heaven were bright as bright might be--the sky was blue as violets--that
braided whiteness, that here and there floated like a veil on the brow
of night, was all that recalled the memory of clouds--and as for the
moon, no faintest halo yellowed round her orb, that seemed indeed "one
perfect chrysolite;"--yet while all the winds seemed laid asleep till
morn, and beauty to have chained all the elements into peace--overcast
in a moment is the firmament--an evanishing has left it blank as
mist--there is a fast, thick, pattering on the woods--yes--rain--rain--
rain--and ere we reach Bowness, the party will be wet through to their
skins. Nay--matters are getting still more serious--for there was
lightning--yea, lightning! Ten seconds! and hark, very respectable
thunder! With all our wisdom, we have not been weather-wise--or we
should have known, when we saw it, an electrical sunset. Only look now
towards the West. There floats Noah's Ark--a magnificent spectacle; and
now for the Flood. That far-off sullen sound proclaims cataracts. And
what may mean that sighing and moaning and muttering up among the
cliffs? See--see how the sheet lightning shows the long lake-shore all
tumbling with foamy breakers. A strong wind is there--but here there is
not a breath. But the woods across the lake are bowing their heads to
the blast. Windermere is in a tumult--the storm comes flying on wings
all abroad--and now we are in the very heart of the hurricane. See, in
Bowness is hurrying many a light--for the people fear we may be on the
lake; and faithful Billy, depend on't, is launching his life-boat to go
to our assistance. Well, this is an adventure.--But soft--what ails our
Argand Lamp! Our study is in such darkness that we cannot see our
paper--in the midst of a thunderstorm we conclude, and to bed by a flaff
of lightning.
THE MOORS.
PROLOGUE.
Once we knew the Highlands absolutely too well--not a nook that was not
as familiar to us as our brown study. We had not to complain of the
lochs, glens, woods, and mountains alone, for having so fastened
themselves upon us on a great scale that we found it impossible to shake
them off; but the hardship in our case was, that all the subordinate
parts of the scenery, many of them dull and dreary enough, and some of
them intolerably tedious, had taken it upon themselves so to thrust
their intimacy upon us, in all winds and weathers, that without giving
them the cut direct there was no way of escaping from the burden of
their friendship. To courteous and humane Christians, such as we have
always been both by name and nature as far back as we can recollect, it
is painful to cut even an impudent stone, or an upsetting tree that may
cross our path uncalled for, or obtrude itself on our privacy when we
wish to be alone in our meditations. Yet, we confess, they used
sometimes sorely to try our temper. It is all very well for you, our
good sir, to say in excuse for them that such objects are inanimate. So
much the worse. Were they animate, like yourself, they might be reasoned
with on the impropriety of interrupting the stream of any man's
soliloquies. But being not merely inanimate but irrational, objects of
that class know not to keep their own place, which indeed, it may be
said in reply, is kept for them by nature. But that Mistress of the
Ceremonies, though enjoying a fine green old age, cannot be expected to
be equally attentive to the proceedings of all the objects under her
control. Accordingly, often when she is not looking, what more common
than for a huge hulking fellow of a rock, with an absurd tuft of trees
on his head, who has observed you lying half-asleep on the greensward,
to hang eavesdropping, as it were, over your most secret thoughts,
which he whispers to the winds, and they to all the clouds! Or for some
grotesque and fantastic ash, with a crooked back, and arms
disproportionately long, like a giant in extreme old age dwindling into
a dwarf, to jut out from the hole in the wall, and should your leaden
eye chance at the time to love the ground, to put his mossy fist right
in your philosophical countenance! In short, it is very possible to know
a country so thoroughly well, outside and in, from mountain to
mole-hill, that you get mutually tired of one another's company, and are
ready to vent your quarrel in reciprocal imprecations.
So was it once with us and the Highlands. That "too much familiarity
breeds contempt" we learned many a long year ago, when learning to write
large text; and passages in our life have been a running commentary on
the theme then set us by that incomparable caligraphist, Butterworth.
All "the old familiar faces" occasionally come in for a portion of that
feeling; and on that account, we are glad that we saw, but for one day
and one night, Charles Lamb's. Therefore, some dozen years ago we gave
up the Highlands, not wishing to quarrel with them, and confined our
tender assiduities to the Lowlands, while, like two great flats as we
were, we kept staring away at each other, with our lives on the same
level. All the consequences that might naturally have been expected have
ensued; and we are now as heartily sick of the Lowlands, and they of us.
