Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

CHRISTMAS DREAMS.

How graciously provided are all the subdivisions of Time, diversifying the dream of human life! And why should moralists mourn over the mutability that gives the chief charm to all that passes so transitorily before our eyes!—leaving image upon image in the waters of memory, that can bear being stirred without being disturbed, and contain steadier and steadier reflections as they seem to repose on an unfathomable depth!—the years, the months, the weeks, the days, the nights, the hours, the minutes, the moments, each in itself a different living, and peopled, and haunted world. One life is a thousand lives, and each individual, as he fully renews the past, reappears in a thousand characters; yet all of them bearing a mysterious identity not to be misunderstood, and all of them, while every passion has been shifting and ceasing, and reascending into power, still under the dominion of the same Conscience, that feels and knows it is from God.

Who will complain of the shortness of human life, that can re-travel all the windings, and wanderings, and mazes that his feet have trodden since the farthest back hour at which memory pauses, baffled and blindfolded, as she vainly tries to penetrate and illumine the palpable, the impervious darkness that shrouds the few first years of our inscrutable being? Long, long, long ago seems it to be indeed, when we now remember it, the Time we first pulled the primroses on the sunny braes, wondering in our first blissful emotions of beauty at the leaves with a softness all their own—a yellowness nowhere else so vivid—"the bright consummate flower" so starlike to our awakened imagination among the lowly grass—lovely indeed to our admiring eyes as any one of all the stars that, in their turn, did seem themselves like flowers in the blue fields of heaven! Long, long, long ago, the time when we danced hand in hand with our golden-haired sister! Long, long, long ago, the day on which she died—the hour, so far more dismal than any hour that can now darken us on this earth, when her coffin descended slowly, slowly into the horrid clay, and we were borne death-like, and wishing to die, out of the churchyard, that, from that moment, we thought we could enter never more! What a multitudinous being must ours have been, when, before our boyhood was gone, we could have forgotten her buried face! or at the dream of it, dashed off a tear, and away, with a bounding heart, in the midst of a cloud of playmates, breaking into fragments on the hill-side, and hurrying round the shores of those wild moorland lochs, in vain hope to surprise the heron that slowly uplifted his blue bulk, and floated away, regardless of our shouts, to the old castle woods. It is all like a reminiscence of some other state of existence.

Then, after all the joys and sorrows of those few years, which we now call transitory, but which our Boyhood felt as if they would be endless—as if they would endure for ever—arose upon us the glorious dawning of another new life—Youth—with its insupportable sunshine, and its agitating storms. Transitory, too, we now know, and well deserving the same name of dream. But while it lasted, long, various, and agonising; as, unable to sustain the eyes that first revealed to us the light of love, we hurried away from the parting hour, and, looking up to moon and stars, invocated in sacred oaths, hugged the very heavens to our heart. Yet life had not then nearly reached its meridian, journeying up the sunbright firmament. How long hung it there exulting, when "it flamed on the forehead of the noontide sky!" Let not the Time be computed by the lights and shadows of the years, but by the innumerable array of visionary thoughts, that kept deploying as if from one eternity into another—now in dark sullen masses, now in long array, brightened as if with spear-points and standards, and moving along through chasm, abyss, and forest, and over the summits of the highest mountains, to the sound of ethereal music, now warlike and tempestuous—now, as "from flutes and soft recorders" accompanying not pæans of victory but hymns of peace. That Life, too, seems, now that it is gone, to have been of a thousand years. Is it gone? Its skirts are yet hovering on the horizon. And is there yet another Life destined for us? That Life which men fear to face—Age, Old Age! Four dreams within a dream—and where to awake?

At dead of night—and it is now dead of night—how the heart quakes on a sudden at the silent resurrection of buried thoughts! Perhaps the sunshine of some one single Sabbath of more exceeding holiness comes first glimmering, and then brightening upon us, with the very same sanctity that filled all the air at the tolling of the kirk-bell, when all the parish was hushed, and the voice of streams heard more distinctly among the banks and braes. Then, all at once, a thunderstorm, that many years before, or many years after, drove us, when walking alone over the mountains, into a shieling, will seem to succeed; and we behold the same threatening aspect of the heavens that then quailed our beating hearts, and frowned down our eyelids before the lightning began to flash, and the black rain to deluge all the glens. No need now for any effort of thought. The images rise of themselves—independently of our volition—as if another being, studying the working of our minds, conjured up the phantasmagoria before us who are beholding it with love, wonder, and fear. Darkness and silence have a power of sorcery over the past; the soul has then, too, often restored to it feelings and thoughts that it had lost, and is made to know that nothing it once experiences ever perishes, but that all things spiritual possess a principle of immortal life.

