Poem--ay--four Great Poems--"Lear"--"Hamlet"--"Othello"--"Macbeth." And
was the revealer of those high mysteries in his youth a deer-stealer in
the parks of Warwickshire, a linkboy in London streets? And died he
before his grand climacteric in a dimmish sort of a middle-sized
tenement in Stratford-on-Avon, of a surfeit from an overdose of
home-brewed humming ale? Such is the tradition.
Had we a daughter--an only daughter--we should wish her to be like
"Heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb."
In that one line has Wordsworth done an unappreciable service to
Spenser. He has improved upon a picture in "The Fairy Queen"--making
"the beauty still more beauteous," by a single touch of a pencil dipped
in moonlight, or in sunlight tender as Luna's smiles. Through Spenser's
many nine-lined stanzas the lovely lady glides along her own world--and
our eyes follow in delight the sinless wanderer. In Wordsworth's one
single celestial line we behold her neither in time nor space--an
immortal omnipresent idea at one gaze occupying the soul.
And is not "The Fairy Queen" a Great Poem? Like "The Excursion," it is
at all events a long one--"slow to begin, and never ending." That fire
was a fortunate one in which so many books of it were burnt. If no such
fortunate fire ever took place, then let us trust that the moths
drillingly devoured the manuscript--and that 'tis all safe. Purgatorial
pains--unless indeed they should prove eternal--are insufficient
punishment for the impious man who invented Allegory. If you have got
anything to say, sir, out with it--in one or other of the many forms of
speech employed naturally by creatures to whom God has given the gift of
"discourse of reason." But beware of misspending your life in perversely
attempting to make shadow substance, and substance shadow. Wonderful
analogies there are among all created things, material and
immaterial--and millions so fine that Poets alone discern them--and
sometimes succeed in showing them in words. Most spiritual region of
poetry--and to be visited at rare times and seasons--nor all life long
ought bard there to abide. For a while let the veil of Allegory be drawn
before the face of Truth, that the light of its beauty may shine through
it with a softened charm--dim and drear--like the moon gradually
obscuring in its own halo on a dewy night. Such air-woven veil of
Allegory is no human invention. The soul brought it with her when
"Trailing clouds of glory she did come
From heaven, which is her home."
Sometimes, now and then, in moods strange and high--obey the bidding of
the soul--and allegorise; but live not all life-long in an
Allegory--even as Spenser did--Spenser the divine; for with all his
heavenly genius--and brighter visions never met mortal eyes than
his--what is he but a "dreamer among men," and what may save that
wondrous poem from the doom of oblivion?
To this conclusion must we come at last--that in the English language
there is but one Great Poem. What! Not "Lear," Hamlet, "Othello,"
"Macbeth?"--"PARADISE LOST."
INCH-CRUIN.
Oh! for the plumes and pinions of the poised Eagle, that we might now
hang over Loch Lomond and all her isles! From what point of the compass
would we come on our rushing vans? Up from Leven-banks, or down from
Glenfalloch, or over the hill of Luss, or down to Rowardennan; and then
up and away, as the chance currents in the sky might lead, with the
Glory of Scotland, blue, bright, and breaking into foam, thousands on
thousands of feet below, with every Island distinct in the peculiar
beauty of its own youthful or ancient woods? For remember, that with the
eagle's wing we must also have the eagle's eye; and all the while our
own soul to look with such lens and such iris, and with its own endless
visions to invest the pinnacles of all the far-down ruins of church or
castle, encompassed with the umbrage of undying oaks.
