Chapter 27

and Diana, who has ascended high in heaven, without our having once observed the divinity, bends her silver bow among the rejoicing stars, while the lake, like another sky, seems to contain its own luminaries, a different division of the constellated night! 'Tis merry Windermere no more. Yet we must not call her melancholy--though somewhat sad she seems, and pensive, as if the stillness of universal nature did touch her heart. How serene all the lights--how peaceful all the shadows! Steadfast alike--as if they would brood for ever--yet transient as all loveliness--and at the mercy of every cloud. In some places, the lake has disappeared--in others, the moonlight is almost like sunshine--only silver instead of gold. Here spots of quiet light--there lines of trembling lustre--and there a flood of radiance checkered by the images of trees. Lo! the Isle called Beautiful has now gathered upon its central grove all the radiance issuing from that celestial Urn; and almost in another moment it seems blended with the dim mass of mainland, and blackness enshrouds the woods. Still as seems the night to unobservant eyes, it is fluctuating in its expression as the face of a sleeper overspread with pleasant but disturbing dreams. Never for any two successive moments is the aspect of the night the same--each smile has its own meaning, its own character; and Light is felt to be like Music, to have a melody and a harmony of its own--so mysteriously allied are the powers and provinces of eye and ear, and by such a kindred and congenial agency do they administer to the workings of the spirit.

Well, that is very extraordinary--Rain--rain--rain! All the eyes of heaven were bright as bright might be--the sky was blue as violets--that braided whiteness, that here and there floated like a veil on the brow of night, was all that recalled the memory of clouds--and as for the moon, no faintest halo yellowed round her orb, that seemed indeed "one perfect chrysolite;"--yet while all the winds seemed laid asleep till morn, and beauty to have chained all the elements into peace--overcast in a moment is the firmament--an evanishing has left it blank as mist--there is a fast, thick, pattering on the woods--yes--rain--rain-- rain--and ere we reach Bowness, the party will be wet through to their skins. Nay--matters are getting still more serious--for there was lightning--yea, lightning! Ten seconds! and hark, very respectable thunder! With all our wisdom, we have not been weather-wise--or we should have known, when we saw it, an electrical sunset. Only look now towards the West. There floats Noah's Ark--a magnificent spectacle; and now for the Flood. That far-off sullen sound proclaims cataracts. And what may mean that sighing and moaning and muttering up among the cliffs? See--see how the sheet lightning shows the long lake-shore all tumbling with foamy breakers. A strong wind is there--but here there is not a breath. But the woods across the lake are bowing their heads to the blast. Windermere is in a tumult--the storm comes flying on wings all abroad--and now we are in the very heart of the hurricane. See, in Bowness is hurrying many a light--for the people fear we may be on the lake; and faithful Billy, depend on't, is launching his life-boat to go to our assistance. Well, this is an adventure.--But soft--what ails our Argand Lamp! Our study is in such darkness that we cannot see our paper--in the midst of a thunderstorm we conclude, and to bed by a flaff of lightning.

THE MOORS.

PROLOGUE.

Once we knew the Highlands absolutely too well--not a nook that was not as familiar to us as our brown study. We had not to complain of the lochs, glens, woods, and mountains alone, for having so fastened themselves upon us on a great scale that we found it impossible to shake them off; but the hardship in our case was, that all the subordinate parts of the scenery, many of them dull and dreary enough, and some of them intolerably tedious, had taken it upon themselves so to thrust their intimacy upon us, in all winds and weathers, that without giving them the cut direct there was no way of escaping from the burden of their friendship. To courteous and humane Christians, such as we have always been both by name and nature as far back as we can recollect, it is painful to cut even an impudent stone, or an upsetting tree that may cross our path uncalled for, or obtrude itself on our privacy when we wish to be alone in our meditations. Yet, we confess, they used sometimes sorely to try our temper. It is all very well for you, our good sir, to say in excuse for them that such objects are inanimate. So much the worse. Were they animate, like yourself, they might be reasoned with on the impropriety of interrupting the stream of any man's soliloquies. But being not merely inanimate but irrational, objects of that class know not to keep their own place, which indeed, it may be said in reply, is kept for them by nature. But that Mistress of the Ceremonies, though enjoying a fine green old age, cannot be expected to be equally attentive to the proceedings of all the objects under her control. Accordingly, often when she is not looking, what more common than for a huge hulking fellow of a rock, with an absurd tuft of trees on his head, who has observed you lying half-asleep on the greensward, to hang eavesdropping, as it were, over your most secret thoughts, which he whispers to the winds, and they to all the clouds! Or for some grotesque and fantastic ash, with a crooked back, and arms disproportionately long, like a giant in extreme old age dwindling into a dwarf, to jut out from the hole in the wall, and should your leaden eye chance at the time to love the ground, to put his mossy fist right in your philosophical countenance! In short, it is very possible to know a country so thoroughly well, outside and in, from mountain to mole-hill, that you get mutually tired of one another's company, and are ready to vent your quarrel in reciprocal imprecations.

