royal race seems nearly extinct in Scotland. Gaze as you will over the
wide circumference of a Highland heaven, calm as the bride's dream of
love, or disturbed as the shipwrecked sailor's vision of a storm, and
all spring and summer long you may not chance to see the shadow of an
Eagle in the sun. The old kings of the air are sometimes yet seen by the
shepherds on cliff or beneath cloud; but their offspring are rarely
allowed to get full-fledged in spite of the rifle always lying loaded in
the shieling. But in the days of our boyhood there were many glorious
things on earth and air that now no more seem to exist, and among these
were the Eagles. One pair had from time immemorial built on the
Echo-cliff, and you could see with a telescope the eyry, with the rim of
its circumference, six feet in diameter, strewn with partridges,
moorfowl, and leverets--their feathers and their skeletons. But the
Echo-cliff was inaccessible.
"Hither the rainbow comes, the cloud,
And mists that spread the flying shroud,
And sunbeams, and the flying blast,
That if it could, would hurry past,
But that enormous barrier binds it fast."
No human eye ever saw the birds within a thousand feet of the lower
earth; yet how often must they have stooped down on lamb and leveret,
and struck the cushat in her very yew-tree in the centre of the wood!
Perhaps they preyed at midnight, by the light of the waning moon--at
mid-day, in the night of sun-hiding tempests--or afar off, in even more
solitary wilds, carried thither on the whirlwind of their own wings,
they swept off their prey from uninhabited isles,
"Placed far amid the melancholy main,"
or vast inland glens, where not a summer shieling smiles beneath the
region of eternal snows. But eagles are subject to diseases in flesh,
and bone, and blood, just like the veriest poultry that die of croup and
consumption on the dunghill before the byre-door. Sickness blinds the
eye that God framed to pierce the seas, and weakens the wing that
dallies with the tempest. Then the eagle feels how vain is the doctrine
of the divine right of kings. He is hawked at by the mousing owl, whose
instinct instructs him that these talons have lost their grasp and these
pinions their deathblow. The eagle lies for weeks famished in his eyry,
and, hunger-driven over the ledge, leaves it to ascend no more. He is
dethroned, and wasted to mere bones--a bunch of feathers--his flight is
now slower than that of the buzzard--he floats himself along now with
difficulty from knoll to knoll, pursued by the shrieking magpies,
buffeted by the corby, and lying on his back, like a recreant, before
the beak of the raven, who, a month ago, was terrified to hop round the
carcass till the king of the air was satiated, and gave his permission
to croaking Sooty to dig into the bowels he himself had scorned. Yet he
is a noble aim to the fowler still; you break a wing and a leg, but fear
to touch him with your hand; Fro feels the iron-clutch of his talons
constricted in the death-pang; and holding him up, you wonder that such
an anatomy--for his weight is not more than three pounds--could drive
his claws through that shaggy hide till blood sprung to the
blow--inextricable but to yells of pain, and leaving gashes hard to
heal, for virulent is the poison of rage in a dying bird of prey.
