Part 16

But far more than the murmuring and insecty air of the moorland does the wet _chirk-chirking_ of the living shore give one the idea of crowded and multitudinous life. [Sidenote: Hunting razor-fish.] Did the reader ever hunt razor-fish?--not sport like tiger-hunting, I admit; yet it has its pleasures and excitements, and can kill a forenoon for an idle man agreeably. On the wet sands yonder the razor-fish are spouting like the fountains at Versailles on _fête_ day. The shy fellow sinks on discharging his watery _feu de joie_. If you are quickly after him through the sand, you catch him, and then comes the tug of war. Address and dexterity are required. If you pull vigorously, he slips out of his sheath a "mother-naked" mollusc, and escapes. If you do your spiriting gently, you drag him up to light, a long thin case, with a white fishy bulb protruding at one end like a root. Rinse him in sea water, toss him into your basket, and plunge after another watery flash. These razor-fish are excellent eating, the people say, and when used as bait no fish that swims the ocean stream--cod, whiting, haddock, flat skate, broad-shouldered crimson bream--no, not the detested dog-fish himself, this summer swarming in every Loch and becursed by every fisherman--can keep himself off the hook, and in an hour your boat is laden with glittering spoil. Then, if you take your gun to the low islands--and you can go dry-shod at ebb of tide--you have your chance of sea-fowl. Gulls of all kinds are there, dookers and divers of every description, flocks of shy curlews, and specimens of a hundred tribes to which my limited ornithological knowledge cannot furnish a name. The solan goose yonder falls from heaven into the water like a meteor-stone. See the solitary scart, with long narrow wing and outstretched neck, shooting towards some distant promontory. Anon, high above head, come wheeling a covey of lovely sea-swallows. You fire, one flutters down, never more to skim the horizon or to dip in the sea-sparkle. Lift it up; is it not beautiful? The wild, keen eye is closed, but you see the delicate slate-colour of the wings, and the long tail-feathers white as the creaming foam. There is a stain of blood on the breast, hardly brighter than the scarlet of its beak and feet. Lay it down, for its companions are dashing round and round, uttering harsh cries of rage and sorrow; and had you the heart, you could shoot them one by one. At ebb of tide wild-looking children, from turf cabins on the hill-side, come down to hunt shell-fish. Even now a troop is busy; how their shrill voices go the while! [Sidenote: Old Effie.] Old Effie I see is out to-day, quite a picturesque object, with her white cap and red shawl. With a tin can in one hand, an old reaping-hook in the other, she goes poking among the tangle. Let us see what sport she has had. She turns round at our salutation--very old, old almost as the worn rocks around. She might have been the wife of Wordsworth's "Leech-gatherer." Her can is sprawling with brown crabs; and, opening her apron, she exhibits a large black and blue lobster--a fellow such as she alone can capture. A queer woman is Effie, and an awesome. She is familiar with ghosts and apparitions. She can relate legends that have power over the superstitious blood, and with little coaxing will sing those wild Gaelic songs of hers--of dead lights on the sea, of fishing-boats going down in squalls, of unburied bodies tossing day and night upon the gray peaks of the waves, and of girls that pray God to lay them by the sides of their drowned lovers, although for them should never rise mass nor chant, and although their flesh should be torn asunder by the wild fishes of the sea.

