Chapter 39

Was there ever such a man as Ossian? We devoutly hope there was--for if so, then there were a prodigious number of fine fellows, besides his Bardship, who after their death figured away as their glimmering ghosts, with noble effect, among the moonlight mists of the mountains. The poetry of Ossian has, it is true, since the days of Macpherson, in no way coloured the poetry of the island; and Mr Wordsworth, who has written beautiful lines about the old Phantom, states that fact as an argument against its authenticity. He thinks Ossian, as we now possess him, no poet; and alleges, that if these compositions had been the good things so many people have thought them, they would, in some way or other, have breathed their spirit over the poetical genius of the land. Who knows that they may not do so yet? The time may not have come. But must all true poetry necessarily create imitation, and a school of imitators? One sees no reason why it must. Besides, the life which the poetry of Ossian celebrates, has utterly passed away; and the poetry itself, good, bad, or indifferent, is so very peculiar, that to imitate it at all you must almost transcribe it. That, for a good many years, was often done, but naturally inspired any other feeling than delight or admiration. But the simple question is, Do the poems of Ossian delight greatly and widely? We think they do. Nor can we believe that they would not still delight such a poet as Mr Wordsworth. What dreariness overspreads them all! What a melancholy spirit shrouds all his heroes, passing before us on the cloud, after all their battles have been fought, and their tombs raised on the hill! The very picture of the old blind Hero-bard himself, often attended by the weeping virgins whom war has made desolate, is always touching, often sublime. The desert is peopled with lamenting mortals, and the mists that wrap them with ghosts, whose remembrances of this life are all dirge and elegy. True, that the images are few and endlessly reiterated; but that, we suspect, is the case with all poetry composed not in a philosophic age. The great and constant appearances of nature suffice, in their simplicity, for all its purposes. The poet seeks not to vary their character, and his hearers are willing to be charmed over and over again by the same strains. We believe that the poetry of Ossian would be destroyed by any greater distinctness or variety of imagery. And if, indeed, Fingal lived and Ossian sung, we must believe that the old bard was blind; and we suspect that in such an age, such a man would, in his blindness, think dreamily indeed of the torrents, and lakes, and heaths, and clouds, and mountains, moons and stars, which he had leapt, swam, walked, climbed, and gazed on in the days of his rejoicing youth. Then has he no tenderness--no pathos--no beauty? Alas for thousands of hearts and souls if it be even so! For then are many of their holiest dreams worthless all, and divinest melancholy a mere complaint of the understanding, which a bit of philosophical criticism will purge away, as the leech's phial does a disease of the blood.

Macpherson's "Ossian," is it not poetry? Wordsworth says it is not--but Christopher North says it is--with all reverence for the King. Let its antiquity be given up--let such a state of society as is therein described be declared impossible--let all the inconsistencies and violations of nature ever charged against it be acknowledged--let all its glaring plagiarisms from poetry of modern date inspire what derision they may--and far worse the perpetual repetition of its own imbecilities and inanities, wearying one down even to disgust and anger;--yet, in spite of all, are we not made to feel, not only that we are among the mountains, but to forget that there is any other world in existence, save that which glooms and glimmers, and wails and raves around us in mists and clouds, and storms and snows--full of lakes and rivers, sea-intersected and sea-surrounded, with a sky as troublous as the earth--yet both at times visited with a mournful beauty that sinks strangely into the soul--while the shadowy life depictured there eludes not our human sympathies; nor yet, aerial though they be--so sweet and sad are their voices--do there float by as unbeloved, unpitied, or unhonoured--single, or in bands--the ghosts of the brave and beautiful; when the few stars are dim, and the moon is felt, not seen, to be yielding what faint light there may be in the skies.

