It is Summer. Day is now at its longest, the season at its brightest;
and the heat comes down through the glowing heavens—broiling the sons of
labour, but whitening the fields for the harvest. Like hapless Semele,
consumed by the splendours of her divine lover, Earth seems about to
perish beneath the ardent glances of the God of Day. The sun comes
bowling from the Tropics to visit the Hyperboreans. The strange
phenomenon of the Polar day—when for six months he keeps careering
through the sky, without a single rising or setting, rolling like a
fiery ball along the edge of the horizon, glittering like a thousand
diamonds on the fields of ice—is now melting the snows that hide the
lichens, the rein-deer’s food; and, quivering down through the azure
shallows of the Greenland coast, infuses the fire of love and the lust
for roaming into the “scaly myriads” of the herring tribe.
On ourselves, the Summer sun is shining, glowing—robing in gold the
declining days of July, and taking her starry jewels from the crown of
Night—nay, lifting the diadem from her sable brow, and invading the
skies of midnight with his lingering beams. Oh, what a glory in those
evening skies! The sun, just set, brings out the summits of the far-off
hills sharp and black against his amber light: Nature is dreaming;
yonder sea is calm as if it had never known a storm. It is the hour of
Reverie: old memories, half-forgotten poetry, come floating like dreams
into the soul. We wander in thought to the lonely Greek Isle, where Juan
and Haidee are roaming with encircling arms upon the silvery sands, or
gaze in love’s reverie from the deserted banquet-room upon the
slumbering waters of the Ægean. We see the mariner resting on his oars
within the shadow of Ætna, and hear the “Ave Sanctissima” rising in
solemn cadence from the waveless sea. We stand beneath the lovely skies
of Italy—we rest on the woody slopes of the Apennines, where the bell of
some distant convent is proclaiming sundown, and the vesper hymn floats
on the rosy stillness, a vocal prayer.
“Ave Maria! blessed be the hour,
The time, the clime, the spot where I so oft
Have felt that moment in its fullest power
Sink o’er the earth so beautiful and soft;
While swung the deep bell in the distant tower,
And the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft;
While not a breath stole through the rosy air,
And yet the forest leaves seem’d stirr’d with prayer!”
Study is impossible in the Summer evenings—those long, clear, mellow
nights, when the Evening Star hangs like a diamond lamp in the amber
skies of the West, and the hushed air seems waiting for serenades. The
very charm of our Study is then our ruin. Whenever we lift our eyes from
the page, we look clear away, as from a lofty turret, upon the
ever-shifting glories of sunset, where far-off mountains form the magic
horizon, and a wide arm of the sea sleeps calmly between, reflecting the
skyey splendours. Our heart is not in our task. There is a vague
yearning within us, for happiness more ethereal than any we have yet
beheld, a happiness which the eye cannot figure, which only the soul can
feel—it is the Spirit dreaming of its immortal home. Now and then we
pause—the beauty without, half-unconsciously fixes upon itself our
dreamy gaze.
“Oh, Summer night!
So soft and bright!”
That air, that lovely serenade of Donizetti’s, seems floating in the
room. A sweet voice is singing it in my ear, in my heart. Ah, those old
times! I think of the hour when first I heard that strain, and of the
fair creature singing it—with the twilight shadows around us, and her
lip, that might have tempted an Angel, curling, half-proudly,
half-kindly, as “upon entreaty” she resumed the strain. I fall into
deeper reverie as I recollect it all—those evenings of entrancement,
those days of boyish pain and jealousy. And ever the melody comes
floating in through my brain, yet without attracting my thoughts—a
strain of sweetest sounds accompanying the dissolving views which are
dreamily, perpetually, forming and changing, gathering and dispersing,
before my mind’s eye, like the rose-clouds of sunset. Those shapes are
too ethereal for the mind to grasp them. Is it a Juno-like form, beneath
the skies and amid the flowers of Summer—with Zephyr playing among her
golden curls, as she lifts from her neck a hair-chain to yield it to the
suit of love! Or is it a zigzag path on a hill-side—a steed backing on a
precipice—a lovely girl on the green bank, clinging to her
preserver—sinking, swooning, quivering from that vision of sudden death!
Who shall daguerreotype those airy shapes? We feel their presence rather
than know their form, and the instant we try to see what we are seeing,
they are gone!
