Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

Loud-flapping Cushat! it was thou that inspiredst these solemn fancies; and we have only to wish thee, for thy part contributed to our Recreations, now that the acorns of autumn must be well-nigh consumed, many a plentiful repast, amid the multitude of thy now congregated comrades, in the cleared stubble lands—as severe weather advances, and the ground becomes covered with snow, regales undisturbed by fowler, on the tops of turnip, rape, and other cruciform plants, which all of thy race affect so passionately—and soft blow the sea-breezes on thy unruffled plumage, when thou takest thy winter's walk with kindred myriads on the shelly shore, and for a season minglest with gull and seamew—apart every tribe, one from the other, in the province of its own peculiar instinct—yet all mysteriously taught to feed or sleep together within the roar or margin of the main.

Sole-sitting Cushat! We see thee through the yew-tree's shade, on some day of the olden time, but when or where we remember not—for what has place or time to do with the vision of a dream? That we see thee is all we know, and that serenely beautiful thou art! Most pleasant is it to dream, and to know we dream! By sweet volition we keep ourselves half asleep and half awake; and all our visions of thought, as they go swimming along, partake at once of reality and imagination. Fiction and truth—clouds, shadows, phantoms and phantasms—ether, sunshine, substantial forms and sounds that have a being, blending together in a scene created by us, and partly impressed upon us, and which one motion of the head on the pillow may dissolve, or deepen into more oppressive delight! In some such dreaming state of mind are we now; and, gentle reader, if thou art broad awake, lay aside the visionary volume, or read a little longer, and likely enough is it that thou too mayest fall half asleep. If so, let thy drowsy eyes still pursue the glimmering paragraphs—and wafted away wilt thou feel thyself to be into the heart of a Highland forest, that knows no bounds but those of the uncertain sky.

Away from our remembrance fades the noisy world of men into a silent glimmer—and now it is all no more than a mere faint thought. On—on—on! through briery brake—matted thicket—grassy glade—On—on—on! further into the Forest! What a confusion of huge stones, rocks, knolls, all tumbled together into a chaos—not without its stern and sterile beauty! Still are there, above, blue glimpses of the sky—deep though the umbrage be, and wide-flung the arms of the oaks, and of pines in their native wilderness gigantic as oaks, and extending as broad a shadow. Now the firmament has vanished—and all is twilight. Immense stems, "in number without number numberless,"—bewildering eye and soul—all still—silent—steadfast—and so would they be in a storm. For what storm—let it rage aloft as it might, till the surface of the forest toss and roar like the sea—could force its path through these many million trunks? The thunder-stone might split that giant there—how vast! how magnificent!—but the brother by his side would not tremble; and the sound—in the awful width of the silence—what more would it be than that of the woodpecker alarming the insects of one particular tree!

Poor wretch that we are!—to us the uncompanioned silence of the solitude hath become terrible. More dreadful is it than the silence of the tomb; for there, often arise responses to the unuttered soliloquies of the pensive heart. But this is as the silence, not of Time, but of Eternity. No burial heaps—no mounds—no cairns! It is not as if man had perished here, and been forgotten; but as if this were a world in which there had been neither living nor dying. Too utter is the solitariness even for the ghosts of dead! For they are thought to haunt the burial-places of what once was their bodies—the chamber where the spirit breathed its final farewell—the spot of its transitory love and delight, or of its sin and sorrow—to gaze with troubled tenderness on the eyes that once they worshipped—with cold ear to drink the music of the voices long ago adored; and in all their permitted visitations, to express, if but by the beckoning of the shadow of a hand, some unextinguishable longing after the converse of the upper world, even within the gates of the grave.

A change comes over us. Deep and still as is the solitude, we are relieved of our awe, and out of the forest-gloom arise images of beauty that come and go, gliding as on wings, or, statue-like, stand in the glades, like the sylvan deities to whom of old belonged, by birthright, all the regions of the woods. On—on—on!—further into the Forest!—and let the awe of imagination be still further tempered by the delight breathed even from any one of the lovely names sweet-sounding through the famous fables of antiquity. Dryad, Hamadryad! Faunus! Sylvanus!—Now, alas! ye are but names, and no more! Great Pan himself is dead, or here he would set up his reign. But what right has such a dreamer to dream of the dethroned deities of Greece? The language they spoke is not his language; yet the words of the great poets who sang of gods and demigods, are beautiful in their silent meanings as they meet his adoring eyes; and, mighty Lyrists! has he not often floated down the temple-crowned and altar-shaded rivers of your great Choral Odes?

On—on—on!—further into the Forest!—unless, indeed, thou dreadest that the limbs that bear on thy fleshy tabernacle may fail, and the body, left to itself, sink down and die. Ha! such fears thou laughest to scorn; for from youth upwards thou hast dallied with the wild and perilous: and what but the chill delight in which thou hast so often shivered in threatening solitude brought thee here! These dens are not dungeons, nor are we a thrall. Yet if dungeons they must be called—and they are deep, and dark, and grim—ten thousand gates hath this great prison-house, and wide open are they all. So on—on—on!—further into the Forest! But who shall ascend to its summit? Eagles and dreams. Round its base we go, rejoicing in the new-found day, and once more cheered and charmed with the music of birds. Say whence came, ye scientific world-makers, these vast blocks of granite? Was it fire or water, think ye, that hung in air the semblance of yon Gothic cathedral, without nave, or chancel, or aisle—a mass of solid rock? Yet it looks like the abode of Echoes; and haply when there is thunder, rolls out its lengthening shadow of sound to the ear of the solitary shepherd afar off on Cairngorm.