Why linger on the shadowy wall some of those phantasmagoria—returning after they have disappeared—and reluctant to pass away into their former oblivion? Why shoot others athwart the gloom, quick as spectral figures seen hurrying among mountains during a great storm? Why do some glare and threaten—why others fade away with a melancholy smile? Why that one—a Figure all in white, and with white roses in her hair—come forward through the haze, beautifying into distincter form and face, till her pale beseeching hands almost touch our neck—and then, in a moment, it is as nothing?

But now the room is disenchanted—and feebly our lamp is glimmering, about to leave us to the light of the moon and stars. There it is trimmed again—and the sudden increase of lustre cheers the heart within us like a festal strain. And To-Morrow—To-Morrow is Merry Christmas; and when its night descends there will be mirth and music, and the light sound of the merry-twinkling feet within these now so melancholy walls—and sleep, now reigning over all the house save this one room, will be banished far over the sea—and morning will be reluctant to allow her light to break up the innocent orgies.

Were every Christmas of which we have been present at the celebration, painted according to nature—what a Gallery of Pictures! True that a sameness would pervade them all—but only that kind of sameness that pervades the nocturnal heavens. One clear night always is, to common eyes, just like another; for what hath any night to show but one moon and some stars—a blue vault, with here a few braided, and there a few castellated, clouds? Yet no two nights ever bore more than a family resemblance to each other before the studious and instructed eye of him who has long communed with Nature, and is familiar with every smile and frown on her changeful, but not capricious, countenance. Even so with the Annual Festivals of the heart. Then our thoughts are the stars that illumine those skies—and on ourselves it depends whether they shall be black as Erebus, or brighter than Aurora.

"Thoughts! that like spirits trackless come and go"—

is a fine line of Charles Lloyd's. But no bird skims, no arrow pierces the air, without producing some change in the Universe, which will last to the day of doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor irrecoverable by Nature's law is any consciousness, however ghostlike; though many a one, even the most blissful, never does return, but seems to be buried among the dead. But they are not dead—but only sleep; though to us who recall them not, they are as they had never been, and we, wretched ingrates, let them lie for ever in oblivion! How passing sweet when of their own accord they arise to greet us in our solitude?—as a friend who, having sailed away to a foreign land in our youth, has been thought to have died many long years ago, may suddenly stand before us, with face still familiar and name reviving in a moment, and all that he once was to us brought from utter forgetfulness close upon our heart.

My Father's House! How it is ringing like a grove in spring, with the din of creatures happier, a thousand times happier, than all the birds on earth. It is the Christmas Holidays—Christmas Day itself—Christmas Night—and Joy in every bosom intensifies Love. Never before were we brothers and sisters so dear to one another—never before had our hearts so yearned towards the authors of our being—our blissful being! There they sit—silent in all that outcry—composed in all that disarray—still in all that tumult; yet, as one or other flying imp sweeps round the chair, a father's hand will playfully strive to catch a prisoner—a mother's gentler touch on some sylph's disordered symar be felt almost as a reproof, and for a moment slacken the fairy-flight. One old game treads on the heels of another—twenty within the hour—and many a new game never heard of before nor since, struck out by the collision of kindred spirits in their glee, the transitory fancies of genius inventive through very delight. Then, all at once, there is a hush, profound as ever falls on some little plat within a forest when the moon drops behind the mountain, and the small green-robed People of Peace at once cease their pastime, and evanish. For She—the Silver-Tongued—is about to sing an old ballad, words and air alike hundreds of years old—and sing she doth, while tears begin to fall, with a voice too mournfully beautiful long to breathe below—and, ere another Christmas shall have come with the falling snows, doomed to be mute on earth—but to be hymning in Heaven.