We should as soon think of penning a critique on "Milton's Paradise
Lost" as on Loch Lomond. People there are in the world, doubtless, who
think them both too long; but to our minds, neither the one nor the
other exceeds the due measure by a leaf or a league. Toil may, if it so
pleaseth you, think it, in a mist, a Mediterranean Sea. For then you
behold many miles of tumbling waves, with no land beyond; and were a
ship to rise up in full sail, she would seem voyaging on to some distant
shore. Or you may look on it as a great arm only of the ocean, stretched
out into the mountainous mainland. Or say, rather, some river of the
first order, that shows to the sun Islands never ceasing to adorn his
course for a thousand leagues, in another day, about to be lost in the
dominion of the sea. Or rather look on it as it is, as Loch Lomond, the
Loch of a hundred Isles--of shores laden with all kinds of beauty,
throughout the infinite succession of bays and harbours--huts and
houses sprinkled over the sides of its green hills, that ever and anon
send up a wider smoke from villages clustering round the church-tower
beneath the wooded rocks--halls half-hidden in groves, for centuries the
residence of families proud of their Gaelic blood--forest that, however
wide be the fall beneath the axe when their hour is come, yet, far as
the eye can reach, go circling round the mountain's base, inhabited by
the roe and the red-deer;--but we have got into a sentence that
threatens to be without end--a dim, dreary, sentence, in the middle of
which the very writer himself gets afraid of ghosts, and fervently prays
for the period when he shall be again chatting with the reader on a
shady seat, under his own paragraph and his own pear-tree.
Oh! for our admirable friend Mr Smith of Jordanhill's matchless cutter,
to glide through among the glittering archipelago! But we must be
contented with a somewhat clumsy four-oared barge, wide and deep enough
for a cattle ferry-boat. This morning's sunrise found us at the mouth of
the Goblin's Cave on Loch Katrine, and among Lomond's lovely isles shall
sunset leave us among the last glimmer of the softened gold. To which of
all those lovely isles shall we drift before the wind on the small
heaving and breaking waves? To Inch-Murrin, where the fallow-deer
repose--or to the yew-shaded Inch-Caillach, the cemetery of
Clan-Alpin--the Holy Isle of Nuns? One hushing afternoon hour may yet be
ours on the waters--another of the slowly-walking twilight--that time
which the gazing spirit is too wrapt to measure, while "sinks the
Day-star in the ocean's bed"--and so on to midnight, the reign of
silence and shadow, the resplendent Diana with her hair-halo, and all
her star-nymphs, rejoicing round their Queen. Let the names of all
objects be forgotten--and imagination roam over the works of nature, as
if they lay in their primeval majesty, without one trace of man's
dominion. Slow-sailing Heron, that cloudlike seekest thy nest on yonder
lofty mass of pines--to us thy flight seems the very symbol of a long
lone life of peace. As thou foldest thy wide wings on the topmost bough,
beneath thee tower the unguarded Ruins, where many generations sleep.
Onwards thou floatest like a dream, nor changest thy gradually
descending course for the Eagle, that, far above thy line of travel,
comes rushing unwearied from his prey in distant Isles of the sea. The
Osprey! off--off--to Inch-Loning--or the dark cliffs of Glenfalloch,
many leagues away, which he will reach almost like a thought! Close your
eyes but for a moment--and when you look again, where is the
Cloud-Cleaver now? Gone in the sunshine, and haply seated in his eyrie
on Ben Lomond's head.
But amidst all this splendour and magnificence, our eyes are drawn
against our will, and by a sort of sad fascination which we cannot
resist, along the glittering and dancing waves, towards the melancholy
shores of Inch-Cruin, the Island of the Afflicted. Beautiful is it by
nature, with its bays, and fields, and woods, as any isle that sees its
shadow in the deeps; but human sorrows have steeped it in eternal gloom,
and terribly is it haunted to our imagination. Here no woodman's hut
peeps from the glade--here are not seen the branching antlers of the
deer moving among the boughs that stir not--no place of peace is this
where the world-wearied hermit sits penitent in his cell, and prepares
his soul for Heaven. Its inhabitants are a woeful people, and all its
various charms are hidden from their eyes, or seen in ghastly
transfiguration; for here, beneath the yew-tree's shade, sit moping, or
roam about with rueful lamentation, the soul-distracted and the insane!
Ay--these sweet and pleasant murmurs break round a Lunatic Asylum! And
the shadows that are now and then seen among the umbrage are laughing or
weeping in the eclipse of reason, and may never know again aught of the
real character of this world, to which, exiled as they are from it, they
are yet bound by the ties of a common nature that, though sorely
deranged, are not wholly broken, and still separate them by an awful
depth of darkness from the beasts that perish.
