Ha! Matutine Roses!--budding, half-blown, consummate--you are, indeed,

in irresistible blush! We shall not say which of you we love best--_she

knows it_; but we see there is no hope to-day for the old man--for you

are all paired--and he must trudge it _solus_, in capacity of

Guide-General of the Forces. What! the nymphs are going to pony it? And

you intend, you selfish fellows, that we shall hold all the reins

whenever the spirit moveth you to deviate from bridle-path, to clamber

cliff for a bird's-eye view, or dive into dells for some rare plant?

Well, well--there is a tradition, that once we were young ourselves; and

so redolent of youth are these hills, that we are more than half

inclined to believe it--so blush and titter, and laugh and look down, ye

innocent wicked ones, each with her squire by her palfrey's mane, while

good old Christopher, like a true guide, keeps hobbling in the rear on

his Crutch. Holla there!--to the right of our friend Mr Benson's

smithy--and to Rothay-bridge. Turn in at a gate to the right hand,

which, twenty to one, you will find open, that the cattle may take an

occasional promenade along the turnpike, and cool their palates with a

little ditch grass, and saunter along by Millar-bridge and Foxgill on to

Pelter-bridge, and, if you please, to Rydal-mere. Thus, and thus only,

is seen the vale of Ambleside; and what a vale of grove, and glade, and

stream, and cliff, and cottage, and villa, and grassfield, and garden,

and orchard, and--But not another word, for you would forthwith compare

our description with the reality, and seeing it faint and feeble, would

toss it into the Rothay, and laugh as the Vol. plumped over a waterfall!

The sylvan--or say rather the forest scenery--(for there is to us an

indescribable difference between these two words)--of Rydal-park, was,

in memory of living men, magnificent, and it still contains a treasure

of old trees. Lady Diana's white pea-fowl, sitting on the limbs of that

huge old tree like creatures newly alighted from the Isles of Paradise!

all undisturbed by the waterfalls, which, as you keep gazing on the

long-depending plumage illumining the forest gloom, seem indeed to lose

their sound, and to partake the peace of that resplendent show--each

splendour a wondrous Bird! For they stretch themselves all up, with

their graceful crests, o'ercanopied by the umbrage draperied as from a

throne. And never surely were seen in this daylight world such

unterrestrial creatures--though come from afar, all happy as at home in

the Fairies' Oak.

By all means ride away into these woods, and lose yourself for half an

hour among the cooing of cushats, and the shrill shriek of startled

blackbirds, and the rustle of the harmless slow-worm among the last

year's red beech-leaves. No very great harm in a kiss under the shadow

of an oak (oh fie!) while the magpie chatters angrily at safe distance,

and the more innocent squirrel peeps down upon you from a bough of the

canopy, and, hoisting his tail, glides into the obscurity of the

loftiest umbrage. You still continue to see and hear; but the sight is a

glimmer, and the sound a hum, as if the forest-glade were swarming with

bees, from the ground-flowers to the herons' nests. Refreshed by your

dream of Dryads, follow a lonesome din that issues from a pile of wooded

cliffs, and you are led to a Waterfall. Five minutes are enough for

taking an impression, if your mind be of the right material, and you

carry it away with you further down the Forest. Such a torrent will not

reach the lake without disporting itself into many little cataracts; and

saw ye ever such a fairy one as that flowing through below an ivied

bridge into a circular basin overshadowed by the uncertain twilight of

many checkering branches, and washing the rook-base of a Hermitage, in

which a sin-sickened or pleasure-palled man might, before his hairs were

grey, forget all the gratifications and all the guilt of the noisy

world?

You are now all standing together in a group beside Ivy-cottage, the

river gliding below its wooden bridge from Rydal-mere. It is a perfect

model of such architecture--breathing the very spirit of Westmoreland.

The public road, skirted by its front paling, does not in the least

degree injure its character of privacy and retirement; so we think at

this dewy hour of prime, when the gossamer meets our faces, extended

from the honey-suckled slate-porch to the trees on the other side of the

turnpike. And see how the multitude of low-hanging roofs and gable-ends,

and dovecot-looking windows, steal away up a green and shrubberied

acclivity, and terminating in wooded rocks that seem part of the

building, in the uniting richness of ivy, lichens, moss-roses, broom,

and sweet-brier, murmuring with birds and bees, busy near hive and nest!

It would be extremely pleasant to breakfast in that deep-windowed room

on the ground-floor, on cream and barley cakes, eggs, coffee, and

dry-toast, with a little mutton-ham not too severely salted, and at the

conclusion, a nut-shell of Glenlivet or Cognac. But, Lord preserve ye!

it is not yet six o'clock in the morning; and what Christian kettle

simmereth before seven? Yes, my sweet Harriet, that sketch does you

credit, and it is far from being very unlike the original. Rather too

many chimneys by about half-a-dozen; and where did you find that steeple

immediately over the window marked "Dairy?" The pigs are somewhat too

sumptuously lodged in that elegant sty, and the hen-roost might

accommodate a phoenix. But the features of the chief porch are very

happily hit off--you have caught the very attic spirit of the roof--and

some of the windows may be justly said to be staring

likenesses.--Ivy-cottage is slipped into our portfolio, and we shall

compare it, on our return to Scotland, with Buchanan Lodge.

Gallantry forbids, but Truth demands to say, that young ladies are but

indifferent sketchers. The dear creatures have no notion of perspective.

At flower-painting and embroidery, they are pretty fair hands, but they

make sad work among waterfalls and ruins. Notwithstanding, it is

pleasant to hang over them, seated on stone or stool, drawing from

nature; and now and then to help them in with a horse or a hermit. It is

a difficult, almost an impossible thing--that foreshortening. The most

speculative genius is often at a loss to conjecture the species of a

human being foreshortened by a young lady. The hanging Tower at Pisa is,

we believe, some thirty feet or so off the perpendicular, and there is

one at Caerphilly about seventeen; but these are nothing to the castles

in the air we have seen built by the touch of a female magician; nor is

it an unusual thing with artists of the fair sex to order their plumed

chivalry to gallop down precipices considerably steeper than a house, on

animals apparently produced between the tiger and the bonassus. When

they have succeeded in getting something like the appearance of water

between what may be conjectured banks, they are not very particular

about its running occasionally up-hill; and it is interesting to see a

stream stealing quietly below trees in gradual ascension, till,

disappearing for a few minutes over one summit, it comes thundering down

another, in the shape of a waterfall, on the head of an elderly

gentleman, unsuspectingly reading Mr Wordsworth's "Excursion," perhaps,

in the foreground. Nevertheless, we repeat, that it is delightful to

hang over one of the dear creatures, seated on stone or stool, drawing

from nature; for whatever may be the pencil's skill, the eye may behold

the glimpse of a vision whose beauty shall be remembered when even

Windermere herself has for a while faded into oblivion.

On such excursions there are sure to occur a few enviable adventures.

First, the girths get wrong, and, without allowing your beloved virgin

to alight, you spend more time than is absolutely necessary in arranging

them; nor can you help admiring the attitude into which the graceful

creature is forced to draw up her delicate limbs, that her fairy feet

may not be in the way to impede your services. By-and-by a calf--which

you hope will be allowed to grow up into a cow--stretching up her curved

red back from behind a wall, startles John Darby, albeit unused to the

starting mood, and you leap four yards to the timely assistance of the

fair shrieker, tenderly pressing her bridle-hand as you find the rein

that has not been lost, and wonder what has become of the whip that

never existed. A little further on, a bridgeless stream crosses the

road--a dangerous-looking ford indeed--a foot deep at the very least,

and scorning wet feet, as they ought to be scorned, you almost carry,

serene in danger, your affianced bride (or she is in a fair way of

becoming so) in your arms off the saddle, nor relinquish the delightful

clasp till all risk is at an end, some hundred yards on, along the

velvet herbage. Next stream you come to has indeed a bridge--but then

what a bridge! A long, coggly, cracked slate-stone, whose unsteady

clatter would make the soberest steed jump over the moon. You beseech

the timid girl to sit fast, and she almost leans down to your breast as

you press to meet the blessed burden, and to prevent the steady old

stager from leaping over the battlements. But now the chasm on each side

of the narrow path is so tremendous, that she must dismount, after due

disentanglement, from that awkward, old-fashioned crutch and pummel, and

from a stirrup, into which a little foot, when it has once crept like a

mouse, finds itself caught as in a trap of singular construction, and

difficult to open for releasement. You feel that all you love in the

world is indeed fully, freshly, and warmly in your arms, nor can you

bear to set the treasure down on the rough stony road, but look round,

and round, and round, for a soft spot, which you finally prophesy at

some distance up the hill, whitherwards, in spite of pouting Yea and

Nay, you persist in carrying her whose head is ere long to lie in your

tranquil bosom.

Ivy-cottage, you see, is the domicile of gentlemen and lady folk; but

look through yonder dispersion, and in a minute or two your eyes will

see distinctly, in spite of the trees, a _bonâ fide_ farmhouse,

inhabited by a family whose head is at once an agriculturist, a

shepherd, and a woodsman. A Westmoreland cottage has scarcely any

resemblance to a Scottish one. A Scottish cottage (in the Lowlands) has

rarely any picturesque beauty in itself--a narrow oblong, with steep

thatched roof, and an ear-like chimney at each of the two gable-ends.

Many of the Westmoreland cottages would seem, to an ignorant observer,

to have been originally built on a model conceived by the finest

poetical genius. In the first place, they are almost always built

precisely where they ought to be, had the builder's prime object been to

beautify the dale; at least, so we have often felt in moods, when

perhaps our emotions were unconsciously soothed into complacency by the

spirit of the scene. Where the sedgy brink of the lake or tarn circles

into a lone bay, with a low hill of coppice-wood on one side, and a few

tall pines on the other, no--it is a grove of sycamores--there, about a

hundred yards from the water, and about ten above its ordinary level,

peeps out from its cheerful seclusion that prettiest of all

hamlets--Braithwaite-fold. The hill behind is scarcely sylvan--yet it

has many hazels--a few bushes--here and there a holly--and why or

wherefore, who can now tell, a grove of enormous yews. There is sweet

pasturage among the rocks, and as you may suppose it a spring-day, mild

without much sunshine, there is a bleating of lambs, a twitter of small

birds, and the deep coo of the stock-dove. A wreath of smoke is always a

feature of such a scene in description; but here there is now none, for

probably the whole household are at work in the open air, and the fire,

since fuel is not to be wasted, has been wisely suffered to expire on

the hearth. No. There is a volume of smoke, as if the chimney were in

flame--a tumultuous cloud pours aloft, straggling and broken, through

the broad slate stones that defend the mouth of the vomitory from every

blast. The matron within is doubtless about to prepare breakfast, and

last year's rotten pea-sticks have soon heated the capacious grid-iron.

Let the smoke-wreath melt away at its leisure, and do you admire, along

with us, the infinite variety of all those little shelving and sloping

roofs. To feel the full force of the peculiar beauty of these antique

tenements, you must understand their domestic economy. If ignorant of

that, you can have no conception of the meaning of any one thing you

see--roofs, eaves, chimneys, beams, props, doors, hovels, and sheds, and

hanging staircase, being all huddled together, as you think, in

unintelligible confusion; whereas they are all precisely what and where

they ought to be, and have had their colours painted, forms shaped, and

places allotted by wind and weather, and the perpetually but pleasantly

felt necessities Of the natural condition of mountaineers.

