or evil spirit that their children were in the clutches of such a night?
As well seek for a single bark in the middle of the misty main! But the
inland storm had been seen brewing among the mountains round King's
House, and hut had communicated with hut, though far apart in regions
where the traveller sees no symptoms of human life. Down through the
long cliff-pass of Mealanumy, between Buachaille-Etive and the Black
Mount, towards the lone House of Dalness, that lives in everlasting
shadows, went a band of shepherds, trampling their way across a hundred
frozen streams. Dalness joined its strength--and then away over the
drift-bridged chasms toiled that Gathering, with their sheep-dogs
scouring the loose snows--in the van, Fingal the Red Reaver, with his
head aloft on the look-out for deer, grimly eyeing the Correi where last
he tasted blood. All "plaided in their tartan array," these shepherds
laughed at the storm--and hark! you hear the bagpipe play--the music the
Highlanders love both in war and in peace.
"They think then of the ourie cattle,
And silly sheep;"
and though they ken 'twill be a moonless night--for the snow-storm will
sweep her out of heaven--up the mountain and down the glen they go,
marking where flock and herd have betaken themselves, and now, at
nightfall, unafraid of that blind hollow, they descend into the depth
where once stood the old Grove of Pines. Following the dogs, who know
their duties in their instinct, the band, without seeing it, are now
close to that ruined hut. Why bark the sheep-dogs so--and why howls
Fingal, as if some spirit passed athwart the night? He scents the dead
body of the boy who so often had shouted him on in the forest, when the
antlers went by! Not dead--nor dead she who is on his bosom. Yet life in
both is frozen--and will the iced blood in their veins ever again be
thawed? Almost pitch-dark is the roofless ruin--and the frightened sheep
know not what is the terrible Shape that is howling there. But a man
enters, and lifts up one of the bodies, giving it into the arms of them
at the doorway--and then lifts up the other; and, by the flash of a
rifle, they see that it is Ranald Cameron and Flora Macdonald,
seemingly both frozen to death. Some of those reeds that the shepherds
burn in their huts are kindled, and in that small light they are assured
that such are the corpses. But that noble dog knows that death is not
there--and licks the face of Ranald, as if he would restore life to his
eyes. Two of the shepherds know well how to fold the dying in their
plaids--how gentliest to carry them along; for they had learnt it on the
field of victorious battle, when, without stumbling over the dead and
wounded, they bore away the shattered body--yet living--of the youthful
warrior, who had shown that of such a Clan, he was worthy to be the
Chief.
The storm was with them all the way down the glen--nor could they have
heard each other's voices had they spoke--but mutely they shifted the
burden from strong hand to hand--thinking of the Hut in Glenco, and of
what would be felt there on their arrival with the dying or dead. Blind
people walk through what to them is the night of crowded
daystreets--unpausing turn round corners--unhesitatingly plunge down
steep stairs--wind their way fearlessly through whirlwinds of life--and
reach in their serenity, each one unharmed, his own obscure house. For
God is with the blind. So is he with all who walk on works of mercy.
This saving band had no fear--and therefore there was no danger--on the
edge of the pitfall or the cliff. They knew the countenances of the
mountains shown momentarily by ghastly gleamings through the fitful
night, and the hollow sound of each particular stream beneath the snow
at places where in other weather there was a pool or a waterfall. The
dip of the hills, in spite of the drifts, familiar to their feet, did
not deceive them now; and then, the dogs in their instinct were guides
that erred not, and as well as the shepherds knew it themselves did
Fingal know that they were anxious to reach Glenco. He led the way, as
if he were in moonlight; and often stood still when they were shifting
their burden, and whined as if in grief. He knew where the bridges
were--stones or logs; and he rounded the marshes where at springs the
wild-fowl feed. And thus Instinct, and Reason, and Faith conducted the
saving band along--and now they are at Glenco--and at the door of the
Hut.
To life were brought the dead; and there at midnight sat they up like
ghosts. Strange seemed they--for a while--to each other's eyes--and at
each other they looked as if they had forgotten how dearly once they
loved. Then as if in holy fear they gazed on each other's faces,
thinking that they had awoke together in heaven. "Flora!" said
Ranald--and that sweet word, the first he had been able to speak,
reminded him of all that had passed, and he knew that the God in whom
they had put their trust had sent them deliverance. Flora, too, knew her
parents, who were on their knees--and she strove to rise up and kneel
down beside them--but she was powerless as a broken reed--and when she
thought to join with them in thanksgiving, her voice was gone. Still as
death sat all the people in the hut--and one or two who were fathers
were not ashamed to weep.
