Next morning, when he rose to go
A-fishing, and his wife still slept,
He stole
The seal-skin from that secret hole
Where he had kept
It, and flung it on a chair,
Saying, “She will be glad to find it there
To-day
When I am gone,
And yet
Perhaps she will not put it on,”
He said, “Nor go away.”
In sleeping his wife wept;
Then the Fisherman took his net
And crept
Into the chill air.
The night drew on—the air was still,
Homeward the fisher climbed the hill.
All day he’d thought, “She will not go;”
And now, “She has not,” pondered he.
“She is not gone,” he said, “I know,
There is a lamp in our window,
Put ready on the sill
To guide me home, and I shall see
The dear light glimmering presently,
Just as I round the hill.”
But when he turn’d, there was no light
To guide him homeward through the night.
Then, “I am late,” he said,
“And maybe she was weary
Looking so long for me.
She lays the little ones in bed
Well content,
In the inner room where I shall find her,
And where she went,
Forgetting to leave the light behind her.”
So he came to his cottage door,
And threw it open wide;
But stood a breathing space, before
He dared to look inside.
No fire was in the fireplace, nor
A light on any side;
But a little heap lay on the floor,
And the voice of a baby cried.
Rocking and moaning on the floor,
That little heap
Was the children, tired with crying,
Trying to sleep,
Moaning and rocking to and fro;
But Baby Willie hindered the trying
By wailing so.
Then “Wife! wife!” said the Fisherman,
“Come from the inner room.”
There was no answer, and he ran
Searching into the gloom.
“Wife! wife! why don’t you come?
The children want you, and I’ve come home.”
“Mammy’s gone, Daddy,” said Harry—
“Gone into the sea;
She’ll never come back to carry
Tired Baby Willie.
It’s no use now, Daddy, looking about;
I can tell you just how it all fell out.
“There was a seal-skin
In the kitchen—
A little crumpled thing;
I can’t think how it came there;
But this morning
Mammy found it on a chair,
And when she began
To feel it, she dropped
It on the floor—
But snatch’d it up again and ran
Straight out at the door,
And never stopped
Till she-reach’d the shore.
“Then we three, Daddy,
Ran after, crying, ‘Take us to the sea!
Wait for us, Mammy, we are coming too!
Here’s Alice, Willie can’t keep up with you!
Mammy, stop—just for a minute or two!’
But Alice said, ‘Maybe
She’s making us a boat
Out of the seal-skin cleverly,
And by-and-by she’ll float
It on the water from the sands
For us.’ Then Willie clapt his hands
And shouted, ‘Run on, Mammy, to the sea,
And we are coming, Willie understands.’
“At last we came to where the hill
Slopes straight down to the beach,
And there we stood all breathless, still,
Fast clinging each to each.
We saw her sitting upon a stone,
Putting the little seal-skin on.
Oh! Mammy! Mammy!
She never said good-bye, Daddy,
She didn’t kiss us three;
She just put the little seal-skin on,
And slipped into the sea!
Oh! Mammy’s gone, Daddy; Mammy’s gone!
She slipp’d into the sea!”
A SURPRISE.
“SHE is dead!” they said to him. “Come away;
Kiss her! and leave her!—thy love is clay!”
They smoothed her tresses of dark brown hair;
On her forehead of stone they laid it fair:
Over her eyes, which gazed too much,
They drew the lids with a gentle touch;
With a tender touch they closed up well
The sweet thin lips that had secrets to tell;
About her brows, and her dear, pale face
They tied her veil and her marriage-lace;
And drew on her white feet her white silk shoes;—
Which were the whiter no eye could choose!
And over her bosom they crossed her hands;
“Come away,” they said,—“God understands!”
And then there was Silence;—and nothing there
But the Silence—and scents of eglantere,
And jasmine, and roses, and rosemary;
For they said, “As a lady should lie, lies she!”
And they held their breath as they left the room,
With a shudder to glance at its stillness and gloom.
