which we remember once to have put to our own, even when thy beloved
barrel was double-loaded! Now we sigh to think on what then made us
shudder! Oh! that thy butt were but now resting on our shoulder! Alas!
for ever discharged! Burst and rent asunder, art thou now lying buried
in a peat-moss? Did some vulgar villain of a village Vulcan convert
thee, name and nature, into nails? Some dark-visaged Douglas of a
henroost-robbing Egyptian, solder thee into a pan? Oh! that our passion
could dig down unto thee in the bowels of the earth--and with loud
lamenting elegies, and louder hymns of gratulation, restore thee,
buttless, lockless, vizyless, burst, rent, torn, and twisted though thou
be'st, to the light of day, and of the world-rejoicing Sun! Then would
we adorn thee with evergreen wreaths of the laurel and the ivy--and hang
thee up, in memory and in monument of all the bright, dim, still, stormy
days of our boyhood--when gloom itself was glory--and when--But
"Be hush'd my dark spirit! for wisdom condemns,
When the faint and the feeble deplore."
Cassandra--Corinna--Sappho--Lucretia--Cleopatra--Tighe--De Stael--in
their beauty or in their genius, are, with millions on millions of the
fair-faced or bright-souled, nothing but dust and ashes; and as they
are, so shall Baillie, and Grant, and Hemans, and Landon be--and why
vainly yearn "with love and longings infinite," to save from doom of
perishable nature--of all created things, but one alone--Muckle-mou'd
Meg!
After a storm comes a calm; and we hasten to give the sporting world the
concluding account of our education. In the moorland parish--God bless
it--in which we had the inestimable advantage of passing our
boyhood--there' were a good many falcons--of course the kite or
glead--the buzzard--the sparrowhawk--the marsh harrier--that imp the
merlin--and, rare bird and beautiful! there, on a cliff which, alas! a
crutched man must climb no more, did the Peregrine build her nest. You
must not wonder at this, for the parish was an extensive one even for
Scotland--half Highland half Lowland--and had not only "muirs and mosses
many o," but numerous hills, not a few mountains, some most
extraordinary cliffs, considerable store of woods, and one, indeed, that
might well be called the Forest.
Lift up thy rock-crowned forehead through thy own sweet stormy skies,
Auld Scotland! and as sternly and grimly thou look'st far over the
hushed or howling seas, remember thee--till all thy moors and mosses
quake at thy heart, as if swallowing up an invading army--a fate that
oft befell thy foes of yore--remember thee, in mist-shrouded dream, and
cloud-born vision, of the long line of kings, and heroes, and sages, and
bards, whose hallowed bones sleep in pine-darkened tombs among the
mountain heather, by the side of rivers, and lochs, and arms of
ocean--their spirits yet seen in lofty superstition, sailing or sitting
on the swift or settled tempest. Lift up thy rock-crowned forehead, Auld
Scotland! and sing aloud to all the nations of the earth, with thy voice
of cliffs, and caves, and caverns,
"Wha daur meddle wi' me?"
What! some small, puny, piteous windpipes are heard cheeping against
thee from the Cockneys--like ragged chickens agape in the pip. How the
feeble and fearful creatures would crawl on their hands and knees, faint
and giddy, and shrieking out for help to the heather stalks, if forced
to face one of thy cliffs, and foot its flinty bosom! How would the
depths of their long ears, cotton-stuffed in vain, ache to the
spray-thunder of thy cataracts! Sick, sick would be their stomachs,
storm-swept in a six-oared cutter into the jaws of Staffa! That sight
is sufficient to set the most saturnine on the guffaw--the Barry
Cornwall himself, crossing a chasm a hundred yards deep,
"On the uncertain footing of a spar,"
on a tree felled where it stood, centuries ago, by steel or storm, into
a ledgeless bridge, oft sounding and shaking to the hunter's feet in
chase of the red-deer! The Cockneys do not like us Scotchmen--because of
our high cheek-bones. They are sometimes very high indeed, very coarse,
and very ugly, and give a Scotchman a grim and gaunt look, assuredly not
to be sneezed at, with any hope of impunity, on a dark day and in a
lonesome place, by the most heroic chief of the most heroic clan in all
the level land of Lud, travelling all by himself in a horse and gig, and
with a black boy in a cockaded glazed hat, through the Heelands o'
Scotland, passing of course, at the very least, for a captain of
Hussars! Then Scotchmen canna keep their backs straught, it seems, and
are always booin' and booin' afore a great man. Cannot they, indeed? Do
they, indeed? Ascend with that Scottish shepherd yon mountain's
breast--swim with him that mountain loch--a bottle of Glenlivet, who
first stands in shallow water, on the Oak Isle--and whose back will be
straughtest, that of the Caledonian or the Cockney? The little Luddite
will be puking among the heather, about some five hundred feet above the
level of the sea--higher for the first time in his life than St Paul's,
and nearer than he ever will again be, either in the spirit or the
flesh, to heaven. The little Luddite will be puking in the hitherto
unpolluted loch, after some seven strokes or so, with a strong Scottish
weed twisted like an eel round its thigh, and shrieking out for the
nearest resuscitating machine in a country, where, alas! there is no
Humane Society. The back of the shepherd--even in presence of that
"great man"--will be as straught as--do not tremble, Cockney--this
Crutch. Conspicuous from afar like a cairn, from the inn-door at
Arrochar, in an hour he will be turning up his little finger so--on the
Cobler's head; or, in twenty minutes, gliding like a swan, or shooting
like a salmon, his back being still straught--leaving Luss, he will be
shaking the dewdrops from his brawny body on the silver sand of Inch
Morren.