Dear, dear is the thatch to the eyes of a son of Caledonia, for he may

remember the house in which he was born; but what thatch was ever so

beautiful as that slate from the quarry of the White-moss? Each

one--no--not each one--but almost each one--of these little overhanging

roofs seems to have been slated, or repaired at least, in its own

separate season, so various is the lustre of lichens that bathes the

whole, as richly as ever rock was bathed fronting the sun on the

mountain's brow. Here and there is seen some small window, before

unobserved, curtained perhaps--for the statesman, and the statesman's

wife, and the statesman's daughters, have a taste--a taste inspired by

domestic happiness, which, seeking simply comfort, unconsciously creates

beauty, and whatever its homely hand touches, that it adorns. There

would seem to be many fireplaces in Braithwaite-fold, from such a number

of chimney-pillars, each rising up to a different altitude from a

different base, round as the bole of a tree--and elegant, as if shaped

by Vitruvius. To us, we confess, there is nothing offensive in the most

glaring white rough-cast that ever changed a cottage into a patch of

sunny snow. Yet here that greyish-tempered unobtrusive hue does

certainly blend to perfection with roof, rock, and sky. Every instrument

is in tune. Not even in sylvan glade, nor among the mountain rocks, did

wanderer's eyes ever behold a porch of meeting tree-stems, or reclining

cliffs, more gracefully festooned than the porch from which now issues

one of the fairest of Westmeria's daughters. With one arm crossed before

her eyes in a sudden burst of sunshine, with the other Ellinor Inman

waves to her little brother and sisters among the bark-peelers in the

Rydal woods. The graceful signal is repeated till seen, and in a few

minutes a boat steals twinkling from the opposite side of the lake, each

tug of the youthful rowers distinctly heard through the hollow of the

vale. A singing voice rises and ceases--as if the singer were watching

the echo--and is not now the picture complete?

After a time old buildings undergo no perceptible change, any more than

old trees; and after they have begun to feel the touch of decay, it is

long before they look melancholy; for while they continue to be used,

they cannot help looking cheerful, and even dilapidation is painful only

when felt to be lifeless. The house now in ruins, that we passed a few

hundred yards ago without your seeing it--we saw it with a sigh--among

some dark firs, just before we began to ascend the hill, was many years

ago inhabited by Miles Mackareth, a man of some substance, and

universally esteemed for his honest and pious character. His integrity,

however, wanted the grace of courteousness, and his religion was

somewhat gloomy and austere, while all the habits of his life were sad,

secluded, and solitary. His fireside was always decent, but never

cheerful--there the passing traveller partook of an ungrudging, but a

grave hospitality; and although neighbours dropping in unasked were

always treated as neighbours, yet seldom were they invited to pass an

evening below his roof, except upon the stated festivals of the seasons,

or some domestic event demanding sociality, according to the country

custom. Year after year the gloom deepened on his strong-marked

intellectual countenance; and his hair, once black as jet, became

untimely grey. Indeed, although little more than fifty years old, when

you saw his head uncovered, you would have taken him for a man

approaching to threescore and ten. His wife and only daughter, both

naturally of a cheerful disposition, grew every year more retired, till

at last they shunned society altogether, and were seldom seen but at

church. And now a vague rumour ran through the hamlets of the

neighbouring valleys, that he was scarcely in his right mind--that he

had been heard by shepherds on the hills talking to himself wild words,

and pacing up and down in a state of distraction. The family ceased to

attend divine worship, and as for some time the Sabbath had been the

only day they were visible, few or none now knew how they fared, and by

many they were nearly forgotten. Meanwhile, during the whole summer, the

miserable man haunted the loneliest places; and, to the terror of his

wife and daughter, who had lost all power over him, and durst not speak,

frequently passed whole days they knew not where, and came home, silent,

haggard, and ghastly, about midnight. His widow afterwards told that he

seldom slept, and never without dreadful dreams--that often he would sit

up all night in his bed, with his eyes fixed and staring on nothing, and

uttering ejaculations for mercy for all his sins.

What these sins were he never confessed--nor, as far as man may judge of

man, had he ever committed any act that needed to lie heavy on his

conscience. But his whole being, he said, was one black sin--and a

spirit had been sent to tell him, that his doom was to be with the

wicked through all the ages of eternity. That spirit, without form or

shadow--only a voice--seldom left his side day or night, go where he

would; but its most dreadful haunt was under a steep rock called

Blakerigg-scaur; and thither, in whatever direction he turned his face

on leaving his own door, he was led by an irresistible impulse, even as

a child is led by the hand. Tenderly and truly had he once loved his

wife and daughter, nor less because that love had been of few words, and

with a shade of sorrow. But now he looked on them almost as if they had

been strangers--except at times, when he started up, kissed them, and

wept. His whole soul was possessed by horrid fantasies, of which it was

itself object and victim; and it is probable that had he seen them both

lying dead, he would have left their corpses in the house, and taken his

way to the mountains. At last one night passed away and he came not. His

wife and daughter, who had not gone to bed, went to the nearest house

and told their tale. In an hour a hundred feet were traversing all the

loneliest places--till a hat was seen floating on Loughrigg-tarn, and

then all knew that the search was near an end. Drags were soon got from

the fishermen on Windermere, and a boat crossed and recrossed the tarn

on its miserable quest, till in an hour, during which wife and daughter

sat without speaking on a stone by the water-edge, the body came

floating to the surface, with its long silver hair. One single shriek

only, it is said, was heard, and from that shriek till three years

afterwards, his widow knew not that her husband was with the dead. On

the brink of that small sandy bay the body was laid down and cleansed of

the muddy weeds--his daughter's own hands assisting in the rueful

work--and she walked among the mourners, the day before the Sabbath,

when the funeral entered the little burial-ground of Langdale chapel,

and the congregation sung a Christian psalm over the grave of the

forgiven suicide.

We cannot patronise the practice of walking in large parties of ten or a

score, ram-stam and helter-skelter, on to the front-green or gravel-walk

of any private nobleman's or gentleman's house, to enjoy, from a

commanding station, an extensive or picturesque view of the circumjacent

country. It is too much in the style of the Free and Easy. The family

within, sitting perhaps at dinner with the windows open, or sewing and

reading in a cool dishabille, cannot like to be stared in upon by so

many curious and inquisitive pupils all a-hunt for prospects; nor were

these rose-bushes planted there for public use, nor that cherry-tree in

vain netted against the blackbirds. Not but that a party may now and

then excusably enough pretend to lose their way in a strange country;

and looking around them in well-assumed bewilderment, bow hesitatingly

and respectfully to maid or matron at door or window, and, with a

thousand apologies, lingeringly offer to retire by the avenue gate, on

the other side of the spacious lawn, that terrace-like hangs over vale,

lake, and river. But to avoid all possible imputation of impertinence,

follow you our example, and make all such incursions by break of day. We

hold that, for a couple of hours before and after sunrise, all the earth

is common property. Nobody surely would think for a moment of looking

black on any number of freebooting lakers coming full sail up the

avenue, right against the front, at four o'clock in the morning? At that

hour, even the poet would grant them the privilege of the arbour where

he sits when inspired, and writing for immortality. He feels conscious

that he ought to have been in bed; and hastens, on such occasions, to

apologise for his intrusion on strangers availing themselves of the

rights and privileges of the Dawn.

Leaving Ivy-cottage, then, and its yet unbreathing chimneys, turn in at

the first gate to your right (if it be not built up, in which case leap

the wall), and find your way the best you can through among old

pollarded and ivied ash-trees, intermingled with yews, and over knolly

ground, brier-woven, and here and there whitened with the jagged thorn,

till you reach, through a slate-stile, a wide gravel walk, shaded by

pine-trees, and open on the one side to an orchard. Proceed--and little

more than a hundred steps will land you on the front of Rydal-mount, the

house of the great Poet of the Lakes. Mr Wordsworth is not at home, but

away to cloudland in his little boat so like the crescent moon. But do

not by too much eloquence awaken the family, or scare the silence, or

frighten "the innocent brightness of the new-born day." We hate all

sentimentalism; but we bid you, in his own words,

"With gentle hand

Touch, for there is a spirit in the leaves."

From a quaint platform of evergreens you see a blue gleam of Windermere

over the grove-tops--close at hand are Rydal-hall and its ancient

woods--right opposite the Loughrigg-fells, ferny, rocky, and sylvan, but

the chief breadth of breast pastoral--and to the right Rydal-mere,

seen, and scarcely seen, through embowering trees, and mountain-masses

bathed in the morning light, and the white-wreathed mists for a little

while longer shrouding their summits. A lately erected private chapel

lifts its little tower from below, surrounded by a green, on which there

are yet no graves--nor do we know if it be intended for a place of

burial. A few houses are sleeping beyond the chapel by the river-side;

and the people beginning to set them in order, here and there a pillar

of smoke ascends into the air, giving cheerfulness and animation to the

scene.

The Lake-Poets! ay, their day is come. The lakes are worthy of the

poets, and the poets of the lakes. That poets should love and live among

lakes, once seemed most absurd to critics whose domiciles were on the

Nor-Loch, in which there was not sufficient water for a tolerable

quagmire. Edinburgh Castle is a noble rock--so are the Salisbury Craigs

noble craigs--and Arthur's seat a noble lion couchant, who, were he to

leap down on Auld Reekie, would break her backbone and bury her in the

Cowgate. But place them by Pavey-ark, or Red-scaur, or the glamour of

Glaramara, and they would look about as magnificent as an upset pack of

cards. Who, pray, are the Nor-Loch poets? Not the Minstrel--he holds by

the tenure of the Tweed. Not Campbell--"he heard in dreams the music of

the Clyde." Not Joanna Baillie--her inspiration was nursed on the

Calder's sylvan banks and the moors of Strathaven. Stream-loving Coila

nurtured Burns; and the Shepherd's grave is close to the cot in which he

was born--within hearing of the Ettrick's mournful voice on its way to

meet the Yarrow. Skiddaw overshadows, and Greta freshens the bower of

him who framed,

"Of Thalaba, the wild and wondrous song."

Here the woods, mountains, and waters of Rydal imparadise the abode of

the wisest of nature's bards, with whom poetry is religion. And where

was he ever so happy as in that region, he who created "Christabelle,"

"beautiful exceedingly;" and sent the "Auncient Mariner" on the wildest

of all voyagings, and brought him back with the ghastliest of all crews,

and the strangest of all curses that ever haunted crime?

Of all Poets that ever lived Wordsworth has been at once the most

truthful and the most idealising; external nature from him has received

a soul, and becomes our teacher; while he has so filled our minds with

images from her, that every mood finds some fine affinities there, and

thus we all hang for sustenance and delight on the bosom of our mighty

Mother. We believe that there are many who have an eye for Nature, and

even a sense of the beautiful, without any very profound feeling; and to

them Wordsworth's finest descriptive passages seem often languid or

diffuse, and not to present to their eyes any distinct picture. Perhaps

sometimes this objection may be just; but to paint to the eye is easier

than to the imagination--and Wordsworth, taking it for granted that

people can now see and hear, desires to make them feel and understand;

of his pupil it must not be said,

"A primrose by the river's brim

A yellow primrose is to him,

And it is nothing more;"

the poet gives the something more till we start at the disclosure as at

a lovely apparition--yet an apparition of beauty not foreign to the

flower, but exhaling from its petals, which till that moment seemed to

us but an ordinary bunch of leaves. In these lines is a humbler example

of how recondite may be the spirit of beauty in any most familiar thing

belonging to the kingdom of nature; one higher far--but of the same

kind--is couched in two immortal verses--

"To me the humblest flower that blows, can give

Thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears."

In what would the poet differ from the worthy man of prose, if his

imagination possessed not a beautifying and transmuting power over the

objects of the inanimate world? Nay, even the naked truth itself is seen

clearly but by poetic eyes; and were a sumph all at once to become a

poet, he would all at once be stark-staring mad. Yonder ass licking his

lips at a thistle, sees but water for him to drink in Windermere a-glow

with the golden lights of setting suns. The ostler or the boots at

Lowood-inn takes a somewhat higher flight, and for a moment, pausing

with curry-comb or blacking-brush in his suspended hand, calls on Sally

Chambermaid for gracious sake to look at Pull-wyke. The waiter, who has

cultivated his taste from conversation with Lakers, learns their

phraseology, and declares the sunset to be exceedingly handsome. The

Laker, who sometimes has a soul, feels it rise within him as the rim of

the orb disappears in the glow of softened fire. The artist compliments

Nature, by likening her evening glories to a picture of Claud

Lorraine--while the poet feels the sense sublime

"Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things."