Rain is my enemy here; and at this writing I am suffering siege. For three days this rickety dwelling has stood assault of wind and rain. Yesterday a blast breached the door, and the tenement fluttered for a moment like an umbrella caught in a gust. All seemed lost; but the door was got closed again, heavily barred across, and the enemy foiled. An entrance, however, had been effected, and that portion of the attacking column which I had imprisoned by my dexterous manœuvre, maddened itself into whirlwind, rushed up the chimney, scattering my turf-fire as it went, and so escaped. Since that time the windy columns have retired to the gorges of the hills, where I can hear them howl at intervals; and the only thing I am exposed to is the musketry of the rain. How viciously the small shot peppers the walls! Here must I wait till the cloudy armament breaks up. One's own mind is a dull companion in such circumstances. A Sheridan himself--wont with his wit to brighten the feast, whose mind is a phosphorescent sea, dark in its rest, but when touched giving out a flash of splendour for response--if cooped up here would be dull as a Lincolnshire fen at midnight, unenlivened by a single Jack-o'-Lantern. Books are the only refuge on a rainy day; but in Skye bothies books are rare. [Sidenote: The "Monthly Review."] To me, however, the gods have proved kind--for in my sore need I found on a shelf here two volumes of the old _Monthly Review_, and I have sauntered through those dingy literary catacombs with considerable satisfaction. What a strange set of old fogies the writers are! To read them is like conversing with the antediluvians. Their opinions have fallen into disuse long ago, and resemble to-day the rusty armour and gimcracks of an old curiosity shop. Mr Henry Rogers has written a fine essay on the "_Glory and Vanity of Literature_"--in my own thoughts, out of this dingy material before me I can frame a finer. These essays and criticisms were thought brilliant, I suppose, when they appeared last century; and authors praised therein doubtless considered themselves rather handsome flies preserved in pure critical amber for the inspection and admiration of posterity. The volumes were published, I notice, from 1790 to 1792, and exhibit a period of wonderful literary activity. Not to speak of novels, histories, travels, farces, tragedies, upwards of two hundred poems, short and long, are brought to judgment; and several of these--with their names and the names of their authors I have, during the last two days, made acquaintance for the first time--are assured of immortality. Perhaps they deserved it; but they have gone down like the steamship _President_ and left no trace. On the whole, these Monthly Reviewers worked hard, and with proper spirit and deftness. They had a proud sense of the importance of their craft, they laid down the law with great gravity, and from critical benches shook their awful wigs on offenders. How it all looks _now_! "Let us indulge ourselves with another extract," quoth one, "and contemplate once more the tear of grief before we are called upon to witness the tear of rapture." _Both_ tears dried up long ago--like those that may have sparkled on a Pharaoh's cheek. Hear this other, stern as Rhadamanthus. Behold Duty steeling itself against human weakness! "It grieves us to wound a young man's feelings: but our judgment must not be biased by any plea whatsoever. Why will men apply for our opinion when they know that we cannot be silent, and that we will not lie?" Listen to this prophet in Israel, one who has not bent the knee to Baal, and say if there be not a plaintive touch of pathos in him:--"Fine words do not make fine poems. Scarcely a month passes in which we are not obliged to issue this decree. But in these days of universal heresy our decrees are no more respected than the bulls of the Bishop of Rome." Oh that men would hear, that they would incline their hearts to wisdom! One peculiarity I have noticed--the advertisement sheets which accompanied the numbers are bound up with them, and form an integral portion of the volumes. And just as the tobacco-less man whom we met at the entrance to Glen Sligachan smoked the paper in which his roll of pigtail had been wrapped, so when I had finished the criticisms I attacked the advertisements, and found them much the more amusing reading. Might not the magazine-buyer of to-day follow the example of the unknown Islesman? Depend upon it, to the reader of the next century the advertising sheets will be more interesting than the poetry, or the essays, or the stories. The two volumes were a godsend; but at last I began to weary of the old literary churchyard in which the poet and his critic sleep in the same oblivion. When I closed the books, and placed them on their shelves, the rain peppered the walls as pertinaciously as when I took them down.

Next day it rained still. It was impossible to go out; the volumes of the _Monthly Review_ were sucked oranges, and could yield no further amusement or interest. What was to be done? I took refuge with the Muse. Certain notions had got into my brain,--certain stories had taken possession of my memory,--and these I resolved to versify and finally to dispose of. Here are "Poems Written in a Skye Bothy." The competent critic will see at a glance that they are the vilest plagiarisms,--that as throughout I have called the sky "blue" and the grass "green," I have stolen from every English poet from Chaucer downwards; he will observe also, from occasional uses of "all" and "and," that they are the merest Tennysonian echoes. But they served their purpose,--they killed for me the languor of the rainy days, which is more than they are likely to do for the critic. Here they are:--

[Sidenote: The Well.]

THE WELL.

The well gleams by a mountain road Where travellers never come and go From city proud, or poor abode That frets the dusky plain below. All silent as the mouldering lute That in a ruin long hath lain; All empty as a dead man's brain-- The path untrod by human foot, That, thread-like, far away doth run To savage peaks, whose central spire Bids farewell to the setting sun, Good-morrow to the morning's fire.