Thither love, yielding reluctantly at last to despair, has consented
that the object on which all its wise solicitudes had for years been
unavailably bestowed both night and day, should be rowed over, perhaps
at midnight, and when asleep, and left there with beings like itself,
all dimly conscious of their doom. To many such the change may often
bring little or no heed--for outward things may have ceased to impress,
and they may be living in their own rueful world, different from all
that we hear or behold. To some it may seem that they have been
spirited away to another state of existence--beautiful, indeed, and fair
to see, with all those lovely trees and shadows of trees; but still a
miserable, a most miserable place, without one face they ever saw
before, and haunted by glaring eyes that shoot forth fear, suspicion,
and hatred. Others, again, there are, who know well the misty head of
Ben Lomond, which, with joyful pleasure-parties set free from the city,
they had in other years exultingly scaled, and looked down, perhaps, in
a solemn pause of their youthful ecstasy, on the far-off and melancholy
Inch-Cruin! Thankful are they for such a haven at last--for they are
remote from the disturbance of the incomprehensible life that bewildered
them, and from the pity of familiar faces that was more than could be
borne.
So let us float upon our oars behind the shadow of this rock, nor
approach nearer the sacred retreat of misery. Let us not gaze too
intently into the glades, for we might see some figure there who wished
to be seen nevermore, and recognise in the hurrying shadow the living
remains of a friend. How profound the hush! No sigh--no groan--no
shriek--no voice--no tossing of arms--no restless chafing of feet! God
in mercy has for a while calmed the congregation of the afflicted, and
the Isle is overspread with a sweet Sabbath-silence. What medicine for
them like the breath of heaven--the dew--the sunshine--and the murmur of
the wave! Nature herself is their kind physician, and sometimes not
unfrequently brings them by her holy skill back to the world of clear
intelligence and serene affection. They listen calmly to the blessed
sound of the oar that brings a visit of friends--to sojourn with them
for a day--or to take them away to another retirement, where they, in
restored reason, may sit around the board, nor fear to meditate during
the midnight watches on the dream, which, although dispelled, may in all
its ghastliness return. There was a glorious burst of sunshine! And of
all the Lomond Isles, what one rises up in the sudden illumination so
bright as Inch-Cruin?
Methinks we see sitting in his narrow and low-roofed cell, careless of
food, dress, sleep, or shelter alike, him who in the opulent mart of
commerce was one of the most opulent, and devoted heart and soul to show
and magnificence. His house was like a palace with its pictured and
mirrored walls, and the nights wore away to dance, revelry, and song.
Fortune poured riches at his feet, which he had only to gather up; and
every enterprise in which he took part prospered beyond the reach of
imagination. But all at once--as if lightning had struck the dome of his
prosperity, and earthquake let down its foundations, it sank, crackled,
and disappeared--and the man of a million was a houseless, infamous, and
bankrupt beggar. In one day his proud face changed into the ghastly
smiling of an idiot--he dragged his limbs in paralysis--and slavered out
unmeaning words foreign to all the pursuits in which his active
intellect had for many years been plunged. All his relations--to whom it
was known he had never shown kindness--were persons in humble condition.
Ruined creditors we do not expect to be very pitiful, and people asked
what was to become of him till he died. A poor creature, whom he had
seduced and abandoned to want, but who had succeeded to a small property
on the death of a distant relation, remembered her first, her only love,
when all the rest of the world were willing to forget him; and she it
was who had him conveyed thither, herself sitting in the boat with her
arm round the unconscious idiot, who now vegetates on the charity of her
whom he betrayed. For fifteen years he has continued to exist in the
same state, and you may pronounce his name on the busy Exchange of the
city where he flourished and fell, and haply the person you speak to
shall have entirely forgotten it.
