Science, true daughter of old Time thou art,
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes!
Why prey’st thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee, or how deem thee wise
Who wouldst not leave him, in his wandering,
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana, from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood?
Hast thou not spoilt a story in each star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood?
The elfin from the grass?—the dainty _fay_,
The witch, the sprite, the goblin—where are they?
_Anon._
“La musique,” says Marmontel, with the same odd confusion of thought and
language which leads him to give his very equivocal narratives the title
of “_Contes Moraux_”—“la musique est le seul des talens qui jouissent
de lui même; tous les autres veulent des temoins.” He here confounds the
pleasure derivable from sweet sounds with the capacity for creating
them. No more than any other _talent_, is that for music susceptible of
complete enjoyment, where there is no second party to appreciate its
exercise. And it is only in common with other talents that it produces
_effects_ which may be fully enjoyed in solitude. The idea which the
_raconteur_ has either failed to entertain clearly, or has sacrificed,
in its expression, to his national love of _point_, is, doubtless, the
very tenable one that the higher order of music is the most thoroughly
estimated when we are the most exclusively alone. The proposition, in
this form, will be admitted at once by those who love the lyre for its
own sake, and for its spiritual uses. But there is one pleasure still
within the reach of fallen mortality—and perhaps only one—which owes
even more than does music to the accessory sentiment of seclusion. I
mean the happiness experienced in the contemplation of natural scenery.
In truth, the man who would behold aright the glory of God upon earth
must in solitude behold that glory. To me, at least, the presence—not
of human life only—but of life in any other form than that of the green
things which grow upon the soil and are voiceless—is a stain upon the
landscape—is at war with the genius of the scene. I love, indeed, to
regard the dark valleys, and the grey rocks, and the waters that
silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the
proud watchful mountains that look down upon all—I love to regard these
as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient
whole—a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and
the most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose
meek handmaiden is the moon; whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose
life is eternity; whose intelligence is that of a God; whose enjoyment
is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity; whose cognizance of
ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculæ in crystal,
or of those which infest the brain—a being which we, in consequence,
regard as purely inanimate and material, much in the same manner as
these animalculæ must thus regard us.
Our telescopes, and our mathematical investigations assure us on every
hand—notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the
priesthood—that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important
consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars
move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the
greatest possible number of bodies. The forms of these bodies are
accurately such as, within a given surface, to include the greatest
possible amount of matter;—while the surfaces themselves are so
disposed as to accommodate a denser population than could be
accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged. Nor is it any
argument against bulk being an object with God, that space itself is
infinite; for there may be an infinity of matter to fill it. And since
we see clearly that the endowment of matter with vitality is a
principle—indeed as far as our judgments extend, the _leading_
principle—in the operations of Deity—it is scarcely logical to imagine
that it is confined to the regions of the minute, where we daily trace
it, and that it does not extend to those of the august. As we find cycle
within cycle without end—yet all revolving around one far-distant
centre which is the God-head, may we not analogically suppose, in the
same manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all
within the Spirit Divine? In short, we are madly erring, through
self-esteem, in believing man, in either his temporal or future
destinies, to be of more moment in the universe than that vast “clod of
the valley” which he tills and contemns, and to which he denies a soul
for no more profound reason than that he does not behold its operation.
These fancies, and such as these, have always given to my meditations
among the mountains, and the forests, by the rivers and the ocean, a
tinge of what the every-day world would not fail to term the fantastic.
My wanderings amid such scenes have been many, and far-searching, and
often solitary; and the interest with which I have strayed through many
a dim deep valley, or gazed into the reflected Heaven of many a bright
lake, has been an interest greatly deepened by the thought that I have
strayed and gazed _alone_. What flippant Frenchman was it who said, in
allusion to the well-known work of Zimmerman, that “_la solitude est une
belle chose; mais il faut quelqu ’un pour vous dire que la solitude est
une belle chose_?” The epigram cannot be gainsayed; but the necessity is
a thing that does not exist.
It was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far-distant region of
mountain locked within mountain, and sad rivers and melancholy tarns
writhing or sleeping within all—that I chanced upon the rivulet and the
island which are the subject of our engraving. I came upon them suddenly
in the leafy June, and threw myself upon the turf, beneath the branches
of an unknown odorous shrub, that I might doze as I contemplated the
scene. I felt that thus only should I look upon it, such was the
character of phantasm which it wore.