Compare any one page, or any twenty pages, with the character given of

Wordsworth's poetry in the obsolete criticism that sought to send it to

oblivion. The poet now sits on his throne in the blue serene--and no

voice from below dares deny his supremacy in his own calm dominions. And

was it of him, whom devout imagination, dreaming of ages to come, now

sees, placed in his immortality between Milton and Spenser, that the

whole land once rang with ridicule, while her wise men wiped their eyes

"of tears that sacred _pity_ had engendered," and then relieved their

hearts by joining in the laughter "of the universal British nation?" All

the ineffable absurdities of the bard are now embodied in Seven

Volumes--the sense of the ridiculous still survives among us--our men of

wit and power are not all dead--we have yet our satirists, great and

small--editors in thousands, and contributors in tens of thousands--yet

not a whisper is heard to breathe detraction from the genius of the

high-priest of nature; while the voice of the awakened and enlightened

land declares it to be divine--using towards him not the language merely

of admiration but of reverence--of love and gratitude due to the

benefactor of humanity, who has purified its passions by loftiest

thoughts and noblest sentiments, stilling their turbulence by the same

processes that magnify their power, and showing how the soul, in ebb and

flow, and when its tide is at full, may be at once as strong and as

serene as the sea.

There are few pictures painted by him merely for the pleasure of the

eye, or even the imagination, though all the pictures he ever painted

are beautiful to both; they have all a moral meaning--many a meaning

more than moral--and his poetry can be comprehended, in its full scope

and spirit, but by those who feel the sublimity of these four lines in

his "Ode to Duty,"--

"Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,

And fragrance in thy footing treads;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,

And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."

Is thy life disturbed by guilty or sinful passions? Have they gained a

mastery of thee--and art thou indeed their slave? Then the poetry of

Wordsworth must be to thee

"As is a picture to a blind man's eye;"

or if thine eyes yet see the light in which it is enveloped, and thy

heart yet feels the beauty it reveals, in spite of the clouds that

overhang and the storms that trouble them, that beauty will be

unbearable, till regret become remorse, and remorse penitence, and

penitence restore thee to those intuitions of the truth that illumine

his sacred pages, and thou knowest and feelest once more that

"The primal duties shine aloft--like stars,"

that life's best pleasures grow like flowers all around and beneath thy

feet.

Nor are we not privileged to cherish a better feeling than pride in the

belief, or rather knowledge, that WE have helped to diffuse Wordsworth's

poetry not only over this Island, but the furthest dependencies of the

British empire, and throughout the United States of America. Many

thousands have owed to us their emancipation from the prejudices against

it, under which they had wilfully remained ignorant of it during many

years; and we have instructed as many more, whose hearts were free, how

to look on it with those eyes of love which alone can discover the

Beautiful. Communications have been made to us from across the Atlantic,

and from the heart of India--from the Occident and the Orient--thanking

us for having vindicated and extended the fame of the best of our

living bards, till the name of Wordsworth has become a household word on

the banks of the Mississippi and the Ganges. It would have been so had

we never lived, _but not so soon_; and many a noble nature has

worshipped his genius, as displayed in our pages, not in fragments but

in perfect poems, accompanied with our comments, who had no means in

those distant regions of possessing his volumes, whereas Maga flies on

wings to the uttermost parts of the earth.

As for our own dear Scotland--for whose sake, with all her faults, the

light of day is sweet to our eyes--twenty years ago there were not

twenty copies--we question if there were ten--of the "Lyrical Ballads"

in all the land of the mountain and the flood. Now Wordsworth is studied

all Scotland over--and Scotland is proud and happy to know, from his

Memorials of the Tours he has made through her brown heaths and shaggy

woods, that the Bard's heart overflows with kindness towards her

children--that his songs have celebrated the simple and heroic character

of her olden times, nor left unhonoured the virtues that yet survive in

her national character. All her generous youth regard him now as a great

Poet; and we have been more affected than we should choose to confess,

by the grateful acknowledgment of many a gifted spirit, that to us it

was owing that they had opened their eyes and their hearts to the

ineffable beauty of that poetry in which they had, under our

instructions, found not a vain visionary delight, but a strength and

succour and consolation, breathed as from a shrine in the silence and

solitude of nature, in which stood their father's hut, sanctifying their

humble birthplace with pious thoughts that made the very weekdays to

them like Sabbaths--nor on the evening of the Sabbath might they not

blamelessly be blended with those breathed from the Bible, enlarging

their souls to religion by those meditative moods which such pure poetry

inspires, and by those habits of reflection which its study forms, when

pursued under the influence of thoughtful peace.

Why, if it were not for that everlasting--we beg pardon--immortal

Wordsworth--the LAKES, and all that belong to them, would be our

own--_jure divino_--for we are the heir-apparent to the

"Sole King of rocky Cumberland."

But Wordsworth never will--never can die; and so we are in danger of

being cheated out of our due dominion. We cannot think this fatherly

treatment of such a son--and yet in our loftiest moods of filial

reverence we have heard ourselves exclaiming, while

"The Cataract of Lodore

Peal'd to our orisons,"

O King! live for ever!

Therefore, with the fear of "The Excursion" before our eyes, we took to

prose--to numerous prose--ay, though we say it that should not say it,

to prose as numerous as any verse--and showed such scenes

"As savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew."

Here an English Lake--there a Scottish loch--till Turner grew jealous,

and Thomson flung his brush at one of his own unfinished mountains--when

lo! a miracle! Creative of grandeur in his very despair, he stood

astonished at the cliff that came prerupt from his canvass, and

christened itself "the Eagle's Eyrie," as it _frowned serenely_ upon the

sea, maddening in a foamy circle at its inaccessible feet.

Only in such prose as ours can the heart pour forth its effusions like a

strong spring discharging ever so many gallons in a minute, either into

pipes that conduct it through some great Metropolitan city, or into a

water-course that soon becomes a rivulet, then a stream, then a river,

then a lake, and then a sea. Would Fancy luxuriate? Then let her expand

wings of prose. In verse, however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged,

and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let

the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and

deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of

the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous

of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There

is room and power of ascension for any quantity of ballast--fling it

out, and up she goes! Let some gas escape, and she descends far more

gingerly than Mrs Graham and his Serene Highness; the grapnel catches a

stile, and she steps "like a dreadless angel unpursued" once more upon

_terra firma_, and may then celebrate her aerial voyage, if she choose,

in an Ode which will be sure near the end to rise--into prose.

Prose, we believe, is destined to drive what is called Poetry out of the

world. Here is a fair challenge. Let any Poet send us a poem of five

hundred lines--blanks or not--on any subject; and we shall write on that

subject a passage of the same number of words in prose; and the Editors

of the Quarterly, Edinburgh, and Westminster, shall decide which

deserves the prize. Milton was woefully wrong in speaking of "prose or

numerous verse." Prose is a million times more numerous than verse. Then

prose improves the more poetical it becomes; but verse, the moment it

becomes prosaic, goes to the dogs. Then, the connecting links between

two fine passages in verse, it is enjoined, shall be as little like

verse as possible; nay, whole passages, critics say, should be of that

sort; and why, pray, not prose at once? Why clip the King's English, or

the Emperor's German, or the Sublime Porte's Turkish, into bits of dull

jingle--pretending to be verses merely because of the proper number of

syllables--some of them imprisoned perhaps in parentheses, where they

sit helplessly protruding the bare soles of their feet, like folks that

have got muzzy, in the stocks?

Wordsworth says well, that the language of common people, when giving

utterance to passionate emotions, is highly figurative; and hence he

concludes not so well fit for a lyrical ballad. Their volubility is

great, nor few their flowers of speech. But who ever heard them, but by

the merest accident, spout verses? Rhyme do they never--the utmost they

reach is occasional blanks. But their prose! Ye gods! how they do talk!

The washerwoman absolutely froths like her own tub; and you never dream

of asking her "how she is off for soap?" Paradise Lost! The Excursion!

The Task indeed! No man of woman born, no woman by man begotten, ever

yet in his or her senses spoke like the authors of those poems. Hamlet,

in his sublimest moods, speaks in prose--Lady Macbeth talks prose in her

sleep--and so it should be printed. "Out damned spot!" are three words

of prose; and who that beheld Siddons wringing her hands to wash them of

murder, did not feel that they were the most dreadful ever extorted by

remorse from guilt?

A green old age is the most loving season of life, for almost all the

other passions are then dead or dying--or the mind, no more at the mercy

of a troubled heart, compares the little pleasure their gratification

can ever yield now with what it could at any time long ago, and lets

them rest. Envy is the worst disturber or embitterer of man's declining

years; but it does not deserve the name of a passion--and is a disease,

not of the poor in spirit--for they are blessed--but of the mean, and

then they indeed are cursed. For our own parts, we know Envy but as we

have studied it in others--and never felt it except towards the wise and

good; and then 'twas a longing desire to be like them--painful only when

we thought that might never be, and that all our loftiest aspirations

might be in vain. Our envy of Genius is of a nature so noble, that it

knows no happiness like that of guarding from mildew the laurels on the

brows of the Muses' Sons. What a dear kind soul of a critic is old

Christopher North! Watering the flowers of poetry, and removing the

weeds that might choke them--letting in the sunshine upon them, and

fencing them from the blast--proclaiming where the gardens grow, and

leading boys and virgins into the pleasant alleys--teaching hearts to

love and eyes to see their beauty, and classifying, by the attributes it

has pleased nature to bestow on the various orders, the plants of

Paradise--This is our occupation--and the happiness of witnessing them

all growing in the light of admiration is our reward.

Finding our way back as we choose to Ivy-cottage, we cross the wooden

bridge, and away along the western shore of Rydal-mere. Hence you see

the mountains in magnificent composition, and craggy coppices with

intervening green fields shelving down to the lake margin. It is a small

lake, not much more than a mile round, and of a very peculiar character.

One memorable cottage only, as far as we remember, peeps on its shore

from a grove of sycamores, a statesman's pleasant dwelling; and there

are the ruins of another on a slope near the upper end, the circle of

the garden still visible. Everything has a quiet but wildish pastoral

and sylvan look, and the bleating of sheep fills the hollow of the

hills. The lake has a reedy inlet and outlet, and the angler thinks of

pike when he looks upon such harbours. There is a single boat-house,

where the Lady of the Hall has a padlocked and painted barge for

pleasure parties; and the heronry on the high pine-trees of the only

island connects the scene with the ancient park of Rydal, whose oak

woods, though thinned and decayed, still preserve the majestic and

venerable character of antiquity and baronial state.

Having taken a lingering farewell of Rydal-mere, and of the new

Chapel-tower, that seems among the groves already to be an antique, we

may either sink down to the stream that flows out of Grassmere and

connects the two lakes, crossing a wooden bridge, and then joining the

new road that sweeps along to the Village, or we may keep up on the face

of the hill, and by a terrace-path reach the Loughrigg-road, a few

hundred yards above Tail-end, a pretty cottage-ornée which you will

observe crowning a wooded eminence, and looking cheerfully abroad over

all the vale. There is one Mount in particular, whence we see to

advantage the delightful panorama--encircling mountains--Grassmere Lake

far down below your feet, with its one green pastoral isle, sylvan

shores, and emerald meadows--huts and houses sprinkled up and down in

all directions--the village partly embowered in groves, and partly open

below the shadow of large single trees--and the Church-tower, almost

always a fine feature in the scenery of the north of England, standing

in stately simplicity among the clustering tenements, nor dwindled even

by the great height of the hills.

