childhood's uncertain speech, that murmurs only when indigent nature
prompts; and her own parents wondered whence they came, when first they
looked upon her kneeling in an unbidden prayer. As one mild week of
vernal sunshine covers the braes with primroses, so shone with fair and
fragrant feelings--unfolded, ere they knew, before her parents'
eyes--the divine nature of her who for a season was lent to them from
the skies. She learned to read out of the Bible--almost without any
teaching--they knew not how--just by looking gladly on the words, even
as she looked on the pretty daisies on the green--till their meanings
stole insensibly into her soul, and the sweet syllables, succeeding each
other on the blessed page, were all united by the memories her heart had
been treasuring every hour that her father or her mother had read aloud
in her hearing from the Book of Life. "Suffer little children to come
unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of
heaven"--how wept her parents, as these the most affecting of our
Saviour's words dropt silver-sweet from her lips, and continued in her
upward eyes among the swimming tears!
Be not incredulous of this dawn of reason, wonderful as it may seem to
you, so soon becoming morn--almost perfect daylight--with the "Holy
Child." Many such miracles are set before us--but we recognise them not,
or pass them by with a word or a smile of short surprise. How leaps the
baby in its mother's arms, when the mysterious charm of music thrills
through its little brain! And how learns it to modulate its feeble
voice, unable yet to articulate, to the melodies that bring forth all
round its eyes a delighted smile! Who knows what then may be the
thoughts and feelings of the infant awakened to the sense of a new
world, alive through all its being to sounds that haply glide past our
ears unmeaning as the breath of the common air! Thus have mere infants
sometimes been seen inspired by music, till, like small genii, they
warbled spell-strains of their own, powerful to sadden and subdue our
hearts. So, too, have infant eyes been so charmed by the rainbow
irradiating the earth, that almost infant hands have been taught, as if
by inspiration, the power to paint in finest colours, and to imitate
with a wondrous art, the skies so beautiful to the quick-awakened spirit
of delight. What knowledge have not some children acquired, and gone
down scholars to their small untimely graves! Knowing that such things
have been--are--and will be--why art thou incredulous of the divine
expansion of soul, so soon understanding the things that are divine--in
the "Holy Child?"
Thus grew she in the eye of God, day by day waxing wiser and wiser in
the knowledge that tends towards the skies; and, as if some angel
visitant were nightly with her in her dreams, awakening every morn with
a new dream of thought, that brought with it a gift of more
comprehensive speech. Yet merry she was at times with her companions
among the woods and braes, though while they all were laughing, she only
smiled; and the passing traveller, who might pause for a moment to bless
the sweet creatures in their play, could not but single out one face
among the many fair, so pensive in its paleness, a face to be
remembered, coming from afar, like a mournful thought upon the hour of
joy.
Sister or brother of her own had she none--and often both her
parents--who lived in a hut by itself up among the mossy stumps of the
old decayed forest--had to leave her alone--sometimes even all the day
long from morning till night. But she no more wearied in her
solitariness than does the wren in the wood. All the flowers were her
friends--all the birds. The linnet ceased not his song for her, though
her footsteps wandered into the green glade among the yellow broom,
almost within reach of the spray from which he poured his melody--the
quiet eyes of his mate feared her not when her garments almost touched
the bush where she brooded on her young. Shyest of the winged sylvans,
the cushat clapped not her wings away on the soft approach of such
harmless footsteps to the pine that concealed her slender nest. As if
blown from heaven, descended round her path the showers of the painted
butterflies, to feed, sleep, or die--undisturbed by her--upon the
wildflowers--with wings, when motionless, undistinguishable from the
blossoms. And well she loved the brown, busy, blameless bees, come
thither for the honey-dews from a hundred cots sprinkled all over the
parish, and all high overhead sailing away at evening, laden and
wearied, to their straw-roofed steps in many a hamlet garden. The leaf
of every tree, shrub, and plant, she knew familiarly and lovingly in its
own characteristic beauty; and she was loth to shake one dewdrop from
the sweetbrier rose. And well she knew that all nature loved in
return--that they were dear to each other in their innocence--and that
the very sunshine, in motion or in rest, was ready to come at the
bidding of her smiles. Skilful those small white hands of hers among the
reeds and rushes and osiers--and many a pretty flower-basket grew
beneath their touch, her parents wondering on their return home to see
the handiwork of one who was never idle in her happiness. Thus
early--ere yet but five years old--did she earn her mite for the
sustenance of her own beautiful life. The russet garb she wore she
herself had won--and thus Poverty, at the door of that hut, became even
like a Guardian Angel, with the lineaments of heaven on her brow, and
the quietude of heaven beneath her feet.
