Where the forest murmurs

by William Sharp

THE RAINY HYADES

“Where is the star Imbrifer? Let us adore it.”

Years ago I remember coming upon this mysterious phrase in a poem or poetic drama by a French writer. The pagans, led by a priest, then went into the woods; and, in a hollow made of a hidden place swept by great boughs, worshipped a moist star. I forget whether the scourge of drought ended then, and if winds lifted the stagnant branches, if rains poured through the leaves and mosses and reached the well-springs. I recall only the invocation, and some faint and broken memory of the twilight-procession of bitter hearts and wild voices, weary of vain lamentation and of unanswered prayers to sleeping or silent gods. But often I wondered as to Imbrifer, that dark lord with the sonorous name. Was he a Gaulish divinity, or, as his name signals, a strayed Latin? And was he, as our Manan of the West, a sea-deity, or a divinity of the clouds, clothed, like the shepherd Angus Sunlocks, in mist, so as the more secretly to drive before him down the hidden ways of heaven the myriad hosts of the rain? Or had he an angelic crest, with wings of unfalling water, as a visionary once portrayed for me a likeness of Midir, that ancient Gaelic god at whose coming came and still come the sudden dews, or whose presence or the signs of whose passage would be revealed and still are revealed by the white glisten on thickets and grasses, by the moist coolness on the lips of leaf and flower.

The name, too, or one very like it, I heard once in a complicated (and, alas, for the most part forgotten) tale of the Kindred of Manan, the Poseidon of the Gael: remembered because of the singular companionship of three or four other Latin-sounding names, which the old Schoolmaster-teller may have invented or himself introduced, or mayhap had in the sequence of tradition from some forgotten monkish reciter of old. Aquarius and either Cetus or Delphinius (quaintly given as the Pollack, the porpoise) were of the astronomical company, I remember—and Neptheen or Nepthuinn (Neptune), notwithstanding his oneness with Manan’s self.

But Imbrifer had faded from my mind, as though washed away by one of his waves of rain or obliterated by one of his dense mists, till the other day. Then, as it happened, I came upon the name once more, in a Latin quotation in an old book. So, he was of the proud Roman clan after all! and, by the context, clearly a divinity of the autumnal rains, and of those also that at the vernal equinox are as a sound of innumerable little clapping hands.

Could he be an astronomical figure, a Zodiacal prince of dominion, I wondered. In vain I searched through all available pages connected with the Hyades, the Stars of Water: in vain, the chronicles of Aquarius, of Cetus and the Dolphin, of Hydra and Pisces and Argo, that proud Ship of March. But last night, sitting by the fire and hearing the first sleet of winter whistle through the dishevelled oaks and soughing firs, when I was idly reading and recalling broken clues in connection with the astrological ‘House of Seturn,’ suddenly, in pursuit of a cross-reference to some detail in connection with the constellation of Capricorn, I encountered Imbrifer once more. ‘Imbrifer, the Rain-Bringing One.’

So, then, he is more than an obscure divinity of the woods and of remote ancestral clans! Greater even than Midir of the Dews, one of the great Lords of Death: greater than the Greek Poseidon or the Gaelic Manan, heaven-throned among the older gods though seen of mortals only on gigantic steeds of ocean, vast sea-green horses with feet of running waves and breasts of billows. For he is no other than one of the mightiest of the constellations, Capricorn itself! The name, in a word, is but one of several more or less obscure or forgotten analogues of this famous constellation, concerning which the first printed English astrological almanac (1386) has ‘whoso is born in Capcorn schal be ryche and wel lufyd’!

Imbrifer himself ... or itself ... is certainly not ‘wel lufyd’ on many of these October and November days of floods and rains! Imbrifer ... the very name is a kind of stately, Miltonic, autumnal compeer of our insignificant (and, in Scotland, dreaded!) rain-saint of July, Swithin of dubious memory! It would add dignity to the supplication or imprecation of the sleet-whipt citizen of Edinburgh or the rain-and-mud splashed wayfarer in London, during the wet and foggy days of November, if, instead of associating the one or the other with ‘the weather’ or ‘our awful climate’ he could invoke or abjure so imposing and grandiloquent an abstraction as ‘Imbrifer’!

Truly a fit Constellation of late autumn, Capricornus.

“Thy Cold, for Thou o’er Winter Signs dost reign,
Pullst back the Sun....”

as a bygone astronomical versifier has it. Perhaps he had in mind Horace’s ‘tyrannus Hesperiae Capricornus undae,’ who in turn may have recalled an earlier poet still, English’d thus:

“... Then grievous blasts
Break southward on the Sea, when coincide
The Goat and Sun: and then a heaven-sent cold.”

Many of us will remember with a thrill Milton’s magnificent image

“... Thence down amain
As deep as Capricorn,”

and others will recall the often-quoted line of Dante in the Paradiso (relative to the Sun’s entrance into Capricorn between January 18 and February 14).

“The horn of the Celestial Goat doth touch the Sun.”

May and November are the two ‘fatal’ months with the Celtic peoples: the first because of the influence of the Queen of Faerie (she has many names), and the second because of Midir, who sleeps in November, or, as another legend has it, ‘goes away’ in that month. In that month too the Daughter of Midir has departed on her long quest of her brother Aluinn Og (is this a legend or a confused traditionary remembrance, or a mytho-poeic invention.... I have come upon it once only), to find him asleep under the shaken fans of the Northern Lights, and to woo him with pale arctic fires, and auroras, and a faint music wrought out of the murmur of polar airs on a harp made of a seal’s breast-bone. It is but in another guise the old Greek legend of Persephone in the Kingdom of Aidoneus. Again, it is in November that the touch of Dalua, the Secret Fool or the Accursed of the Everlasting Ones, gives death. Once more, it is in November that Lîr holds his great banquet, a banquet that lasts three months, in Tir-fo-tuinn, the Country under the waves. In one way or another all these dreams are associated with the sea, with water and the Winter Solstice. By different ways of thought, of tradition, and of dreaming phantasy, the minds of this race or that people, of these scattered tribes or those broken clans, have reached the same strange goals of the imagination. The spell of Capricorn may be of the Waters of all time, since the Horned Goat of our Celtic forbears, the ‘Buccan Horn’ of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, the Latin ‘Imbrifer’ or ‘Gelidus’ or ‘Sea-Goat’ (in several variants), the Greek ‘Athalpees’ or the commoner term signifying a Horned Goat, the ancient Egyptian Chnemu, God of the Waters, the perhaps as ancient Aztec Cipactli, imaged like the narwhal, the Chinese Mo Ki and the Assyrian Munaxa, both signifying Goat Fish—and so forth, East and West, in the dim past and the confused present,—are all directly or indirectly associated with the element of Water, with the Sea, or rains, storm and change and subtle regeneration. The Greek writers called the allied constellation of Aquarius Hydrochoüs, the Water-Pourer, in mythological connection (a Latin commentator avers) with Deucalion and the great Flood, that many believe to have been an ancestral memory of the Deluge which submerged Atlantis. The Anglo-Saxons gave it the same name, ‘se waeter-gyt.’ There is a Breton legend in connection with Ys, that dim Celtic remembrance of vanished Lyonesse or drowned Atlantis, to the effect (for I know it only in modern guise) that on the fatal night when King Gradlon saw his beautiful city unloosened to the devouring waves by Dahut the Red, his Daughter, the Stars of water shook a fiery rain upon land and sea and that the floods of heaven fell, from the wake of the Great Galley (the Great Bear) to the roots of the unseen tree that bears the silver Apples (the Pleiades), and as far as the hidden Wellsprings (the Constellation of Capricorn) and The Mansion of the White King (the Constellation of Aquarius)—the White King being water personified.

Nearly all the ancient Greek and Asian analogues for the last named, Aquarius, relate to water. One of the few old-world exceptions was that Roman Zodiac on which the constellation figured as a peacock, symbol of Hêrê (Juno), because that in her month Gamelion (part January, part February) the sun enters this sign. The Greek Islanders of Ceos called it Aristaeus, in memory of a native Rain Bringer. Another name was Cecrops, because the Cicada or Field-cricket is nourished by the dews and has its eggs hatched by the vernal rains. It would be wearisome to collate superfluous instances. Enough, now, that the Arab, the Persian, the Syrian and the Israelite, were at one with the Hellene and the Anglo-Saxon in the designation of the Water-Pourer, or an equivalent such as the Arabian Al Dalw, the Well-Bucket: that in China of old its sign was recognised as a symbol of the Emperor Tchoun Hin, the Chinese Deucalion: and that still among the astrologers of Central Asia and Japan it has for emblem the Rat, the far-Asiatic ideograph for water. Strange too that Star-Seers so remote as the Magi of the East and the Druids of the West should centrate their stellar science on this particular constellation. And, once more, not less strange that alike by the banks of the Euphrates where it was called the Star of Mighty Destiny, on the Arabian Sands, where it was called the Fortune of all Fortune, and in the Druidic woods of the Gaul and the Gael where too it symbolised Fortune, a star of its group should be the Star of Fortune—the group alluded to by Dante in the Purgatorio:

“... geomancers their Fortuna Major
See in the Orient before the dawn ...”

