Reel-music for ever! Ten fathom are run out already--and see how she
shoots, Hamish;--such a somerset as that was never thrown from a
spring-board. Just the size for strength and agility--twenty pound to an
ounce--jimp weight, Hamish--ha! Harlequin art thou--or Columbine?
Assuredly neither Clown nor Pantaloon. Now we have turned her ladyship's
nose up the stream, her lungs, if she have any, must be beginning to
labour, and we almost hear her snore. What! in the sulks already--sullen
among the stones. But we shall make you mudge, madam, were we to tear
the very tongue out of your mouth. Ay, once more down the middle to the
tune of that spirited country-dance--"Off she goes!" Set corners, and
reel! The gaff, Hamish--the gaff! and the landing-net! For here is a
shallow of the silver sand, spreading into the bay of a ford--and ere
she recovers from her astonishment, here will we land her--with a strong
pull, a long pull, and a pull altogether--just on the edge of the
greensward--and then smite her on the shoulder, Hamish--and, to make
assurance doubly sure, the net under her tail, and hoist her aloft in
the sunshine, a glorious prize, dazzling the daylight, and giving a
brighter verdure to the woods.
He who takes two hours to kill a fish--be its bulk what it may--is no
man, and is not worth his meat, nor the vital air. The proportion is a
minute to the pound. This rule were we taught by the "Best at Most"
among British sportsmen--Scrope the Matchless on moor, mountain, river,
loch, or sea; and with exquisite nicety have we now carried it into
practice. Away with your useless steelyards. Let us feel her teeth with
our forefinger, and then held out at arm's length--so--we know by
feeling, that she is, as we said soon as we saw her side, a
twenty-pounder to a drachm, and we have been true to time, within two
seconds. She has literally no head; but her snout is in her shoulders.
That is the beauty of a fish--high and round shoulders, short-waisted,
no loins, but all body, and not long of terminating--the shorter still
the better--in a tail sharp and pointed as Diana's, when she is crescent
in the sky.
And lo, and behold! there is Diana--but not crescent--for round and
broad is she as the sun himself--shining in the south, with as yet a
needless light--for daylight has not gone down in the west--and we can
hardly call it gloaming. Chaste and cold though she seem, a nunlike
luminary who has just taken the veil--a transparent veil of fine fleecy
clouds--yet, alas! is she frail as of old, when she descended on the top
of Latmos, to hold dalliance with Endymion. She has absolutely the
appearance of being in the family way--and not far from her time. Lo!
two of her children stealing from ether towards her feet. One on her
right hand, and another on her left--the fairest daughters that ever
charmed mother's heart--and in heaven called stars. What a celestial
trio the three form in the sky! The face of the moon keeps brightening
as the lesser two twinkle into darker lustre; and now, though day is
still lingering, we feel that it is Night. When the one comes and when
the other goes, what eye can note, what tongue can tell--but what heart
feels not in the dewy hush divine--as the power of the beauty of earth
decays over us, and a still dream descends upon us in the power of the
beauty of heaven!
But hark! the regular twang and dip of oars coming up the river--and lo!
indistinct in the distance, something moving through the moonshine--and
now taking the likeness of a boat--a barge--with bonneted heads leaning
back at every flashing stroke--and, Hamish, list! a choral song in thine
own dear native tongue! Sent hither by the Queen of the sea-fairies to
bear back in state Christopher North to the Tent? No. 'Tis the big coble
belonging to the tacksman of the Awe--and the crew are going to pull her
through the first few hours of the night--along with the flowing
tide--up to Kinloch-Etive, to try a cast with their long net at the
mouth of the river, now winding dim like a snake from King's House
beneath the Black Mount, and along the bays at the head of the Loch. A
rumour that we were on the river had reached them--and see an awning of
tartan over the stern, beneath which, as we sit, the sun may not smite
our head by day, nor the moon by night. We embark--and descending the
river like a dream, rapidly but stilly, and kept in the middle of the
current by cunning helmsman, without aid of idle oar, all six suspended,
we drop along through the sylvan scenery, gliding serenely away back
into the mountain-gloom, and enter into the wider moonshine trembling on
the wavy verdure of the foam-crested sea. May this be Loch-Etive?