It is pleasant to lose sight entirely of a beautiful scene, and to plod

along for a few hundred yards in almost objectless shadow. Our

conceptions and feelings are bright and strong from the nearness of

their objects, yet the dream is somewhat different from the reality. All

at once, at a turning of the road, the splendour reappears like an

unfurled banner, and the heart leaps in the joy of the senses. This sort

of enjoyment comes upon you before you reach the Village of Grassmere

from the point of vision above described, and a stranger sometimes is

apt to doubt if it be really the same Lake--that one island, and those

few promontories, shifting into such varied combinations with the

varying mountain-ridges and ranges, that show top over top in

bewildering succession, and give hints of other valleys beyond, and of

Tarns rarely visited, among the moorland wastes. A single long dim

shadow, falling across the water, alters the whole physiognomy of the

scene--nor less a single bright streak of sunshine, brightening up some

feature formerly hidden, and giving animation and expression to the

whole face of the Lake.

About a short mile from the Village Inn, you will pass by without seeing

it--unless warned not to do so--one of the most singularly beautiful

habitations in the world. It belongs to a gentleman of the name of

Barber, and, we believe, has been almost entirely built by him--the

original hut on which his taste has worked having been a mere shell. The

spirit of the place seems to us to be that of Shadowy Silence. Its

bounds are small; but it is an indivisible part of a hill-side so secret

and sylvan, that it might be the haunt of the roe. You hear the tinkle

of a rill, invisible among the hazels--a bird sings or flutters--a bee

hums his way through the bewildering wood--but no louder sound. Some

fine old forest-trees extend widely their cool and glimmering shade; and

a few stumps or armless trunks, whose bulk is increased by a load of ivy

that hides the hollow wherein the owls have their domicile, give an air

of antiquity to the spot, that, but for other accompaniments, would

almost be melancholy. As it is, the scene has a pensive character. As

yet you have seen no house, and wonder whither the gravel-walks are to

conduct you, winding fancifully and fantastically through the

smooth-shaven lawn, bestrewed by a few large leaves of the

horse-chestnut or sycamore. But there are clustered verandas where the

nightingale might woo the rose, and lattice-windows reaching from eaves

to ground-sill, so sheltered that they might stand open in storm and

rain, and tall circular chimneys, shaped almost like the stems of the

trees that overshadow the roof irregular, and over all a gleam of blue

sky and a few motionless clouds. The noisy world ceases to be, and the

tranquil heart, delighted with the sweet seclusion, breathes, "Oh! that

this were my cell, and that I were a hermit!"

But you soon see that the proprietor is not a hermit; for everywhere you

discern unostentatious traces of that elegance and refinement that

belong to social and cultivated life; nothing rude and rough-hewn, yet

nothing prim and precise. Snails and spiders are taught to keep their

own places; and among the flowers of that hanging garden on a sunny

slope, not a weed is to be seen, for weeds are beautiful only by the

wayside, in the matting of hedge-roots, by the mossy stone, and the

brink of the well in the brae--and are offensive only when they intrude

into society above their own rank, and where they have the air and

accent of aliens. By pretty pebbled steps of stairs you mount up from

platform to platform of the sloping woodland banks--the prospect

widening as you ascend, till from a bridge that spans a leaping rivulet,

you behold in full blow all Grassmere Vale, Village, Church-tower, and

Lake, the whole of the mountains, and a noble arch of sky, the

circumference of that little world of peace.

Circumscribed as are the boundaries of this place, yet the grounds are

so artfully, while one thinks so artlessly, laid out, that, wandering

through their labyrinthine recesses, you might believe yourself in an

extensive wilderness. Here you come out upon a green open glade (you see

by the sun-dial it is past seven o'clock)--there the arms of an immense

tree overshadow what is in itself a scene--yonder you have an alley that

serpentises into gloom and obscurity--and from that cliff you doubtless

would see over the tree-tops into the outer and airy world. With all its

natural beauties is intermingled an agreeable quaintness, that shows the

owner has occasionally been working in the spirit of fancy, almost

caprice; the tool-house in the garden is not without its ornaments--the

barn seems habitable, and the byre has somewhat the appearance of a

chapel. You see at once that the man who lives here, instead of being

sick of the world, is attached to all elegant socialities and amities;

that he uses silver cups instead of maple bowls, shows his scallop-shell

among other curiosities in his cabinet, and will treat the passing

pilgrim with pure water from the spring, if he insists upon that

beverage, but will first offer him a glass of the yellow cowslip-wine,

the cooling claret, or the sparkling champagne.

Perhaps we are all beginning to get a little hungry, but it is too soon

to breakfast; so, leaving the village of Grassmere on the right, keep

your eye on Helm-crag, while we are finding, without seeking, our way up

Easdale. Easdale is an arm of Grassmere, and in the words of Mr Green

the artist, "it is in places profusely wooded, and charmingly

sequestered among the mountains." Here you may hunt the waterfalls, in

rainy weather easily run down, but difficult of detection in a drought.

Several pretty rustic bridges cross and recross the main stream and its

tributaries; the cottages, in nook and on hill-side, are among the most

picturesque and engaging in the whole country; the vale widens into

spacious and noble meadow-grounds, on which might suitably stand the

mansion of any nobleman in England--as you near its head, everything

gets wild and broken, with a slight touch of dreariness, and by no very

difficult ascent we might reach Easdale-tarn in less than an hour's

walking from Grassmere--a lonely and impressive scene, and the haunt of

the angler almost as frequently as of the shepherd.

How far can we enjoy the beauty of external nature under a sharp

appetite for breakfast or dinner? On our imagination the effect of

hunger is somewhat singular. We no longer regard sheep, for instance, as

the fleecy or the bleating flock. Their wool or their baaing is nothing

to us--we think of necks, and jigots, and saddles of mutton; and even

the lamb frisking on the sunny bank is eaten by us in the shape of

steaks and fry. If it is in the morning, we see no part of the cow but

her udder, distilling richest milkiness. Instead of ascending to heaven

on the smoke of a cottage chimney, we put our arms round the column, and

descend on the lid of the great pan preparing the family breakfast.

Every interesting object in the landscape seems edible--our mouth waters

all over the vale--as the village clock tolls eight, we involuntarily

say grace, and Price on the Picturesque gives way to Meg Dods's Cookery.

Mrs Bell of the Red Lion Inn, Grassmere, can give a breakfast with any

woman in England. She bakes incomparable bread--firm, close, compact,

and white, thin-crusted, and admirably raised. Her yeast always works

well. What butter! Before it a primrose must hide its unyellowed head.

Then jam of the finest quality, goose, rasp, and strawberry! and as the

jam is, so are her jellies. Hens cackle that the eggs are fresh--and

these shrimps were scraping the sand last night in the Whitehaven sea.

What glorious bannocks of barley-meal! Crisp wheaten cakes, too, no

thicker than a wafer. Do not, our good sir, appropriate that cut of

pickled salmon; it is heavier than it looks, and will weigh about four

pounds. One might live a thousand years, yet never weary of such

mutton-ham. Virgin honey, indeed! Let us hope that the bees were not

smothered, but by some gracious disciple of Bonar or Huber decoyed from

a full hive into an empty one, with half the summer and all the autumn

before them to build and saturate their new Comb-Palace. No bad thing

is a cold pigeon-pie, especially of cushats. To hear them cooing in the

centre of a wood is one thing, and to see them lying at the bottom of a

pie is another--which is the better, depends entirely on time, place,

and circumstance. Well, a beef-steak at breakfast is rather

startling--but let us try a bit with these fine ingenuous youthful

potatoes, from a light sandy soil on a warm slope. Next to the country

clergy, smugglers are the most spiritual of characters; and we verily

believe that to be "sma' still." Our dear sir--you are in orders, we

believe--will you have the goodness to return thanks? Yes, now you may

ring the bell for the bill. Moderate indeed! With a day's work before

one, there is nothing like the deep broad basis of breakfast.

STROLL TO GRASSMERE.

SECOND SAUNTER.

It is yet only ten o'clock--and what a multitude of thoughts and

feelings, sights and sounds, lights and shadows, have been ours since

sunrise! Had we been in bed, all would have remained unfelt and unknown.

But, to be sure, one dream might have been worth them all. Dreams,

however, when they are over, are gone, be they of bliss or bale, heaven

or the shades. No one weeps over a dream. With such tears no one would

sympathise. Give us reality, "the sober certainty of waking bliss," and

to it memory shall cling. Let the object of our sorrow belong to the

living world, and, transient though it be, its power may be immortal.

Away then, as of little worth, all the unsubstantial and wavering world

of dreams, and in their place give us the very humblest humanities, so

much the better if enjoyed in some beautiful scene of nature like this,

where all is steadfast but the clouds, whose very being is change, and

the flow of waters that have been in motion since the Flood.

Ha! a splendid equipage with a coronet. And out steps, handed by her

elated husband, a high-born beautiful and graceful bride. They are

making a tour of the Lakes, and the honeymoon hath not yet filled her

horns. If there be indeed such a thing as happiness on this earth, here

it is--youth, elegance, health, rank, riches, and love--all united in

ties that death alone can sunder. How they hang towards each other--the

blissful pair! Blind in their passion to all the scenery they came to

admire, or beholding it but by fits and snatches, with eyes that can see

only one object. She hath already learnt to forget father and mother,

and sister and brother, and all the young creatures like herself--every

one--that shared the pastimes and the confidence of her virgin

youthhood. With her, as with Genevieve--

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

All are but ministers of Love,

And feed his sacred flame!"

And will this holy state of the spirit endure? No--it will fade, and

fade, and fade away, so imperceptibly, so unconsciously (so like the

shortening of the long summer-days, that lose minute after minute of the

light, till again we hear the yellow leaves rustling in autumnal

twilight), that the heart within that snow-drifted bosom will know not

how great has been the change, till at last it shall be told the truth,

and know that all mortal emotion, however paradisiacal, is born to die.

Fain would we believe that forebodings like these are, on all such

occasions, whispered by a blind and ignorant misanthropy, and that of

wedded life it may generally be said,

"O, happy state, where souls together draw,

Where love is liberty, and nature law!"

What profound powers of affection, grief, pity, sympathy, delight, and

religion belong, by its constitution, to the frame of every human soul!

And if the courses of life have not greatly thwarted the divine

dispensations of nature, will they not all rise into genial play within

bosoms consecrated to each other's happiness, till comes between them

the cold hand of death? It would seem that everything fair and good must

flourish under that holy necessity--everything foul and bad fade away;

and that no quarrel or unkindness could ever be between pilgrims

travelling together through time to eternity, whether their path lead

through an Eden or a waste. Habit itself comes with humble hearts to be

gracious and benign; they who have once loved, will not, for that very

reason, cease to love; memory shall brighten when hope decays; and if

the present be not now so blissful, so thrilling, so steeped in rapture

as it was in the golden prime, yet shall it without repining suffice to

them whose thoughts borrow unconsciously sweet comforts from the past

and future, and have been taught by mutual cares and sorrows to indulge

tempered expectations of the best earthly felicity. And is it not so?

How much tranquillity and contentment in human homes! Calm onflowings of

life shaded in domestic privacy, and seen but at times coming out into

the open light! What brave patience under poverty! What beautiful

resignation in grief! Riches take wings to themselves and flee away--yet

without and within the door there is the decency of a changed, not an

unhappy lot--The clouds of adversity darken men's characters even as if

they were the shadows of dishonour, but conscience quails not in the

gloom--The well out of which humility hath her daily drink, is nearly

dried up to the very spring, but she upbraideth not Heaven--Children,

those flowers that make the hovel's earthen floor delightful as the

glades of Paradise, wither in a day, but there is holy comfort in the

mother's tears; nor are the groans of the father altogether without

relief--for they have gone whither they came, and are blooming now in

the bowers of heaven.

