Ruins! Among all the external objects of imagination, surely they are most affecting! Some sumptuous edifice of a former age, still standing in its undecayed strength, has undoubtedly a great command over us, from the ages that have flowed over it; but the mouldering edifice which Nature has begun to win to herself, and to dissolve into her own bosom, is far more touching to the heart, and more awakening to the spirit. It is beautiful in its decay—not merely because green leaves, and wild flowers, and creeping mosses soften its rugged frowns, but because they have sown themselves on the decay of greatness; they are monitors to our fancy, like the flowers on a grave, of the untroubled rest of the dead. Battlements riven by the hand of time, and cloistered arches reft and rent, speak to us of the warfare and of the piety of our ancestors, of the pride of their might, and the consolations of their sorrow: they revive dim shadows of departed life, evoked from the land of forgetfulness; but they touch us more deeply when the brightness which the sun flings on the broken arches, and the warbling of birds that are nestled in the chambers of princes, and the moaning of winds through the crevices of towers, round which the surges of war were shattered and driven back, lay those phantoms again to rest in their silent bed, and show us, in the monuments of human life and power, the visible footsteps of Time and Oblivion coming on in their everlasting and irresistible career, to sweep down our perishable race, and to reduce all the forms of our momentary being into the undistinguishable elements of their original nothing.
What is there below the skies like the place of mighty and departed cities? the vanishing or vanished capitals of renowned empires? There is no other such desolation. The solitudes of nature may be wild and drear, but they are not like the solitude from which human glory is swept away. The overthrow or decay of mighty human power is, of all thoughts that can enter the mind, the most overwhelming. The whole imagination is at once stirred by the prostration of that, round which so many high associations have been collected for so many ages. Beauty seems born but to perish, and its fragility is seen and felt to be inherent in it by a law of its being. But power gives stability, as it were, to human thought, and we forget our own perishable nature in the spectacle of some abiding and enduring greatness. Our own little span of years—our own confined region of space—are lost in the endurance and far-spread dominion of some mighty state, and we feel as if we partook of its deep-set and triumphant strength. When, therefore, a great and ancient empire falls into pieces, or when fragments of its power are heard rent asunder, like column after column disparting from some noble edifice, in sad conviction, we feel as if all the cities of men were built on foundations beneath which the earthquake sleeps. The same doom seems to be imminent over all the other kingdoms that still stand; and in the midst of such changes, and decays, and overthrows—or as we read of them of old—we look, under such emotions, on all power as foundationless, and in our wide imagination embrace empires covered only with the ruins of their desolation. Yet such is the pride of the human spirit, that it often unconsciously, under the influence of such imagination, strives to hide from itself the utter nothingness of its mightiest works. And when all its glories are visibly crumbling into dust, it creates some imaginary power to overthrow the fabrics of human greatness—and thus attempts to derive a kind of mournful triumph even in its very fall. Thus, when nations have faded away in their sins and vices, rotten at the heart and palsied in all their limbs, we strive not to think of that sad internal decay, but imagine some mighty power smiting empires and cutting short the records of mortal magnificence. Thus Fate and Destiny are said in our imagination to lay our glories low. Thus, even, the calm and silent air of Oblivion has been thought of as an unsparing Power. Time, too, though in moral sadness wisely called a shadow, has been clothed with terrific attributes, and the sweep of his scythe has shorn the towery diadem of cities. Thus the mere sigh in which we expire, has been changed into active power—and all the nations have with one voice called out "Death!" And while mankind have sunk, and fallen, and disappeared in the helplessness of their own mortal being, we have still spoken of powers arrayed against them—powers that are in good truth only another name for their own weaknesses. Thus imagination is for ever fighting against truth—and even when humbled, her visions are sublime—conscious even amongst saddest ruin of her own immortality.
Higher and higher than ever rose the tower of Belus, uplifted by ecstasy, soars the Lark, the lyrical poet of the sky. Listen, listen! and the more remote the bird the louder seems his hymn in heaven. He seems, in such altitude, to have left the earth for ever, and to have forgotten his lowly nest. The primroses and the daisies, and all the sweet hill-flowers, must be unremembered in that lofty region of light. But just as the Lark is lost—he and his song together—as if his orisons had been accepted—both are seen and heard fondly wavering earthwards, and in a little while he is walking with his graceful crest contented along the furrows of the brairded corn, or on the clover lea that in man's memory has not felt the ploughshare; or after a pause, in which he seems dallying with a home-sick passion, drooping down like one dead, beside his mate in her shallow nest.
Of all birds to whom is given dominion over the air, the Lark alone lets loose the power that is in his wings only for the expression of love and gratitude. The eagle sweeps in passion of hunger—poised in the sky his ken is searching for prey on sea or sward—his flight is ever animated by destruction. The dove seems still to be escaping from something that pursues—afraid of enemies even in the dangerless solitudes where the old forests repose in primeval peace. The heron, high over houseless moors, seems at dusk fearful in her laborious flight, and weariedly gathers her long wings on the tree-top, as if thankful that day is done, and night again ready with its rest. "The blackening trains o' craws to their repose" is an image that affects the heart of "mortal man who liveth here by toil," through sympathy with creatures partaking with him a common lot. The swallow, for ever on the wing, and wheeling fitfully before fancy's eyes in element adapted for perpetual pastime, is flying but to feed—for lack of insects prepares to forsake the land of its nativity, and yearns for the blast to bear it across the sea. Thou alone, O Lark! hast wings given thee that thou mayest be perfectly happy—none other bird but thou can at once soar and sing—and heavenward thou seemest to be borne, not more by those twinkling pinions than by the ever-varying, ever-deepening melody effusing from thy heart.