Yea--verily; but so broad here is its bosom, and so far spreads the
billowy brightness, that we might almost believe that our bark was
bounding over the ocean, and marching merrily on the main. Are we--into
such a dream might fancy for a moment half beguile herself--rowing back,
after a day among the savage islanders, to our ship lying at anchor in
the offing, on a voyage of discovery round the world?
Where are all the dogs? Ponto, Piro, Basta, trembling partly with cold,
partly with hunger, partly with fatigue, and partly with fear, among and
below the seats of the rowers--with their noses somewhat uncomfortably
laid between their fore-paws on the tarry timbers; but O'Bronte boldly
sitting at our side, and wistfully eyeing the green swell as it heaves
beautifully by, ready at the slightest signal to leap overboard, and
wallow like a walrus in the brine, of which you might almost think he
was born and bred, so native seems the element to the "Dowg o' Dowgs."
Ay, these are sea-mews, O'Bronte, wheeling white as silver in the
moonshine; but we _shall_ not shoot them--no--no--no--we _will_ not
shoot you, ye images of playful peace, so fearlessly, nay, so lovingly
attending our bark as it bounds over the breasts of the billows, in
motion quick almost as your slowest flight, while ye linger around, and
behind, and before our path, like fair spirits wiling us along up this
great Loch, farther and farther through gloom and glimmer, into the
heart of profounder solitude. On what errands of your own are ye
winnowing your way, stooping ever and anon just to dip your wing-tips in
the waves, and then up into the open air--the blue light filling this
magnificent hollow--or seen glancing along the shadows of the mountains
as they divide the Loch into a succession of separate bays, and often
seem to block it up, till another moonlight reach is seen extending far
beyond, and carries the imagination on--on--on--into inland recesses
that seem to lose at last all connection with the forgotten sea. All at
once the moon is like a ghost;--and we believe--Heaven knows why--in the
authenticity of Ossian's Poems.
Was there ever such a man as Ossian? We devoutly hope there was--for if
so, then there were a prodigious number of fine fellows, besides his
Bardship, who after their death figured away as their glimmering ghosts,
with noble effect, among the moonlight mists of the mountains. The
poetry of Ossian has, it is true, since the days of Macpherson, in no
way coloured the poetry of the island; and Mr Wordsworth, who has
written beautiful lines about the old Phantom, states that fact as an
argument against its authenticity. He thinks Ossian, as we now possess
him, no poet; and alleges, that if these compositions had been the good
things so many people have thought them, they would, in some way or
other, have breathed their spirit over the poetical genius of the land.
Who knows that they may not do so yet? The time may not have come. But
must all true poetry necessarily create imitation, and a school of
imitators? One sees no reason why it must. Besides, the life which the
poetry of Ossian celebrates, has utterly passed away; and the poetry
itself, good, bad, or indifferent, is so very peculiar, that to imitate
it at all you must almost transcribe it. That, for a good many years,
was often done, but naturally inspired any other feeling than delight or
admiration. But the simple question is, Do the poems of Ossian delight
greatly and widely? We think they do. Nor can we believe that they would
not still delight such a poet as Mr Wordsworth. What dreariness
overspreads them all! What a melancholy spirit shrouds all his heroes,
passing before us on the cloud, after all their battles have been
fought, and their tombs raised on the hill! The very picture of the old
blind Hero-bard himself, often attended by the weeping virgins whom war
has made desolate, is always touching, often sublime. The desert is
peopled with lamenting mortals, and the mists that wrap them with
ghosts, whose remembrances of this life are all dirge and elegy. True,
that the images are few and endlessly reiterated; but that, we suspect,
is the case with all poetry composed not in a philosophic age. The great
and constant appearances of nature suffice, in their simplicity, for all
its purposes. The poet seeks not to vary their character, and his
hearers are willing to be charmed over and over again by the same
strains. We believe that the poetry of Ossian would be destroyed by any
greater distinctness or variety of imagery. And if, indeed, Fingal lived
and Ossian sung, we must believe that the old bard was blind; and we
suspect that in such an age, such a man would, in his blindness, think
dreamily indeed of the torrents, and lakes, and heaths, and clouds, and
mountains, moons and stars, which he had leapt, swam, walked, climbed,
and gazed on in the days of his rejoicing youth. Then has he no
tenderness--no pathos--no beauty? Alas for thousands of hearts and souls
if it be even so! For then are many of their holiest dreams worthless
all, and divinest melancholy a mere complaint of the understanding,
which a bit of philosophical criticism will purge away, as the leech's
phial does a disease of the blood.