Again, is it tradition or coincidence that the Platonists of old held ‘the stairs of Capricorn’ to be the stellar way by which the souls of men ascended to heaven, so that the constellation became known as the Gate of the Gods, and that to-day the astrologers and mystics of the West share the same belief? Even the Caer Arianrod of our Celtic forbears—the Silver Road, as generally given though obviously very loosely ... and may not the name more likely, especially in connection with a basic legend of the constellation of Corona Borealis, be the ‘Mansion of Ariand’ (Ariadne)? ... though commonly applied to the Milky Way or less often to the Northern Crown, is sometimes in its modern equivalent used to designate Capricorn. Naturally, to astrologers, this Constellation with that of Aquarius, is of greatest import, for at a certain time ‘the House of Saturn’ is here to be discerned.

It is a drop from such sounding names as these to ‘the Skinker.’ Yet by this name our English forefathers probably knew in common speech the constellation of Aquarius. At any rate a Mr. Cock, ‘Philomathemat,’ in a rare book of some 200 years ago, Meteorologiae, speaks of Aquarius by this singular name, and as though it were the familiar and accepted designation: ‘Jupiter in the Skinker opposed by Saturn in the Lion did raise mighty South-west Winds.’ Here again in this old English word, meaning a tapster, we have an analogue of the Water-Pourer, that universal Zodiacal sign of Aquarius.

But for all that Horace, and following him James Thomson in the Seasons (‘Winter’), say of ‘Fierce Aquarius staining the inverted year,’ the constellation is more associated with the rain-tides of spring. It is then, too, in mid-February to mid-March, that, following its passage through Capricorn, the Sun enters it—so that ‘benign’ and not ‘fierce’ becomes the apt epithet.

All these ‘watery constellations’—Aquarius, Capricorn, Cetus, the Dolphin, Hydra, Pisces—are set aside, in the mouths of poets and in the familiar lore of the many, for the Hyades, that lovely sestet of Taurus which in these winter-months are known to all of us, where they flash and dance south-east of the Silver Apples of childhood’s sky—the clustered Pleiades. They have become the typical stars of the onset of winter—the Lords of Rain—‘sad companions of the turning year’ as an old Roman poet calls them, ‘the seaman-noted Hyades’ of Euripides, ‘the Boar-Throng’ (feeders on the mast brought down in late October and November by the autumnal rains) of our Anglo-Saxon fathers, the ‘Storm-Star’ of Pliny, the Moist Daughters of Spenser, so much more familiar to us in Tennyson’s

“Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea.”

Of old the whole group was called Aldebaran, but now we recognise in that name only the superb star whose pale-rose flame lights gloriously ‘the cold forehead of the wintry sky’ to quote an undeservedly forgotten poet. And now, Aldebaran stands apart in Taurus, and the six storm-stars are torches set apart.

Well, the Season of the Rainy Hyades has come. The Water-Pourer, the Whale and swift Dolphin, Pisces (‘Leaders of the Celestial Host’ and ‘the Diadem of November’), Hydra the Water-Snake, every Rain-Star, from flashing Corona, Bride of the White Hawk, to the far southern torch of splendid Achernar in Eridanus the Celestial River, all have lent the subtle influences of the first of the Elements, Water. In the mystic’s language, we are now in the season when the soul may least confusedly look into its life as in a shaken mirror, and when the spirit may ‘look before and after.’ For, they tell us, in the occult sense, we are the Children of Water.

To-night, looking at the Hyades, dimmed in a vaporous haze foretelling coming storm, as yet afar off, I find myself, I know not why, and in a despondency come I know not whence, thinking of and repeating words I read to-day in a translation of the Bhagavad Gita:—‘I am in the hearts of all. Memory and Knowledge, and the loss of both, are all from Me. There are two entities in this world, the Perishable and the Imperishable. All creatures are the Perishable and the unconcerned One is the Imperishable.’

The unconcerned One!

WINTER STARS
I

To know in a new and acute way the spell of the nocturnal skies, it is not necessary to go into the everlasting wonder and fascination of darkness with an astronomer, or with one whose knowledge of the stars can be expressed with scholarly exactitude. For the student it is needful to know, for example, that the Hyades are Alpha, Delta, Eeta, etc., of Tauri, and lie 10° south-east of the Pleiades. But as one sits before the fireglow, with one’s book in hand to suggest or one’s memory to remind, it is in another way as delightful and as fascinating to repeat again to oneself how Tennyson in Ulysses speaks of this stellar cluster as

“Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vext the dim sea....”

or how Christopher Marlowe wrote of them

“As when the seaman sees the Hyades
Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds,
Auster and Aquilon with wingëd steeds....”

to recall how Spenser alludes to them as ‘the Moist Daughters,’ or how our Anglo-Saxon ancestors called them ‘the Boar-Throng.’ One must know that Alpha of Boötes is the astronomical signature of the greater Arcturus, but how much it adds to the charm of this star’s interest for us to learn that among its popular names are the Herdsman, the Bear-Watcher, the Driver of the Wain, and to know why these now familiar names were given and by whom. One may grasp the significance of the acquired knowledge that this vast constellation of Boötes stretches from the constellation of Draco to that of Virgo, and the numeration of its degrees in declination and ascension, and (if one may thus choose between the 85 and the 140 of astronomers) that it contains a hundred stars visible to the naked eye. But, for some of us at least, there is something as memorable, something as revealing, in a line such as that of the Persian poet Hafiz, as paraphased by Emerson,

“Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear”—

or that superb utterance of Carlyle in Sartor Resartus,

“What thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his Hunting Dogs over the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire?”

Not, I may add in parenthesis, that the seekers after astronomical knowledge should depend on the poets and romancers for even an untechnical accuracy. Literature, alas, is full of misstatements concerning the moon and stars. Few poets are accurate as Milton is magnificently accurate, his rare slips lying within the reach of a knowledge achieved since his day: or as Tennyson is accurate. Carlyle himself, quoted above in so beautiful a passage, has made more than one strange mistake for (as he once aspired to be) a student astronomer: not only, as in one instance, making the Great Bear for ever revolve round Boötes, but, in a famous passage in his French Revolution, speaking of Orion and the Pleiades glittering serenely over revolutionary Paris on the night of 9th August 1792, whereas, as some fact-loving astronomer soon pointed out, Orion did not on that occasion rise till daybreak. It has been said of the Moon, in fiction, that her crescents and risings and wanings are to most poets and novelists apparently an inexplicable mystery, an unattainable knowledge. Even a writer who was also a seaman and navigator, Captain Marryat, writes in one of his novels of a waning crescent moon seen in the early evening. The great Shakespeare himself wrote of the Pole Star as immutable, as the one unpassing, the one fixt and undeviating star—

“... constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and lasting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.”

This was, of course, ignorance of what has since been ascertained, and not uninstructedness or mere hearsay. Possibly, too, he had in mind rather that apparent unchanging aloofness from the drowning sea-horizon to which Homer alludes in the line beautifully translated ‘Arctos, sole star that never bathes in the ocean wave’ ... of which, no doubt, our great poet had read in the quaint delightful words of Chaucer (rendering Boetius)—‘Ne the sterre y-cleped “the Bere,” that enclyneth his ravisshinge courses abouten the soverein heighte of the worlde, ne the same sterre Ursa nis never-mo wasshen in the depe westrene see, ne coveitith nat to deyen his flaumbe in the see of the occian, al-thogh he see other sterres y-plounged in the see.’

That constellation ‘y-cleped the Bere,’ how profoundly it has impressed the imagination of all peoples. In every age, in every country, our kindred on lonely lands, on lonely seas, from caverns and camp-fires and great towers, have watched it ‘incline its ravishing courses’ about the Mountain of the North, ‘coveting not’ to drown its white fires in the polar seas. Here, however, it is strange to note the universality of the Ursine image with the Greeks and Romans and the nations of the South, and the universality with the Teutonic peoples of designations such as the Wain and the Plough. It was not till the Age of Learning set in among the Northern peoples that the classic term came into common use. Thus in a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon manual of astronomy the writer, in adopting the Greek Arctos (still used occasionally instead of the Bear), adds ‘which untaught men call Carleswæn,’ that is Charles’s Wain, the Waggon. A puzzling problem is why a designation which primarily arose from an association of the early Greeks concerning Arkas, their imaginary racial ancestor, with Kallisto his mother, who had been changed into a great bear in the heavens, should also suggest itself to other peoples, to races so remote in all ways as the North American Indians. Yet before the white man had visited the tribes of North America the red men called the constellation by names signifying a bear. The historian Bancroft has proved that alike among the Algonquins of the Atlantic and of the Mississippi, among the Eastern Narragansett nations and among the nations of the Illinois, the Bear was the accepted token.

Boötes, the Great Bear, the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor, these great constellations, with their splendid beacons Arcturus, the Triones or the Seven Hounds of the North, and the Pole Star—

“By them, on the deep,
The Achaians gathered where to sail their ships”—

and in like fashion all the races of man since Time was have ‘gathered’ the confusing ways of night on all lonely seas and in all lonely lands.

