FISHING HOLIDAYS
I had not known my husband six months before I knew him for an
enthusiastic fisherman. He tells in his Reminiscences of the first
teaching he had from a reprobate old peasant in the Lake Country, and
the passion for it never left him; the happiest of his summer days
were spent in the pursuit of it and, from the time when I--set to
watch a float while he threw a line further down the stream--allowed
the fish to escape, to an evening towards the close of his life when
I helped his unsteady steps to the bank of the Windrush at Burford,
his characteristic grey felt hat stuck full of flies and the graceful
gesture with which his long line was flung back and forward and then
laid softly on the water of some quiet stream, are among the things
which I often recall.
I can see him now, on that first holiday, stumbling with his swaying
rod down the rocky bed of the Dove with the sunset behind him, while
I sat waiting on a grassy bank eager to know what sport he had had
as soon as he was within earshot. He was a most expert angler; and
that was the beginning of many happy fishing trips--in Derbyshire
and Westmoreland, on the Tweed at Peebles and the lochs and rivers of
Perthshire, Argyllshire and Sutherland; but most notably on the stretch
of a Hertfordshire stream which he rented for some years with other
friends, and where he could best exercise his skill with the dry fly.
A tiny cottage, just big enough for three men or for me and the
children, stood on the edge of the water, which was crossed by a plank
bridge. Sometimes, when there was no one else, I would be allowed--most
alarming of experiences!--to use the landing net, and I think any of
his angling comrades--A. E. W. Mason, Seymour Hicks, Sam Sothern and
others--would sympathise with my terror over the responsibility.
I think there were no happier days in my husband’s life than
those spent in that Hertfordshire cot, and there is no frame into which
his figure fits more familiarly than the sedgy bank of that sunlit
river, hemmed by boldly contrasting forget-me-not and marshmallow, with
the May-fly flitting over the sparkling ripples and the shaded pools.
And nothing so helped his periods of creative work as this rural
recreation.
It was on the shores of Loch Rannoch that he wrote the first Acts of
his _King Arthur_ for Henry Irving, and on the banks of the Lea that
he saw the barge bearing the body of the Fair Elaine. The Black Mount
at the foot of the loch may have stood for the rugged rocks around
Camelot, and the limpid stream dividing emerald meadows at eventide,
for the river that circled Arthur’s Halls.
He was wont whimsically to declare that the “gaslights of
Piccadilly” were more satisfying to him than a country life
unless enhanced by the pleasure of sport; but no one saw the beauties
of Nature in the intervals of sport more sympathetically than he did,
as he tells for himself in _Coasting Bohemia_:
“I sometimes think,” he writes, “that those who
haunt the country, without conscious sense of its many beauties,
are apt to learn and love its beauties best. How often the memory
of a day’s shooting is indissolubly linked with the pattern
of a fading autumn sky, when we have stood at the edge of a stubble
field wondering whether the growing twilight will suffice for the
last drive. And if this is true of other forms of sport, it is
everlastingly true of fishing. There is hardly a remembered day on a
Scotch loch, or beside a southern stream, which has not stamped upon
it some unfading image of landscape beauty. It was not for that we
set forth in the morning, for then the changing lights in a dappled
sky counted for no more than a promise of good sport; during those
earlier hours there is no feeling but a feeling of impatience to be
at work; and the splash of a rising trout, before the rod is joined
and ready and the line run through its rings, is heard with a sense
of half-resentment lest we should have missed the favourable moment
of the day. But as the hours pass, the mind becomes more tranquilly
attuned to its surroundings. The keenness of the pursuit is still
there, but little by little the still spirit of the scene invades our
thoughts, and as we tramp home at nightfall the landscape that was
unregarded when we set forth upon our adventure now seems to wrap
itself like a cloak around us with a spell that it is impossible to
resist. A hundred such visions, born of an angler’s wanderings,
come back to me across the space of many years. I can see the reeds
etched against a sunset sky, as they spring out of a little loch in
the hills above the inn at Tummel. And then, with a changing flash
of memory, the broad waters of Rannoch are outspread, fringed by its
purple hills. And then, again, in a homelier frame, I can see the
willows that border the Lea, their yellow leaves turned to gold under
the level rays of the evening sun; and I can hear the nightingale in
the first notes of its song as I cross the plank bridge that leads me
homeward to the cottage by the stream.”
By which it will also be seen that his “love of laziness”
did not hinder him in the pursuit of sport.