Macpherson's "Ossian," is it not poetry? Wordsworth says it is not--but
Christopher North says it is--with all reverence for the King. Let its
antiquity be given up--let such a state of society as is therein
described be declared impossible--let all the inconsistencies and
violations of nature ever charged against it be acknowledged--let all
its glaring plagiarisms from poetry of modern date inspire what derision
they may--and far worse the perpetual repetition of its own imbecilities
and inanities, wearying one down even to disgust and anger;--yet, in
spite of all, are we not made to feel, not only that we are among the
mountains, but to forget that there is any other world in existence,
save that which glooms and glimmers, and wails and raves around us in
mists and clouds, and storms and snows--full of lakes and rivers,
sea-intersected and sea-surrounded, with a sky as troublous as the
earth--yet both at times visited with a mournful beauty that sinks
strangely into the soul--while the shadowy life depictured there eludes
not our human sympathies; nor yet, aerial though they be--so sweet and
sad are their voices--do there float by as unbeloved, unpitied, or
unhonoured--single, or in bands--the ghosts of the brave and beautiful;
when the few stars are dim, and the moon is felt, not seen, to be
yielding what faint light there may be in the skies.
The boat in a moment is a bagpipe; and not only so, but all the
mountains are bagpipes, and so are the clouds. All the bagpipes in the
world are here, and they fill heaven and earth. 'Tis no
exaggeration--much less a fiction--but the soul and body of truth. There
Hamish stands stately at the prow; and as the boat hangs by midships on
the very point that commands all the echoes, he fills the whole night
with the "Campbells are coming," till the sky yells with the gathering
as of all the Clans. His eyes are triumphantly fixed on ours to catch
their emotions; his fingers cease their twinkling; and still that wild
gathering keeps playing of itself among the mountains--fainter and
fainter, as it is flung from cliff to cliff, till it dies away far--far
off--as if in infinitude--sweet even and soft in its evanescence as some
lover's lute.
We are now in the bay of Gleno. For though moonlight strangely alters
the whole face of nature, confusing its most settled features, and with
a gentle glamoury blending with the greensward what once was the grey
granite, and investing with apparent woodiness what an hour ago was the
desolation of herbless cliffs--yet not all the changes that wondrous
nature, in ceaseless ebb and flow, ever wrought on her works, could
metamorphose out of our recognition that Glen, in which, one
night--long--long ago--
"In life's morning march, when our spirit was young!"
we were visited by a dream--a dream that shadowed forth in its
inexplicable symbols the whole course of our future life--the
graves--the tombs where many we loved are now buried--that churchyard,
where we hope and believe that one day our own bones will rest.
But who shouts from the shore, Hamish--and now, as if through his
fingers, sends forth a sharp shrill whistle that pierces the sky? Ah,
ha! we ken his shadow in the light, with the roe on his shoulder. 'Tis
the schoolmaster of Gleno, bringing down our quarry to the boat--kilted,
we declare, like a true Son of the Mist. The shore here is shelving but
stony, and our prow is aground. But strong-spined and loined, and strong
in their withers, are the M'Dougals of Lorn; and, wading up to the red
hairy knees, he has flung the roe into the boat, and followed it himself
like a deer-hound. So bend to your oars, my hearties--my heroes--the
wind freshens, and the tide strengthens from the sea; and at eight knots
an hour we shall sweep along the shadows, and soon see the lantern,
twinkling as from a lighthouse, on the pole of our Tent.
In a boat, upon a great sea-arm, at night, among mountains, who would be
so senseless, so soulless as to speak? The hour has its might,
"Because not of this noisy world, but silent and divine!"
A sound there is in the sea-green swell, and the hollows of the rocks,
that keep muttering and muttering, as their entrances feel the touch of
the tide. But nothing beneath the moon can be more solemn, now that her
aspect is so wan, and that some melancholy spirit has obscured the
lustre of the stars. We feel as if the breath of old elegiac poetry were
visiting our slumber. All is sad within us, yet why we know not; and the
sadness is stranger as it is deeper after a day of almost foolish
pastime, spent by a being who believes that he is immortal, and that
this life is but the threshold of a life to come. Poor, puny, and paltry
pastimes indeed are they all! But are they more so than those pursuits
of which the moral poet has sung,
"The paths of glory lead but to the grave!"