Reverse the picture--and tremble for the fate of those whom God hath

made one, and whom no one man must put asunder. In common natures, what

hot and sensual passions, whose gratification ends in indifference,

disgust, loathing, or hatred! What a power of misery, from fretting to

madness, lies in that mean but mighty word--Temper! The face, to whose

meek beauty smiles seemed native during the days of virgin love, shows

now but a sneer, a scowl, a frown, or a glare of scorn. The shape of

those features is still fine--the eye of the gazelle--the Grecian nose

and forehead--the ivory teeth, so small and regular--and thin line of

ruby lips breathing Circassian luxury--the snow-drifts of the bosom

still heave there--a lovelier waist Apollo never encircled stepping from

the chariot of the sun--nor limbs more graceful did ever Diana veil

beneath the shadows of Mount Latmos. But she is a fiend--a devil

incarnate, and the sovereign beauty of three counties has made your

house a hell.

But suppose that you have had the sense and sagacity to marry a homely

wife--or one comely at the best--nay, even that you have sought to

secure your peace by admitted ugliness--or wedded a woman whom all

tongues call--plain; then may an insurance-ticket, indeed, flame like

the sun in miniature on the front of your house--but what Joint-Stock

Company can undertake to repay the loss incurred by the perpetual

singeing of the smouldering flames of strife, that blaze up without

warning at bed and board, and keep you in an everlasting alarm of fire?

We defy you to utter the most glaring truth that shall not be instantly

contradicted. The most rational proposals for a day or hour of pleasure,

at home or abroad, are on the nail negatived as absurd. If you dine at

home every day for a month, she wonders why nobody asks you out, and

fears you take no trouble to make yourself agreeable. If you dine from

home one day in a month, then are you charged with being addicted to

tavern-clubs. Children are perpetual bones of contention--there is

hatred and sorrow in house-bills--rent and taxes are productive of

endless grievances; and although education be an excellent thing--indeed

quite a fortune in itself--especially to a poor Scotsman going to

England, where all the people are barbarous--yet is it irritatingly

expensive when a great Northern Nursery sends out its hordes, and gawky

hoydens and hobbletehoys are getting themselves accomplished in the

foreign languages, music, drawing, geography, the use of the globes, and

the dumb-bells.

"Let observation, with extensive view,

Survey mankind from China to Peru,"

(two bad lines, by the way, though written by Dr Johnson)--and

observation will find the literature of all countries filled with

sarcasms against the marriage-life. Our old Scottish songs and ballads

especially, delight in representing it as a state of ludicrous misery

and discomfort. There is little or no talk of horns--the dilemma of

English wit; but every individual moment of every individual minute, of

every individual hour of every individual day, and so on, has its

peculiar, appropriate, characteristic, and incurable wretchedness. Yet

the delightful thing is, that in spite of all this jeering and gibing,

and grinning and hissing, and pointing with the finger--marrying and

giving in marriage, births and christenings, continue their career of

prosperity; and the legitimate population doubles itself somewhere about

every thirty-five years. Single houses rise out of the earth--double

houses become villages--villages towns--towns cities--and our Metropolis

is itself a world!

While the lyrical poetry of Scotland is thus rife with reproach against

wedlock, it is equally rife with panegyric on the tender passion that

leads into its toils. In one page you shudder in a cold sweat over the

mean miseries of the poor "gudeman;" in the next you see, unconscious of

the same approaching destiny, the enamoured youth lying on his Mary's

bosom beneath the milk-white thorn. The pastoral pipe is tuned under a

fate that hurries on all living creatures to love; and not one lawful

embrace is shunned from any other fears than those which of themselves

spring up in the poor man's thoughtful heart. The wicked betray, and the

weak fall--bitter tears are shed at midnight from eyes once bright as

the day--fair faces never smile again, and many a hut has its broken

heart--hope comes and goes, finally vanquishing, or yielding to

despair--crowned passion dies the sated death, or, with increase of

appetite, grows by what it feeds on--wide, but unseen, over all the

regions of the land, are cheated hopes, vain desires, gnawing jealousy,

dispirited fear, and swarthy-souled revenge--beseechings, seductions,

suicides, and insanities--and all, all spring from the root of Love; yet

all the nations of the earth call the Tree blest, and long as time

endures, will continue to flock thither panting to devour the fruitage,

of which every other golden globe is poison and death.

Smile away then, with all thy most irresistible blandishments, thou

young and happy Bride! What business have we to prophesy bedimming tears

to those resplendent eyes? or that the talisman of that witching smile

can ever lose its magic? Are not the high-born daughters of England also

the high-souled? And have not honour and virtue, and charity and

religion, guarded for centuries the lofty line of thy pure and

unpolluted blood? Joyful, therefore, mayst thou be, as the dove in the

sunshine on the Tower-top--and as the dove serene, when she sitteth on

her nest within the yew-tree's gloom, far within the wood!

Passing from our episode, let us say that we are too well acquainted

with your taste, feeling, and judgment, to tell you on what objects to

gaze or glance, in such a scene as the vale and village of Grassmere. Of

yourselves you will find out the nooks and corners from which the pretty

white-washed and flowering cottages do most picturesquely combine with

each other, and with the hills, and groves, and old church-tower.

Without our guiding hand will you ascend knoll and eminence, be there

pathway or no pathway, and discover for yourselves new Lake-Landscapes.

Led by your own sweet and idle, chaste and noble fancies, you will

disappear, single, or in pairs and parties, into little woody

wildernesses, where you will see nothing but ground-flowers and a

glimmering contiguity of shade. Solitude sometimes, you know, is best

society, and short retirement urges sweet return. Various travels or

voyages of discovery may be undertaken, and their grand object attained

in little more than an hour. The sudden whirr of a cushat is an

incident, or the leaping of a lamb among the broom. In the quiet of

nature, matchless seems the music of the milkmaid's song--and of the

hearty laugh of the haymakers, crossing the meadow in rows, how sweet

the cheerful echo from Helm-crag! Grassmere appears by far the most

beautiful place in all the Lake-country. You buy a field--build a

cottage--and in imagination lie (for they are too short to enable you to

sit) beneath the shadow of your own trees!

In an English village--highland or lowland--seldom is there any spot so

beautiful as the churchyard. That of Grassmere is especially so, with

the pensive shadows of the old church-tower settling over its cheerful

graves. Ay, its cheerful graves! Startle not at the word as too

strong--for the pigeons are cooing in the belfry, the stream is

murmuring round the mossy churchyard wall, a few lambs are lying on the

mounds, and flowers laughing in the sunshine over the cells of the dead.

But hark! the bell tolls--one--one--one--a funeral knell, speaking not

of time, but of eternity! To-day there is to be a burial--and close to

the wall of the Tower you see the new-dug grave.

Hush! The sound of singing voices in yonder wood, deadened by the weight

of umbrage! Now it issues forth into the clear air, and now all is

silence--but the pause speaks of death. Again the melancholy swell

ascends the sky--and then comes slowly along the funeral procession, the

coffin borne aloft, and the mourners all in white; for it is a virgin

who is carried to her last home. Let every head be reverently uncovered

while the psalm enters the gate, and the bier is borne for holy rites

along the chancel of the church, and laid down close to the altar. A

smothered sobbing disturbeth not the service--'tis a human spirit

breathing in accordance with the divine. Mortals weeping for the

immortal--Earth's passions cleaving to one who is now in heaven.

Was she one flower of many, and singled out by death's unsparing finger

from a wreath of beauty, whose remaining blossoms seem now to have lost

all their fragrance and all their brightness? Or was she the sole

delight of her greyhaired parents' eyes, and is the voice of joy

extinguished in their low-roofed home for ever? Had her loveliness been

beloved, and had her innocent hopes anticipated the bridal-day, nor her

heart, whose beatings were numbered, ever feared that narrow bed? All

that we know is her name and age--you see them glittering on her

coffin--"Anabella Irvine, aged xix years"!

The day seems something dim, now that we are all on our way back to

Ambleside; and although the clouds are neither heavier nor more numerous

than before, somehow or other the sun is a little obscured. We must not

indulge too long in a mournful mood--yet let us all sit down under the

shadow of this grove of sycamores, overshadowing this reedy bay of

Rydal-mere, and listen to a Tale of Tears.

Many a tame tradition, embalmed in a few pathetic verses, lives for

ages, while the memory of the most affecting incidents, to which genius

has allied no general emotion, fades like the mist, and leaves

heart-rending griefs undeplored. Elegies and dirges might indeed have

well been sung amidst the green ruins of yonder Cottage, that looks now

almost like a fallen wall--at best, the remnants of a cattle-shed shaken

down by the storm.

Thirty years ago--how short a time in national history--how long in that

of private sorrows!--all tongues were speaking of the death that there

befell; and to have seen the weeping, you would have thought that the

funeral could never have been forgotten. But stop now the shepherd on

the hill, and ask him who lived in that nook, and chance is he knows not

even their name, much less the story of their afflictions. It was

inhabited by Allan Fleming, his wife, and an only child, known

familiarly in her own small world by the name of LUCY OF THE FOLD. In

almost every district among the mountains, there is its peculiar

pride--some one creature to whom nature has been especially kind, and

whose personal beauty, sweetness of disposition, and felt superiority of

mind and manner, single her out, unconsciously, as an object of

attraction and praise, making her the May-day Queen of the unending

year. Such a darling was Lucy Fleming ere she had finished her

thirteenth year; and strangers, who had heard tell of her loveliness,

often dropt in, as if by accident, to see the Beauty of Rydal-mere. Her

parents rejoiced in their child; nor was there any reason why they

should dislike the expression of delight and wonder with which so many

regarded her. Shy was she as a woodland bird, but as fond too of her

nest; and when there was nothing near to disturb her, her life was

almost a perpetual hymn. From joy to sadness, and from sadness to joy;

from silence to song, and from song to silence; from stillness like that

of the butterfly on the flower, to motion like that of the same creature

wavering in the sunshine over the wood-top--was to Lucy as welcome a

change as the change of lights and shadows, breezes and calms, in the

mountain-country of her birth.

One summer day, a youthful stranger appeared at the door of the house,

and after an hour's stay, during which Lucy was from home, asked if they

would let him have lodging with them for a few months--a single room for

bed and books, and that he would take his meals with the family.

Enthusiastic boy! to him poetry had been the light of life, nor did ever

creature of poetry belong more entirely than he to the world of

imagination. He had come into the free mountain region from the

confinement of college walls, and his spirit expanded within him like a

rainbow. No eyes had he for realities--all nature was seen in the light

of genius--not a single object at sunrise and sunset the same. All was

beautiful within the circle of the green hill-tops, whether shrouded in

the soft mists or clearly outlined in a cloudless sky. Home, friends,

colleges, cities--all sunk away into oblivion, and HARRY HOWARD felt as

if wafted off on the wings of a spirit, and set down in a land beyond

the sea, foreign to all he had before experienced, yet in its perfect

and endless beauty appealing every hour more tenderly and strongly to a

spirit awakened to new power, and revelling in new emotion. In that

cottage he took up his abode. In a few weeks came a library of books in

all languages; and there was much wondering talk over all the

countryside about the mysterious young stranger who now lived at the

Fold.