And happy were we, Christopher North, happy were we in the parish in
which Fate delivered us up to Nature, that, under her tuition our
destinies might be fulfilled. A parish! Why it was in itself a
kingdom--a world. Thirty miles long by twenty at the broadest, and five
at the narrowest; and is not that a kingdom--is not that a world worthy
of any monarch that ever wore a crown? Was it level? Yes, league-long
levels were in it of greensward, hard as the sand of the sea-shore, yet
springy and elastic, fit training-ground for Childers, or Eclipse, or
Hambletonian, or Smolensko, or for a charge of cavalry in some great
pitched battle, while artillery might keep playing against artillery
from innumerous affronting hills. Was it boggy? Yes, black bogs were
there, which extorted a panegyric from the roving Irishman in his
richest brogue--bogs in which forests had of old been buried, and armies
with all their banners. Was it hilly? Ay, there the white sheep nibbled,
and the black cattle grazed; there they baa'd and they lowed upon a
thousand hills--a crowd of cones, all green as emerald. Was it
mountainous? Give answer from afar, ye mist-shrouded summits, and ye
clouds cloven by the eagle's wing! But whether ye be indeed mountains,
or whether ye be clouds, who can tell, bedazzled as are his eyes by that
long-lingering sunset, that drenches heaven and earth in one
indistinguishable glory, setting the West on fire, as if the final
conflagration were begun! Was it woody? Hush, hush, and you will hear a
pine-cone drop in the central silence of a forest--a silent and solitary
wilderness--in which you may wander a whole day long, unaccompanied but
by the cushat, the corby, the falcon, the roe, and they are all shy of
human feet, and, like thoughts, pass away in a moment; so if you long
for less fleeting farewells from the native dwellers in the wood, lo!
the bright brown queen of the butterflies, gay and gaudy in her
glancings through the solitude, the dragon-fly whirring bird-like over
the pools in the glade; and if your ear desire music, the robin and the
wren may haply trill you a few notes among the briery rocks, or the bold
blackbird open wide his yellow bill in his holly-tree, and set the
squirrels a-leaping all within reach of his ringing roundelay. Any
rivers? one--to whom a thousand torrents are tributary--as he himself is
tributary to the sea. Any lochs? how many we know not--for we never
counted them twice alike--omitting perhaps some forgotten tarns, or
counting twice over some one of our more darling waters, worthy to dash
their waves against the sides of ships--alone wanting to the
magnificence of those inland seas! Yes, it was as level, as boggy, as
hilly, as mountainous, as woody, as lochy, and as rivery a parish, as
ever laughed to scorn Colonel Mudge and his Trigonometrical Survey.