We are no bad risers in the morning, but we never saw the sun rise on
Midsummerday but once. It is many years ago, yet we remember it as
vividly as if it had been this morning. It was from the summit of the
Calton Hill, the unfinished Acropolis, the still-born ruin of Modern
Athens. The whole sky in the south and west, opposite to where the sun
was about to appear, was suffused from the horizon to the zenith with a
deep pink or rose hue; and in the midst, spanning the heavens, stood a
magnificent Rainbow! A symbol of peace in a sea of blood! There lay the
palatial edifices of the New Town, white and still in the hush of early
morning, and high above them and around them rose that strange emblem of
mercy amid judgment. Such an apparition might fitly have filled the
skies of the Cities of the Plain on that woeful morn, the last the
blessed sun ever rose upon them;—ere amid mutterings in the earth and
thunders in the clouds, the volcano awoke from its sleep, and the red
lava poured from its sources of fire—when clouds of stones and ashes,
falling, falling, falling, gathered deeper and deeper above the Plain,
and the descending lightnings set fire to the thousand founts of naphtha
bubbling up from their subterranean reservoirs—when a whirlwind of flame
shot up against the face of the sky, like the last blasphemy of a
godless world; and with a hollow groaning, the sinking, convulsed earth
hid the scene of pollution and wrath beneath the ever mournful-looking
waters of the Dead Sea. The skies of night and morning are familiar to
me as those of day, but never but that once did that Heavenly Spectre
meet my eye.
As I reached the northern brow of the hill, it wanted but a minute or
two of sunrise; in a few seconds a new Day would dawn—a flake would
separate itself from the infinite Future, and be born into the world. I
stood awaiting the Incarnation of Time. A flapping wing broke on the
solemn stillness. Two rooks rose slowly from the ground, where they had
been preying upon the tenants of the turf. Below me, to the east and
north, spread out the waters of the Firth of Forth—not a billow breaking
against its rocky islets—its broad expanse of the colour of lead, sombre
and waveless, like the lifeless waters of the Asphaltite Sea; while,
toiling like an imp of darkness, a small steam-boat tore up its
leaden-like surface, disappearing behind the house-tops of Leith. The
spirits of night seemed hurrying to their dens, to escape the golden
arrows of the God of Day. In the bowery gardens below me, the birds
began an overture as the curtain of the Dawn was lifting. At length the
sun shot up into the sky; then seemed to pause for some time, his lower
limb resting on the dark sea, his upper almost touching a bank of
overhanging cloud. Pale tremulous rays, like those of the aurora
borealis, darted laterally from the orb, shooting quiveringly along the
sky, and returning: the waves of light were ebbing and flowing on the
sands of Night. The sea and the slopes of the Calton still lay in the
dull hues of dawn; but a strange cold sun-gleam which one felt
instinctively would be short-lived, glittered around me on the crest of
the hill, and on the white stone monuments that crown it as with a
diadem. Foremost and loftiest rose the noble columns of the National
Monument, even in their imperfection the most Grecian of British
edifices, standing aloft like the ruins of Minerva’s temple on the bluff
Cape of Sunium, visible from afar to mariners entering the romantic Bay
of the Forth. The glitter which now tinged them with gold was bright and
brief as the national fervour which gave them birth. In a few minutes
the sun passed up behind the bank of cloud, and nothing remained of his
beams but a golden streak on the far edge of the waters.
Fair Summer has come, and the ocean wooes us. Breaking her ward, she has
leapt like a lovely Bacchante to our arms; while men who have been
“sighing like furnace” for her, and chiding the dull delay of her
coming, now fly from her embraces into the sea—plunge into the haunts of
the Nereids. In what “infernal machines” do they go a-wooing! And yet
they appear to have every confidence in their natural powers of
attraction; the Nereids run no danger of being deceived as to the
_physique_ of their human admirers. Queer fishes some of them are
certainly! Only look at yon big fat old fellow, for all the world like a
skinned porpoise, floundering and blowing in the shallows like a
stranded whale! while another more modest animal, of like dimensions,
floats like cork or blubber in deep water, thumping energetically with
leg and arm, and hides obesity in a cataract of foam. Yonder, over the
clear blue depths, breasting at his ease the flood, goes the long steady
stroke of the practised swimmer—an animal half-amphibious, seen at times
afar off, lifting on the crest of a wave a mile at sea. With laugh and
splutter a band of juveniles rub their heads with water in the most
approved manner, as if they were a set of old topers afraid of apoplexy;
or with whoop and hollo engage in a water-combat, or in a race in
bunting that reminds one of running in sacks; while a still younger
member of the human family roars lustily as he clings to his pitiless
nurse’s neck, or emerges half-suffocated from the prescriptive
thrice-repeated dip. Yet there is something gladsome in the flash of the
waters around the sportive bathers, and in the glancing glitter of the
sun-beams on the ivory-like arms that are swaying to and fro upon the
blue waters. It speaks of Summer; and that of itself awakens gladness.