The boat in a moment is a bagpipe; and not only so, but all the mountains are bagpipes, and so are the clouds. All the bagpipes in the world are here, and they fill heaven and earth. 'Tis no exaggeration--much less a fiction--but the soul and body of truth. There Hamish stands stately at the prow; and as the boat hangs by midships on the very point that commands all the echoes, he fills the whole night with the "Campbells are coming," till the sky yells with the gathering as of all the Clans. His eyes are triumphantly fixed on ours to catch their emotions; his fingers cease their twinkling; and still that wild gathering keeps playing of itself among the mountains--fainter and fainter, as it is flung from cliff to cliff, till it dies away far--far off--as if in infinitude--sweet even and soft in its evanescence as some lover's lute.

We are now in the bay of Gleno. For though moonlight strangely alters the whole face of nature, confusing its most settled features, and with a gentle glamoury blending with the greensward what once was the grey granite, and investing with apparent woodiness what an hour ago was the desolation of herbless cliffs--yet not all the changes that wondrous nature, in ceaseless ebb and flow, ever wrought on her works, could metamorphose out of our recognition that Glen, in which, one night--long--long ago--

"In life's morning march, when our spirit was young!"

we were visited by a dream--a dream that shadowed forth in its inexplicable symbols the whole course of our future life--the graves--the tombs where many we loved are now buried--that churchyard, where we hope and believe that one day our own bones will rest.

But who shouts from the shore, Hamish--and now, as if through his fingers, sends forth a sharp shrill whistle that pierces the sky? Ah, ha! we ken his shadow in the light, with the roe on his shoulder. 'Tis the schoolmaster of Gleno, bringing down our quarry to the boat--kilted, we declare, like a true Son of the Mist. The shore here is shelving but stony, and our prow is aground. But strong-spined and loined, and strong in their withers, are the M'Dougals of Lorn; and, wading up to the red hairy knees, he has flung the roe into the boat, and followed it himself like a deer-hound. So bend to your oars, my hearties--my heroes--the wind freshens, and the tide strengthens from the sea; and at eight knots an hour we shall sweep along the shadows, and soon see the lantern, twinkling as from a lighthouse, on the pole of our Tent.

In a boat, upon a great sea-arm, at night, among mountains, who would be so senseless, so soulless as to speak? The hour has its might,

"Because not of this noisy world, but silent and divine!"

A sound there is in the sea-green swell, and the hollows of the rocks, that keep muttering and muttering, as their entrances feel the touch of the tide. But nothing beneath the moon can be more solemn, now that her aspect is so wan, and that some melancholy spirit has obscured the lustre of the stars. We feel as if the breath of old elegiac poetry were visiting our slumber. All is sad within us, yet why we know not; and the sadness is stranger as it is deeper after a day of almost foolish pastime, spent by a being who believes that he is immortal, and that this life is but the threshold of a life to come. Poor, puny, and paltry pastimes indeed are they all! But are they more so than those pursuits of which the moral poet has sung,

"The paths of glory lead but to the grave!"

Methinks, now, as we are entering into a sabler mass of shadow, that the doctrine of eternal punishment of sins committed in time--but--

"Here's a health to all good lasses, Here's a health to all good lasses, Pledge it merrily, fill your glasses; Let the bumper toast go round, Let the bumper toast go round!"

Best on your oars, lads. Hamish! the quaich! give each man a caulker, that his oar may send a bolder twang from its rollock, and our fish-coble walk the waves like a man-of-war's gig, with the captain on board, going ashore, after a long cruise, to meet his wife. Now she spins! and lo! lights at Kinloch-Etive, and beyond on the breast of the mountain, bright as Hesperus--the Pole-star of our Tent!

Well, this is indeed the Londe of Faery! A car with a nag caparisoned at the water edge! On with the roe, and in with Christopher and the Fish. Now, Hamish, hand us the Crutch. After a cast or two, which, may they be successful as the night is auspicious, your presence, gentlemen, will be expected in the Tent. Now, Hamish, handle thou the ribbons--alias the hair-tether--and we will touch him behind, should he linger, with a weapon that might

"Create a soul under the ribs of death."

