"I think it is a verb," said John, who was deep in other diversions besides those of Burley; "and I think it must have been originally _the Perfect of Live_, like thrive, throve, strive, strove."
"Capital, John!" suddenly growled Uncle Oldbuck, who was supposed to be asleep in his arm-chair by the fireside, and who snubbed and supported the entire household. "It was that originally, and it will be our own faults, children, if it is not that at last, as well as, ay, and more than at first. What does Richardson say, John? read him out." John reads--
[Illustration: 0268]
* They are strange beings, these lexicographers. Richardson,
for instance, under the word snail, gives this quotation
from Beaumont and Fletcher's Wit at Several Weapons,
"Oh, Master Pompey! how is't, man?
Clown--Snails, I'm almost starved with love and cold, and
one thing or other."
Any one else knows of course that it is 11's nails"--the
contraction of the old oath or interjection--God's nails.
After this, Uncle sent the cousins to their beds. John's mother was in hers, never to rise from it again. She was a widow, and Mary was her husband's niece. The house quiet, Uncle sat down in his chair, put his feet on the fender, and watched the dying fire; it had a rich central glow, but no flame, and no smoke, it was flashing up fitfully, and bit by bit falling in. He fell asleep watching it, and when he slept, he dreamed.
[Illustration: 0269]
He was young; he was seventeen, he was prowling about the head of North St. David Street, keeping his eye on a certain door,--we call them common stairs in Scotland. He was waiting for Mr. White's famous English class for girls coming out. Presently out rushed four or five girls, wild and laughing; then came one, bounding like a roe!
"Such eyes were in her head,
And so much grace and power!"
She was surrounded by the rest, and away they went laughing, she making them always laugh the more. Seventeen followed at a safe distance, studying her small, firm, downright heel. The girls dropped off one by one, and she was away home by herself, swift and reserved. He, impostor as he was, disappeared through Jamaica Street, to reappear and meet her, walking as if on urgent business, and getting a cordial and careless nod. This beautiful girl of thirteen was afterwards the mother of our Mary, and died in giving her birth. She was Uncle Old-buck's first and only sweetheart; and here was he, the only help our young Horne Tooke, and his mother and Mary had. Uncle awoke, the fire dead, and the room cold. He found himself repeating Lady John Scott's lines--
"When thou art near me,
Sorrow seems to fly,
And then I think, as well I may,
That on this earth there is no one
More blest than I.
But when thou leav'st me,
Doubts and fears arise, \
And darkness reigns,
Where all before was light.
The sunshine of my soul
Is in those eyes,
And when they leave me
All the world is night.
But when thou art near me,
Sorrow seems to fly,
And then I feel, as well I may,
That on this earth there dwells not one
So blest as I." *
* Can the gifted author of these lines and of their music
not be prevailed on to give them and others to the world, as
well as to her friends?
Then taking down _Chambers's Scottish Songs_, he read aloud:--
"O, I'm wat, wat,
O, I'm wat and weary;
Yet fain wad I rise and rin,
If I thocht I would meet my dearie.
Aye wankin', O!
Wankin' aye, and weary;
Sleep I can get nane
For thinkin' o' my dearie.
Simmer's a pleasant time,
Flowers o' every colour;
The wafer rins ower the heugh,
And I long for my true lover.
When I sleep I dream,
When I wauk I'm eerie,
Sleep I can get nane,
For thinkin' o' my dearie.
Lanely nicht comes on,
A' the lave are sleepin';
I think on my true love,
And blear my een wi' greetin'.
Feather beds are saft--
Pentit rooms are bonnie;
But ae kiss o' my dear love
Better's far than ony.
O for Friday nicht!
Friday at the gloamin';
O for Friday nicht--
Friday's lang o' cornin'!"
This love-song, which Mr. Chambers gives from recitation, is, thinks Uncle to himself, all but perfect; Burns, who in almost every instance, not only adorned, but transformed and purified whatever of the old he touched, breathing into it his own tenderness and strength, fails here, as may be seen in reading his version:--
"Oh, spring's a pleasant time
Flowers o' every colour--
_The sweet bird builds her nest_,
And I lang for my lover.