So was it once with us and the Highlands. That "too much familiarity breeds contempt" we learned many a long year ago, when learning to write large text; and passages in our life have been a running commentary on the theme then set us by that incomparable caligraphist, Butterworth. All "the old familiar faces" occasionally come in for a portion of that feeling; and on that account, we are glad that we saw, but for one day and one night, Charles Lamb's. Therefore, some dozen years ago we gave up the Highlands, not wishing to quarrel with them, and confined our tender assiduities to the Lowlands, while, like two great flats as we were, we kept staring away at each other, with our lives on the same level. All the consequences that might naturally have been expected have ensued; and we are now as heartily sick of the Lowlands, and they of us. What can we do but return to our First Love?

Allow us to offer another view of the subject. There is not about Old Age one blessing more deserving gratitude to Heaven, than the gradual bedimming of memory brought on by years. In youth, all things, internal and external, are unforgetable, and by the perpetual presence of passion oppress the soul. The eye of a woman haunts the victim on whom it may have given a glance, till he leaps perhaps out of a four-story window. A beautiful lake, or a sublime mountain, drives a young poet as mad as a March hare. He loses himself in an interminable forest louring all round the horizon of a garret six feet square. It matters not to him whether his eyes be open or shut. He is at the mercy of all Life and all Nature, and not for one hour can he escape from their persecutions. His soul is the slave of the Seven Senses, and each is a tyrant with instruments of torture, to whom and to which Phalaris, with his brazen bull, was a pointless joke. But in old age "the heart of a man is oppressed with care" no longer; the Seven Tyrants have lost their sceptres, and are dethroned; and the grey-headed gentleman feels that his soul has "set up its rest." His eyes are dazzled no more with insufferable light--no more his ears tingle with music too exquisite to be borne--no more his touch is transport. The scents of nature, stealing from the balmy mouths of lilies and roses, are deadened in his nostrils. He is above and beyond the reach of all the long arms of many-handed misery, as he is out of the convulsive clutch of bliss. And is not this the state of best happiness for mortal man? Tranquillity! The peaceful air that we breathe as we are westering towards the sunset-regions of our Being, and feel that we are about to drop down for ever out of sight behind the Sacred Mountains.

All this may be very fine, but cannot be said to help us far on with our Prologue. Let us try it again. Old men, we remarked, ought to be thankful to Heaven for their dim memories. Never do we feel that more profoundly than when dreaming about the Highlands. All is confusion. Nothing distinctly do we remember--not even the names of lochs and mountains. Where is Ben Cru--Cru--Cru--what's-his-name? Ay--ay--Cruachan. At this blessed moment we see his cloud-capped head--but we have clean forgotten the silver sound of the name of the county he encumbers. Ross-shire? Nay, that won't do--he never was at Tain. We are assured by Dr Reid's, Dr Beattie's, and Dugald Stewart's great Instinctive First Principle Belief, that oftener than once, or ten times either, have we been in a day-long hollow among precipices dear to eagles, called Glen-Etive. But where begins or where ends that "severe sojourn" is now to us a mystery--though we hear the sound of the sea and the dashing of cataracts. Yet though all is thus dim in our memory, would you believe it that nothing is utterly lost? No, not even the thoughts that soared like eagles vanishing in the light--or that dived like ravens into the gloom. They all reappear--those from the Empyrean--these from Hades--reminding us of the good or the evil borne in other days, within the spiritual regions of our boundless being. The world of eye and ear is not in reality narrowed because it glimmers; ever and anon as years advance, a light direct from heaven dissipates the gloom, and bright and glorious as of yore the landscape laughs to the sea, the sea to heaven, and heaven back again to the gazing spirit that leaps forward to the hailing light with something of the same divine passion that gave wings to our youth.