Linger! why the lightning flies from his heels, as he carries us along a fine natural causeway, like Ossian's car-borne heroes. From the size and state of the stones over which we make such a clatter, we shrewdly suspect that the parliamentary grant for destroying the old Highland torrent-roads has not extended its ravages to Glen-Etive. O'Bronte,

"Like panting Time, toils after us in vain;"

and the pointers are following us by our own scent, and that of the roe, in the distant darkness. Pull up, Hamish, pull up, or otherwise we shall overshoot our mark, and meet with some accident or other, perhaps a capsize on Buachaille-Etive, or the Black Mount. We had no idea the circle of greensward in front of the Tent was so spacious. Why, there is room for the Lord Mayor of London's state-coach to turn with its eight horses, and that enormous ass, Parson Dillon, on the dickey. What could have made us think at this moment of London? Certes, the association of ideas is a droll thing, and also sometimes most magnificent. Dancing in the Tent, among strange figures! Celebration of the nuptials of some Arab chief, in an oasis in the Great Desert of Stony Arabia! Heavens! look at Tickler! How he hauls the Hizzies! There is no time to be lost--he and the Admiral must not have all the sport to themselves; and, by-and-by, spite of age and infirmity, we shall show the Tent a touch of the Highland Fling. Hollo! you landloupers! Christopher is upon you--behold the Tenth Avatar incarnated in North.

But what Apparitions at the Tent-door salute our approach?

"Back step these two fair angels, half afraid So suddenly to see the Griesly King!"

Goat-herdesses from the cliffs of Glencreran or Glenco, kilted to the knee, and not unconscious of their ankles, one twinkle of which is sufficient to bid "Begone dull care" for ever. One hand on a shoulder of each of the mountain-nymphs--sweet liberties--and then embraced by both, half in their arms, and half on their bosoms, was ever Old Man so pleasantly let down from triumphal car, on the soft surface of his mother-earth? Ay, there lies the Red-deer! and what heaps of smaller slain! But was there ever such a rush of dogs! We shall be extinguished. Down, dogs, down--nay, ladies and gentlemen, be seated--on one another's knees as before--we beseech you--we are but men like yourselves--and

"Without the smile from partial beauty won, Oh! what were man?--a world without a sun!"

What it is to be the darling of gods and men, and women and children! Why the very stars burn brighter--and thou, O Moon! art like the Sun. We foresee a night of dancing and drinking--till the mountain-dew melt in the lustre of morn. Such a day should have a glorious death--and a glorious resurrection. Hurra! Hurra!

THE MOORS FOR EVER! THE MOORS! THE MOORS!

HIGHLAND SNOW-STORM.

What do you mean by original genius? By that fine line in the "Pleasures of Hope"--

"To muse on Nature with a poet's eye?"

Why--genius--one kind of it at least--is transfusion of self into all outward things. The genius that does that--naturally, but novelly--is original; and now you know the meaning of one kind of original genius. Have we, then, Christopher North, that gift? Have you? Yea, both of Us. Our spirits animate the insensate earth, till she speaks, sings, smiles, laughs, weeps, sighs, groans, goes mad, and dies. Nothing easier, though perhaps it is wicked, than for original genius like ours, or yours, to drive the earth to distraction. We wave our wizard hand thus--and lo! list! she is insane. How she howls to heaven, and how the maddened heaven howls back her frenzy! Two dreadful maniacs raging apart, but in communion, in one vast bedlam! The drift-snow spins before the hurricane, hissing like a nest of serpents let loose to torment the air. What fierce flakes! furies! as if all the wasps that ever stung had been revivified, and were now careering part and parcel of the tempest. We are in a Highland Hut in the midst of mountains. But no land is to be seen any more than if we were in the middle of the sea. Yet a wan glare shows that the snow-storm is strangely shadowed by superincumbent cliffs; and though you cannot see, you _hear_ the mountains. Rendings are going on, frequent, over your head--and all around the blind wilderness--the thunderous tumblings down of avalanches, mixed with the moanings, shriekings, and yellings of caves, as if spirits there were angry with the snow-drift choking up the fissures and chasms in the cliffs. Is that the creaking and groaning, and rooking and tossing of old trees, afraid of being uprooted and flung into the spate?