Sublime solitude of our boyhood! where each stone in the desert was
sublime, unassociated though it was with dreams of memory, in its own
simple native power over the human heart! Each sudden breath of wind
passed by us like the voice of a spirit. There were strange meanings in
the clouds--often so like human forms and faces threatening us off, or
beckoning us on, with long black arms, back into the long-withdrawing
wilderness of heaven. We wished then, with quaking bosoms, that we had
not been all alone in the desert--that there had been another heart,
whose beatings might have kept time with our own, that we might have
gathered courage in the silent and sullen gloom from the light in a
brother's eye--the smile on a brother's countenance. And often had we
such a Friend in these our far-off wanderings over moors and mountains,
by the edge of lochs, and through the umbrage of the old pine-woods. A
Friend from whom "we had received his heart, and given him back our
own,"--such a friendship as the most fortunate and the most happy--and
at that time we were both--are sometimes permitted by Providence, with
all the passionate devotion of young and untamed imagination, to enjoy,
during a bright dreamy world of which that friendship is as the Polar
star. Emilius Godfrey! for ever holy be the name! a boy when we were but
a child--when we were but a youth, a man. We felt stronger in the shadow
of his arm--happier, bolder, better in the light of his countenance. He
was the protector--the guardian of our moral being. In our pastimes we
bounded with wilder glee--at our studies we sat with intenser
earnestness, by his side. He it was that taught us how to feel all those
glorious sunsets, and imbued our young spirit with the love and worship
of nature. He it was that taught us to feel that our evening prayer was
no idle ceremony to be hastily gone through--that we might lay down our
head on the pillow, then soon smoothed in sleep, but a command of God,
which a response from nature summoned the humble heart to obey. He it
was who for ever had at command wit for the sportive, wisdom for the
serious hour. Fun and frolic flowed in the merry music of his
lips--they lightened from the gay glancing of his eyes; and then, all at
once, when the one changed its measures, and the other gathered, as it
were, a mist or a cloud, an answering sympathy chained our own tongue,
and darkened our own countenance, in intercommunion of spirit felt to be
indeed divine! It seemed as if we knew but the words of language--that
he was a scholar who saw into their very essence. The books we read
together were, every page, and every sentence of every page, all covered
over with light. Where his eye fell not as we read, all was dim or dark,
unintelligible or with imperfect meanings. Whether we perused with him a
volume writ by a nature like our own, or the volume of the earth and the
sky, or the volume revealed from heaven, next day we always knew and
felt that something had been added to our being. Thus imperceptibly we
grew up in our intellectual stature, breathing a purer moral and
religious air, with all our finer affections towards other human beings,
all our kindred and our kind, touched with a dearer domestic tenderness,
or with a sweet benevolence that seemed to our ardent fancy to embrace
the dwellers in the uttermost regions of the earth. No secret of
pleasure or pain--of joy or grief--of fear or hope--had our heart to
withhold or conceal from Emilius Godfrey. He saw it as it beat within
our bosom, with all its imperfections--may we venture to say, with all
its virtues. A repented folly--a confessed fault--a sin for which we
were truly contrite--a vice flung from us with loathing and with
shame--in such moods as these, happier were we to see his serious and
his solemn smile, than when in mirth and merriment we sat by his side in
the social hour on a knoll in the open sunshine, and the whole school
were in ecstasies to hear tales and stories from his genius, even like a
flock of birds chirping in their joy all newly-alighted in a vernal
land. In spite of that difference in our years--or oh! say rather
because that very difference did touch the one heart with tenderness and
the other with reverence, how often did we two wander, like elder and
younger brother, in the sunlight and moonlight solitudes! Woods--into
whose inmost recesses we should have quaked alone to penetrate, in his
company were glad as gardens, through their most awful umbrage; and
there was beauty in the shadows of the old oaks. Cataracts--in whose
lonesome thunder, as it pealed into those pitchy pools, we durst not by
ourselves have faced the spray--in his presence, dinn'd with a merry
music in the desert, and cheerful was the thin mist they cast sparkling
up into the air. Too severe for our uncompanioned spirit, then easily
overcome with awe, was the solitude of those remote inland lochs. But as
we walked with him along the winding shores, how passing sweet the calm
of both blue depths--how magnificent the white-crested waves tumbling
beneath the black thunder-cloud! More beautiful, because our eyes gazed
on it along with his, at the beginning or the ending of some sudden