All this may be still finer, yet cannot be said, any more than the preceding paragraph, much to help us on with our Prologue. To come then, if possible, to the point at once--We are happy that our dim memory and our dim imagination restore and revive in our mind none but the characteristic features of the scenery of the Highlands, unmixed with baser matter, and all floating magnificently through a spiritual haze, so that the whole region is now more than ever idealised; and in spite of all his present, past, and future prosiness--Christopher North, soon as in thought his feet touch the heather, becomes a poet.

It has long been well known to the whole world that we are a sad egotist--yet our egotism, so far from being a detraction from our attraction, seems to be the very soul of it, making it impossible in nature for any reasonable being to come within its sphere, without being drawn by sweet compulsion to the old wizard's heart. He is so _humane_! Only look at him for a few minutes, and liking becomes love--love becomes veneration. And all this even before he has opened his lips--by the mere power of his ogles and his temples. In his large mild blue eyes is written not only his nature, but miraculously, in German text, his very name, #Christopher North#. Mrs Gentle was the first to discover it; though we remember having been asked more than once in our youth, by an alarmed virgin on whom we happened at the time to be looking tender, "If we were aware that there was something preternatural in our eyes?" #Christopher# is conspicuous in our right eye--#North# in our left; and when we wish to be incog., we either draw their fringed curtains, or, nun-like, keep the tell-tale orbs fixed on the ground. Candour whispers us to confess, that some years ago a child was exhibited at sixpence with WILLIAM WOOD legible in its optics--having been affiliated, by ocular evidence, on a gentleman of that name, who, with his dying breath, disowned the soft impeachment. But in that case nature had written a vile scrawl--in ours her hand is firm, and goes off with a flourish.

Have you ever entered, all alone, the shadows of some dilapidated old burial-place, and in a nook made beautiful by wild-briers and a flowering thorn, beheld the stone image of some long-forgotten worthy lying on his grave? Some knight who perhaps had fought in Palestine,--or some holy man, who in the Abbey--now almost gone--had led a long still life of prayer? The moment you knew that you were standing among the dwellings of the dead, how impressive became the ruins! Did not that stone image wax more and more lifelike in its repose? And as you kept your eyes fixed on the features Time had not had the heart to obliterate, seemed not your soul to hear the echoes of the Miserere sung by the brethren?

So looks Christopher--on his couch--in his ALCOVE. He is taking his siesta--and the faint shadows you see coming and going across his face are dreams. 'Tis a pensive dormitory, and hangs undisturbed in its spiritual region as a cloud on the sky of the Longest Day when it falls on the Sabbath.

What think you of OUR FATHER, alongside of the Pedlar in "The Excursion?" Wordsworth says--

"Amid the gloom, Spread by a brotherhood of lofty elms, Appear'd a roofless hut; four naked walls That stared upon each other! I look'd round, And to my wish and to my hope espied Him whom I sought; a man of reverend age, But stout and hale, for travel unimpair'd. There was he seen upon the cottage bench, Recumbent in the shade, as if asleep; An iron-pointed staff lay at his side."

Alas! "stout and hale" are words that could not be applied, without cruel mocking, to our figure. "Recumbent in the shade" unquestionably he is--yet, "recumbent" is a clumsy word for such quietude; and, recurring to our former image, we prefer to say, in the words of Wilson,--

"Still is he as a frame of stone That in its stillness lies alone, With silence breathing from its face, For ever in some holy place, Chapel or aisle--on marble laid, With pale hands on his pale breast spread, An image humble, meek, and low, Of one forgotten long ago!"