Every day--and, when he chose to absent himself from his haunts among

the hills, every hour was Lucy before the young poet's eyes--and every

hour did her beauty wax more beautiful in his imagination. Who Mr Howard

was, or even if that were indeed his real name, no one knew; but none

doubted that he was of gentle birth, and all with whom he had ever

conversed in his elegant amenity, could have sworn that a youth so bland

and free, and with such a voice, and such eyes, would not have injured

the humblest of God's creatures, much less such a creature as Lucy of

the Fold. It was indeed even so--for, before the long summer days were

gone, he who had never had a sister, loved her even as if she had slept

on the same maternal bosom. Father or mother he now had none--indeed,

scarcely one near relation--although he was rich in this world's riches,

but in them poor in comparison with the noble endowments that nature had

lavished upon his mind. His guardians took little heed of the splendid

but wayward youth--and knew not now whither his fancies had carried him,

were it even to some savage land. Thus the Fold became to him the one

dearest roof under the roof of heaven. All the simple ongoings of that

humble home, love and imagination beautified into poetry; and all the

rough or coarser edges of lowly life were softened away in the light of

genius that transmuted everything on which it fell; while all the silent

intimations which nature gave there of her primal sympathies, in the hut

as fine and forceful as in the hall, showed to his excited spirit

pre-eminently lovely, and chained it to the hearth, around which was

read the morning and the evening prayer.

What wild schemes does not love imagine, and in the face of very

impossibility achieve! "I will take Lucy to myself, if it should be in

place of all the world. I will myself shed light over her being, till in

a new spring it shall be adorned with living flowers that fade not away,

perennial and self-renewed. In a few years the bright docile creature

will have the soul of a very angel--and then, before God and at His holy

altar, mine shall she become for ever--here and hereafter--in this

paradise of earth, and, if more celestial be, in the paradise of

heaven."

Thus two summers and two winters wheeled away into the past; and in the

change, imperceptible from day to day, but glorious at last, wrought on

Lucy's nature by communication with one so prodigally endowed, scarcely

could her parents believe it was their same child, except that she was

dutiful as before, as affectionate, and as fond of all the familiar

objects, dead or living, round and about her birthplace. She had now

grown to woman's stature--tall, though she scarcely seemed so except

when among her playmates; and in her maturing loveliness, fulfilling,

and far more than fulfilling, the fair promise of her childhood. Never

once had the young stranger--stranger no more--spoken to daughter,

father, or mother, of his love. Indeed, for all that he felt towards

Lucy there must have been some other word than love. Tenderness, which

was almost pity--an affection that was often sad--wonder at her

surpassing beauty, nor less at her unconsciousness of its

power--admiration of her spiritual qualities, that ever rose up to meet

instruction as if already formed--and that heart-throbbing that stirs

the blood of youth when the innocent eyes it loves are beaming in the

twilight through smiles or through tears,--these, and a thousand other

feelings, and above all, the creative faculty of a poet's soul, now

constituted his very being when Lucy was in presence, nor forsook him

when he was alone among the mountains.

At last it was known through the country that Mr Howard--the stranger,

the scholar, the poet, the elegant gentleman, of whom nobody knew much,

but whom everybody loved, and whose father must at the least have been a

lord, was going--in a year or less--to marry the daughter of Allan

Fleming--Lucy of the Fold. O, grief and shame to the parents--if still

living--of the noble Boy! O, sorrow for himself when his passion

dies--when the dream is dissolved--and when, in place of the angel of

light who now moves before him, he sees only a child of earth, lowly

born, and long rudely bred--a being only fair as many others are fair,

sister in her simplicity to maidens no less pleasing than she, and

partaking of many weaknesses, frailties, and faults now unknown to

herself in her happiness, and to him in his love! Was there no one to

rescue them from such a fate--from a few months of imaginary bliss, and

from many years of real bale? How could such a man as Allan Fleming be

so infatuated as sell his child to fickle youth, who would soon desert

her broken-hearted? Yet kind thoughts, wishes, hopes, and beliefs

prevailed; nor were there wanting stories of the olden time, of

low-born maidens married to youths of high estate, and raised from hut

to hall, becoming mothers of a lordly line of sons, that were

counsellors to Kings and Princes.

In Spring, Mr Howard went away for a few months--it was said to the

great city--and on his return at midsummer, Lucy was to be his bride.

They parted with a few peaceful tears, and though absent were still

together. And now a letter came, saying that before another Sabbath he

would be at the Fold. A few fields in Easdale, long mortgaged beyond

their fee-simple by the hard-working statesman from whom they

reluctantly were passing away, had meanwhile been purchased by Mr

Howard, and in that cottage they were to abide, till they had built for

themselves a house a little further up the side of the sylvan hill,

below the shadow of Helm-crag. Lucy saw the Sabbath of his return and

its golden sun, but it was in her mind's eye only; for ere it was to

descend behind the hills, she was not to be among the number of living

things.

Up Forest-Ullswater the youth had come by the light of the setting sun;

and as he crossed the mountains to Grassmere by the majestic pass of the

Hawse, still as every new star arose in heaven, with it arose as

lustrous a new emotion from the bosom of his betrothed. The midnight

hour had been fixed for his return to the Fold; and as he reached the

cliffs above White-moss, according to agreement a light was burning in

the low window, the very planet of love. It seemed to shed a bright

serenity over all the vale, and the moon-glittering waters of Rydal-mere

were as an image of life, pure, lonely, undisturbed, and at the pensive

hour how profound! "Blessing and praise be to the gracious God! who

framed my spirit so to delight in His beautiful and glorious

creation--blessing and praise to the Holy One, for the boon of my Lucy's

innocent and religious love!" Prayers crowded fast into his soul, and

tears of joy fell from his eyes, as he stood at the threshold, almost

afraid, in the trembling of life-deep affection, to meet her first

embrace.

In the silence, sobs and sighs, and one or two long deep groans! Then in

another moment, he saw, through the open door of the room where Lucy

used to sleep, several figures moving to and fro in the light, and one

figure upon its knees--who else could it be but her father! Unnoticed he

became one of the pale-faced company--and there he beheld her on her

bed, mute and motionless, her face covered with a deplorable

beauty--eyes closed, and her hands clasped upon her breast! "Dead, dead,

dead!" muttered in his ringing ears a voice from the tombs, and he fell

down in the midst of them with great violence upon the floor.

Encircled with arms that lay round him softer and silkier far than

flower-wreaths on the neck of a child who has laid him down from play,

was he when he awoke from that fit--lying even on his own maiden's bed,

and within her very bosom, that beat yet, although soon about to beat no

more. At that blest awakening moment, he might have thought he saw the

first glimpse of light of the morning after his marriage-day; for her

face was turned towards his breast, and with her faint breathings he

felt the touch of tears. Not tears alone now bedimmed those eyes, for

tears he could have kissed away; but the blue lids were heavy with

something that was not slumber--the orbs themselves were scarcely

visible--and her voice--it was gone, to be heard never again, till in

the choir of white-robed spirits that sing at the right hand of God.

Yet no one doubted that she knew him--him who had dropt down, like a

superior being, from another sphere, on the innocence of her simple

childhood--had taught her to know so much of her own soul--to love her

parents with a profounder and more holy love--to see, in characters more

divine, Heaven's promises of forgiveness to every contrite heart--and a

life of perfect blessedness beyond death and the grave. A smile that

shone over her face the moment that she had been brought to know that he

had come at last, and was nigh at hand--and that never left it while her

bosom moved--no--not for all the three days and nights that he continued

to sit beside the corpse, when father and mother were forgetting their

cares in sleep--that smile told all who stood around, watching her

departure, neighbour, friend, priest, parent, and him the suddenly

distracted and desolate, that in the very moment of expiration she knew

him well, and was recommending him and his afflictions to the pity of

One who died to save sinners.

Three days and three nights, we have said, did he sit beside her who so

soon was to have been his bride; and come or go who would into the room,

he saw them not--his sight was fixed on the winding-sheet, eyeing it,

without a single tear, from feet to forehead, and sometimes looking up

to heaven. As men forgotten in dungeons have lived miserably long

without food, so did he--and so he would have done, on and on to the

most far-off funeral day. From that one chair, close to the bedside, he

never rose. Night after night, when all the vale was hushed, he never

slept. Through one of the midnights there had been a great thunderstorm,

the lightning smiting a cliff close to the cottage; but it seemed that

he heard it not--and during the floods of next day, to him the roaring

vale was silent. On the morning of the funeral, the old people--for now

they seemed to be old--wept to see him sitting still beside their dead

child; for each of the few remaining hours had now its own sad office,

and a man had come to nail down the coffin. Three black specks suddenly

alighted on the face of the corpse--and then off--and on--and away--and

returning--was heard the buzzing of large flies, attracted by beauty in

its corruption. "Ha--ha!" starting up, he cried in horror--"What birds

of prey are these, whom Satan has sent to devour the corpse?" He became

stricken with a sort of palsy--and, being led out to the open air, was

laid down, seemingly as dead as her within, on the green daisied turf,

where, beneath the shadow of the sycamore, they had so often sat,

building up beautiful visions of a long blissful life.

The company assembled--but not before his eyes--the bier was lifted up

and moved away down the sylvan slope, and away round the head of the

Lake, and over the wooden bridge, accompanied, here and there, as it

passed the wayside houses on the road to Grassmere, by the sound of

psalms--but he saw--he heard not;--when the last sound of the spade

rebounded from the smooth arch of the grave, he was not by--but all the

while he was lying where they left him, with one or two pitying dalesmen

at his head and feet. When he awoke again and rose up, the cottage of

the Fold was as if she had never been born--for she had vanished for

ever and aye, and her sixteen years' smiling life was all extinguished

in the dust.

Weeks and months passed on, and still there was a vacant wildness in his

eyes, and a mortal ghastliness all over his face, inexpressive of a

reasonable soul. It scarcely seemed that he knew where he was, or in

what part of the earth, yet, when left by himself, he never sought to

move beyond the boundaries of the Fold. During the first faint

glimmerings of returning reason, he would utter her name, over and over

many times, with a mournful voice, but still he knew not that she was

dead--then he began to caution them all to tread softly, for that sleep

had fallen upon her, and her fever in its blessed balm might abate--then

with groans too affecting to be borne by those who heard them, he would

ask why, since she was dead, God had the cruelty to keep him, her

husband, in life; and finally, and last of all, he imagined himself in

Grassmere Churchyard, and clasping a little mound on the green, which it

was evident he thought was her grave, he wept over it for hours and

hours, and kissed it, and placed a stone at its head, and sometimes all

at once broke out into fits of laughter, till the hideous fainting-fits

returned, and after long convulsions left him lying as if stone-dead. As

for his bodily frame, when Lucy's father lifted it up in his arms,

little heavier was it than a bundle of withered fern. Nobody supposed

that one so miserably attenuated and ghost-like could for many days be

alive--yet not till the earth had thrice revolved round the sun did that

body die, and then it was buried far away from the Fold, the banks of

Rydal-water, and the sweet mountains of Westmoreland; for after passing

like a shadow through many foreign lands, he ceased his pilgrimage in

Palestine, even beneath the shadow of Mount Sion, and was laid, with a

lock of hair--which, from the place it held, strangers knew to have

belonged to one dearly beloved--close to his heart, on which it had lain

so long, and was to moulder away in darkness together, by Christian

hands and in a Christian sepulchre.

L'ENVOY.

Periodical literature is a type of many of the most beautiful things and

interesting events in nature; or say, rather, that _they_ are types of

_it_--the Flowers and the Stars. As to Flowers, they are the prettiest

periodicals ever published in folio--the leaves are wire-wove and

hot-pressed by Nature's self; their circulation is wide over all the

land; from castle to cottage they are regularly taken in; as old age

bends over them, his youth is renewed; and you see childhood poring upon

them pressed close to its very bosom. Some of them are ephemeral--their

contents are exhaled between the rising and setting sun. Once a-week

others break through their green, pink, or crimson cover; and how

delightful, on the seventh day, smiles in the sunshine the Sabbath

Flower--a Sunday publication perused without blame by the most

religious--even before morning prayer! Each month, indeed, throughout

the whole year, has its own Flower periodical. Some are annual, some

biennial, some triennial, and there are perennials that seem to live for

ever--and yet are still periodical--though our love will not allow us to

know when they die, and phoenix-like reappear from their own ashes. So

much for Flowers--typifying or typified;--leaves emblematical of

pages--buds of binding--dew-veils of covers--and the wafting away of

bloom and fragrance like the dissemination of fine feelings, bright

fancies, and winged thoughts.