Aye wakin', oh!
Wakin' aye and _wearie_:
Sleep I can get nane,
For thinkin' o' my dearie!
When I sleep I dream,
When I wauk I'm eerie,
Rest I canna get,
For thinkin' o' my dearie.
Aye wakin', oh!
Wakin' aye and weary,
_Come, come, blissful dream,_
Bring me to my dearie.
_Darksome_ nicht comes doun--
A the lave are sleepin';
I think on my kind lad.
And blin' my een wi' greetin'.
Aye wakin', oh!
Wakin' aye and weary;
_Hope is sweet,_ but ne'er
Sae sweet as my dearie!"
How weak these italics! No one can doubt which of these is the better. The old song is perfect in the procession, and in the simple beauty of its thoughts and words. A ploughman or shepherd--for I hold that it is a man's song--comes in "wat, wat" after a hard day's work among the furrows or on the hill. The wat ness of wat, wat, is as much wetter than wet as a Scotch mist is more of a mist than an English one; and he is not only wat, wat, but "weary," longing for a dry skin and a warm bed and rest; but no sooner said and felt, than, by the law of contrast, he thinks on "Mysie" or "Ailie," his Genevieve; and then "all thoughts, all passions, all delights" begin to stir him, and "fain wad I rise and rin" (what a swiftness beyond run is "rin"!) Love now makes him a poet; the true imaginative power enters and takes possession of him. By this time his clothes are off, and he is snug in bed; not a wink can he sleep; that "fain" is domineering over him,--and he breaks out into what is as genuine passion and poetry, as anything from Sappho to Tennyson--abrupt, vivid, heedless of syntax. "Simmer's a pleasant time." Would any of our greatest geniuses, being limited to one word, have done better than take "pleasant"? and then the fine vagueness of "time"! "Flowers o' every colour;" he gets a glimpse of "herself a fairer flower," and is off in pursuit. "The water rins ower the heugh" (a steep precipice); flinging itself wildly, passionately over, and so do I long for my true lover. Nothing can be simpler and finer than
"When I sleep, I dream;
When I wauk, I'm eerie."
"Lanely nicht;" how much richer and more touching than "darksome."
"Feather beds are saft;" "pentit rooms are bonnie;" I would infer from this, that his "dearie," his "true love," was a lass up at "the big house"--a dapper Abigail possibly--at Sir William's at the Castle, and then we have the final paroxysm upon Friday nicht--Friday at the gloamin'! O for Friday nicht!--Friday's lang o' cornin'!--it being very likely Thursday before day-break when this affectionate _ululatus_ ended in repose.
Now, is not this rude ditty, made very likely by some clumsy, big-headed Galloway herd, full of the real stuff of love? He does not go off upon her eye-brows, or even her eyes; he does not sit down, and in a genteel way announce that "love in thine eyes for ever sits," etc. etc., or that her feet look out from under her petticoats like little mice: he is far past that; he is not making love, he is in it. This is one and a chief charm of Burns' love-songs, which are certainly of all love-songs except those wild snatches left to us by her who flung herself from the Leu-cadian rock, the most in earnest, the tenderest, the "most moving delicate and full of life." Burns makes you feel the reality and the depth, the truth of his passion: it is not her eyelashes, or her nose, or her dimple, or even
"A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson diops
I' the bottom of a cowslip,"
that are "winging the fervour of his love;" not even her soul; it is herself. This concentration and earnestness, this _perfervor_ of our Scottish love poetry, seems to me to contrast curiously with the light, trifling, philandering of the English; indeed, as far as I remember, we have almost no love-songs in English, of the same class as this one, or those of Burns. They are mostly either of the genteel, or of the nautical (some of these capital), or of the comic school. Do you know the most perfect, the finest love-song in our or in any language; the love being affectionate more than passionate, love in possession not in pursuit?
"Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt,
I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee:
Or did Misfortune's bitter storms
Around thee blaw, around thee blaw,
Thy bield should be my bosom,
To share it a', to share it a'.
