A Wet February--A Good Time Coming--Sir Walter
Scott--Mr. Gladstone--Death of Sir David Brewster.
One swallow doesn't make a summer, says the proverb, and unless
one fine day (the 19th) makes a spring, we haven't for the last
six weeks [February 1870] and more had a single hour of a character
to be disassociated from one of the wettest and wildest winters on
record. No sooner has one storm died away, less from any voluntary
cessation on its part than from sheer exhaustion of its forces, than,
after a slushy, sludgy interregnum of brief duration, it has been
succeeded in every instance by another and another still of equal
or greater violence and fury, so that of quiet or calm we have known
little, and of sun or moon or stars we have seen hardly the briefest
glimpse since Old New Year's Day. When Foote, the incomparable comedian
(Johnson said of him that "the dog was irresistible"), after acquiring
and dissipating several fortunes, was at last lucky enough to be able
to set up his carriage in a more dashing style than ever, he selected
as his motto, and emblematical of his career, the words Iterum,
Iterum, Iterumque! (Again, and Again, and Again!) It has struck us
that if the Meteorological Society were to apply to the Herald's
College for a crest and armorial bearings to be displayed on the
title-page of their volume of "Transactions" for the first quarter
of the current year, we, should they do us the honour to consult us,
would suggest a cloud-cumulus, rain-surcharged, proper on the shield,
with Aquarius and the "watery" Hyades as supporters; Eolus ordering
"a fresh hand to the bellows" as a crest, and the Iterum, Iterum,
Iterumque of Foote's chariot as a motto of singular appropriateness
and meaning. How delighted, by the way, must our amphibious friend
Mr. Symons be in the midst of all this rainfall! His crest again
should be a man's head on a fish's body in an overflowed meadow,
natant, and his supporters an anemometer and rain-gauge proper! It is
needless to say that anything like spring work is with us not only in
a very backward state, but has hardly been commenced. Before the end
of February we had our own corn seed and potatoes in the ground last
year. If we get them down this year any time during the next month,
it will be earlier than the weather at the date of the present writing
promises. Our ornithological studies extend over a greater number of
years than we care at this moment very accurately to count; but never
have we known our wild-birds so listless and loveless on Shrovetide Eve
as they are this season. Except an occasional carol from the wren, who
has a soul as big as that of his namesake Sir Christopher, who built
the dome of St. Paul's (the wren also, by the way, is a dome-builder),
and an irregular strophe at rare intervals from the redbreast, our
woods are songless, and of nidification there is not a sign. Meliora
sperare, nevertheless, is sound philosophy. Let us hope for better
things: He is faithful that promised that while the earth remaineth,
seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and
day and night, shall not cease. Scott has few finer passages than the
following, which we are fond of repeating in such a season as this. It
occurs in his epistle to William Stewart Rose, introductory to the
first canto of Marmion, and, though very beautiful, is seldom quoted:--
"No longer Autumn's glowing red
Upon our Forest hills is shed;
No more, beneath the evening beam,
Fair Tweed reflects their purple gleam;
Away hath passed the heather bell
That bloomed so rich on Needpath fell;
Sallow his brow, and russet bare
Are now the sister-heights of Yair.
The sheep, before the pinching heaven,
To sheltered dale and down are driven,
Where yet some faded herbage pines
And yet a watery sunbeam shines:
In meek despondency they eye
The wither'd sward and wintry sky,
And far beneath their summer hill
Stray sadly by Glenkinnon's rill:
The shepherd shifts his mantle's fold,
And wraps him closer from the cold;
His dogs no merry circles wheel,
But, shivering, follow at his heel;
A cowering glance they often cast,
As deeper moans the gathering blast.
"My imps, though hardy, bold, and wild,
As best befits the mountain child,
Feel the sad influence of the hour,
And wail the daisy's vanished flower;
Their summer gambols tell, and mourn,
And anxious ask--Will spring return,
And birds and lambs again be gay,
And blossoms clothe the hawthorn spray?
"Yes, prattlers, yes. The daisy's flower
Again shall paint your summer bower;
Again the hawthorn shall supply
The garlands you delight to tie;
The lambs upon the lea shall bound,
The wild birds carol to the round;
And while you frolic light as they,
Too short shall seem the summer day."
