think otherwise, be so good as give us a better: meanwhile let us
descend from The Station--and its stained windows--stained into setting
sunlight--frost and snow--the purpling autumn--and the first faint
vernal green--and re-embark at the Ferry-House pier. Berkshire Island is
fair--but we have always looked at it with an evil eye since unable to
weather it in our old schooner, one day when the Victory, on the same
tack, shot by us to windward like a salmon. But now we are half-way
between Storr's Point and Rawlinson's Nab--so, my dear Garnet, down with
the helm and let us put about (who is that catching crabs?) for a fine
front view of the Grecian edifice. It does honour to the genius of
Gandy--and say what people choose of a classic clime, the light of a
Westmoreland sky falls beautifully on that marble-like stone, which,
whether the heavens be in gloom or glory, "shines well where it stands,"
and flings across the lake a majestic shadow. Methought there passed
along the lawn the image of one now in his tomb! The memory of that
bright day returns, when Windermere glittered with all her sails in
honour of the great Northern Minstrel, and of him the Eloquent, whose
lips are now mute in the dust. Methinks we see his smile benign--that we
hear his voice silver-sweet!
"But away with melancholy,
Nor doleful changes ring"--
as such thoughts came like shadows, like shadows let them depart--and
spite of that which happeneth to all men--"this one day we give to
merriment." Pull, Billy, pull--or we will turn you round--and in that
case there is no refreshment nearer than Newby-bridge. The Naiad feels
the invigorated impulse--and her cut-water murmurs to the tune of six
knots through the tiny cataract foaming round her bows. The woods are
all running down the lake,--and at that rate, by two _post meridiem_
will be in the sea.
Commend us--on a tour--to lunch and dinner in one. 'Tis a saving both of
time and money--and of all the dinner-lunches that ever were set upon a
sublunary table, the _facile principes_ are the dinner-lunches you may
devour in the White Lion, Bowness. Take a walk--and a seat on the green
that overlooks the village, almost on a level with the lead-roof of the
venerable church--while Hebe is laying the cloth for a repast fit for
Jove, Juno, and the other heathen gods and goddesses; and if you must
have politics--why, call for the _Standard_ or _Sun_ (Heavens! there is
that hawk already at the _Times_), and devote a few hurried and hungry
minutes to the French Revolution. Why, the Green of all Greens--often
traced by us of yore beneath the midnight moonlight, till a path was
worn along the edge of the low wall, still called "North's Walk"--is
absolutely converted into a reading-room, and our laking party into a
political club. There is Louisa with the _Leeds Intelligencer_--and
Matilda with the _Morning Herald_--and Harriet with that York paper
worth them all put together--for it tells of Priam, and the Cardinal,
and St Nicholas--but, hark! a soft footstep! And then a soft voice--no
dialect or accent pleasanter than the Westmoreland--whispers that the
dinner-lunch is on the table--and no leading article like a cold round
of beef, or a veal pie. Let the Parisians settle their Constitution as
they will--meanwhile let us strengthen ours; and after a single glass of
Madeira--and a horn of home-brewed--let us off on foot--on horseback--in
gig--car and chariot--to Troutbeck.
It is about a Scottish mile, we should think, from Bowness to Cook's
House--along the turnpike road--half the distance lying embowered in the
Rayrig woods--and half open to lake, cloud, and sky. It is pleasant to
lose sight now and then of the lake along whose banks you are
travelling, especially if during separation you become a Druid. The
water woos you at your return with her bluest smile, and her whitest
murmur. Some of the finest trees in all the Rayrig woods have had the
good sense to grow by the roadside, where they can see all that is
passing--and make their own observations on us deciduous plants. Few of
them seem to be very old--not much older than Christopher North--and,
like him, they wear well, trunk sound to the core, arms with a long
sweep, and head in fine proportions of cerebral development, fortified
against all storms--perfect pictures of oaks in their prime. You may
see one--without looking for it--near a farmhouse called
Miller-ground--himself a grove. His trunk is clothed in a tunic of moss,
which shows the ancient Sylvan to great advantage, and it would be no
easy matter to give him a fall. Should you wish to see Windermere in all
her glory, you have but to enter a gate a few yards on this side of his
shade, and ascend an eminence called by us Greenbank--but you had as
well leave your red mantle in the carriage, for an enormous white,
long-horned Lancashire bull has for some years established his
head-quarters not far off, and you would not wish your wife to become a
widow, with six fatherless children. But the royal road of poetry is
often the most splendid--and by keeping the turnpike, you soon find
yourself on a terrace to which there was nothing to compare in the
hanging gardens of Babylon. There is the widest breadth of water--the
richest foreground of wood--and the most magnificent background of
mountains--not only in Westmoreland but--believe us--in all the world.