The country stretches out beneath In gloom of wood and gray of heath; The carriers' carts with mighty loads Black dot the long white country roads; The stationary stain of smoke Is crown'd by spire and castle rock; A silent line of vapoury white, The train creeps on from shade to light; The river journeys to the main Throughout a vast and endless plain, Far-shadow'd by the labouring breast Of thunder leaning o'er the west.

A rough uneven waste of gray, The landscape stretches day by day; But strange the sight when evening sails Athwart the mountains and the vales; Furnace and forge, by daylight tame, Uplift their restless towers of flame, And cast a broad and angry glow Upon the rain-cloud hanging low; As dark and darker grows the hour, More wild their colour, vast their power, Till by the glare in shepherd's shed, The mother sings her babe a-bed: From town to town the pedlar wades Through far-flung crimson lights and shades.

As softly fall the autumn nights The city blossoms into lights; Now here, now there, a sudden spark Sputters the twilight's light-in-dark; Afar a glimmering crescent shakes; The gloom across the valley breaks In glow-worms; swiftly, strangely fair, A bridge of lamps leaps through the air, And hangs in night; and sudden shines The long street's splendour-fretted lines. Intense and bright that fiery bloom Upon the bosom of the gloom; At length the starry clusters fail, Afar the lustrous crescents pale, Till all the wondrous pageant dies In gray light of damp-dawning skies.

High stands that lonely mountain ground Above each babbling human sound; Yet from its place afar it sees Night scared by angry furnaces; The lighting up of city proud, The brightness o'er it in the cloud. The foolish people never seek Wise counsel from that silent peak, Though from its height it looks abroad All-seeing as the eye of God, Haunting the peasant on the down, The workman in the busy town; Though from the closely-curtain'd dawn The day is by the mountain drawn-- Whether the slant lines of the rain Fill high the brook and shake the pane; Or noonday reapers, wearied, halt On sheaves beneath a blinding vault, Unshaded by a vapour's fold-- Though from that mountain summit old The cloudy thunder breaks and rolls, Through deep reverberating souls; Though from it comes the angry light, Whose forky shiver scars the sight, And rends the shrine from floor to dome, And leaves the gods without a home.

And ever in that under-world, Round which the weary clouds are furl'd, The cry of one that buys and sells, The laughter of the bridal bells Clear-breaking from cathedral towers; The pedlar whistling o'er the moors; The sun-burnt reapers, merry corps, With stocks behind and grain before; The huntsman cheering on his hounds, Build up one sound of many sounds. As instruments of diverse tone, The organ's temple-shaking groan, Proud trumpet, cymbal's piercing cry, Build one consummate harmony: As smoke that drowns the city's spires, Is fed by twice a million fires; As midnight draws her complex grief From sob and wail of bough and leaf: And on those favourable days When earth is free from mist and haze, And heaven is silent as an ear Down-leaning, loving words to hear, Stray echoes of the world are blown Around those pinnacles of stone-- The saddest sound beneath the sun, Earth's thousand voices blent in one.

And purely gleams the crystal well Amid the silence terrible; On heaven its eye is ever wide, At morning and at eventide; And as a lover in the sight And favour of his maiden bright, Bends till his face he proudly spies In the clear depths of upturn'd eyes-- The mighty heaven above it bow'd, Looks down and sees its crumbling cloud; Its round of summer blue immense, Drawn in a yard's circumference, And lingers o'er the image there, Than its once self more purely fair.

Whence come the waters, garner'd up So purely in that rocky cup? They come from regions high and far, Where blows the wind, and shines the star. The silent dews that Heaven distils At midnight on the lonely hills; The shower that plain and mountain dims, On which the dazzling rainbow swims: The torrents from the thunder gloom, Let loose as by the crack of doom, The whirling waterspout that cracks Into a scourge of cataracts, Are swallow'd by the thirsty ground, And day and night without a sound, Through banks of marl, and belts of ores, They filter through a million pores, Losing each foul and turbid stain: So fed by many a trickling vein, The well, through silent days and years, Fills softly, like an eye with tears.