On her rich roll of worthies, Scotland has but few names of whom
she has more reason to be proud than that of Walter Scott. If we
had even said not one, an objector might perhaps find the assertion
more difficult to disprove than he wots of. Nor has the star of his
marvellous power and influence for good set or been extinguished; it
has only been clouded for a season by the intervention of exhalations
of the "earth, earthy"--exhalations that the growth of a healthier
and holier taste is already dissipating, and the Wizard's star shall
reappear in undiminished lustre, and young and old will clap their
hands and rejoice in its purity and power. Some years ago arose a
school of poetry that flared and flickered for a season, and found
admirers on the same mysterious principle, we suppose, that Antoinetta
Bourignon and Joanna Southcott found followers. It was happily styled
the "spasmodic" school; and it died and disappeared--the best thing it
could do. A new school has succeeded, that may be called the sensuous,
and, we had almost said, the lascivious, and with a strong tendency
to the reproduction in modern guise of all that was worst and best
in the ancient Greek drama. Of this school, Mr. Swinburne is, facile
princeps, the chief. It also will last but for a season, and will
die and disappear ignominiously, as did its predecessor. There is
yet another school, that has existed for some time longer--full of
missyism, sentimentalism, and languid goodyism--"too good for banning,
too bad for a blessing." It also is slowly dwindling, and dwining,
and dying, and must soon expire, leaving people hardly any better
or worse than it found them. And so with the novels of the day,
with their "sensations," their seductions, murders, and unspeakable
horrors, worse than were mingled in the bubbling cauldron of the
witches in Macbeth: their day is doomed; for purer taste, banished
but for a moment, must reappear--is already reappearing--and people,
awakening as if from a dream, will once again consent to quench their
thirst at healthier fountains, and to wander in less questionable
bye-paths. The poetry and novels of Scott will then resume their
attraction and reassert their influence and power; and whithersoever
he leads, no parent need be ashamed to follow, or feel obliged in the
interests of morality to forbid and forego the companionship of wife
or children through scenes where there is everything to delight and
nothing to offend. It is well that in the world of poetry and fiction,
as in social and political affairs, the maxim holds true that--
"Res nolunt diu male administrari."
Of Mr. Gladstone, the politician, there are many more enthusiastic
admirers than ourselves, though we would not willingly be supposed to
yield to any one in our ardent admiration of his ripe scholarship and
unrivalled eloquence; but we shall think better of him while we live,
and have a kindlier and warmer interest in all he says and does,
on account of his recent eulogium on the character and writings of
Sir Walter Scott.
And who can speak of Scott, or think of Abbotsford and Melrose and
the classic Tweed at the present moment, without also thinking of
Allerly and Sir David Brewster, one of the greatest men of science
that Scotland has ever produced; and greater far, as sometimes happens
in such cases, out of it than in it, for during full forty years,
wherever, throughout the habitable parts of the earth, science had
lit her lamp and could count her votaries, however humble, there
the name of David Brewster was familiar as a household word, and his
discoveries known and applauded. He was the first really distinguished
man of letters and science we ever knew, and it was while writing one
of the earlier chapters of this work, on a subject in which he felt
the keenest interest, and in connection with which we had occasion
to mention his name, that the grand old man, venerable in honours
and in years, was breathing his last, with a Christian resignation
to the Divine will, and a Christian's joyful faith in the Divine
mercy and goodness. Passing through the valley of death, he feared
no evil, for his Lord and Saviour sustained his steps. Through the
first Lady Brewster (née Macpherson), to whom we had the honour of
being known before we had yet seen her distinguished husband, we
were fortunate enough to be admitted, at the very beginning of our
curriculum at college, to a degree of familiarity with the Principal
of our University, that our relative positions would not otherwise have
warranted, and which we have the satisfaction to remember we had sense
enough to value highly and to be proud of even at that early age. It
was by his practised hand that the instrument was adjusted through
which we had our first view of two of the most beautiful sights that
the telescope reveals to us--Jupiter with his belts and retinue of
attendant moons, and Saturn with his rings; and very patient and
good-natured and kindly were his replies to our eager questionings
with regard to the nature of the wonders then first opened to our
gaze. Sir David, if forced into it, could fight, and never turned
his back on an assailant. If you hit him, he hit again, and he always
hit severely; but he was, notwithstanding, a man of kindest heart and
most amiable disposition, and it would be difficult to meet with any
one more cheerful or courteous or pleasant within the circle of his
own family and in his daily intercourse with his acquaintances and
friends. Requiescat in pace: he was in truth a great man. Not often
does it happen that in the same country, and within so short a time
of each other, two such stars so large and lustrous as Faraday and
Brewster have disappeared from the firmament of science. A century may
elapse ere the thrones they have left vacant shall again be adequately
filled. There is something extremely beautiful and affecting in one
of Sir David Brewster's last utterances upon earth. On the morning
of his death, Sir James Simpson, standing by his bedside, remarked
that it had been given to him to show forth much of God's great and
marvellous works; and the dying philosopher solemnly and quietly
replied, "Yes, I have found them to be great and marvellous, and I
have found and felt them to be His."