What can we do but return to our First Love?
Allow us to offer another view of the subject. There is not about Old
Age one blessing more deserving gratitude to Heaven, than the gradual
bedimming of memory brought on by years. In youth, all things, internal
and external, are unforgetable, and by the perpetual presence of passion
oppress the soul. The eye of a woman haunts the victim on whom it may
have given a glance, till he leaps perhaps out of a four-story window. A
beautiful lake, or a sublime mountain, drives a young poet as mad as a
March hare. He loses himself in an interminable forest louring all round
the horizon of a garret six feet square. It matters not to him whether
his eyes be open or shut. He is at the mercy of all Life and all Nature,
and not for one hour can he escape from their persecutions. His soul is
the slave of the Seven Senses, and each is a tyrant with instruments of
torture, to whom and to which Phalaris, with his brazen bull, was a
pointless joke. But in old age "the heart of a man is oppressed with
care" no longer; the Seven Tyrants have lost their sceptres, and are
dethroned; and the grey-headed gentleman feels that his soul has "set up
its rest." His eyes are dazzled no more with insufferable light--no more
his ears tingle with music too exquisite to be borne--no more his touch
is transport. The scents of nature, stealing from the balmy mouths of
lilies and roses, are deadened in his nostrils. He is above and beyond
the reach of all the long arms of many-handed misery, as he is out of
the convulsive clutch of bliss. And is not this the state of best
happiness for mortal man? Tranquillity! The peaceful air that we breathe
as we are westering towards the sunset-regions of our Being, and feel
that we are about to drop down for ever out of sight behind the Sacred
Mountains.
All this may be very fine, but cannot be said to help us far on with our
Prologue. Let us try it again. Old men, we remarked, ought to be
thankful to Heaven for their dim memories. Never do we feel that more
profoundly than when dreaming about the Highlands. All is confusion.
Nothing distinctly do we remember--not even the names of lochs and
mountains. Where is Ben Cru--Cru--Cru--what's-his-name?
Ay--ay--Cruachan. At this blessed moment we see his cloud-capped
head--but we have clean forgotten the silver sound of the name of the
county he encumbers. Ross-shire? Nay, that won't do--he never was at
Tain. We are assured by Dr Reid's, Dr Beattie's, and Dugald Stewart's
great Instinctive First Principle Belief, that oftener than once, or ten
times either, have we been in a day-long hollow among precipices dear to
eagles, called Glen-Etive. But where begins or where ends that "severe
sojourn" is now to us a mystery--though we hear the sound of the sea and
the dashing of cataracts. Yet though all is thus dim in our memory,
would you believe it that nothing is utterly lost? No, not even the
thoughts that soared like eagles vanishing in the light--or that dived
like ravens into the gloom. They all reappear--those from the
Empyrean--these from Hades--reminding us of the good or the evil borne
in other days, within the spiritual regions of our boundless being. The
world of eye and ear is not in reality narrowed because it glimmers;
ever and anon as years advance, a light direct from heaven dissipates
the gloom, and bright and glorious as of yore the landscape laughs to
the sea, the sea to heaven, and heaven back again to the gazing spirit
that leaps forward to the hailing light with something of the same
divine passion that gave wings to our youth.
All this may be still finer, yet cannot be said, any more than the
preceding paragraph, much to help us on with our Prologue. To come then,
if possible, to the point at once--We are happy that our dim memory and
our dim imagination restore and revive in our mind none but the
characteristic features of the scenery of the Highlands, unmixed with
baser matter, and all floating magnificently through a spiritual haze,
so that the whole region is now more than ever idealised; and in spite
of all his present, past, and future prosiness--Christopher North, soon
as in thought his feet touch the heather, becomes a poet.
It has long been well known to the whole world that we are a sad
egotist--yet our egotism, so far from being a detraction from our
attraction, seems to be the very soul of it, making it impossible in
nature for any reasonable being to come within its sphere, without being
drawn by sweet compulsion to the old wizard's heart. He is so _humane_!
Only look at him for a few minutes, and liking becomes love--love
becomes veneration. And all this even before he has opened his lips--by
the mere power of his ogles and his temples. In his large mild blue
eyes is written not only his nature, but miraculously, in German text,
his very name, #Christopher North#. Mrs Gentle was the first to discover
it; though we remember having been asked more than once in our youth, by
an alarmed virgin on whom we happened at the time to be looking tender,
"If we were aware that there was something preternatural in our eyes?"