Exercise for its own sake he resolutely refused to take, and when my
Alpine-enthusiast father dragged him up a Piz--the last bit with his
eyes shut--he said: “I shall never climb anything again!”
But Seymour Hicks could tell a different tale of a memorable evening on
which he hooked a big trout in the dusk--Joe teasing him as to its poor
weight--and when they stayed so late beside a Scottish tarn to land
it that their friends below came up the mountain with lanterns to the
rescue.
In Peeblesshire, too, he had gay hours with a Captain Fearon, known to
our children as _Plum-bun_, because of a rhyme with which he teased
them.
This fine old sportsman--though he must have been sixty at the
time--walked twenty miles after a day’s sport so as to let Joe
have the only spare seat on a buggy that he might catch the night
express to town for work on the morrow. I can see the tall handsome old
man now on the moorside, gaily waving adieu to Joe with a champagne
bottle which he had seized from the picnic basket to cheer him on the
road.
Joe had many days with him on the Tweed; one of them, following such a
big spate that an old countryman wading in front of them was never seen
more after they had warned him against imprudently breasting the swirl
of the water where the river made an abrupt bend ahead.
The gloom of this incident was partly mitigated by their being told
that the man was a drunkard whose fate had often been so prophesied to
him; but they fished no more in a spate on the Tweed.
Fun was oftener their portion. I fancy it was to Fearon that Joe made
the _bon-mot_ current in the Garrick Club, where he represented himself
as lunching with Noah on the Ark.
“You must have good spate fishing here, Mr. Noah,” he
reports himself as saying while they sat smoking on the balcony
overlooking the Flood.
“It _would_ be good,” replied the host, “but
unluckily, you see, I have only two worms.”
He writes himself of his fishing on Loch Awe; and later, on Loch Etive,
as the guest of our charming friend Alec Stevenson, whose cheery voice
would ask of his keeper after breakfast: “Is it fishin’
or shutin’ the day, Duncan?” But there is no mention of
a happy six weeks in Sutherlandshire where we were chiefly fed by the
guests “killing” of the daily trout, proudly displayed at
even upon a large tray in the hall.
I think it was here that Joe had trudged for three hours up a
mountain with his fly-rod set up, to find--when he reached the tarn
at the top--that his top joint had fallen off on the road; as he was
alone only the midges heard his remarks, for he had not even his
fourteen-year old son with him--the happy companion of his later
angling days. It was into just such a tarn, that that boy fell off the
boat one day, when landing a trout, and was advised by his father to
run about in the natural state on the moor while his clothes dried on a
sun-baked rock.
A lovely place is Inchnadamph on blue Loch Assynt; the great mountain
that guards the valley towards Lochinver can be golden in the long,
northern twilight, when the water that has been as a sapphire before
the sunset, becomes purple in the gloaming; but oh! the midges!
Useless to tie our heads in bags and grease our faces: they penetrated
everywhere and “bit like dogs.” They _almost_ deterred Joe
from his evening hour on the water because of the landing afterwards,
when the pony would not stand for him to step into the cart.
But nothing really deterred Joe from fly-fishing--neither heat nor
cold nor rain nor wind; he only regarded the weather at those times
from the point of view of its influence on the sport. Even when it was
too bad for fishing he couldn’t keep away from the water. But he could
never keep away from water--he said it was the life of a landscape
as the blood is the life of the human body. In our early days, when
we were too poor for Highland trips, visits to friends on the Thames
afforded him his best access to it; and, though he was not perhaps a
perfect oarsman, as may be proved by a “stroke’s” petition that he
would not “go so deep,” to which he replied: “Ah, I never leave a stone
unturned!”--he loved the “noble river.” Though for perfect satisfaction
he chose more swiftly running waters.
I came across some passages in one of Stopford Brooke’s letters
which strangely call to mind Joe’s passion for a free stream.
“There is no companion like a quick stream,” writes the
older man; “full, but not too full, capable of shallows and
water-breaks, with deep pools when it likes and with a thousand shadows
acquainted with all the tales of the hills....”
And once more: “Running water surely is the dearest and best-bred
thing in the world. And a great workman and a great artist.... Nor is
there any Singer, any Poet, any Companion so near and dear as it is
when it shapes itself into a mountain stream in a quiet country.”
Often have I seen Joe beside such streams, and though it so chanced
that the last happy holiday we had together was spent beside lakes
rather than rivers, the sense of moving water remains associated in my
mind with him through all the earlier days of our life.