AUTUMN.

Happy tourist, freed from London, The planets' murmur in the _Times_! Seated here with task work undone, I must list the city chimes A fortnight longer. As I gaze On Pentland's back, where noon-day piles his Mists and vapours: old St Giles's Coronet in sultry haze: A hoary ridge of ancient town Smoke-wreathed, picturesque, and still; Cirque of crag and templed hill, And Arthur's lion couching down In watch, as if the news of Flodden Stirr'd him yet--my fancy flies To level wastes and moors untrodden Purpling 'neath the low-hung skies. I see the burden'd orchards, mute and mellow: I see the sheaves; while, girt by reaper trains, And blurr'd by breaths of horses, through a yellow September moonlight, roll the swaggering wanes.

While in this delicious weather The apple ripens row on row, I see the footsteps of the heather Purpling ledges: to and fro In the wind the restless swallows Turn and twitter; on the crag The ash, with all her scarlet berries, Dances o'er a burn that hurries Foamily from jag to jag: Now it babbles over shallows Where great scales of sunlight flicker; Narrow'd 'gainst the bank it quicker Runs in many a rippled ridge; Anon in purple pools and hollows It slumbers: and beyond the bridge, On which a troop of savage children clamber, A sudden ray comes out And scuds a startled trout O'er golden stones, through chasms brilliant amber. To-day one half remembers With a sigh, In the yellow-moon'd Septembers Long gone by, Many a solitary stroll With an ever-flowing soul When the moonbeam, falling white On the wheat fields, was delight; When the whisper of the river Was a thing to list for ever; When the call of lonely bird Deeper than all music stirr'd; When the restless spirit shook O'er some prophesying book, In whose pages dwelt the hum Of a life that was to come; When I, in a young man's fashion, Long'd for some excess of passion-- Melancholy, glory, pleasure, Heap'd up to a lover's measure; For some unknown experience To unlock this mortal fence, And let the coop'd-up spirit range A world of wonder, sweet and strange: And thought, O joy all joys above! Experience would be faced like Love. When I dream'd that youth would be Blossom'd like an apple-tree, The fancy in extremest age Would dwell within the spirit sage. Like the wall-flower on the ruin, With its smile at Time's undoing, Like the wall-flower on the ruin, The brighter from the wreck it grew in. Ah, how dearly one remembers Memory-embalm'd Septembers! But I start, as well I may, I have wasted half a day. The west is red above the sun, And my task work unbegun.

Nature will not hold a truce With a beauty without use: Spring, though blithe and ebonair, Ripens plum and ripens pear.

O mellow, mellow orchard bough! O yellow, yellow wheaten plain! Soon will reaper wipe his brow, Gleaner glean her latest grain, October, like a gipsy bold, Pick the berries in the lane, And November, woodman old, With fagots gather'd 'gainst the cold, Trudge through wind and rain.

WARDIE--SPRING-TIME.

In the exuberance of hope and life, When one is play'd on like an instrument By passion, and plain faces are divine; When one holds tenure in the evening star, We love the pensiveness of autumn air, The songless fields, brown stubbles, hectic woods: For as a prince may in his splendour sigh, Because the splendours are his common wear, Youth pines within the sameness of delight: And the all-trying spirit, uncontent With aught that can be fully known, beguiles Itself with melancholy images, Sits down at gloomy banquets, broods o'er graves, Tries unknown sorrow's edge as curiously (And not without a strange prophetic thrill) As one might try a sword's, and makes itself The Epicurus of fantastic griefs.

But when the blood chills and the years go by, As we resemble autumn more, the more We love the resurrection time of spring. And spring is now around me. Snowdrops came; Crocuses gleam'd along the garden walk Like footlights on the stage. But these are gone. And now before my door the poplar burns, A torch enkindled at an emerald fire. The flowering currant is a rosy cloud; One daffodil is hooded, one full blown: The sunny mavis from the tree top sings; Within the flying sunlights twinkling troops Of chaffinches jerk here and there; beneath The shrubbery the blackbird runs, then flits, With chattering cry: demure at ploughman's heel, Within the red-drawn furrow, stalks the rook, A pale metallic glister on his back; And, like a singing arrow upwards shot Far out of sight, the lark is in the blue.

