though here the edge of his disc as yet be invisible, is diffusing
abroad "the sweet hour of prime," and all the eastern region is tinged
with crimson, faint and fine as that which sleeps within the wreaths of
the sea-sounding shells. Hark! the eagle's earliest cry, yet in his
eyrie. Another hour, and he and his giant mate will be seen spirally
ascending the skies, in many a glorious gyration, tutoring their
offspring to dally with the sunshine, that, when their plumes are
stronger, they may dally with the storm. O, Forest of Dalness! how sweet
is thy name! Hundreds of red-deer are now lying half-asleep among the
fern and heather, with their antlers, could our eyes now behold them,
motionless as the birch-tree branches with which they are blended in
their lair. At the signal-belling of their king, a hero unconquered in a
hundred fights, the whole herd rises at once like a grove, and with
their stately heads lifted aloft on the weather-gleam, snuff the sweet
scent of the morning air, far and wide surcharged with the honey-dew yet
unmelting on the heather, and eye with the looks of liberty the glad
daylight that mantles the Black Mount with a many-coloured garment. Ha!
the first plunge of the salmon in the Rowan-tree Pool. There again he
shoots into the air, white as silver, fresh run from the sea! For
Loch-Etive, you must know, is one of the many million arms of Ocean, and
bright now are rolling in the billows of the far-heaving tide. Music
meet for such a morn and such mountains. Straight stretches the glen for
leagues, and then, bending through the blue gloom, seems to wind away
with one sweep into infinitude. The Great Glen of Scotland--Glen-More
itself--is not grander. But the Great Glen of Scotland is yet a living
forest. Glen-Etive has few woods or none--and the want of them is
sublime. For centuries ago pines and oaks in the course of nature all
perished; and they exist now but in tradition wavering on the tongues of
old bards, or deep down in the mosses show their black trunks to the
light, when the torrents join the river in spate, and the moor divulges
its secrets as in an earthquake. Sweetly sung, thou small, brown,
moorland bird, though thy song be but a twitter! And true to thy
time--even to a balmy minute--art thou, with thy velvet tunic of black
striped with yellow, as thou windest thy small but not sullen horn--by
us called in our pride HUMBLE-BEE--but not, methinks, so very humble,
while booming high in air in oft-repeated circles, wondering at our
Tent, and at the flag that now unfolds its gaudy length like a burnished
serpent, as if the smell of some far-off darling heather-bed had touched
thy finest instinct, away thou fliest straight southward to that rich
flower-store, unerringly as the carrier-pigeon wafting to distant lands
some love-message on its wings. Yet humble after all thou art; for all
day long, making thy industry thy delight, thou returnest at shut of
day, cheerful even in thy weariness, to thy ground-cell within the
knoll, where as Fancy dreams the Fairies dwell--a Silent People in the
Land of Peace.
And why hast thou, wild singing spirit of the Highland Glenorchy, that
cheerest the long-withdrawing vale from Inveruren to Dalmally, and from
Dalmally Church-tower to the Old Castle of Kilchurn, round whose
mouldering turrets thou sweepest with more pensive murmur, till thy name
and existence are lost in that noble loch--why hast thou never had thy
Bard? "A hundred bards have I had in bygone ages," is thy reply; "but
the Sassenach understands not the traditionary strains, and the music of
the Gaelic poetry is wasted on his ear." Songs of war and of love are
yet awakened by the shepherds among these lonely braes; and often when
the moon rises over Ben-Cruachan, and counts her attendant stars in soft
reflection beneath the still waters of that long inland sea, she hears
the echoes of harps chiming through the silence of departed years.
Tradition tells, that on no other banks did the fairies so love to
thread the mazes of their mystic dance, as on the heathy, and brackeny,
and oaken banks of the Orchy, during the long summer nights when the
thick-falling dews perceptibly swelled the stream, and lent a livelier
music to every waterfall.