Was not that a noble parish for apprenticeship in sports and pastimes of
a great master? No need of any teacher. On the wings of joy we were
borne over the bosom of nature, and learnt all things worthy and needful
to be learned, by instinct first, and afterwards by reason. To look at a
wild creature--winged with feathers, or mere feet--and not desire to
destroy or capture it--is impossible to passion--to imagination--to
fancy. Thus had we longed to feel and handle the glossy plumage of the
beaked birds--the wide-winged Birds of Prey--before our finger had ever
touched a trigger. Their various flight, in various weather, we had
watched and noted with something even of the eye of a naturalist--the
wonder of a poet; for among the brood of boys there are hundreds and
thousands of poets who never see manhood--the poetry dying away--the boy
growing up into mere prose;--yet to some even of the paragraphs of these
Three Fyttes do we appeal, that a few sparks of the sacred light are yet
alive within us; and sad to our old ears would be the sound of "Put out
the light, and then--put out the light!" Thus were we impelled, even
when a mere child, far away from the manse, for miles, into the moors
and woods. Once it was feared that poor wee Kit was lost; for having set
off all by himself, at sunrise, to draw a night-line from the distant
Black Loch, and look at a trap set for a glead, a mist overtook him on
the moor on his homeward way, with an eel as long as himself hanging
over his shoulder, and held him prisoner for many hours within its
shifting walls, frail indeed, and opposing no resistance to the hand,
yet impenetrable to the feet of fear as the stone dungeon's thraldom. If
the mist had remained, that would have been nothing; only a still cold
wet seat on a stone; but as "a trot becomes a gallop soon, in spite of
curb and rein," so a Scotch mist becomes a shower--and a shower a
flood--and a flood a storm--and a storm a tempest--and a tempest thunder
and lightning--and thunder and lightning heavenquake and
earthquake--till the heart of poor wee Kit quaked, and almost died
within him in the desert. In this age of Confessions, need we be
ashamed to own, in the face of the whole world, that we sat us down and
cried! The small brown Moorland bird, as dry as a toast, hopped out of
his heather-hole, and cheerfully cheeped comfort. With crest just a
thought lowered by the rain, the green-backed, white-breasted peaseweep,
walked close by us in the mist; and sight of wonder, that made even in
that quandary by the quagmire our heart beat with joy--lo! never seen
before, and seldom since, three wee peaseweeps, not three days old,
little bigger than shrew-mice, all covered with blackish down,
interspersed with long white hair, running after their mother! But the
large hazel eye of the she peaseweep, restless even in the most utter
solitude, soon spied us glowering at her, and her young ones, through
our tears; and not for a moment doubting--Heaven forgive her for the
shrewd but cruel suspicion!--that we were Lord Eglinton's
gamekeeper--with a sudden shrill cry that thrilled to the marrow in our
cold backbone--flapped and fluttered herself away into the mist, while
the little black bits of down disappeared, like devils, into the moss.
The croaking of the frogs grew terrible. And worse and worse, close at
hand, seeking his lost cows through the mist, the bellow of the
notorious red bull! We began saying our prayers; and just then the sun
forced himself out into the open day, and, like the sudden opening of
the shutters of a room, the whole world was filled with light. The frogs
seemed to sink among the powheads--as for the red bull who had tossed
the tinker, he was cantering away, with his tail towards us, to a lot of
cows on the hill; and hark--a long, a loud, an oft-repeated halloo! Rab
Roger, honest fellow, and Leezy Muir, honest lass, from the manse, in
search of our dead body! Rab pulls our ears lightly, and Leezy kisses us
from the one to the other--wrings the rain out of our long yellow
hair--(a pretty contrast to the small grey sprig now on the crown of our
pericranium, and the thin tail acock behind)--and by-and-by stepping
into Hazel-Deanhead for a drap and a "chitterin' piece," by the time we
reach the manse we are as dry as a whistle--take our scold and our
pawmies from the minister--and, by way of punishment and penance, after
a little hot whisky-toddy, with brown sugar and a bit of bun, are
bundled off to bed in the daytime!
Thus we grew up a Fowler, ere a loaded gun was in our hand--and often
guided the city-fowler to the haunts of the curlew, the plover, the
moorfowl, and the falcon. The falcon! yes--in the higher region of
clouds and cliffs. For now we had shot up into a stripling--and how fast
had we so shot up you may know, by taking notice of the schoolboy on the
play-green, and two years afterwards, discovering, perhaps, that he is
that fine tall ensign carrying the colours among the light-bobs of the
regiment, to the sound of clarion and flute, cymbal and great drum,
marching into the city a thousand strong.