But these were but her lonely pastimes, or gentle taskwork self-imposed
among her pastimes, and itself the sweetest of them all, inspired by a
sense of duty that still brings with it its own delight, and hallowed
by religion, that even in the most adverse lot changes slavery into
freedom--till the heart, insensible to the bonds of necessity, sings
aloud for joy. The life within the life of the "Holy Child," apart from
even such innocent employments as these, and from such recreations as
innocent, among the shadows and the sunshine of those sylvan haunts, was
passed--let us fear not to say the truth, wondrous as such worship was
in one so very young--was passed in the worship of God; and her
parents--though sometimes even saddened to see such piety in a small
creature like her, and afraid, in their exceeding love, that it
betokened an early removal from this world of one too perfectly pure
ever to be touched by its sins and sorrows--forbore, in an awful pity,
ever to remove the Bible from her knees, as she would sit with it there,
not at morning and at evening only, or all the Sabbath long, as soon as
they returned from the kirk, but often through all the hours of the
longest and sunniest weekdays, when, had she chosen to do so, there was
nothing to hinder her from going up the hill-side, or down to the little
village, to play with the other children, always too happy when she
appeared--nothing to hinder her but the voice she heard speaking in that
Book, and the hallelujahs that, at the turning over of each blessed
page, came upon the ear of the "Holy Child" from white-robed saints all
kneeling before His throne in heaven.
Her life seemed to be the same in sleep. Often at midnight, by the light
of the moon shining in upon her little bed beside theirs, her parents
leant over her face, diviner in dreams, and wept as she wept, her lips
all the while murmuring, in broken sentences of prayer, the name of Him
who died for us all. But plenteous as were her penitential
tears--penitential in the holy humbleness of her stainless spirit, over
thoughts that had never left a dimming breath on its purity, yet that
seemed in those strange visitings to be haunting her as the shadows of
sins--soon were they all dried up in the lustre of her returning smiles.
Waking, her voice in the kirk was the sweetest among many sweet, as all
the young singers, and she the youngest far, sat together by themselves,
and within the congregational music of the psalm uplifted a silvery
strain that sounded like the very spirit of the whole, even like
angelic harmony blent with a mortal song. But sleeping, still more
sweetly sang the "Holy Child;" and then, too, in some diviner
inspiration than ever was granted to it while awake, her soul composed
its own hymns, and set the simple scriptural words to its own mysterious
music--the tunes she loved best gliding into one another, without once
ever marring the melody, with pathetic touches interposed never heard
before, and never more to be renewed! For each dream had its own
breathing, and many-visioned did then seem to be the sinless creature's
sleep.
The love that was borne for her all over the hill-region, and beyond its
circling clouds, was almost such as mortal creatures might be thought to
feel for some existence that had visibly come from heaven. Yet all who
looked on her, saw that she, like themselves, was mortal, and many an
eye was wet, the heart wist not why, to hear such wisdom falling from
such lips; for dimly did it prognosticate, that as short as bright would
be her walk from the cradle to the grave. And thus for the "Holy Child"
was their love elevated by awe, and saddened by pity--and as by herself
she passed pensively by their dwellings, the same eyes that smiled on
her presence, on her disappearance wept.
Not in vain for others--and for herself, oh! what great gain!--for those
few years on earth did that pure spirit ponder on the word of God! Other
children became pious from their delight in her piety--for she was
simple as the simplest among them all, and walked with them hand in
hand, nor declined companionship with any one that was good. But all
grew good by being with her--and parents had but to whisper her name,
and in a moment the passionate sob was hushed--the lowering brow
lighted--and the household in peace. Older hearts owned the power of the
piety so far surpassing their thoughts; and time-hardened sinners, it is
said, when looking and listening to the "Holy Child," knew the error of
their ways, and returned to the right path as at a voice from heaven.