There it was, on a little river-island, that once, whether sleeping or
waking we know not, we saw celebrated a Fairy's Funeral. First we heard
small pipes playing, as if no bigger than hollow rushes that whisper to
the night winds; and more piteous than aught that trills from earthly
instrument was the scarce audible dirge! It seemed to float over the
stream, every foam-bell emitting a plaintive note, till the airy anthem
came floating over our couch, and then alighted without footsteps among
the heather. The pattering of little feet was then heard, as if living
creatures were arranging themselves in order, and then there was nothing
but a more ordered hymn. The harmony was like the melting of musical
dewdrops, and sang, without words, of sorrow and death. We opened our
eyes, or rather sight came to them when closed, and dream was vision!
Hundreds of creatures, no taller than the crest of the lapwing, and all
hanging down their veiled heads, stood in a circle on a green plat among
the rocks; and in the midst was a bier, framed as it seemed of flowers
unknown to the Highland hills; and on the bier, a Fairy, lying with
uncovered face, pale as the lily, and motionless as the snow. The dirge
grew fainter and fainter, and then died quite away; when two of the
creatures came from the circle, and took their station, one at the head
and the other at the foot of the bier. They sang alternate measures, not
louder than the twittering of the awakened wood-lark before it goes up
the dewy air, but dolorous and full of the desolation of death. The
flower-bier stirred; for the spot on which it lay sank slowly down, and
in a few moments the greensward was smooth as ever--the very dews
glittering above the buried Fairy. A cloud passed over the moon; and,
with a choral lament, the funeral troop sailed duskily away, heard afar
off, so still was the midnight solitude of the glen. Then the
disenthralled Orohy began to rejoice as before, through all her streams
and falls; and at the sudden leaping of the waters and outbursting of
the moon, we awoke.
Age is the season of Imagination, youth of Passion; and having been long
young, shall we repine that we are now old? They alone are rich who are
full of years--the Lords of Time's Treasury are all on the staff of
Wisdom; their commissions are enclosed in furrows on their foreheads,
and secured to them for life. Fearless of fate, and far above fortune,
they hold their heritage by the great charter of nature for behoof of
all her children who have not, like impatient heirs, to wait for their
decease; for every hour dispenses their wealth, and their bounty is not
a late bequest, but a perpetual benefaction. Death but sanctifies their
gifts to gratitude; and their worth is more clearly seen and profoundly
felt within the solemn gloom of the grave.
And said we truly that Age is the season of Imagination? That Youth is
the season of Passion your own beating and bounding hearts now tell
you--your own boiling blood. Intensity is its characteristic; and it
burns like a flame of fire, too often but to consume. Expansion of the
soul is ours, with all its feelings and all its "thoughts, that wander
through eternity;" nor needeth then the spirit to have wings, for power
is given her, beyond the dove's or the eagle's, and no weariness can
touch her on that heavenward flight.
Yet we are all of "the earth earthy," and, young and old alike, must we
love and honour our home. Your eyes are bright--ours are dim; but "it is
the soul that sees," and "this diurnal sphere" is visible through the
mist of tears. In that light how more than beautiful--how holy--appears
even this world! All sadness, save of sin, is then most sacred; and sin
itself loses its terrors in repentance, which, alas! is seldom perfect
but in the near prospect of dissolution. For temptation may intercept
her within a few feet of her expected rest, nay, dash the dust from her
hand that she has gathered from the burial-place to strew on her head;
but Youth sees flowery fields and shining rivers far-stretching before
her path, and cannot imagine for a moment that among life's golden
mountains there is many a Place of Tombs!
But let us speak only of this earth--this world--this life--and is not
Age the season of Imagination? Imagination is Memory imbued by joy or
sorrow with creative power over the past, till it becomes the present,
and then, on that vision "far off the coming shines" of the future, till
all the spiritual realm overflows with light. Therefore was it that, in
illumined Greece, Memory was called the Mother of the Muses; and how
divinely indeed they sang around her as she lay in the pensive shade!
