sea! Waves of water, when at the prodigious, are never higher than the
foretop of a man-of-war. Waves of vapour--they alone are seen flying
mountains high--dashing, but howling not--and in their silent ascension,
all held together by the same spirit, but perpetually changing its
beautiful array, where order seems ever and anon to come in among
disorder, there is a grandeur that settles down in the soul of youthful
poet roaming in delirium among the mountain glooms, and "pacifies the
fever of his heart."
Call not now these vapours waves; for movement there is none among the
ledges, and ridges, and roads, and avenues, and galleries, and groves,
and houses, and churches, and castles, and fairy palaces--all framed of
mist. Far up among and above that wondrous region, through which you
hear voices of waterfalls deepening the silence, behold hundreds of
mountain-tops--blue, purple, violet--for the sun is shining straight on
some and aslant on others--and on those not at all; nor can the shepherd
at your side, though he has lived among them all his life, till after
long pondering tell you the names of those most familiar to him; for
they seem to have all interchanged sites and altitudes, and Black Benhun
himself, the Eagle-Breeder, looks so serenely in his rainbow, that you
might almost mistake him for Ben Louey or the Hill of Hinds.
Have you not seen sunsets in which the mountains were imbedded in masses
of clouds all burning and blazing--yes, blazing--with unimaginable
mixtures of all the colours that ever were born--intensifying into a
glory that absolutely became insupportable to the soul as insufferable
to the eyes--and that left the eyes for hours after you had retreated
from the supernatural scene, even when shut, all filled with floating
films of cross-lights, cutting the sky-imagery into gorgeous fragments?
And were not the mountains of such sunsets, whether they were of land or
of cloud, sufficiently vast for your utmost capacities and powers of
delight and joy longing to commune with the Region then felt to be in
very truth Heaven? Nor could the spirit, entranced in admiration,
conceive at that moment any Heaven beyond--while the senses themselves
seemed to have had given them a revelation, that as it was created could
be felt but by an immortal spirit.
It elevates our being to be in the body near the sky--at once on earth
and in heaven. In the body? Yes--we feel at once fettered and free. In
Time we wear our fetters, and heavy though they be, and painfully
riveted on, seldom do we welcome Death coming to strike them off--but
groan at sight of the executioner. In eternity we believe that all is
spiritual--and in that belief, which doubt sometimes shakes but to prove
that its foundation lies rooted far down below all earthquakes,
endurable is the sound of dust to dust. Poets speak of the spirit, while
yet in the flesh, blending, mingling, being absorbed in the great forms
of the outward universe, and they speak as if such absorption were
celestial and divine. But is not this a material creed? Let Imagination
beware how she seeks to glorify the objects of the senses, and having
glorified them, to elevate them into a kindred being with our own,
exalting them that we may claim with them that kindred being, as if we
belonged to them and not they to us, forgetting that they are made to
perish, we to live for ever!
But let us descend the mountain by the side of this torrent. What a
splendid series of translucent pools! We carry "The Excursion" in our
pocket, for the use of our friends; but our own presentation-copy is
here--we have gotten it by heart. And it does our heart good to hear
ourselves recite. Listen, ye Naiads, to the famous picture of the Ram:--
"Thus having reach'd a bridge, that overarch'd
The hasty rivulet, where it lay becalm'd
In a deep pool, by happy chance we saw
A twofold image; on a grassy bank
A snow-white Ram, and in the crystal flood
Another and the same! Most beautiful
On the green turf, with his imperial front
Shaggy and bold, and wreathed horns superb,
The breathing creature stood; as beautiful
Beneath him, show'd his shadowy counterpart;
Each had his glowing mountains, each his sky,
And each seem'd centre of his own fair world.
Antipodes unconscious of each other,
Yet, in partition, with their several spheres
Blended in perfect stillness to our sight.
Ah! what a pity were it to disperse
Or to disturb so fair a spectacle,
And yet a breath can do it."
