Obrázky na stránke
PDF
ePub

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

evanishing has left it blank as mist-there is a fast, thick, attering on the woods-yesrain-rain-rain-and ere we reach Bowness, the party will be wet through to their skins. Nay-matters are getting still more serious-blast. Windermere is in a tumult-the storm 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 mcaning and muttering up among the cliffs? See-see how the sheet lightning

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 thunder-storm we conclude, and to bed by a flaff of lightning.

PROLOGUE.

THE MOORS.

tesque 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 molehill, that you get mutually tired of one another's company, and are ready to vent your quarrel in reciprocal imprecations.

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 in- So was it once with us and the Highlands. timacy upon us, in all winds and weathers, that That "too much familiarity breeds contempt" without giving them the cut direct there was we learned many a long year ago, when learnno way of escaping from the burden of their ing to write large text; and passages in our friendship. To courteous and humane Chris-life have been a running commentary on the tians, such as we have always been both by theme then set us by that incomparable caliname and nature as far back as we can recol-graphist, Butterworth. All "the old familiar lect, it is painful to cut even an impudent faces" occasionally come in for a portion of 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 Allow us to offer another view of the sub. by nature. But that Mistress of the Ceremo-ject. There is not about Old Age one blessing nies, though enjoying a fine green old age, more deserving gratitude to Heaven, than the cannot be expected to be equally attentive to gradual bedimming of memory brought on ty the proceedings of all the objects under her years. In youth, all things, internal and extercontrol. Accordingly, often when she is not nal, are unforgetable, and by the perpetual looking, what more common than for a huge presence of passion oppress the soul. The hulking fellow of a rock, with an absurd tuft eye of a woman haunts the victim on whom of trees on his head, who has observed you it may have given a glance, till he leaps per lying half-asleep on the greensward, to hang haps out of a four-story window. A beautiful eavesdropping, as it were, over your most lake, or a sublime mountain, drives a young secret thoughts, which he whispers to the winds, poet as mad as a March hare. He loses him and they to all the clouds! Or for some gro-self in an interminable forest louring all round

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 Firsi Love?

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 grayheaded 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-hisname? 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 country he encumbers. Rossshire? 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 g.oom. They all re-appear-those from the Empyrean-hese 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 ima gination 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 idealized; 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 king 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 remem. ber 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, nunlike, keep the tell-tale orbs fixed on the ground. Candour whispers us to confess, that some years ago a child was exhibited at six-pence with WILLIAM Woon 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 Abbeynow 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 oun FATHER, alongside of the Pedlar in the Excursion? Words worth says

"Amid the gloom, Spreal by a brotherhood of lofty elni

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" unques-
tionably 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 ne 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--or 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 in-
dependent KNOUT.

We

Was the Pedlar absolutely asleep? chrewdly 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 lail'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 midday snooze-as we have been beholding in our mind's eye our venerated and mysterious Double.

We cannot help flattering ourse ves-if indeed it be flattery-that though no relative of his, we have a look of the Pedlar—as he is ela

borately 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,

Detained 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 agejust 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 lack-a-daisical. 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! nign-of a man conscious of his greatness at once austere and gracious-haughty and bewhile yet companioning with the humble-ar 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 in that very attitude-having deposited on the Emeritus of the Three Days. We were standing 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 checks
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 in our 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 Mil-
lar's class, we could have given you the alti-
tude 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,"

dom 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 an humble dwelling in the
Highlands of Scotland.

"Among the hills of Athol 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."

His childhood was nurtured at home in Chris-
tian love and truth-and acquired other know-
ledge at a winter school; for in summer he
"tended cattle on the hill"-

"That stood

Sole building on a mountain's dreary edge." And the influence of such education and occupation among such natural objects, Wordsworth expounds in some as fine poetry as ever issued from the cells of philosophic thought.

"So the foundations of his mind were laid."

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 molecatcher 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 in- But in the Manse there were books-ana he deed dearly love, though when old Surly looks suspicious 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 wis

The boy had small need of books-
"For many a tale
Traditionary, round the mountains hung,
And many a legend, peopling the dark woods,
Nourish'd Imagination in her growth,
And gave the mind that apprehensive power
By which she is made quick to recognise
The moral properties and scope of things."

read

"Whate'er the minister's old shelf supplied,
The life and death of martyrs, who sustain'd,
With will inflexible, those fearful pangs,
Triumphantly display'd in records left
Of persecution and the Covenant."

Can you not believe that by the time he was as old as you were when you used to ride to the races on a pony, by the side of your sire the Squire, this boy was your equal in knowledge, though you had a private tutor all to yourself, and were then a promising lad, as indeed you are now after the lapse of a quar ter of a century? True, as yet he "had small Latin and no Greek;" but the elements of these languages may be learned-trust usby slow degrees-by the mind rejoicing in the consciousness of its growing faculties-during leisure hours from other studies-as they were by the Athol adolescent. A Scholar-in your sense of the word-he might not be called, even when he had reached his seventeenth year, though probably he would have puzzled you in Livy and Virgil; nor of English poetry had he read much-the less the better for such a mind-at that age, and in that conditionfor

"Accumulated feelings press'd his heart

With still increasing weight; he was o'erpower'd
By nature, by the turbulence subdued
Of his own mind, by mystery and hope,
And the first virgin passion of a soul
Communing with the glorious Universe."