But best of all, to know this spell of the nocturnal skies, one should be in the company of fisher-folk or old seamen or shepherds, perchance unlettered but wise in traditional lore and leal to the wisdom of their fathers. How much more I value what I have heard from some shepherd on the wide dark moors, or from some islesman in a fishing-coble or drifting wherry, on moonless nights filled with a skyey ‘phosphorescence’ as radiant as that a-dance and a-gleam in the long seethe of the wake of a ship, than what I have found concerning scientific star-names in books of astronomy. Nothing that I have since learned of ‘the Pointers’ has impressed me so much as what I learned as a child of ‘the Hounds of Angus,’ nor, in later and fuller knowledge of Polaris, has the child’s first knowledge of the mystery and wonder of ‘the Star of Wisdom,’ as pointed out and tale-told by an old Hebridean fisherman, or of ‘the House of Dreams,’ as sung to me in a forgotten ballad by a Gaelic woman of Argyll, been surpassed.

It was they—herdsmen and mariners, the wayfarer, the nomad, the desert-wanderer—who, of old, gave these names to which the nations have grown used. It was with the nomad that astronomy began. The Chaldæan shepherd, the Phœnician mariner, studied the stars and named them and the great constellations which group themselves from horizon to horizon in the nocturnal skies. They perceived strange symmetries, symbolic images, grotesque resemblances. The same instinct made the Arab of the Desert call the Pleiades the Herd of Camels, made the Akkadian call them the Wild Doves, made the Celtic hunter call them the Pack of Hounds, made the Teuton peasant call them the Hen and Chickens, made the Australian savage call them (in conjunction with the Bear) Young Girls playing to Young Men dancing: the same instinct, this, as made the ancient poet of the Zend-Avesta call them the Seven Beneficent Spirits, or made the modern poet of Locksley Hall liken them to a swarm of fireflies, or made the Gaelic poet of to-day image them as the Herring-Net. In a word, the instinct of poetry: which is as deep as hunger and thirst, as deep as love, as deep as fear, as deep as the desire of life. The instinct of the imagination to clothe the mysterious and the inexplicable in the raiment of the familiar or of recognisable and intimate symbol.

How infinitely it adds to the beauty of star-names such as Aldebaran, Alcyone, Polaris, to know that to the swarthy nomads of the desert it imaged itself as one following in a skyey desert, a camel-driver tracking lost camels, a hound following a quarry, a warrior following a foe, a holy pilgrim tracking the difficult ways of God, so that no name seemed to them so apt as Al Dabarān, the Follower: or to know that to the pastoral Akkadians or the early tillers and hunters of sea-set Greece, looking at the Pleiades in winter, Alcyone in its lovely group suggested the Nest of the Halcyon, the summer-bird who had flown to the remote depths of the sky to sit and brood there on a windless wave-unreached nest till once again ‘the Halcyon days’ of calm settled on land and sea: or to know that to our own seafaring folk of old, the men who voyaged perilously in small and frail craft without compass and with little knowledge of the mysterious laws of the mysterious forces of earth and sea and heaven, Polaris was the one unchanging skyey beacon, the steadfast unswerving North Star; and, so, lovingly called by our old Saxon forbears the Scipsteorra, the Ship-Star, and by the Elizabethan seafarers the Lodestar or Pilot-Star, and by the Hebridean fishermen the Home-Star, and by others the Star of the Sea.

“Constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go.
Star of the Pole! and thou dost see them set.
Alone in thy cold skies,
Thou keep’st thy old unmoving station yet
Nor join’st the dances of that glittering train,
Nor dipp’st thy virgin orb in the blue western main.
On thy unaltering blaze
The half-wrecked mariner, his compass lost,
Fixes his steady gaze,
And steers, undoubting, to the friendly coast;
And they who stray in perilous wastes by night
Are glad when thou dost shine to guide their footsteps right.”

The same spirit which animated Bryant when he wrote these verses in his beautiful ‘Hymn to the North Star,’ or made one of the Gaelic island-poets allude to it as the Star of Compassion, prevailed with these Chaldæan shepherds and Arabian nomads of old. They gave the familiar or beautiful names of love or intimate life, and in exchange the taciturn face of heaven lost its terrifying menace of silence, and the Night became a comrade, became the voice of the poets, of the sages, of the prophets and seers, the silver gateways of the Unknown.

The Hunter, the Herdsman, the Bear-Watcher, the Driver of the Wain—how much more we love Boötes, or, as Chaucer called the constellation, ‘ye sterres of Arctour,’ because of these simple names. The Herdsman, the Hunter, ... the words strike the primitive music. The youth of the world is in them. In these few letters what infinite perspectives, what countless images. The Golden Age lies hid in their now impenetrable thickets. Through their branches we may look at the tireless hunter of to-day on the interminable pampas, at the bowed trailer in the dim savannahs of the Amazon, at the swarthy nomad on the wastes of Sahara guarding his camels like ships becalmed in a vast sea of sand, or may see the solitary mountain-shepherd in the hill-wildernesses of Spain or Italy, or the Northern herdsman toiling against wind and snow on our Gaelic hills.

Here also is the romance of the stars, as well as that deeper and perturbing romance which is disclosed to us in the revelations of science. That sense of incalculable distances, of immeasurable periods, of unknown destinies and amazing arrivals, which haunts the imagination of the astronomer when he looks beyond the frontiers of ascertained knowledge, half-doubting perhaps whether even that be not a terrible illusory logic, is also here. One goes back, as in thought one recedes into the beautiful, impassioned wonderland of childhood. One seems to see mankind itself as a child, gone but a little way even yet, looking up trustfully or fearfully to the mysterious mother-eyes of a Face it cannot rightly discern, in its breath being Immortality, Eternity in its glance, and on its brows Infinitude.

WINTER STARS
II

Of all winter stars surely the most familiar is Polaris, the Pole Star or Lodestar: of all winter Constellations, the Plough, the Little Dipper (to give the common designations), Orion, and the lovely cluster of the Pleiades, are, with the Milky Way, the most commonly observed stellar groups. One of our old Scottish poets, Gawain Douglas, writing towards the close of the fifteenth or early in the sixteenth century, thus quaintly brought them into conjunction—

“Arthurys hous, and Hyades betaikning rane,
Watling strete, the Home and the Charlewane,
The fiers Orion with his goldin glave.”

Here possibly he has taken Arcturus for Polaris. Of old, the Lodestar and Arcturus (or, as often given in the North, ‘Arturus’ or ‘Arthur’ ... a word itself signifying the Great or Wondrous Bear) were often confused. Sometimes, too, Arcturus stood for the whole constellation of Ursa Major—or, as we commonly call it, the Plough or the Wain, as, for example, in Scott’s lines:

“Arthur’s slow wain his course doth roll,
In utter darkness, round the Pole.”

But it is obvious Gawain Douglas did not mean this to be understood, for in the second line he speaks of ‘Charlewane,’ i.e., Charles’s Wain ... the Wain or Waggon being then, as it still is among country-folk, even more familiar a term than the Great Bear or than the Plough itself. Probably, then, he had in mind the Pole Star, the ‘House of Arthur’ of the ancient British. His choice of the ‘rain-betokening Hyades’ may be taken here as including the Pleiades, these ‘greater seven’ in whom centres so much poetry and old legend. A previous paper has been devoted to the Milky Way, so that there is no need to explain why Watling Street should be analogous with the Galaxy. The ‘Horne’ is the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor. Than ‘fierce Orion with his glistering sword’ there is no constellation so universally familiar. If, then, to this category of the old Scottish poet, we add the star Aldebaran, and the constellation of Taurus or the Bull, we have more than enough Winter Lights to consider in one chapter.

Having already, however, dealt with ‘the watery constellations’ we can be the more content now to ignore Alcyone, Maia, Taygeta, Electra, and the other Pleiadic stars of Taurus. This great constellation is one of the earliest in extant astronomical records: the earliest, it is believed. The stellar image of a Bull has occurred to many nations since the designation first arose among the ancient Cretans or Akkadians—if, indeed, in its origin it was not immeasurably more remote. East and West, in the deserts of the South and among the grey isles of the North, ‘the Bull’ was recognised. To-day the Scottish peasant still calls it ‘the Steer,’ as his German kinsman does in der Stier, his French kinsman in le Taureau, his Spanish or Italian kinsman in Toro. When certain of the Greeks and Latins used Keráon and Cornus instead of Tauros and Taurus, they said merely the same thing—the Horned One. Virgil, as many will remember, utilises the image in the first ‘Georgic’:

“When with his golden horns bright Taurus opes
The year....”

just as a poet of our own time, in a beautiful ‘Hymn to Taurus,’ writes:

“... I mark, stern Taurus, through the twilight grey
The glinting of thy horn
And sullen front, uprising large and dim
Bent to the starry Hunter’s sword at bay.”

Among our own ancestors, the Druids made Taurus an object of worship, the Tauric Festival having been one of the great events of the year, signalised when the sun first entered the imagined frontiers of this constellation. To-day, among the homesteads of our Scottish lowlands, the farm-folk tell of the Candlemas Bull who may be seen to rise in the gloaming on New Year’s Eve and move slowly to the dark pastures which await his coming.