We used in early boyhood, deceived by some uncertainty in size, not to
distinguish between a kite and a buzzard, which was very stupid, and
unlike us--more like Poietes in Salmonia. The flight of the buzzard, as
may be seen in Selby, is slow--and except during the season of
incubation, when it often soars to a considerable height, it seldom
remains long on the wing. It is indeed a heavy, inactive bird, both in
disposition and appearance, and is generally seen perched upon some old
and decayed tree, such being its favourite haunt. Him we soon thought
little or nothing about--and the last one we shot, it was, we remember,
just as he was coming out of the deserted nest of a crow, which he had
taken possession of out of pure laziness; and we killed him for not
building a house of his own in a country where there was no want of
sticks. But the kite or glead, as the same distinguished ornithologist
rightly says, is proverbial for the ease and gracefulness of its flight,
which generally consists of large and sweeping circles, performed with a
motionless wing, or at least with a slight and almost imperceptible
stroke of its pinions, and at very distant intervals. In this manner,
and directing its course by its tail, which acts as a rudder, whose
slightest motion produces effect, it frequently soars to such a height
as to become almost invisible to the human eye. Him we loved to slay, as
a bird worthy of our barrel. Him and her have we watched for days, like
a lynx, till we were led, almost as if by an instinct, to their nest in
the heart of the forest--a nest lined with wool, hair, and other soft
materials, in the fork of some large tree. They will not, of course,
utterly forsake their nest, when they have young, fire at them as you
will, though they become more wary, and seem as if they heard a leaf
fall, so suddenly will they start and soar to heaven. We remember, from
an ambuscade in a briery dell in the forest, shooting one flying
overhead to its nest; and, on going up to him as he lay on his back,
with clenched talons and fierce eyes, absolutely shrieking and yelling
with fear, and rage, and pain, we intended to spare his life, and only
take him prisoner, when we beheld beside him on the sod, a chicken from
the brood of famous ginger piles, then, all but his small self,
following the feet of their clucking mother at the manse! With visage
all inflamed, we gave him the butt on his double organ of
destructiveness, then only known to us by the popular name of "back o'
the head," exclaiming
"Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas
Immolat"--
Quivered every feather, from beak to tail and talon, in his last
convulsion,
"Vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras!"
In the season of love what combats have we been witness
to--Umpire--between birds of prey! The Female Falcon, she sat aloof like
a sultana, in her soft, sleek, glossy plumes, the iris in her eye of
wilder, more piercing, fiery, cruel, fascinating, and maddening lustre,
than ever lit the face of the haughtiest human queen, adored by princes
on her throne of diamonds. And now her whole plumage shivers--and is
ruffled--for her own Gentle Peregrine appears, and they two will enjoy
their dalliance on the edge of the cliff-chasm--and the Bride shall
become a wife in that stormy sunshine on the loftiest precipice of all
these our Alps. But a sudden sugh sweeps down from heaven, and a rival
Hawk comes rushing in his rage from his widowed eyry, and will win and
wear this his second selected bride--for her sake, tearing, or to be
torn, to pieces. Both struck down from heaven, fall a hundred fathom to
the heather, talon-locked, in the mutual gripe of death. Fair play,
gentlemen, and attend to the Umpire. It is, we understand, to be an
up-and-down fight. Allow us to disentangle you--and without giving
advantage to either--elbow-room to both. Neither of you ever saw a human
face so near before--nor ever were captive in a human hand. Both fasten
their momentarily frightened eyes on us, and, holding back their heads,
emit a wild ringing cry. But now they catch sight of each other, and in
an instant are one bunch of torn, bloody plumes. Perhaps their wings are
broken, and they can soar no more--so up we fling them both into the
air--and wheeling each within a short circle, clash again go both birds
together, and the talons keep tearing throats till they die. Let them
die, then, for both are for ever disabled to enjoy their lady-love. She,
like some peerless flower in the days of chivalry at a fatal tournament,
seeing her rival lovers dying for her sake, nor ever to wear her glove
or scarf in the front of battle, rising to leave her canopy in tears of
grief and pride--even like such Angelica, the Falcon unfolds her wings,
and flies slowly away from her dying ravishers, to bewail her virginity
on the mountains. "O, Frailty! thy name is woman!" A third Lover is
already on the wing, more fortunate than his preceding peers--and
Angelica is won, wooed, and sitting, about to lay an egg in an old eyry,
soon repaired and furbished up for the honey-week, with a number of
small birds lying on the edge of the hymeneal couch, with which, when
wearied with love, and yawp with hunger, Angelica may cram her maw till
she be ready to burst, by her bridegroom's breast.