No "iron-pointed staff lies at his side"--but "Satan's dread," THE CRUTCH! Wordsworth tells us over again that the Pedlar--

"With no appendage but a staff, The prized memorial of _relinquish'd_ toils, Upon the cottage-bench reposed his limbs, Screen'd from the sun."

On his couch, in his Alcove, Christopher is reposing--not his limbs alone, but his very essence. THE CRUTCH is, indeed, both _de jure_ and _de facto_ the prized memorial of toils--but, thank Heaven, not _relinquished_ toils; and then how characteristic of the dear merciless old man--hardly distinguishable among the fringed draperies of his canopy, the dependent and independent KNOUT!

Was the Pedlar absolutely asleep? We shrewdly suspect not--'twas but a doze. "Recumbent in the shade, _as if asleep_"--"Upon that cottage-bench _reposed_ his limbs" induce us to lean to the opinion that he was but on the border of the Land of Nod. Nay, the poet gets more explicit, and with that minute particularity so charming in poetical description, finally informs us that

"Supine the wanderer lay, _His eyes, as if in drowsiness, half shut_, The shadows of the breezy elms above Dappling his face."

It would appear, then, on an impartial consideration of all the circumstances of the case, that the "man of reverend age," though "recumbent" and "supine" upon the "cottage bench," "as if asleep," and "his eyes, as if in drowsiness, half shut," was in a mood between sleeping and waking; and this creed is corroborated by the following assertion--

"He had not heard the sound Of my approaching steps, and in the shade Unnoticed did I stand some minutes' space. At length I hail'd him, seeing that his hat Was moist with water-drops, as if the brim Had newly scoop'd a running stream."

He rose; and so do We, for probably by this time you may have discovered that we have been describing Ourselves in our siesta or mid-day snooze--as we have been beholding in our mind's eye our venerated and mysterious Double.

We cannot help flattering ourselves--if indeed it be flattery--that though no relative of his, we have a look of the Pedlar--as he is elaborately painted by the hand of a great master in the aforesaid Poem.

"Him had I mark'd the day before--alone, And station'd in the public way, with, face Turn'd to the sun then setting, while that staff Afforded to the figure of the man, Detain'd for contemplation or repose, Graceful support," &c.

As if it were yesterday, we remember our first interview with the Bard. It was at the Lady's Oak, between Ambleside and Rydal. We were then in the very flower of our age--just sixty; so we need not say the century had then seen but little of this world. The Bard was a mere boy of some six lustres, and had a lyrical-ballad look that established his identity at first sight, all unlike the lackadaisical. His right hand was within his vest on the region of the heart, and he ceased his crooning as we stood face to face. What a noble countenance! at once austere and gracious--haughty and benign--of a man conscious of his greatness while yet companioning with the humble--an unrecognised power dwelling in the woods. Our figure at that moment so impressed itself on his imagination, that it in time supplanted the image of the real Pedlar, and grew into the _Emeritus of the Three Days_. We were standing in that very attitude--having deposited on the coping of the wall our Kit, since adopted by the British Army, with us at once a library and a larder.

And again--and even more characteristically,--

"Plain was his garb: Such as might suit a rustic sire, prepared For Sabbath duties; yet he was a man Whom no one could have pass'd without remark, Active and nervous was his gait; his limbs And his whole figure breathed intelligence. Time had compress'd the freshness of his cheeks Into a narrower circle of deep red, But had not tamed his eye, that under brows, Shaggy and grey, had meanings, which it brought From years of youth; whilst, like a being made Of many beings, he had wondrous skill To blend with knowledge of the years to come, Human, or such as lie beyond the grave."

In our intellectual characters we indulge the pleasing hope that there are some striking points of resemblance, on which, however, our modesty will not permit us to dwell--and incur acquirements, more particularly in Plane and Spherical Trigonometry:--

"While yet he linger'd in the rudiments Of science, and among her simplest laws, His triangles--they were the stars of heaven, The silent stars! oft did he take delight To measure the altitude of some tall crag, That is the eagle's birthplace," &c.