The particular stellar glory of this constellation is Aldebaran. This beautiful star has appealed to the imagination of all peoples. I do not know what were its earliest Celtic or Anglo-Saxon names. But as in Gaelic it is sometimes called ‘the Hound,’ this term may well be a survival from ancient days. If so, there is an interesting relation with the primitive Arabic name by which it is all but universally known. Aldebaran is Al Dabarān, the Follower: and, figuratively, a follower could hardly be better symbolised than by a hound. I recall a Gaelic poem on a legendary basis where the analogy is still further emphasised, for there Aldebaran is called ‘the Hound of the Pleiades,’ which is exactly what the Arabian astronomers implied in ‘the Follower.’ Another interesting resemblance is between ‘the red hound’ of the Gaelic poet and legend and the Rohinī of the Hindûs, that word signifying ‘a red deer’ ... in each case the ruddy gleam of the star having suggested the name. Probably it was this characteristic which led Ptolemy to apply to the star the name ‘Lampadias’ or the Torch-Bearer. In the narration of folk-tales I have more than once or twice heard Aldebaran alluded to as the star of good fortune, of ‘the golden luck.’ With us it is pre-eminently a winter-star, and may be seen at its finest from the latter part of January till the approach of the vernal equinox. Some idea of its luminosity may be gained from the fact that this is thrice the outflow of the Pole Star. How often I have stood on a winter’s night, and watched awhile this small red ‘torch’ burning steadfastly in the unchanging heavens, and thought of its vast journeys, of that eternal, appalling procession through the infinite deeps: how often I have felt the thrill of inexplicable mystery when, watching its silent fire in what appears an inexorable fixity, I recall what science tells us, that it is receding from our system at an all but unparalleled velocity, a backward flight into the unknown at the rate of thirty miles a second.

It would be hopeless to attempt here even the briefest account of the primitive and diverse nomenclature, the mythology, the folklore of Orion ... the Winter-Bringer, as this constellation is called in an old Scandinavian saga, identical thus with the marginal reading in the Geneva Bible relative to the reference to Orion in Job—‘which starre bringeth in winter,’ an allusion to its evening appearance at the season of cold and storms. For these things are writ in the records of a hundred nations. They are alive in the poetry of all peoples. Centuries before our era, when Thebes was the greatest city of Greece, the poetess Corinna sang of this great Warrior, the Great Hunter, whose nightly course was so glorious above the dusky lands and waters of Hellas. Long after Pindar and the Greek poets, Catullus and Horace gave it a like preeminence in Latin literature. In our own poetry, many surely will recall from Paradise Lost:

“... when with fierce winds Orion arm’d
Hath vext the Red-sea coast, whose waves o’erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry....”

or Tennyson’s beautiful line in Locksley Hall:

“Great Orion sloping slowly to the west....”

or, it may be, that epic of ‘Orion’ upon which is based Richard Hengist Horne’s claim to remembrance—or, once more, Matthew Arnold’s fine allusion to Sirius and Orion in Sohrab and Rustum:

“... the Northern Bear,
Who from her frozen height with jealous eye
Confronts the Dog and Hunter in the South.”

Before Catullus or Pindar the Egyptians had identified Orion both with Horus and Osiris. Among the peoples of Israel the poets acclaimed the constellation as Nimrod, ‘the mighty Hunter’ (or by another term signifying the Giant), ‘bound to the sky for rebellion against Jehovah.’ Among the Celtic races it has had kindred names, sometimes abstract, sometimes personal, as the Gaelic Fionn. A year or so ago I was told a sea-tale of the Middle Isles, in which was an allusion to this constellation as The Bed of Diarmid. This is of especial interest, because of its connection with Fionn or Finn, the Nimrod, the great Hunter of the Gael. But in this story (a modern, not an ancient tale, though with more than one strange old survival) the major position is not held by Fionn, but by the Alban-Gaelic hero Diarmid, who is represented as succumbing under the spear thrust in his left side by the enraged Fionn, at last in grips with the daring chieftain who had robbed him of Grania. When questioned, my informant said he had heard a variant of this attribution, and that the constellation was an image of Diarmid with Grania hanging to his side in a swoon, because she and her lover have been overtaken by the wrath of Fionn ... though from the description I could not make out whether the latter indicated the star Sirius, or the rival constellation of the Great Bear. The Gaels of old called Orion Caomai, a name said to signify the Armed King: while the Gall (the Scandinavian races) applied the name Orwandil, but with what signification I do not know, though I have read somewhere that it stood for Hero, or for an heroic personage.

Of the chief stars in Orion there is not space here to speak. But of the splendid Rigel—as affluent in the mysterious science of the astrologer as in nocturnal light—pearly Anilam, of the Belt or Sword—ominous Bellatrix—ruddy-flamed Betelgeuze—of these alone one might write much ... as one might write much of the Girdle or Staff itself, what Scott in The Lay of the Last Minstrel calls ‘Orion’s studded belt.’ It has a score of popular names, from the Danish Frigge Rok (Freya’s Distaff) to the seamen’s ‘Yard-arm,’ as, collectively, its three great stars have all manner of names in different countries, from the Magi, or the Three Kings or the Three Marys, to The Rake of the French Rhinelanders or the Three Mowers of the Silesian peasant.

Those who have studied the mythology and folklore of the Pleiades will remember how universally the numeral seven is associated with their varying nomenclature. But there was, and still is among primitive peoples, not infrequent confusion in the use of ‘The Seven Stars’ as a specific name. Although from China to Arabia, from India and Persia to the Latin countries of the South, the term almost invariably designates the Pleiades, in the folklore of many Western nations it is used for the seven planets, and in many Northern races it is often used for the seven brilliant stars of the Great Bear. Even the Biblical allusion to ‘The Seven Stars,’ as our own Anglo-Saxon ancestral Sifunsterri, does not necessarily indicate the Pleiades: many consider the seven great planets to be meant. There is a Shetland rune, common to all the north isles and to be heard in Iceland and Norway, known as the rune of sevens, and of which one of the invocatory lines is ‘And by da seven shiners.’ All kinds of interpretation have explained this, from the obvious ‘seven planets,’ or else the Pleiades, to the Seven Candlesticks of Revelation and I know not what besides. I have again and again asked fisher-folk or others from the Orkneys and Shetlands, and in all but one or two instances the answer has clearly indicated the Great Bear, occasionally Polaris and the Ursine Arcturus and their nearest brilliant ‘shiners.’ Again, Crannarain, one of the Gaelic names for the Pleiades, is, perhaps, as often applied to the Great Bear: the curious legend of the Baker’s Shovel, implied in the Gaelic term, fitting equally.

Of the Great Bear, of the North Star, however, I have already spoken. Of Polaris itself, indeed, there is more than enough to draw upon. Years ago I began an MS. book called ‘The Book of the North Star,’ and from my recollection of it (for at the moment of writing I am far from my books) I should say there is enough folklore and legend and various interest connected with this star wherefrom to evolve a volume solely devoted to it. It is strange that ‘the Lamp of the North’ should have so fascinated all the poets from the time of Homer till to-day, and yet that all have dwelled in the same illusion as to its absolute steadfastness. Nevertheless, Homer’s

“Arctos, sole star that never bathes in the ocean wave”

has both poetic truth and the truth of actuality.

It is a relief to put aside notes and pen and paper, and to go out and look up into the darkness and silence, to those ‘slow-moving palaces of wandering light’ of which one has been writing. How overwhelmingly futile seems not only the poor written word, but even the mysterious pursuit of the far-fathoming thought of man. By the sweat of the brow, by the dauntless pride of the mind, we mortal creatures have learned some of the mysteries of the coming and going in infinitude of these incalculable worlds, of their vast procession from the unknown to the unknown. Then, some night, one stands solitary in the darkness, and feels less than the shadow of a leaf that has passed upon the wind, before these still, cold, inevitable, infinitely remote yet overwhelmingly near Children of Immortality.

BEYOND THE BLUE SEPTENTRIONS
TWO LEGENDS OF THE POLAR STARS

The star Septentrion is, for the peoples of the North and above all for the shepherd, the seaman and the wayfarer, the star of stars. A hundred legends embody its mystery, its steadfast incalculable service, its unswerving isolation over the Pole. Polaris, the North Star, the Pole-Star, the Lodestar, the Seaman’s Star, the Star of the Sea, the Gate of Heaven, Phœnice, Cynosure, how many names, in all languages, at all times. The Mongolian nomad called it the Imperial Ruler of Heaven: the Himalayan shepherd, Grahadāra, the Pivot of the Planets: the Arab knows it as the Torch of Prayer, burning for ever at the portal of the heavenly Mecca. It shines through all literature, since (and indeed long before) Euripides wrote his superb verse of how the two great Northern constellations which encircle Polaris, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the two ‘swift-wandering’ Bears, ‘guard the Atlantean Pole,’ till a poet of our own time wrote the less majestic but not less lovely line relating to these constellations which gives the title to this paper. In all ages, too, the dreaming mind of man has imagined here the Throne of the Gods, the Seat of the Mighty, the last Portal of the Unknown. It is the Flatheansas of our Gaelic ancestors, the ultimate goal of the heroic spirit: the Himinbiorg, or Hill of Heaven, of the Norsemen of old, and the abode of Heimdallr, the guardian of the bridge Bifröst (the Rainbow) which unites Asgard the Everlasting with that brief whirling phantom, the Earth. It is Albordy, ‘the dazzling mountain on which was held the Assembly of the Gods’ of the ancient Teutonic peoples: the mysterious Mount Mēru, the seat of the gods, of the Aryan dreamers of old, and the Hindû sages of later time: ‘the holy mountain of God’ alluded to in Ezekiel—so, at least, it has been surmised.