But he had read Poetry-ay, the same Poetry

that Wordsworth's self read at the same age | artificial society; and in ten thousand cases. -and

"Among the hills

He gazed upon that mighty Orb of Sun,
The divine Milton."

Thus endowed, and thus instructed,

"By Nature, that did never yet betray The heart that loved her,"

the youth was "greater than he knew;" yet that there was something great in, as well as about him, he felt

"Thus daily thirsting in that lonesome life," for some diviner communication than had yet been vouchsafed to him by the Giver and Inspirer of his restless Being.

"In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought,

Thus was he rear'd; much wanting to assist
The growth of intellect, yet gaining more,

And every moral feeling of his soul
Strengthen'd and braced, by breathing in content
The keen, the wholesome air of poverty,
And drinking from the well of homely life."
But he is in his eighteenth year, and

"Is summon'd to select the course
Of humble industry that promised best
To yield him no unworthy maintenance."

For a season he taught a village school, which
many a fine, high, and noble spirit has done
and is doing; but he was impatient of the hills
he loved, and

"That stern yet kindly spirit, who constrains
The Savoyard to quit his native rocks,

The free-born Swiss to leave his narrow vales,
(Spirit attach'd to regions mountainous
Like their own steadfast clouds,) did now impel
His restless mind to look abroad with hope."

where the heart of such society was happily sound at the core, notwithstanding the rotten kitchen-stuff with which it was incrusted, the shocks have killed the prejudices; and men and women, encouraged to consult their own breasts, have heard responses there to the truths uttered in music by the high-souled Bard, assuring them of an existence there of capacities of pure delight, of which they had had either but a faint suspicion, or, because "of the world's dread laugh," feared to in dulge, and nearly let die.

Mr. Wordsworth quotes from Heron's Scotland an interesting passage, illustrative of the life led in our country at that time by that class of persons from whom he has chosen one-not, mind you, imaginary, though for purposes of imagination-adding that "his own personal knowledge emboldened him to draw the portrait." In that passage Heron says, "As they wander, each alone, through thinly inhabited districts, they form habits of reflection and of sublime contemplation," and that, with all their qualifications, no wonder they should contribute much to polish the roughness and soften the rusticity of our peasantry. "In North America," he says, "travel ling merchants from the settlements have done

and continue to do much more towards civiliz ing the Indian natives than all the missiona ries, Papist or Protestant, who have ever been sent among them;" and, speaking again of Scotland, he says, "it is not more than twenty or thirty years, since a young man going from It had become his duty to choose a profession any part of Scotland to England for the -a trade-a calling. He was not a gentle-purpose to carry the pack, was considered as man, mind ye, and had probably never so much as heard a rumour of the existence of a silver fork: he had been born with a wooden spoon in his mouth-and had lived, partly from choice and partly from necessity, on a vegetable diet. He had not ten pounds in the world he could call his own; but he could borrow fifty, for his father's son was to be trusted to that amount by any family that chanced to have it among the Athol hills-therefore he resolved on "a

going to lead the life, and acquire the fortune of a gentleman. When, after twenty years' absence in that honourable line of employment, he returned with his acquisitions to his native country, he was regarded as a gentleman to all intents and purposes." We have ourselves known gentlemen who had carried the pack-one of them a man of great talents and acquirements-who lived in his old age in the highest circles of society. Nobody troubled their head about his birth and parentage-for he was then very rich; but you could not sit ten When squire, and priest, and they who round them minutes in his company without feeling that

hard service," which

'Gain'd merited respect in simpler times;

dwelt

he was 66
one of God Almighty's gentlemen,"
belonging to the "aristocracy of Nature."

In rustic sequestration, all dependent Upon the PEDLAR'S toil, supplied their wants, Or pleased their fancies with the ware he brought. You have heard, we hope, of Alexander Would Alfred have ceased to be Alfred had Wilson, the illustrious Ornithologist, second he lived twenty years in the hut where he not even to Audubon-and sometimes absurd. spoiled the bannocks? Would Gustavus have ly called the Great American Ornithologist, ceased to be Gustavus had he been doomed to because with pen and pencil he painted in dree an ignoble life in the obscurest nook in colours that will never die-the Birds of the Dalecarlia? Were princes and peers in our New World. He was a weaver-a Paisley day degraded by working, in their expatria- weaver-a useful trade, and a pleasant place tion, with head or hand for bread? Are the-where these now dim eyes of ours first saw Polish patriots degraded by working at eighteen the light. And Sandy was a pedlar. Hear his pence a day, without victuals, on embankments words in an autobiography unknown to the of railroads? "At the risk of giving a shock Bard:-"I have this day, I believe, measured to the prejudices of artificial society, I have the height of an hundred stairs, and explored ever been ready to pay homage to the aristo- the recesses of twice that number of miseracracy of nature, under a conviction that vigor- ble habitations; and what have I gained by ous human-heartedness is the constituent principle of true taste." These are Wordsworth's own words, and deserve letters of gold. He has given many a shock to the prejudices of

it ?-only two shillings of worldly pelf! but an invaluable treasure of observation. in this elegant dome, wrapt up in glittering silks, and stretched on the downy sofa, recline the fair

« PredošláPokračovať »