The Flowers are the periodicals of the earth--the Stars are the

periodicals of heaven. With what unfailing regularity do the numbers

issue forth! Hesperus and Lucifer! ye are one concern. The Pole-star is

studied by all nations. How popular the poetry of the Moon! On what

subject does not the Sun throw light? No fear of hurting your eyes by

reading that fine clear large type on that softened page. As you turn

them over, one blue, another yellow, and another green, all are alike

delightful to the pupil, dear as the very apple of his eye. Yes, the

great Periodical Press of heaven is unceasingly at work--night and day;

the only free power all over the world--'tis indeed like the air we

breathe--if we have it not, we die.

Look, then, at all paper periodicals with pleasure, for sake of the

Flowers and the Stars. Suppose them all extinct, and life would be like

a flowerless earth, a starless heaven. We should soon forget the

Seasons. The periodicals of the External would soon all lose their

meaning, were there no longer any periodicals of the Internal. These are

the lights and shadows of life, merrily dancing or gravely stealing over

the dial; remembrancers of the past--teachers of the present--prophets

of the future hours. Were they all dead, Spring would in vain renew her

promise--wearisome would be the interminable summer days--the fruits of

autumn tasteless--the winter ingle blink mournfully round the hearth.

What are the blessed Seasons themselves, in nature and in Thomson, but

periodicals of a larger growth? We should doubt the goodness of that

man's heart, who loved not the periodical literature of earth and

sky--who would not weep to see one of its flowers wither--one of its

stars fall--one beauty die on its humble bed--one glory drop from its

lofty sphere. Let them bloom and burn on--flowers in which there is no

poison, stars in which there is no disease--whose blossoms are all

sweet, and whose rays are all sanative--both alike steeped in dew, and

both, to the fine ear of nature's worshipper, bathed in music.

Pomposo never reads Magazine poetry--nor, we presume, ever looks at a

field or wayside flower. He studies only the standard authors. He walks

only in gardens with high brick walls--and then admires only at a hint

from the head-gardener. Pomposo does not know that many of the finest

poems of our day first appeared in magazines--or, worse still, in

newspapers; and that in our periodicals, daily and weekly, equally with

the monthlies and quarterlies, is to be found the best criticism of

poetry anywhere extant, superior far, in that unpretending form, to

nine-tenths of the learned lucubrations of Germany--though some of it,

too, is good--almost as one's heart could desire. What is the

circulation even of a popular volume of verses--if any such there

be--to that of a number of Maga? Hundreds of thousands at home peruse it

before it is a week old--as many abroad ere the moon has thrice renewed

her horns; and the Series ceases not--regular as the Seasons that make

up the perfect year. Our periodical literature--say of it what you

will--gives light to the heads and heat to the hearts of millions of our

race. The greatest and best men of the age have not disdained to belong

to the brotherhood; and thus the hovel holds what must not be missing in

the hall--the furniture of the cot is the same as that of the

palace--and duke and ditcher read their lessons from the same page.

Good people have said, and it would be misanthropical to disbelieve or

discredit their judgment, that our Prose is original--nay, has created a

new era in the history of Periodical Literature. Only think of that,

Christopher, and up with your Tail like a Peacock! Why, there is some

comfort in that reflection, while we sit rubbing our withered hands up

and down on these shrivelled shanks. Our feet are on the fender, and

that fire is felt on our face; but we verily believe our ice-cold shanks

would not shrink from the application of the red-hot poker. Peter has a

notion that but for that red-hot poker the fire would go out; so to

humour him we let it remain in the ribs, and occasionally brandish it

round our head in moments of enthusiasm when the Crutch looks tame, and

the Knout a silken leash for Italian Greyhound.

Old Simonides--old Mimnermus--old Theognis--old Solon-old Anacreon--old

Sophocles--old Pindar--old Hesiod--old Homer--and old Methuselah! What

mean we by the word _old_? All these men are old in three lights--they

lived to a raven age--long long ago--and we heard tell of them in our

youth. Their glory dawned on us in a dream of life's golden prime--and

far away seems now that dawn, as if in another world beyond a million

seas! In that use of the word "old," far from us is all thought of

dotage or decay. Old are those great personages as the stars are old; a

heaven there is in which are seen shining, for ever young, all the most

ancient spiritual "orbs of Song."

In our delight, too, we love to speak of old Venus and of old Cupid--of

old Eve and of old Cleopatra--of old Helen and of old Dalilah; yea, of

old Psyche, though her aerial wings are as rainbow bright as the first

hour she waved them in the eye of the youthful Sun.

How full of endearment "old boy!"--"old girl!" "Old Christopher

North!"--"old Maga!" To our simplest sayings age seems to give a

consecration which youth reveres. And why may not our hand, withered

somewhat though it be, but yet unpalsied, point out aloft to heedless

eyes single light or constellation, or lily by herself or in groups

unsuspected along the waysides of our mortal pilgrimage?

Age like ours is even more lovable than venerable; and, thinking on

ourselves, were we a young woman, we should assuredly marry an old man.

Indeed, no man ought to marry before thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty;

and, were it not that life is so short, soon enough at threescore and

ten. At seventy you are sager than ever, though scarcely so strong. You

and life love each other as well as ever; yet 'tis unpleasant, when

sailing on Windermere or Lochlomond with your bride, to observe the Man

in the Honeymoon looking at you with a congratulatory grin of

condolence, to fear that the old villain will smile over your grave in

the Season of Kirns and Harvest Homes, when the fiddle is heard in every

farmhouse, and the bagpipes are lowing like cattle on a thousand hills.

Fain would he insure his life on the Tipperary Tables. But the enamoured

annuitant is haunted with visions of his own Funeral deploying in a long

line of chariots--one at the head of all armed with scythes--through the

city, into the wide gates of the Greyfriars. Lovely is his bride in

white, nor less so his widow in black--more so in grey, portentous of a

great change. Sad, too, to the Sage the thought of leaving his

first-born as yet unborn--or if born, haply an elfish Creature with a

precocious countenance, looking as if he had begun life with borrowing

ten years at least from his own father--auld-farrant as a Fairy, and

gash as the Last of the Lairds.

Dearly do we love the young--yea, the young of all animals--the young

swallows twittering from their straw-built shed--the young lambs

bleating on the lea--the young bees, God bless them! on their first

flight away off to the heather--the young butterflies, who, born in the

morning, will die of old age ere night--the young salmon-fry glorying in

the gravel at the first feeling of their fins--the young adders basking,

ere they can bite, in the sun, as yet unconscious, like sucking

satirists, of their stings--young pigs, pretty dears! all a-squeak with

their curled tails after prolific grumphie--young lions and tigers,

charming cubs! like very Christian children nuzzling in their nurse's

breast--young devils, ere Satan has sent them to Sin, who keeps a

fashionable boarding-school in Hades, and sends up into the world

above-ground only her finished scholars.

Oh! lad of the lightsome forehead! Thou art smiling at Us; and for the

sake of our own Past we enjoy thy Present, and pardon the contumely with

which thou silently insultest our thin grey hairs. Just such another

"were we at Ravensburg." "_Carpe Diem_" was then our motto, as now it is

yours; "no fear that dinner cool," for we fed then, as you feed now, on

flowers and fruits of Eden. We lived then under the reign of the Seven

Senses; Imagination was Prime Minister, and Reason, as Lord-Chancellor,

had the keeping of the Royal Conscience; and they were kings, not

tyrants--we subjects, not slaves. Supercilious as thou art, Puer, art

thou as well read in Greek as we were at thy flowering age? Come close

that we may whisper in thine ear--while we lean our left shoulder on

thine--our right on the Crutch. The time will come when thou wilt be, O

Son of the Morning! even like unto the shadow by thy side! Was he not

once a mountaineer? If he be a vainglorious boaster, give him the lie,

Ben-y-glo and thy brotherhood--ye who so often heard our shouts mixed

with the red-deer's belling--tossed back in exultation by Echo,

Omnipresent Auditress on youth's golden hills.

Know, all ye Neophytes, that three lovely Sisters often visit the old

man's solitude--Memory, Imagination, Hope. It would be hard to say which

is the most beautiful. Memory has deep, dark, quiet eyes, and when she

closes their light, the long eyelashes lie like shadows on her pensive

cheeks, that smile faintly as if the dreamer were half asleep--a

visionary slumber, which sometimes the dewdrop melting on the leaf will

break, sometimes not the thunder-peal with all its echoes. Imagination

is a brighter and bolder Beauty, with large lamping eyes of uncertain

colour, as if fluctuating with rainbow light, and with features fine as

those which Grecian genius gave to the Muses in the Parian Marble, yet

in their daring delicacy defined like the face of Apollo. As for

Hope--divinest of the divine--Collins, in one long line of light, has

painted the picture of the angel,--

"And Hope enchanted smiled, and waved her golden hair."

All our great prose-writers owe the glory of their power to our great

poets. Even Hobbes translated Homer as well--that is as ill--as

Thucidydes; the Epic in his prime after eighty; the History in his youth

at forty; and it is fearful to dream what the brainful and heartless

metaphysician would have been, had he never heard of the Iliad and the

Odyssey. What is the greatest of prose-writers in comparison with a

great poet? Nay--we shall not be deterred by the fear of

self-contradiction (see our "Stroll to Grassmere") from asking who is a

great prose-writer? We cannot name one; they all sink in Shakespeare.

Campbell finely asks and answers--

"Without the smile from partial beauty won,

Oh! what were man? a world without a sun."

Suppose the world without poetry--how absurd would seem the Sun! Strip

the word "phenomena" of its poetical meaning, and forthwith the whole

human race, "moving about in worlds _realised_," would lose their powers

of speech. But, thank Heaven! we are Makers all. Inhabiting, we verily

believe, a real, and substantial, and palpable outer world, which

nevertheless shall one day perish like a scroll, we build our bowers of

joy in the Apparent, and lie down to rest in a drapery of Dreams.

Thus we often love to dream our silent way even through the noisy world.

And dreamers are with dreamers spiritually, though in the body apart;

nor wandering at will think they whence they come, or whither they are

going, assured by delight that they will reach their journey's end--like

a bee, that in many a musical gyration goes humming round men's heads

and tree-tops, aimlessly curious in his joy, yet knowing instinctively

the straight line that intersects all those airy circles, leading to and

fro between his hive in the garden and the honey-dew on the heather

hills.

What can it be that now recalls to our remembrance a few lines of Esop,

the delightful old Fabulist, the Merry and Wise, who set our souls

a-thinking and our hearts a-feeling in boyhood, by moral lessons read to

them in almost every incident befalling in life's common walks--solemn

as Simonides in this his sole surviving elegiac strain?

"What weary woe, what endless strife

Bring'st thou to mortal men, O Life!

Each hour they draw their breath.

Alas! the wretches all despair

To flee the ills they cannot bear,

But through the gates of Death.

And yet how beautiful art Thou

On Earth and Sea--and on the brow

Of starry Heaven! The Night

Sends forth the moon Thee to adorn;

And thee to glorify the Morn

Restores the Orb of Light.

Yet all is full of Pain and Dread;

Bedrench'd in tears for ever shed;

The darkness render'd worse

By gleams of joy--and if by Heaven

A Blessing seemeth to be given,

It changes to a curse."

