A dead man's diary

by Coulson Kernahan

"An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him, but for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling's jest."

At best we could but copy, but if it so happened that we, to whom it was given to create, had never been permitted to set eyes even upon this earth beforehand, what sort of a world then, think you, should we contrive to construct?

I believe that if God were to make a man, a full-grown man in a moment, and were to set him down in the midst of the world, to look upon it with new eyes, and for the first time, instead of letting him grow up from a child, to become accustomed to it—for it is true, as Mr. Lowell says, that "we glance carelessly at the sunrise, and get used to Orion and the Pleiades,"—I believe that that man would be in danger of delirium from his overwhelming joy and wonder at the beauty and the boundlessness of that which he saw around.

Even this grim old London is full of beauty and of boundlessness; of beauty which strikes me breathless, and of boundlessness of life, and sky; for in what slum of it, be it never so stifling, are we quite shut out from view of the stars or the sunshine, or of the human faces that come and go in the streets? But a moment ago, while looking out from my window upon a crowded, choking city thoroughfare, I caught one glimpse of a woman's profile, as she passed with her head poised, and half-turned towards me; and though the vision was gone in an instant, the sweep of the queenly neck, ivory-white and stately as a lily-stem, set my senses vibrating with a thrill of exquisite pleasure. And yonder, looking into a window, I see another face, the sweet pure face of a maiden. I run my eye like a finger along the profile, I follow the flowing line of the hair; but even as I look, she turns, is gone and is forgotten, for her place is taken by a girl with a basket of flowers, the flowers that I love as I love nothing else but poetry. It is Emerson, I think, who tells us that God's loveliest gifts are the commonest; and that sun and sky and flowers are scarce denied to a beggar's call; and it is pitiful, as he says in another passage, the things by which we call ourselves rich or poor. Why, I have gone home from my morning's walk, feeling richer in the possession of a handful of honey-suckle than if I had found a purse of sovereigns by the wayside; nor could all the art-treasures of Bond Street (not that I fail to appreciate them, either) give me a more exquisite thrill of sweetly-saddened pleasure than does the tender perfume of a bunch of violets.

As a child I used to fancy that I found in a flower all my whitest and purest thoughts crystallized into a thing; and now, though I am a man, the white-pure thoughts of my childhood still live for me in every flower that blossoms in the meadows; for the flowers bring me back not only my vanished childhood, but my childhood's innocence and peace. Even in those remote child-days I was persuaded that the flowers were not of earth, but of heaven, nor while I had them could I believe heaven to be so very far off, after all. "Else how could the flower-seeds have been blown over its edge, and fallen down to the earth-land?" I would say to myself. And I find myself fancying now, as I fancied then, that God takes the flowers home to His heaven in the winter, and every spring when I welcome them back, I feel that they have come as direct from Him and from heaven as if He had leant down out of the skies to give them to me; and I feel that they are not my flowers, but His flowers; for even as I gather them to call them mine, He puts forth His hand and claims them, so that they fade away again to the heaven whence they came.

Yes, I love this world, and the things of it. To me the mere consciousness of life is a gladness, the pulsing of my heart a pleasure. I pencil the latter part of this chapter while lying lazily in a sun-filled meadow, and as I write I seem to feel the very drawing of my breath a joy. The sky spreads above me, a shimmering sea of blue—not the cool, crystalline sapphire of early morning, but the deep dense azure of a midsummer noon. How hot the bees must feel in that furry coat! As I lie here, basking in the sunlight, and watching the buttercups dancing and dipping above the grass, like golden banners amid an army of green-bladed bayonets, I do not wonder that the poor bees keep up a dull droning hum of monotonous murmuring. I can see the hot air simmering and quivering above the clover fields, but all else is drowsily, dreamily still. I know that the streets of the far-off city are reeking and smoking with dry and dusty heat, but here I am in another world, and the bees and the birds are my brothers. This meadow is my boundless prairie; my head is below the level of the grass tops, and they spread feathery, filmy arms above, like the boughs of a vast forest.