"Or were I in the wildest waste,
Sae black and bare, sae black and bare,
The desert were a paradise,
If thou wert there, if thou wert there;
Or were I monarch o' the globe,
Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign,
The brightest jewel in my crown
Wad be my queen, wad be my queen."
The following is Mr. Chambers's account of the origin of this song:---Jessy Lewars had a call one morning from Burns. He offered, if she would play him any tune of which she was fond, and for which she desired new verses, that he would do his best to gratify her wish. She sat down at the piano, and played over and over the air of an old song, beginning with the words--
"The robin cam' to the wren's nest,
And keekit in, and keekit in:
'O wae's me on your auld pow!
Wad ye be in, wad ye be in?
Ye'se ne'er get leave to lie without.
And I within, and I within,
As lang's I hae an auld clout,
To row ye in, to row ye in.'"
[Illustration: 0275]
Uncle now took his candle, and slunk off to bed, slipping up noiselessly that he might not disturb the thin sleep of the sufferer, saying in to himself--"I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee "If thou wert there, if thou wert there and though the morning was at the window, he was up by eight, making breakfast for John and Mary.
$EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES.
(reprinted from "the museum.")
"_Now, in matter of the knowledge of the works of nature, I would have you to study that exactly; that so there be no sea, river, nor fountain, of which thou dost not know the fishes; all thefowls of the air; all the several kinds of shrubs and trees, whether in forest or orchard; all the sorts of herbs and flowers that grow upon the ground; all the z'arious metals that are hid within the bowels of the earth. Let nothing of all these be hidden from thee.... But because, as the wise man Solomon saith, wisdotti entereth not into a malicious mind, and that knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul; it behoveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God, and on him to cast all thy thoughts and all thy hope, and, by faith forvied in love to cleave unto him, so that thou rnayest never be separated from him by thy sins."--Letter from Garagantua to his son Pantagruel. '
"Qui curiosuspostulat totum suce
Patere menti, ferre qui non stifficit
Mediocritatis conscientiam suce,
Jtidex iniquus, cestimator est malus
Suique naturæque; nam rerumparens,
Libanda tantum quæ venit mortaliôus,
Nos scire patica, multa mirari jubet."
"--Quiescet animus, errabit minus
Cotitentus eruditione parabili,
Nec quorct illam, siqua quorentem fugit.
Nescire qucedam magna pars sapientio est."
Grotius._
[Greek]
|One of the chief sins of our time is hurry: it is helter-skelter, and devil take the hindmost. Off we go all too swift at starting, and we neither run so fast nor so far as we would have done, had we taken it _cannily_ at first. This is true of a boy as well as of a blood colt. Not only are boys and colts made to do the work and the running of fullgrown men and horses, but they are hurried out of themselves and their _now_, and pushed into the middle of next week where nobody is wanting them, and beyond which they frequently never get.
The main duty of those who care for the young is to secure their wholesome, their entire growth, for health is just the development of the whole nature in its due sequences and proportions: first the blade--then the ear --then, and not till then, the full corn in the ear; and thus, as Dr. Temple wisely says, "not to forget wisdom in teaching knowledge." If the blade be forced, and usurp the capital it inherits; if it be robbed by you its guardian of its birthright, or squandered like a spendthrift, then there is not any ear, much less any corn; if the blade be blasted or dwarfed in our haste and greed for the full shock and its price, we spoil all three. It is not easy to keep this always before one's mind, that the young "idea" is in a young body, and that healthy growth and harmless passing of the time are more to be cared for than wrhat is vainly called accomplishment. We are preparing him to run his race, and accomplish that which is one of his chief ends; but we are too apt to start him off at his full speed, and be either bolts or breaks down--the worst thing for him generally being to win. In this wray a child or boy should be regarded much more as a mean than as an end, and his cultivation should have reference to this; his mind, as old Montaigne said, should be forged, as well as--indeed, I would say, rather than--furnished, fed rather than filled, --two not always coincident conditions. Now exercise --the joy of interest, of origination, of activity, of excitement--the play of the faculties,--this is the true life of a boy, not the accumulation of mere words. Words--the coin of thought--unless as the means of buying something else, are just as useless as other coin when it is hoarded; and it is as silly, and in the true sense as much the part and lot of a miser to amass words for their own sakes, as to keep all your guineas in a stocking and never spend them, but be satisfied with every now and then looking greedily at them and making them chink. Therefore it is that I dislike--as indeed who doesn't?--the cramming system. The great thing with knowledge and the young is to secure that it shall be their own--that it be not merely external to their inner and real self, but shall go _in succum et sanguinem_; and therefore it is, that the self-teaching that a baby and a child give themselves remains with them for ever--it is of their essence, whereas what is given them _ab extra_, especially if it be received mechanically, without relish, and without any energizing of the entire nature, remains pitifully useless and _wersh_. Try, therefore, always to get the resident teacher _inside the skin_, and who is for ever giving his lessons, to help you and be on your side.