#Christopher# is conspicuous in our right eye--#North# in our left; and
when we wish to be incog., we either draw their fringed curtains, or,
nun-like, keep the tell-tale orbs fixed on the ground. Candour whispers
us to confess, that some years ago a child was exhibited at sixpence
with WILLIAM WOOD legible in its optics--having been affiliated, by
ocular evidence, on a gentleman of that name, who, with his dying
breath, disowned the soft impeachment. But in that case nature had
written a vile scrawl--in ours her hand is firm, and goes off with a
flourish.
Have you ever entered, all alone, the shadows of some dilapidated old
burial-place, and in a nook made beautiful by wild-briers and a
flowering thorn, beheld the stone image of some long-forgotten worthy
lying on his grave? Some knight who perhaps had fought in Palestine,--or
some holy man, who in the Abbey--now almost gone--had led a long still
life of prayer? The moment you knew that you were standing among the
dwellings of the dead, how impressive became the ruins! Did not that
stone image wax more and more lifelike in its repose? And as you kept
your eyes fixed on the features Time had not had the heart to
obliterate, seemed not your soul to hear the echoes of the Miserere sung
by the brethren?
So looks Christopher--on his couch--in his ALCOVE. He is taking his
siesta--and the faint shadows you see coming and going across his face
are dreams. 'Tis a pensive dormitory, and hangs undisturbed in its
spiritual region as a cloud on the sky of the Longest Day when it falls
on the Sabbath.
What think you of OUR FATHER, alongside of the Pedlar in "The
Excursion?" Wordsworth says--
"Amid the gloom,
Spread by a brotherhood of lofty elms,
Appear'd a roofless hut; four naked walls
That stared upon each other! I look'd round,
And to my wish and to my hope espied
Him whom I sought; a man of reverend age,
But stout and hale, for travel unimpair'd.
There was he seen upon the cottage bench,
Recumbent in the shade, as if asleep;
An iron-pointed staff lay at his side."
Alas! "stout and hale" are words that could not be applied, without
cruel mocking, to our figure. "Recumbent in the shade" unquestionably he
is--yet, "recumbent" is a clumsy word for such quietude; and, recurring
to our former image, we prefer to say, in the words of Wilson,--
"Still is he as a frame of stone
That in its stillness lies alone,
With silence breathing from its face,
For ever in some holy place,
Chapel or aisle--on marble laid,
With pale hands on his pale breast spread,
An image humble, meek, and low,
Of one forgotten long ago!"
No "iron-pointed staff lies at his side"--but "Satan's dread," THE
CRUTCH! Wordsworth tells us over again that the Pedlar--
"With no appendage but a staff,
The prized memorial of _relinquish'd_ toils,
Upon the cottage-bench reposed his limbs,
Screen'd from the sun."
On his couch, in his Alcove, Christopher is reposing--not his limbs
alone, but his very essence. THE CRUTCH is, indeed, both _de jure_ and
_de facto_ the prized memorial of toils--but, thank Heaven, not
_relinquished_ toils; and then how characteristic of the dear merciless
old man--hardly distinguishable among the fringed draperies of his
canopy, the dependent and independent KNOUT!
Was the Pedlar absolutely asleep? We shrewdly suspect not--'twas but a
doze. "Recumbent in the shade, _as if asleep_"--"Upon that cottage-bench
_reposed_ his limbs" induce us to lean to the opinion that he was but on
the border of the Land of Nod. Nay, the poet gets more explicit, and
with that minute particularity so charming in poetical description,
finally informs us that
"Supine the wanderer lay,
_His eyes, as if in drowsiness, half shut_,
The shadows of the breezy elms above
Dappling his face."
It would appear, then, on an impartial consideration of all the
circumstances of the case, that the "man of reverend age," though
"recumbent" and "supine" upon the "cottage bench," "as if asleep," and
"his eyes, as if in drowsiness, half shut," was in a mood between
sleeping and waking; and this creed is corroborated by the following
assertion--
"He had not heard the sound
Of my approaching steps, and in the shade
Unnoticed did I stand some minutes' space.
At length I hail'd him, seeing that his hat
Was moist with water-drops, as if the brim
Had newly scoop'd a running stream."
He rose; and so do We, for probably by this time you may have discovered
that we have been describing Ourselves in our siesta or mid-day
snooze--as we have been beholding in our mind's eye our venerated and
mysterious Double.
