In company we are silent—in solitude we soliloquise. So dearly do we love our own voice that we cannot bear to hear it mixed with that of others—perhaps drowned; and then our bashfulness tongue-ties us in the hush expectant of our "golden opinions," when all eyes are turned to the speechless "old man eloquent," and you might hear a tangle dishevelling itself in Neæra's hair. But all alone by ourselves, in the country, among trees standing still among untrodden leaves—as now—how we do speak! All thoughts—all feelings—desire utterance; left to themselves they are not happy till they have evolved into words—winged words that sometimes settle on the ground, like moths on flowers—sometimes seek the sky, like eagles above the clouds.
No such soliloquies in written poetry as these of ours—the act of composition is fatal as frost to their flow; yet composition there is at such solitary times going on among the moods of the mind, as among the clouds on a still but not airless sky, perpetual but imperceptible transformations of the beautiful, obedient to the bidding of the spirit of beauty.
Who but Him who made it knoweth aught of the Laws of Spirit? All of us may know much of what is "wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best," in obedience to them; but leaving the open day, we enter at once into thickest night. Why at this moment do we see a spot once only visited by us—unremembered for ever so many flights of black or bright winged years—see it in fancy as it then was in nature, with the same dewdrops on that wondrous myrtle beheld but on that morning—such a myrtle as no other eyes beheld ever on this earth but ours, and the eyes of one now in heaven?
Another year is about to die—and how wags the world? "What great events are on the gale?" Go ask our statesmen. But their rule—their guidance is but over the outer world, and almost powerless their folly or their wisdom over the inner region in which we mortals live, and move, and have our being, where the fall of a throne makes no more noise than that of a leaf!
Thank Heaven! Summer and Autumn are both dead and buried at last, and white lie the snow on their graves! Youth is the season of all sorts of insolence, and therefore we can forgive and forget almost anything in Spring. He has always been a privileged personage; and we have no doubt that he played his pranks even in Paradise. To-day, he meets you unexpectedly on the hill-side; and was there ever a face in this world so celestialised by smiles! All the features are framed of light. Gaze into his eyes, and you feel that in the untroubled lustre there is something more sublime than in the heights of the cloudless heavens, or in the depths of the waveless seas. More sublime, because essentially spiritual. There stands the young Angel, entranced in the conscious mystery of his own beautiful and blessed being; and the earth becomes all at once fit region for the sojourn of the Son of the Morning. So might some great painter image the First-born of the Year, till nations adored the picture.—To-morrow you repair, with hermit steps, to the Mount of the Vision, and,
"Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,"
Spring clutches you by the hair with the fingers of frost; blashes a storm of sleet in your face, and finishes, perhaps, by folding you in a winding-sheet of snow, in which you would infallibly perish but for a pocket-pistol of Glenlivet.—The day after to-morrow, you behold him—Spring—walking along the firmament, sad, but not sullen—mournful, but not miserable—disturbed, but not despairing—now coming out towards you in a burst of light—and now fading away from you in a gathering of gloom—even as one might figure in his imagination a fallen Angel. On Thursday, confound you if you know what the deuce to make of his Springship. There he is, stripped to the buff—playing at hide-and-seek, hare-and-hound, with a queer crazy crony of his in a fur cap, swan-down waistcoat, and hairy breeches, Lodbrog or Winter. You turn up the whites of your eyes, and the browns of your hands in amazement, till the Two, by way of change of pastime, cease their mutual vagaries, and, like a couple of hawks diverting themselves with an owl, in conclusion buffet you off the premises. You insert the occurrence, with suitable reflections, in your Meteorological Diary, under the head—Spring.—On Friday, nothing is seen of you but the blue tip of your nose, for you are confined to bed by rheumatism, and nobody admitted to your sleepless sanctum but your condoling Mawsey. 'Tis a pity. For never since the flood-greened earth on her first resurrection morn laughed around Ararat, spanned was she by such a Rainbow! By all that is various and vanishing, the arch seems many miles broad, and many miles high, and all creation to be gladly and gloriously gathered together without being crowded—plains, woods, villages, towns, hills, and clouds, beneath the pathway of Spring, once more an Angel—an unfallen Angel! While the tinge that trembles into transcendent hues fading and fluctuating—deepening and dying—now gone, as if for ever—and now back again in an instant, as if breathing and alive—is felt, during all that wavering visitation, to be of all sights the most evanescent, and yet inspirative of a beauty-born belief, bright as the sun that flung the image on the cloud—profound as the gloom it illumines—that it shone and is shining there at the bidding of Him who inhabiteth eternity.—The grim noon of Saturday, after a moaning morning, and one silent intermediate lour of grave-like stillness, begins to gleam fitfully with lightning like a maniac's eye; and is not that
"The sound
Of thunder heard remote?"