The evils genius sometimes brings to its possessor have often been said
and sung, perhaps with exaggerations, but not always without truth. It
is found frequently apart from prudence and principle; and in a world
constituted like ours, how can it fail to reap a harvest of misery or
death? A fine genius, and even a high, had been bestowed on One who is
now an inmate of that cottage-cell, peering between these two rocks. At
College he outstripped all his compeers by powers equally versatile and
profound--the first both in intellect and in imagination. He was a poor
man's son--the only son of a working carpenter--and his father intended
him for the church. But the youth soon felt that to him the trammels of
a strict faith would be unbearable, and he lived on from year to year,
uncertain what profession to choose. Meanwhile his friends, all inferior
to him in talents and acquirements, followed the plain, open, and
beaten path, that leads sooner or later to respectability and
independence. He was left alone in his genius, useless, although
admired--while those who had looked in high hopes on his early career,
began to have their fears that they might never be realised. His first
attempts to attract the notice of the public, although not absolute
failures--for some of his compositions, both in prose and verse, were
indeed beautiful--were not triumphantly successful, and he began to
taste the bitterness of disappointed ambition. His wit and colloquial
talents carried him into the society of the dissipated and the
licentious; and, before he was aware of the fact, he had got the
character of all others the most humiliating--that of a man who knew not
how to estimate his own worth, nor to preserve it from pollution. He
found himself silently and gradually excluded from the higher circle
which he had once adorned, and sunk inextricably into a lower grade of
social life. His whole habits became loose and irregular; his studies
were pursued but by fits and starts; his knowledge, instead of keeping
pace with that of the times, became clouded and obscure, and even
diminished; his dress was meaner; his manners hurried, and reckless, and
wild, and ere long he became a slave to drunkenness, and then to every
low and degrading vice.
His father died, it was said, of a broken heart--for to him his son had
been all in all, and the unhappy youth felt that the death lay at his
door. At last, shunned by most--tolerated but by a few for the sake of
other times--domiciled in the haunts of infamy--loaded with a heap of
paltry debts, and pursued by the hounds of the law, the fear of a prison
drove him mad, and his whole mind was utterly and hopelessly overthrown.
A few of the friends of his boyhood raised a subscription in his
behoof--and within the gloom of these woods he has been shrouded for
many years, but not unvisited once or twice a summer by some one, who
knew, loved, and admired him in the morning of that genius that long
before its meridian brightness had been so fatally eclipsed.
And can it be in cold and unimpassioned words like these that we thus
speak of Thee and thy doom, thou Soul of fire, and once the brightest of
the free, privileged by nature to walk along the mountain-ranges, and
mix their spirits with the stars! Can it be that all thy glorious
aspirations, by thyself forgotten, have no dwelling-place in the memory
of one who loved thee so well, and had his deepest affection so
profoundly returned! Thine was a heart once tremblingly alive to all the
noblest and finest sympathies of our nature, and the humblest human
sensibilities became beautiful when tinged by the light of thy
imagination. Thy genius invested the most ordinary objects with a charm
not their own; and the vision it created thy lips were eloquent to
disclose. What although thy poor old father died, because by thy hand
all his hopes were shivered, and for thy sake poverty stripped even the
coverlet from his dying-bed--yet we feel as if some dreadful destiny,
rather than thy own crime, blinded thee to his fast decay, and closed
thine ears in deafness to his beseeching prayer. Oh! charge not to
creatures such as we all the fearful consequences of our misconduct and
evil ways! We break hearts we would die to heal--and hurry on towards
the grave those whom to save we would leap into the devouring fire. Many
wondered in their anger that thou couldst be so callous to the old man's
grief--and couldst walk tearless at his coffin. The very night of the
day he was buried thou wert among thy wild companions, in a house of
infamy, close to the wall of the churchyard. Was not that enough to tell
us all that disease was in thy brain, and that reason, struggling with
insanity, had changed sorrow to despair. But perfect forgiveness--
forgiveness made tender by profoundest pity--was finally extended to
thee by all thy friends--frail and erring like thyself in many things,
although not so fatally misled and lost, because in the mystery of
Providence not so irresistibly tried. It seemed as if thou hadst
offended the Guardian Genius, who, according to the old philosophy which
thou knewest so well, is given to every human being at his birth; and
that then the angel left thy side, and Satan strove to drag thee to
perdition. And hath any peace come to thee--a youth no more--but in what
might have been the prime of manhood, bent down, they say, to the
ground, with a head all floating with silver hairs--hath any peace come
to thy distracted soul in these woods, over which there now seems again
to brood a holy horror? Yes--thy fine dark eyes are not wholly without
intelligence as they look on the sun, moon, and stars; although all
their courses seem now confused to thy imagination, once regular and
ordered in their magnificence before that intellect which science
claimed as her own. The harmonies of nature are not all lost on thy ear,
poured forth throughout all seasons, over the world of sound and sight.