That blue roof is Calgarth--and no traveller ever pauses on this brow
without giving it a blessing--for the sake of the illustrious dead; for
there long dwelt in the body Richard Watson, the Defender of the Faith,
and there within the shadow of his memory still dwell those, dearest on
earth to his beatified spirit. So pass along in high and solemn thought,
till you lose sight of Calgarth in the lone road that leads by St
Catharine's, and then relapse into pleasant fancies and picturesque
dreams. This is the best way by far of approaching Troutbeck. No ups and
downs in this life were ever more enlivening--not even the ups and downs
of a bird learning to fly. Sheep-fences, six feet high, are admirable
contrivances for shutting out scenery; and by shutting out much scenery,
why, you confer an unappreciable value on the little that remains
visible, and feel as if you could hug it to your heart. But sometimes
one does feel tempted to shove down a few roods of intercepting
stone-wall higher than the horse-hair on a cuirassier's casque--though
sheep should eat the suckers and scions, protected as they there shoot,
at the price of the concealment of the picturesque and the poetical from
beauty-searching eyes. That is a long lane, it is said, which has never
a turning; so this must be a short one, which has a hundred. You have
turned your back on Windermere--and our advice to you is, to keep your
face to the mountains. Troutbeck is a jewel--a diamond of a stream--but
Bobbin Mills have exhausted some of the most lustrous pools, changing
them into shallows, where the minnows rove. Deep dells are his
delight--and he loves the rugged scaurs that intrench his wooded
banks--and the fantastic rocks that tower-like hang at intervals over
his winding course, and seem sometimes to block it up; but the miner
works his way out beneath galleries and arches in the living
stone--sometimes silent--sometimes singing--and sometimes roaring like
thunder--till subsiding into a placid spirit, ere he reaches the wooden
bridge in the bonny holms of Calgarth, he glides graceful as the swan
that sometimes sees his image in his breast, and through alder and
willow banks murmurs away his life in the Lake.
Yes--that is Troutbeck Chapel--one of the smallest--and to our eyes the
very simplest--of all the chapels among the hills. Yet will it be
remembered when more pretending edifices are forgotten--just like some
mild, sensible, but perhaps somewhat too silent person, whose
acquaintanceship--nay, friendship--we feel a wish to cultivate we scarce
know why, except that he is mild, sensible, and silent; whereas we would
not be civil to the _brusque_, upsetting, and loquacious puppy at his
elbow, whose information is as various as it is profound, were one word
or look of courtesy to save him from the flames. For Heaven's sake,
Louisa, don't sketch Troutbeck Chapel. There is nothing but a square
tower--a horizontal roof--and some perpendicular walls. The outlines of
the mountains here have no specific character. That bridge is but a poor
feature--and the stream here very commonplace. Put them not on paper.
Yet alive--is not the secluded scene felt to be most beautiful? It has a
soul. The pure spirit of the pastoral age is breathing here--in this
utter noiselessness there is the oblivion of all turmoil; and as the
bleating of flocks comes on the ear, along the fine air, from the green
pastures of the Kentmere range of soft undulating hills, the stilled
heart whispers to itself, "this is peace!"