On all sides—save to the west, where the sun was about sinking—arose
the verdant walls of the forest. The little river, which turned sharply
in its course, and was thus immediately lost to sight, seemed to have no
exit from its prison, but to be absorbed by the deep green foliage of
the trees to the east—while in the opposite quarter (so it appeared to
me as I lay at length and glanced upward) there poured down noiselessly
and continuously into the valley, a rich, golden and crimson waterfall
from the sun-set fountains of the sky.
About midway in the short vista which my dreamy vision took in, one
small circular island, fantastically verdured, reposed upon the bosom of
the stream.
So blended bank and shadow there,
That each seemed pendulous in air—
so mirror-like was the glassy water, that it was scarcely possible to
say at what point upon the slope of the emerald turf its crystal
dominion began.
My position enabled me to include in a single view both the eastern and
western extremities of the islet; and I observed a singularly-marked
difference in their aspects. The latter was all one radiant harem of
garden beauties. It glowed and blushed beneath the eye of the slant
sunlight, and fairly laughed with flowers. The grass was short, springy,
sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed. The trees were lithe,
mirthful, erect—bright, slender and graceful—of eastern figure and
foliage, with bark smooth, glossy, and particolored. There seemed a deep
sense of life and of joy about all; and although no airs blew from out
the Heavens, yet every thing had motion through the gentle sweepings to
and fro of innumerable butterflies, that might have been mistaken for
tulips with wings.[1]
The other, or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the blackest shade.
A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom here pervaded all things. The
trees were dark in color and mournful in form and attitude—wreathing
themselves into sad, solemn, and spectral shapes, that conveyed ideas of
mortal sorrow and untimely death. The grass wore the deep tint of the
cypress, and the heads of its blades hung droopingly, and, hither and
thither among it, were many small unsightly hillocks, low, and narrow,
and not very long, that had the aspect of graves, but were not, although
over and all about them the rue and the rosemary clambered. The shade of
the trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed to bury itself
therein, impregnating the depths of the element with darkness. I fancied
that each shadow, as the sun descended lower and lower, separated itself
sullenly from the trunk that gave it birth, and thus became absorbed by
the stream; while other shadows issued momently from the trees, taking
the place of their predecessors entombed.
This idea, having once seized upon my fancy, greatly excited it, and I
lost myself forthwith in reverie. “If ever island were enchanted,”—said
I to myself,—“this is it. This is the haunt of the few gentle Fays who
remain from the wreck of the race. Are these green tombs theirs?—or do
they yield up at all their sweet lives as mankind yield up their own? In
dying, do they not rather waste away mournfully; rendering unto God
their existence little by little, as these trees render up shadow after
shadow, exhausting their substances unto dissolution? What the wasting
tree is to the water that imbibes its shade, growing thus blacker by
what it preys upon, may not the life of the Fay be to the Death which
engulfs it?—but what fairy-like form is this which glides so solemnly
along the water?”
As I thus mused, with half-shut eyes, while the sun rapidly sank to
rest, and eddying currents careered round and round the island, bearing
upon their bosom large, dazzling white flakes of the bark of the
sycamore—flakes which, in their multiform positions upon the water, a
quick imagination might have converted into anything it pleased—while I
thus mused, it appeared to me that the form of one of those very Fays
about whom I had been pondering, made its way slowly into the darkness
from out the light at the western end of the island. She stood erect in
a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom of an
oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams, her attitude
seemed indicative of joy—but sorrow deformed it as she passed within
the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at length rounded the islet and
re-entered the region of light. “The revolution which has just been made
by the Fay,”—continued I musingly—“is the cycle of the brief year of
her life. She has floated through her winter and through her summer. She
is a year nearer to Death; for I did not fail to see that as she came
into the shade, her shadow fell from her, and was swallowed up in the
dark water, making its blackness more black.”
And again the boat appeared, and the Fay;—but about the attitude of the
latter there was more of care and uncertainty, and less of elastic joy.
She floated again from out the light, and into the gloom, (which
deepened momently) and again her shadow fell from her into the ebony
water, and became absorbed into its blackness. And again and again she
made the circuit of the island, (while the sun rushed down to his
slumbers;) and at each issuing forth into the light, there was more
sorrow about her person, while it grew feebler, and far fainter, and
more indistinct; and at each passage into the gloom, there fell from her
a darker shade, which became whelmed in a shadow more black. But at
length, when the sun had utterly departed, the Fay, now the mere ghost
of her former self, went disconsolately with her boat into the region of
the ebony flood—and that she issued thence at all I cannot say,—for
darkness fell over all things, and I beheld her magical figure no more.
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[1] Florem putares nare per liquidum æthera.—_P. Commire._
Philadelphia, May, 1841.
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