Bright was her seventh summer--the brightest, so the aged said, that had
ever, in man's memory, shone over Scotland. One long, still, sunny, blue
day followed another, and in the rainless weather, though the dews kept
green the hills, the song of the streams was low. But paler and paler,
in sunlight and moonlight, became the sweet face that had been always
pale; and the voice that had been always something mournful, breathed
lower and sadder still from the too perfect whiteness of her breast. No
need--no fear--to tell her that she was about to die. Sweet whispers had
sung it to her in her sleep--and waking she knew it in the look of the
piteous skies. But she spoke not to her parents of death more than she
had often done--and never of her own. Only she seemed to love them with
a more exceeding love--and was readier, even sometimes when no one was
speaking, with a few drops of tears. Sometimes she disappeared--nor,
when sought for, was found in the woods about the hut. And one day that
mystery was cleared; for a shepherd saw her sitting by herself on a
grassy mound in a nook of the small solitary kirkyard, a long mile off
among the hills, so lost in reading the Bible, that shadow or sound of
his feet awoke her not; and, ignorant of his presence, she knelt down
and prayed--for a while weeping bitterly--but soon comforted by a
heavenly calm--that her sins might be forgiven her!
One Sabbath evening, soon after, as she was sitting beside her parents
at the door of their hut, looking first for a long while on their faces,
and then for a long while on the sky, though it was not yet the stated
hour of worship, she suddenly knelt down, and leaning on their knees,
with hands clasped more fervently than her wont, she broke forth into
tremulous singing of that hymn which from her lips they never heard
without unendurable tears:
"The hour of my departure's come,
I hear the voice that calls me home;
At last, O Lord, let trouble cease,
And let thy servant die in peace!"
They carried her fainting to her little bed, and uttered not a word to
one another till she revived. The shock was sudden, but not unexpected,
and they knew now that the hand of death was upon her, although her eyes
soon became brighter and brighter, they thought, than they had ever been
before. But forehead, cheeks, lips, neck, and breast, were all as white,
and, to the quivering hands that touched them, almost as cold, as snow.
Ineffable was the bliss in those radiant eyes; but the breath of words
was frozen, and that hymn was almost her last farewell. Some few words
she spake--and named the hour and day she wished to be buried. Her lips
could then just faintly return the kiss, and no more--a film came over
the now dim blue of her eyes--the father listened for her breath--and
then the mother took his place, and leaned her ear to the unbreathing
mouth, long deluding herself with its lifelike smile; but a sudden
darkness in the room, and a sudden stillness, most dreadful both,
convinced their unbelieving hearts at last, that it was death.
All the parish, it may be said, attended her funeral--for none stayed
away from the kirk that Sabbath--though many a voice was unable to join
in the Psalm. The little grave was soon filled up--and you hardly knew
that the turf had been disturbed beneath which she lay. The afternoon
service consisted but of a prayer--for he who ministered had loved her
with love unspeakable--and, though an old grey-haired man, all the time
he prayed he wept. In the sobbing kirk her parents were sitting, but no
one looked at them--and when the congregation rose to go, there they
remained sitting--and an hour afterwards, came out again into the open
air, and parting with their pastor at the gate, walked away to their
hut, overshadowed with the blessing of a thousand prayers.
And did her parents, soon after she was buried, die of broken hearts, or
pine away disconsolately to their graves? Think not that they, who were
Christians indeed, could be guilty of such ingratitude. "The Lord
giveth, and the Lord taketh away--blessed be the name of the Lord!" were
the first words they had spoke by that bedside; during many, many long
years of weal or woe, duly every morning and night, these same blessed
words did they utter when on their knees together in prayer--and many a
thousand times besides, when they were apart, she in her silent hut, and
he on the hill--neither of them unhappy in their solitude, though never
again, perhaps, was his countenance so cheerful as of yore--and though
often suddenly amidst mirth or sunshine their eyes were seen to
overflow. Happy had they been--as we mortal beings ever can be
happy--during many pleasant years of wedded life before she had been
born. And happy were they--on to the verge of old age--long after she
had here ceased to be. Their Bible had indeed been an idle Book--the
Bible that belonged to "the Holy Child,"--and idle all their kirk-goings
with "the Holy Child," through the Sabbath-calm--had those intermediate
years not left a power of bliss behind them triumphant over death and
the grave.