Of that House—to our eyes the fairest of earthly dwellings—with its old ivied turrets, and orchard-garden bright alike with fruit and with flowers, not one stone remains. The very brook that washed its foundations has vanished along with them—and a crowd of other buildings, wholly without character, has long stood where here a single tree, and there a grove, did once render so lovely that small demesne; which, how could we, who thought it the very heart of Paradise, even for one moment have believed was one day to be blotted out of being, and we ourselves—then so linked in love that the band which bound us all together was, in its gentle pressure, felt not nor understood—to be scattered far and abroad, like so many leaves that after one wild parting rustle are separated by roaring wind-eddies, and brought together no more! The old Abbey—it still survives; and there, in that corner of the burial-ground, below that part of the wall which was least in ruins, and which we often climbed to reach the flowers and nests—there, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, lie the Loved and Venerated—for whom, even now that so many grief-deadening years have fled, we feel, in this holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to have ceased to weep—so seldom to have remembered!—And then, with a powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief, the floods we all wept together—at no long interval—on those pale and placid faces as they lay, most beautiful and most dreadful to behold, in their coffins.

We believe that there is genius in all childhood. But the creative joy that makes it great in its simplicity dies a natural death or is killed, and genius dies with it. In favoured spirits, neither few nor many, the joy and the might survive; for you must know that unless it be accompanied with imagination, memory is cold and lifeless. The forms it brings before us must be inspired with beauty—that is, with affection or passion. All minds, even the dullest, remember the days of their youth; but all cannot bring back the indescribable brightness of that blessed season. They who would know what they once were, must not merely recollect, but they must imagine, the hills and valleys—if any such there were—in which their childhood played, the torrents, the waterfalls, the lakes, the heather, the rocks, the heaven's imperial dome, the raven floating only a little lower than the eagle in the sky. To imagine what he then heard and saw, he must imagine his own nature. He must collect from many vanished hours the power of his untamed heart, and he must, perhaps, transfuse also something of his maturer mind into these dreams of his former being, thus linking the past with the present by a continuous chain, which, though often invisible, is never broken. So is it too with the calmer affections that have grown within the shelter of a roof. We do not merely remember, we imagine our father's house, the fireside, all his features then most living, now dead and buried; the very manner of his smile, every tone of his voice. We must combine with all the passionate and plastic power of imagination the spirit of a thousand happy hours into one moment; and we must invest with all that we ever felt to be venerable such an image as alone can satisfy our filial hearts. It is thus that imagination, which first aided the growth of all our holiest and happiest affections, can preserve them to us unimpaired—

"For she can give us back the dead,
Even in the loveliest looks they wore."

Then came a New Series of Christmases, celebrated one year in this family, another year in that—none present but those whom Charles Lamb the Delightful calleth the "old familiar faces;" something in all features, and all tones of voice, and all manners, betokening origin from one root—relations all, happy, and with no reason either to be ashamed or proud of their neither high nor humble birth—their lot being cast within that pleasant realm, "the Golden Mean," where the dwellings are connecting-links between the hut and the hall—fair edifices resembling manse or mansion-house, according as the atmosphere expands or contracts their dimensions—in which Competence is next-door neighbour to Wealth, and both of them within the daily walk of Contentment.

Merry Christmases they were indeed—one Lady always presiding, with a figure that once had been the stateliest among the stately, but then somewhat bent, without being bowed down, beneath an easy weight of most venerable years. Sweet was her tremulous voice to all her grandchildren's ears. Nor did those solemn eyes, bedimmed into a pathetic beauty, in any degree restrain the glee that sparkled in orbs that had as yet shed not many tears, but tears of joy or pity. Dearly she loved all those mortal creatures whom she was soon about to leave; but she sat in sunshine even within the shadow of death; and the "voice that called her home" had so long been whispering in her ear, that its accents had become dear to her, and consolatory every word that was heard in the silence, as from another world.