Who were they--the solitary pair--all alone by themselves save a small
image of her on whose breast it lay--whom--seven summers after--we came
upon in our wanderings, before their Shieling in Correi-Vollach at the
foot of Ben Chrulas, who sees his shadow in a hundred lochs? Who but
Ranald and Flora!
* * * * *
Nay, dry up--Daughter of our Age, dry up thy tears! and we shall set a
vision before thine eyes to fill them with unmoistened light.
Oft before have those woods and waters--those clouds and mountains--that
sun and sky, held thy spirit in Elysium,--thy spirit, that then was
disembodied, and living in the beauty and the glory of the elements.
'TIS WINDERMERE--WINDERMERE! Never canst thou have forgotten those more
than fortunate--those thrice-blessed Isles! But when last we saw them
within the still heaven of thy smiling eyes, summer suns had overloaded
them with beauty, and they stooped their flowers and foliage down to the
blushing, the burning deep, that glowed in its transparency with other
groves as gorgeous as themselves, the whole mingling mass of reality and
of shadow forming one creation. But now, lo! Windermere in Winter. All
leafless now the groves that girdled her as if shifting rainbows were in
love perpetually letting fall their colours on the Queen of Lakes. Gone
now are her banks of emerald that carried our calm gazings with them,
sloping away back into the cerulean sky. Her mountains, shadowy in
sunshine, and seeming restless as seas, where are they now?--The
cloud-cleaving cliffs that shot up into the blue region where the
buzzard sailed? All gone. But mourn not for that loss. Accustom thine
eye--and through it thy soul, to that transcendent substitution, and
deeply will they be reconciled. Sawest thou ever the bosom of the Lake
hushed into profounder rest? No white-winged pinnace glides through the
sunshine--no clanking oar is heard leaving or approaching cape, point,
or bay--no music of voice, stop, or string, wakens the sleeping echoes.
How strangely dim and confused on the water the fantastic frostwork
imagery, yet more steadfastly hanging there than ever hung the banks of
summer! For all one sheet of ice, now clear as the Glass of Glamoury in
which that lord of old beheld his Geraldine--is Windermere, the
heaven-loving and the heaven-beloved. Not a wavelet murmurs in all her
bays, from the sylvan Brathay to where the southern straits narrow into
a river--now chained too the Leven on his sylvan course towards that
perilous Estuary afar off raging on its wreck-strewn sands. The frost
came after the last fall of snow--and not a single flake ever touched
that surface; and now that you no longer miss the green twinkling of the
large July leaves, does not imagination love those motionless frozen
forests, cold but not dead, serene but not sullen, inspirative in the
strangeness of their appareling of wild thoughts about the scenery of
foreign climes, far away among the regions of the North, where Nature
works her wonders aloof from human eyes, and that wild architect Frost,
during the absence of the sun, employs his night of months in building
and dissolving his ice-palaces, magnificent beyond the reach of any
power set to work at the bidding of earth's crowned and sceptred kings?
All at once a hundred houses, high up among the hills, seem on fire. The
setting sun has smitten them, and the snow-tracts are illuminated by
harmless conflagrations. Their windows are all lighted up by a lurid
splendour, in its strong suddenness sublime. But look, look we beseech
you, at the sun--the sunset--the sunset region--and all that kindred and
corresponding heaven, effulgent where a minute ago lay in its cold
glitter the blue bosom of the lake. Who knows the laws of light and the
perpetual miracle of their operation? God--not thou. The snow-mountains
are white no more, but gorgeous in their colouring as the clouds. Lo!
Pavey-Ark--magnificent range of cliffs--seeming to come forward, while
you gaze!--How it glows with a rosy light, as if a flush of flowers
decked the precipice in that delicate splendour! Langdale-Pikes,
methinks, are tinged with finest purple, and the thought of violets is
with us as we gaze on the tinted bosom of the mountains dearest to the
setting sun. But that long broad slip of orange-coloured sky is
yellowing with its reflection almost all the rest of our Alps--all but
yon stranger--the summit of some mountain belonging to another
region--ay--the Great Gabel--silent now as sleep--when last we clomb his
cliffs, thundering in the mists of all his cataracts. In his shroud he
stands pallid like a ghost. Beyond the reach of the setting sun he lours
in his exclusion from the rejoicing light, and imagination personifying
his solitary vastness into forsaken life, pities the doom of the forlorn
Giant. Ha! just as the eye of day is about to shut, one smile seems sent
afar to that lonesome mountain, and a crown of crimson encompasses his
forehead.
