales,

woods, groves, single trees, dwellings--all asleep! O Lakes! but ye are,

indeed, by far too beautiful! O fortunate Isles! too fair for human

habitation, fit abode for the Blest! It will not hide itself--it will

not sink into the earth--it will rise; and risen, it will stand steady

with its shadow in the overpowering moonlight, that ONE TREE! that ONE

HOUSE!--and well might the sight of ye two together--were it

harder--break our heart. But hard at all it is not--therefore it is but

crushed.

Can it be that there we are utterly forgotten! No star hanging higher

than the Andes in heaven--but sole-sitting at midnight in a small

chamber--a melancholy man are we--and there seems a smile of

consolation, O Wordsworth! on thy sacred Bust.

Alas! how many heavenly days, "seeming immortal in their depth of rest,"

have died and been forgotten! Treacherous and ungrateful is our memory

even of bliss that overflowed our being as light our habitation. Our

spirit's deepest intercommunion with nature has no place in her

records--blanks are there that ought to have been painted with

imperishable imagery, and steeped in sentiment fresh as the morning on

life's golden hills. Yet there is mercy in this dispensation--for who

can bear to behold the light of bliss re-arising from the past on the

ghastlier gloom of present misery? The phantoms that will not come when

we call on them to comfort us, are too often at our side when in our

anguish we could almost pray that they might be reburied in oblivion.

Such hauntings as these are not as if they were visionary--they come and

go like forms and shapes still imbued with life. Shall we vainly stretch

out our arms to embrace and hold them fast, or as vainly seek to

intrench ourselves by thoughts of this world against their visitation?

The soul in its sickness knows not whether it be the duty of love to

resign itself to indifference or to despair. Shall it enjoy life, they

being dead! Shall we the survivors, for yet a little while, walk in

other companionship out into the day, and let the sunbeams settle on

their heads as they used to do, or cover them with dust and ashes, and

show to those in heaven that love for them is now best expressed by

remorse and penitence!

Sometimes we have fears about our memory--that it is decaying; for,

lately, many ordinary yet interesting occurrences and events, which we

regarded at the time with pain or pleasure, have been slipping away

almost into oblivion, and have often alarmed us of a sudden by their

return, not to any act of recollection, but of themselves, sometimes

wretchedly out of place and season, the mournful obtruding upon the

merry, and worse, the merry upon the mournful--confusion, by no fault of

ours, of piteous and of gladsome faces--tears where smiles were a duty

as well as a delight, and smiles where nature demanded, and religion

hallowed, a sacrifice of tears.

For a good many years we have been tied to town in winter by fetters as

fine as frostwork filigree, which we could not break without destroying

a whole world of endearment. That seems an obscure image; but it means

what the Germans would call in English--our winter environment. We are

imprisoned in a net of our own weaving--an invisible net; yet we can see

it when we choose--just as a bird can see, when he chooses, the wires of

his cage, that are invisible in his happiness, as he keeps hopping and

fluttering about all day long, or haply dreaming on his perch with his

poll under his plumes--as free in confinement as if let loose into the

boundless sky. That seems an obscure image too; but we mean, in truth,

the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is; and we have

improved on that idea, for we have built our own--and are prisoner,

turnkey, and jailer all in one, and 'tis noiseless as the house of

sleep. Or what if we declare that Christopher North is a king in his

palace, with no subjects but his own thoughts--his rule peaceful over

those lights and shadows--and undisputed to reign over them his right

divine.

The opening year in a town, now, answers in all things to our heart's

desire. How beautiful the smoky air! The clouds have a homely look as

they hang over the happy families of houses, and seem as if they loved

their birthplace; all unlike those heartless clouds that keep

_stravaiging_ over mountain-tops, and have no domicile in the sky! Poets

speak of living rocks, but what is their life to that of houses? Who

ever saw a rock with eyes--that is, with windows? Stone-blind all, and

stone-deaf, and with hearts of stone; whereas who ever saw a house

without eyes--that is, windows? Our own is an Argus; yet the good old

Conservative grudges not the assessed taxes--his optics are as cheerful

as the day that lends them light, and they love to salute the setting

sun, as if a hundred beacons, level above level, were kindled along a

mountain side. He might safely be pronounced a madman who preferred an

avenue of trees to a street. Why, trees have no chimneys; and, were you

to kindle a fire in the hollow of an oak, you would soon be as dead as a

Druid. It won't do to talk to us of sap, and the circulation of sap. A

grove in winter, bole and branch--leaves it has none--is as dry as a

volume of sermons. But a street, or a square, is full of "vital sparks

of heavenly flame" as a volume of poetry, and the heart's blood

circulates through the system like rosy wine.

But a truce to comparisons; for we are beginning to feel contrition for

our crime against the country, and, with humbled head and heart, we

beseech you to pardon us--ye rocks of Pavey-Ark, the pillared palaces of

the storms--ye clouds, now wreathing a diadem for the forehead of

Helvellyn--ye trees, that hang the shadows of your undying beauty over

the "one perfect chrysolite" of blessed Windermere!

Our meaning is transparent now as the hand of an apparition waving peace

and goodwill to all dwellers in the land of dreams. In plainer but not

simpler words (for words are like flowers, often rich in their

simplicity--witness the Lily, and Solomon's Song)--Christian people all,

we wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New-Year, in town or in

country--or in ships at sea.

A Happy New-Year!--Ah! ere this ARIA, sung _sotto voce_, reach your ears

(eyes are ears, and ears eyes), the week of all weeks will be over and

gone, and the New-Year will seem growing out of the old year's

ashes!--for the year is your only Phoenix. But what with time to do

has a wish--a hope--a prayer! Their power is in the Spirit that gives

them birth. And what is Spirit but the well-head of thoughts and

feelings flowing and overflowing all life, yet leaving the well-head

full of water as ever--so lucid, that on your gazing intently into its

depths, it seems to become a large soft spiritual eye, reflecting the

heavens and the earth; and no one knows what the heavens and the earth

are, till he has seen them there--for that God made the heavens and the

earth we feel from that beautiful revelation--and where feeling is not,

knowledge is dead, and a blank the universe. Love is life. The unloving

merely breathe. A single sweet beat of the heart is token of something

spiritual that will be with us again in Paradise. "O, bliss and beauty!

are these our feelings"--thought we once in a dream--"all circling in

the sunshine--fair-plumed in a flight of doves!" The vision kept sailing

on the sky--"to and fro for our delight"--no sound on their wings more

than on their breasts; and they melted away in light as if they were

composed of light--and in the hush we heard high-up and far-off

music--as of an angel's song.

That was a dream of the mysterious night; but now we are broad

awake--and see no emblematical phantoms, but the mere sights of the

common day. But sufficient for the day is the beauty thereof--and it

inspires us with affection for all beneath the skies. Will the whole

world, then, promise henceforth to love us?--and we promise henceforth

to love the whole world.

It seems the easiest of all easy things to be kind and good--and then it

is so pleasant! "Self-love and social are the same," beyond all

question; and in that lies the nobility of our nature. The intensest

feeling of self is that of belonging to a brotherhood. All selves then

know they have duties which are in truth loves--and loves are

joys--whether breathed in silence, or uttered in words, or embodied in

actions; and if they filled all life, then all life would be good--and

heaven would be no more than a better earth. And how may all men go to

heaven? By making themselves a heaven on earth, and thus preparing their

spirits to breathe empyreal air when they have dropped the dust. And how

may they make for themselves a heaven on earth? By building up a happy

HOME FOR THE HEART. Much, but not all--oh! not nearly all--is in the

site. But it must be within the precincts of the holy ground--and within

hearing of the waters of life.

Pleasures of Imagination! Pleasures of Memory! Pleasures of Hope! All

three most delightful poems; yet all the thoughts and all the feelings

that inspired them--etherealised--will not make--FAITH! "The day-spring

from on high hath visited us!" Blessed is he who feels that line--nor

need his heart die within him, were a voice to be heard at midnight

saying--"This New-Year's day shall be thy last!"

One voice--one young voice--all by its sweet, sad, solitary self,

singing to us a Christmas Hymn! Listening to that music is like looking

at the sky with all its stars.

Was it a spirit?

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk unseen,

Sole or responsive to each other's voice,

Hymning their great Creator."

No, the singer, like ourselves, is mortal; and in that thought, to our

hearts, lies the pathos of her prayers. The angels, veiling their faces

with their wings, sing in their bliss hallelujahs round the throne of

heaven; but she--a poor child of clay, with her face veiled but with the

shades of humility and contrition, while

"Some natural tears she drops, but wipes them soon,"--

sings, in her sorrow, supplications to be suffered to see afar-off its

everlasting gates--opening not surely for her own sake--for all of woman

born are sinful--and even she in what love calls her innocence feels

that her fallen being does of itself deserve but to die. The hymn is

fading away, liker and liker an echo, and our spirit having lost it in

the distance, returns back holier to the heart-hush of home.