So it was with us. Give us but a base and a quadrant--and when a student in Jemmy Millar's class, we could have given you the altitude of any steeple in Glasgow or the Gorbals.

Occasionally, too, in a small party of friends, though, not proud of the accomplishment, we have been prevailed on, as you may have heard, to delight humanity with a song--"The Flowers of the Forest," "Roy's Wife," "Flee up, flee up, thou bonnie bonnie Cock," or "Auld Langsyne"--just as the Pedlar

"At request would sing Old songs, the product of his native hills; A skilful distribution of sweet sounds, Feeding the soul, and eagerly imbibed As cool refreshing water, by the care Of the industrious husbandman diffused Through a parch'd meadow-field in time of drought."

Our natural disposition, too, is as amiable as that of the "Vagrant Merchant."

"And surely never did there live on earth A man of kindlier nature. The rough sports And teasing ways of children vex'd not him: Indulgent listener was he to the tongue Of garrulous age; nor did the sick man's tale, To his fraternal sympathy address'd, Obtain reluctant hearing."

Who can read the following lines, and not think of Christopher North?

"Birds and beasts, And the mute fish that glances in the stream, And harmless reptile coiling in the sun, And gorgeous insect hovering in the air, The fowl domestic, and the household dog-- In his capacious mind he loved them all."

True, that our love of

"The mute fish that glances in the stream,"

is not incompatible with the practice of the "angler's silent trade," or with the pleasure of "filling our pannier." The Pedlar, too, we have reason to know, was like his poet and ourselves, in that art a craftsman, and for love beat the mole-catcher at busking a batch of May-flies. We question whether Lascelles himself were his master at a green dragon. "The harmless reptile coiling in the sun" we are not so sure about, having once been bit by an adder, whom in our simplicity we mistook for a slow-worm--the very day, by the by, on which we were poisoned by a dish of toadstools, by our own hand gathered for mushrooms. But we have long given over chasing butterflies, and feel, as the Pedlar did, that they are beautiful creatures, and that 'tis a sin between finger and thumb to compress their mealy wings. The household dog we do indeed dearly love, though when old Surly looks suspicions we prudently keep out of the reach of his chain. As for "the domestic fowl," we breed scores every spring, solely for the delight of seeing them at their _walks_

"Among the rural villages and farms;"

and though game to the back-bone, they are allowed to wear the spurs nature gave them--to crow unclipped, challenging but the echoes; nor is the sward, like the _sod_, ever reddened with their heroic blood, for hateful to our ears the war-song,

"Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory!"

'Tis our way, you know, to pass from gay to grave matter, and often from a jocular to a serious view of the same subject--it being natural to us--and having become habitual too, from our writing occasionally in _Blackwood's Magazine_. All the world knows our admiration of Wordsworth, and admits that we have done almost as much as Jeffrey or Taylor to make his poetry popular among the "educated circles." But we are not a nation of idolaters, and worship neither graven image nor man that is born of a woman. We may seem to have treated the Pedlar with insufficient respect in that playful parallel between him and Ourselves; but there you are wrong again, for we desire thereby to do him honour. We wish now to say a few words on the wisdom of making such a personage the chief character in a Philosophical Poem.

He is described as endowed by nature with a great intellect, a noble imagination, a profound soul, and a tender heart. It will not be said that nature keeps these her noblest gifts for human beings born in this or that condition of life: she gives them to her favourites--for so, in the highest sense, they are to whom such gifts befall; and not unfrequently, in an obscure place, of one of the FORTUNATI

"The fulgent head Star-bright appears."

Wordsworth appropriately places the birth of such a being in a humble dwelling in the Highlands of Scotland.

"Among the hills of Atholl he was born; Where on a small hereditary farm, An unproductive slip of barren ground, His parents, with their numerous offspring, dwelt; A virtuous household, though exceeding poor."