Whether we were indeed all so witty as we thought ourselves—uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, cousins, and "the rest," it might be presumptuous in us, who were considered by ourselves and a few others not the least amusing of the whole set, at this distance of time to decide—especially in the affirmative; but how the roof did ring with sally, pun, retort, and repartee! Ay, with pun—a species of impertinence for which we have therefore a kindness even to this day. Had incomparable Thomas Hood had the good fortune to have been born a cousin of ours, how with that fine fancy of his would he have shone at those Christmas festivals, eclipsing us all! Our family, through all its different branches, has ever been famous for bad voices, but good ears; and we think we hear ourselves—all those uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, and cousins—singing now! Easy is it to "warble melody" as to breathe air. But we hope harmony is the most difficult of all things to people in general, for to us it was impossible; and what attempts ours used to be at Seconds! Yet the most woeful failures were rapturously encored; and ere the night was done we spoke with most extraordinary voices indeed, every one hoarser than another, till at last, walking home with a fair cousin, there was nothing left for it but a tender glance of the eye—a tender pressure of the hand—for cousins are not altogether sisters, and although partaking of that dearest character, possess, it may be, some peculiar and appropriate charms of their own; as didst thou, Emily the "Wild-cap!"—That sobriquet all forgotten now—for now thou art a matron, nay a Grandam, and troubled with an elf fair and frolicsome as thou thyself wert of yore, when the gravest and wisest withstood not the witchery of thy dancings, thy singings, and thy showering smiles.

On rolled Suns and Seasons—the old died—the elderly became old—and the young, one after another, were wafted joyously away on the wings of hope, like birds almost as soon as they can fly ungratefully forsaking their nests and the groves in whose safe shadow they first essayed their pinions; or like pinnaces that, after having for a few days trimmed their snow-white sails in the land-locked bay, close to whose shores of silvery sand had grown the trees that furnished timber both for hull and mast, slip their tiny cables on some summer-day, and gathering every breeze that blows, go dancing over the waves in sunshine, and melt far off into the main. Or, haply, some were like fair young trees, transplanted during no favourable season, and never to take root in another soil, but soon leaf and branch to wither beneath the tropic sun, and die almost unheeded by those who knew not how beautiful they had been beneath the dews and mists of their own native climate.

Vain images! and therefore chosen by fancy not too painfully to touch the heart. For some hearts grow cold and forbidding with selfish cares—some, warm as ever in their own generous glow, were touched by the chill of Fortune's frowns, ever worst to bear when suddenly succeeding her smiles—some, to rid themselves of painful regrets, took refuge in forgetfulness, and closed their eyes to the past—duty banished some abroad, and duty imprisoned others at home—estrangements there were, at first unconscious and unintended, yet ere long, though causeless, complete—changes were wrought insensibly, invisibly, even in the innermost nature of those who being friends knew no guile, yet came thereby at last to be friends no more—unrequited love broke some bonds—requited love relaxed others—the death of one altered the conditions of many—and so—year after year—the Christmas Meeting was interrupted—deferred—till finally it ceased with one accord, unrenewed and unrenewable. For when Some Things cease for a time—that time turns out to be for ever.

Survivors of those happy circles! wherever ye be—should these imperfect remembrances of days of old chance, in some thoughtful pause of life's busy turmoil, for a moment to meet your eyes, let there be towards the inditer a few throbs of revived affection in your hearts—for his, though "absent long and distant far," has never been utterly forgetful of the loves and friendships that charmed his youth. To be parted in body is not to be estranged in spirit—and many a dream and many a vision, sacred to nature's best affections, may pass before the mind of one whose lips are silent. "Out of sight out of mind" is rather the expression of a doubt—of a fear—than of a belief or a conviction. The soul surely has eyes that can see the objects it loves, through all intervening darkness—and of those more especially dear it keeps within itself almost undimmed images, on which, when they know it not, think it not, believe it not, it often loves to gaze, as on relics imperishable as they are hallowed.

All hail! rising beautiful and magnificent through the mists of morning—ye Woods, Groves, Towers, and Temples, overshadowing that famous Stream beloved by all the Muses! Through this midnight hush—methinks we hear faint and far-off sacred music—

"Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise!"

How steeped now in the stillness of moonlight are all those pale, pillared Churches, Courts and Cloisters, Shrines and Altars, with here and there a Statue standing in the shade, or Monument sacred to the memory of the pious—the immortal dead. Some great clock is striking from one of many domes—from the majestic Tower of St Mary Magdalen—and in the deepened hush that follows the solemn sound, the mingling waters of the Cherwell and the Isis soften the severe silence of the holy night.