"Red comes the river down, and loud and oft The angry spirit of the water shrieks,"

more fearful than at midnight in this night-like day--whose meridian is a total sun eclipse. The river runs by, blood-like, through the snow--and, short as is the reach you can see through the flaky gloom, that short reach shows that all his course must be terrible--more and more terrible--as, gathering his streams like a chieftain his clan--ere long he will sweep shieling, and hut, and hamlet to the sea, undermining rocks, cutting mounds asunder, and blowing up bridges that explode into the air with a roar like that of cannon. You sometimes think you hear thunder, though you know that cannot be--but sublimer than thunder is the nameless noise so like that of agonised life--that eddies far and wide around--high and huge above--fear all the while being at the bottom of your heart--an objectless, dim, dreary, undefinable fear, whose troubled presence--if any mortal feeling be so--is sublime. Your imagination is troubled, and dreams of death, but of no single corpse, of no single grave. Nor fear you for yourself--for the Hut in which you thus enjoy the storm is safer than the canopied cliff-calm of the eagle's nest; but your spirit is convulsed from its deepest and darkest foundations, and all that lay hidden there of the wild and wonderful, the pitiful and the strange, the terrible and pathetic, is now upturned in dim confusion, and imagination, working among the hoarded gatherings of the heart, creates out of them moods kindred and congenial with the hurricane, intensifying the madness of the heaven and the earth, till that which sees and that which is seen, that which hears and that which is heard, undergo alternate mutual transfiguration; and the blind Roaring Day--at once substance, shadow, and soul--is felt to be one with ourselves--the blended whole either the Live-Dead, or the Dead-Alive.

We are in a Highland Hut--if we called it a Shieling we did so merely because we love the sound of the word Shieling, and the image it at once brings to eye and ear--the rustling of leaves on a summer sylvan bower, by simple art slightly changed from the form of the growth of nature, or the waving of fern on the turf-roof and turf-walls, all covered with wildflowers and mosses, and moulded by one single season into a knoll-like beauty, beside its guardian birch-tree, insupportable to all evil spirits, but with its silvery stem and drooping tresses dear to the Silent People that won in the land of peace. Truly this is not the sweet Shieling-season, when, far away from all other human dwellings, on the dip of some great mountain, quite at the head of a day's-journey-long glen, the young herdsman, haply all alone, without one single being with him that has the use of speech, liveth for months retired far from kirk and cross--Luath his sole companion--his sole care the pasturing herds--the sole sounds he hears the croak of the raven on the cliff, or bark of the eagle in the sky. O sweet, solitary lot of lover! Haply in some oasis in the wilderness, some steadfast gleam of emerald light amid the hyacinthine-hue of the heather, that young herdsman hath pitched his tent, by one Good Spirit haunted morning, noon, and night, through the sunny, moonlight, starry months,--the Orphan-girl, whom years ago her dying father gave into his arms--the old blind soldier--knowing that the boy would shield her innocence when every blood-relation had been buried--now Orphan-girl no more, but growing there like a lily at the Shieling door, or singing within sweetlier than any bird--the happiest of all living things--her own Ronald's dark-haired Bride.

We are in a Highland Hut among a Highland Snow-storm--and all at once amidst the roar of the merciless hurricane we remember the words of Burns--the peerless Peasant. Simple as they are, with what profound pathos are they charged!

"List'ning the doors an' winnocks rattle; I think me on the ourie cattle, Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle O' winter war, And thro' the drift, deep-lairing sprattle, Beneath a scaur!

Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing, That, in the merry months o' spring, Delighted me to hear thee sing, What comes o' thee? Whar wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, An' close thy ee?

Ev'n you on murdering errands toil'd, Lone from your savage homes exiled, The blood-stain'd roost, and sheep-cot spoil'd, My heart forgets, While pitiless the tempest wild Sore on you beats."

Burns is our Lowland bard--but poetry is poetry all over the world, when streamed from the life-blood of the human heart. So sang the Genius of inspired humanity in his bleak "auld clay-biggin," on one of the braes of Coila, and now our heart responds the strain, high up among the Celtic cliffs, central among a sea of mountains hidden in a snow-storm that enshrouds the day. Ay--the one single door of this Hut--the one single "winnock," does "rattle"--by fits--as the blast smites it, in spite of the white mound drifted hill-high all round the buried dwelling. Dim through the peat-reek cower the figures in tartan--fear has hushed the cry of the infant in the swinging cradle--and all the other imps are mute. But the household is thinner than usual at the meal-hour; and feet that loved to follow the red-deer along the bent, now fearless of pitfalls, since the first lour of morning light have been traversing the tempest. The shepherds, who sit all day long when summer hues are shining, and summer flowerets are blowing, almost idle in their plaids, beneath the shadow of some rock watching their flocks feeding above, around, and below, now expose their bold breasts to all the perils of the pastoral life. This is our Arcadia--a realm of wrath--woe--danger, and death. Here are bred the men whose blood--when the bagpipe blows--is prodigally poured forth on a thousand shores. The limbs strung to giant-force by such snows as these, moving in line of battle within the shadow of the Pyramids,

"Brought from the dust the sound of liberty,"

while the Invincible standard was lowered before the heroes of the Old Black Watch, and victory out of the very heart of defeat arose on "that thrice-repeated cry" that quails all foes that madly rush against the banners of Albyn. The storm that has frozen in his eyrie the eagle's wing, driven the deer to the comb beneath the cliffs, and all night imprisoned the wild-cat in his cell, hand-in-hand as is their wont when crossing a stream or flood, bands of Highlanders now face in its strongholds all over the ranges of mountains, come it from the wrathful inland or the more wrathful sea.

"They think upon the ourie cattle And silly sheep,"

and man's reason goes to the help of brute instinct.

How passing sweet is that other stanza, heard like a low hymn amidst the noise of the tempest! Let our hearts once more recite it,--

"Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing, That, in the merry months o' spring, Delighted me to hear thee sing, What comes o' thee? Whar wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, An' close thy ee?"

The whole earth is for a moment green again--trees whisper--streamlets murmur--and the "merry month o' Spring" is musical through all her groves. But in another moment we know that almost all those sweet-singers are now dead--or that they "cow'r the chittering wing"--never more to flutter through the woodlands, and "close the ee" that shall never more be re-illumined with love, when the Season of Nests is at hand, and bush, tree, and tower are again all a-twitter with the survivors of some gentler climate.

The poet's heart, humanised to utmost tenderness by the beauty of its own merciful thoughts, extends its pity to the poor beasts of prey. Each syllable tells--each stroke of the poet-painter's pencil depicts the life and sufferings of the wretched creatures. And then, feeling that at such an hour all life is subject to one lot, how profound the pathos reflected back upon our own selves and our mortal condition, by these few simplest words,--

"My heart forgets, While pitiless the tempest wild Sore on you beats!"

They go to help the "ourie cattle" and the "silly sheep;" but who knows that they are not _sent_ on an errand of higher mercy, by Him whose ear has not been shut to the prayer almost frozen on the lips of them about to perish!--an incident long forgotten, though on the eve of that day on which the deliverance happened, so passionately did we all regard it, that we felt that interference providential--as if we had indeed seen the hand of God stretched down through the mist and snow from heaven. We all said that it would never leave our memory; yet all of us soon forgot it--but now, while the tempest howls, it seems again of yesterday.