We cannot help flattering ourselves--if indeed it be flattery--that
though no relative of his, we have a look of the Pedlar--as he is
elaborately painted by the hand of a great master in the aforesaid Poem.
"Him had I mark'd the day before--alone,
And station'd in the public way, with, face
Turn'd to the sun then setting, while that staff
Afforded to the figure of the man,
Detain'd for contemplation or repose,
Graceful support," &c.
As if it were yesterday, we remember our first interview with the Bard.
It was at the Lady's Oak, between Ambleside and Rydal. We were then in
the very flower of our age--just sixty; so we need not say the century
had then seen but little of this world. The Bard was a mere boy of some
six lustres, and had a lyrical-ballad look that established his identity
at first sight, all unlike the lackadaisical. His right hand was within
his vest on the region of the heart, and he ceased his crooning as we
stood face to face. What a noble countenance! at once austere and
gracious--haughty and benign--of a man conscious of his greatness while
yet companioning with the humble--an unrecognised power dwelling in the
woods. Our figure at that moment so impressed itself on his imagination,
that it in time supplanted the image of the real Pedlar, and grew into
the _Emeritus of the Three Days_. We were standing in that very
attitude--having deposited on the coping of the wall our Kit, since
adopted by the British Army, with us at once a library and a larder.
And again--and even more characteristically,--
"Plain was his garb:
Such as might suit a rustic sire, prepared
For Sabbath duties; yet he was a man
Whom no one could have pass'd without remark,
Active and nervous was his gait; his limbs
And his whole figure breathed intelligence.
Time had compress'd the freshness of his cheeks
Into a narrower circle of deep red,
But had not tamed his eye, that under brows,
Shaggy and grey, had meanings, which it brought
From years of youth; whilst, like a being made
Of many beings, he had wondrous skill
To blend with knowledge of the years to come,
Human, or such as lie beyond the grave."
In our intellectual characters we indulge the pleasing hope that there
are some striking points of resemblance, on which, however, our modesty
will not permit us to dwell--and incur acquirements, more particularly
in Plane and Spherical Trigonometry:--
"While yet he linger'd in the rudiments
Of science, and among her simplest laws,
His triangles--they were the stars of heaven,
The silent stars! oft did he take delight
To measure the altitude of some tall crag,
That is the eagle's birthplace," &c.
So it was with us. Give us but a base and a quadrant--and when a student
in Jemmy Millar's class, we could have given you the altitude of any
steeple in Glasgow or the Gorbals.
Occasionally, too, in a small party of friends, though, not proud of the
accomplishment, we have been prevailed on, as you may have heard, to
delight humanity with a song--"The Flowers of the Forest," "Roy's Wife,"
"Flee up, flee up, thou bonnie bonnie Cock," or "Auld Langsyne"--just as
the Pedlar
"At request would sing
Old songs, the product of his native hills;
A skilful distribution of sweet sounds,
Feeding the soul, and eagerly imbibed
As cool refreshing water, by the care
Of the industrious husbandman diffused
Through a parch'd meadow-field in time of drought."
Our natural disposition, too, is as amiable as that of the "Vagrant
Merchant."
"And surely never did there live on earth
A man of kindlier nature. The rough sports
And teasing ways of children vex'd not him:
Indulgent listener was he to the tongue
Of garrulous age; nor did the sick man's tale,
To his fraternal sympathy address'd,
Obtain reluctant hearing."
Who can read the following lines, and not think of Christopher North?
"Birds and beasts,
And the mute fish that glances in the stream,
And harmless reptile coiling in the sun,
And gorgeous insect hovering in the air,
The fowl domestic, and the household dog--
In his capacious mind he loved them all."
True, that our love of
"The mute fish that glances in the stream,"
is not incompatible with the practice of the "angler's silent trade," or
with the pleasure of "filling our pannier." The Pedlar, too, we have
reason to know, was like his poet and ourselves, in that art a
craftsman, and for love beat the mole-catcher at busking a batch of
May-flies. We question whether Lascelles himself were his master at a
green dragon. "The harmless reptile coiling in the sun" we are not so
sure about, having once been bit by an adder, whom in our simplicity we
mistook for a slow-worm--the very day, by the by, on which we were
poisoned by a dish of toadstools, by our own hand gathered for
mushrooms. But we have long given over chasing butterflies, and feel, as
the Pedlar did, that they are beautiful creatures, and that 'tis a sin
between finger and thumb to compress their mealy wings. The household
dog we do indeed dearly love, though when old Surly looks suspicions we
prudently keep out of the reach of his chain. As for "the domestic
fowl," we breed scores every spring, solely for the delight of seeing
them at their _walks_
"Among the rural villages and farms;"
and though game to the back-bone, they are allowed to wear the spurs
nature gave them--to crow unclipped, challenging but the echoes; nor is
the sward, like the _sod_, ever reddened with their heroic blood, for
hateful to our ears the war-song,
"Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victory!"