You know the words of Milton--
"Till old experience doth attain
To something like prophetic strain;"
and you know, while reading them, that Experience is consummate Memory,
Imagination wide as the world, another name for Wisdom, all one with
Genius, and in its "prophetic strain"--Inspiration.
We would fain lower our tone--and on this theme speak like what we are,
one of the humblest children of Mother Earth. We cannot leap now
twenty-three feet on level ground (our utmost might be twenty-three
inches), nevertheless we could "put a girdle round the globe in forty
minutes,"--ay, in half an hour, were we not unwilling to dispirit Ariel.
What are feats done in the flesh and by the muscle? At first, worms
though we be, we cannot even crawl;--disdainful next of that
acquirement, we creep, and are distanced by the earwig;--pretty lambs,
we then totter to the terror of our deep-bosomed dames--till the welkin
rings with admiration to behold, _sans_ leading-strings, the weanlings
walk;--like wildfire then we run, for we have found the use of our
feet;--like wild-geese then we fly, for we may not doubt we have
wings;--in car, ship, balloon, the lords of earth, sea, and sky, and
universal nature. The car runs on a post--the ship on a rock--the "air
hath bubbles as the water hath"--the balloon is one of them, and bursts
like a bladder--and we become the prey of sharks, surgeons, or sextons.
Where, pray, in all this is there a single symptom or particle of
Imagination? It is of Passion "all compact."
True, this is not a finished picture--'tis but a slight sketch of the
season of Youth; but paint it as you will, and if faithful to nature you
will find Passion in plenty, and a dearth of Imagination. Nor is the
season of Youth therefore to be pitied--for Passion respires and expires
in bliss ineffable, and so far from being eloquent as the unwise
lecture, it is mute as a fish, and merely gasps. In Youth we are the
creatures, the slaves of the senses. But the bondage is borne exultingly
in spite of its severity; for ere long we come to discern through the
dust of our own raising, the pinnacles of towers and temples serenely
ascending into the skies, high and holy places for rule, for rest, or
for religion, where as kings we may reign, as priests minister, as
saints adore.
We do not deny, excellent youth, that to your eyes and ears beautiful
and sublime are the sights and sounds of Nature--and of Art her Angel.
Enjoy thy pupilage, as we enjoyed ours, and deliver thyself up withouten
dread, or with a holy dread, to the gloom of woods, where night for ever
dwells--to the glory of skies, where morn seems enthroned for ever.
Coming and going a thousand and a thousand times, yet, in its familiar
beauty, ever new as a dream--let thy soul span the heavens with the
rainbow. Ask thy heart in the wilderness if that "thunder, heard
remote," be from cloud or cataract; and ere it can reply, it may shudder
at the shuddering moor, and your flesh creep upon your bones, as the
heather seems to creep on the bent, with the awe of a passing
earthquake. Let the sea-mew be thy guide up the glen, if thy delight be
in peace profounder than ever sat with her on the lull of summer waves!
For the inland loch seems but a vale overflowing with wondrous
light--and realities they all look, these trees and pastures, and rocks
and hills, and clouds--not softened images, as they are, of realities
that are almost stern even in their beauty, and in their sublimity
over-awing; look at yon precipice that dwindles into pebbles the granite
blocks that choke up the shore!
Now all this, and a million times more than all this, have we too done
in our Youth, and yet 'tis all nothing to what we do whenever we will it
in our Age. For almost all _that_ is passion; spiritual passion
indeed--and as all emotions are akin, they all work with, and into one
another's hands, and, however remotely related, recognise and welcome
one another, like Highland cousins, whenever they meet. Imagination is
not the Faculty to stand aloof from the rest, but gives the one hand to
Fancy and the other to Feeling, and _sets_ to Passion, who is often so
swallowed up in himself as to seem blind to their _vis-a-vis_, till all
at once he hugs all the Three, as if he were demented, and as suddenly
sporting _dos-a-dos_--is off on a gallopade by himself right slick away
over the mountain-tops.