On which of the two sunsets art thou now gazing? Thou who art to our old
loving eyes so like the "mountain nymph, sweet Liberty?" On the sunset
in the heaven--or the sunset in the lake? The divine truth is--O
Daughter of our Age!--that both sunsets are but visions of our own
spirits. Again both are gone from the outward world--and nought remains
but a forbidding frown of the cold bleak snow. But imperishable in thy
imagination will both sunsets be--and though it will sometimes retire
into the recesses of thy memory, and lie there among the unsuspected
treasures of forgotten imagery that have been unconsciously accumulating
there since first those gentle eyes of thine had perfect vision given to
their depths--yet mysteriously brought back from vanishment by some one
single silent thought, to which power has been yielded over that bright
portion of the Past, will both of them sometimes reappear to thee in
solitude--or haply when in the very heart of life. And then surely a few
tears will fall for sake of him--then no more seen--by whose side thou
stoodest, when that double sunset enlarged thy sense of beauty, and made
thee in thy father's eyes the sweetest--best--and brightest
poetess--whose whole life is musical inspiration--ode, elegy, and hymn,
sung not in words but in looks--sigh-breathed or speechlessly distilled
in tears flowing from feelings the farthest in this world from grief.
So much, though but little, for the beautiful--with, perhaps, a tinge of
the sublime. Are the two emotions different and distinct--think'st thou,
O! metaphysical critic of the gruesome countenance--or modifications of
one and the same? 'Tis a puzzling question--and we, Sphinx, might wait
till doomsday, before you, Oedipus, could solve the enigma. Certainly
a Rose is one thing and Mount Aetna is another--an antelope and an
elephant--an insect and a man-of-war, both sailing in the sun--a little
lucid well in which the fairies bathe, and the Polar Sea in which
Leviathan is "wallowing unwieldy, enormous in his gait"--the jewelled
finger of a virgin bride, and grim Saturn with his ring--the upward eye
of a kneeling saint, and a comet "that from his horrid hair shakes
pestilence and war." But let the rose bloom on the mouldering ruins of
the palace of some great king--among the temples of Balbec or Syrian
Tadmor--and in its beauty, methinks, 'twill be also sublime. See the
antelope bounding across a raging chasm--up among the region of eternal
snows on Mont Blanc--and deny it, if you please--but assuredly we think
that there is sublimity in the fearless flight of that beautiful
creature, to whom nature grudged not wings, but gave instead the power
of plumes to her small delicate limbs, unfractured by alighting among
the pointed rocks. All alone, by your single solitary self, in some
wide, lifeless desert, could you deny sublimity to the unlooked-for hum
of the tiniest insect, or to the sudden shiver of the beauty of his
gauze-wings? Not you, indeed. Stooping down to quench your thirst in
that little lucid well where the fairies bathe, what if you saw the
image of the evening star shining in some strange subterranean world? We
suspect that you would hold in your breath, and swear devoutly that it
was sublime. Dead on the very evening of her marriage day is that virgin
bride whose delicacy was so beautiful; and as she lies in her white
wedding garments that serve for a shroud, that emblem of eternity and of
eternal love, the ring, upon her finger--with its encased star shining
brightly now that her eyes, once stars, are closed--would, methinks, be
sublime to all Christian hearts. In comparison with all these beautiful
sublimities, Mount Aetna, the elephant, the man-of-war, Leviathan
swimming the ocean-stream, Saturn with his ring, and with his horrid
hair the comet--might be all less than nothings. Therefore beauty and
sublimity are twin-feelings--one and the same birth--seldom
inseparable;--if you still doubt it, become a fire-worshipper, and sing
your morning and evening orisons to the rising and the setting sun.
THE HOLY CHILD.
This house of ours is a prison--this Study of ours a cell. Time has laid
his fetters on our feet--fetters fine as the gossamer, but strong as
Samson's ribs, silken-soft to wise submission, but to vain impatience
galling as cankered wound that keeps ceaselessly eating into the bone.