Even in our paraphrase are not these lines very impressive? In the

original they are much more solemn. They are not querulous, yet full of

lamentation. We see in them not a weak spirit quarrelling with fate, but

a strong spirit subdued by a sense of the conditions on which life has

been given; conditions against which it is vain to contend, to which it

is hard to submit, but which may yet be borne by a will deriving

strength from necessity, and in itself noble by nature. Nor, dark as the

doctrine is, can we say it is false. Intellect and Imagination may from

doleful experiences have too much generalised their inductions, so as to

seem to themselves to have established the Law of Misery as the Law of

Life. But perhaps it is only thus that the Truth can be made available

to man, as it regards the necessity of Endurance. All is not

wretchedness; but the soul seeks to support itself by the belief that it

is really so. Holding that creed, it has no excuse for itself, if at any

time it is stung to madness by misery, or grovels in the dust in a

passion of grief; none, if at any time it delivers itself wholly up,

abandoning itself to joy, and acts as if it trusted to the permanence

of any blessing under the law of Mutability. The Poet, in the hour of

profound emotion, declares that every blessing sent from heaven is a

Nemesis. That oracular response inspires awe. A salutary fear is kept

alive in the foolish by such sayings of the wise. Even to us--now--they

sound like a knell. Religion has instructed Philosophy; and for Fate we

substitute God. But all men feel that the foundations of Faith are laid

in the dark depths of their being, and that all human happiness is

mysteriously allied with pain and sorrow. The most perfect bliss is ever

awful, as if we enjoyed it under the shadow of some great and gracious

wing that would not long be detained from heaven.

It is not for ordinary minds to attempt giving utterance to such

simplicities. On their tongues truths become truisms. Sentiments, that

seem always fresh, falling from the lips of moral wisdom, are stale in

the mouths of men uninitiated in the greater mysteries. Genius colours

common words with an impressive light, that makes them moral to all

eyes--breathes into them an affecting music, that steals into all hearts

like a revelation and a religion. They become memorable. They pass, as

maxims, from generation to generation; and all because the divinity that

is in every man's bosom responds to the truthful strain it had of yore

itself inspired. Just so with the men we meet on our life-journey. One

man is impressive in all his looks and words, on all serious or solemn

occasions; and we carry away with us moral impressions from his eyes or

lips. Another man says the same things, or nearly so, and perhaps with

more fervour, and his locks are silver. But we forget his person in an

hour; nor does his voice ever haunt our solitude.

Simonides--Solon--Esop!--why do such lines of theirs as those assure us

they were Sages? The same sentiments are the staple of many a sermon

that has soothed sinners into snoring sleep.

Men take refuge even in ocular deception from despair. Over buried

beauty, that once glowed with the same passion that consumes themselves,

they build a white marble tomb, or a green grass grave, and forget much

they ought to remember--all profounder thoughts--while gazing on the

epitaph of letters or flowers. 'Tis a vision to their senses, with which

Imagination would fain seek to delude Love. And 'tis well that the

deception prospers; for what if Love could bid the burial-ground give

up or disclose its dead? Or if Love's eyes saw through dust as through

air? What if this planet--which men call Earth--were at all times seen

and felt to be a cemetery circling round the sun that feeds it with

death, and not a globe of green animated with life--even as the dewdrop

on the rose's leaf is animated with millions of invisible creatures,

wantoning in bliss born of the sunshine and the vernal prime.

Are we sermonising overmuch in this our L'ENVOY to these our misnamed

RECREATIONS? Even a sermon is not always useless; the few concluding

sentences are sometimes luminous, like stars rising on a dull twilight;

the little flower that attracted Park's eyes when he was fainting in the

desert, was to him beauteous as the rose of Sharon; there is solemnity

in the shadow of quiet trees on a noisy road; a churchyard may be felt

even in a village fair; a face of sorrow passes by us in our gaiety,

neither unfelt nor unremembered in its uncomplaining calm; and sweet

from some still house in the city stir is

"The voice of psalms, the simple song of praise."

We daresay you are a very modest person; but we are all given to

self-glorification, private men and public, individuals and nations; and

every one Era and Ego has been prouder than another of its respective

achievements. To hear the Present Generation speak, such an elderly

gentleman as the Past Generation begins to suspect that his personal

origin lies hid in the darkness of antiquity; and worse--that he is of

the Pechs. Now, we offer to back the Past Generation against the Present

Generation, at any feat the Present Generation chooses, and give the

long odds. Say Poetry. Well, we bring to the scratch a few

champions--such as, Beattie, Cowper, Crabbe, Rogers, Bowles, Burns,

Baillie, Campbell, Graham, Montgomery, Scott, Southey, Coleridge,

Wordsworth, Hunt, Hogg, Shelley, Keates, Pollok, Cunningham, Bloomfield,

Clare, and _risum teneatis amici_--Ourselves.

"All with waistcoats of red and breeches of blue,

And mighty long tails that come swingeing through."

And at sight of the cavalcade--for each poet is on his Pegasus--the

champions of the Present Generation, accoutred in corduroy kilts and

top-boots, and on animals which, "well do we know, but dare not name,"

wheel to the right-about with "one dismal universal bray," brandishing

their wooden sabres, till, frenzied by their own trumpeters, they charge

madly a palisade in their own rear, and as dismounted cavalry make good

their retreat. This in their strategies is called a drawn battle.

Heroes, alive or dead, of the Past Generation, we bid you hail!

Exceeding happiness to have been born among such Births--to have lived

among such Lives--to be buried among such Graves. O great glory to have

seen such Stars rising one after another larger and more lustrous--at

times, when dilated with delight, more like Moons than Stars--like

Seraphs hovering over the earth they loved, though seeming so high up in

heaven!

To whom now may the young enthusiast turn as to Beings of the same kind

with himself, but of a higher order, and therefore with a love that

fears no sin in its idolatry? The young enthusiast may turn to some of

the living, but he will think more of others who are gone. The dead know

not of his love, and he can hold no communion with the grave. But Poets

never die--immortal in their works, the Library is the world of spirits;

there they dwell, the same as in the flesh, when by meditation most

cleansed and purified--yet with some holy change it seems--a change not

in them but in us, who are stilled by the stillness, and attribute

something supernatural to the Living Dead.

Since first this Golden Pen of ours--given us by One who meant it but

for a memorial--began, many years ago, to let drop on paper a few

careless words, what quires so distained--some pages, let us hope, with

durable ink--have accumulated on our hands! Some haughty ones have

chosen to say rather, how many leaves have been wafted away to wither?

But not a few of the gifted--near and afar--have called on us with other

voices--reminding us that long ago we were elected, on sight of our

credentials--not indeed without a few black balls--into the Brotherhood.

The shelf marked with our initials exhibits some half-dozen volumes

only, and has room for scores. It may not be easily found in that vast

Library; but, humble member as we are, we feel it now to be a point of

honour to make an occasional contribution to the Club. So here is the

FIRST SERIES of what we have chosen to call our RECREATIONS. There have

been much recasting and remoulding--many alterations, believed by us to

have been wrought with no unskilful spirit of change--cruel, we confess,

to our feelings, rejections of numerous lucubrations to their father

dear--and if we may use such words, not a few new creations, in the same

_genial_ spirit in which we worked of old--not always unrewarded by

sympathy, which is better than praise.

For kindness shown when kindness was most needed--for sympathy and

affection--yea, love itself--for grief and pity not misplaced, though

bestowed in a mistaken belief of our condition, forlorn indeed, but not

wholly forlorn--for solace and encouragement sent to us from afar, from

cities and solitudes, and from beyond seas and oceans, from brethren who

never saw our face, and never may see it, we owe a debt of everlasting

gratitude; and life itself must leave our heart, that beats not now as

it used to beat, but with dismal trepidation, before it forget, or cease

to remember as clearly as now it hears them, every one of the many words

that came sweetly and solemnly to us from the Great and Good. Joy and

sorrow make up the lot of our mortal estate, and by sympathy with them,

we acknowledge our brotherhood with all our kind. We do far more. The

strength that is untasked, lends itself to divide the load under which

another is bowed; and the calamity that lies on the heads of men is

lightened, while those who at the time are not called to bear, are yet

willing to involve themselves in the sorrow of a brother. So soothed by

such sympathy may a poor mortal be, that the wretch almost upbraids

himself for transient gleams of gladness, as if he were false to the

sorrow which he sighs to think he ought to have cherished more sacredly

within his miserable heart.

One word embraces all these pages of ours--Memorials. Friends are lost

to us by removal--for then even the dearest are often utterly forgotten.

But let something that once was theirs suddenly meet our eyes, and in a

moment, returning from the region of the rising or the setting sun, the

friend of our youth seems at our side, unchanged his voice and his

smile; or dearer to our eyes than ever, because of some affecting

change wrought on face and figure by climate and by years. Let it be but

his name written with his own hand on the title-page of a book; or a few

syllables on the margin of a favourite passage which long ago we may

have read together, "when life itself was new," and poetry overflowed

the whole world; or a lock of _her_ hair in whose eyes we first knew the

meaning of the word "depth." And if death hath stretched out the absence

into the dim arms of eternity--and removed the distance away into that

bourne from which no traveller returns--the absence and the distance of

her on whose forehead once hung the relic we adore--what heart may abide

the beauty of the ghost that doth sometimes at midnight appear at our

sleepless bed, and with pale uplifted arms waft over us at once a

blessing and a farewell!

Why so sad a word--_Farewell_? We should not weep in wishing welfare,

nor sully felicity with tears. But we do weep because evil lies lurking

in wait over all the earth for the innocent and the good, the happy and

the beautiful; and, when guarded no more by our eyes, it seems as if the

demon would leap out upon his prey. Or is it because we are so selfish

that we cannot bear the thought of losing the sight of the happiness of

a beloved object, and are troubled with a strange jealousy of beings

unknown to us, and for ever to be unknown, about to be taken into the

very heart, perhaps, of the friend from whom we are parting, and to whom

in that fear we give almost a sullen farewell? Or does the shadow of

death pass over us while we stand for the last time together on the

sea-shore, and see the ship with all her sails about to voyage away to

the uttermost parts of the earth? Or do we shudder at the thought of

mutability in all created things--and know that ere a few suns shall

have brightened the path of the swift vessel on the sea, we shall be

dimly remembered--at last forgotten--and all those days, months, and

years that once seemed eternal, swallowed up in everlasting oblivion?

With us all ambitious desires some years ago expired. Far rather would

we read than write nowadays--far rather than read, sit with shut eyes

and no book in the room--far rather than so sit, walk about alone

anywhere

"Beneath the umbrage deep

That shades the silent world of memory."

Shall we live? or "like beasts and common people die?" There is

something harsh and grating in the collocation of these words of the

"Melancholy Cowley;" yet he meant no harm, for he was a kind, good

creature as ever was born, and a true genius. He there has expressed

concisely, but too abruptly, the mere fact of their falling alike and

together into oblivion. Far better Gray's exquisite words,

"On some fond breast the parting soul relies!"

The reliance is firm and sure; the "fond breast" is faithful to its

trust, and dying, transmits it to another; till after two or three

transmissions--holy all, but fainter and dimmer--the pious tradition

dies, and all memorial of the love and the delight, the pity and the

sorrow, is swallowed up in vacant night.

Posthumous Fame! Proud words--yet may they be uttered in a humble

spirit. The common lot of man is, after death--oblivion. Yet genius,

however small its sphere, if conversant with the conditions of the human

heart, may vivify with indestructible life some happy delineations, that

shall continue to be held dear by successive sorrowers in this vale of

tears. If the _name_ of the delineator continue to have something sacred

in its sound--obscure to the many as it may be, or non-existent--the

hope of such posthumous fame is sufficient to one who overrates not his

own endowments. And as the hope has its root in love and sympathy, he

who by his writings has inspired towards himself when in life, some of

these feelings in the hearts of not a few who never saw his face, seems

to be justified in believing that even after final obliteration of _Hic

jacet_ from his tombstone, his memory will be regarded with something of

the same affection in his REMAINS.

REMARKS

ON THE

SCENERY OF THE HIGHLANDS.

REMARKS

ON THE

SCENERY OF THE HIGHLANDS.