The million hunger and thirst after the stronger and darker passions;

nothing will go down with them but _the intense_. They are

intolerant--or careless--or even ashamed of those emotions and

affections that compose the blessing of our daily life, and give its

lustre to the fire on the hearth of every Christian household. Yet, for

all that, they are inexperienced in those same stronger and darker

passions of which they prate, and know nothing of the import of those

pictures of them painted, with background of gloom and foreground of

fire, in the works of the truly great masters. The disturbed spirit of

such delineations is far beyond the reaches of their souls; and they

mistake their own senseless stupor for solemn awe--or their own mere

physical excitement for the enthusiasm of imagination soaring through

the storm on the wings of intellect. There are such things in "Satan's

Invisible World Displayed" in poetry, as strong and dark passions; and

they who are acquainted with their origin and end call them _bad_

passions; but the good passions are not dark, but bright--and they are

strong too, stronger than death or the grave.

All human beings who know how to reap

"The harvest of a quiet eye,

That broods and sleeps on its own heart,"

feel, by the touch, the flowers of affection in every handful of beauty

they gather up from those fortunate fields on which shines, for ever

through all seasons, the sun of life. How soft the leaves! and, as they

meet the eye, how fair! Framed, so might it seem, of green dew

consolidated into fragrance. Nor do they fade when gently taken from

their stalk on its native bed. They flourish for ever if you bruise them

not--sensitive indeed; and, if you are so forgetful as to treat them

rashly, like those of the plant that bears that name, they shrink, and

seem to shrivel for a time--growing pale, as if upbraiding your

harshness; but cherished, they are seen to be all of

"Immortal amaranth, the tree that grows

Fast by the throne of God;"

for the seeds have fallen from heaven to earth, and for eighteen hundred

years have been spreading themselves over all soils fit for their

reception--and what soil is not fit? Even fit are stony places, and

places full of thorns. For they will live and grow there in spite of

such obstruction--and among rank and matted weeds will often be seen

peering out like primroses gladdening the desert.

That voice again--"One of old Scotland's songs, so sad and slow!" Her

heart is now blamelessly with things of earth. "Sad and slow!" and most

purely sweet. Almost mournful although it be, it breathes of

happiness--for the joy dearest to the soul has ever a faint tinge of

grief. O innocent enchantress! thou encirclest us with a wavering haze

of beautiful imagery, by the spell of that voice awakening after a mood

of awe, but for thy own delight. From the long dim tracts of the past

come strangely blended recognitions of woe and bliss, undistinguishable

now to our own heart--nor knows that heart if it be a dream of

imagination or of memory. Yet why should we wonder? In our happiest

hours there may have been something in common with our most

sorrowful--some shade of sadness cast over them by a passing cloud, that

now allies them in retrospect with the sombre spirit of grief; and in

our unhappiest hours there may have been gleams of gladness, that seem

now to give the return the calm character of peace. Do not all thoughts

and feelings, almost all events, seem to resemble each other--when they

are dreamt of as all past? All receive a sort of sanctification in the

stillness of the time that has gone by--just like the human being whom

they adorned or degraded--when they, too, are at last buried together in

the bosom of the same earth.

Perhaps none among us ever wrote verses of any worth, who had not been,

more or less, readers of our old ballads. All our poets have been

so--and even Wordsworth would not have been the veritable and only

Wordsworth, had he not in boyhood pored--oh, the miser!--over Percy's

"Reliques." From the highest to the humblest, they have all drunk from

those silver springs. Shepherds and herdsmen and woodsmen have been the

masters of the mighty--their strains have, like the voice of a solitary

lute, inspired a power of sadness into the hearts of great poets that

gave their genius to be prevalent over all tears, or with a power of

sublimity that gave it dominion over all terror, like the sound of a

trumpet. "The Babes in the Wood!" "Chevy Chace!" Men become women while

they weep--

"Or start up heroes from the glorious strain."

Sing then "The Dirge," my Margaret, to the Old Man, "so tender and so

true" to the spirit of those old ballads, which we might think were

written by Pity's self.

DIRGE.

"O dig a grave, and dig it deep,

Where I and my true love may sleep!

We'll dig a grave, and dig it deep,

Where thou and thy true love shall sleep!

And let it be five fathom low,

Where winter winds may never blow!--

And it shall be five fathom low,

Where winter winds shall never blow!

And let it be on yonder hill,

Where grows the mountain daffodil!--

And it shall be on yonder hill,

Where grows the mountain daffodil!

And plant it round with holy briers,

To fright away the fairy fires!--

We'll plant it round with holy briers!

To fright away the fairy fires!

And set it round with celandine,

And nodding heads of columbine!--

We'll set it round with celandine,

And nodding heads of columbine!

And let the ruddock build his nest

Just above my true love's breast!--

The ruddock he shall build his nest

Just above thy true love's breast!

And warble his sweet wintry song

O'er our dwelling all day long!

And he shall warble his sweet song

O'er your dwelling all day long.

Now, tender friends, my garments take,

And lay me out for Jesus' sake!

And we will now thy garments take,

And lay thee out for Jesus' sake!

And lay me by my true love's side,

That I may be a faithful bride!--

We'll lay thee by thy true love's side,

That thou may'st be a faithful bride!"

Ay--ay--thou too art gone, WILLIAM STANLEY ROSCOE! What years have flown

since we walked among the "alleys green" of Allerton with thee and thy

illustrious father! and who ever conversed with him for a few hours in

and about his own home--where the stream of life flowed on so full and

clear--without carrying away impressions that never seemed to be

remembrances--so vivid have they remained amidst the obscurations and

obliterations of Time, that sweeps with his wings all that lies on the

surface, but has no power to disturb, much less destroy, the record

printed on the heart.

We are all of us getting old--or older; nor would we, for our own

part--if we could--renew our youth. Methinks the river of life is nobler

as it nears the sea. The young are dancing in their skiffs on the

pellucid shallows near the source on the Sacred Mountains of the Golden

East. They whose lot it is to be in their prime, are dropping down the

longer and wider reaches, that seem wheeling by with their sylvan

amphitheatres, as if the beauty were moving morn-wards, while the

voyagers are stationary among the shadows, or slowly descending the

stream to meet the meridian day. Many forget

"The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below,"

and are lost in the roaring whirlpool. Under Providence, we see

ourselves on the river expanded into a sea-like lake, or arm of the sea;

and for all our soul has escaped and suffered, we look up to the stars

in gratitude--and down to the stars--for the water too is full of stars

as well as the sky--faint and dim indeed--but blended by the pervading

spirit of beauty, with the brighter and bolder luminaries reposing on

infinitude.

OUR WINTER QUARTERS.

BUCHANAN LODGE--for a few months--farewell! 'Tis the Twelfth of

November; and for the City we leave thee not without reluctance, early

in March by the blessing of Heaven again to creep into thy blooming

bourne. Yet now and then we shall take a drive down, to while away a

sunny forenoon among thy undecaying evergreens, to breathe the balm of

thy Christmas roses, and for one _Gentle_ bosom to cull the earliest

crocuses that may be yellowing through the thin snows of Spring.

In truth, we know not well why we should ever leave thee, for thou art

the Darling of all the Seasons; and Winter, so churlish elsewhere, is

ever bland to thee, and, daily alighting in these gardens, loves to fold

and unfold, in the cool sunshine, the stainless splendour of his

pale-plumaged wings. But we are no hermit. Dear to us though Nature be,

here, hand-in-hand with Art walking through our peaceful but not

unpeopled POLICY, a voice comes to us from the city-heart--winning us

away from the stillness of solitude into the stir of life. Milton speaks

of a region

"Above the stir and smoke of this dim spot,

Which men call earth;"

and oft have we visited it; but while yet we pursue the ends of this our

mortal being, in the mystery of the brain whence ideas arise, and in the

mystery of the heart whence emotions flow--kindred and congenial

all--thought ever blending with feeling, reason with imagination, and

conscience with passion--'tis our duty to draw our delight from

intercommunion with the spirit of our kind. Weakest or wickedest of

mortals are your soul-sick, life-loathing, world-wearied men. In

solitude we are prone to be swallowed up in selfishness; and out of

selfishness what sins and crimes may not grow! At the best, moral

stagnation ensues--and the spirit becomes, like "a green-mantled pool,"

the abode of reptiles. Then ever welcome to us be living faces, and

living voices, the light and the music of reality--dearer far than any

mere ideas or emotions hanging or floating aloof by themselves in the

atmosphere of imagination. Blest be the cordial grasp of the hand of

friendship--blest the tender embrace of the arms of love! Nay, smile

not, fair reader, at an old man's fervour; for Love is a gracious

spirit, who deserteth not declining age.