How imagination unifies! then most intensive when working with and in the heart. Who thinks, when profoundly listening with his eyes shut to the warbling air, that there is another lark in creation? The lark—sole as the season—or the rainbow. We can fancy he sings to charm our own particular ear—to please us descends into silence—for our sakes erects his crest as he walks confidingly near our feet. Not till the dream-circle, of which ourselves are the centre, dissolves or subsides, do the fairest sights and sweetest sounds in nature lose their relationship to us the beholder and hearer, and relapse into the common property of all our kind. To self appertains the whole sensuous as well as the whole spiritual world. Egoism is the creator of all beauty and all bliss, of all hope and of all faith. Even thus doth imagination unify Sabbath worship. All our beloved Scotland is to the devout breast on that day one House of God. Each congregation—however far apart—hears but one hymn—sympathy with all is an all-comprehensive self—and Christian love of our brethren is evolved from the conviction that we have ourselves a soul to be saved or lost.
Yet, methinks, imagination loveth just as well to pursue an opposite process, and to furnish food to the heart in separate picture after separate picture, one and all imbued not with the same but congenial sentiment, and therefore succeeding one another at her will, be her will intimated by mild bidding or imperial command. In such mood imagination, in still series, visions a thousand parish-kirks, each with its own characteristic localities, Sabbath-sanctified; distributes the beauty of that hallowed day in allotments all over the happy land—so that in one Sabbath there are a thousand Sabbaths.
Keep carolling, then, all together, ye countless Larks, till heaven is one hymn! Imagination thinks she sees each particular field that sends up its own singer to the sky—the spot of each particular nest. And of the many hearts all over loveliest Scotland in the sweet vernal season a-listening your lays, she is with the quiet beatings of the happy, with the tumult in them that would wish to break! The little maiden by the well in the brae-side above the cottage, with the Bible on her knees, left in tendance of an infant—the palsied crone placed safely in the sunshine till after service—the sickly student meditating in the shade, and somewhat sadly thinking that these spring flowers are the last his eyes may see—lovers walking together on the Sabbath before their marriage to the house of God—life-wearied wanderers without a home—remorseful men touched by the innocent happiness they cannot help hearing in heaven—the sceptic—the unbeliever—the atheist to whom "hope comes not that comes to all." What different meanings to such different auditors hath the same music at the same moment filling the same sky!
Does the Lark ever sing in winter? Ay, sometimes January is visited with a May-day hour; and in the genial glimpse, though the earth be yet barer than the sky, the Lark, mute for months, feels called on by the sun to sing, not so near to heaven's gate, and a shorter than vernal lyric, or during that sweetest season when neither he nor you can say whether it is summer or but spring. Unmated yet, nor of mate solicitous, in pure joy of heart he cannot refrain from ascent and song; but the snow-clouds look cold, and ere he has mounted as high again as the church-spire, the aimless impulse dies, and he comes wavering down silently to the yet unprimrosed brae.
In our boyish days, we never felt that the Spring had really come till the clear-singing Lark went careering before our gladdened eyes away up to heaven. Then all the earth wore a vernal look, and the ringing sky said, "Winter is over and gone." As we roamed, on a holiday, over the wide pastoral moors, to angle in the lochs and pools, unless the day were very cloudy the song of some lark or other was still warbling aloft, and made a part of our happiness. The creature could not have been more joyful in the skies than we were on the greensward. We, too, had our wings, and flew through our holiday. Thou soul of glee! who still leddest our flight in all our pastimes—representative child of Erin!—wildest of the wild—brightest of the bright—boldest of the bold!—the lark-loved vales in their stillness were no home for thee. The green glens of ocean, created by swelling and subsiding storms, or by calms around thy ship transformed into immeasurable plains, they filled thy fancy with images dominant over the memories of the steadfast earth. The petterel and the halcyon were the birds the sailor loved, and he forgot the songs of the inland woods in the moanings that haunt the very heart of the tumultuous sea. Of that ship nothing was ever known but that she perished. He, too, the grave and thoughtful English boy, whose exquisite scholarship we all so enthusiastically admired, without one single particle of hopeless envy—and who accompanied us on all our wildest expeditions, rather from affection to his playmates than any love of their sports—he who, timid and unadventurous as he seemed to be, yet rescued little Marian of the Brae from a drowning death when so many grown-up men stood aloof in selfish fear—gone, too, for ever art thou, our beloved Edward Harrington! and, after a few brilliant years in the Oriental clime,
——"on Hoogley's banks afar,
Looks down on thy lone tomb the Evening Star."