It was in Ireland--his motherland, though he had never seen it till
then--that we passed those last unforgetable weeks of autumn.
Even as we landed at Rosslare there seemed to fall upon him an
unnameable affinity with the country of his blood; as we travelled
slowly--very slowly--over her truly emerald bosom, he sat in a dream
watching the little black cattle, that we afterwards learnt to beware
of for “cross bastes,” as they cropped the sedgy meadows,
his eyes wandering from them to the tender Irish sky and then waking
into fun as he saw a peasant at a small station trip a boy up unawares
and cuff him soundly, laughing as he did it.
And when we reached Waterford--only a dirty town to me--he plunged at
once among his people and laughed joyously at the retort of a begging
urchin, whose pathetic plea of hunger he had pretended to rail at:
“That’s where ye’re wrong, yer honour,” the cheery little villain had
cried: “A man may be fat and hungry too.”
The horse races were going on, and the inn was in an uproar, which he
sat up most of the night to watch.
But the next day sleepy ways prevailed once more, and it took us a long
time to get off at the station, where I recollect his amusement at the
porter’s instruction: “This way to America.”
We reached Killarney without trunks, and the conveyance sent to meet us
broke down on the way to the hotel; but he would meet no _contretemps_
save with a smile, and it was borne in on me that it was because he
was an Irishman that Italian happy-go-luckiness had never ruffled him.
So we fell in with the leisurely ways of the land, and were fain to
“enjoy the soft rain” at that romantic spot and watch for
the beautiful shapes of the hills to appear out of the mists on the
lake.
Next morning, however, that unique green-blue sky, washed with rain and
dappled with wisps of cloud, smiled on us in faint sunshine, and from
that hour our journey was one passing from fair to fairer scenes.
In a short time our train was climbing, or burrowing, through perilous
cliffs of granite, crowned with lonely moors and, presently swooping
down on the glorious coast-line, that makes for Valencia Island.
This we left on one side, and at Lough Caragh we also did not halt,
tempting as it was; for our destination was Waterville, where we had
rooms booked at the charming Great Southern Hotel for the fishing
season; and after an hour or so more of leisurely travel we reached
Cahirciveen, where a ramshackle trap waited to carry us over the moors
to the village that lies twixt sea and lough.
The whole journey, and the last of it not least, was a revelation to
him of which I think he was proud to talk to me, and I certainly had
formed no notion of the beauties of _The Kingdom of Kerry_. The rough
road across the wild heather-moor was bordered almost continuously
with hedges of the small purple-red fuchsia in full bloom, and the
cabins--white or pink-washed, with thatched roofs--that we passed at
rare intervals, were shaded with it and covered with honeysuckle.
“You live in a fair country,” said Joe to an old man
standing one day at the door of his tiny hovel; and I--looking beyond
him to the dim range of the Macgillicuddy Reeks--added, “and
with beautiful hills.”
“The visitors say ’tis fair, but I’ve seen it _arl_
me life,” replied the proprietor, with a quaint smile. And then
to me--“but sure the Reeks are illigant in winter wi’ the
darlin’ snaws upon them.”
But that was later. That day we were silent with contented fatigue
till the muffled boom of the great Atlantic breakers began to fall as
distant thunder on our ears: then suddenly Ballinskelligs’ Bay
lay before us with the massive headlands of Bolus and Hog’s Head
guarding it from the Ocean.
The shore is wild and desolate with the sense of the vast Atlantic
ever present; but soon we turned inland again towards the mountains of
the “deep Glenmore,” and there, under the purple shadow of
Mount Knockaline, lay a long, grave Lough with a tiny deserted islet
in its midst upon which one of the ancient beehive cells stands under
the eaves of a ruined church. It is Lough Currane, and we drove under
overhanging fuchsias, to the Great Southern Hotel on its shore.
We had two more beautiful drives while we were in the _Kingdom of
Kerry_: one along the perilous Irish _Cornice_, known as the Coomakista
Pass, where one prayed one might not meet the coach, to Park-na-Silla;
the other from Kenmare over a rocky road to Glengariff.