The DROSKY is at the door--and, my eye! what a figure is Peter! There he

sits, like a bear, with the ribbons in his paws--no part visible of his

human face or form divine, but his small red eyes--and his ruby nose,

whose re-grown enormity laughs at Liston. One little month ago, the

knife of that skilful chirurgeon pared it down to the dimensions of a

Christian proboscis. Again 'tis like a wart on a frost-reddened Swedish

turnip. Pretty Poll, with small delicate pale features, sits beside him

like a snowdrop. How shaggy since he returned from our last Highland

tour is Filho da Puta! His mane long as his tail--and the hair on his

ears like that on his fetlocks. He absolutely reminds us of Hogg's

Bonassus. Ay, bless these patent steps--on the same principle as those

by which we ascend our nightly couch--we are self-deposited in our

Drosky. Oh! the lazy luxury of an air-seat! We seem to be sitting on

nothing but a voluptuous warmth, restorative as a bath. And then what

furry softness envelopes our feet! Yes--Mrs Gentle--Mrs Gentle--thy

Cashmere shawl, twined round our bust, feels almost as silken-smooth as

thine own, and scented is it with the balm of thy own lips. Boreas blows

on it tenderly as a zephyr--and the wintry sunshine seems summery as it

plays on the celestial colours. Thy pelisse, too, over our old happy

shoulders, purple as the neck of the dove when careering round his mate.

Thy comforter, too, in our bosom--till the dear, delightful, delicious,

wicked worsted thrills through skin and flesh to our very heart. It

dirls. Drive away, Peter. Farewell Lodge--and welcome, in a jiffy, Moray

Place.

And now, doucely and decently sitting in our Drosky, behold us driven by

Peter, proud as Punch to tool along the staring streets the

great-grandson of the Desert-born! Yet--yet--couldst thou lead the

field, Filho, with old Kit Castor on thy spine. But though our day be

not quite gone by, we think we see the stealing shades of eve, and, a

little further on in the solemn vista, the darkness of night; and

therefore, like wise children of nature, not unproud of the past, not

ungrateful for the present, and unfearful of the future, thus do we now

skim along the road of life, broad and smooth to our heart's content,

able to pay the turnpikes, and willing, when we shall have reached the

end of our journey, to lie down, in hope, at the goal.

What pretty, little, low lines of garden-fronted cottages! leading us

along out of rural into suburban cheerfulness, across the Bridge, and

past the Oriental-looking Oil-Gas Works, with a sweep winding into the

full view of PITT Street (what a glorious name!) steep as some straight

cliff-glen, and an approach truly majestic--yea, call it at once

magnificent--right up to the great city's heart. "There goes Old

Christopher North!" the bright boys in the playground of the New Academy

exclaim. God bless you, you little rascals!--We could almost find it in

our heart to ask the Rector for a holiday. But, under him, all your days

are holidays--for when the precious hours of study are enlightened by a

classic spirit, how naturally do they melt into those of play!

"Gay hope is yours, by fancy fed,

Less pleasing when possest;

The tear forgot as soon as shed,

The sunshine of the breast;

Yours buxom health, of rosy hue,

Wild wit, invention ever new,

And lively cheer, of vigour born;

The thoughtless day, the easy night,

The spirits pure, the slumbers light,

That fly th' approach of morn."

Descending from our Drosky, we find No. 99 Moray Place, exhibiting

throughout all its calm interior the self-same expression it wore the

day we left it for the Lodge, eight months ago. There is our venerable

winter Hat--as like Ourselves, it is said, as he can stare--sitting on

the Circular in the Entrance-hall. Everything has been tenderly dusted

as if by hands that touched with a Sabbath feeling; and though the

furniture cannot be said to be new, yet while it is in all sobered, it

is in nothing faded. You are at first unaware of its richness on account

of its simplicity--its grace is felt gradually to grow out of its

comfort--and that which you thought but ease lightens into elegance,

while there is but one image in nature which can adequately express its

repose--that of a hill-sheltered field by sunset, under a fresh-fallen

vest of virgin snow. For then snow blushes with a faint crimson--nay,

sometimes when Sol is extraordinarily splendid, not faint, but with a

gorgeousness of colouring that fears not to face in rivalry the western

clouds.

Let no man have two houses with one set of furniture. Home's deepest

delight is undisturbance. Some people think no articles fixtures--not

even grates. But sofas and ottomans, and chairs and footstools, and

screens--and above all, beds--all are fixtures in the dwelling of a wise

man, cognoscitive and sensitive of the blessings of this life. Each has

its own place assigned to it by the taste, tact, and feeling of the

master of the mansion, where order and elegance minister to comfort, and

comfort is but a homely word for happiness. In various moods we vary

their arrangement--nor is even the easiest of all Easy-chairs secure for

life against being gently pushed on his wheels from chimney-nook to

window-corner, when the sunshine may have extinguished the fire, and the

blue sky tempts the _Paterfamilias_, or him who is but an uncle, to lie

back with half-shut eyes, and gaze upon the cheerful purity, even like a

shepherd on the hill. But these little occasional disarrangements serve

but to preserve the spirit of permanent arrangement, without which the

very virtue of domesticity dies. What sacrilege, therefore, against the

Lares and Penates, to turn a whole house topsy-turvy, from garret to

cellar, regularly as May-flowers deck the zone of the year! Why, a

Turkey or a Persian, or even a Wilton or a Kidderminster carpet, is as

much the garb of the wooden floor inside, as the grass is of the earthen

floor outside of your house. Would you lift and lay down the greensward?

But without further illustration--be assured the cases are kindred--and

so, too, with sofas and shrubs, tent-beds and trees. Independently,

however, of these analogies, not fanciful, but lying deep in the nature

of things, the inside of one's tabernacle, in town and country, ought

ever to be sacred from all radical revolutionary movements, and to lie

for ever in a waking dream of graceful repose. All our affections

towards lifeless things become tenderer and deeper in the continuous and

unbroken flow of domestic habit. The eye gets lovingly familiarised with

each object occupying its own peculiar and appropriate place, and feels

in a moment when the most insignificant is missing or removed. We say

not a word about children, for fortunately, since we are yet unmarried,

we have none; but even they, if brought up Christians, are no dissenters

from this creed, and however rackety in the nursery, in an orderly-kept

parlour or drawing-room how like so many pretty little white mice do

they glide cannily along the floor! Let no such horror, then, as a

_flitting_ ever befall us or our friends! O mercy! only look at a long

huge train of waggons, heaped up to the windows of the first floors,

moving along the dust-driving or mire-choked streets with furniture from

a gutted town-house towards one standing in the rural shades with an

empty stomach! All is dimmed or destroyed--chairs crushed on the

table-land, and four-posted beds lying helplessly with their astonished

feet up to heaven--a sight that might make the angels weep!

People have wondered why we, an old barren bachelor, should live in such

a large house. It is a palace; but never was there a greater mistake

than to seek the solution in our pride. Silence can be had but in a

large house. And silence is the chief condition of home happiness. We

could now hear a leaf fall--a leaf of the finest wire-wove. Peter and

Betty, Polly and the rest, inhabit the second sunk story--and it is

delightful to know that they may be kicking up the most infernal

disturbance at this blessed moment, and tearing out each other's hair in

handfuls, without the faintest whisper of the uproar reaching us in our

altitude above the drawing-room flat. On New-Year's Day morning there is

regularly a competition of bagpipers in the kitchen, and we could fondly

imagine 'tis an Eolian Harp. In his pantry Peter practised for years on

the shrill clarion, and for years on the echoing horn; yet had he thrown

up both instruments in despair of perfection ere we so much as knew that

he had commenced his musical studies. In the sunk story, immediately

below _that_, having been for a season consumptive, we kept a Jenny ass

and her daughter--and though we believe it was not unheard around Moray

and Ainslie Places, and even in Charlotte Square, we cannot charge our

memory with an audit of their bray. In the sunk story immediately below

that again, that distinguished officer on half-pay, Captain Campbell of

the Highlanders--when on a visit to us for a year or two--though we

seldom saw him--got up a _Sma' still_--and though a more harmless

creature could not be, there he used to sit for hours together, with the

worm that never dies. On one occasion, it having been supposed by Peter

that the Captain had gone to the East Neuk of Fife, weeks elapsed, we

remember, ere he was found sitting dead, just as if he had been alive,

in his usual attitude in his arm-chair, commanding a view of the

precipice of the back court.