storm, the Apparition of the Rainbow! Grander in its wildness, that
seemed to sweep at once all the swinging and stooping woods to our ear,
because his too listened, the concerto by winds and waves played at
midnight, when not one star was in the sky. With him we first followed
the Falcon in her flight--he showed us on the Echo-cliff the Eagle's
eyry. To the thicket he led us where lay couched the lovely-spotted Doe,
or showed us the mild-eyed creature browsing on the glade with her two
fawns at her side. But for him we should not then have seen the antlers
of the red-deer, for the Forest was indeed a most savage place, and
haunted--such was the superstition at which they who scorned it
trembled--haunted by the ghost of a huntsman whom a jealous rival had
murdered as he stooped, after the chase, at a little mountain well that
ever since oozed out blood. What converse passed between us two in all
those still shadowy solitudes! Into what depths of human nature did he
teach our wondering eyes to look down! Oh! what was to become of us, we
sometimes thought in sadness that all at once made our spirits
sink--like a lark falling suddenly to earth, struck by the fear of some
unwonted shadow from above--what was to become of us when the mandate
should arrive for him to leave the Manse for ever, and sail away in a
ship to India never more to return! Ever as that dreaded day drew
nearer, more frequent was the haze in our eyes; and in our blindness, we
knew not that such tears ought to have been far more rueful still, for
that he then lay under orders for a longer and more lamentable voyage--a
voyage over a narrow strait to the Eternal shore. All--all at once he
drooped; on one fatal morning the dread decay began; with no
forewarning, the springs on which his being had so lightly--so
proudly--so grandly moved--gave way. Between one Sabbath and another his
bright eyes darkened--and while all the people were assembled at the
sacrament, the soul of Emilius Godfrey soared up to Heaven. It was
indeed a dreadful death, serene and sainted though it were; and not a
hall--not a house--not a hut--not a shieling within all the circle of
those wide mountains, that did not on that night mourn as if it had lost
a son. All the vast parish attended his funeral--Lowlanders and
Highlanders in their own garb of grief. And have time and tempest now
blackened the white marble of that monument--is that inscription now
hard to be read--the name of Emilius Godfrey in green obliteration--nor
haply one surviving who ever saw the light of the countenance of him
there interred! Forgotten as if he had never been! for few were that
glorious orphan's kindred--and they lived in a foreign land--forgotten
but by one heart, faithful through all the chances and changes of this
restless world! And therein enshrined among all its holiest
remembrances, shall be the image of Emilius Godfrey, till it too, like
his, shall be but dust and ashes!
Oh! blame not boys for so soon forgetting one another--in absence or in
death. Yet forgetting is not just the very word; call it rather a
reconcilement to doom and destiny--in thus obeying a benign law of
nature that soon streams sunshine over the shadows of the grave. Not
otherwise could all the ongoings of this world be continued. The nascent
spirit outgrows much in which it once found all delight; and thoughts
delightful still, thoughts of the faces and the voices of the dead,
perish not, lying sometimes in slumber--sometimes in sleep. It belongs
not to the blessed season and genius of youth, to hug to its heart
useless and unavailing griefs. Images of the well-beloved, when they
themselves are in the mould, come and go, no unfrequent visitants,
through the meditative hush of solitude. But our main business--our
prime joys and our prime sorrows--ought to be, must be, with the living.
Duty demands it; and Love, who would pine to death over the bones of the
dead, soon fastens upon other objects with eyes and voices to smile and
whisper an answer to all his vows. So was it with us. Ere the midsummer
sun had withered the flowers that spring had sprinkled over our
Godfrey's grave, youth vindicated its own right to happiness; and we
felt that we did wrong to visit too often that corner in the kirkyard.
No fears had we of any too oblivious tendencies; in our dreams we saw
him--most often all alive as ever--sometimes a phantom away from that
grave! If the morning light was frequently hard to be endured, bursting
suddenly upon us along with the feeling that he was dead, it more
frequently cheered and gladdened us with resignation, and sent us forth
a fit playmate to the dawn that rang with all sounds of joy. Again we
found ourselves angling down the river, or along the loch--once more
following the flight of the Falcon along the woods--eying the Eagle on
the Echo-cliff. Days passed by, without so much as one thought of
Emilius Godfrey--pursuing our pastime with all our passion, reading our
books intently--just as if he had never been! But often and often, too,
we thought we saw his figure coming down the hill straight towards
us--his very figure--we could not be deceived; but the love-raised ghost
disappeared on a sudden--the grief-woven spectre melted into the mist.