To the senses of a schoolboy a green sour crab is as a golden pippin,
more delicious than any pine-apple--the tree which he climbs to pluck it
seems to grow in the garden of Eden--and the parish, moorland though it
be, over which he is let loose to play--Paradise. It is barely possible
there may be such a substance as matter, but all its qualities worth
having are given it by mind. By a necessity of nature, then, we are all
poets. We all make the food we feed on; nor is jealousy, the green-eyed
monster, the only wretch who discolours and deforms. Every evil thought
does so--every good thought gives fresh lustre to the grass--to the
flowers--to the stars. And as the faculties of sense, after becoming
finer and more fine, do then, because that they are earthly, gradually
lose their power, the faculties of the soul, because that they are
heavenly, become then more and more and more independent of such
ministrations, and continue to deal with images, and with ideas which
are diviner than images, nor care for either partial or total eclipse of
the daylight, conversant as they are, and familiar with a more
resplendent--a spiritual universe.
You still look incredulous and unconvinced of the truth of our
position--but it was established in our first three paragraphs; and the
rest, though proofs too, are intended merely for illustrations. Age
alone understands the language of old Mother Earth--for Age alone, from
his own experience, can imagine its meanings in trouble or in
rest--often mysterious enough even to him in all conscience--but
intelligible though inarticulate--nor always inarticulate; for though
sobs and sighs are rife, and whispers and murmurs, and groans and
gurgling, yea, sometimes yells and cries, as if the old Earth were
undergoing a violent death--yet many a time and oft, within these few
years, have we heard her slowly syllabling words out of the Bible, and
as in listening we looked up to the sky, the fixed stars responded to
their truth, and, like Mercy visiting Despair, the Moon bore it into the
heart of the stormy clouds.
And are there not now--have there never been young Poets? Many; for
Passion, so tossed as to leave, perhaps to give, the sufferer power to
reflect on his ecstasy, grows poetical because creative, and loves to
express itself in "Prose or numerous verse," at once its nutriment and
relief. Nay, Nature sometimes gifts her children with an imaginative
spirit, that, from slight experiences of passion, rejoices to idealise
intentions, and incidents, and characters all coloured by it, or subject
to its sway; and these are Poets, not with old heads on young shoulders,
but with old hearts in young bosoms; yet such premature genius seldom
escapes blight, the very springs of life are troubled, and its possessor
sinks, pines, fades, and dies. So was it with Chatterton and Keats.
It may be, after all, that we have only proved Age to be the strongest
season of Imagination; and if so, we have proved all we wish, for we
seek not to deny, but to vindicate. Knowledge is power to the poet as
it is power to all men--and indeed without Art and Science what is
Poetry? Without cultivation the faculty divine can have but imperfect
vision. The inner eye is dependent on the outward eye long familiar with
material objects--a finer sense, cognisant of spiritualities, but
acquired by the soul from constant communion with shadows--innate the
capacity, but awakened into power by gracious intercourse with Nature.
Thus Milton _saw_--after he became blind.
But know that Age is not made up of a multitude of years--though that be
the vulgar reckoning--but of a multitude of experiences; and that a man
at thirty, if good for much, must be old. How long he may continue in
the prime of Age, God decrees; many men of the most magnificent
minds--for example, Michael Angelo--have been all-glorious in power and
majesty at fourscore and upwards; but one drop of water on the brain can
at any hour make it barren as desert dust. So can great griefs.
Yestreen we had rather a hard bout of it in the Tent--the Glenlivet was
pithy--and our Tail sustained a total overthrow. They are snoring as if
it still were midnight. And is it thus that we sportsmen spend our time
on the Moors? Yet while "so many of our poorest subjects are yet
asleep," let us re-point the nib of our pen, and in the eye of the
sweet-breathed morning--moralise.
Well-nigh quarter a century, we said, is over and gone since by the Linn
of Dee we pitched--on that famous excursion--THE TENT. Then was the
genesis of that white witch Maga--
"Like some tall Palm her noiseless fabric grew!"