Just as quiet are the Attics. They, too, are furnished; for the feeling

of there being one unfurnished room, however small, in the largest

house, disturbs the entire state of mind of such an occupant, and when

cherished and dwelt on, which it must not unfrequently be, inspires a

cold air of desolation throughout the domicile, till "thoughts of

flitting rise." There is no lumber-room. The room containing

Blue-Beard's murdered wives might in idea be entered without distraction

by a bold mind.--But oh! the lumber-room, into which, on an early walk

through the house of a friend on whom we had been sorning, all

unprepared did we once set our foot! From the moment--and it was but for

a moment, and about six o'clock--far away in the country--that appalling

vision met our eyes--till we found ourselves, about another six o'clock,

in Moray Place, we have no memory of the flight of time. Part of the

journey--or voyage--we suspect, was performed in a steamer. The noise of

knocking, and puffing, and splashing seems to be in our inner ears; but

after all it may have been a sail-boat, possibly a yacht!--In the Attics

an Aviary open to the sky. And to us below, the many voices, softened

into one sometimes in the pauses of severer thought, are sometimes very

affecting, so serenely sweet it seems, as the laverock's in our youth at

the gates of heaven.

At our door stand the Guardian Genii, Sleep and Silence. We had an ear

to them in the building of our house, and planned it after a long summer

day's perusal of the "Castle of Indolence." O Jemmy Thomson! Jemmy

Thomson!--O that thou and we had been rowers in the same boat on the

silent river! Rowers, indeed! Short the spells and far between that we

should have taken--the one would not have turned round the other, but

when the oar chanced to drop out of his listless hand--and the canoe

would have been allowed to drift with the stream, unobservant we of our

backward course, and wondering and then ceasing to wonder at the

slow-receding beauty of the hanging banks of grove--the cloud-mountains,

immovable as those of earth, and in spirit one world.

Ay! Great noise as we have made in the world--our heart's desire is for

silence--its delight is in peace. And is it not so with all men,

turbulent as may have been their lives, who have ever looked into their

own being? The soul longs for peace in itself; therefore, wherever it

discerns it, it rejoices in the image of which it seeks the reality. The

serene human countenance, the wide water sleeping in the moonlight, the

stainless marble-depth of the immeasurable heavens, reflect to it that

tranquillity which it imagines within itself, though it never long dwelt

there, restless as a dove on a dark tree that cannot be happy but in the

sunshine. It loves to look on what it loves, even though it cannot

possess it; and hence its feeling, on contemplating such calm, is not of

simple repose, but desire stirs in it, as if it would fain blend itself

more deeply with the quiet it beholds! The sleep of a desert would not

so affect it; it is Beauty that makes the difference--that attracts

spirit to matter, while spirit becomes not thereby materialised--but

matter spiritualised; and we fluctuate in the air-boat of imagination

between earth and heaven. In most and in all great instances there is

apprehension, dim and faint, or more distinct, of pervasion of a spirit

throughout that which we conceive Beautiful. Stars, the moon, the deep

bright ether, waters, the rainbow, a pure lovely flower--none of them

ever appear to us, or are believed by us to be mere physical and

unconscious dead aggregates of atoms. That is what they are; but we

could have no pleasure in them, if we knew them as such. There is

illusion, then, of some sort, and to what does it amount? We cannot well

tell. But if there is really a love in human hearts to these distant

orbs--if there is an emotion of tenderness to the fair, opening,

breathing blossom that we would not crush it--"in gentleness of heart

touch, for there is a spirit in the leaves"--it must be that we do not

see them as they are, but "create a soul under the ribs of death." We

could not be touched, or care for what has no affinity to ourselves--we

make the affinity--we animate, we vivify them, and thenceforward,

"Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus,

Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet."

Now you do believe that we do love Silence--and every other thing worthy

to be loved--you and yours--and even that romp, your shock-headed Coz,

to whom Priscilla Tomboy was an Imogen.

All our ceilings are deadened--we walk ankle-deep in carpeting--nobody

is suffered to open a door but ourselves--and they are so constructed,

that it is out of their power to _slam_. Our winter furniture is all

massy--deepening the repose. In all the large rooms two fireplaces--and

fires are kept perpetually burning day and night, in them all, which,

reflected from spacious mirrors, give the mansion quite the appearance

of a Pandemonium. _Not gas always._ Palm-oil burns scentless as

moonlight; and when motion, not rest, in a place is signified, we

accompany ourselves with a wax candle, or taper from time immemorial

green. Yet think not that there is a blaze of light. We have seen the

midnight heaven and earth nearly as bright, with but one moon and a

small scatter of stars. And places of glimmer--and places of gloom--and

places "deaf to sound and blind to light" there are in this our mansion,

known but to ourselves--cells--penitentiaries--where an old man may sit

sighing and groaning, or stupified in his misery--or at times almost

happy. So senseless, and worse than senseless, seems then all mortal

tribulation and anguish, while the self-communing soul is assured, by

its own profound responses, that "whatever is, is best."

And thus is our domicile a domain--a kingdom. We should not care to be

confined to it all the rest of our days. Seldom, indeed, do we leave our

own door--yet call on us, and ten to one you hear us in winter chirping

like a cricket, or in summer like a grasshopper. We have the whole range

of the house to ourselves, and many an Excursion make we on the Crutch.

Ascending and descending the wide-winding stair-cases, each broad step

not above two inches high, we find ourselves on spacious landing-places

illumined by the dim religious light of stained windows, on which

pilgrims, and palmers, and prophets, single or in pairs or troops, are

travelling on missions through glens or forests or by sea-shores--or

shepherd piping in the shade, or poet playing with the tangles of

Neæra's hair. We have discovered a new principle on which, within narrow

bounds, we have constructed Panoramic Dioramas, that show splendid

segments of the great circle of the world. We paint all of them

ourselves--now a Poussin, now a Thomson, now a Claude, now a Turner, now

a Rubens, now a Danby, now a Salvator, now a Maclise.

Most people, nay, we suspect all people but ourselves, make a point of

sleeping in the same bed (that is awkwardly expressed) all life through;

and out of that bed many of them avow their inability to "bow an eye;"

such is the power of custom, of habit, of use and wont, over weary

mortals even in the blessing of sleep. No such slavish fidelity do we

observe towards any one bed of the numerous beds in our mansion. No one

dormitory is entitled to plume itself, in the pride of its heart, on

being peculiarly Ours; nor is any one suffered to sink into despondency

from being debarred the privilege of contributing to Our repose. They

are all furnished, if not luxuriously, comfortably in the extreme; in

number, nine--each, of course, with its two dressing-rooms--those on the

same story communicating with one another, and with the parlours,

drawing-rooms, and libraries--"a mighty maze, but not without a plan,"

and all harmoniously combined by one prevailing and pervading spirit of

quietude by day and by night, awake or asleep--the chairs being

couch-like, the couches bed-like, the beds, whether tent or canopy,

enveloped in a drapery of dreams.

We go to bed at no stated hour--but when we are tired of sitting up,

then do we lie down; at any time of the night or the day; and we rise,

neither with the lark, nor the swallow, nor the sparrow, nor the cock,

nor the owl, nor the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, nor Lucifer, nor

Aurora, but with Christopher North. Yellow, or green, or blue, or

crimson, or fawn, or orange, or pinky light salutes our eyes, as sleep's

visionary worlds recede and relapse into airy nothing, and as we know of

a certainty that _these_ are real web-and-woof damask curtains, _that_

flock palpable on substantial walls.

True wisdom soon accommodates itself even to involuntary or inevitable

change--but to that which flows from our own sweet will, however sudden

and strong, it instantly moulds itself in a novel delight, with all its

familiar and domestic habits. Why, we have not been in 99 Moray Place

for a week--nay, not for two days and nights--till you might swear we

had been all our life a Cit, we look so like a Native. The rustic air of

the Lodge has entirely left us, and all our movements are metropolitan.

You see before you a Gentleman of the Old School, who knows that the

eyes of the town are upon him when he seeks the open air, and who

preserves, even in the privacy of the parlour, that dignity of dress and

demeanour which, during winter, befits his age, his rank, and his

character. Now, we shave every morning; John, who in his boyish days

served under Barbarossa, lightly passes the comb through our "sable

silvered;" and then, in our shawl dressing-gown, we descend about ten to

our study, and sit, not unstately, beside the hissing urn at our

protracted breakfast. In one little month or less, "or ere our shoes are

old," we feel as if we had belonged to _this_ house alone, and it to us,

from our birth. The Lodge is seen to be standing in its stillness, far

away! Dear memories of the pensive past now and then come floating upon

the cheerful present--like birds of fairest plumage floating far inland

from the main. But there is no idle longing--no vain regret. This, we

say, is true wisdom. For each scene and season--each pleasure and

place--ought to be trusted to itself in the economy of human life, and

to be allowed its own proper power over our spirit. People in the

country are often restless to return to town--and people in town unhappy

till they rush away into the country--thus cheating their entire

existence out of its natural calm and satisfaction. Not so we. We give

both their due--and that due is an almost undivided delight in each

while we live under its reign. For Nature, believe us, is no jealous

mistress. She is an affectionate wife, who, being assured of his

fidelity, is not afraid to trust her husband out of her sight,

"When still the town affairs do call him thence,"

and who waits with cheerful patience for his return, duly welcomed with

a conjugal shower of smiles and kisses.