Remote from kindred, and from all the friendships that were the native growth of the fair fields where our boyhood and our youth had roamed and meditated and dreamed, those were indeed years of high and lofty mood which held us in converse with the shades of great Poets and Sages of old in Rhedicyna's hallowed groves, still, serene, and solemn, as that Attic Academe where divine Plato, with all Hybla on his lips, discoursed such excellent music that his life seemed to the imagination spiritualised—a dim reminiscence of some former state of being. How sank then the Christmas Service of that beautiful Liturgy into our hearts! Not faithless we to the simple worship that our forefathers had loved; but Conscience told us there was no apostasy in the feelings that rose within us when that deep organ began to blow, that choir of youthful voices so sweetly to join the diapason,—our eyes fixed all the while on that divine Picture over the Altar, of our Saviour

"Bearing his cross up rueful Calvary."

The City of Palaces disappears—and in the setting sunlight we behold mountains of soft crimson snow! The sun hath set, and even more beautiful are the bright-starred nights of winter, than summer in all its glories beneath the broad moons of June. Through the woods of Windermere, from cottage to cottage, by coppice-pathways winding up to dwellings among the hill-rocks where the birch-trees cease to grow—

"Nodding their heads, before us go,
The merry minstrelsy."

They sing a salutation at every door, familiarly naming old and young by their Christian names; and the eyes that look upward from the vales to the hanging huts among the plats and cliffs, see the shadows of the dancers ever and anon crossing the light of the star-like window, and the merry music is heard like an echo dwelling in the sky. Across those humble thresholds often did we on Christmas-week nights of yore—wandering through our solitary sylvan haunts, under the branches of trees within whose hollow trunk the squirrel slept—venture in, unasked perhaps, but not unwelcome, and, in the kindly spirit of the season, did our best to merrify the Festival by tale or song. And now that we behold them not, are all those woods, and cliffs, and rivers, and tarns, and lakes, as beautiful as when they softened and brightened beneath our living eyes, half-creating, as they gazed, the very world they worshipped? And are all those hearths as bright as of yore, without the shadow of our figure? And the roofs, do they ring as mirthfully, though our voice be forgotten? We hang over Westmoreland, an unobserved—but observant star. Mountains, hills, rocks, knolls, vales, woods, groves, single trees, dwellings—all asleep! O Lakes! but ye are, indeed, by far too beautiful! O fortunate Isles! too fair for human habitation, fit abode for the Blest! It will not hide itself—it will not sink into the earth—it will rise; and risen, it will stand steady with its shadow in the overpowering moonlight, that One Tree! that $1!—and well might the sight of ye two together—were it harder—break our heart. But hard at all it is not—therefore it is but crushed.

Can it be that there we are utterly forgotten! No star hanging higher than the Andes in heaven—but sole-sitting at midnight in a small chamber—a melancholy man are we—and there seems a smile of consolation, O Wordsworth! on thy sacred Bust.

Alas! how many heavenly days, "seeming immortal in their depth of rest," have died and been forgotten! Treacherous and ungrateful is our memory even of bliss that overflowed our being as light our habitation. Our spirit's deepest intercommunion with nature has no place in her records—blanks are there that ought to have been painted with imperishable imagery, and steeped in sentiment fresh as the morning on life's golden hills. Yet there is mercy in this dispensation—for who can bear to behold the light of bliss re-arising from the past on the ghastlier gloom of present misery? The phantoms that will not come when we call on them to comfort us, are too often at our side when in our anguish we could almost pray that they might be reburied in oblivion. Such hauntings as these are not as if they were visionary—they come and go like forms and shapes still imbued with life. Shall we vainly stretch out our arms to embrace and hold them fast, or as vainly seek to intrench ourselves by thoughts of this world against their visitation? The soul in its sickness knows not whether it be the duty of love to resign itself to indifference or to despair. Shall it enjoy life, they being dead! Shall we the survivors, for yet a little while, walk in other companionship out into the day, and let the sunbeams settle on their heads as they used to do, or cover them with dust and ashes, and show to those in heaven that love for them is now best expressed by remorse and penitence!

Sometimes we have fears about our memory—that it is decaying; for, lately, many ordinary yet interesting occurrences and events, which we regarded at the time with pain or pleasure, have been slipping away almost into oblivion, and have often alarmed us of a sudden by their return, not to any act of recollection, but of themselves, sometimes wretchedly out of place and season, the mournful obtruding upon the merry, and worse, the merry upon the mournful—confusion, by no fault of ours, of piteous and of gladsome faces—tears where smiles were a duty as well as a delight, and smiles where nature demanded, and religion hallowed, a sacrifice of tears.