Nay, not noiseless--for the deafest wight that ever strove to hear with
his mouth wide open, might have sworn that he heard the sound of ten
thousand hammers. Neither grew she like a Palm--but like a Banyan-tree.
Ever as she threw forth branches from her great unexhausted stem, they
were borne down by the weight of their own beauty to the soil--the deep,
black rich soil in which she grew, originally sown there by a bird of
Paradise, that dropt the seed from her beak as she sailed along in the
sunshiny ether--and every limberest spray there again taking root,
reascended a stately scion, and so on ceaselessly through all the hours,
each in itself a spring-season, till the figurative words of Milton
have been fulfilled,--
--"Her arms
Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade
High overarch'd, and echoing walks between;
There oft the Ettrick Shepherd, shunning heat,
Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
At loopholes cut through thickest shade."
But, alas! for the Odontist! He, the "_Deliciae generis Humani_," is
dead. The best of all the Bishops of Bristol is no more. Mansel had not
a tithe of his wit--nor Kaye a tithe of his wisdom. And can it be that
we have not yet edited "His Remains!" "Alas! poor Yorick!" If Hamlet
could smile even with the skull of the Jester in his hands, whom when a
princely boy he had loved, hanging on his neck many a thousand times,
why may not we, in our mind's eye seeing that mirthful face "quite
chap-fallen," and hearing as if dismally deadened by the dust, the voice
that "so often set our table on a roar!" Dr Parr's wig, too, is all out
of frizzle; a heavier shot has dishevelled its horsehair than ever was
sent from the Shepherd's gun; no more shall it be mistaken for owl
a-blink on the mid-day bough, or ptarmigan basking in the sun high up
among the regions of the snow. It has vanished, with other lost things,
to the Moon; and its image alone remains for the next edition of the
celebrated treatise "_De Rebus Deperditis_," a suitable and a welcome
frontispiece, transferred thither by the engraver's cunning from the
first of those Eight Tomes that might make the Trone tremble, laid on
the shoulders of Atlas who threatens to put down the Globe, by the least
judicious and the most unmerciful of editors that ever imposed upon the
light living the heavy dead--John Johnson, late of Birmingham, Fellow of
the Royal Society, and of the Royal College of Physicians, whose
practice is duller than that of all Death's doctors, and his
prescriptions in that preface unchristianly severe. ODoherty, likewise,
has been gathered to his fathers. The Standard-bearer has lowered his
colours before the foe who alone is invincible. The Ensign, let us not
fear, has been advanced to a company without purchase, in the
Celestials; the Adjutant has got a Staff appointment. Tims was lately
rumoured to be in a galloping consumption; but the very terms of the
report, about one so sedentary, were sufficient to give it the lie.
Though puny, he is far from being unwell; and still engaged in polishing
tea-spoons and other plated articles, at a rate cheaper than travelling
gypsies do horn. Prince Leopold is now King of the Belgians--but we must
put an end in the Tent to that portentous snore.
"Arise, awake, or be for ever fallen!"
Ho--ho! gentlemen--so you have had the precaution to sleep in your
clothes. The sun, like Maga, is mounting higher and higher in heaven; so
let us, we beseech you, to breakfast, and then off to the Moors.
"Substantial breakfast!" by Dugald Dhu, and by Donald Roy, and by Hamish
Bhan--heaped up like icebergs round the pole. How nobly stands in the
centre that ten-gallon Cask of Glenlivet! Proud is that Round to court
his shade. That twenty-pound Salmon lies beneath it even as yesterday he
lay beneath the cliff, while a column of light falls from him on that
Grouse-Pie. Is not that Ham beautiful in the calm consciousness of his
protection? That Tongue mutely eloquent in his praise? Tap him with your
knuckles, tenderly as if you loved him--and that with all your heart and
soul you do--and is not the response firm as from the trunk of the
gnarled oak? He is yet "Virgin of Proserpina"--"by Jove" he is; no
wanton lip has ever touched his mouth so chaste; so knock out the bung,
and let us hear him gurgle. With diviner music does he fill the pitcher,
and with a diviner liquidity of light than did ever Naiad from fount of
Helicon or Castaly, pour into classic urn gracefully uplifted by Grecian
damsel to her graceful head, and borne away, with a thanksgiving hymn,
to her bower in the olive-grove.