Oh! that the Solitary, and the Pedlar, and the Poet, and the Priest and
his Lady, were here to see a sight more glorious far than that
illustrious and visionary Ram. Two Christopher Norths--as Highland
chieftains--in the Royal Tartan--one burning in the air--the other in
the water--two stationary meteors, each seeming native to its own
element! This setting the heather, that the linn on fire--this ablaze
with war, that tempered into truce; while the Sun, astonied at the
spectacle, nor knowing the refulgent substance from the resplendent
shadow, bids the clouds lie still in heaven, and the winds all hold
their breath, that exulting nature may be permitted for a little while
to enjoy the miracle she unawares has wrought--alas! gone as she gazes,
and gone for ever! Our bonnet has tumbled into the Pool--and
Christopher--like the Ram in "The Excursion"--stands shorn of his
beams--no better worth looking at than the late Laird of Macnab.
Now, since the truth must be told, that was but a Flight of Fancy--and
our apparel is more like that of a Lowland Quaker than a Highland chief.
'Tis all of a snuffy brown--an excellent colour for hiding the dirt.
Single-breasted our coatee--and we are in shorts. Were our name to be
imposed by our hat, it would be Sir Cloudesly Shovel. On our back a
wallet--and in our hand the Crutch. And thus, not without occasional
alarm to the cattle, though we hurry no man's, we go stalking along the
sward and swimming across the stream, and leaping over the quagmires--by
no means unlike that extraordinary pedestrian who has been accompanying
us for the last half-hour, far overhead up-by yonder, as if he meant
mischief; but he will find that we are up to a trick or two, and not
easily to be done brown by a native, a Cockney of Cloud-Land, a
long-legged awkward fellow with a head like a dragon and proud of his
red plush, in that country called thunder-and-lightning breeches, hot
very, one would think, in such sultry weather--but confound us if he has
not this moment stript them off, and be not pursuing his journey _in
puris naturalibus_--yes, as naked as the minute he was born--our Shadow
on the Clouds!
The Picture of the Ram has been declared by sumphs in search of the
sublime to border on the Burlesque. They forget that a sumph may just as
truly be said to border on a sage. All things in heaven and on earth,
mediately and immediately, border on one another--much depends on the
way you look at them--and Poets, who are strange creatures, often love
to enjoy and display their power by bringing the burlesque into the
region of the sublime. Of what breed was the Tup? Cheviot, Leicester,
Southdown? Had he gained the Cup at the Great North Show? We believe
not, and that his owner saw in him simply a fine specimen of an ordinary
breed--a shapely and useful animal. In size he was not to be named on
the same day with the famous Ram of Derby, "whose tail was made a rope,
sir, to toll the market-bell." Jason would have thought nothing of him
compared with the Golden Fleece. The Sun sees a superior sire of flocks
as he enters Aries. Sorry are we to say it, but the truth must be
spoken, he was somewhat bandy-legged, and rather coarse in the wool. But
heaven, earth, air, and water conspired to glorify him, as the Poet and
his friends chanced to come upon him at the Pool, and, more than them
all united, the Poet's own soul; and a sheep that would not have sold
for fifty shillings, became Lord Paramount of two worlds, his regal mind
all the time unconscious of its empiry, and engrossed with the thought
of a few score silly ewes.
Seldom have we seen so serene a day. It seems to have lain in one and
the same spirit over all the Highlands. We have been wandering since
sunrise, and 'tis now near sunset; yet not an hour without a visible
heaven in all the Lochs. In the pure element overflowing so many
spacious vales and glens profound, the great and stern objects of
nature have all day long been looking more sublime or more beautiful in
the reflected shadows, invested with one universal peace. The momentary
evanescence of all that imagery at a breath touches us with the thought
that all it represents, steadfast as seems its endurance, will as
utterly pass away. Such visions, when gazed on in that wondrous depth
and purity on a still slow-moving day, always inspire some such feeling
as this; and we sigh to think how transitory must be all things, when
the setting sun is seen to sink behind the mountain, and all the golden
pomp at the same instant to evanish from the Loch.