Forgotten all human dwellings, and all the thoughts and feelings that
abide by firesides, and doorways, and rooms, and roofs--delightful was
it, during the long long midsummer holiday, to lie all alone, on the
greensward of some moor-surrounded mount, not far from the foot of some
range of cliffs, and with our face up to the sky, wait, unwearying, till
a speck was seen to cross the blue cloudless lift, and steadying itself
after a minute's quivering into motionless rest, as if hung suspended
there by the counteracting attraction of heaven and earth, known to be a
Falcon! Balanced far above its prey, and, soon as the right moment came,
ready to pounce down, and fly away with the treasure in its talons to
its crying eyry! If no such speck were for hours visible in the ether,
doubtless dream upon dream, rising unbidden, and all of their own wild
accord, congenial with the wilderness, did, like phantasmagoria, pass to
and fro, backwards and forwards, along the darkened curtain of our
imagination, all the lights of reason being extinguished or removed! In
that trance, not unheard, although scarcely noticed, was the cry of the
curlew, the murmur of the little moorland burn, or the din, almost like
dashing, of the far-off loch. 'Twas thus that the senses, in their most
languid state, ministered to the fancy, and fed her for a future day,
when all the imagery then received so imperfectly, and in broken
fragments, into her mysterious keeping, was to arise in orderly array,
and to form a world more lovely and more romantic even than the reality,
which then lay hushed or whispering, glittering or gloomy, in the
outward air. For the senses hear and see all things in their seeming
slumbers, from all the impulses that come to them in solitude gaining
more, far more, than they have lost! When we are awake, or half awake,
or almost sunk into a sleep, they are ceaselessly gathering materials
for the thinking and feeling soul--and it is hers, in a deep delight
formed of memory and imagination, to put them together by a divine
plastic power, in which she is almost, as it were, a very creator, till
she exult to look on beauty and on grandeur such as this earth and these
heavens never saw, products of her own immortal and immaterial energies,
and BEING once, to BE for ever, when the universe, with all its suns and
systems, is no more!
But oftener we and our shadows glided along the gloom at the foot of the
cliffs, ear-led by the incessant cry of the young hawks in their nest,
ever hungry except when asleep. Left to themselves, when the old birds
are hunting, an hour's want of food is felt to be famine, and you hear
the cry of the callow creatures, angry with one another, and it may be,
fighting with soft beak and pointless claws, till a living lump of down
tumbles over the rock-ledge, soon to be picked to the bone by insects,
who likewise all live upon prey; for example. Ants of Carrion. Get you
behind that briery bield, that wild-rose hanging rock, far and wide
scenting the wilderness with a faint perfume; or into that cell, almost
a parlour, with a Gothic roof formed by large stones leaning one against
the other and so arrested, as they tumbled from the frost-riven breast
of the precipice. Wait there, though it should be for hours--but it will
not be for hours; for both the old hawks are circling the sky, one over
the marsh and one over the wood. She comes--she comes--the female
Sparrowhawk, twice the size of her mate; and while he is plain in his
dress, as a cunning and cruel Quaker, she is gay and gaudy as a Demirep
dressed for the pit of the Opera--deep and broad her bosom, with an air
of luxury in her eyes that glitter like a serpent's. But now she is a
mother, and plays a mother's part--greedier, even than for herself, for
her greedy young. The lightning flashes from the cave-mouth, and she
comes tumbling, and dashing, and rattling through the dwarf bushes on
the cliff-face, perpendicular and plum-down, within three yards of her
murderer. Her husband will not visit his nest this day--no--nor all
night long: for a father's is not as a mother's love. Your only chance
of killing him, too, is to take a lynx-eyed circuit round about all the
moors within half a league; and possibly you may see him sitting on some
cairn, or stone, or tree-stump, afraid to fly either hither or thither,
perplexed by the sudden death he saw appearing among the unaccountable
smoke, scenting it yet with his fine nostrils, so as to be unwary of
your approach. Hazard a long shot--for you are right behind him--and a
slug may hit him on the head, and, following the feathers, split his
skull-cap and scatter his brains. 'Tis done--and the eyry is orphan'd.
Let the small brown moorland birds twitter Io Paean, as they hang
balanced on the bulrushes--let the stone-chat glance less fearfully
within shelter of the old grey cairn--let the cushat coo his joyous
gratitude in the wood--and the lark soar up to heaven, afraid no more of
a demon descending from the cloud. As for the imps in the eyry, let them
die of rage and hunger--for there must always be pain in the world; and
'tis well when its endurance by the savage is the cause of pleasure to
the sweet--when the gore-yearning cry of the cruel is drowned in the
song of the kind at feed or play--and the tribes of the peace-loving
rejoice in the despair and death of the robbers and shedders of blood!