All eggs are good eating; and 'tis a vulgar heresy which holds that
those laid by sea-fowl have a fishy taste. The egg of the Sew-mew is
exceeding sweet; so is that of the Gull. Pleasant is even the yolk of
the Cormorant--in the north of England ycleped the Scarth, and in the
Lowlands of Scotland the Black Byuter. Try a Black Byuter's egg, my dear
boy; for though not newly laid, it has since May been preserved in
butter, and is as fresh as a daisy after a shower. Do not be afraid of
stumbling on a brace of embryo Black Byuters in the interior of the
globe, for by its weight we pronounce it an egg in no peril of
parturition. You may now smack your lips, loud as if you were smacking
your palms, for that yellow morsel was unknown to Vitellius. Don't crush
the shell, but throw it into the Etive, that the Fairies may find it at
night, and go dancing in the fragile but buoyant canoe, in fits of small
shrill laughter, along with the foam-bells over the ebb-tide Rapids
above Connal's raging Ferry.
The salmon is in shivers, and the grouse-pie has vanished like a dream.
"So fades, so languishes, grows dim, and dies,
All that this world is proud of!"
Only a goose remains! and would that he too were gone to return no more;
for he makes us an old man. No tradition survives in the Glen of the era
at which he first flourished. He seems to have belonged to some tribe of
the Anseres now extinct; and as for his own single individual self, our
senses tell us, in a language not to be misinterpreted, that he must
have become defunct in the darkness of antiquity. But nothing can be too
old for a devil--so at supper let us rectify him in Cayenne.
Oh! for David Wilkie, or William Simpson (while we send Gibb to bring
away yonder Shieling and its cliff), to paint a picture--coloured, if
possible, from the life--of the Interior of our airy Pyramid. Door open,
and perpendicular canvass walls folded up--that settled but cloudy sky,
with here its broad blue fields, and there its broad blue glimpsing
glades--this greensward mound in the midst of a wilderness of
rock-strewn heather--as much of that one mountain, and as many of those
others, as it can be made to hold--that bright bend of the river--a
silver bow--and that white-sanded, shelly, shingly shore at Loch-Etive
Head, on which a troop of Tritons are "charging with all their
chivalry," still driven back and still returning, to the sound of
trumpets, of "flutes and soft recorders," from the sea. On the table,
all strewn and scattered "in confusion worse confounded," round the
Cask, which
--"dilated stands
Like Teneriffe or Atlas _unremoved_,"
what "buttery touches" might be given to the
--"reliquias Danaum atque inmitis Achillei!"
Then the camp-beds tidily covered and arranged along their own
department of the circle--quaint dresses hanging from loops, all the
various apparelling of hunter, shooter, fisher, and forester--rods,
baskets, and nets occupying their picturesque division--fowling-pieces,
double and single, rejoicing through the oil-smooth brownness of their
barrels in the exquisite workmanship of a Manton and a Lancaster--American
rifles, with their stocks more richly silver-chased than you could have
thought within reach of the arts in that young and prosperous
land--duck-guns, whose formidable and fatal length had in Lincolnshire
often swept the fens--and on each side of the door, a brass carronade on
idle hours to awaken the echoes--sitting erect on their hurdies,
deer-hound, greyhound, lurcher, pointer, setter, spaniel, varmint, and
though last, not least, O'Bronte watching Christopher with his steadfast
eyes, slightly raised his large hanging triangular ears, his Thessalian
bull dewlaps betokening keen anxiety to be off and away to the mountain,
and with a full view of the white star on his coal-black breast;--
"Plaided and plumed in their tartan array"