The strength, that formerly had come from his counsels, now began to
grow up of itself within our own unassisted being. The world of nature
became more our own, moulded and modified by all our own feelings and
fancies; and with a bolder and more original eye we saw the smoke from
the sprinkled cottages, and read the faces of the mountaineers on their
way to their work, or coming and going to the house of God.
Then this was to be our last year in the parish--now dear to us as our
birthplace; nay, itself our very birthplace--for in it from the darkness
of infancy had our soul been born. Once gone and away from the region of
cloud and mountain, we felt that most probably never more should we
return. For others, who thought they knew us better than we did
ourselves, had chalked out a future life for young Christopher North--a
life that was sure to lead to honour, and riches, and a splendid name.
Therefore we determined with a strong, resolute, insatiate spirit of
passion, to make the most--the best--of the few months that remained to
us, of that our wild, free, and romantic existence, as yet untrammelled
by those inexorable laws, which, once launched into the world, all
alike--young and old--must obey. Our books were flung aside--nor did
our old master and minister frown--for he grudged not to the boy he
loved the remnant of the dream about to be rolled away like the dawn's
rosy clouds. We demanded with our eye--not with our voice--one long
holiday, throughout that our last autumn, on to the pale farewell
blossoms of the Christmas rose. With our rod we went earlier to the loch
or river; but we had not known thoroughly our own soul--for now we
angled less passionately--less perseveringly than was our wont of
yore--sitting in a pensive, a melancholy, a miserable dream, by the
dashing waterfall or the murmuring wave. With our gun we plunged earlier
in the morning into the forest, and we returned later at eve--but less
earnest--less eager were we to hear the cushat's moan from his
yew-tree--to see the hawk's shadow on the glade, as he hung aloft on the
sky. A thousand dead thoughts came to life again in the gloom of the
woods--and we sometimes did wring our hands in an agony of grief, to
know that our eyes should not behold the birch-tree brightening there
with another spring.
Then every visit we paid to cottage or to shieling was felt to be a
farewell; there was something mournful in the smiles on the sweet faces
of the ruddy rustics, with their silken snoods, to whom we used to
whisper harmless love-meanings, in which there was no evil guile; we
regarded the solemn toil-and-care-worn countenances of the old with a
profounder emotion than had ever touched our hearts in the hour of our
more thoughtless joy; and the whole life of those dwellers among the
woods, and the moors, and the mountains, seemed to us far more affecting
now that we saw deeper into it, in the light of a melancholy sprung from
the conviction that the time was close at hand when we should mingle
with it no more. The thoughts that possessed our most secret bosom
failed not by the least observant to be discovered in our open eyes.
They who had liked us before, now loved us; our faults, our follies, the
insolences of our reckless boyhood, were all forgotten; whatever had
been our sins, pride towards the poor was never among the number; we had
shunned not stooping our head beneath the humblest lintel; our mite had
been given to the widow who had lost her own; quarrelsome with the young
we might sometimes have been, for boyhood is soon heated, and boils
before a defying eye; but in one thing at least we were Spartans, we
revered the head of old age.