Evening is preparing to let fall her shades--and Nature, cool, fresh,
and unwearied, is laying herself down for a few hours' sleep. There had
been a long strong summer drought, and a week ago you would have
pitied--absolutely pitied the poor Highlands. You missed the
cottage-girl with her pitcher at the well in the brae, for the spring
scarcely trickled, and the water-cresses were yellow before their time.
Many a dancing hill-stream was dead--only here and there one stronger
than her sisters attempted a _pas-seul_ over the shelving rocks; but all
choral movements and melodies forsook the mountains, still and silent as
so much painted canvass. Waterfalls first tamed their thunder, then
listened alarmed to their own echoes, wailed themselves away into
diminutive murmurs, gasped for life, died, and were buried at the feet
of the green slippery precipices. Tarns sank into moors; and there was
the voice of weeping heard and low lament among the water-lilies. Ay,
millions of pretty flowerets died in their infancy, even on their
mother's breast; the bee fainted in the desert for want of the
honey-dew, and the ground-cells of industry were hushed below the
heather. Cattle lay lean on the brownness of a hundred hills, and the
hoof of the red-deer lost its fleetness. Along the shores of lochs great
stones appeared, within what for centuries had been the lowest
water-mark; and whole bays, once bright and beautiful with reed-pointed
wavelets, became swamps, cracked and seamed, or rustling in the aridity
with a useless crop, to the sugh of the passing wind. On the shore of
the sea alone you beheld no change. The tides ebbed and flowed as
before--the small billows racing over the silver sands to the same goal
of shells, or climbing up to the same wildflowers that bathe the
foundation of some old castle belonging to the ocean.
But the windows of heaven were opened,--and, like giants refreshed with
mountain-dew, the rivers flung themselves over the cliffs with roars of
thunder. The autumnal woods are fresher than those of summer. The mild
harvest-moon will yet repair the evil done by the outrageous sun; and,
in the gracious after-growth, the green earth far and wide rejoices as
in spring. Like people that have hidden themselves in caves when their
native land was oppressed, out gush the torrents, and descend with songs
to the plain. The hill-country is itself again when it hears the voice
of streams. Magnificent army of mists! whose array encompasses islands
of the sea, and who still, as thy glorious vanguard keeps deploying
among the glens, rollest on in silence more sublime than the trampling
of the feet of horses, or the sound of the wheels of chariots, to the
heath-covered mountains of Scotland, we bid thee hail!
In all our wanderings through the Highlands, towards night we have
always found ourselves at home. What though no human dwelling was at
hand? We cared not--for we could find a bedroom among the casual
inclinations of rocks, and of all curtains the wild-brier forms itself
into the most gracefully-festooned draperies, letting in green light
alone from the intercepted stars. Many a cave we know of--cool by day,
and warm by night--how they happen to be so, we cannot tell--where no
man but ourselves ever slept, or ever will sleep; and sometimes, on
startling a doe at evening in a thicket, we have lain down in her lair,
and in our slumbers heard the rain pattering on the roofing birk-tree,
but felt not one drop on our face, till at dawning we struck a shower of
diamonds from the fragrant tresses. But to-night we shall not need to
sleep among the sylvans; for our Tail has pitched our Tent on the
Moor--and is now sweeping the mountain with telescope for sight of our
descending feet. Hark! signal-gun and bagpipe hail our advent, and the
Pyramid brightens in its joy, independent of the sunlight, that has left
but one streak in the sky.
THE MOORS.
FLIGHT FIRST.--GLEN-ETIVE.