But what is this we see before us? Winter--we declare--and in full fig

with his powdered wig! On the mid-day of November, absolutely snow! a

full, fair, and free fall of indisputable snow.

Not the slightest idea had we, the day before, that a single flake had

yet been formed in the atmosphere, which, on closing of our shutters,

looked through the clear-obscure, indicative of a still night and a

bright morning. But we had not seen the moon. She, we are told by an

eyewitness, early in the evening, _stared_ from the south-east, "through

the misty horizontal air," with a face of portentous magnitude and

brazen hue, symptomatic, so weatherwise seers do say, of the approach of

the Snow-king. On such occasions it requires all one's astronomical

science to distinguish between sun and moon; for then sister resembles

brother in that wan splendour, and you wonder for a moment, as the large

beamless orb (how unlike Dian's silver bow!) is in ascension, what can

have brought the lord of day, at this untimeous hour, from his sea-couch

behind the mountains of the west. Yet during the night-calm we suspected

snow--for the hush of the heavens had that downy feel, to our

half-sleeping fancy, that belongs to the eider-pillow in which

disappears our aged, honoured, and un-nightcap'd head. Looking out by

peep of day--rather a ghostlike appearance in our long night-shirt,

which trails a regal train--we beheld the fair feathers dimly descending

through the glimmer, while momently the world kept whitening and

whitening, till we knew not our home-returning white cat on what was

yesterday the back-_green_, but by the sable tail that singularly shoots

from the rump of that phenomenon. We were delighted. Into the cold

plunge-bath we played plop like a salmon--and came out as red as a cut

of that incomparable fish. One ply of leather--one of flannel--and one

of the linen fine; and then the suit of pepper-and-salt over all; and

you behold us welcoming, hailing, and blessing the return of day. Frost,

too, felt at the finger and toe tips--and in unequivocal true-blue at

the point, Pensive Public, of thy Grecian or Roman nose. Furs, at once,

are all the rage; the month of muffs has come; and round the neck of

Eve, and every one of all her daughters, is seen harmlessly coiling a

boa-constrictor. On their lovely cheeks the Christmas roses are already

in full blow, and the heart of Christopher North sings aloud for joy.

Furred, muffed, and boa'd, Mrs Gentle adventures abroad in the blast;

and, shouldering his Crutch, the rough, ready, and ruddy old man shows

how widows are won, whispers in that delicate ear of the publication of

bans, and points his gouty toe towards the hymeneal altar. In the

bracing air, his frame is strung like Paganini's fiddle, and he is felt

to be irresistible in the _piggicato_. "Lord of his presence, and small

land beside," what cares he even for a knight of the Guelphic order? On

his breast shines a star--may it never prove a cross--beyond bestowal by

king or kaisar; nor is Maga's self jealous or envious of these wedded

loves. And who knows but that ere another November snow sheets the

Shotts, a curious little Kit, with the word North distinctly traceable

in blue letters on the whites of his eyes, may not be playing antics on

his mother's knee, and with the true Tory face in miniature, smiling

upon the guardian of the merry fellow's own and his country's

constitution?

What kind of a Winter--we wonder--are we to have in the way of wind and

weather? We trust it will be severe. As summer set in with his usual

severity, Winter must not be behindhand with him; but after an

occasional week's rain of a commendably boisterous character, must come

out in full fig of frost. He has two suits which we greatly admire,

combining the splendour of a court-dress with the strength of a work-day

garb--we mean his garments of black and his garments of white frost. He

looks best in the former, we think, on to about Christmas--and the

latter become the old gentleman well from that festival season, on to

about the day sacred to a class of persons who will never read our

Recreations.

Of all the months of the year, November--in our climate--whether in town

or country, bears the worst character. He is almost universally thought

to be a sour, sulky, sullen, savage, dim, dull, dark, disconsolate, yet

designing month--in fewer words, a month scarcely fit to live. Abhorring

all personalities, we repent having sometimes given in to this national

abuse of November. We know him well--and though we admit at once that he

is no beauty, and that his manners are at the best bluff, at the worst

repulsive, yet on those who choose to cultivate his acquaintance, his

character continues so to mellow and ameliorate itself, that they come

at last, if not to love, to like him, and even to prefer his company "in

the season of the year," to that of other more brilliant visitors. So

true is it with months and men, that it requires only to know the most

unpleasant of them, and to see them during a favourable phasis, in order

to regard them with that Christian complacency which a good heart sheds

over all its habits. 'Tis unlucky for November--poor fellow!--that he

follows October. October is a month so much admired by the world, that

we often wonder he has not been spoiled. "What a glorious October!"

"Why, you will surely not leave us till October comes!" "October is the

month of all months--and, till you see him, you have not seen the

Lakes." We acknowledge his claims. He is often truly delightful; but,

like other brilliant persons, thinks himself not only privileged to be

at times extremely dull, but his intensest stupidity is panegyrised as

wit of the first water--while his not unfrequent rudeness, of which many

a common month would be ashamed, passes for the ease of high birth or

the eccentricity of genius. A very different feeling indeed exists

towards unfortunate November. The moment he shows his face, all other

faces are glum. We defy month or man, under such a trial, to make

himself even tolerably agreeable. He feels that he is no favourite, and

that a most sinister misinterpretation will be put on all his motions,

manners, thoughts, words, and deeds. A man or a month so circumstanced

is much to be pitied. Think, look, speak, act as he will--yea, even more

like an angel than a man or a month--every eyebrow arches--every nostril

distends--every lip curls towards him in contempt, while blow over the

ice that enchains all his feelings and faculties, heavy-chill

whisperings of "who is that disagreeable fellow?" In such a frozen

atmosphere, eloquence would be congealed on the lips of an

Ulysses--Poetry prosified on those of an Apollo.

Edinburgh, during the dead of Summer, is a far more solitary place than

Glenetive, Glenevis, or Glenco. There is not, however, so much danger of

being lost in it as in the Moor of Rannoch--for streets and squares,

though then utterly tenantless, are useful as landmarks to the pilgrim

passing through what seems to be

"A still forsaken City of the Dead!"

But, like a frost-bound river suddenly dissolved by a strong thaw, and

coming down in spate from the mountains to the low lands, about the

beginning of November life annually re-overflows our metropolis, with a

noise like "the rushing of many chariots." The streets, that for months

had been like the stony channels of dried-up streams--only not quite so

well paved--are again all a-murmur, and people addicted to the study of

political economy begin to hold

"Each strange tale devoutly true"

in the Malthusian theory of population. What swarms keep hovering round

the great Northern Hive! Add eke after eke to the skep, and still seems

it too small to contain all the insects. Edinburgh is almost as large as

London. Nay, don't stare! We speak comparatively; and as England is

somewhere about six times more populous than Scotland, you may, by

brushing up your arithmetic, and applying to the Census, discover that

we are not so far wrong in our apparent paradox.

Were November in himself a far more wearifu' month than he is, Edinburgh

would nevertheless be gladsome in the midst of all his gloom, even as a

wood in May with the Gathering of the Clans. The country flows into the

town--all its life seems to do so--and to leave nothing behind but the

bare trees and hedges. Equipages again go glittering along all the

streets, squares, circuses, and crescents; and one might think that the

entire "nation of ladies and gentlemen"--for King George the Fourth, we

presume, meant to include the sex in his compliment--were moving through

their metropolis. Amusement and business walk hand-in-hand--you hardly

know, from their cheerful countenances, which is which; for the Scots,

though a high-cheeked, are not an ill-favoured folk in their

features--and though their mouths are somewhat of the widest, their

teeth are white as well as sharp, and on the opening of their ruddy

lips, their ivory-cases are still further brightened by hearty smiles.

'Twould be false to say that their figures are distinguished by an air

of fashion--for we have no court, and our nobles are almost all

absentees. But though, in one sense, the men are ugly customers, as they

will find

"Who chance to tread upon their freeborn toe,"

yet, literally, they are a comely crew, and if formed into battalions in

marching order, would make the National Guard in Paris look like

"That small infantry

Warr'd on by cranes."

Our females have figures that can thaw any frost; and 'tis universally

allowed that they walk well, though their style of pedestrianism does

not so readily recall to the imagination Virgil's picture of Camilla

flying along the heads of corn without touching their ears, as the

images of paviers with post-looking mallets driving down dislodged

stones into the streets. Intermingling with the lighter and more elastic

footsteps of your Southron dames, the ongoings of our native virgins

produce a pleasant variety of motion in the forenoon mêlée that along

the Street of Princes now goes nodding in the sun-glint.

"Amid the general dance and minstrelsy"

who would wear a long face, unless it were in sympathy with his length

of ears? A din of multitudinous joy hums in the air; you cannot see the

city for the houses, its inhabitants for the people; and as for finding

one particular acquaintance in the crowd, why, to use an elegant simile,

you might as well go search for a needle in a bottle of hay.