But while our bodily feet are thus bound by an inevitable and inexorable
law, our mental wings are free as those of the lark, the dove, or the
eagle--and they shall be expanded as of yore, in calm or tempest, now
touching with their tips the bosom of this dearly-beloved earth, and now
aspiring heavenwards, beyond the realms of mist and cloud, even unto the
very core of the still heart of that otherwise unapproachable sky which
graciously opens to receive us on our flight, when, disencumbered of the
burden of all grovelling thoughts, and strong in spirituality, we exult
to soar
"Beyond this visible diurnal sphere,"
nearing and nearing the native region of its own incomprehensible being.
Now touching, we said, with their tips the bosom of this dearly-beloved
earth! How sweet that attraction to imagination's wings! How delightful
in that lower flight to skim along the green ground, or as now along the
soft-bosomed beauty of the virgin snow! We were asleep all night
long--sound asleep as children--while the flakes were falling, "and soft
as snow on snow" were all the descendings of our untroubled dreams. The
moon and all her stars were willing that their lustre should be veiled
by that peaceful shower; and now the sun, pleased with the purity of the
morning earth, all white as innocence, looks down from heaven with a
meek unmelting light, and still leaves undissolved the stainless
splendour. There is Frost in the air--but he "does his spiriting
gently," studding the ground-snow thickly with diamonds, and shaping the
tree-snow according to the peculiar and characteristic beauty of the
leaves and sprays, on which it has alighted almost as gently as the dews
of spring. You know every kind of tree still by its own spirit showing
itself through that fairy veil--momentarily disguised from
recognition--but admired the more in the sweet surprise with which again
your heart salutes its familiar branches, all fancifully ornamented with
their snow-foliage, that murmurs not like the green leaves of summer,
that like the yellow leaves of autumn strews not the earth with decay,
but often melts away into changes so invisible and inaudible, that you
wonder to find that it is all vanished, and to see the old tree again
standing in its own faint-green glossy bark, with its many million buds,
which perhaps fancy suddenly expands into a power of umbrage
impenetrable to the sun in Scorpio.
A sudden burst of sunshine! bringing back the pensive spirit from the
past to the present, and kindling it, till it dances like light
reflected from a burning mirror. A cheerful Sun-scene, though almost
destitute of life. An undulating Landscape, hillocky and hilly, but not
mountainous, and buried under the weight of a day and night's incessant
and continuous snow-fall. The weather has not been windy--and now that
the flakes have ceased falling, there is not a cloud to be seen, except
some delicate braidings here and there along the calm of the Great Blue
Sea of Heaven. Most luminous is the sun, yet you can look straight on
his face, almost with unwinking eyes, so mild and mellow is his large
light as it overflows the day. All enclosures have disappeared, and you
indistinctly ken the greater landmarks, such as a grove, a wood, a hall,
a castle, a spire, a village, a town--the faint haze of a far-off and
smokeless city. Most intense is the silence; for all the streams are
dumb, and the great river lies like a dead serpent in the strath. Not
dead--for, lo! yonder one of his folds glitters--and in the glitter you
see him moving--while all the rest of his sullen length is palsied by
frost, and looks livid and more livid at every distant and more distant
winding. What blackens on that tower of snow? Crows roosting innumerous
on a huge tree--but they caw not in their hunger. Neither sheep nor
cattle are to be seen or heard--but they are cared for;--the folds and
the farmyards are all full of life--and the ungathered stragglers are
safe in their instincts. There has been a deep fall--but no storm--and
the silence, though partly that of suffering, is not that of death.
Therefore, to the imagination, unsaddened by the heart, the repose is
beautiful. The almost unbroken uniformity of the scene--its simple and
grand monotony--lulls all the thoughts and feelings into a calm, over
which is breathed the gentle excitation of a novel charm, inspiring many
fancies, all of a quiet character. Their range, perhaps, is not very
extensive, but they all regard the home-felt and domestic charities of
life. And the heart burns as here and there some human dwelling
discovers itself by a wreath of smoke up the air, or as the
robin-redbreast, a creature that is ever at hand, comes flitting before
your path with an almost pert flutter of his feathers, bold from the
acquaintanceship he has formed with you in severer weather at the
threshold or window of the tenement, which for years may have been the
winter sanctuary of the "bird whom man loves best," and who bears a
Christian name in every clime he inhabits. Meanwhile the sun waxes
brighter and warmer in heaven--some insects are in the air, as if that
moment called to life--and the mosses that may yet be visible here and
there along the ridge of a wall or on the stem of a tree, in variegated
lustre frost-brightened, seem to delight in the snow, and in no other
season of the year to be so happy as in winter. Such gentle touches of
pleasure animate one's whole being, and connect, by many a fine
association, the emotions inspired by the objects of animate and of
inanimate nature.
