“Alas, then!” says the dear reader, “we are to have some antiquarian reflections. Better Parnassus and Bedlam!”—Fear not. Providence, which has otherwise been very good to me, gave me a Protestant mind; and while therein exists no disposition to adore St. Botolph’s toes, or to worship St. Pancras’s well-preserved tibia, I am equally unenthusiastic about Pope’s nightcap, I don’t care a fig for Queen Anne’s farthings, and I would not go round the corner to behold the site of the Chelsea bunhouse. There is little, after all, in bricks, bones, and the coffins of men; but a glimpse into the lives of men, or into the eyes of nature—that is another thing.
The one may always be had in London, the other never could be had, were it not for Holborn Hill. Circumstances permitting, every city ought to be built on a hill; for reasons of morality, and therefore for reasons of state. No doubt, there is a certain agreeable monotony in levels, gentle gradients, and a perspicuous network of streets; they may even impose a wholesome contrast upon the minds of well-to-do citizens, who go “out of town.” But what of the ill-to-do citizen, who never leaves its walls? Not only do the bare hard streets present to him no natural thing, but with strait lines of brick on every side, a stony plane at his feet, and a flat dull roof over all, he gets no hint of a natural thing; and all that is artificial in him is hardened and encouraged. But suppose the city streets wind up and down and round about a hill? Then by no devices of brick or stone can you keep out the country. Then Nature defies your macadamization and your chimney stacks; it is impossible to forget her, or to escape her religious gaze.
When did it occur to any ordinary person walking Bond Street, that once there had been turf there, and a running about of beetles? On the other hand, what man of any kind looks over the little Fleet valley to where Holborn Hill rises on the other side, without wondering how the houses came there—without feeling that they are only another sort of tents, pitched upon the earth for a time? “They, too, have to be struck,” says he, “and there is everywhere wandering away!”
The result is, then, that he hits upon a reflection, which is, I do not say profound, but at the bottom of all profundity, so far as we have plumbed it. This reflection is to be found in the sap, fibre, and fruit of all morality, all law, philosophy, and religion. There is nothing like it to move the hearts of men; the heart it cannot move belongs to an atheist (which creature, and not the ape, as some have supposed, is the link between brutes and men), the heart which it has not moved, to one quite unawakened. For instance, those who fill the gaols; the society of thieves; the scum of the population, as it is termed, fermenting in alleys and poisoning the state. We have reformatories for the young of this breed, whom we endeavour to reclaim by reading, writing, and arithmetic—attendance at chapel, and book-keeping by double entry. But when you have put the young reprobate through all these exercises, you have only succeeded in making gravel walks in a wilderness; and though from those trim avenues you may scatter good seed enough, it perishes on the soil, or withers in a tangle of weeds. After all our labour and seed-scattering, we still complain that it is so hard to reach the heart. Now here we have the best means of touching it, perhaps. Let there be found some Professor of Time and Eternity, skilled to show how the world goes—and is going: who should exhibit, as in a wizard’s glass, the unending procession of human life. The Roman in his pride, a hundred million Romans in their pride—all perished; millions of elegant Greeks, with their elegant wives and mistresses, all perished; Attila’s thundering hosts riding off the scene—vanished: the clatter of their spears, the fury of their eyes, the tossing of their shaggy hair, the cloud of thoughts that moved upon their faces—they and all that belonged to them.
Not that these personages make the most affecting groups in the series of dissolving views which illustrate the history of the world. I would rather confine myself to Holborn Hill, were I professor, in a penitentiary, of Time and Eternity; and between the period when it lay solitary in the moonlight, clothed with grass, crowned with trees, bitterns booming by the river below, while some wild mother lay under the branches singing to her baby in a tongue dead as herself now—from that time to the present there has been a very pretty striking of tents and wandering away. Quite enough for any professor’s purpose. Quite enough, if impressed upon an ignorant vicious heart, to prepare it for a better—certainly for a more responsible life. Your young reprobate will never perceive his relations to his Creator, till he has discovered the relations of mankind to creation, and his own place among mankind. You desire him to contemplate the Future: he cannot do it till he is shown the Past.