But he—who loved her too well to dread
The sweet, the stately, the beautiful dead,—
He lit his lamp, and took the key,
And turn’d it!—Alone again—he and she!
He and she; but she would not speak,
Though he kiss’d, in the old place, the quiet cheek;
He and she; yet she would not smile,
Though he call’d her the name that was fondest erewhile.
He and she; and she did not move
To any one passionate whisper of love.
Then he said, “Cold lips! and breast without breath!
Is there no voice?—no language of death
“Dumb to the ear and still to the sense,
But to heart and to soul distinct,—intense?
“See, now,—I listen with soul, not ear—
What was the secret of dying, Dear?
“Was it the infinite wonder of all,
That you ever could let life’s flower fall?
“Or was it a greater marvel to feel
The perfect calm o’er the agony steal?
“Was the miracle greatest to find how deep,
Beyond all dreams, sank downward that sleep?
“Did life roll backward its record, Dear,
And show, as they say it does, past things clear?
“And was it the innermost heart of the bliss
To find out so what a wisdom love is?
“Oh, perfect Dead! oh, Dead most dear,
I hold the breath of my soul to hear;
“I listen—as deep as to horrible hell,
As high as to heaven!—and you do not tell!
“There must be pleasures in dying, Sweet,
To make you so placid from head to feet!
“I would tell you, Darling, if I were dead,
And ’twere your hot tears upon my brow shed.
“I would say, though the angel of death had laid
His sword on my lips to keep it unsaid.
“You should not ask, vainly, with streaming eyes,
Which in Death’s touch was the chiefest surprise;
“The very strangest and suddenest thing
Of all the surprises that dying must bring.”
* * * *
Ah! foolish world! Oh! most kind Dead!
Though he told me, who will believe it was said?
Who will believe that he heard her say,
With the soft rich voice, in the dear old way:—
“The utmost wonder is this,—I hear,
And see you, and love you, and kiss you, Dear;
“I can speak now you listen with soul, not ear;
If your soul could see, it would all be clear
“What a strange delicious amazement is Death,
To be without body and breathe without breath.
“I should laugh for joy if you did not cry;
Oh, listen! Love lasts!—Love never will die.
“I am only your Angel who was your Bride;
And I see, that though dead, I have never died.”
THE GLOAMING.
THE gloaming! the gloaming! “What is the gloaming?” was asked by some
honourable member of this honourable Society, when the word was chosen a
month ago. “Twilight,” was promptly answered by another honourable
member! And although the gloaming is undoubtedly _twilight_, is twilight
as undoubtedly the gloaming?—the gloaming of Burns, of Scott, the
gloaming so often referred to in our old Northern minstrelsy? The City
clerk on the knife-board of his familiar “bus,” soothing himself with a
fragrant Pickwick, after his ten hours’ labour in that turmoil and eddy
of restless humanity—the City—may see, as he rolls westward, the sun
slowly sinking and setting in its fiery grandeur behind the Marble Arch.
He may see the shades of evening stealing over the Park and the Bayswater
Road, and darkness settling softly over gentle Notting Hill; and he may
see, if there be no fog, or not too much smoke in the atmosphere to
prevent astronomical observations, the stars stealing out one by one in
the Heavens above him, as the gas-lamps are being lit in the streets
around him; but would that observant youth on his knife-board, with his
Pickwick, amidst the lamp-lights, in the roar of London, be justified in
describing what he had seen as “the gloaming?” I think not. Is not the
gloaming twilight only in certain localities, and under certain
conditions? Is not the gloaming chiefly confined to the North country,
or to mountainous districts? It is difficult to say where the gloaming
shall be called gloaming no more, and where twilight is just simple
twilight, and no gloaming; but surely there lives not the man who will
assert that he has seen a real gloaming effect in the _Tottenham Court
Road_, for instance!