‘The blue Septentrions’ ... Boötes with Arcturus, the Great Bear, the Lesser Bear, the Pointers or the Northern Hounds, the North Star ... what legend, what poetry, what romance, what wonder belongs to these stars and constellations which guard the marches of the Arctic North. To the mass of what is already extant, what need to add further matter? And yet there is ever new justification in that continual need of the soul to hear over and over again and in ever-varying ways even the most fragmentary runes or sagas of this unfathomably mysterious stellar universe which encloses us with Silence and Beauty and Wonder, the three Veils of God—as the Hebridean islesman, the Irish Gael of the dreaming west, and the Arab of the Desert alike have it.

I have elsewhere spoken of the legendary association of Arthur (the Celtic-British King and the earlier mythical Arthur, semi-divine, and at last remote and celestial) with Arcturus, that lovely Lamp of the North, the glory of Boötes. But now, I may add what there I had to omit.

In all European lands, and above all in the countries of the West, there is none without its legend of King Arthur. The Bretons claim him as theirs, and the places of his passage and exploit are familiar, though only the echo, only the phantom of a great fame ever reached Arvôr. In the Channel and Scilly Isles the story runs that there is Lyonesse, and that Arthur sleeps in a cavern of the seas. The Cornish folk and their kindred of Somerset and Devon believe there is not a rood of ground between Camelot and Tintagel where the great King has not dwelt or passed. Wales calls him her son, and his chivalry her children, and the Cymric poets of a thousand mabinogion have sung his heroic fame. Clydesdale, that more ancient home of the Cymri, has dim memories older than what Taliesin sang: Arthur’s Seat hangs above Edinburgh, a city so old that a thousand years ago its earlier name was forgotten; and from the Sidlaw to the Ochil, from blue Demyat to grey Schiehallion, old names and broken tradition preserve the obscure trails of a memory fallen into oblivion, but not so fallen that the names of Arthur and Queen Guinevere and wild-eyed Merlin of the Woods have ceased to stir the minds of the few who still care for the things that moved our fathers from generation to generation. The snow of the Grampians have not stayed the wandering tale: and there are still a few old people who recall at times, in the winter story-telling before farm-kitchen fires, how the fierce Modred, King of the North, made Queen Gwannolê his own, and how later, in a savage revenge, Arthur condemned her to be torn asunder by wild horses. Lancelot passes from the tale before it crosses the Border, and as it goes north (or is it not that as it comes south?) Merlin is no more a courtier but a wild soothsayer of the woods, Queen Wanders or Gwannolê or Guinevere is tameless as a hawk, and Arthur himself, though a hero and great among his kind, is of the lineage of fire and sword.

Where is Joyeuse Gard? Some say it is in the isle Avillion off the Breton shores: some that it is in Avalon, under the sacred hill of Glastonbury: some that it is wet with the foam of Cornish Seas: others aver that it lies in fathomless silence under the sundown wandering wave and plunging tide. Another legend tells that it leaned once upon the sea from some lost haven under Berwick Law, perhaps where North Berwick now is, or where Dirleton looks across to Fidra, or where the seamews on ruined Tantallon scream to the Bass.

Arthur himself has a sleeping-place (for nowhere is he dead, but sleeps, awaiting a trumpet-call) in ‘a lost land’ in Provence, in Spain, under the waters of the Rhine. To-day one may hear from Calabrian shepherd or Sicilian fisherman that the Great King sleeps in a deep hollow underneath the Straits of Messina. And strangest of all (if not a new myth of the dreaming imagination, for I have not been able to trace the legend beyond a modern Slavonic ballad) among the Carpathian Highlands is a nameless ancient tomb lost in a pine-forest, where at mid-winter a bear has been seen to rise, walking erect like a man, crowned with a crown of iron and gold holding a single shining stone magnificent as the Pole Star, and crying in a deep voice, ‘I am Arthur of the West, who shall yet be king of the World.’

Strange indeed, for here among the debris of the lost history of Arthur, that vast shadowy kingly figure whose only kingdom may have been the soul of primitive races, and whose sword may have been none other than the imagination that is for ever on its beautiful and perilous quest, here among that débris of legend scattered backward from the realms of the north across Europe is one, remote as it is, which brings us back to the early astronomical myth which identifies the great Celtic champion with the chief constellation of the north.

But as I have heard this fragment of our old lost mythology related in a way I have not seen in any book, I will give it here altered but slightly if at all from one of the countless legends told to me in my childhood.

---

At sunset the young son of the great King Pendragon came over the brow of a hill that stepped forward from a dark company of mountains and leaned over the shoreless sea which fills the west and drowns the north. All day he had been wandering alone, his mind heavy with wonder over many things. He had heard strange tales of late, tales about his heroic father and the royal clan, and how they were not as other men, but half divine. They were not gods, he knew, for they could be slain in battle or could die with the crowding upon them of many years: but they were more terrible in battle than were the greatest of men, and they had vision and knowledge beyond the vision and knowledge of the druids, and were lordly beyond all men in mien and the beauty of courtesy, and lived beyond the common span of years, and had secret communion with the noble and invisible company. He had heard, too, of his destiny: that he, too, was to be a great king, as much greater than Pendragon, than Pendragon was above all the kings of the world. What was Destiny, he wondered. Then, again, he turned over and over in his mind all the names he could think of that he might choose for his own: for the time was come for him to put away the name of his childhood and to take on that by which he should be known among men.

He came over the brow of the hill, and out of the way of the mountain-wind, and, being tired, lay down among the heather and stared across the grey wilderness of the sea. The sun set, and the invisible throwers of the nets trailed darkness across the waves and up the wild shores and over the faces of the cliffs. Stars climbed out of shadowy abysses, and the great chariots of the constellations rode from the west to the east and from the north to the south. His eyes closed, but when he opened them again to see if a star quivering on the verge of the horizon had in that brief moment sprung like a deer above the drowning wave or had sunk like a white seabird passing out of sight, he saw a great and kingly figure standing beside him. So great in stature, so splendid in kingly beauty was the mysterious one who had so silently joined him, that he thought this must be one of the gods.

“Do you not know me, my son?” said the kingly stranger.

The boy looked at him in awe and wonder, but unrecognisingly.

“Do you not know me, my son?” he heard again ... “for I am your father Pendragon. But my home is yonder, and there I go before long, and that is why I have come to you as a vision in a dream ...” and, as he spoke, he pointed to the constellation of the Arth, or Bear, which nightly prowls through the vast abysses of the polar sky.

When the boy turned his gaze from the great constellation which hung in the dark wilderness overhead, he saw that he was alone again. While he yet wondered in great awe at what he had seen and heard, he felt himself float like a mist and become like a cloud, and, as a cloud, rise beyond the brows of the hills, and ascend the invisible stairways of the sky.

When for minutes that were as hours he had moved thus mysteriously into the pathless and unvisited realms of the air, he saw that he had left the highest clouds like dust on a valley-road after one has climbed to the summit of a mountain: nor could he see the earth save as a blind and obscure thing that moved between the twilights of night and dawn.

It seemed to him thereafter that a swoon came over him, in which he passed beyond the far-off blazing fires of strange stars. At last, suddenly, he stood on the verge of Arth, or Arth Uthyr, the Great Bear. There he saw, with the vision of immortal not of mortal eyes, a company of most noble and majestic figures seated at what he thought a circular abyss but which had the semblance of a vast table. Each of these seven great knights or lordly kings had a star upon his forehead, and these were the stars of the mighty constellation of the Bear which the boy had seen night after night from his home among the mountains by the sea.

It was with a burning throb at his heart that he recognised in the King of all these kings no other than himself.

While he looked, in amazement so great that he could hear the pulse of his heart, as in the silence of a wood one hears the tapping of a woodpecker, he saw this mighty phantom-self rise till he stood towering over all there, and heard a voice as though an ocean rose and fell through the eternal silences.

“Comrades in God,” it said, “the time is come when that which is great shall become small.”

And when the voice was ended, the mighty figure faded into the blue darkness, and only a great star shone where the uplifted dragon-helm had brushed the roof of heaven. One by one the white lords of the sky followed in his mysterious way, till once more were to be seen only the stars of the Bear.

The boy-king dreamed that he fell as a falling meteor, and then that he floated over land and sea as a cloud, and then that he sank as mist upon the hills of his own land.

A noise of wind stirred in his ears, and he felt the chill dew creep over his hands like the stealthy cold lip of the tide. He rose stumblingly, and stood, staring around him. He was on the same spot, under the brow of the hill that looked over the dim shoreless seas, now obscure with the dusk. He glanced upward and saw the stars of the Great Bear in their slow majestic march round the Pole. Then he remembered.