For a good many years we have been tied to town in winter by fetters as fine as frostwork filigree, which we could not break without destroying a whole world of endearment. That seems an obscure image; but it means what the Germans would call in English—our winter environment. We are imprisoned in a net of our own weaving—an invisible net; yet we can see it when we choose—just as a bird can see, when he chooses, the wires of his cage, that are invisible in his happiness, as he keeps hopping and fluttering about all day long, or haply dreaming on his perch with his poll under his plumes—as free in confinement as if let loose into the boundless sky. That seems an obscure image too; but we mean, in truth, the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is; and we have improved on that idea, for we have built our own—and are prisoner, turnkey, and jailer all in one, and 'tis noiseless as the house of sleep. Or what if we declare that Christopher North is a king in his palace, with no subjects but his own thoughts—his rule peaceful over those lights and shadows—and undisputed to reign over them his right divine.

The opening year in a town, now, answers in all things to our heart's desire. How beautiful the smoky air! The clouds have a homely look as they hang over the happy families of houses, and seem as if they loved their birthplace; all unlike those heartless clouds that keep stravaiging over mountain-tops, and have no domicile in the sky! Poets speak of living rocks, but what is their life to that of houses? Who ever saw a rock with eyes—that is, with windows? Stone-blind all, and stone-deaf, and with hearts of stone; whereas who ever saw a house without eyes—that is, windows? Our own is an Argus; yet the good old Conservative grudges not the assessed taxes—his optics are as cheerful as the day that lends them light, and they love to salute the setting sun, as if a hundred beacons, level above level, were kindled along a mountain side. He might safely be pronounced a madman who preferred an avenue of trees to a street. Why, trees have no chimneys; and, were you to kindle a fire in the hollow of an oak, you would soon be as dead as a Druid. It won't do to talk to us of sap, and the circulation of sap. A grove in winter, bole and branch—leaves it has none—is as dry as a volume of sermons. But a street, or a square, is full of "vital sparks of heavenly flame" as a volume of poetry, and the heart's blood circulates through the system like rosy wine.

But a truce to comparisons; for we are beginning to feel contrition for our crime against the country, and, with humbled head and heart, we beseech you to pardon us—ye rocks of Pavey-Ark, the pillared palaces of the storms—ye clouds, now wreathing a diadem for the forehead of Helvellyn—ye trees, that hang the shadows of your undying beauty over the "one perfect chrysolite" of blessed Windermere!

Our meaning is transparent now as the hand of an apparition waving peace and goodwill to all dwellers in the land of dreams. In plainer but not simpler words (for words are like flowers, often rich in their simplicity—witness the Lily, and Solomon's Song)—Christian people all, we wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New-Year, in town or in country—or in ships at sea.

A Happy New-Year!—Ah! ere this Aria, sung sotto voce, reach your ears (eyes are ears, and ears eyes), the week of all weeks will be over and gone, and the New-Year will seem growing out of the old year's ashes!—for the year is your only Phœnix. But what with time to do has a wish—a hope—a prayer! Their power is in the Spirit that gives them birth. And what is Spirit but the well-head of thoughts and feelings flowing and overflowing all life, yet leaving the well-head full of water as ever—so lucid, that on your gazing intently into its depths, it seems to become a large soft spiritual eye, reflecting the heavens and the earth; and no one knows what the heavens and the earth are, till he has seen them there—for that God made the heavens and the earth we feel from that beautiful revelation—and where feeling is not, knowledge is dead, and a blank the universe. Love is life. The unloving merely breathe. A single sweet beat of the heart is token of something spiritual that will be with us again in Paradise. "O, bliss and beauty! are these our feelings"—thought we once in a dream—"all circling in the sunshine—fair-plumed in a flight of doves!" The vision kept sailing on the sky—"to and fro for our delight"—no sound on their wings more than on their breasts; and they melted away in light as if they were composed of light—and in the hush we heard high-up and far-off music—as of an angel's song.

That was a dream of the mysterious night; but now we are broad awake—and see no emblematical phantoms, but the mere sights of the common day. But sufficient for the day is the beauty thereof—and it inspires us with affection for all beneath the skies. Will the whole world, then, promise henceforth to love us?—and we promise henceforth to love the whole world.