Now in children, as we all know, he works chiefly through the senses. The quantity of accurate observation--of induction, and of deduction too (both of a much better quality than most of Mr. Buckle's); of reasoning from the known to the unknown; of inferring; the nicety of appreciation of the like and the unlike, the common and the rare, the odd and the even; the skill of the rough and the smooth--of form, of appearance, of texture, of weight, of all the minute and deep philosophies of the touch and of the other senses,--the amount of this sort of objective knowledge which every child of eight years has acquired--especially if he can play in the lap of nature and out of doors--and acquired for life, is, if we could only think of it, marvellous beyond any of our mightiest marches of intellect. Now, could we only get the knowledge of the school to go as sweetly and deeply and clearly into the vitals of the mind as this self-teaching has done, and this is the paradisiac way of it, we should make the young mind grow as well as learn, and be in understanding a man as well as in simplicity a child; we should get rid of much of that dreary, sheer endurance of their school-hours--that stolid lending of ears that do not hear--that objectless looking without ever once seeing, and straining their minds without an aim; alternating, it may be, with some feats of dexterity and effort, like a man trying to lift himself in his own arms, or take his head in his teeth, exploits as dangerous, as ungraceful, and as useless, except to glorify the showman and bring wages in, as the feats of an acrobat.
But you will ask, how is all this to be avoided if everybody must know how far the sun is from _Georgium Sidus_, and how much of phosphorus is in our bones, and of ptyalin and flint in human spittle--besides some 10,000 times 10,000 other things which we must be told and try to remember, and which we cannot prove not to be true, but which I decline to say we know.
But _is_ it necessary that everybody should know everything? Is it not much more to the purpose for every man, when his turn comes, to be able to _do_ something; and I say, that other things being equal, a boy who goes bird-nesting, and makes a collection of eggs, and knows all their colours and spots, going through the excitements and glories of getting them, and observing everything with a keenness, an intensity, an exactness, and a permanency, which only youth and a quick pulse, and fresh blood and spirits combined, can achieve,--a boy who teaches himself natural history in this way, is not only a healthier and happier boy, but is abler in mind and body for entering upon the great game of life, than the pale, nervous, bright-eyed, feverish, "interesting" boy, with a big head and a small bottom and thin legs, who is the "captain," the miracle of the school; dux for his brief year or two of glory, and, if he live, booby for life. I am, of course, not going in for a complete curriculum of general ignorance; but I am for calling the attention of teachers to drawing out the minds, the energies, the hearts of their pupils through their senses, as well as pouring in through these same apertures the general knowledge of mankind, the capital of the race, into this one small being, who it is to be hoped will contrive to forget much of the mere words he has unhappily learned.
