Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

Here an English Lake—there a Scottish loch—till Turner grew jealous, and Thomson flung his brush at one of his own unfinished mountains—when lo! a miracle! Creative of grandeur in his very despair, he stood astonished at the cliff that came prerupt from his canvass, and christened itself "the Eagle's Eyrie," as it frowned serenely upon the sea, maddening in a foamy circle at its inaccessible feet.

Only in such prose as ours can the heart pour forth its effusions like a strong spring discharging ever so many gallons in a minute, either into pipes that conduct it through some great Metropolitan city, or into a water-course that soon becomes a rivulet, then a stream, then a river, then a lake, and then a sea. Would Fancy luxuriate? Then let her expand wings of prose. In verse, however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged, and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There is room and power of ascension for any quantity of ballast—fling it out, and up she goes! Let some gas escape, and she descends far more gingerly than Mrs Graham and his Serene Highness; the grapnel catches a stile, and she steps "like a dreadless angel unpursued" once more upon terra firma, and may then celebrate her aerial voyage, if she choose, in an Ode which will be sure near the end to rise—into prose.

Prose, we believe, is destined to drive what is called Poetry out of the world. Here is a fair challenge. Let any Poet send us a poem of five hundred lines—blanks or not—on any subject; and we shall write on that subject a passage of the same number of words in prose; and the Editors of the Quarterly, Edinburgh, and Westminster, shall decide which deserves the prize. Milton was woefully wrong in speaking of "prose or numerous verse." Prose is a million times more numerous than verse. Then prose improves the more poetical it becomes; but verse, the moment it becomes prosaic, goes to the dogs. Then, the connecting links between two fine passages in verse, it is enjoined, shall be as little like verse as possible; nay, whole passages, critics say, should be of that sort; and why, pray, not prose at once? Why clip the King's English, or the Emperor's German, or the Sublime Porte's Turkish, into bits of dull jingle—pretending to be verses merely because of the proper number of syllables—some of them imprisoned perhaps in parentheses, where they sit helplessly protruding the bare soles of their feet, like folks that have got muzzy, in the stocks?

Wordsworth says well, that the language of common people, when giving utterance to passionate emotions, is highly figurative; and hence he concludes not so well fit for a lyrical ballad. Their volubility is great, nor few their flowers of speech. But who ever heard them, but by the merest accident, spout verses? Rhyme do they never—the utmost they reach is occasional blanks. But their prose! Ye gods! how they do talk! The washerwoman absolutely froths like her own tub; and you never dream of asking her "how she is off for soap?" Paradise Lost! The Excursion! The Task indeed! No man of woman born, no woman by man begotten, ever yet in his or her senses spoke like the authors of those poems. Hamlet, in his sublimest moods, speaks in prose—Lady Macbeth talks prose in her sleep—and so it should be printed. "Out damned spot!" are three words of prose; and who that beheld Siddons wringing her hands to wash them of murder, did not feel that they were the most dreadful ever extorted by remorse from guilt?

A green old age is the most loving season of life, for almost all the other passions are then dead or dying—or the mind, no more at the mercy of a troubled heart, compares the little pleasure their gratification can ever yield now with what it could at any time long ago, and lets them rest. Envy is the worst disturber or embitterer of man's declining years; but it does not deserve the name of a passion—and is a disease, not of the poor in spirit—for they are blessed—but of the mean, and then they indeed are cursed. For our own parts, we know Envy but as we have studied it in others—and never felt it except towards the wise and good; and then 'twas a longing desire to be like them—painful only when we thought that might never be, and that all our loftiest aspirations might be in vain. Our envy of Genius is of a nature so noble, that it knows no happiness like that of guarding from mildew the laurels on the brows of the Muses' Sons. What a dear kind soul of a critic is old Christopher North! Watering the flowers of poetry, and removing the weeds that might choke them—letting in the sunshine upon them, and fencing them from the blast—proclaiming where the gardens grow, and leading boys and virgins into the pleasant alleys—teaching hearts to love and eyes to see their beauty, and classifying, by the attributes it has pleased nature to bestow on the various orders, the plants of Paradise—This is our occupation—and the happiness of witnessing them all growing in the light of admiration is our reward.

Finding our way back as we choose to Ivy-cottage, we cross the wooden bridge, and away along the western shore of Rydal-mere. Hence you see the mountains in magnificent composition, and craggy coppices with intervening green fields shelving down to the lake margin. It is a small lake, not much more than a mile round, and of a very peculiar character. One memorable cottage only, as far as we remember, peeps on its shore from a grove of sycamores, a statesman's pleasant dwelling; and there are the ruins of another on a slope near the upper end, the circle of the garden still visible. Everything has a quiet but wildish pastoral and sylvan look, and the bleating of sheep fills the hollow of the hills. The lake has a reedy inlet and outlet, and the angler thinks of pike when he looks upon such harbours. There is a single boat-house, where the Lady of the Hall has a padlocked and painted barge for pleasure parties; and the heronry on the high pine-trees of the only island connects the scene with the ancient park of Rydal, whose oak woods, though thinned and decayed, still preserve the majestic and venerable character of antiquity and baronial state.