But hark! a hollow sound, distant, and as yet referred to no distinct

place--then a faint mixture of a clear chime that is almost music--now a

tune--and at last, rousing the massy multitude to enthusiasm, a military

march, swelling various, profound, and high, with drum, trombone,

serpent, trump, clarionet, fife, flute, and cymbal, bringing slowly on

(is it the measured tramp of the feet of men, or the confused trampling

of horses?) banners floating over the procession, above the glitter of

steel, and the golden glow of helmets. 'Tis a regiment of

cavalry--hurra! the Carbineers! What an Advanced Guard!

"There England sends her men, of men the chief,"

still, staid, bold, bronzed faces, with keen eyes, looking straight

forward from between sabres; while beneath the equable but haughty

motion of their steeds, almost disciplined as their riders, with long

black horse-hair flowing in martial majesty, nod their high Roman

casques. The sweet storm of music has been passing by while we were

gazing, and is now somewhat deadened by the retiring distance and by

that mass of buildings (how the windows are alive, and agaze with

faces!) while troop after troop comes on, still moving, it is felt by

all, to the motion of the warlike tune, though now across the Waterloo

Bridge sounding like an echo, till the glorious war-pageant is all gone

by, and the dull day is deadened down again into the stillness and

silence of an ignoble peace.

"Now all the youth of Scotland are on fire!"

All her cities and towns are rejoicing in the welcome Winter; and mind,

invigorated by holidays, is now at work, like a giant refreshed, in all

professions. The busy bar growls, grumphs, squeaks, like an old sow with

a litter of pigs pretending to be quarrelling about straws. Enter the

Outer or the Inner House, and you hear eloquence that would have put

Cicero to the blush, and reduced Demosthenes to his original stutter.

The wigs of the Judges seem to have been growing during the long

vacation, and to have expanded into an ampler wisdom. Seldom have we

seen a more solemn set of men. Every one looks more _gash_ than another,

and those three in the centre seem to us the embodied spirits of Law,

Equity, and Justice. What can be the meaning of all this endless

litigation? On what immutable principles in human nature depends the

prosperity of the Fee-fund? Life is strife. Inestimable the blessing of

the great institution of Property! For without it, how could people go

together by the ears, as if they would tear one another to pieces? All

the strong, we must not call them bad passions, denied their natural

element, would find out some channels to run in, far more destructive to

the commonweal than lawsuits, and the people would be reduced to the

lowest ebb of misery, and raised to the highest flow of crime. Our

Parliament House here is a vast safety-valve for the escape of the foul

steam that would otherwise explode and shatter the engine of the State,

blowing the body and members of society to smash. As it is, how the

engine works! There it goes! like Erickson's Novelty or Stephenson's

Rocket along a railroad; and though an accident may occur now and then,

such as an occasional passenger chucked by some uncalculated collision

into the distant horizon, to be picked up whole, or in fragments, by the

hoers in some turnip-field in the adjacent county, yet few or none are

likely to be fatal on a great scale; and on goes the Novelty or Rocket,

like a thought, with many weighty considerations after it, in the shape

of waggons of Christians or cottons, while Manufactures and Commerce

exult in the cause of Liberty and Locomotion all over the world.

But to us utter idlesse is perfect bliss. And why? Because, like a lull

at sea, or _lown_ on land, it is felt to descend from Heaven on man's

toilsome lot. The lull and the lown, what are they when most profound,

but the transient cessation of the restlessness of winds and waters--a

change wrought for an hour of peace in the heart of the hurricane!

Therefore the sailor enjoys it on the green wave--the shepherd on the

greensward; while the memory of mists and storms deepens the

enchantment. Even so, Idlesse can be enjoyed but by those who are

permitted to indulge it, while enduring the labours of an active or a

contemplative life. To use another, and a still livelier image--see the

pedlar toiling along the dusty road, with an enormous pack, on his

excursion; and when off his aching shoulders slowly falls back on the

bank the loosened load, in blessed relief think ye not that he enjoys,

like a very poet, the beauty of the butterflies that, wavering through

the air, settle down on the wildflowers around him that embroider the

wayside! Yet our pedlar is not so much either of an entomologist or a

botanist as not to take out his scrip, and eat his bread and cheese with

a mute prayer and a munching appetite--not idle, it must be confessed,

in that sense--but in every other idle even as the shadow of the

sycamore, beneath which, with his eyes half-open--for by hypothesis he

is a Scotsman--he finally sinks into a wakeful, but quiet half-sleep.

"Hallo! why are you sleeping there, you _idle_ fellow?" bawls some

beadle, or some overseer, or some magistrate, or perhaps merely one of

those private persons who, out of season and in season, are constantly

sending the sluggard to the ant to learn wisdom--though the ant, Heaven

bless her! at proper times sleeps as sound as a sick-nurse.

We are now the idlest, because once were we the most industrious of men.

Up to the time that we engaged to take an occasional glance over the

self-growing sheets of The Periodical, we were tied to one of the oars

that move along the great vessel of life; and we believe that it was

allowed by all the best watermen, that

"We feather'd our oars with skill and dexterity."

But ever since we became an Editor, our repose, bodily and mental, has

been like that of a Hindoo god. Often do we sit whole winter nights,

leaning back on our chair, more like the image of a man than a man

himself, with shut eyes, that keep seeing in succession all the things

that ever happened to us, and all the persons that we ever loved, hated,

or despised, embraced, beat, or insulted, since we were a little boy.

They too have all an image-like appearance, and 'tis wondrous strange

how silent they all are, actors and actresses on the stage of that

revived drama, which sometimes seems to be a genteel comedy, and

sometimes a broad farce, and then to undergo dreadful transfiguration

into a tragedy deep as death.

We presume that the Public read in her own papers--we cannot be but hurt

that no account of it has appeared in the "Court Journal"--that on

Thursday the 12th current, No. 99 Moray Place was illuminated by our

annual Soireé, Conversazione, Rout, Ball, and Supper. A Ball! yes--for

Christopher North, acting in the spirit of his favourite James

Thomson,--

"No purpose gay,

Amusement, dance, or song he sternly scorns;

For happiness and true philosophy

Are of the social, still, and smiling kind."

All the rooms in the house were thrown open, except the cellars and the

Sanctum. To the people congregated outside, the building, we have been

assured, had all the brilliancy of the Bude Light. It was like a palace

of light, of which the framework or skeleton was of white unveined

marble. So strong was the reflection on the nocturnal heavens, that a

rumour ran through the City that there was a great fire in Moray Place,

nor did it subside till after the arrival and departure of several

engines. The alarm of some huge conflagration prevailed during most part

of the night all over the kingdom of Fife; while, in the Lothians, our

illumination was much admired as an uncommonly fine specimen of the

Aurora Borealis.

"From the arch'd roof,

Pendent by subtle magic, many a row

Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed

With naphtha and asphaltus, yielded light

As from a sky. The hasty multitude

Admiring enter'd."

We need not say who received the company, and with what grace SHE did

so, standing at the first landing-place of the great staircase in sable

stole; for the widow's weeds have not _yet_ been doffed for the robes of

saffron--with a Queen-Mary cap pointed in the front of her serene and

ample forehead, and, to please us, a few pearls sprinkled among her

hair, still an unfaded auburn, and on her bosom one star-bright diamond.

Had the old General himself come to life again, and beheld her then and

there, he could not have been offended with such simple ornaments. The

weeds he would have felt due to him, and all that his memory was fairly

entitled to; but the flowers--to speak figuratively--he would have

cheerfully acknowledged were due to us, and that they well became both

face and figure of his lovely relict. As she moved from one room to

another, showering around her serene smiles, we felt the dignity of

those Virgilian words,

"Incedit Regina."

Surely there is something very poetical in the gradual flowing in of the

tide of grace, elegance, and beauty, over the floors of a suite of

regal-looking rooms, splendidly illuminated. Each party as it comes on

has its own peculiar picturesqueness, and affects the heart or

imagination by some novel charm, gently gliding onward a little while by

itself, as if not unconscious of its own attractions, nor unproud of the

gaze of perhaps critical admiration that attends its progressive

movement. We confess ourselves partial to plumes of feathers above the

radiant braidings of the silken tresses on the heads of virgins and

matrons--provided they be not "dumpy women"--tall, white, blue, and pink

plumes, silent in their wavings as gossamer, and as finely delicate,

stirred up by your very breath as you bend down to salute their

cheeks--not with kisses--for they would be out of order both of time and

place--but with words almost as tender as kisses, and awakening almost

as tender a return--a few sweet syllables breathed in a silver voice,

with blushing cheeks, and downcast eyes that, when again uplifted, are

seen to be from heaven.