The Cornice drive beggars description, and I never knew Joe to be so
enthusiastic over a view. Shallow little coves fringed with brilliant
golden seaweed--upon which herons stand feeding at times--indent the
shore itself; but the Sound is studded with numberless islets--some
clad with heather, others with semi-tropical shrubs, and faintly ringed
with the silver foam of a streaked and gentle sea. In an opal haze
beyond them, the opposite shore of County Cork lies as a dream; but
the two great guardian cliffs of Ballinskelligs’ Bay with their
outriders--the Bull and Cow Rocks--stand in firm and grand outline away
whence we came where the Sound joins the Ocean.
The coach driver draws up when he reaches the best point, and tells
us all about it, and points out the Great Skellig Rock--twelve miles
out to sea, and close at hand the bridle path by which O’Connell rode
over the mountains to his home at Darrynane. As we near that Bay and
its multitude of tiny islets, upon one of which stands the ruined
Monastery of St. Finnan, he shews us the “Liberator’s” very house and
then we turn inland again among undulating moors--our road fenced with
the fuchsia and every variety of fern, till of a sudden the beautiful
bridge and square church tower of Sneem village seem to beckon us into
the very heart of a fiery sunset.
Our second drive from Kenmare was again quite different and not without
incident. In the first place Irish unpunctuality caused us to start
two hours late, and in the second, when the carriage arrived at last,
the harness had to be tied up with cord before we could proceed, a
beginning which filled me with alarm though it reminded me of youthful
days in Italy: but to Joe it only afforded opportunity for pleasant
raillery with his compatriot, and I only wish I could remember all the
_bon-mots_ with which they capped one another.
The last part of the ascent was very wild, but when we emerged from
the tunnel that pierces the topmost granite cliff, the view that burst
upon us--though wild still in its freedom from the intrusion of human
interest, was soft and tender with all the glamour of the South. Range
upon range of finely-chiselled hills stood crossing and re-crossing one
another with gentle valleys between, and the glint of water here and
there made visible by the golden splash of sunset; and presently the
hills--so soft and so solemn upon the mellow evening sky--were cleft to
their base, and Bantry Bay lay spread in the distance beneath us.
The road went down in sharp turns and, the driver cheerfully remarking
that we should have to pass a motor-roller on the way, my heart
jumped into my mouth. But Joe administered a little salutary chaff
together with a cup of tea at the wayside inn, where we changed
drivers, and a pretty girl assured me that “Faith,” I had
“no need to fear, for the lad was the coolest whip on arl the
mountain-side.”
So he was, but he went a fine pace, and the waiter at the inn, who told
us he was the girl’s brother, told us also that that cool lad was
her lover, so perhaps he was eager to show his prowess.
At Glengariff our weather was hot and fine, and the water of that
land-locked end of the Bay was so calm that the pleasure boats round
the jetty, and indeed every tree on the shore and on the near island,
would lie reflected on its surface in the rosy dawns or the golden
sunsets as they do on the Italian lakes. But out beyond the island
the breeze would freshen, and thither Joe hied him with a friendly
fisherman every morning to lie in wait for the bass and the mackerel.
Our friends--Mr. and Mrs. Annan Bryce--owned the beautiful island at
the mouth of the bay, and there we spent happy afternoons wandering
over the heather and gazing afar from the old castle’s ruined
battlements; but Joe’s mornings were his own, and he would go
even further out to sea than the island, to where the seals sunned
themselves on the rocks, unscared by the approach of man, but scuttling
under water when the fishing-reel ran out, the old ones calling their
young to safety with an eerie cry.
Perhaps Glengariff was the most lovely spot that we saw, but the
hothouse atmosphere of it made a prolonged stay too trying, hence we
enjoyed Waterville and Lough Currane best, where the more invigorating
air of the open Atlantic in our wake kept even the moisture of the
valleys freshened with soft breezes.
Also it is here that Joe rejoiced in the only branch of angling that he
really loved; sunshine, mist or rain he was off on the lough with his
faithful gillie, his trout-rod set up, his old hat well-adorned with
every likely fly and, if necessary, his oilskins about him.
It took him all his time--easy as it usually was with him to make
friends--to make them with that gillie: a curiously sad and silent lad,
whose rage at the “lack of pride” in a besotted old poacher
who would hang about the landing-stage, knew no bounds.
But Joe would only laugh, and give the old beggar the
“tanner” that he begged “for the love of God,”
with a willing heart.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” he would say to the
young boatman. But the boy had been in America, and, as it presently
appeared, was ashamed of the lazy ways of his countrymen.