Methinks, now, as we are entering into a sabler mass of shadow, that the
doctrine of eternal punishment of sins committed in time--but--
"Here's a health to all good lasses,
Here's a health to all good lasses,
Pledge it merrily, fill your glasses;
Let the bumper toast go round,
Let the bumper toast go round!"
Best on your oars, lads. Hamish! the quaich! give each man a caulker,
that his oar may send a bolder twang from its rollock, and our
fish-coble walk the waves like a man-of-war's gig, with the captain on
board, going ashore, after a long cruise, to meet his wife. Now she
spins! and lo! lights at Kinloch-Etive, and beyond on the breast of the
mountain, bright as Hesperus--the Pole-star of our Tent!
Well, this is indeed the Londe of Faery! A car with a nag caparisoned at
the water edge! On with the roe, and in with Christopher and the Fish.
Now, Hamish, hand us the Crutch. After a cast or two, which, may they be
successful as the night is auspicious, your presence, gentlemen, will be
expected in the Tent. Now, Hamish, handle thou the ribbons--alias the
hair-tether--and we will touch him behind, should he linger, with a
weapon that might
"Create a soul under the ribs of death."
Linger! why the lightning flies from his heels, as he carries us along a
fine natural causeway, like Ossian's car-borne heroes. From the size and
state of the stones over which we make such a clatter, we shrewdly
suspect that the parliamentary grant for destroying the old Highland
torrent-roads has not extended its ravages to Glen-Etive. O'Bronte,
"Like panting Time, toils after us in vain;"
and the pointers are following us by our own scent, and that of the roe,
in the distant darkness. Pull up, Hamish, pull up, or otherwise we shall
overshoot our mark, and meet with some accident or other, perhaps a
capsize on Buachaille-Etive, or the Black Mount. We had no idea the
circle of greensward in front of the Tent was so spacious. Why, there is
room for the Lord Mayor of London's state-coach to turn with its eight
horses, and that enormous ass, Parson Dillon, on the dickey. What could
have made us think at this moment of London? Certes, the association of
ideas is a droll thing, and also sometimes most magnificent. Dancing in
the Tent, among strange figures! Celebration of the nuptials of some
Arab chief, in an oasis in the Great Desert of Stony Arabia! Heavens!
look at Tickler! How he hauls the Hizzies! There is no time to be
lost--he and the Admiral must not have all the sport to themselves; and,
by-and-by, spite of age and infirmity, we shall show the Tent a touch of
the Highland Fling. Hollo! you landloupers! Christopher is upon
you--behold the Tenth Avatar incarnated in North.
But what Apparitions at the Tent-door salute our approach?
"Back step these two fair angels, half afraid
So suddenly to see the Griesly King!"
Goat-herdesses from the cliffs of Glencreran or Glenco, kilted to the
knee, and not unconscious of their ankles, one twinkle of which is
sufficient to bid "Begone dull care" for ever. One hand on a shoulder of
each of the mountain-nymphs--sweet liberties--and then embraced by both,
half in their arms, and half on their bosoms, was ever Old Man so
pleasantly let down from triumphal car, on the soft surface of his
mother-earth? Ay, there lies the Red-deer! and what heaps of smaller
slain! But was there ever such a rush of dogs! We shall be extinguished.
Down, dogs, down--nay, ladies and gentlemen, be seated--on one another's
knees as before--we beseech you--we are but men like yourselves--and
"Without the smile from partial beauty won,
Oh! what were man?--a world without a sun!"
What it is to be the darling of gods and men, and women and children!
Why the very stars burn brighter--and thou, O Moon! art like the Sun. We
foresee a night of dancing and drinking--till the mountain-dew melt in
the lustre of morn. Such a day should have a glorious death--and a
glorious resurrection. Hurra! Hurra!
THE MOORS FOR EVER! THE MOORS! THE MOORS!
HIGHLAND SNOW-STORM.
What do you mean by original genius? By that fine line in the "Pleasures
of Hope"--
"To muse on Nature with a poet's eye?"
Why--genius--one kind of it at least--is transfusion of self into all
outward things. The genius that does that--naturally, but novelly--is
original; and now you know the meaning of one kind of original genius.
Have we, then, Christopher North, that gift? Have you? Yea, both of Us.