A long hour ago, and all the mansion was empty and motionless--with us

two alone sitting by each other's side affectionately and respectfully

on a sofa. Now it is filled with life, and heard you ever such a happy

murmur? Yet no one in particular looks as if he or she were speaking

much above breath, so gentle is true refinement, like a delightful

fragrance

"From the calm manners quietly exhaled."

Oh! the atrocious wickedness of a great, big, hearty, huge, hulking,

horse-laugh, in an assemblage of ladies and gentlemen, gathered

gracefully together to enjoy the courtesies, the amenities, the

urbanities, and the humanities of cultivated Christian life! The pagan

who perpetrates it should be burnt alive--not at a slow fire--though

that would be but justice--but at a quick one--that all remnants of him

and his enormity may be instantly extinguished. Lord Chesterfield has

been loudly laughed at with leathern lungs for his anathema against

laughter. But though often wrong, there his lordship was right, and for

that one single rule of manners he deserves a monument, as having been

one of the benefactors of his species. Let smiles mantle--and that

sweet, soft, low sound be heard, the _susurrus_. Let there be a

many-voiced quiet music, like that of the summer moonlight sea when the

stars are in its breast. But laughter--loud peals of laughter--are like

breakers--blind breakers on a blind coast, where no verdure grows except

that of tangle, and whatever is made into that vulgarist of all

commodities, kelp.

'Tis not a literary conversazione, mind ye, gentle reader; for we leave

that to S. T. Coleridge, the Monarch of the Monologue. But all

speak--talk--whisper--or smile, of all the speakable, talkable,

whisperable, and smileable little interesting affairs, incidents, and

occurrences, real or fabulous, of public, private, demi-public, or

demi-semi-private life. Topics are as plentiful as snow-flakes, and melt

away as fast in the stream of social pleasure,

"A moment white, then gone for ever!"

Not a little scandal--much gossip, we daresay; but as for scandal, it

is the vulgarest error in the world to think that it either means, or

does any harm to any mortal. It does infinite good. It ventilates the

atmosphere, and prevents the "golden-fretted vault" from becoming "a

foul congregation of vapours." As for gossip, what other vindication

does it need, than an order for you to look at a soirée of swallows in

September on a slate-roof, the most innocent and white-breasted

creatures that pay

"Their annual visits round the globe,

Companions of the sun,"

but such gossipers that the whole air is a-twitter with their talk about

their neighbours' nest--when--whew! off and away they go, winnowing

their way westwards, through the setting sunlight, and all in perfect

amity with themselves and their kind, while

"The world is all before them, where to choose,

And Providence their guide."

And, madam, you do not matronise--and, sir, you do not

patronise--_waltzing_? 'Tis very O fie-fieish, you think--and in danger

of becoming very, very faux-papa-ish!

"Oh! the great goodness of the knights of old,"

whose mind-motto was still--

"_Honi soit qui mal y pense!_"

Judging by ourselves, 'tis a wicked world we unwillingly confess; but be

not terrified at trifles, we beseech you, and be not gross in your

censure of innocent and delicate delights. Byron's exquisitely sensitive

modesty was shocked by the sight of waltzing, which he would not have

suffered the Guiccioli, while she was in his keeping, to have indulged

in even with her own husband. Thus it is that sinners see sin only where

it is not--and shut their eyes to it when it comes upon them open-armed,

bare-bosomed, and brazen-faced, and clutches them in a grasp more like

the hug of a bear than the embrace of a woman. Away with such mawkish

modesty and mouthing morality--for 'tis the slang of the hypocrite.

Waltzing does our old eyes good to look on it, when the whole Circling

Flight goes gracefully and airily on its orbit, and we think we see the

realisation of that picture (we are sad misquoters) when the Hours--

"Knit by the Graces and the Loves in dance,

Lead on the eternal spring!"

But the Circling Flight breaks into airy fragments, the Instrumental

Band is hushed, and so is the whole central Drawing-room; for,

blushingly obedient to the old man's beck, THE STAR OF EVE--so call we

her who is our heart's-ease and heart's-delight--the granddaughter of

one whom hopelessly we loved in youth, yet with no unreturned

passion--but

"The course of true love never yet ran smooth"--

comes glidingly to our side, and having heard our wish breathed

whisperingly into her ear--a rare feature when small, thin, and delicate

as a leaf--just as glidingly she goes, in stature that is almost

stateliness, towards her Harp, and assuming at once a posture that would

have charmed Canova, after a few prelusive touches that betray the hand

of a mistress in the divine art, to the enchantment of the white motions

of those graceful arms and fingers fine, awakes a spirit in the strings

accordant to the spirit in that voice worthy to have blended with St

Cecilia's in her hymning orisons. A Hebrew melody! And now your heart

feels the utter mournfulness of these words,

"By Babel's streams we sat and wept!"

How sudden, yet how unviolent, the transitions among all our feelings!

Under no other power so swift and so soft as that of Music. The soul

that sincerely loves Music, offers at no time the slightest resistance

to her sway, but yields itself up entirely to all its moods and

measures, led captive by each successive strain through the whole

mysterious world of modulated air. Not a smile over all that hush.

Entranced in listening, they are all still as images. A sigh--almost a

sob--is heard, and there is shedding of tears. The sweet singer's self

seems as if she felt all alone at some solitary shrine--

"Her face, oh! call it fair, not pale!"

Yet pale now it is, as if her heart almost died within her at the

pathos of her own beautiful lament in a foreign land, and lovelier in

her captivity never was the fairest of the daughters of Zion!

How it howls! That was a very avalanche. The snow-winds preach charity

to all who have roofs overhead--towards the houseless and them who

huddle round hearths where the fire is dying or dead. Those blankets

must have been a God-send indeed to not a few families, and your plan is

preferable to a Fancy-Fair. Yet that is good too--nor do we find fault

with them who dance for the Destitute. We sanction amusements that give

relief to misery--and the wealthy may waltz unblamed for behoof of the

poor.

Again, what a howling in the chimney! What a blattering on the windows,

and what a cannonading on the battlements! What can the night be about?

and what has put old Nox into such a most outrageous passion? He has

driven our Winter Rhapsody clean out of our noddle--and to-morrow we

must be sending for the slater, the plumber, and the glazier. To go to

bed in such a hurly-burly, would be to make an Ultra-Toryish

acknowledgment, not only of the divine right, but of the divine power of

King Morpheus. But an Ultra-Tory we are not--though Ultra-Trimmers try

to impose upon themselves that fiction among a thousand others; so we

shall smoke a cigar, and let sleep go to the dogs, the deuce, the devil,

and the Chartists.

STROLL TO GRASSMERE.

FIRST SAUNTER.

Companion of the Crutch! hast thou been a loving observer of the weather

of our island-clime? We do not mean to ask if you have from youth been

in the daily practice of rising from your study-chair at regular

intervals, and ascertaining the precise point of Mercury's elevation on

the barometrical scale. The idea of trusting, throughout all the

fluctuations of the changeful and capricious atmosphere in which we

live, to quicksilver, is indeed preposterous; and we have long noticed

that meteorologists make an early figure in our obituaries. Seeing the

head of the god above the mark "fair," or "settled," out they march in

thins, without great-coat or umbrella, when such a thunder-plump falls

down in a deluge, that, returning home by water and steam, they take to

bed, and on the ninth day fever hurries them off, victims to their

confidence in that treacherous tube. But we mean to ask have you an eye,

an ear, and a sixth sense, anonymous and instinctive, for all the

prognosticating sights and sounds, and motions and shapes, of nature?

Have you studied, in silence and solitude, the low, strange, and

spirit-like whisperings, that often, when bird and bee are mute, come

and go, here and there, now from crag, now from coppice, and now from

moor, all over the sultry stillness of the clouded landscape? Have you

listened among mountains to the voice of streams, till you heard them

prophesying change? Have you so mastered the occult science of mists, as

that you can foretell each proud or fair Emergency, and the hour when

grove, precipice, or plain, shall in sudden revelation be clothed with

the pomp of sunshine? Are all Bewick's birds, and beasts, and fishes

visible to your eyes in the woods, wastes, and waves of the clouds? And

know ye what aerial condor, dragon, and whale, respectively portend? Are

the Fata Morgana as familiar to you as the Aberdeen Almanac? When a

mile-square hover of crows darkens air and earth, or settling loads

every tree with sable fruitage, are you your own augur, equally as when

one raven lifts up his hoary blackness from a stone, and sails sullenly

off with a croak, that gets fiercer and more savage in the lofty

distance? Does the leaf of the forest twinkle futurity? the lonely

lichen brighten or pale its lustre with change? Does not the gift of

prophecy dwell with the family of the violets and the lilies? The

prescient harebells, do they not let drop their closing blossoms when

the heavens are niggard of their dews, or uphold them like cups thirsty

for wine, when the blessing, yet unfelt by duller animal life, is

beginning to drop balmily down from the rainy cloud embosomed in the

blue of a midsummer's meridian day?