This morning, when the stormy front of March, Is mask'd with June, and has as sweet a breath, And sparrows fly with straws, and in the elms Rooks flap and caw, then stream off to the fields, And thence returning, flap and caw again, I gaze in idle pleasantness of mood, Far down upon the harbour and the sea-- The smoking steamer half-way 'cross the Firth Shrank to a beetle's size, the dark-brown sails Of scatter'd fishing-boats, and still beyond, Seen dimly through a veil of tender haze, The coast of Fife endorsed with ancient towns,-- As quaint and strange to-day as when the queen, In whose smile lay the headsman's glittering axe, Beheld them from her tower of Holyrood, And sigh'd for fruitful France, and turning, cower'd From the lank shadow, Darnley, at her side.

Behind, the wondrous city stretches dim With castle, spire, and column, from the line Of wavy Pentland, to the pillar'd range That keeps in memory the men who fell In the great war that closed at Waterloo. Whitely the pillars gleam against the hill, While the light flashes by. The wondrous town, That keeps not summer, when the summer comes, Without her gates, but takes it to her heart! The mighty shadow of the castle falls! At noon athwart deep gardens, roses blow And fade in hearing of the chariot-wheel. High-lifted capital that look'st abroad, With the great lion couchant at thy side, O'er fertile plains emboss'd with woods and towns; O'er silent Leith's smoke-huddled spires and masts; O'er unlink'd Forth, slow wandering with her isles To ocean's azure, spreading faint and wide, O'er which the morning comes--if but thy spires Were dipp'd in deeper sunshine, tenderer shade, Through bluer heavens rolled a brighter sun, The traveller would call thee peer of Rome, Or Florence, white-tower'd, on the mountain side.

Burns trod thy pavements with his ploughman's stoop And genius-flaming eyes. Scott dwelt in thee, The homeliest-featured of the demigods; Apollo, with a deep Northumbrian burr, And Jeffrey with his sharp-cut critic face, And Lockhart with his antique Roman taste, And Wilson, reckless of his splendid gifts, As hill-side of its streams in thunder rain; And Chalmers, with those heavy slumberous lids, Veiling a prophet's eyes; and Miller, too, Primeval granite amongst smooth-rubb'd men; Of all the noble race but one remains, Aytoun--with silver bugle at his side, That echo'd through the gorges of romance-- Pity that 'tis so seldom at his lip!

This place is fair; but when the year hath grown From snow-drops to the dusk auricula, And spaces throng'd to-day with naked boughs, Are banks of murmuring foliage, chestnut-flower'd, Far fairer. Then, as in the summer past, From the red village underneath the hill, When the long daylight closes, in the hush Comes the pathetic mirth of children's games: Or clear sweet trebles, as two lines of girls Advance and then retire, singing the while Snatches of some old ballad sore decay'd, And crumbling to no-meaning through sheer age-- A childish drama watch'd by labouring men, In shirt-sleeves, smoking at the open doors, With a strange sweetness stirring at their hearts. Then when the darkness comes and voices cease, The long-ranged brick-kilns glow, the far-stretch'd pier Breaks out, like Aaron's rod, in buds of fire; And with a startling suddenness the light, That like a glow-worm slumbers on Inchkeith, Broadens, then to a glow-worm shrinks again. The sea is dark, but on the darker coast Beyond, the ancient towns Queen Mary knew Glitter, like swarms of fire-flies, here and there. Come, Summer, from the south, and grow apace From flower to flower, until thy prime is reach'd, Then linger, linger, linger o'er the rose!

DANSCIACH.

Upon a ruin by the desert shore, I sat one autumn day of utter peace, Watching a lustrous stream of vapour pour O'er Blaavin, fleece on fleece.

The blue frith stretch'd in front without a sail, Huge boulders on the shore lay wreck'd and strown; Behind arose, storm-bleach'd and lichen-pale, Buttress and wall of stone.

And sitting on the Norseman's ruin'd stair, While through the shining vapours downward roll'd, A ledge of Blaavin gleam'd out, wet and bare, I heard this story told:--