Can it be applied to eventide in the flat fens of Lincolnshire and
Cambridgeshire? Does the gloaming ever fall on the manufacturing
districts of Yorkshire—Leeds, Sheffield, Huddersfield? Twilight in the
Potteries is surely twilight and no gloaming. May not, are not the
limits within which the latter word may be used as aptly describing
eventide, be the limits within which our old balladry sprung and
flourished? May not, are not the limits within which the word is wholly
inapplicable to describe the close of day, be the limits within which the
love of song was not so strongly developed—where external nature did not,
and does not suggest song, or poetry to the mind? Well, that definition
is quite enough for the present day, in which “hard and fast lines” are
at a discount! But there is still that awkward question, “What is the
gloaming?” And what is there in the gloaming that distinguishes it from
that which is twilight merely? To answer that with any hope of conveying
any sense of the difference which undoubtedly _does_ exist, is a matter
which is beyond the capacity of any one not being a Ruskin. As to
_define_ the gloaming is beyond the powers of ordinary mortals, and as
ostracism is threatened if I do not do something—as I am writing _in
terrorem_, and to save my pen-and-pencil existence, which is hanging on
this slender thread—I will, in default of being able to do better, give
my own experiences of a real “GLOAMING.”
Time of year—the end of August. Locality, _not_ the Tottenham Court
Road, but one of the northernmost points of the Northumberland border—a
wild, rough, hard land—the fighting ground, for centuries upon centuries,
first of the old Romans, and then of our own border laddies, who held it
against the “rieving Scots”—a land over which the famous Sixth Legion has
marched—a land which has seen Hotspur fight and Douglas fall—a land where
almost every hillside and burn has its legend and ballad—a land on which
one would reasonably expect to see the gloaming, as distinguished from
twilight, fall! I had had ten days walking after wild grouse—tramping
through the heather, generally dripping wet, for the Scotch mist did not
observe or keep the border line, worse luck to it. At last a fine day,
and a long tramp on the moors. At the close of it, having first walked
enough over the soft moss and young heather to make me exult in the grand
condition for exercise which ten days’ hill air will give, I separated
from my party to try for a snipe down by a little tarn, lying in the
midst of a “faded bent” in the moor, intending to tramp home afterwards
in my own company—and in my own company it _was_ that I had full
opportunity of studying the effect of the gloaming.
The sun was getting low as I separated from my party and walked up the
side of a long hill covered with old heather, moss, patches of grass,
patches of reeds, and bogs. It was a glorious scene! A sea of
moorland—wave over wave of undulating hill—rolled from me northward to
the foot of old Cheviot, whose long back, some twenty miles away, was lit
up by the brilliant sinking sun so clearly that I could distinguish the
gullies and inequalities in its time-honoured old sides. Wave over wave,
southward and westward, rolled those same moorland hills from my feet,
seemingly into the still more distant hills of Cumberland, and from north
to south, east to west, was a sea of purple heather in its fullest bloom,
lit up by the golden floods of light of the setting sun. In another five
minutes the sun had disappeared, and I was down by the side of the little
Tarn. Already the air, always fresh on the hills, became fresher; the
golden light was dying out of the sky; the blue of the Heaven above me
was darkening, the hills, a mass of purple sheen so few minutes ago,
stood out sharp and black against the sky; and so I started on my long
tramp home, watching the growth of the “gloaming.” There was still the
heather. I was still tramping through it, but its colour was gone. It
was now an expanse of purple blackness. More intensely dark became the
blue of the sky above me as the red streaks, still hovering over the
place where the sun had dipped, faded. Gradually, imperceptibly was
darkness spreading over everything; and as the darkness spread, the
stillness and sweetness of the “gloaming” made itself felt. The
stillness and freshness of the air, the mysterious blackness of the
hills; the startling white flashes of the little pools, in the moors,
looking as though they had absorbed light from somewhere, and were loth
to part with it; the faintly reflected colours of the fading sky given
back by the burns and streamlets which crossed my path, the whispering of
the reeds and long grass; the great grey boulders looming here and there
through the dark heather and bracken—boulders behind which at that hour
one could not help believing that Kelpies and Pixies were hiding, and
might dart out at any moment for some Tam-o’-Shanter frolic over the
moor—and the soft springy moss, grass, and heather, still under my feet
deadening all the sound of my tread. Light dying, fading, and darkness,
a rich purple darkness, spreading; and everywhere the scent of heather
bloom and stillness and freshness—freshness indescribable, a stillness
only broken by the call here and there of the scattered grouse; or the
soft rush of wings and whistling of golden plover far away over head; or
the cry of the lapwing—or the bark miles away of a collie dog; or the
dripping and murmuring and bubbling of the little burns in the gullies!
