The well-depicted flower,
Wrought patiently into the snowy lawn
Unfolds its bosom; buds, and leaves, and sprigs,
And curling tendrils, gracefully disposed,
Follow the nimble finger of the fair;
A wreath, that cannot fade, of flowers that blow
With most success when all besides decay.[2]
[2] “The Winter Evening.”
There was not much of a garden about the place, but there was a little lawn amongst the pines, in the midst of which stood a huge old patriarch, with red stem and grotesquely contorted branches: beneath it was a bench, and there, after their return from their two hours’ ride, the ladies sat, while the sun was at its warmest, on the mornings of their first and second readings: Malcolm sat on a wheelbarrow. After lunch on the second day, which they had agreed from the first, as ladies so often do, when free of the more devouring sex, should be their dinner, and after due visits paid to a multitude of animals, the desire awoke simultaneously in them for another portion of “St Ronan’s Well.” They resolved therefore to send for their reader as soon as they had had tea. But when they sent he was nowhere to be found, and they concluded on a stroll.
Anticipating no further requirement of his service that day, Malcolm had gone out. Drawn by the sea, he took his way through the dim solemn boughless wood, as if to keep a moonlight tryst with his early love. But the sun was not yet down, and among the dark trees, shot through by the level radiance, he wandered, his heart swelling in his bosom with the glory and the mystery. Again the sun was in the wood, its burning centre, the marvel of the home which he left in the morning only to return thither at night, and it was now a temple of red light, more gorgeous, more dream-woven than the morning. How he glowed on the red stems of the bare pines, fit pillars for that which seemed temple and rite, organ and anthem in one—the worship of the earth, uplifted to its Hyperion! It was a world of faery; anything might happen in it. Who, in that region of marvel, would start to see suddenly a knight on a great sober war-horse come slowly pacing down the torrent of carmine splendour, flashing it, like the Knight of the Sun himself, in a flood from every hollow, a gleam from every flat, and a star from every round and knob of his armour? As the trees thinned away, and his feet sank deeper in the looser sand, and the sea broke blue out of the infinite, talking quietly to itself of its own solemn swell into being out of the infinite thought unseen, Malcolm felt as if the world with its loveliness and splendour were sinking behind him, and the cool entrancing sweetness of the eternal dreamland of the soul, where the dreams are more real than any sights of the world, were opening wide before his entering feet.
“Shall not death be like this?” he said, and threw himself upon the sand, and hid his face and his eyes from it all. For there is this strange thing about all glory embodied in the material, that, when the passion of it rises to its height, we hurry from its presence that its idea may perfect itself in silent and dark and deaf delight. Of its material self we want no more: its real self we have, and it sits at the fountain of our tears. Malcolm hid his face from the source of his gladness, and worshipped the source of that source.
Rare as they are at any given time, there have been, I think, such youths in all ages of the world—youths capable of glorying in the fountain whence issues the torrent of their youthful might. Nor is the reality of their early worship blasted for us by any mistral of doubt that may blow upon their spirit from the icy region of the understanding. The cold fevers, the vital agues that such winds breed, can but prove that not yet has the sun of the perfect arisen upon them; that the Eternal has not yet manifested himself in all regions of their being; that a grander, more obedient, therefore more blissful, more absorbing worship yet, is possible, nay, is essential to them. These chills are but the shivers of the divine nature, unsatisfied, half-starved, banished from its home, divided from its origin, after which it calls in groanings it knows not how to shape into sounds articulate. They are the spirit-wail of the holy infant after the bosom of its mother. Let no man long back to the bliss of his youth—but forward to a bliss that shall swallow even that, and contain it, and be more than it. Our history moves in cycles, it is true, ever returning toward the point whence it started; but it is in the imperfect circles of a spiral it moves; it returns—but ever to a point above the former: even the second childhood, at which the fool jeers, is the better, the truer, the fuller childhood, growing strong to cast off altogether, with the husk of its own enveloping age, that of its family, its country, its world as well. Age is not all decay: it is the ripening, the swelling of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.
When Malcolm lifted his head, the sun had gone down. He rose and wandered along the sand towards the moon—at length blooming out of the darkening sky, where she had hung all day like a washed-out rag of light, to revive as the sunlight faded. He watched the banished life of her day-swoon returning, until, gathering courage, she that had been no one, shone out fair and clear, in conscious queendom of the night. Then, in the friendly infolding of her dreamlight and the dreamland it created, Malcolm’s soul revived as in the comfort of the lesser, the mitigated glory, and, as the moon into radiance from the darkened air, and the nightingale into music from the sleep-stilled world of birds, blossomed from the speechlessness of thought and feeling into a strange kind of brooding song. If the words were half nonsense, the feeling was not the less real. Such as they were, they came almost of themselves, and the tune came with them.
Rose o’ my hert,
Open yer leaves to the lampin’ mune;
Into the curls lat her keek an’ dert;
She’ll tak the colour but gi’e ye tune.
Buik o’ my brain,
Open yer neuks to the starry signs;
Lat the een o’ the holy luik an’ strain
An’ glimmer an’ score atween the lines.
Cup o’ my sowl,
Gowd an’ diamond an’ ruby cup,
Ye’re noucht ava but a toom dry bowl,
Till the wine o’ the kingdom fill ye up,
Conscience-glass,
Mirror the infinite all in thee;
Melt the bounded and make it pass
Into the tideless, shoreless sea.
World of my life,
Swing thee round thy sunny track;
Fire and wind and water and strife—
Carry them all to the glory back.
Ever as he halted for a word, the moonlight, and the low sweet waves on the sands, filled up the pauses to his ear; and there he lay, looking up to the sky and the moon and the rose-diamond stars, his thoughts half-dissolved in feeling, and his feeling half-crystallised to thought.
Out of the dim wood came two lovely forms into the moonlight, and softly approached him—so softly that he knew nothing of their nearness until Florimel spoke.