Yes, lying here in this sun-filled meadow on this summer morning, I am conscious that I love my life, and that I should be loath to leave it. I love to feel the wind upon my cheek, and to hear it as it whistles by me, singing in my ears, as in the hollow convolutions of a shell. I love to stand and look out upon the sea, or upon open plains and broad sky-spaces, which give us eyesight room and room for our souls to be. I love to lie and listen to the song of the wind among the pine-trees,—the "sailing" pine trees,—and to watch them swing and sway like storm-tossed barks at sea. I love to see the rook beat up against the wind, and poise and hover and soar, and slide down upon the edge of the blast with rigid blade-like wings that shear the air like a knife. And when I watch him cut the ether in circles as full and fair as the curves of a woman's bosom, I think of him less as a bird than as some winged artist of the heights, who delights in flowing line, and grace of form and feature; and I too feel buoyant and airy, and to my very limbs is lent the lightness of his flight.

I love, too, the companionship of those who love the things that I love—my spiritual brethren and fellow-worshippers; for, to my thinking, the lovers of Art, Music, Nature, Poetry, or of Religion, are all of them in one attitude of mind, and are animated by one and the same spirit—I call it the Worshipping Spirit. It may body itself forth in the homage-love of the musician for harmony, in the artist-worship of sensuous beauty, or, highest of all, in the adoration of Christ and of that which is spiritually perfect; and yet all these loves are not many loves, but one love, for they are but different expressions of one and the same spirit. Hence to turn from a chapter of St. John to a sunset, a sonnet from Wordsworth, or a picture by Botticelli, is to me not unseemly, but natural, for each of these arouses, in different degrees, one and the same emotion, and that emotion has its source in one and the same Worshipping Spirit.

I love also travel, change and adventure. I love the Botticellis, the Fra Angelicos and the Leonardo of our own princely National Gallery, not the less, but the better for an occasional ramble in the Louvre, or among the galleries of Holland or Italy. I love the life, the stir and bustle of our London streets; but I love, too, the old-world rest and repose of Bruges or of Berne; and many a time have I lingered the long day through in the antique streets of Antwerp, listening to the sweet uproar and silvern wrangling that ripples, cloud-borne and wind-wafted, from where the stately belfry soars lark-like above the world. To me to have been happy once is to establish a claim upon happiness thenceforward, and it is for this reason, I suppose, that I love so to re-live the past, and to dwell on the memory of former sights and scenes. It is true, as Frederick Robertson says, that the "first time never returns," and shall I ever forget the exultation of the moment when, after repeated failures, I first set foot on that inaccessible mountain-height which I had risked my life to scale? Even now, lying here in this sunny English meadow, I seem to re-live that moment, and to see that scene again. Before me rises one wild and wasteful world of white—a white on which the fierce rays of the sun beat and burn with blinding, blazing, intolerable brilliance. Above, swimming and soaring away into unfathomable azure, spreads the silent heaven, but around, about, beneath, all is white, deathly-white, save only where the vast angles of ice-crag or column deepen into a lustrous turquoise, or where a blue mist broods athwart the mouth of yawning crevasse or cavern. Below me and afar—so far that it seems as if I were cut off from it for ever,—lies the sunny village that I left so many toilsome hours ago, just visible, a wee white dot upon the green. There the air is sweet with the breath of flowers and of the clover-fields, there, too, are the bees, and the butterflies, and the music of rushing water. But here, where the wasteful snows writhe and wreathe around in arch and cave and column, vast and wonderful to behold—above, the shining zenith, below, the sheer abyss and the treacherous descent—here in the solemn solitude and silence of this whited wilderness, I can scarcely believe that I am still on the earth, and of it, and that the dazzling dome on which I am standing is but the white and swelling bosom of the Great Mother from whom we all sprang.

Or, weary of the silence and the snow-solitudes, I close my eyes, and lo! I am down in the valley again, and all around me spreads a blithe and beauteous scene of serenest summer. On every breeze that sings from sunny slope or smiling pasture is borne the windy chime and clamour of countless cattle-bells from the hillside, but beyond that, and the unbroken buzz and burr, which bespeak the deep content of innumerable bees, all is still, drowsily still. Here, if anywhere, one can realize for a moment the deep, dreamy peacefulness that pervades the opening lines of Mr. Swinburne's majestic "Garden of Proserpine,"—