On earth wind there is none—not so much as a breath. But there is a strong wind in heaven—for see how that huge cloud-city, a night within a day, comes moving on along the hidden mountain-tops, and hangs over the loch all at once black as pitch, except that here and there a sort of sullen purple heaves upon the long slow swell, and here and there along the shores—how caused we know not—are seen, but heard not, the white melancholy breakers! Is no one smitten blind? No! Thank God! But ere the thanksgiving has been worded, an airquake has split asunder the cloud-city, the night within the day, and all its towers and temples are disordered along the firmament, to a sound that might waken the dead. Where are ye, ye echo-hunters, that grudge not to purchase gunpowder explosions on Lowood bowling-green at four shillings the blast? See! there are our artillerymen stalking from battery to battery—all hung up aloft facing the west—or "each standing by his gun" with lighted match, moving or motionless, Shadow-figures, and all clothed in black-blue uniform, with blood-red facings portentously glancing in the sun, as he strives to struggle into heaven. The Generalissimo of all the forces, who is he but—Spring?—Hand in hand with Spring, Sabbath descends from heaven unto earth; and are not their feet beautiful on the mountains? Small as is the voice of that tinkling bell from that humble spire, overtopped by its coeval trees, yet is it heard in the heart of infinitude. So is the bleating of these silly sheep on the braes—and so is that voice of psalms, all at once rising so spirit-like, as if the very kirk were animated, and singing a joyous song in the wilderness to the ear of the Most High. For all things are under his care—those that, as we dream, have no life—the flowers, and the herbs, and the trees—those that some dim scripture seems to say, when they die, utterly perish—and those that all bright scripture, whether written in the book of God, or the book of Nature, declares will live for ever!
If such be the character and conduct of Spring during one week, wilt thou not forget and forgive—with us—much occasional conduct on his part that appears not only inexplicable, but incomprehensible? But we cannot extend the same indulgence to Summer and to Autumn. Summer is a season come to the years of discretion, and ought to conduct himself like a staid, sober, sensible, middle-aged man, not past, but passing, his prime. Now, Summer, we are sorry to say it, often behaves in a way to make his best friends ashamed of him—in a way absolutely disgraceful to a person of his time of life. Having picked a quarrel with the Sun—his benefactor, nay, his father—what else could he expect but that that enlightened Christian would altogether withhold his countenance from so undutiful and ungrateful a child, and leave him to travel along the mire and beneath the clouds? For some weeks Summer was sulky—and sullenly scorned to shed a tear. His eyes were like ice. By-and-by, like a great school-boy, he began to whine and whimper—and when he found that would not do, he blubbered like the booby of the lowest form. Still the Sun would not look on him—or if he did, 'twas with a sudden and short half-smile half-scowl that froze the ingrate's blood. At last the Summer grew contrite, and the Sun forgiving, the one burst out into a flood of tears, the other into a flood of light. In simple words, the Summer wept and the Sun smiled—and for one broken month there was a perpetual alternation of rain and radiance! How beautiful is penitence! How beautiful forgiveness! For one week the Summer was restored to his pristine peace and old luxuriance, and the desert blossomed like the rose.