OUR PARISH.
Nature must be bleak and barren indeed to possess no power over the
young spirit daily expanding on her breast into new susceptibilities,
that ere long are felt to fill life to overflowing with a perpetual
succession--an infinite series--of enjoyments. Nowhere is she destitute
of that power--not on naked sea-shores--not in central deserts. But our
boyhood was environed by the beautiful--its home was among moors and
mountains, which people in towns and cities called dreary, but which we
knew to be the cheerfullest and most gladsome parish in all braid
Scotland--and well it might be, for it was in her very heart. Mountains
they seemed to us in those days, though now we believe they are only
hills. But such hills!--undulating far and wide away till the highest
even on clear days seemed to touch the sky, and in cloudy weather were
verily a part of heaven. Many a valley, and many a glen--and many a
hollow that was neither valley nor glen--and many a flat, of but a few
green acres, which we thought plains--and many a cleft waterless with
its birks and breckans, except when the rains came down, and then they
all sang a new song in merry chorus--and many a wood, and many a grove,
for it takes no great number of trees to make a wood, and four firs by
themselves in a lonesome place are a grove--and many a single sycamore,
and many a single ash, kenned afar-off above its protected cottage--and
many an indescribable spot of scenery at once pastoral and agricultural
and sylvan, where, if house there was, you hardly knew it among the
rocks;--so was Our Parish, which people in towns and cities called
dreary, composed; but the composition itself,--as well might we hope
thus to show it to your soul's eye, as by a few extracts however fine,
and a few criticisms however exquisite, to give you the idea of a
perfect poem.
But we have not given you more than a single hint of a great part of our
Parish--the Moor. It was then ever so many miles long, and ever so many
miles broad, and nobody thought of guessing how many miles round--but
some twenty years ago it was absolutely measured to a rood by a
landlouper of a land-surveyor--distributed--drained--enclosed--utterly
ruined for ever. No, not for ever. Nature laughs to scorn acts of
Parliament, and we predict that in a quarter of a century she will
resume her management of that moor. We rejoice to hear that she is
beginning already to take lots of it into her own hands. Wheat has no
business there, and should keep to the carses. In spring, she takes him
by the braird till he looks yellow in the face long before his time--in
summer, by the cuff of the neck till he lies down on his back and rots
in the rain--in autumn, by the ears, and rubs him against the grain till
he expires as fushionless as the windle-straes with which he is
interlaced--in winter, she shakes him in the stook till he is left but a
shadow which pigeons despise. See him in stack at Christmas, and you
pity the poor straw. Here and there bits of bear or big, and barley, she
permits to flourish--nor is she loth to see the flowers and shaws and
apples on the poor man's plant, the life-sustaining potato--which none
but political economists hate and all Christians love. She is not so
sure about turnips, but as they are a green crop she leaves them to the
care of the fly. But where have her gowans gone? There they still are in
flocks, which no cultivation can scatter or eradicate--inextinguishable
by all the lime that was ever brought unslokened from all the kilns that
ever glowed--by all the dung that was ever heaped up fresh and fuming
from all the Augean stables in the land. Yet her heart burns within her
to behold, even in the midst of what she abhors, the large dew-loved
heads of clover whitening or reddening, or with their rival colours
amicably intermingled, a new birth glorious in the place of reedy marish
or fen where the catspaws nodded--and them she will retain unto herself
when once more she shall rejoice in her Wilderness Restored.
And would we be so barbarous as to seek to impede the progress of
improvement, and to render agriculture a dead letter? We are not so
barbarous, nor yet so savage. We love civilised life, of which we have
long been one of the smaller but sincerest ornaments. But agriculture,
like education, has its bounds. It is, like it, a science, and woe to
the country that encourages all kinds of quacks. Cultivate a moor!
educate a boor! First understand the character of Clods and Clodhoppers.