Yes! all we have to do is to let down their lids--to will what our eyes
shall see--and, lo! there it is--a creation! Day dawns, and for our
delight in soft illumination from the dim obscure floats slowly up a
visionary loch--island after island evolving itself into settled
stateliness above its trembling shadow, till, from the overpowering
beauty of the wide confusion of woods and waters, we seek relief, but
find none, in gazing on the sky; for the east is in all the glory of
sunrise, and the heads and the names of the mountains are uncertain
among the gorgeous colouring of the clouds. Would that we were a
painter! Oh! how we should dash, on the day and interlace it with night!
That chasm should be filled with enduring gloom, thicker and thicker,
nor the sun himself suffered to assuage the sullen spirit, now lowering
and threatening there, as if portentous of earthquake. Danger and fear
should be made to hang together for ever on those cliffs, and half-way
up the precipice be fixed the restless cloud ascending from the abyss,
so that in imagination you could not choose but hear the cataract. The
Shadows should seem to be stalking away like evil spirits before angels
of light--for at our bidding the Splendours should prevail against them,
deploying from the gates of Heaven beneath the banners of morn. Yet the
whole picture should be harmonious as a hymn--as a hymn at once sublime
and sweet--serene and solemn; nor should it not be felt as even
cheerful--and sometimes as if there were about to be merriment in
Nature's heart--for the multitude of the isles should rejoice--and the
new-woke waters look as if they were waiting for the breezes to enliven
them into waves, and wearied of rest to be longing for the motion
already beginning to rustle by fits along the sylvan shores. Perhaps a
deer or two--but we have opened a corner of the fringed curtains of our
eyes--the idea is gone--and Turner or Thomson must transfer from our
paper to his canvass the imperfect outline--for it is no more--and make
us a present of the finished picture.
Strange that, with all our love of nature and of art, we never were a
Painter. True that in boyhood we were no contemptible hand at a Lion or
a Tiger--and sketches by us of such cats springing or preparing to
spring in keelivine, dashed off some fifty or sixty years ago, might
well make Edwin Landseer stare. Even yet we are a sort of Salvator Rosa
at a savage scene, and our black-lead pencil heaps up confused
shatterings of rocks, and flings a mountainous region into convulsions,
as if an earthquake heaved, _in a way that is no canny_, making people
shudder as if something had gone wrong with this planet of ours, and
creation were falling back into chaos. But we love scenes of beautiful
repose too profoundly ever to dream of "transferring them to canvass."
Such employment would be felt by us to be desecration--though we look
with delight on the work when done by others--the picture without the
process--the product of genius without thought of its mortal
instruments. We work in words, and words are, in good truth, images,
feelings, thoughts; and of these the outer world, as well as the inner,
is composed, let materialists say what they will. Prose is poetry--we
have proved _that_ to the satisfaction of all mankind. Look! we beseech
you--how a little Loch seems to rise up with its tall heronry--a central
isle--and all its sylvan braes, till it lies almost on a level with the
floor of our Cave, from which in three minutes we could hobble on our
crutch down the inclining greensward to the Bay of Waterlilies, and in
that canoe be afloat among the Swans. All birches--not any other kind of
tree--except a few pines, on whose tops the large nests repose--and here
and there a still bird standing as if asleep. What a place for Roes!
The great masters, were their eyes to fall on our idle words, might
haply smile--not contemptuously--on our ignorance of art--but graciously
on our knowledge of nature. All we have to do, then, is to learn the
theory and practice of art--and assuredly we should forthwith set about
doing so, had we any reasonable prospect of living long enough to open
an exhibition of pictures from our own easel. As it is, we must be
contented with that Gallery, richer than the Louvre, which our
imagination has furnished with masterpieces beyond all price or
purchase--many of them touched with her own golden finger, the rest the
work of high but not superior hands. Imagination, who limns in air, has
none of those difficulties to contend with that always beset, and often
baffle, artists in oils or waters. At a breath she can modify, alter,
obliterate, or restore; at a breath she can colour vacuity with rainbow
hues--crown the cliff with its castle--swing the drawbridge over the
gulf profound--through a night of woods roll the river along on its
moonlit reach--by fragmentary cinctures of mist and cloud, so girdle one
mountain that it has the power of a hundred--giant rising above giant,
far and wide, as if the mighty multitude, in magnificent and triumphant
disorder, were indeed scaling heaven.