The worst of it is, that of all the people that on earth do dwell, your
Troutbeck _statesmen_, we have heard, are the most litigious--the most
quarrelsome about straws. Not a footpath, in all the parish that has
not cost many pounds in lawsuits. The most insignificant style is
referred to a full bench of magistrates. That gate was carried to the
Quarter Sessions. No branch of a tree can shoot six inches over a
march-wall without being indicted for a trespass. And should a
frost-loosened stone tumble from some _skrees_ down upon a neighbour's
field, he will be served with a notice to quit before next morning. Many
of the small properties hereabouts have been mortgaged over head and
ears mainly to fee attorneys. Yet the last hoop of apples will go the
same road--and the statesman, driven at last from his paternal fields,
will sue for something or another _in forma pauperis_, were it but the
worthless wood and second-hand nails that may be destined for his
coffin. This is a pretty picture of pastoral life--but we must take
pastoral life as we find it. Nor have we any doubt that things were
every whit as bad in the time of the patriarchs--else--whence the
satirical sneer, "sham Abraham?" Yonder is the village straggling away
up along the hill-side, till the furthest house seems a rock fallen with
trees from the mountain. The cottages stand for the most part in
clusters of twos or threes--with here and there what in Scotland we
should call a _clachan_--many a sma' toun within the ae lang toun; but
where in all braid Scotland is a mile-long scattered congregation of
rural dwellings, all dropt down where the Painter and the Poet would
have wished to plant them, on knolls and in dells, and on banks and
braes, and below tree-crested rocks, and all bound together in
picturesque confusion by old groves of ash, oak, and sycamore, and by
flower-gardens and fruit-orchards, rich as those of the Hesperides?
If you have no objections--our pretty dears--we shall return to Bowness
by Lowood. Let us form a straggling line of march--so that we may one
and all indulge in our own silent fancies--and let not a word be spoken,
virgins--under the penalty of two kisses for one syllable--till we crown
the height above Briary-Close. Why, there it is already--and we hear our
musical friend's voice-accompanied guitar. From the front of his
cottage, the head and shoulders of Windermere are seen in their most
majestic shape--and from nowhere else is the long-withdrawing Langdale
so magnificently closed by mountains. There at sunset hangs "Cloudland,
gorgeous land," by gazing on which for an hour we shall all become
poets and poetesses. Who said that Windermere was too narrow? The same
critic who thinks the full harvest moon too round--and despises the
twinkling of the evening star. It is all the way down--from head to
foot--from the Brathay to the Leven--of the proper breadth precisely--to
a quarter of an inch. Were the reeds in Poolwyke Bay--on which the birds
love to balance themselves--at low or high water, to be visible longer
or shorter than what they have always been in the habit of being on such
occasions since first we brushed them with an oar, when landing in our
skiff from the Endeavour, the beauty of the whole of Windermere would be
impaired--so exquisitely adapted is that pellucid gleam to the lips of
its sylvan shores. True, there are flaws in the diamond--but only when
the squalls come; and as the blackness sweeps by, that diamond of the
first water is again sky-bright and sky-blue as an angel's eyes. Lowood
Bay--we are now embarked in Mr Jackson's prettiest pinnace--when the sun
is westering--which it now is--surpasses all other bays in fresh-water
mediterraneans. Eve loves to see her pensive face reflected in that
serenest mirror. To flatter such a divinity is impossible--but sure she
never wears a smile so divine as when adjusting her dusky tresses in
that truest of all glasses, set in the richest of all frames. Pleased
she retires--with a wavering motion--and casting "many a longing,
lingering look behind," fades indistinctly away among the Brathay woods;
while Night, her elder sister, or rather her younger--we really know not
which--takes her place at the darkening mirror, till it glitters with
her crescent-moon-coronet, wreathed perhaps with a white cloud, and just
over the silver bow the lustre of one large yellow star.
As none of the party complain of hunger, let us crack among us a single
bottle of our worthy host's choice old Madeira--and then haste in the
barouche (ha! here it is) to Bowness. It is right now to laugh--and
sing--and recite poetry--and talk all manner of nonsense. Didn't ye hear
something crack? Can it be a spring--or merely the axle-tree? Our
clerical friend from Chester assures us 'twas but a string of his
guitar--so no more shrieking--and after coffee we shall have
"Rise up, rise up, Xarifa, lay your golden cushion down!"