There is a Scripture text apropos of this, which I have longed many a day to sermonize upon, but we are far enough from Holborn Hill already; and apart from moral and mental considerations, it is a sufficient reason for building cities in hilly places, if the hard-worked, captive people are thus kept in remembrance of the country, and its peace and health. This is a luxury as well as a good; delight to the senses, as well as medicine for the mind. Some of us love nature with a large and personal love. I am sure I do, for one. Thinking of her, immured in London as I am, I think also of that prisoner in the Bastille, who prayed Monseigneur for “some tidings of my poor wife, were it only her name upon a card.” Were I a prisoner long, I should pray not only for that, but for some tidings of my mistress Nature, were it only her name in a leaf. And whereas some of us who have sweethearts go prowling about the dear one’s house, searching through the walls for her, so at favourable opportunities I search for my mistress through the bricks and stones of Holborn Hill. In the noon of a midsummer day, with the roar of carts, waggons, Atlas and other omnibusses rattling in my ears, with that little bill of Timmins’s on my mind, how have I seen it clad in green, the stream running in the hollow, and white dandelion tufts floating in the air. There a grasshopper chirped; a bee hummed, going his way; and countless small creatures, burrowing in the grass, buzzed and whirred like a company of small cotton-spinners with all their looms at work. Practically, there is no standing timber within several miles of the place; but if I have not seen trees where an alamode beef business is supposed to be carried on, I am blind. I have seen trees, and heard the blackbird whistle.
There is much significance, under the circumstances, in hearing the blackbird whistle. It is a proof that to me there was perfect silence. The peculiarity of this animal is, that he makes silence. The more he whistles, the more still is all nature beside. It is not difficult to imagine him a sort of fugleman, herald, or black rod, going between earth and heaven in the interest of either. Take a case: an evening in autumn. About six o’clock there comes a shower of rain, a bountiful shower, all in shilling drops. The earth drinks and drinks, holding its breath; while the trees make a pleasant noise, their leaves kissing each other for joy. Presently the rain ceases. Drops fall one by one, lazily, from the satisfied boughs, and sink to the roots of the grass, lying there in store. Then the blackbird, already on duty in his favourite tree, sounds his bugle-note. “Attention!” sings he to the winds big and little; “the earth will return thanks.” Whereupon there is a stillness deep as—no, not as death, but a silence so profound that it seems as if it were itself the secret of life, that profoundest thing. This your own poor carcase appears to recognize. The little life therein—not more than a quart pot full—knows the presence of the great ocean from which it was taken, and yearns. It stirs in its earthen vessel; you feel it moving in your very fingers; you may almost hear your right hand calling to the left, “I live! I live!” Silence proclaimed, thanksgiving begins. There is a sensation of the sound of ten thousand voices, and the swinging of ten thousand censers; besides the audible singing of birds, the humming of beetles, and the noise of small things which praise the Lord by rubbing their legs together.
This bird seems to take another important part in the scheme of nature, worth mentioning.
Everybody—everybody at least who has watched by a sick-bed—knows that days have their appointed time, and die as well as men. There is one awful minute in the twenty-four hours when the day palpably expires, and then there is a reach of utter vacancy, of coldness and darkness; and then a new day is born, and earth, reassured, throbs again. This is not a fancy; or if so, is it from fancy that so many people die in this awful hour (“between the night and the morning,” nurses call it), or that sick men grow paler, fainter, more insensible? I think not. To appearance they are plainly washed down by the ebbing night, and plainly stranded so near the verge of death that its waters wash over them. Now, in five minutes, the sick man is floated away and is gone; or the new day comes, snatches him to its bosom, and bears him back to us; and we know that he will live. I hope I shall die between the night and the morning, so peacefully do we drift away then. But ah! blessed Morning, I am not ungrateful. That long-legged daughter of mine, aged eight at present, did you not bring her back to me in your mysterious way? At half-past two, we said, “Gone!” and began to howl. Three minutes afterward, a breath swept over her limbs; five minutes afterward there was a blush like a reflected light upon her face; seven minutes, and whose eyes but hers should open, bright and pure as two blue stars? We had studied those stars; and read at a glance that our little one had again entered the House of Life.
Our baby’s dying and her new birth is an exact type of the death and birth of the day. One description serves for both. As she sank away, fainting and cold, so night expires. This takes place at various times, according to the season; but generally about two o’clock in the morning in these latitudes. If you happen to be watching or working within doors, you may note the time by a coldness and shuddering in your limbs, and by the sudden waning of the fire, in spite of your best efforts to keep it bright and cheerful. Then a wind—generally not a very gentle one—sweeps through the streets—once: it does not return, but hurries straight on, leaving all calm behind it: that is the breath that passed over the child. Now a blush suffuses the East, and then open the violet eyes of the day, bright and pure as if there were no death in the world, nor sin. All which the blackbird seems to announce to the natural world below. The wind we spoke of warns him; whereupon he takes his head from under his wing, and keeps a steady look-out toward the East. As soon as the glory of the morning appears, he sings his soldierly song; as soon as he sings, smaller fowl wake and listen, and peep about quietly; when—there comes the day overhead, sailing in the topmost air, in the golden boat with the purple sails. And the little winds that blow in the sails—here come they, swooping over the meadows, scudding along hedgerows, bounding into the big trees, and away to fill those purple sails again, not only with a wind, but with a hundred perfumes, and airs heavy with the echoes of a hundred songs.[25]