To speak more prosaically, every true and accepted lover of nature
regards her with a painter's as well as a poet's eye. He breaks not down
any scene rudely, and with "many an oft-repeated stroke;" but
unconsciously and insensibly he transfigures into Wholes, and all day
long, from morn till dewy eve, he is preceded, as he walks along, by
landscapes retiring in their perfection, one and all of them the birth
of his own inspired spirit. All non-essentials do of themselves drop off
and disappear--all the characteristics of the scenery range themselves
round a centre recognised by the inner sense that cannot err--and thus
it is that "beauty pitches her tents before him"--that sublimity
companions the pilgrim in the waste wilderness--and grandeur for his
sake keeps slowly sailing or settling in the clouds. With such pictures
has our Gallery been so thickly hung round for many years, that we have
often thought there was not room for one other single frame; yet a
vacant space has always been found for every new _chef-d'oeuvre_ that
came to add itself to our collection--and the light from that cupola so
distributes itself that it falls wherever it is wanted--wherever it is
wanted not how tender the shadow! or how solemn the gloom!
Why, we are now in Glen-Etive--and sitting with our sketch-book at the
mouth of our Tent. Our oft-repeated passionate prayer,
"O, for a lodge in some vast wilderness!"
has once more, after more than twenty years' absence, in this haunt of
our fanciful youth and imaginative manhood, been granted, and
Christopher, he thinks, could again bound along these cliffs like a
deer. Ay, well-nigh quarter of a century has elapsed since we pitched
this self-same snow-white Tent amid the purple heather, by the Linn of
Dee. How fleetly goes winnowing on the air even the weariest waving of
Time's care-laden wings! A few yellow weather-stains are on the
canvass--but the pole is yet sound--or call it rather mast--for we have
hoisted our topgallant,
"And lo! the silver cross, to Scotland dear,"
languidly lifts itself up, an ineffectual streamer, in the fitful
morning breezes!
Bold son, or bright daughter of England! hast thou ever seen a SCOTTISH
THRISSLE? What height are you--Captain of the Grenadier Guards? "Six
feet four on my stocking-soles." Poo--a dwarf! Stand up with your back
to that stalk. Tour head does not reach above his waist--he hangs high
over you--"his radious croun of rubies." There's a Flower! dear to Lady
Nature above all others, saving and excepting the Rose, and he is the
Rose's husband--the Guardian Genii of the land consecrated the Union,
and it has been blest. Eyeing the sun like an angry star that will not
suffer eclipse either from light or shadow--but burns proudly--fiercely--in
its native lustre--storm-brightened, and undishevelled by the tempest in
which it swings. See! it stoops beneath the blast within reach of your
hand. Grasp it ere it recoil aloft; and your hand will be as if it had
crushed a sleeping wasp-swarm. But you cannot crush it--to do that would
require a giant with an iron glove. Then let it alone to dally with the
wind, and the sun, and the rain, and the snow--all alike dear to its
spears and rubies; and as you look at the armed lustre, you will see a
beautiful emblem and a stately of a people's warlike peace. The stalk
indeed is slender, but it sways without danger of breaking in the blast;
in the calm it reposes as gently as the gowan at its root. The softest
leaf that enfolds in silk the sweetest flower of the garden, not greener
than those that sting not if but tenderly you touch them, for they are
green as the garments of the Fairies that dance by moonlight round the
Symbol of old Scotland, and unchristened creatures though they the
Fairies be, they pray heaven to let fall on the AWFUL THRISSLE all the
health and happiness that are in the wholesome stars.