Forgive these friendly interrogatories. Perhaps you are weather-wiser

than ourselves; yet for not a few years we bore the name of "The Man of

the Mountains;" and, though no great linguists, we hope that we know

somewhat more than the vocabulary of the languages of calm and storm.

Remember that we are now at Ambleside--and one week's residence there

may let you into some of the secrets of the unsteady Cabinet of St

Cloud.

One advice we give you, and by following it you cannot fail to be happy

at Ambleside, and everywhere else. Whatever the weather be, love,

admire, and delight in it, and vow that you would not change it for the

atmosphere of a dream. If it be close, hot, oppressive, be thankful for

the faint air that comes down fitfully from cliff and chasm, or the

breeze that ever and anon gushes from stream and lake. If the heavens

are filled with sunshine, and you feel the vanity of parasols, how cool

the sylvan shade for ever moistened by the murmurs of that fairy

waterfall! Should it blow great guns, cannot you take shelter in yonder

magnificent fort, whose hanging battlements are warded even from the

thunder-bolt by the dense umbrage of unviolated woods?

Rain--rain--rain--an even-down pour of rain, that forces upon you

visions of Noah and his ark, and the top of Mount Ararat--still, we

beseech you, be happy. It cannot last long at that rate; the thing is

impossible. Even this very afternoon will the rainbow span the blue

entrance into Rydal's woody vale, as if to hail the westering sun on

his approach to the mountains--and a hundred hill-born torrents will be

seen flashing out of the upfolding mists. What a delightful dazzle on

the light-stricken river! Each meadow shames the lustre of the emerald;

and the soul wishes not for language to speak the pomp and prodigality

of colours that Heaven now rejoices to lavish on the grove-girdled

Fairfield, who has just tossed off the clouds from his rocky crest.

You will not imagine, from anything we have ever said, that we are

enemies to early rising. Now and then, what purer bliss than to embrace

the new-wakened Morn, just as she is rising from her dewy bed! At such

hour, we feel as if there were neither physical nor moral evil in the

world. The united power of peace, innocence, and beauty subdues

everything to itself, and life is love.

Forgive us, loveliest of Mornings! for having overslept the assignation

hour, and allowed thee to remain all by thyself in the solitude,

wondering why thy worshipper could prefer to thy presence the fairest

phantoms that ever visited a dream. And thou hast forgiven us--for not

clouds of displeasure these that have settled on thy forehead: the

unreproaching light of thy countenance is upon us--a loving murmur

steals into our heart from thine--and pure as a child's, daughter of

Heaven! is thy breath.

In the spirit of that invocation we look around us, and as the idea of

morning dies, sufficient for our happiness is "the light of common

day"--the imagery of common earth. There has been rain during the

night--enough, and no more, to enliven nature--the mists are ascending

composedly with promise of gentle weather--and the sun, so mild that we

can look him in the face with unwinking eyes, gives assurance that as he

has risen so will he reign, and so will he set in peace.

Yet we cannot help thinking it somewhat remarkable, that, to the best of

our memory, never once were we the very first out into the dawn. We say

nothing of birds--for they, with their sweet jargoning, anticipate it,

and from their bed on the bough feel the forerunning warmth of the

sunrise; neither do we allude to hares, for they are "hirpling hame," to

sleep away the light hours, open-eyed, in the briery quarry in the

centre of the trackless wood. Even cows and horses we can excuse being

up before us, for they have bivouacked; and the latter, as they often

sleep standing, are naturally somnambulists. Weasels, too, we can pardon

for running across the road before us, and as they reach the

hole-in-the-wall, showing by their clear eyes that they have been awake

for hours, and have probably breakfasted on leveret. We have no spite at

chanticleer, nor the hooting owls against whom he is so lustily crowing

hours before the orient; nor do we care although we know that is not the

first sudden plunge of the tyrant trout into the insect cloud already

hovering over the tarn. But we confess that it is a little mortifying to

our pride of time and place, to meet an old beggar-woman, who from the

dust on her tattered brogues has evidently marched miles from her last

night's wayside howf, and who holds out her withered palm for charity,

at an hour when a cripple of fourscore might have been supposed sleeping

on her pallet of straw. A pedlar, too, who has got through a portion of

the Excursion before the sun has illumed the mountain-tops, is

mortifying, with his piled pack and ellwand. There, as we are a

Christian, is Ned Hurd, landing a pike on the margin of the Reed-pool,

on his way from Hayswater, where he has been all night angling, till his

creel is as heavy as a sermon; and a little further on, comes issuing

like a Dryad's daughter, from the gate in the lane, sweet little Alice

Elleray, with a basket dangling beneath her arm, going in her orphan

beauty to gather, in their season, wild strawberries or violets in the

woods.

Sweet orphan of Wood-edge! what would many a childless pair give for a

creature one-half so beautiful as thou, to break the stillness of a home

that wants but one blessing to make it perfectly happy! Yet there are

few or none to lay a hand on that golden head, or leave a kiss upon its

ringlets. The father of Alice Elleray was a wild and reckless youth,

and, going to the wars, died in a foreign land. Her mother soon faded

away of a broken heart;--and who was to care for the orphan child of the

forgotten friendless? An old pauper who lives in that hut, scarcely

distinguishable from the shielings of the charcoal-burners, was glad to

take her from the parish for a weekly mite that helps to eke out her own

subsistence. For two or three years the child was felt a burden by the

solitary widow; but ere she had reached her fifth summer, Alice Elleray

never left the hut without darkness seeming to overshadow it--never

entered the door without bringing the sunshine. Where can the small,

lonely creature have heard so many tunes, and airs, and snatches of old

songs--as if some fairy bird had taught her melodies of fairyland? She

is now in her tenth year, nor an idler in her solitude. Do you wish for

a flowery bracelet for the neck of a chosen one, whose perfumes may

mingle with the bosom-balm of her virgin beauty? The orphan of Wood-edge

will wreath it of blossoms cropt before the sun hath melted the dew on

leaf or petal. Will you be for carrying away with you to the far-off

city some pretty little sylvan toy, to remind you of Ambleside and

Rydal, and other beautiful names of beautiful localities near the lucid

waters of Windermere? Then, Lady! purchase, at little cost, from the

fair basket-maker, an ornament for your parlour, that will not disgrace

its fanciful furniture, and, as you sit at your dreamy needlework, will

recall the green forest glades of Brathy or Calgarth. Industrious

creature! each day is to thee, in thy simplicity, an entire life. All

thoughts, all feelings, arise and die in peace between sunrise and

sunset. What carest thou for being an orphan! knowing, as thou well

dost, that God is thy father and thy mother, and that a prayer to Him

brings health, food, and sleep to the innocent.

Letting drop a curtsy, taught by Nature, the mother of the Graces, Alice

Elleray, the orphan of Wood-edge, without waiting to be twice bidden,

trills, as if from a silver pipe, a wild, bird-like warble, that in its

cheerfulness has now and then a melancholy fall, and, at the close of

the song, hers are the only eyes that are not dimmed with the haze of

tears. Then away she glides with a thankful smile, and dancing over the

greensward, like an uncertain sunbeam, lays the treasure, won by her

beauty, her skill, and her industry, on the lap of her old guardian, who

blesses her with the uplifting of withered hands.

Meanwhile, we request you to walk away with us up to Stockgill-force.

There has been a new series of dry weather, to be sure; but to our

liking, a waterfall is best in a rainless summer. After a flood, the

noise is beyond all endurance. You get stunned and stupified till your

head splits. Then you may open your mouth like a barn-door--we are

speaking to you, sir--and roar into a friend's ear all in vain a remark

on the cataract. To him you are a dumb man. In two minutes you are as

completely drenched in spray as if you had fallen out of a boat--and

descend to dinner with a toothache that keeps you in starvation in the

presence of provender sufficient for a whole bench of bishops. In dry

weather, on the contrary, the waterfall is in moderation; and instead of

tumbling over the cliff in a perpetual peal of thunder, why, it slides

and slidders merrily and musically away down the green shelving rocks,

and sinks into repose in many a dim or lucid pool, amidst whose

foam-bells is playing or asleep the fearless Naiad. Deuce a headache

have you--speak in a whisper, and not a syllable of your excellent

observation is lost; your coat is dry, except that a few dewdrops have

been shook over you from the branches stirred by the sudden wing-clap of

the cushat--and as for toothache interfering with dinner, you eat as if

your tusks had been just sharpened, and would not scruple to discuss

nuts, upper-and-lower-jaw-work fashion, against the best crackers in the

county. And all this comes of looking at Stockgill-force, or any other

waterfall, in dry weather, after a few refreshing and fertilising

showers that make the tributary rills to murmur, and set at work a

thousand additional feeders to every Lake.