He went slowly down the hillside, his mind heavy with thought. When he was come to the place of the King his father, lo, Pendragon and all his fierce chivalry came out to meet him, for the archdruid had foretold that the great King to be had received his mystic initiation among the holy silence of the hills.

“I am no more Snowbird the child,” the boy said, looking at them fearlessly, and as though already King. “Henceforth I am Arth-Uthyr,[2] for my place is in the Great Bear which we see yonder in the north.”

[2] Pronounced Arth-Uir, or Arth-Ur. In ancient British Arth means Bear, and Uthyr great, wondrous.

So all there acclaimed him as Arthur, the wondrous one of the stars, the Great Bear.

“I am old,” said Pendragon, “and soon you shall be King, Arthur my son. So ask now a great boon of me and it shall be granted to you.”

Then Arthur remembered his dream.

“Father and King,” he said, “when I am the King after you I shall make a new order of knights, who shall be strong and pure as the Immortal Ones, and be tender as women, and simple as little children. But first I ask of you seven flawless virgin knights to be of my chosen company. To-morrow let the wood-wrights make for me a round daïs or table such as that where we eat our roasted meats and drink from the ale-horns, but round and of a size whereat I and my chosen knights may sit at ease.”

The King listened, and all there.

“So be it,” said the King.

Then Arthur chose the seven flawless virgin knights, and called them to him.

“Ye are now Children of the Great Bear,” he said, “and comrades and liegemen to me, Arthur, who shall be King of the West. And ye shall be known as the Knights of the Round Table. But no man shall make a mock of that name and live: and in the end that name shall be so great in the mouths and minds of men that they shall consider no glory of the world to be so great as to be the youngest and frailest of that knighthood.”

---

And that is how Arthur, the son of Pendragon, who three years later became King of the West, read the Rune of the Stars that are called the Great Bear, and took their name upon him, and from the strongest and purest and noblest of the land made Knighthood, such as the world had not seen, such as the world since has not known.

---

Very different, a cruder legend of the Polestar, the drift of which I heard some months ago from a fisherman of Ross, ‘foregathered with’ in the Sound of Morvern.

One day, Finn, before he was born the King of the West, a thousand years earlier than that and maybe thousands more on the top of that thousand, went hunting a great bear beyond the highest mountains in Ross and Sutherland. It came to the Ord, and then, seeing there was no more land, it went into the sea with an awesome plunge, like Iceland in the story before it swam away from Scotland, so that the fish were knocked out of the nets and the fishing cobles were thrown on the shores like buckies, and the tides ran like hares till they leaped into the sea again at the rocks of Wick and over Cromarty Cliffs. Aye, it is said a green wave ran right through the great Kirk at Inverness; and that away across the lands of Mackenzie and Chisholm, of Fraser and Gordon, a storm of foam blew like snow against the towers and steeples of Aberdeen. At least all this might well have been, if in those old ancient days there had been any Aberdeen or Inverness to see it, or if there were cobles and nets then, as, for all you or I or the wind know, there may have been. Well, the Bear swam away due north, and Finn after it and his great hounds Luath and Dorch. It took them a month to come up with it, and then it was among mountains of solid ice with the sea between hard as granite. Then it came to the place where there’s an everlasting Rainbow. The Bear climbed this, to jump to the other side of the Pole, but Luath ran up one side and Dorch the other and Finn hurled his great shining spears, one after the other: so that down the bear came with a rush, and so great was the noise and stramash that the icebergs melted, and out flew thousands of solanders and grey swans and scarts and God knows what all, every kind of bird that is with a web to its foot. The hounds fell into the water, and the Bear lay on a floe like a wounded seal, but Finn never moved an inch but put spear after spear into the Bear. “Well, you’re dead now,” he said; “and if you’re not, you ought to be,” he added, seeing that the Bear was up again and ready to be off.

“This can’t go on,” said God Allfather, so He swung a noose and sagged up the Bear into the black Arctic sky. But the hounds hung on to its tail, and so were carried up too. And as for Finn, he took the hero-leap, and with one jump was on the Pole, and with the next was in the Northman’s Torch (Arcturus), and with the third was on the Hill of Heaven itself. And that’s where he went back to on the day he died after his three hundred years of mortal life. He’s never moved since, and he won’t move again, till Judgment Day. And by the same token, you can see the Great Bear prowling round the Pole still, and Finn the Watchman never letting him go by, night or day, day or night, and far away down are the two Hounds that herd the Great Bear and his mate. And when these come too near, Finn hurls his spears, and that’s when we see the Northern Lights. And behind the streamers and the auroras and the rainbows and the walls of ice Finn looks into the Garden of Eden—Paradise as they say, just the Flatheanas of the old tales, the old songs. And who would be doubting it?

WHITE WEATHER
A MOUNTAIN REVERIE

To be far north of the Highland Line and among the mountains, when winter has not only whitened the hill-moors but dusted the green roofs of every strath and corrie, may not have for many people the charm of the southward flight. But to the hill-born it is a call as potent as any that can put the bittersweet ache into longing hearts. There is peace there: and silence is there: and, withal, a beauty that is not like any other beauty. The air and wind are auxiliary; every cloud or mist-drift lends itself to the ineffable conspiracy; the polar breath itself is a weaver of continual loveliness often more exquisitely delicate than the harebell, often incalculable or immeasurable, or beautiful with strangeness, as moonlight on great waters, or the solitary torch of Jupiter burning his cold flame in the heart of a mountain-tarn. There is no soundlessness like it. And yet the silence is relative; is, in a word, but an imagination laid upon an illusion. If there is no wind on the moor, there may be a wandering air among the lower heights. If so, many hollows of rocks, caverns lost in bracken, caves of hill-fox and badger, sudden ledges haunted by the daw and the hoodie and filled with holes as though the broken flutes of the dead forgotten giants of old tales, will make a low but audible music: a lifting and falling sighing, with singular turnings upon itself of an obscure chant or refrain, that just as one thinks is slipping into this side knowledge and is almost on the edge of memory, slides like rain along that edge and vanishes, vague as an unremembered fragrance. Or if the suspense be so wide that not a breath moves lower than where the corries climb towards the very brows of the mountains, one will surely hear, far up among the time-hollowed scarps and weather-sculptured scaurs, that singular sound which can sink to a whimpering, as of unknown creatures or lost inhuman clans strayed and bewildered, or can be as though unseen nomads were travelling the mountain-way with songs and strange flutes and thin wailing fifes, or can rise to a confused tumult as of embattled hosts, or to a crying and a lamentation more desperate than the cries of men and a lamenting as of that mysterious and dreaded clan, the Grey Children of the Wind. The wind, in truth, is almost always to be heard, near or far. Sometimes the eye may learn, where the ear fails: as when one is in a glen or strath or on a shore or moor, and, looking up, may see smoke rising from the serrated crests or the curving sky-lines, like the surf of vast billows—to realise soon, that this volcanic apparition means no more than that vast volumes of driven snow are being lifted by the north wind and whirled against and over the extreme mountain-bastions. Trath chaidleas ’s a ghleann an t-àile, ‘when the air sleeps in the glens,’ goes a Gaelic saying, ‘you may hear the wind blowing in the high corries mar chaithream chlàr,’ like the symphony of harps.

Then, too, it is rare that the snowy wilderness is without voice of mountain torrent, for even when frost holds the hill-world in a grip so terrible that the smaller birds cannot fly in the freezing air, there are rushing burns of so fierce a spate that the hands-of-ice are whirled aside like foam, and the brown wave leaps and dashes from rock to rock, from granite ledge to peaty hollow, from brief turbulent channels to chasms and crevasses whence ceaselessly ascends the damp smell of churned surge, above which as ceaselessly rises a phantom spray. Again, there is that strange, continual earth-movement, the alarm of all unfamiliar wayfarers. Who suddenly unloosened that rush of rock and earth yonder? What enemy moved that boulder that leapt and hurtled and crashed downward and beyond, but a score yards away? Of what elfin-artillery are those rattling stones the witness? What hand, in the silence, thrust itself through the snow and crumbled that old serrated ledge, where, a week ago, the red deer stood sniffing the wind, where, yesterday perhaps, the white ptarmigan searched the heather?

Moreover we are in the domain of the eagle, the raven, and the corbie. They are seldom long silent there. And that sudden call on the wind? ... what but the Merry Folk, Clann Aighean Siubhlach, the Wandering Deer-Clan, passing like drifting shadows over white heather-pastures lost to view? It is long since the love-belling of the stags made musical the mountain-side: was not ‘the Silence of the Deer’ the first sign of winter come again? But that cry was the cry of hunger—a guth accaimeach, a sobbing voice, as once I heard a prosaic roadmender unprosaically and with kindly sympathy allude to the winter-bleat of the snow-famished deer. And that other bleating: of sheep left upon the hills, and overtaken by the White Weather. How goes the sound, the translated echo of their mournful iteration, that is now a long ululation of lament and now a rising and falling bleating as of confused words? The same roadmender I speak of said—after himself lamenting in sympathy tha’m fuachd a muigh’s a staigh an diugh ... ‘the cold is outside and inside to-day’—that it went like this: Tha sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr’s gun fhios againn!... ‘We are astray, we are astray, we are astray and have lost our bearings!’