“Home Rule might be arl right,” he would say--adding
shrewdly--“if it don’t keep the visitors” (generally
meaning the English) “away. But, begorra, let us work for
it!”
Few held such wide views even in that day, and Joe could rarely get
any one to talk on that favourite topic of his; but he made various
pleasant little discoveries, one of which was that Catholic and
Protestant children worked together at school without trouble; but then
most of the latter were fathered by English experts working at the
Cable Station and were ranked as “visitors.”
His chief enjoyment when not fishing, was in the cabins--when he could
find excuse for entrance. There was a weaver of the frieze not far from
our inn, and there we went to buy a length for a gift. We were rewarded
for a wet walk. The weaver was out--but his wife sat by the peat-fire
with a new-born baby in her arms.
As we opened the door the cow that was in the yard thrust in a soft
nose to hold it ajar, and lo, we beheld a sow within, rise slowly up
and waddle out, followed by ten wee sucking pigs: then the cow stepped
over the threshold beside us.
The woman rose asking us our errand, while I edged away from the cow
and tried to get out again.
“She’ll not harm ye, lady,” said she with a smile, “It’s her milkin’
time, and sure she knows I’d not take the darlin’ babe out in the rain.”
But it was not often that Joe spared time from serious business for
calling and sight-seeing. Once we went to the Cable Station and
learned, in an amazing short time, from America, that the weather was
fine and dry; and on two occasions I went with him to Lough Coppul (The
Horse) away up in the “deep Glenmore”; but that was only
allowed so that I might see the sleepy beauty of that tiny, lonely
lake, where the water is peat-brown even in the sunlight; here I was
introduced to two lovely children with gold-red hair and deep eyes,
who dwelt in the schoolhouse of four districts, and were Joe’s
special friends. This treat was a great favour granted to me, nor was
I admitted into the boat even then, but had to roam about the shores
while work was done. Luckily it was fine and warm, and the midges are
not nearly so fierce in Ireland; and, with the children’s tales
of the plights of scholars coming over the mountains in winter and a
shy admission, warily coaxed out of them, as to the presence of fairy
horsemen there on All Hallowe’en, many an hour went by like a
dream, till the gloaming called us home.
But my lot was more often to sit reading or writing on the terrace of
the hotel watching for the boats to round the point of _Church Island_,
as they came in with their catch to meals.
Whether anglers are men or women--and most of the women in the Hotel
were anglers--they mind nothing but meals, and rarely the _hours_ of
those; so that I was mostly alone, but the excitement of the “basket”
was an event each time, and Joe’s was often the heaviest.
Through the gap in the fuchsia hedge, whose tassels lay blood-red
upon the lough’s blue background on a fine morning, I would first
distinguish his boat in the offing, and walk down to the landing-stage
to watch it nearing me between the shallows, where those coal-black
little “cross” bullocks stood knee-deep on the emerald marshland. I can
see him, skilfully throwing his line on the water to the last instant;
then turning towards me with the welcoming smile on his face always,
though I generally knew, before he had stepped ashore, whether he had
had good luck or not.
Yet the weather was not by any means always fine, and many a day I sat
in our little parlour, not even seeing the fuchsia hedge, and certainly
not the water.
One wet day comes specially to my mind. It had rained steadily, and out
of the soft, white mist that shrouded the lough, the sound of a tolling
bell had come eerily to me all the afternoon. I knew of no church
within two miles save the ruined one on the Island, and at last I asked
the chambermaid what it might mean.
“Sure, it’ll be a buryin’ on St. Finnan’s
Isle,” said she, crossing herself, after listening for a minute.
“The family will still have the right of it, and they keep a
bell in the broken tower. But the corpse will have come from far, poor
sowl!”
She went her way, and soon the bell ceased, and almost at the same
time the mist began to clear and the shapes of the black cattle to
appear again on the sedgy marshes, browsing as usual; then I saw black
boats--like phantom things--stealing away in the distance and--behind
them--a streak of gold struck across the wet mountain-side and all the
mist shrank away, and the purple ridge was set against that tender
blue-green Irish sky, crossed with bars of rosy light.
I went out and down the wet path to the landing-stage, and there was
Joe’s boat pulling towards the shore, and he standing up in it
with a smile upon his face.
* * * * *
That was our last holiday.
We were often out of London again, and in lovely spots: in summer,
at Studland in Dorset, at Broadway and Burford in Oxon, at Ditchling
in Sussex; in winter, at Hastings and Bournemouth. But it was always
in search of health and to escape the nerve-racking air-raids of
War--never again in the boyish spirit of holiday.