'Tis our way, you know, to pass from gay to grave matter, and often from
a jocular to a serious view of the same subject--it being natural to
us--and having become habitual too, from our writing occasionally in
_Blackwood's Magazine_. All the world knows our admiration of
Wordsworth, and admits that we have done almost as much as Jeffrey or
Taylor to make his poetry popular among the "educated circles." But we
are not a nation of idolaters, and worship neither graven image nor man
that is born of a woman. We may seem to have treated the Pedlar with
insufficient respect in that playful parallel between him and Ourselves;
but there you are wrong again, for we desire thereby to do him honour.
We wish now to say a few words on the wisdom of making such a personage
the chief character in a Philosophical Poem.
He is described as endowed by nature with a great intellect, a noble
imagination, a profound soul, and a tender heart. It will not be said
that nature keeps these her noblest gifts for human beings born in this
or that condition of life: she gives them to her favourites--for so, in
the highest sense, they are to whom such gifts befall; and not
unfrequently, in an obscure place, of one of the FORTUNATI
"The fulgent head
Star-bright appears."
Wordsworth appropriately places the birth of such a being in a humble
dwelling in the Highlands of Scotland.
"Among the hills of Atholl he was born;
Where on a small hereditary farm,
An unproductive slip of barren ground,
His parents, with their numerous offspring, dwelt;
A virtuous household, though exceeding poor."
His childhood was nurtured at home in Christian love and truth--and
acquired other knowledge at a winter school; for in summer he "tended
cattle on the hill,"--
"that stood
Sole building on a mountain's dreary edge."
And the influence of such education and occupation among such natural
objects, Wordsworth expounds in some as fine poetry as ever issued from
the cells of philosophic thought.
"So the foundations of his mind were laid."
The boy had small need of books--
"For many a tale
Traditionary, round the mountains hung,
And many a legend, peopling the dark woods,
Nourish'd Imagination in her growth,
And gave the mind that apprehensive power
By which she is made quick to recognise
The moral properties and scope of things."
But in the Manse there were books--and he read
"Whate'er the minister's old shelf supplied,
The life and death of martyrs, who sustain'd,
With will inflexible, those fearful pangs,
Triumphantly display'd in records left
Of persecution and the Covenant."
Can you not believe that by the time he was as old as you were when you
used to ride to the races on a pony, by the side of your sire the
Squire, this boy was your equal in knowledge, though you had a private
tutor all to yourself, and were then a promising lad, as indeed you are
now after the lapse of a quarter of a century? True, as yet he "had
small Latin, and no Greek;" but the elements of these languages may be
learned--trust us--by slow degrees--by the mind rejoicing in the
consciousness of its growing faculties--during leisure hours from other
studies--as they were by the Atholl adolescent. A Scholar--in your sense
of the word--he might not be called, even when he had reached his
seventeenth year, though probably he would have puzzled you in Livy and
Virgil; nor of English poetry had he read much--the less the better for
such a mind--at that age, and in that condition--for
"Accumulated feelings press'd his heart
With still increasing weight; he was o'erpower'd
By nature, by the turbulence subdued
Of his own mind, by mystery and hope,
And the first virgin passion of a soul
Communing with the glorious Universe."
But he had read Poetry--ay, the same Poetry that Wordsworth's self read
at the same age--and
"Among the hills
He gazed upon that mighty Orb of Song,
The divine Milton."
Thus endowed, and thus instructed,
"By Nature, that did never yet betray
The heart that loved her,"
the youth was "greater than he knew;" yet that there was something great
in, as well as about him, he felt--
"Thus daily thirsting in that lonesome life,"
for some diviner communication than had yet been vouchsafed to him by
the Giver and Inspirer of his restless Being.
"In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought,
Thus was he rear'd; much wanting to assist
The growth of intellect, yet gaining more,
And every moral feeling of his soul
Strengthen'd and braced, by breathing in content
The keen, the wholesome air of poverty,
And drinking from the well of homely life."
But he is in his eighteenth year, and