[Illustration: 0281]
For we may say of our time in all seriousness, what Sydney Smith said in the fulness of his wisdom and his fun of the pantologic master of Trinity--Science is our _forte_, omniscience is our _foible_. There is the seed of a whole treatise, a whole organon in this joke; think over it, and let it simmer in your mind, and you will feel its significance and its power. Now, what is _science_ so called to every 999 men in iooo, but something that the one man tells them he has been told by some one else--who may be one among say 50,000--is true, but of the truth of which these 999 men (and probably even the teaching thousandth man) can have no direct test, and, accordingly, for the truth or falsehood of which they, by a law of their nature, which rejects what has no savour and is superfluous, don't care one fig. How much better, how much dearer, and more precious in a double sense, because it has been bought by themselves,--how much nobler is the knowledge which our little friend, young Edward Forbes, "that marvellous boy," for instance--and what an instance!--is picking up, as he looks into everything he sees, and takes photographs upon his retina?--the _camera lucida_ of his mind--which never fade, of every midge that washes its face as a cat does, and preens its wings, every lady-bird that alights on his knee, and folds and unfolds her gauzy pinions under their spotted and glorious lids. How more real is not only this knowledge, but this little knowledger in his entire nature, than the poor being who can maunder amazingly the entire circle of human science at second, or it may be, twentieth hand!
There are some admirable, though cursory remarks on "Ornithology as a Branch of Liberal Education," by the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, the great Greek scholar, in a pamphlet bearing this title, which he read as a paper before the last meeting of the British Association in Aberdeen. It is not only interesting as a piece of natural history, and a touching co-operation of father and son in the same field--the one on the banks of his own beautiful Dee and among the wilds of the Grampians, the other among the Himalayas and the forests of Cashmere; the son having been enabled, by the knowledge of his native birds got under his father's eye, when placed in an unknown country to recognise his old feathered friends, and to make new ones and tell their story; it is also valuable as coming from a man of enormous scholarship and knowledge--the most learned physician of his time--who knew Aristotle and Plato, and all those old fellows, as we know Maunder or Lardner--a hardworking country surgeon, who was ready to run at any one's call--but who did not despise the modern enlightenments of his profession, because they were not in Paulus Agineta; though, at the same time, he did not despise the admirable and industrious Paul because he was not up to the last doctrine of the nucleated cell, or did not read his Hippocrates by the blaze of paraffine; a man greedy of all knowledge, and welcoming it from all comers, but who, at the end of a long life of toil and thought, gave it as his conviction that one of the best helps to true education, one of the best counteractives to the necessary mischiefs of mere scientific teaching and information, was to be found in getting the young to teach themselves some one of the natural sciences, and singling out ornithology as one of the readiest and most delightful for such a life as his.
I end these intentionally irregular remarks by a story. Some years ago I was in one of the wildest recesses of the Perthshire Highlands. It was in autumn, and the little school, supported mainly by the Chief, who dwelt all the year round in the midst of his own people, was to be examined by the minister, whose native tongue, like that of his flock, was Gaelic, and who was as awkward and ineffectual, and sometimes as unconsciously indecorous, in his English, as a Cockney is in his kilt. It was a great occasion: the keen-eyed, firm-limbed, brown-cheeked little fellows were all in a buzz of excitement as we came in, and before the examination began every eye was looking at us strangers as a dog looks at his game, or when seeking it; they knew everything we had on, everything that could be known through their senses. I never felt myself so studied and scrutinized before. If any one could have examined them upon what they thus mastered, Sir Charles Trevelyan and John Mill would have come away, astonished, and, I trust, humbled. Well, then, the work of the day began; the mill was set a-going, and what a change! In an instant their eyes were like the windows of a house with the blinds down; no one was looking out; everything blank; their very features changed--their jaws fell, their cheeks flattened, they drooped and looked ill at ease--stupid, drowsy, sulky--and getting them to speak or think, or in any way to energize was like trying to get any one to come to the window at three of a summer morning, when, if they do come, they are half awake, rubbing their eyes and growling. So with my little Celts. They were like an idle and half asleep collie by the fireside, as contrasted with the collie on the hill and in the joy of work; the form of dog and boy are there--he, the self of each, was elsewhere (for I differ from Professor Ferrier in thinking that the dog _has_ the reflex ego, and is a very knowing being). I noticed that anything they really knew roused them somewhat; what they had merely to transmit or pass along, as if they were a tube through which the master blew the pea of "knowledge into our faces, was performed as stolidly as if they were nothing but a tube.