And then we two, my dear sir, must have a contest at chess--at which, if
you beat us, we shall leave our bed at midnight, and murder you in your
sleep. "But where," murmurs Matilda, "are we going?" To Oresthead,
love--and Elleray--for you must see a sight these sweet eyes of thine
never saw before--a SUNSET.
We have often wondered if there be in the world one woman indisputably
and undeniably the most beautiful of all women--or if, indeed, our first
mother were "the loveliest of her daughters, Eve." What human female
beauty is all men feel--but few men know--and none can tell--further
than that it is perfect spiritual health, breathingly embodied in
perfect corporeal flesh and blood, according to certain heaven-framed
adaptations of form and hue, that by a familiar yet inscrutable mystery,
to our senses and our souls express sanctity and purity of the immortal
essence enshrined within, by aid of all associated perceptions and
emotions that the heart and the imagination can agglomerate round them,
as instantly and as unhesitatingly as the faculties of thought and
feeling can agglomerate round a lily or a rose, for example, the
perceptions and emotions that make them--by divine right of inalienable
beauty--the Royal Families of Flowers. This definition--or description
rather--of human female beauty, may appear to some, as indeed it appears
to us, something vague; but all profound truths--out of the exact
sciences--are something vague; and it is manifestly the design of a
benign and gracious Providence that they should be so till the end of
time--till mortality puts on immortality--and earth is heaven.
Vagueness, therefore, is no fault in philosophy--any more than in the
dawn of morning, or the gloaming of eve. Enough, if each clause of the
sentence that seeks to elucidate a confessed mystery, has a meaning
harmonious with all the meanings in all the other clauses--and that the
effect of the whole taken together is musical--and a tune. Then it is
Truth. For all Falsehood is dissonant--and verity is consent. It is our
faith, that the souls of some women are angelic--or nearly so--by nature
and the Christian religion; and that the faces and persons of some women
are angelic, or nearly so--whose souls, nevertheless, are seen to be far
otherwise--and, on that discovery, beauty fades or dies. But may not
soul and body--spirit and matter--meet in perfect union at birth; and
grow together into a creature, though of spiritual mould, comparable
with Eve before the Fall? Such a creature--such creatures--may have
been; but the question is--did you ever see one? We almost think that we
have--but many long years ago;
"She is dedde,
Gone to her death-bedde
All under the willow-tree."
And it may be that her image in the moonlight of memory and imagination
may be more perfectly beautiful than she herself ever was, when
"Upgrew that living flower beneath our eye."
Yes--'tis thus that we form to ourselves--incommunicably within our
souls--what we choose to call Ideal Beauty--that is, a life-in-death
image or Eidolon of a Being whose voice was once heard, and whose
footsteps once wandered among the flowers of this earth. But it is a
mistake to believe that such beauty as this can visit the soul only
after the original in which it once breathed is no more. For as it can
only be seen by profoundest passion--and the profoundest are the
passions of Love, and Pity, and Grief--then why may not each and all of
these passions--when we consider the constitution of this world and this
life--be awakened in their utmost height and depth by the sight of
living beauty, as well as by the memory of the dead? To do so is surely
within "the reachings of our souls,"--and if so, then may the virgin
beauty of his daughter, praying with folded hands and heavenward face
when leaning in health on her father's knees, transcend even the ideal
beauty which shall afterwards visit his slumbers nightly, long years
after he has laid her head in the grave. If by ideal beauty you mean a
beauty beyond whatever breathed, and moved, and had its being on
earth--then we suspect that not even "that inner eye which is the bliss
of solitude" ever beheld it; but if you merely mean by ideal beauty,
that which is composed of ideas, and of the feelings attached by nature
to ideas, then, begging your pardon, my good sir, all beauty whatever is
ideal--and you had better begin to study metaphysics.
But what we were wishing to say is this--that whatever may be the truth
with regard to human female beauty--Windermere, seen by sunset from the
spot where we now stand, Elleray, is at this moment the most beautiful
scene on this earth. The reasons why it must be so are multitudinous.