Ponder on the idea--the emotion of purity--and how finely soul-blent is
the delight imagination feels in a bright hush of new-fallen snow! Some
speck or stain--however slight--there always seems to be on the most
perfect whiteness of any other substance--or "dim suffusion veils" it
with some faint discolour--witness even the leaf of the lily or the
rose. Heaven forbid that we should ever breathe aught but love and
delight in the beauty of these consummate flowers! But feels not the
heart, even when the midsummer morning sunshine is melting the dews on
their fragrant bosoms, that their loveliness is "of the earth
earthy"--faintly tinged or streaked, when at the very fairest, with a
hue foreboding languishment and decay? Not the less for its sake are
those soulless flowers dear to us--thus owning kindred with them whose
beauty is all soul enshrined for a short while on that perishable face.
Do we not still regard the insensate flowers--so emblematical of what,
in human life, we do most passionately love and profoundly pity--with a
pensive emotion, often deepening into melancholy that sometimes, ere the
strong fit subsides, blackens into despair! What pain doubtless was in
the heart of the Elegiac Poet of old, when he sighed over the transitory
beauty of flowers--
"Conquerimur natura brevis quam gratia Florum!"
But over a perfectly pure expanse of night-fallen snow, when unaffected
by the gentle sun, the first fine frost has encrusted it with small
sparkling diamonds, the prevalent emotion is Joy. There is a charm in
the sudden and total disappearance even of the grassy green. All the
"old familiar faces" of nature are for a while out of sight, and out of
mind. That white silence shed by heaven over earth carries with it, far
and wide, the pure peace of another region--almost another life. No
image is there to tell of this restless and noisy world. The
cheerfulness of reality kindles up our reverie ere it becomes a dream;
and we are glad to feel our whole being complexioned by the passionless
repose. If we think at all of human life, it is only of the young, the
fair, and the innocent. "Pure as snow," are words then felt to be most
holy, as the image of some beautiful and beloved being comes and goes
before our eyes--brought from a far distance in this our living world,
or from a distance further still in a world beyond the grave--the image
of virgin growing up sinlessly to womanhood among her parents' prayers,
or of some spiritual creature who expired long ago, and carried with her
her native innocence unstained to heaven.
Such Spiritual Creature--too spiritual long to sojourn below the
skies--wert Thou--whose rising and whose setting--both most
starlike--brightened at once all thy native vale, and at once left it in
darkness. Thy name has long slept in our heart--and there let it sleep
unbreathed--even as, when we are dreaming our way through some solitary
place, without naming it we bless the beauty of some sweet wildflower,
pensively smiling to us through the snow.
The Sabbath returns on which, in the little kirk among the hills, we saw
thee baptised. Then comes a wavering glimmer of five sweet years, that
to Thee, in all their varieties, were but as one delightful season, one
blessed life--and, finally, that other Sabbath, on which, at thy own
dying request--between services thou wert buried.
How mysterious are all thy ways and workings, O gracious Nature! Thou
who art but a name given by us to the Being in whom all things are and
have life. Ere three years old, she, whose image is now with us, all
over the small sylvan world that beheld the evanescent revelation of her
pure existence, was called the "Holy Child!" The taint of Sin--inherited
from those who disobeyed in Paradise--seemed from her fair clay to have
been washed out at the baptismal font, and by her first infantine tears.
So pious people almost believed, looking on her so unlike all other
children, in the serenity of that habitual smile that clothed the
creature's countenance with a wondrous beauty, at an age when on other
infants is but faintly seen the dawn of reason, and their eyes look
happy just like the thoughtless flowers. So unlike all other
children--but unlike only because sooner than they she seemed to have
had given to her, even in the communion of the cradle, an intimation of
the being and the providence of God. Sooner, surely, than through any
other clay that ever enshrouded immortal spirit, dawned the light of
religion on the face of the "Holy Child."