It seems the easiest of all easy things to be kind and good—and then it is so pleasant! "Self-love and social are the same," beyond all question; and in that lies the nobility of our nature. The intensest feeling of self is that of belonging to a brotherhood. All selves then know they have duties which are in truth loves—and loves are joys—whether breathed in silence, or uttered in words, or embodied in actions; and if they filled all life, then all life would be good—and heaven would be no more than a better earth. And how may all men go to heaven? By making themselves a heaven on earth, and thus preparing their spirits to breathe empyreal air when they have dropped the dust. And how may they make for themselves a heaven on earth? By building up a happy HOME FOR THE HEART. Much, but not all—oh! not nearly all—is in the site. But it must be within the precincts of the holy ground—and within hearing of the waters of life.

Pleasures of Imagination! Pleasures of Memory! Pleasures of Hope! All three most delightful poems; yet all the thoughts and all the feelings that inspired them—etherealised—will not make—FAITH! "The day-spring from on high hath visited us!" Blessed is he who feels that line—nor need his heart die within him, were a voice to be heard at midnight saying—"This New-Year's day shall be thy last!"

One voice—one young voice—all by its sweet, sad, solitary self, singing to us a Christmas Hymn! Listening to that music is like looking at the sky with all its stars.

Was it a spirit?

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk unseen,
Sole or responsive to each other's voice,
Hymning their great Creator."

No, the singer, like ourselves, is mortal; and in that thought, to our hearts, lies the pathos of her prayers. The angels, veiling their faces with their wings, sing in their bliss hallelujahs round the throne of heaven; but she—a poor child of clay, with her face veiled but with the shades of humility and contrition, while

"Some natural tears she drops, but wipes them soon,"—

sings, in her sorrow, supplications to be suffered to see afar-off its everlasting gates—opening not surely for her own sake—for all of woman born are sinful—and even she in what love calls her innocence feels that her fallen being does of itself deserve but to die. The hymn is fading away, liker and liker an echo, and our spirit having lost it in the distance, returns back holier to the heart-hush of home.

The million hunger and thirst after the stronger and darker passions; nothing will go down with them but the intense. They are intolerant—or careless—or even ashamed of those emotions and affections that compose the blessing of our daily life, and give its lustre to the fire on the hearth of every Christian household. Yet, for all that, they are inexperienced in those same stronger and darker passions of which they prate, and know nothing of the import of those pictures of them painted, with background of gloom and foreground of fire, in the works of the truly great masters. The disturbed spirit of such delineations is far beyond the reaches of their souls; and they mistake their own senseless stupor for solemn awe—or their own mere physical excitement for the enthusiasm of imagination soaring through the storm on the wings of intellect. There are such things in "Satan's Invisible World Displayed" in poetry, as strong and dark passions; and they who are acquainted with their origin and end call them bad passions; but the good passions are not dark, but bright—and they are strong too, stronger than death or the grave.

All human beings who know how to reap

"The harvest of a quiet eye,
That broods and sleeps on its own heart,"

feel, by the touch, the flowers of affection in every handful of beauty they gather up from those fortunate fields on which shines, for ever through all seasons, the sun of life. How soft the leaves! and, as they meet the eye, how fair! Framed, so might it seem, of green dew consolidated into fragrance. Nor do they fade when gently taken from their stalk on its native bed. They flourish for ever if you bruise them not—sensitive indeed; and, if you are so forgetful as to treat them rashly, like those of the plant that bears that name, they shrink, and seem to shrivel for a time—growing pale, as if upbraiding your harshness; but cherished, they are seen to be all of

"Immortal amaranth, the tree that grows
Fast by the throne of God;"

for the seeds have fallen from heaven to earth, and for eighteen hundred years have been spreading themselves over all soils fit for their reception—and what soil is not fit? Even fit are stony places, and places full of thorns. For they will live and grow there in spite of such obstruction—and among rank and matted weeds will often be seen peering out like primroses gladdening the desert.

