Christopher North.
We still linger about those charmingest of country places; and by a wooden gateway—adjoining the approach to Windermere Hotel—upon the “Elleray woods,” amid which lived—eighty years ago—that stalwart friend of De Quincey’s, whose acquaintance he made among the Lakes, and who, like himself, was a devoted admirer of Wordsworth. Indeed, I think it was at the home of the latter that De Quincey first encountered the tall, lusty John Wilson—brimful of enthusiasm and all country ardors; brimful, too, of gush, and all poetic undulations of speech. He[12] was a native of Paisley—his father having been a rich manufacturer there—and had come to spend his abundant enthusiasms and his equally abundant moneys between Wordsworth and the mountains and Windermere. He has his fleet of yachts and barges upon the lake; he knows every pool where any trout lurk—every height that gives far-off views. He is a pugilist, a swimmer, an oarsman—making the hills echo with his jollity, and dashing off through the springy heather with that slight, seemingly frail De Quincey in his wake—who only reaches to his shoulder, but who is all compact of nerve and muscle. For Greek they are fairly mated, both by love and learning; and they can and do chant together the choral songs of heathen tragedies.
This yellow-haired, blue-eyed giant, John Wilson—not so well-known now as he was sixty years ago—we collegians greatly admired in that far-off day. He had written the Isle of Palms, and was responsible for much of the wit and dash and merriment which sparkled over the early pages of Blackwood’s Magazine—in the chapters of the Noctes Ambrosianæ and in many a paper besides:—he had his first university training at Glasgow; had a brief love-episode there also, which makes a prettily coy appearance on the pleasant pages of the biography of Wilson which a daughter (Mrs. Gordon) has compiled. After Glasgow came Oxford; and a characteristic bit of his later writing, which I cite, will show you how Oxford impressed him:—
“Having bidden farewell to our sweet native Scotland, and kissed ere we parted, the grass and the flowers with a show of filial tears—having bidden farewell to all her glens, now a-glimmer in the blended light of imagination and memory, with their cairns and kirks, their low-chimneyed huts, and their high-turreted halls, their free-flowing rivers, and lochs dashing like seas—we were all at once buried not in the Cimmerian gloom, but the Cerulean glitter of Oxford’s Ancient Academic groves. The genius of the place fell upon us. Yes! we hear now, in the renewed delight of the awe of our youthful spirit, the pealing organ in that Chapel called the Beautiful; we see the Saints on the stained windows; at the Altar the picture of One up Calvary meekly ascending. It seemed then that our hearts had no need even of the kindness of kindred—of the country where we were born, and that had received the continued blessings of our enlarging love! Yet away went, even then, sometimes, our thoughts to Scotland, like carrier-pigeons wafting love messages beneath their unwearied wings.”[13]
We should count this, and justly, rather over-fine writing nowadays. Yet it is throughout stamped with the peculiarities of Christopher North; he cannot help his delightfully wanton play with language and sentiment; and into whatever sea of topics he plunged—early or late in life—he always came up glittering with the beads and sparkles of a highly charged rhetoric. Close after Oxford comes that idyllic life[14] in Windermere to which I have referred. Four or more years pass there; his trees grow there; his new roads—hewn through the forests—wind there; he plots a new house there; he climbs the mountains; he is busy with his boats. Somewhat later he marries; he does not lose his old love for the poets of the Greek anthology; he has children born to him; he breeds game fowls, and looks after them as closely as a New England farmer’s wife after her poultry; but with him poetry and poultry go together. There are old diaries of his—into which his daughter gives us a peep—that show such entries as this:—“The small Paisley hen set herself 6th of July, with no fewer than nine eggs;” and again—“Red pullet in Josie’s barn was set with eight eggs on Thursday;” and square against such memoranda, and in script as careful, will appear some bit of verse like this:—
“Oh, fairy child! what can I wish for thee?
Like a perennial flowret may’st thou be,
That spends its life in beauty and in bliss;
Soft on thee fall the breath of time,
And still retain in heavenly clime
The bloom that charms in this.”
He wrote, too, while living there above Windermere, his poem of the Isle of Palms; having a fair success in the early quarter of this century, but which was quickly put out of sight and hearing by the brisker, martial music of Scott, and by the later and more vigorous and resonant verse of Byron.
Indeed, Wilson’s poetry was not such as we would have looked for from one who was a “varra bad un to lick” at a wrestling bout, and who made the splinters fly when his bludgeon went thwacking into a page of controversial prose. His verse is tender; it is graceful; it is delicate; it is full of languors too; and it is tiresome—a gentle girlish treble of sound it has, that you can hardly associate with this brawny mass of manhood.