To say nothing now of the Urbans and Suburbans--a perilous people--yet
of great capabilities; for to discuss that question would lead us into
lanes; and as it is a long lane that has never a turning, for the
present we keep in the open air, and abstain from wynds. We are no
enemies to poor soils, far less to rich ones ignorantly and stupidly
called poor, which under proper treatment effuse riches; but to expect
to extract from paupers _a return_ for the expenditure squandered by
miserly greed on their reluctant bottoms, cold and bare, is the insanity
of speculation, and such schemers deserve being buried along with their
capital in quagmires. Heavens! how they--the quagmires--suck in the
dung! You say they don't suck it in--well, then, they spew it out--it
evaporates--and what is the worth of weeds? Lime whitens a moss, that is
true, but so does snow. Snow melts--what becomes of lime no mortal knows
but the powheads--them it poisons, and they give up the ghost. Drains
are dug deep nowadays--and we respect Mr Johnstone. So are gold mines.
But from gold mines that precious metal--at a great expense, witness its
price--is exterred; in drains that precious metal, witness wages, is
interred, and then it becomes _squash_. Stirks starve--heifers are hove
with windy nothing--with oxen frogs compete in bulk with every prospect
of a successful issue, and on such pasturage where would be the virility
of the Bulls of Bashan?
If we be in error, we shall be forgiven at least by all lovers of the
past, and what to the elderly seems the olden time. Oh, misery for that
Moor! Hundreds, thousands, loved it as well as we did; for though it
grew no grain, many a glorious crop it bore--shadows that glided like
ghosts--the giants stalked--the dwarfs crept; yet sometimes were the
dwarfs more formidable than the giants, lying like blackamoors before
your very feet, and as you stumbled over them in the dark, throttling as
if they sought to strangle you, and then leaving you at your leisure to
wipe from your mouth the mire by the light of a straggling
star;--sunbeams that wrestled with the shadows in the gloom--sometimes
clean flung, and then they cowered into the heather, and insinuated
themselves into the earth; sometimes victorious, and then how they
capered in the lift, ere they shivered away--not always without a hymn
of thunder--in behind the clouds, to refresh themselves in their
tabernacle in the sky.
Won't you be done with this Moor, you monomaniac? Not for yet a little
while--for we see Kitty North all by himself in the heart of it, a boy
apparently about the age of twelve, and happy as the day is long, though
it is the Longest Day in all the year. Aimless he seems to be, but all
alive as a grasshopper, and is leaping like a two-year-old across the
hags. Were he to tumble in, what would become of the personage whom
Kean's Biographer would call "the future Christopher the First?" But no
fear of that--for at no period of his life did he ever overrate his
powers--and he knows now his bound to an inch. Cap, bonnet, hat, he has
none; and his yellow hair, dancing on his shoulders like a mane, gives
him the look of a precocious lion's whelp. Leonine too in his aspect,
yet mild withal; and but for a certain fierceness in his gambols, you
would not suspect he was a young creature of prey. A fowling-piece is in
his left hand, and in his right a rod. And what may he be purposing to
shoot? Anything full-fledged that may play whirr or sugh. Good
grouse-ground this; but many are yet in the egg, and the rest are but
cheepers--little bigger than the small brown moorland bird that goes
birling up with its own short epithalamium, and drops down on the rushes
still as a stone. Them he harms not on their short flight--but marking
them down, twirls his piece like a fugleman, and thinks of the Twelfth.
Safer methinks wilt thou be a score or two yards further off, O Whaup!
for though thy young are yet callow, Kit is beginning to think they may
shift for themselves; and that long bill and that long neck, and those
long legs and that long body--the _tout-ensemble_ so elegant, so
graceful, and so wild--are a strong temptation to the trigger;--click--
clack--whizz--phew--fire--smoke and thunder--head-over-heels topsy-turvy
goes the poor curlew--and Kit stands over him leaning on his
single-barrel, with a stern but somewhat sad aspect, exulting in his
skill, yet sorry for the creature whose wild cry will be heard no more.