And many at last were the kind--some the sad farewells, ere long
whispered by us at gloaming among the glens. Let them rest for ever
silent amidst that music in the memory which is felt, not heard--its
blessing mute though breathing, like an inarticulate prayer! But to
Thee--O palest Phantom--clothed in white raiment, not like unto a ghost
risen with its grave-clothes to appal, but like a seraph descending from
the skies to bless--unto Thee will we dare to speak, as through the mist
of years back comes thy yet unfaded beauty, charming us, while we cannot
choose but weep, with the self-same vision that often glided before us
long ago in the wilderness, and at the sound of our voice would pause
for a little while, and then pass by, like a white bird from the sea,
floating unscared close by the shepherd's head, or alighting to trim its
plumes on a knoll far up an inland glen! Death seems not to have touched
that face, pale though it be--lifelike is the waving of those gentle
hands--and the soft, sweet, low music which now we hear, steals not sure
from lips hushed by the burial mould! Restored by the power of love, she
stands before us as she stood of yore. Not one of all the hairs of her
golden head was singed by the lightning that shivered the tree under
which the child had run for shelter from the flashing sky. But in a
moment the blue light in her dewy eyes was dimmed--and never again did
she behold either flower or star. Yet all the images of all the things
she had loved remained in her memory, clear and distinct as the things
themselves before unextinguished eyes; and ere three summers had flown
over her head--which, like the blossom of some fair perennial flower, in
heaven's gracious dew and sunshine each season lifted its loveliness
higher and higher in the light--she could trip her singing way through
the wild wilderness, all by her joyful self, led, as all believed, nor
erred they in so believing, by an angel's hand! When the primroses
peeped through the reviving grass upon the vernal braes, they seemed to
give themselves into her fingers; and 'twas thought they hung longer
unfaded round her neck or forehead than if they had been left to drink
the dew on their native bed. The linnets ceased not their lays, though
her garment touched the broom-stalk on which they sang. The cushat, as
she thrid her way through the wood, continued to croon in her darksome
tree--and the lark, although just dropped from the cloud, was cheered by
her presence into a new passion of song, and mounted over her head, as
if it were his first matin hymn. All the creatures of the earth and air
manifestly loved the Wanderer of the Wilderness--and as for human
beings, she was named, in their pity, their wonder, and their delight,
the Blind Beauty of the Moor!
She was an only child, and her mother had died in giving her birth. And
now her father, stricken by one of the many cruel diseases that shorten
the lives of shepherds on the hills, was bed-ridden--and he was poor. Of
all words ever syllabled by human lips, the most blessed is--Charity. No
manna now in the wilderness is rained from heaven--for the mouths of the
hungry need it not in this our Christian land. A few goats feeding among
the rocks gave them milk, and there was bread for them in each
neighbour's house--neighbour though miles afar--as the sacred duty came
round--and the unrepining poor sent the grateful child away with their
prayers.
One evening, returning to the hut with her usual song, she danced up to
her father's face on his rushy bed, and it was cold in death. If she
shrieked--if she fainted--there was but one Ear that heard, one Eye that
saw her in her swoon. Not now floating light like a small moving cloud
unwilling to leave the flowery braes, though it be to melt in heaven,
but driven along like a shroud of flying mist before the tempest, she
came upon us in the midst of that dreary moss; and at the sound of our
voice, fell down with clasped hands at our feet--"My father's dead!" Had
the hut put already on the strange, dim, desolate look of mortality? For
people came walking fast down the braes, and in a little while there was
a group round us, and we bore her back again to her dwelling in our
arms. As for us, we had been on our way to bid the fair creature and her
father farewell. How could she have lived--an utter orphan--in such a
world! The holy power that is in Innocence would for ever have remained
with her; but Innocence longs to be away, when her sister Joy has
departed; and 'tis sorrowful to see the one on earth, when the other has
gone to Heaven! This sorrow none of us had long to see; for though a
flower, when withered at the root, and doomed ere eve to perish, may yet
look to the careless eye the same as when it blossomed in its
pride--yet its leaves, still green, are not as once they were--its
bloom, though fair, is faded--and at set of sun, the dews shall find it
in decay, and fall unfelt on its petals. Ere Sabbath came, the orphan
child was dead. Methinks we see now her little funeral. Her birth had
been the humblest of the humble; and though all in life had loved her,
it was thought best that none should be asked to the funeral of her and
her father, but two or three friends; the old clergyman himself walked
at the head of the father's coffin--we at the head of the
daughter's--for this was granted unto our exceeding love;--and thus
passed away for ever the Blind Beauty of the Moor!