That voice again—"One of old Scotland's songs, so sad and slow!" Her heart is now blamelessly with things of earth. "Sad and slow!" and most purely sweet. Almost mournful although it be, it breathes of happiness—for the joy dearest to the soul has ever a faint tinge of grief. O innocent enchantress! thou encirclest us with a wavering haze of beautiful imagery, by the spell of that voice awakening after a mood of awe, but for thy own delight. From the long dim tracts of the past come strangely blended recognitions of woe and bliss, undistinguishable now to our own heart—nor knows that heart if it be a dream of imagination or of memory. Yet why should we wonder? In our happiest hours there may have been something in common with our most sorrowful—some shade of sadness cast over them by a passing cloud, that now allies them in retrospect with the sombre spirit of grief; and in our unhappiest hours there may have been gleams of gladness, that seem now to give the return the calm character of peace. Do not all thoughts and feelings, almost all events, seem to resemble each other—when they are dreamt of as all past? All receive a sort of sanctification in the stillness of the time that has gone by—just like the human being whom they adorned or degraded—when they, too, are at last buried together in the bosom of the same earth.

Perhaps none among us ever wrote verses of any worth, who had not been, more or less, readers of our old ballads. All our poets have been so—and even Wordsworth would not have been the veritable and only Wordsworth, had he not in boyhood pored—oh, the miser!—over Percy's "Reliques." From the highest to the humblest, they have all drunk from those silver springs. Shepherds and herdsmen and woodsmen have been the masters of the mighty—their strains have, like the voice of a solitary lute, inspired a power of sadness into the hearts of great poets that gave their genius to be prevalent over all tears, or with a power of sublimity that gave it dominion over all terror, like the sound of a trumpet. "The Babes in the Wood!" "Chevy Chace!" Men become women while they weep—

"Or start up heroes from the glorious strain."

Sing then "The Dirge," my Margaret, to the Old Man, "so tender and so true" to the spirit of those old ballads, which we might think were written by Pity's self.

DIRGE.

"O dig a grave, and dig it deep,
Where I and my true love may sleep!
We'll dig a grave, and dig it deep,
Where thou and thy true love shall sleep!

And let it be five fathom low,
Where winter winds may never blow!—
And it shall be five fathom low,
Where winter winds shall never blow!

And let it be on yonder hill,
Where grows the mountain daffodil!—
And it shall be on yonder hill,
Where grows the mountain daffodil!

And plant it round with holy briers,
To fright away the fairy fires!—
We'll plant it round with holy briers!
To fright away the fairy fires!

And set it round with celandine,
And nodding heads of columbine!—
We'll set it round with celandine,
And nodding heads of columbine!

And let the ruddock build his nest
Just above my true love's breast!—
The ruddock he shall build his nest
Just above thy true love's breast!

And warble his sweet wintry song
O'er our dwelling all day long!
And he shall warble his sweet song
O'er your dwelling all day long.

Now, tender friends, my garments take,
And lay me out for Jesus' sake!
And we will now thy garments take,
And lay thee out for Jesus' sake!

And lay me by my true love's side,
That I may be a faithful bride!—
We'll lay thee by thy true love's side,
That thou may'st be a faithful bride!"

Ay—ay—thou too art gone, William Stanley Roscoe! What years have flown since we walked among the "alleys green" of Allerton with thee and thy illustrious father! and who ever conversed with him for a few hours in and about his own home—where the stream of life flowed on so full and clear—without carrying away impressions that never seemed to be remembrances—so vivid have they remained amidst the obscurations and obliterations of Time, that sweeps with his wings all that lies on the surface, but has no power to disturb, much less destroy, the record printed on the heart.

We are all of us getting old—or older; nor would we, for our own part—if we could—renew our youth. Methinks the river of life is nobler as it nears the sea. The young are dancing in their skiffs on the pellucid shallows near the source on the Sacred Mountains of the Golden East. They whose lot it is to be in their prime, are dropping down the longer and wider reaches, that seem wheeling by with their sylvan amphitheatres, as if the beauty were moving morn-wards, while the voyagers are stationary among the shadows, or slowly descending the stream to meet the meridian day. Many forget

"The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below,"

and are lost in the roaring whirlpool. Under Providence, we see ourselves on the river expanded into a sea-like lake, or arm of the sea; and for all our soul has escaped and suffered, we look up to the stars in gratitude—and down to the stars—for the water too is full of stars as well as the sky—faint and dim indeed—but blended by the pervading spirit of beauty, with the brighter and bolder luminaries reposing on infinitude.

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