Up here everything may have a snow-change ‘into something rich and rare.’ It was in a hill-solitude, in white weather such as this, that, for example, I heard from an old shepherd names for the eagle, the corbie, and the ptarmigan that I had not elsewhere heard, nor have seen in print, though for long now I have been collecting all whenever and wherever chance permits the Gaelic and Lowland names of birds and animals. The corbie he called An t-Eun Acarachd, the Merciless, literally, ‘the bird without compassion,’ no doubt with thought of its love for young lambs or its savage lust for the eyes of stricken or dying sheep. The ptarmigan he called An t-Eun (Adhar or Aidhre), the bird of the snow or frost—though this is but a variant, of course, of the more familiar Sneacag or Eun-an-Sneachel. When he spoke of the eagle simply as An t-Eun Mòr, the great bird, that seemed less noteworthy, but when he added, Abù! An t-Eun Mòr Abù, I was puzzled. I thought he meant aboo to simulate the Iolair’s cry, though it sounded much more like the muffled hoot of the great owl than the eagle’s screech. He said he remembered that was the eagle’s name in an old tale he had often heard his mother tell when he was a child. I never thought of it as Abù, however, till one day I came upon this word in a Gaelic dictionary and found it entered as being an ancient war-cry of the Gael. Truly, a fit survival, for a wild slogan that has ages ago died away from the Gaelic hills: to live still among these desolate mountains, around those wind-tortured scarps and scaurs, in the scream of the golden eagle. The old man had a special bird-name for most of the birds he spoke of or about which I asked him. Doubtless he was as good a naturalist and with as good a right to make names as any ornithologist who would know what the old man could not know, and would be familiar with common and other names that would be unfamiliar there among the far hills, or, at least, to the old mountaineer, for whom the hill-birds were the best of company. For the curlew, for instance, though he knew the common Scots name, Whaup, he had the good name An t-Eun Chaismeachd, ‘the bird of alarm’—how good a name (though perhaps equally applicable to the grey plover, the green whistler, or the lapwing) must be obvious to all who have walked the moorland or travelled the hillside. And where an islesman or a man of the mainland coasts would, for swiftness, use a comparison such as cho luath ri sgadan, ‘as swift as a herring,’ he would say, cho luath ris nafeadag, ‘as swift as the plover.’

White Weather, he said, was always first ‘called’ by the linnet, the ‘heather lintie’ so loved of Scots song-writers, to which he gave several names (‘out of a good ten that will be known to any one whatever’), one a curious blend of Scots-Gaelic, Shilfe-monaidh (i.e., the moor—chaffinch), another a pretty name, Breacan-Beithe, ‘little speckled one of the birch.’ But even he, for all his hill-wisdom, could not tell me why it is that when the lapwing come again after the great winter-end storm about mid-March, welcome pioneers of the Spring that is stealing slowly up through the glens and straths of the south, they always, if they nest on the slope of a hillside, choose the east side for their unsheltered homes and where to lay their eggs. Do they so love the bleak wind of the east? Hardly any bird takes so little trouble with the nest: often it is but the frost-hardened delve of a cow’s hoof, a tangle of bent, or the hollow of a misplaced stone. I have heard that this is truer of the mainland than of the isles, but I have not found it so. Last March or April I remember that on the long, low-hilled and mainly ‘upland’ island where I then was, not a single lapwing’s nest but was on the east slope of grassy brae or sloping moor or pasture. But though he could not say a word on so strange, almost so inexplicable a habit, he could be positive as to the age of the eagle, and especially as to one aged iolair that he often saw on Maol-Aitionnach, the great hill that was half the world and more to him: namely, that the king-bird lived to be three hundred years. And he computed it thus: that an eagle lives three times less than an oak, and three times more than a deer. There is a familiar proverb that ‘Tri aois feidh aois firein; tri aois firein aois crsoibh dharaich,’ ‘Thrice the age of a deer, the age of an eagle’ (‘ferain,’ ‘fireun,’ and ‘fiolair’ are variants of ‘iolair,’ whose more ancient name is ‘antar’ (an t-ar), one of the oldest names in the Gaelic language); ‘thrice the age of an eagle, the age of an oak.’ The stag lives a hundred years, or so it is universally believed: therefore the eagle lives three hundred, and the oak’s age is at least nine hundred years. I recall, in connection with the eagle, a singular saying which I heard many years ago and have not since heard or anywhere encountered, to the effect that between dusk and dawn a bat’s flight will be the equivalent of a thousand miles, that between dawn and dusk a swallow will cover a thousand miles, and that a thousand miles is the measure of an eagle’s flight between sunrise and sunset.

Well, I must leave Maol-Aitionnach, and the snow-held hills. Everywhere, now, the White Weather may have spread. Far south, listeners may hear the honk-honk of the travelling solander, that most musical and thrilling of all nocturnal sounds or of winter-dawns: or, like phantom-voices from the world of dreams, the kuilliyak-ee, kuilliyak-o of the wild swans, the Clann righ fo gheasan, the Enchanted sons of Kings, who, as they wheel through the snowy twilight under the dawn-star may remember the dim lands of the north, and a great mountain that rises among white and silent hills and looks down upon a black tarn I know of, so dark in the grip of black-frost, and so strangely spared of the snow, that not a white wing rests there, or floats overhead, but is mirrored as an enchanted sail in an enchanted sea.

ROSA MYSTICA
(AND ROSES OF AUTUMN)

... Rosa Sempiterna
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
Odor di lode al Sol....

Sitting here, in an old garden by the sea, it is difficult for me to realise that the swallow has gone on her long flight to the South, that last night I heard countless teal flying overhead, and before dawn this morning the mysterious honk-honk of the wild-geese. A white calm prevails. A sea of faint blue and beaten silver, still molten, still luminous as with yet unsubdued flame, lies motionless beneath an immeasurable dome of a blue as faint, drowned in a universal delicate haze of silver-grey and pearl. But already a change to pale apple-green and mauve is imminent. A single tern flashes a lonely wing along a grey-green line that may be where sky and sea meet, or may be the illusion of the tide refluent from green depths. On the weedy rocks I cannot see even a sleeping seamew: on the havened stretch of yellow-white sand a dotterel runs to and fro in sudden aimless starts, but as suddenly is still, is all but unseen with her breast against a rock covered with the blue-bloom of mussels, and now is like a shadow licked up by twilight.

Along the husht garden-ways beside me and behind me are roses, crimson and yellow, sulphur-white and pale carnation, the blood-red damask, and a trailing-rose, brought from France, that looks as though it were live flame miraculously stilled. It is the hour of the rose. Summer has gone, but the phantom-summer is here still. A yellow butterfly hangs upon a great drooping Marechal Niel: two white butterflies faintly flutter above a corner-group of honey-sweet roses of Provence. A late hermit-bee, a few lingering wasps, and the sweet, reiterated, insistent, late-autumn song of the redbreast. That is all. It is the hour of the rose.

“C’est l’heure de la rose
L’heure d’ambre et flamme,
Quand dans mon àme
Je sens une Blanche Rose Éclose.”

To-night the sea-wind will go moaning from the west into the dark north: before dawn a steely frost will come over the far crests of the hills. To-morrow the garden will be desolate: a garden of phantom dreams. They have waited long, spell-bound! but the enchantment is fallen; in a few hours all shall be a remembrance. What has so marvellously bloomed thus late, so long escaped devastating wind and far-drifting rains and the blight of the sea, will pass in a night. Already, a long way off, I hear a singular, faint, humming sound, like stifled bees. So ... the foam of storm is on the skerries of the seaward isles. Already from the north, a faint but gathering chill comes on the slanting wings of twilight. I rise with a sigh, thinking of an old forgotten refrain in an old forgotten poem:

“Ged tha thu ’n diugh ’a d’aibheis fhuar,
Bha thu nair ’a d’aros righ—”
“(Though thou art to-day a cold ruin
Thou wert once the dwelling of a king.)”

In the long history of the Rose, from the time when the Babylonians carried sceptres ornamented now with this flower now with the apple or lotus, to the coming of the Damask Rose into England in the time of Henry VII.: from the straying into English gardens, out of the Orient, of that lovely yellow cabbage-rose which first came into notice shortly after Shakespeare’s death, or from Shakespeare’s own ‘Provençal rose,’ which is no other than the loved and common cabbage-rose of our gardens: from the combes of Devon to the straths of Sutherland, to that little clustering rose which flowered in Surrey meads in the days of Chaucer and has now wandered so far north that the Icelander can gather it in his brief hyperborean summer: from Keats’ musk-rose—

“The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves—”

to that Green Rose which for more than half a century has puzzled the rose-lover and been a theme of many speculations ... a thousand wise and beautiful things have been said of this most loved of flowers and not a few errors been perpetuated.

What has become of the Blue Roses to which in 1800 a French writer, Guillemeau, alludes as growing wild near Turin? They are no less phantoms than some of the rose-allusions which the poet has made sacrosanct, that to the Rhetorician have become an accepted convention. Again, we are told and retold that the cult of the rose is a modern and not an ancient sentiment. Even, it is said, the allusions of the Latin poets are not those of lovers and enthusiasts. It is the Rose of Catullus, we are reminded, that blooms in the old Italic literature, the flower of festival, of Venus and Bacchus, alluded to more for its associations and its decorative value than for love borne to it or enthusiasm lit by it as by a fragrant flame.