Glimpses of beauty startle thee as thou wanderest along the shores of
thy prison-isle; and that fine poetical genius, not yet extinguished
altogether, although faint and flickering, gives vent to something like
snatches of songs, and broken elegies, that seem to wail over the ruins
of thy own soul! Such peace as ever visits them afflicted as thou art,
be with thee in cell or on shore; nor lost to Heaven will be the wild
moanings of--to us--thy unintelligible prayers!
But hark to the spirit-stirring voice of the bugle scaling the sky, and
leaping up and down in echoes among the distant mountains! Such a strain
animates the voltigeur, skirmishing in front of the line of battle, or
sending flashes of sudden death from the woods. Alas for him who now
deludes his yet high heart with a few notes of the music that so often
was accompanied by his sword waving on to glory! Unappalled was he ever
in the whizzing and hissing fire--nor did his bold broad breast ever
shrink from the bayonet, that with the finished fencer's art he has
often turned aside when red with death. In many of the pitched battles
of the Spanish campaigns his plume was conspicuous over the dark green
lines, that, breaking asunder in fragments like those of the flowing
sea, only to re-advance over the bloody fields, cleared the ground that
was to be debated between the great armaments. Yet in all such desperate
service he never received one single wound. But on a mid-day march, as
he was gaily singing a love-song, the sun smote him to the very brain,
and from that moment his right hand grasped the sword no more.
Not on the face of all the earth--or of all the sea--is there a spot of
profounder peace than that isle that has long been his abode. But to him
all the scene is alive with the pomp of war. Every far-off precipice is
a fort, that has its own Spanish name--and the cloud above seems to his
eyes the tricolor, or the flag of his own victorious country. War, that
dread game that nations play at, is now to the poor insane soldier a
mere child's pastime, from which sometimes he himself will turn with a
sigh or a smile. For sense assails him in his delirium, for a moment and
no more; and he feels that he is far away, and for ever, from all his
companions in glory, in an asylum that must be left but for the grave!
Perhaps in such moments he may have remembered the night, when at
Badajos he led the forlorn hope; but even forlorn hope now hath he none,
and he sinks away back into his delusions, at which even his brother
sufferers smile--so foolish does the restless campaigner seem to these
men of peace!
Lo! a white ghost-like figure, slowly issuing from the trees, and
sitting herself down on a stone, with face fixed on the waters! Now she
is so perfectly still, that had we not seen her motion thither, she and
the rock would have seemed but one! Somewhat fantastically dressed, even
in her apparent despair. Were we close to her, we should see a face yet
beautiful, beneath hair white as snow. Her voice too, but seldom heard,
is still sweet and low; and sometimes, when all are asleep, or at least
silent, she begins at midnight to sing! She yet touches the guitar--an
instrument in fashion in Scotland when she led the fashion--with
infinite grace and delicacy--and the songs she loves best are those in a
foreign tongue. For more than thirty years hath the unfortunate lady
come to the water's edge daily, and hour after hour continue to sit
motionless on that self-same stone, looking down into the loch. Her
story is now almost like a dim tradition from other ages, and the
history of those who come here often fades away into nothing. Everywhere
else they are forgotten--here there are none who can remember. Who once
so beautiful as the "Fair Portuguese?" It was said at that time that she
was a Nun--but the sacred veil was drawn aside by the hand of love, and
she came to Scotland with her deliverer! Yes, her deliverer! He
delivered her from the gloom--often the peaceful gloom that hovers round
the altar of Superstition--and after a few years of love and life and
joy--she sat where you now see her sitting, and the world she had
adorned moved on in brightness and in music as before! Since there has
to her been so much suffering--was there on her part no sin? No--all
believed her to be guiltless, except one, whose jealousy would have seen
falsehood lurking in an angel's eyes; but she was utterly deserted; and
being in a strange country, worse than an orphan, her mind gave way; for
say not--oh say not--that innocence can always stand against shame and
despair! The hymns she sings at midnight are hymns to the Virgin; but
all her songs are songs about love, and chivalry, and knights that went
crusading to the Holy Land. He who brought her from another sanctuary
into the one now before us, has been dead many years. He perished in
shipwreck--and 'tis thought that she sits there gazing down into the
loch, as on the place where he sank or was buried; for when told that he
was drowned, she shrieked, and made the sign of the cross--and since
that long-ago day that stone has in all weathers been her constant seat.