As we look upon the earth in a glorious summer-day, we feel as if all
nature loved us, and that a spirit within is answering to the loving
call of the outer world. We feel as if _caressed_ by the beauty floating
around—as if the mission of nature were to delight us. And it is so. It
was to be a joy for Man that this glorious world sprang out of Chaos,
and it was to enjoy it that we were gifted with our many senses of
beauty. How narrow the enjoyment of the body to the domain of the
spirit! The possessions and enjoyments of man consist less in the acres
we can win from our fellows, than in the wide universe around us.
Creature-comforts are unequally divided, but the charm of existence, the
joy that rays from all nature, are the property of all. Who can set a
price upon the colours of the rose or the hues of sunset? Yet, would the
Vernon Gallery be an adequate exchange? Water and air, prime necessaries
of physical life, are not more free to all, than is its best and highest
food everywhere accessible to the spirit. What we want is, to rub the
dust of the earth off our souls, and let them mirror the beauty of the
universe. What we want is, to open the nature within to the nature
without—to clear the mind from ignorance, the heart from prejudice. We
must learn to see things as they are—to find beauty in nature, love in
man, good everywhere; not to shut our eyes or look through a distorting
medium. We scramble for the crumbs of worldly success, and too often
have neglected the higher delights that are free to our taking. Like the
groveller in the Pilgrim’s Progress, we rake amid straws on the ground,
when a crown of joy is ready to descend upon us if we will only look up.
We turn aside the river from its bed, and toil in the sand for golden
dust, destroying happiness in the search for its symbol, and forget that
the world itself may be made golden, that the art of the Alchemist may
be ours. The true sunshine of life is in the heart. It is there that the
smile is born that makes the light of life, the rosy smile that makes
the world of beauty, and keeps life sweet—the smile that “makes a summer
where darkness else would be.”
We are in one of the pretty lanes of England. The smoke of a great city
is beginning to curl up into the morning skies, but the sounds of that
wakening Babylon cannot reach us in our green seclusion. As we step
along lightly, cheerily, in the cool sunlight, hark to the glad voices
of children; and lo! a cottage-home, sweeter-looking than any we have
yet passed. Honeysuckles and jessamine wreathe the wooden trellis of the
porch with verdure and flowers. In those flowers the early bee is
hanging and humming, birds are chirping aloft, and cherubs are singing
below. An urchin, with his yellow curls half-blinding his big blue eyes,
sits on the sunny gravelwalk, playing with a frisky, red-collared
kitten. On the steps of the door, beneath the shade of the trellis-work,
sit two girls, a lapful of white roses before them, which they are
gathering into a bouquet, or sticking into each other’s hair. What are
they singing?
Come, come, come! Oh, the merry Summer morn!
From dewy slumbers breaking,
Birds and flowers are waking.
Come, come, come! and leave our beds forlorn!
Hark, hark, hark! I hear our playmates call!
Hurrah! for merry rambles!
Morn is the time for gambols.
Yes, yes, yes! Let’s go a-roving all!
Haste, haste, haste! To woodland dells away!
There flowers for us are springing,
And little birds are singing—
“Come, come, come! Good-morrow! come away!”
A wiseacre lately remarked, as a proof of the _sober sense_ of the age,
that no one now sang about the happiness of childhood! _Sombre_ sense,
he should have said,—if he misused the word “sense” at all. No
happiness,—nay, no peculiar happiness in childhood! Does he mean to
maintain that we get happier as we get older?—that life, at the age of
Methuselah, is as joyous as at fifteen? Has novelty, which charms in all
the details of existence, no charm in existence itself? Is
suspicion—that infallible growth of years, that baneful result of
knowledge of the world—no damper on happiness? Is innocence nothing? Is
_ennui_ known to the young? No, no!
Youth is the summer of life; it is the very heyday of joy,—the poetry of
existence. Youth beholds everything through a golden medium,—through the
prism of fancy, not in the glass of reason; in the rose hue of idealism,
not the naked forms that we call reality.
“All that’s bright must fade,
The brightest still the fleetest!”
We have but to look around us and within us to see the sad truth
exemplified. Summer is fading with its roses—Youth vanishes with its
dreams. “Passing away” is written on all things earthly. Yet “a thing of
beauty is a joy for ever.” We have a compensating faculty, which gives
immortality to the mortal in the cells of memory; the joys of which Time
has robbed us still live on in perennial youth. Nay, more, they live
unmarred by the sorrows that in actual life grow up along with them. As
the colours of fancy fade from the Present, they gather in brighter
radiance around the Past. We conserve the roses of Summer—let us embalm
the memories of Youth.