On—on—on!—further into the Forest! Now on all sides leagues of ancient trees surround us, and we are safe as in the grave from the persecuting love or hatred of friends or foes. The sun shall not find us by day, nor the moon by night. Were our life forfeited to what are called the laws, how could the laws discover the criminal? How could they drag us from the impenetrable gloom of this sylvan sanctuary? And if here we chose to perish by suicide or natural death—and famine is a natural death—what eye would ever look on our bones? Raving all; but so it often is with us in severest solitude—our dreams will be hideous with sin and death.

Hideous, said we, with sin and death? Thoughts that came flying against us like vultures, like vultures have disappeared, disappointed of their prey, and afraid to fix their talons in a thing alive. Hither—by some secret and sacred impulse within the soul, that often knoweth not the sovereign virtue of its own great desires—have we been led as into a penitentiary, where, before the altar of nature, we may lay down the burden of guilt or remorse, and walk out of the Forest a heaven-pardoned man. What guilt?—O my soul! canst thou think of Him who inhabiteth eternity, and ask what guilt? What remorse?—For the dereliction of duty every day since thou received'st from Heaven the understanding of good and of evil. All our past existence gathers up into one dread conviction, that every man that is born of woman is a sinner, and worthy of everlasting death. Yet with the same dread conviction is interfused a knowledge, clear as the consciousness of present being, that the soul will live for ever. What was the meaning, O my soul! of all those transitory joys and griefs—of all those fears, hopes, loves, that so shook, each in its own fleeting season, the very foundations on which thy being in this life is laid? Anger, wrath, hatred, pride, and ambition—what are they all but so many shapes of sin coeval with thy birth? That sudden entrance of heaven's light into the Forest, was like the opening of the eye of God! And our spirit stands ashamed of its nakedness, because of the foulness and pollution of sin. But the awful thoughts that have travelled through its chambers have ventilated, swept, and cleansed them—and let us break away from beneath the weight of confession.

Conscience! Speak not of weak and fantastic fears—of abject superstitions—and of all that wild brood of dreams that have for ages been laws to whole nations; though we might speak of them—and, without violation of the spirit of true philosophy, call upon them to bear testimony to the truth. But think of the calm, purified, enlightened, and elevated conscience of the highest natures—from which objectless fear has been excluded—and which hears, in its stillness, the eternal voice of God. What calm celestial joy fills all the being of a good man, when conscience tells him he is obeying God's law! What dismal fear and sudden remorse assail him, whenever he swerves but one single step out of the right path that is shining before his feet! It is not a mere selfish terror—it is not the dread of punishment only that appals him—for, on the contrary, he can calmly look on the punishment which he knows his guilt has incurred, and almost desires that it should be inflicted, that the incensed power may be appeased. It is the consciousness of offence that is unendurable—not the fear of consequent suffering; it is the degradation of sin that his soul deplores—it is the guilt which he would expiate, if possible, in torments; it is the united sense of wrong, sin, guilt, degradation, shame, and remorse, that renders a moment's pang of the conscience more terrible to the good than years of any other punishment—and it thus is the power of the human soul to render its whole life miserable by its very love of that virtue which it has fatally violated. This is a passion which the soul could not suffer—unless it were immortal. Reason, so powerful in the highest minds, would escape from the vain delusion; but it is in the highest minds where reason is most subjected to this awful power—they would seek reconcilement with offended Heaven by the loss of all the happiness that earth ever yielded—and would rejoice to pour out their heart's blood if it could wipe away from the conscience the stain of one deep transgression! These are not the high-wrought and delusive states of mind of religious enthusiasts, passing away with the bodily agitation of the dreamer; but they are the feelings of the loftiest of men's sons—and when the troubled spirit has escaped from their burden, or found strength to support it, the conviction of their reasonableness and of their awful reality remains; nor can it be removed from the minds of the wise and virtuous, without the obliteration from the tablets of memory of all the moral judgments which conscience has there recorded.

It is melancholy to think that even in our own day, a philosopher, and one of high name too, should have spoken slightingly of the universal desire of immortality, as no argument at all in proof of it, because arising inevitably from the regret with which all men must regard the relinquishment of this life. By thus speaking of the desire as a delusion necessarily accompanying the constitution of mind which it has pleased the Deity to bestow on us, such reasoners but darken the mystery both of man and of Providence. But this desire of immortality is not of the kind they say it is, nor does it partake, in any degree, of the character of a blind and weak feeling of regret at merely leaving this present life. "I would not live alway," is a feeling which all men understand—but who can endure the momentary thought of annihilation? Thousands, and tens of thousands—awful a thing as it is to die—are willing to do so—"passing through nature to eternity"—nay, when the last hour comes, death almost always finds his victim ready, if not resigned. To leave earth, and all the light both of the sun and of the soul, is a sad thought to us all—transient as are human smiles, we cannot bear to see them no more—and there is a beauty that binds us to life in the tears of tenderness that the dying man sees gushing for his sake. But between that regret for departing loves and affections, and all the gorgeous or beautiful shows of this earth—between that love and the dread of annihilation, there is no connection. The soul can bear to part with all it loves—the soft voice—the kindling smile—the starting tear—and the profoundest sighs of all by whom it is beloved; but it cannot bear to part with its existence. It cannot even believe the possibility of that which yet it may darkly dread. Its loves—its passions—its joys—its agonies are not itself. They may perish, but it is imperishable. Strip it of all it has seen, touched, enjoyed, or suffered—still it seems to survive; bury all it knew, or could know in the grave—but itself cannot be trodden down into the corruption. It sees nothing like itself in what perishes, except in dim analogies that vanish before its last profound self-meditation—and though it parts with its mortal weeds at last, as with a garment, its life is felt at last to be something not even in contrast with the death of the body, but to flow on like a flood, that we believe continues still to flow after it has entered into the unseen solitude of some boundless desert.