All this may be so, and yet I am not persuaded that the people of ancient days did not love this flower of flowers as truly as, if perhaps differently than, we do. It is true that the ancients do not appear to have regarded nature, either in the abstract or in the particular, in the way characteristic of peoples of modern times and above all of our own time. But literary allusiveness does not reveal the extent or the measure of the love of objects and places. It is almost inconceivable, for example, that so beauty-loving a people as the Greeks did not delight in the rose. The fact that only a mere handful of roses may be culled from all the poetry of Hellas, here a spray from Sappho, a wine-flusht cluster from Anacreon, a dew-wet bloom from Theocritus, a few wild-roses from the Anthology, an epithet from Homer, an image from Simonides or Pindar, a metaphor in some golden mouth, this paucity—so singular compared with the Rose of Poetry in our English speech, from Chaucer’s ‘Rose of Rhone’ to Mr. Yeats’s ‘Rose on the Rood of Time,’ loved and sung through a thousand years. Such paucity does not necessarily mean that only a few poets casually alluded to this supreme flower, and that it was unnoticed or unloved of the many. Doubtless rose-chaplets were woven for lovers, and children made coronals, and at mourning ceremonies and marriage festivals these flowers were strewn. The very fact that Sappho called the rose the queen of flowers showed that it was distinguished from and admired among even the violets, pre-eminently the flowers of Athens. That she likened a young maiden to a rose is as indicative as when an Arab poet likens his love to a delicate green palm, or as when a northern poet speaks of her as a pine-tree swaying in the wind or a wave dancing on the sea.

Then, again, the Rose would not have been consecrated to Venus, as an emblem of beauty: to Eros, as an emblem of love: to Aurora, as an emblem of Youth: and to Harpocrates, as an emblem of silence: if this symbolic usage were not such as would seem fit and natural. That roses, too, were in general demand is evident alone from their far-famed culture and the great trade in them at Paestum, the Lucanian town colonised by the Greek Sybarites five hundred years B.C. All mediæval and later literature is full of the beauty and fragrance of the rose, but were it not so, one could infer that the flower was held in high esteem from the fact that it has for ages been the wont of the Popes to have a golden rose exquisitely finished, and, when consecrated, to present it to some Catholic monarch as a token of special regard. Thus it seems to me that were there not a single allusion to the rose by any great poet from Homer to Sappho, from Anacreon to Theocritus, we might yet discern the love of the ancient Greeks for this flower from, let us say, a single surviving phrase such as the anonymous lovely epitaphial prayer-poem in the Anthology:—‘May many flowers grow on this newly-built tomb; not the dried-up Bramble, or the red flower loved by goats; but Violets and Marjoram, and the Narcissus growing in water; and around thee may all Roses grow.’

In Persia and the East, from Hindustân to Palestine, from remotest Asia to Abyssinia and Barbary, the Rose has ever been loved and honoured. Sâdi of the Rose-garden and many another has sung of it with ecstasy. The Hindû god Indra, even Buddha himself, suffered for robbing a paradisaical garden of a rose. How suggestive it is, that the Eve of the Aztec garden of Eden sinned, not for plucking an apple but a rose: it was a fatal rose, too, that the Eve of primitive Mexican legend gathered to her undoing and that of all her descendants.

What innumerable legends centre round this flower. In every country and in either hemisphere, north of the Equator, the poet and the myth-maker and the legend-weaver have occupied their imaginations to enhance its beauty, to deepen its significance.

Long ago Bion told how the rose sprang from the blood of the wounded Adonis, the supreme type of beauty, and of the tears of Venus. An older Hellenic legend declares that the rose was originally white, till Eros, dancing among the gods, upset a goblet of nectar upon Venus’s flower, which thereupon became red. Christian legend, on the other hand, would have it that the red rose sprang from the brands which had been lighted at Bethlehem to burn to death a Christian virgin-martyr. Remote from Syria as from Greece, the Scandinavian legend arose that this flower was white till Baldur, the god of Youth and Love, bled at the coming of Christ—akin to which is a Gaelic legend, that the flower was white till a drop of Christ’s blood fell from the Cross ... a variant of which is that the robin, who plucked at the thorns in Christ’s forehead till they stained its breast red, leaned exhausted against a wild white-rose on Calvary, which ever after was red as blood. I do not know the origin of the legend save that it is Teutonic in its present colour and shape, of how the Crown of Thorns was woven of the Briar-Rose, and how the drops that fell from the thorns became blood-hued blooms. Teutonic also, I think, is the legend that Judas made a ladder of the rose-briar with which to reach the closed doors of heaven: hence why it is that the name Judas-Stairs is given to the Briar in some parts of Germany to this day, and why the scarlet hips are called Judasbeeren.

Most beautiful of surviving rose-customs is that akin to what is still done in some remote parts of Europe, the placing of an apple into the hand of a dead child, so that the little one may have something to play with in Paradise. I know of a dead Irish girl into whose right hand was placed a white rose, and of a drowned fisherman in whose hand was placed a red rose, symbols of spiritual rebirth and of deathless youth. Against this must be set the strange and widespread aversion to throwing a rose into a grave, or even letting one fall or be lowered there. (‘It is throwing red life away’ it was explained to me once,—with the grim addition, ‘and Death will at once be hungry for more of the rose-thrower.’)

Again, I recall an old legend of the last rose of summer, long anterior to the familiar song so named: a legend of how at Samhain (Hallowmass) when of old was held the festival of summer ended and of winter begun, a young Druid brought a rose to the sunward Stones and, after consecration and invocation, threw it into the sea.

To-day, sitting in my old garden amid many roses, and looking westward across a waveless, a moveless sea, now of faint apple-green and fainter mauve lost in a vast luminous space of milky, violet-shadowed translucency, I dream again that old dream, and wonder what its portent then, what its ancient significance, of what the symbol now, the eternal and unchanging symbol. For nothing is more strange than the life of natural symbols. We may discern in them a new illusion, a new meaning: the thought we slip into them may be shaped to a new desire and coloured with some new fantasy of dreams or of the unspoken and nameless longing in the heart: but the symbol has seen a multitude of desires come and go like shadows, has been troubled with many longings and baffled wings of the veiled passions of the soul, and has known dreams, many dreams, dreams as the uncounted sand, the myriad wave, the illimitable host of cloud, rain that none hath numbered. The Symbol of the Lily has been the chalice of the world’s tears; the symbol of the Rose, the passion of uplifted hearts and of hearts on fire; in the symbol of the Cross has dwelled, like fragrance in a flower, the human Soul. The salt, mutable, and yet unchanging sea has been the phantom in which empires have seen Time like a shadow, the mirage by which kings have wept and nations been amorous in a great pride. The Wind, that no man has seen, on whose rushing mane no hand has been laid, and in whose mouth has been set no bridle since the world swung out of chaos on chariots of flame, ... has not that solitary and dread creature of the deeps been fashioned in our minds to an image of the Everlasting, and in our hearts been shaped to the semblance of a Spirit?

A rose, laid on a stone-altar in the sunfire, and thrown into the sea, with strange hymns, with supplication ... what a symbol this of the desires that do not die with nations, the longings that outlive peoples, the grass of prayer that Time has trampled upon and left and forever leaves green and virginal?

To give that, that lovely fragrant flame of the old material earth, to the altars of the bowed spirit: to clothe it in the fire of heaven: to commit it to the unassuaged thirst of the everlasting graves of the sea.—Surely, here, an image of that Rosa Mundi which has been set upon the forehead of the world since time was, that Rose of Beauty, that Rose of Time, that Rose of the world which the passion of the soul has created as a prayer to the Inscrutable: the Rose of the Soul, of you, of me, of all that have been, of all that are, of all unborn, that we lay upon our places of prayer, and offer to the Secret Fires, and commit to desolation, and sorrow, and the salt and avid hunger of Death? What came of that mystical wedding, of the world we know and the world we do not know, by that rose of the spirit, committed thus in so great a hope, so great a faith? The Druid is not here to tell. Faith after Faith has withered like a leaf. But still we stand by ancestral altars, still offer the Rose of our Desire to the veiled Mystery, still commit this our symbol to the fathomless, the everlasting, the unanswering Deep.

THE STAR OF REST
A FRAGMENT

Rest—what an OCEANIC word! I have been thinking of this unfathomable, unpenetrable word with mingled longing, and wonder, and even awe.

What depths are in it, what infinite spaces, what vast compassionate sky, what tenderness of oblivion, what husht awakenings, what quiet sinkings and fadings into peace.

Waking early, I took the word as one might take a carrier-dove and loosed it into the cloudy suspense of the stilled mind—and it rose again and again in symbolic cloud-thought, now as an infinite green forest murmurous with a hidden wind, now in some other guise and once as Ecstasy herself, listening.

Dear soft, sweet breath of the hills,
Good-night!

“... a change
from dream of Beauty, to
Beauty.”

F. M.

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.