Light still dying away! What was left only “dealt a doubtful sense of
things not so much seen as felt.” And then it was that I realized what
Robert Burns had sung:—
“Gie me the hour o’ gloamin grey,
For it mak’s my heart sae cheery O.”
SKETCHES.
SKETCHES of life upon the slabs of death
Our loving hand on living stone indites:
Sketches of death upon the screens of life
Time, the great limner, for a warning writes.
Sketches of joy upon the face of sorrow,
Still credulous, our aching fingers trace:
Time steals the pencil, and with bitter scorn,
Sketches old sorrow on our young joy’s face.
E’en so our sketch of life is framed and fashion’d;
In vain with glowing touches we begin—
By day we work upon the light and colour,
Time comes by night and puts the shadows in.
SKETCHES.
A CONVERSATION.
KATEY.
“THERE! I have finished my sketch of the sloping field, and the misty
strip of woodland above, in its autumn dress, by putting you in in the
foreground, the only living thing in my misty-autumn picture; though,
after all, you don’t look much more than a brown spot on the green, with
your brown hat and skirt and your old brown book. I am much obliged to
it for keeping you still so long this misty morning. What is there in
it?”
“Sketches,” I answered. “Misty sketches like this of yours.” And I
stretched out my hand for my cousin’s drawing, while she looked over my
shoulder down on to the volume on my knee and uttered an exclamation of
surprise when her eye fell on nothing but black letters on a damp spotted
yellow page. “‘Treating of the four complexions, into which men are
bound during their sojourn in their earthly houses,’” she read aloud;
“what does it mean? Let me look on. ‘Of those that draw their
complexion from the dark and melancholy earth. Of those who take their
complexion from the friendly air. Of those who are complexioned after
the manner of fire. Of those who partake of the nature of the subtle and
yielding water;’ who writes this queer stuff; is it sense or nonsense?”
I held up the book that she might read the faded gilt letters on its
wormeaten leather back. “Letters of Jacob Böhme to John Schauffman and
others,” she read. “Oh!”—rather a doubtful “oh!” it was, as if the name
did not settle the question about sense or nonsense as completely as she
had expected it would.
“This is rather a rare book I flatter myself,” I went on. “I bought it
at a book-stall because it looked so odd and old, and found to my great
joy that it was a miscellaneous collection of Jacob Böhme’s letters, on
all sorts of subjects; the four that I have been reading this morning
about the four different temperaments, or, as he calls it, complexions
into which men may be divided, come in oddly enough among much more
mystical and transcendental matter. They are, as I said, misty sketches
of character, but I think they show that the dreamy old cobbler knew
something about his fellow-men.”
_K._ “What are Jacob Böhme’s writings like?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you that, I can only tell you what it makes one feel
like to read them. Something, as we should feel, you and I, if we
climbed up to that peak above the wood there, and looked down on the mist
in the valley now the sun is gilding it. We should have a vague feeling
of having got up on to a height, and perceived something glorious; but we
should not be able to give much account of what we had seen when we came
down.”
_K._ “But I hope you will be able to give me an account of what you have
been reading to-day. I want you to explain to me about the four
complexions as we walk home.”
“Well, I will try; these four letters have something in them that one can
get hold of and venture to put into fresh words. You must remember, to
begin with, that Böhme still held to there being only four
elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and thought that everything, our
bodies included, was made up of various proportions of these elemental
substances—the soul, a pure indivisible essence, he thinks of as living
imprisoned in these compound bodies. Shadowed and clouded and hindered
in its work by the material form that shuts it in from the true fount of
being; individualizing it and debasing it at the same time. Character,
according to him, depends upon the element that preponderates in the
composition of our bodies; our souls work through it and are more or less
free. His theory of the causes of differences of character may be ever
so foolish, yet I think the classification he draws from it is
interesting, and does somehow or other help us to understand ourselves
and our fellow-creatures a little better.”