Our spirits animate the insensate earth, till she speaks, sings, smiles,
laughs, weeps, sighs, groans, goes mad, and dies. Nothing easier, though
perhaps it is wicked, than for original genius like ours, or yours, to
drive the earth to distraction. We wave our wizard hand thus--and lo!
list! she is insane. How she howls to heaven, and how the maddened
heaven howls back her frenzy! Two dreadful maniacs raging apart, but in
communion, in one vast bedlam! The drift-snow spins before the
hurricane, hissing like a nest of serpents let loose to torment the air.
What fierce flakes! furies! as if all the wasps that ever stung had been
revivified, and were now careering part and parcel of the tempest. We
are in a Highland Hut in the midst of mountains. But no land is to be
seen any more than if we were in the middle of the sea. Yet a wan glare
shows that the snow-storm is strangely shadowed by superincumbent
cliffs; and though you cannot see, you _hear_ the mountains. Rendings
are going on, frequent, over your head--and all around the blind
wilderness--the thunderous tumblings down of avalanches, mixed with the
moanings, shriekings, and yellings of caves, as if spirits there were
angry with the snow-drift choking up the fissures and chasms in the
cliffs. Is that the creaking and groaning, and rooking and tossing of
old trees, afraid of being uprooted and flung into the spate?
"Red comes the river down, and loud and oft
The angry spirit of the water shrieks,"
more fearful than at midnight in this night-like day--whose meridian is
a total sun eclipse. The river runs by, blood-like, through the
snow--and, short as is the reach you can see through the flaky gloom,
that short reach shows that all his course must be terrible--more and
more terrible--as, gathering his streams like a chieftain his clan--ere
long he will sweep shieling, and hut, and hamlet to the sea, undermining
rocks, cutting mounds asunder, and blowing up bridges that explode into
the air with a roar like that of cannon. You sometimes think you hear
thunder, though you know that cannot be--but sublimer than thunder is
the nameless noise so like that of agonised life--that eddies far and
wide around--high and huge above--fear all the while being at the bottom
of your heart--an objectless, dim, dreary, undefinable fear, whose
troubled presence--if any mortal feeling be so--is sublime. Your
imagination is troubled, and dreams of death, but of no single corpse,
of no single grave. Nor fear you for yourself--for the Hut in which you
thus enjoy the storm is safer than the canopied cliff-calm of the
eagle's nest; but your spirit is convulsed from its deepest and darkest
foundations, and all that lay hidden there of the wild and wonderful,
the pitiful and the strange, the terrible and pathetic, is now upturned
in dim confusion, and imagination, working among the hoarded gatherings
of the heart, creates out of them moods kindred and congenial with the
hurricane, intensifying the madness of the heaven and the earth, till
that which sees and that which is seen, that which hears and that which
is heard, undergo alternate mutual transfiguration; and the blind
Roaring Day--at once substance, shadow, and soul--is felt to be one with
ourselves--the blended whole either the Live-Dead, or the Dead-Alive.
We are in a Highland Hut--if we called it a Shieling we did so merely
because we love the sound of the word Shieling, and the image it at once
brings to eye and ear--the rustling of leaves on a summer sylvan bower,
by simple art slightly changed from the form of the growth of nature,
or the waving of fern on the turf-roof and turf-walls, all covered with
wildflowers and mosses, and moulded by one single season into a
knoll-like beauty, beside its guardian birch-tree, insupportable to all
evil spirits, but with its silvery stem and drooping tresses dear to the
Silent People that won in the land of peace. Truly this is not the sweet
Shieling-season, when, far away from all other human dwellings, on the
dip of some great mountain, quite at the head of a day's-journey-long
glen, the young herdsman, haply all alone, without one single being with
him that has the use of speech, liveth for months retired far from kirk
and cross--Luath his sole companion--his sole care the pasturing
herds--the sole sounds he hears the croak of the raven on the cliff, or
bark of the eagle in the sky. O sweet, solitary lot of lover! Haply in
some oasis in the wilderness, some steadfast gleam of emerald light amid
the hyacinthine-hue of the heather, that young herdsman hath pitched his
tent, by one Good Spirit haunted morning, noon, and night, through the
sunny, moonlight, starry months,--the Orphan-girl, whom years ago her
dying father gave into his arms--the old blind soldier--knowing that the
boy would shield her innocence when every blood-relation had been
buried--now Orphan-girl no more, but growing there like a lily at the
Shieling door, or singing within sweetlier than any bird--the happiest
of all living things--her own Ronald's dark-haired Bride.