Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

Therefore ask we the Summer's pardon for thanking Heaven that he was dead. Would that he were alive again, and buried not for ever beneath the yellow forest leaves! O thou first, faint, fair, finest tinge of dawning Light that streaks the still-sleeping yet just-waking face of the morn, Light and no-Light, a shadowy Something, that as we gaze is felt to be growing into an emotion that must be either Innocence or Beauty, or both blending together into devotion before Deity, once more duly visible in the divine colouring that forebodes another day to mortal life—before Thee what holy bliss to kneel upon the greensward in some forest glade, while every leaf is a-tremble with dewdrops, and the happy little birds are beginning to twitter, yet motionless among the boughs—before Thee to kneel as at a shrine, and breathe deeper and deeper—as the lustre waxeth purer and purer, brighter and more bright, till range after range arise of crimson clouds in altitude sublime, and breast above breast expands of yellow woods softly glittering in their far-spread magnificence—then what holy bliss to breathe deeper and deeper unto Him who holds in the hollow of his hand the heavens and the earth, our high but most humble orisons! But now it is Day, and broad awake seems the whole joyful world. The clouds—lustrous no more—are all anchored on the sky, white as fleets waiting for the wind. Time is not felt—and one might dream that the Day was to endure for ever. Yet the great river rolls on in the light—and why will he leave those lovely inland woods for the naked shores? Why—responds some voice—hurry we on our own lives—impetuous and passionate far more than he with all his cataracts—as if anxious to forsake the regions of the upper day for the dim place from which we yet recoil in fear—the dim place which imagination sometimes seems to see even through the sunshine, beyond the bourne of this our unintelligible being, stretching sea-like into a still more mysterious night! Long as a Midsummer Day is, it has gone by like a Heron's flight. The sun is setting!—and let him set without being scribbled upon by Christopher North. We took a pen-and-ink sketch of him in a "Day on Windermere." Poor nature is much to be pitied among painters and poets. They are perpetually falling into

"Such perusal of her face
As they would draw it."

And often must she be sick of the Curious Impertinents. But a Curious Impertinent are not we—if ever there was one beneath the skies, a devout worshipper of Nature; and though we often seem to heed not her shrine—it stands in our imagination, like a temple in a perpetual Sabbath.

It was poetically and piously said by the Ettrick Shepherd, at a Noctes, that there is no such thing in nature as bad weather. Take Summer, which early in our soliloquy we abused in good set terms. Its weather was broken, but not bad; and much various beauty and sublimity is involved in the epithet "broken," when applied to the "season of the year." Commonplace people, especially town-dwellers, who flit into the country for a few months, have a silly and absurd idea of Summer, which all the atmospherical phenomena fail to drive out of their foolish fancies. They insist on its remaining with us for half a year at least, and on its being dressed in its Sunday's best every day in the week as long as they continue in country quarters. The Sun must rise, like a labourer, at the very earliest hour, shine all day, and go to bed late, else they treat him contumeliously, and declare that he is not worth his meat. Should he retire occasionally behind a cloud, which it seems most natural and reasonable for one to do who lives so much in the public eye, why, a whole watering-place, uplifting a face of dissatisfied expostulation to heaven, exclaims, "Where is the Sun? Are we never to have any Sun?" They also insist that there shall be no rain of more than an hour's duration in the daytime, but that it shall all fall by night. Yet when the Sun does exert himself, as if at their bidding, and is shining, as he supposes, to their heart's content, up go a hundred green parasols in his face, enough to startle the celestial steeds in his chariot. A broken summer for us. Now and then a few continuous days—perhaps a whole week—but, if that be denied, now and then,

"Like angels' visits, few and far between,"

one single Day—blue-spread over heaven, green-spread over earth—no cloud above, no shade below, save that dove-coloured marble lying motionless like the mansions of peace, and that pensive gloom that falls from some old castle or venerable wood—the stillness of a sleeping joy, to our heart profounder than that of death, in the air, in the sky, and resting on our mighty mother's undisturbed breast—no lowing on the hills, no bleating on the braes—the rivers almost silent as lochs, and the lochs, just visible in their aerial purity, floating dream-like between earth and sky, imbued with the beauty of both, and seeming to belong to either, as the heart melts to human tenderness, or beyond all mortal loves the imagination soars! Such days seem now to us—as memory and imagination half restore and half create the past into such weather as may have shone over the bridal morn of our first parents in Paradise—to have been frequent—nay, to have lasted all the Summer long—when our boyhood was bright from the hands of God. Each of those days was in itself a life! Yet all those sunny lives melted into one Summer—and all those Summers formed one continuous bliss. Storms and snows vanished out of our ideal year; and then morning, noon, and night, wherever we breathed, we felt, what now we but know, the inmost meaning of that profound verse of Virgil the Divine—

"Devenere locos lætos, et amœna vireta
Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas.
Largior hîc campos æther et lumine vestit
Purpureo: solemque suum, sua sidera norunt."

Few—no such days as those seem now ever to be born. Sometimes we indeed gaze through the face into the heart of the sky, and for a moment feel that the ancient glory of the heavens has returned on our dream of life. But to the perfect beatitude of the skies there comes from the soul within us a mournful response, that betokens some wide and deep—some everlasting change. Joy is not now what joy was of yore; like a fine diamond with a flaw is now Imagination's eye; other motes than those that float through ether cross between its orb and the sun; the "fine gold has become dim," with which morning and evening of old embossed the skies; the dewdrops are not now the pearls once they were, left on

"Flowers, and weeds as beautiful as flowers,"

by angels' and by fairies' wings; knowledge, custom, experience, fate, fortune, error, vice, and sin, have dulled, and darkened, and deadened all things; and the soul, unable to bring over the Present the ineffable bliss and beauty of the Past, almost swoons to think what a ghastly thunder-gloom may by Providence be reserved for the Future!