Yet let it not be supposed that Joe was ever dismal. “Comyns
Carr is a good fellow and a boon fellow,” George Meredith wrote
of him to another old friend, and so he was to the last. Depressed now
and then, but hopeful again till near the end, and always thankful for
every bright moment and for every kindness received. “Grumbling
is so dull,” he would say; and when I was dismayed at the
_contretemps_ of travel lest they should affect his comfort, he would
beg me to “bridge it over”--as he did.
As we drove away from the house at Bournemouth on our last journey he
said to the landlady: “I’ve never been so comfortable in
any lodgings”; yet he had suffered much there, and had often
lacked luxuries unprocurable in war-time. Sometimes in those days,
after a long silence, I would ask him what he was thinking of, and he
would answer simply: “Nothing, dear!” By which I am sure he
meant nothing troublous--and truly to the wearying, harassing thoughts
which beset many of us he was a stranger--for he would sometimes add:
“I’ve plenty to remember.”
And then, to the last, he worked part of every day. His hand had not
been able to write for long, but he would dictate to a shorthand
typist; the whole of his _Ideals of Painting_, posthumously published,
was so written, and his precision never flagged, as he instructed
me over the correction of those proofs--whether in regard to the
letterpress or to the re-production of the illustrations; the
photogravure after Rembrandt’s _Mill_ had been delayed, and
on the last day of his life he asked me if it had come and if it
“looked well.”
Reading over his own words upon the waning of his old friend, Sir John
Millais’ life, they seem to me unconsciously, yet so fitly, to
describe himself, that I shall end this effort to preserve some sort of
a portrait of him by quoting them.
“I never heard from him,” he writes, “however
great the dejection of spirit he must have suffered, a single sour
word concerning life or nature. His outlook on the world was never
tainted by self-compassion, never clouded by any bitterness of personal
experience, and one came to recognise then--as his life and strength
gradually failed and waned--that the spirit of optimism ... was indeed
a beauty deeply resident in his character, which even the shadow of
coming death was powerless to cloud or darken.”
So I think of Joe as he stepped out of the boat on Currane, with the
smile upon his face.
I here add a few unpublished early lyrics and sonnets, never revised by
my husband for publication, which may give pleasure to his friends of
those days.
LOVE’S SUMMER.
Away in our far Northern Land,
Where blustering winds swept o’er the wold,
Love came with Winter hand in hand
Changing our leaden skies to gold,
And as we raced across the Snow,
Love set the frozen world aglow.
Ah, give me back that frozen year,
Those leaden skies, that wind swept wold!
’Twas summer then, ’tis winter here,
Here where my dearest heart is cold,
Where all the Earth and all the Sun,
Tell only that Love’s race is run.
J. C. C.
1870.
A SONG.
I.
What need of words, when lips that might have spoken
Clung close to mine?
And through the shadowed silence long unbroken,
This hand in thine,
There came from lowered lids such speech as lingers
When Love grows dumb,
And muted strings yield up to unseen fingers
Sweet strains to come.
II.
But now! Ah now! what love left half-unheeded
Or half untold,
Each little word those quivering lips conceded
Has turned to gold.
I hoard them all as misers hoard their treasure
In secret store,
Till once again Love finds that muted measure
As once before.
J. C. C.
FOR MUSIC.
O winged Love! bear those red lips to mine,
That at one draught together we may drain
This Cup of Life that holds Love’s magic wine,
Then turn with lip to lip and drink again,
O Winged Love!
Or waft me as a rose to where she lies
And hide me with thy hands within her breast.
That my bruised petals, wakened by her sighs,
May live one hour, then cease, and sink to rest,
O Winged Love!
J. C. C.
1873.
LINES WRITTEN ON A PAGE OF A YOUNG GIRL’S ALBUM
AT RAGATZ, AUGUST 1889.
Just as a dream of music never heard
May charm our spirit with its mystic spell,
This little page without one written word
Speaks more than words can tell:
Fair as the unchanging fields of Alpine snow,
That hide the buried and the unborn spring,
Its silence guards all secrets that we know
And all that time may bring:
Bearing sweet memories of past hours held dear
For all whose youth is flying, or has flown,
And softly whispering in a maiden’s ear
A name as yet unknown.