Not only can the eye take in, but the imagination, in its awakened
power, can master all the component elements of the spectacle--and while
it adequately discerns and sufficiently feels the influence of each, is
alive throughout all its essence to the divine agency of the whole. The
charm lies in its entirety--its unity, which is so perfect--so seemeth
it to our eyes--that 'tis in itself a complete world--of which not a
line could be altered without disturbing the spirit of beauty that lies
recumbent there, wherever the earth meets the sky. There is nothing here
fragmentary; and had a poet been born, and bred here all his days, nor
known aught of fair or grand beyond this liquid vale, yet had he sung
truly and profoundly of the shows of nature. No rude and shapeless
masses of mountains--such as too often in our own dear Scotland encumber
the earth with dreary desolation--with gloom without grandeur--and
magnitude without magnificence. But almost in orderly array, and
irregular just up to the point of the picturesque, where poetry is not
needed for the fancy's pleasure, stand the Race of Giants--mist-veiled
transparently--or crowned with clouds slowly settling of their own
accord into all the forms that Beauty loves, when with her sister-spirit
Peace she descends at eve from highest heaven to sleep among the shades
of earth.
Sweet would be the hush of lake, woods, and skies, were it not so
solemn! The silence is that of a temple, and, as we face the west,
irresistibly are we led to adore. The mighty sun occupies with his
flaming retinue all the region. Mighty yet mild--for from his disc,
awhile insufferably bright, is effused now a gentle crimson light, that
dyes all the west in one uniform glory, save where yet round the cloud
edges lingers the purple, the green, and the yellow lustre, unwilling to
forsake the violet beds of the sky, changing, while we gaze, into
heavenly roses; till that prevailing crimson colour at last gains entire
possession of the heavens, and all the previous splendour gives way to
one, whose paramount purity, lustrous as fire, is in its steadfast
beauty sublime. And, lo! the lake has received that sunset into its
bosom. It, too, softly burns with a crimson glow--and, as sinks the sun
below the mountains, Windermere, gorgeous in her array as the western
sky, keeps fading away as it fades, till at last all the ineffable
splendour expires, and the spirit that has been lost to this world in
the transcendent vision, or has been seeing all things appertaining to
this world in visionary symbols, returns from that celestial sojourn,
and knows that its lot is, henceforth as heretofore, to walk weariedly
perhaps, and woe-begone, over the no longer divine but disenchanted
earth!
It is very kind in the moon and stars--just like them--to rise so soon
after sunset. The heart sinks at the sight of the sky, when a
characterless night succeeds such a blaze of light--like dull reality
dashing the last vestiges of the brightest of dreams. When the moon is
"hid in her vacant interlunar cave," and not a star can "burst its
cerements," imagination in the dim blank droops her wings--our thoughts
become of the earth earthly--and poetry seems a pastime fit but for
fools and children. But how different our mood, when
"Glows the firmament with living sapphires,"
and Diana, who has ascended high in heaven, without our having once
observed the divinity, bends her silver bow among the rejoicing stars,
while the lake, like another sky, seems to contain its own luminaries, a
different division of the constellated night! 'Tis merry Windermere no
more. Yet we must not call her melancholy--though somewhat sad she
seems, and pensive, as if the stillness of universal nature did touch
her heart. How serene all the lights--how peaceful all the shadows!
Steadfast alike--as if they would brood for ever--yet transient as all
loveliness--and at the mercy of every cloud. In some places, the lake
has disappeared--in others, the moonlight is almost like sunshine--only
silver instead of gold. Here spots of quiet light--there lines of
trembling lustre--and there a flood of radiance checkered by the images
of trees. Lo! the Isle called Beautiful has now gathered upon its
central grove all the radiance issuing from that celestial Urn; and
almost in another moment it seems blended with the dim mass of mainland,
and blackness enshrouds the woods. Still as seems the night to
unobservant eyes, it is fluctuating in its expression as the face of a
sleeper overspread with pleasant but disturbing dreams. Never for any
two successive moments is the aspect of the night the same--each smile
has its own meaning, its own character; and Light is felt to be like
Music, to have a melody and a harmony of its own--so mysteriously allied
are the powers and provinces of eye and ear, and by such a kindred and
congenial agency do they administer to the workings of the spirit.