_K._ “Let me see, he divides people into earth, air, fire, and water
people. What sort of character does he suppose the earth element colours
the soul with?”
“You are quite right to use the word _colour_, Böhme thinks of the
complexion, or, as we should say, the humour of a person, as of an
independent _atmosphere_ through which the soul works, but which is no
part of it. He speaks of souls shut up in the dark and melancholy earth
element; these are the silent, sensitive, brooding people, who find it
very difficult either to give out or receive impressions to or from their
fellow-creatures. They are shut up, and as the earth (so at least Böhme
says) draws a great deal more heat and light from the sun than it ever
gives back, and darkly absorbs and stores up heat within itself, so these
earth men and women, separated from their fellows, have the power of
drawing great enlightenment and deep warmth of love _direct_ from the
spiritual source of light and love. Religious enthusiasts are all of
this class; Böhme was an earth person himself, he says so; so was Dante
and John Bunyan, and all the other people one reads of who have had
terrible experiences in the depths of their own souls and ecstatic
visions to comfort them. Böhme says that the very best and the very
worst people are those shut in by the earth. They are the most
_individual_, the most thoroughly separated; if conquering this
hindrance, they re-absorb the Divine into themselves by _direct_ vision;
they rise to heights of wisdom, love, and self-sacrifice that no other
souls can reach; but if by pride and self-will they cut themselves from
spiritual influences, they remain solitary, dark, hungry, always striving
vainly to extract the light and warmth they want from some one or two of
their fellow-creatures, and being constantly disappointed, because, not
having the power of ray-ing out love, they can rarely attract it. They
are eaten up by a sad dark egotism. If they have a great deal of
intellect they throw themselves vehemently into some one pursuit or
study, and become great but never happy.”
_K._ “I am thankful to say I don’t know any earth people.”
“Nor do I, pure earth, but I think I have come across one or two with a
touch of earth in their temperaments. The air folk are much more common.
They are the eager inquisitive people, who want to get into everything
and understand everything, just as the air pervades and permeates all
creation. Great lovers of knowledge and scientific observers must always
be air people. Böhme thinks that in spite of their not being generally
very spiritual, they have the best chance of getting to heaven, because
of all classes they have most sympathy and are least shut up in
themselves, getting everywhere, like their element the air: they get into
the souls of others and understand them and live in them. Their
influence is of a very peculiar kind; not being very individual, they
don’t impress the people round them with a strong sense of their
personality; they are not loved passionately, and they don’t love
passionately, but people turn to them to be understood and helped, and
they are always benevolently ready to understand and help. They are
satisfied that their influence should be breathed like the air, without
being more recognized than the air: Shakespeare was, I expect, a typical
_air_ man. He had been everywhere, into all sorts of souls, peering
about, and understanding them all, and how little any one seems to have
known about himself! He was separated as little as possible from the
universal fount of Being.”
_K._ “Socrates was an air man too I suppose? Your air people would be
all philosophers.”
“More or less lovers of knowledge they must be; but remember that
temperament does not affect the quality of the soul itself, it is only
more or less of a hindrance. The peculiar faults of air people are, as
you will imagine, fickleness and coldness; their sympathy partakes of the
nature of curiosity, and they easily adapt themselves to changes of
circumstance; they can as easily live in one person as in another, and
the love of knowledge in little souls would degenerate into restless
curiosity and fussiness.”
_K._ “Would not Goethe be as good a type of the air temperament as
Shakespeare? He certainly had the besetting faults of the complexion,
fickleness and coldness.”
“Yes, but the great influence he exercised over his contemporaries,
points to his drawing something too from the fire nature.”
_K._ “Those complexioned after the manner of the fire are, I suppose,
the warm-hearted, affectionate souls?”