J. C. C.
My love is fair and yet not made so fair
As though fed only with the sun and sky
For now some viewless vision fills the air
And laughing lips grow mute--she knows not why,
And on her eyelids fallen unaware
The shadow as of passing tears doth lie!
Of tears unwept, born of an unknown care
That dwells beyond the flight of memory.
Ah, sweet, into thy beauty there could come
No better thing: the earth that holds thy feet
Must bring earth’s stain upon them where they meet
The path not made for thee--and the wind’s breath
That speaks not unto others but is dumb,
Whispers to thee of Life and Love and Death.
J. C. C.
1875.
ON A PICTURE.
BY E. BURNE-JONES.
Sad swift return of old love unforgot,
And passion of sweet lips that may not meet,
And trembling eyes that, like to weary feet,
Press close unto the goal yet touch it not,
Ah! Love, what hinders unto these the lot
Of common lovers? Shall no hour complete
This sweetness half-begun, no new day greet
The old love freed of the old stain and blot?
At this last hour, O Death, within thy heart
Hast thou no pity? Shall the night be dumb
Nor ever from thy lips the low words come,
Giving once more the old sweet wanderings?
Shall yearning lips for ever stand apart
Shadowed beneath the darkness of thy wings?
J. W. C. C.
1872.
There was a time, Love, when I strove to tell
Our love but newly won: and tried to sing
In broken verse that scarcely found a wing
Some praise of all the beauty that doth dwell
Beneath long lashes: But then came the spell
Of love possessed, and I no more dared bring,--
Thy hand in mine,--the old verse offering
Lest any spoken word should sound ‘farewell.’
Song at the best is but a cry for love
Not love itself and ere our paths had met
We cried to one another through the maze
That men call life:--until the moon above--
Our steadfast moon of love that’s not yet set--
Had drawn our feet into the selfsame ways.
J. C. C.
_July, 1878._
Ah! Love, I know thou hast no power to bring
Those lips once more to my lips; those sweet eyes,
Back to where once they dreamed so near to mine.--
I know that not again on Earth shall cling
Those fair white arms, and not till all Time dies
Shall these hands in her loosened hair entwine.
There is no might can give back to the Spring
The lowliest flower dead under summer skies.
Yet thou can’st tell me wandering by what stream
And in what fields of night her white feet tread.
Have I not wandered, Love, in many a dream?
Has she not too in dreaming wanderèd?
Then send her soul now to some garden fair
That my soul too may meet and wander there.
J. W. C. C.
The moon that leans o’er yonder fleecy lawn
Lights a white path where wandering souls may stray
From earth as high as heaven: and when the day
Shall pass night’s dusky curtains, newly-drawn,
And swiftly with the footing of a fawn
Leaps up, from cloud to cloud, till all the gray
Burns crimson--then our feet may find a way
From East to West led by the feet of dawn.
Yet now how far apart stand North and South
And that one face and mine! Ah, not so far!
For at the call of one remembered word
I hear again that voice which first I heard
When day dawned in the smile about her mouth
And in her eyes I saw the morning Star.
J. C. C.
1873.
Death speaks one word and all Love’s speech is dumb
And on Love’s parted lips that breathe farewell
Death’s marble finger lays its mystic spell
And bears the unuttered message to the tomb,
From whose closed door no whispered echoes come
To break the discord of the tolling bell
That sounds through city lane and woodland dell
With the sad burthen of Love’s martyrdom.
And so Love dies. Ah no! it is not so!
For locked in Death’s white arms Love lies secure
In changeless sleep that knows no dream of change.
’Tis Life not Death that works Love’s overthrow,
For while Life lasts what love is safe or sure
When each day tells of passionate hearts grown strange?
J. C. C.
1890.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
LTD.
Transcriber’s Notes
Note: In The Table of Contents, ‘IX Social Occasions p115’ is
entitled ‘Entertainment’ in the body of the book.
Page 12: changed, of his sisters’--shaken to of his sister’s--shaken
Page 41: changed, me some grapes, to me some grapes,’
Page 44: changed, surburban to suburban
Page 73: changed, flummuxed to flummoxed
Page 88: changed, ‘Wall Sir, I hope’ to ‘Well Sir, I hope’
Page 126: changed, opportunites to opportunities
Page 136: added the word ‘whom’-the centre around whom the children
Page 136: changed, children, criminals _and women_.” to
children, criminals _and women_.’
Page 170: changed, horsesmen to horsemen