Having taken a lingering farewell of Rydal-mere, and of the new Chapel-tower, that seems among the groves already to be an antique, we may either sink down to the stream that flows out of Grassmere and connects the two lakes, crossing a wooden bridge, and then joining the new road that sweeps along to the Village, or we may keep up on the face of the hill, and by a terrace-path reach the Loughrigg-road, a few hundred yards above Tail-end, a pretty cottage-ornée which you will observe crowning a wooded eminence, and looking cheerfully abroad over all the vale. There is one Mount in particular, whence we see to advantage the delightful panorama—encircling mountains—Grassmere Lake far down below your feet, with its one green pastoral isle, sylvan shores, and emerald meadows—huts and houses sprinkled up and down in all directions—the village partly embowered in groves, and partly open below the shadow of large single trees—and the Church-tower, almost always a fine feature in the scenery of the north of England, standing in stately simplicity among the clustering tenements, nor dwindled even by the great height of the hills.

It is pleasant to lose sight entirely of a beautiful scene, and to plod along for a few hundred yards in almost objectless shadow. Our conceptions and feelings are bright and strong from the nearness of their objects, yet the dream is somewhat different from the reality. All at once, at a turning of the road, the splendour reappears like an unfurled banner, and the heart leaps in the joy of the senses. This sort of enjoyment comes upon you before you reach the Village of Grassmere from the point of vision above described, and a stranger sometimes is apt to doubt if it be really the same Lake—that one island, and those few promontories, shifting into such varied combinations with the varying mountain-ridges and ranges, that show top over top in bewildering succession, and give hints of other valleys beyond, and of Tarns rarely visited, among the moorland wastes. A single long dim shadow, falling across the water, alters the whole physiognomy of the scene—nor less a single bright streak of sunshine, brightening up some feature formerly hidden, and giving animation and expression to the whole face of the Lake.

About a short mile from the Village Inn, you will pass by without seeing it—unless warned not to do so—one of the most singularly beautiful habitations in the world. It belongs to a gentleman of the name of Barber, and, we believe, has been almost entirely built by him—the original hut on which his taste has worked having been a mere shell. The spirit of the place seems to us to be that of Shadowy Silence. Its bounds are small; but it is an indivisible part of a hill-side so secret and sylvan, that it might be the haunt of the roe. You hear the tinkle of a rill, invisible among the hazels—a bird sings or flutters—a bee hums his way through the bewildering wood—but no louder sound. Some fine old forest-trees extend widely their cool and glimmering shade; and a few stumps or armless trunks, whose bulk is increased by a load of ivy that hides the hollow wherein the owls have their domicile, give an air of antiquity to the spot, that, but for other accompaniments, would almost be melancholy. As it is, the scene has a pensive character. As yet you have seen no house, and wonder whither the gravel-walks are to conduct you, winding fancifully and fantastically through the smooth-shaven lawn, bestrewed by a few large leaves of the horse-chestnut or sycamore. But there are clustered verandas where the nightingale might woo the rose, and lattice-windows reaching from eaves to ground-sill, so sheltered that they might stand open in storm and rain, and tall circular chimneys, shaped almost like the stems of the trees that overshadow the roof irregular, and over all a gleam of blue sky and a few motionless clouds. The noisy world ceases to be, and the tranquil heart, delighted with the sweet seclusion, breathes, "Oh! that this were my cell, and that I were a hermit!"

But you soon see that the proprietor is not a hermit; for everywhere you discern unostentatious traces of that elegance and refinement that belong to social and cultivated life; nothing rude and rough-hewn, yet nothing prim and precise. Snails and spiders are taught to keep their own places; and among the flowers of that hanging garden on a sunny slope, not a weed is to be seen, for weeds are beautiful only by the wayside, in the matting of hedge-roots, by the mossy stone, and the brink of the well in the brae—and are offensive only when they intrude into society above their own rank, and where they have the air and accent of aliens. By pretty pebbled steps of stairs you mount up from platform to platform of the sloping woodland banks—the prospect widening as you ascend, till from a bridge that spans a leaping rivulet, you behold in full blow all Grassmere Vale, Village, Church-tower, and Lake, the whole of the mountains, and a noble arch of sky, the circumference of that little world of peace.