Where the forest murmurs

by William Sharp

But it is in June, I think, that the mountain charm is most intoxicating. The airs are lightsome. The hill-mists are seldom heavy, and only on south-wind mornings do the lovely grey-white vapours linger among the climbing corries and overhanging scarps. Many of the slopes are blue as a winter sky, palely blue, aerially delicate, from the incalculable myriad host of the bluebells. The green of the bracken is more wonderful than at any other time. When the wind plays upon it the rise and fall is as the breathing of the green seas among the caverns of Mingulay or among the savage rock-pools of the Seven Hunters or where the Summer Isles lie in the churn of the Atlantic tides. Everything is alive in joy. The young broods exult. The air is vibrant with the eddies of many wings, great and small. The shadow-grass sways with the passage of the shrewmouse or the wing’s-breath of the darting swallow. The stillest pool quivers, for among the shadows of breathless reeds the phantom javelin of the dragon-fly whirls for a second from silence to silence. In the morning the far lamentation of the flocks on the summer shielings falls like the sound of bells across water. The curlew and the plover are not spirits of desolation, but blithe children of the wilderness. As the afternoon swims in blue haze and floating gold the drowsy call of the moorcock stirs the heather-sea. The snorting of trampling deer may be heard. The landrail sweeps the dew from the tall grass and sends her harsh but summer-sweet cry in long monotonous echoes, till the air rings with the resonant krek-crake. And that sudden break in the silences of the dusk, when ... beyond the blossoming elder, or the tangle of wild roses where the white moths rise and fall in fluttering ecstacy, or, yonder, by the black-green juniper on the moorland ... the low whirring note of the nightjar vibrates in a continual passionate iterance! There, in truth, we have the passionate whisper of the heart of June, that most wonderful, that most thrilling of the voices of summer.

It is in June, too, that one mountain charm in particular may be known with rapt delight. It is when one can approach mountains whose outlying flanks and bases are green hills. The bright green of these under-slopes, these swelling heights and rolling uplands, is never more vivid. Near, one wonders why grasses so thick with white daisy and red sorrel and purple orchis and blue harebell can be green at all! But that wonderful sea-green of the hills near at hand gives way soon to the still more wonderful blue as the heights recede. The glens and wooded valleys grow paler. Rock and tree and heather blend. “What colour is that?” I asked a shepherd once. “The blueness of blueness,” he answered, in Gaelic. It is so. It is not blue one sees, but the bloom of blue; as on a wild plum, it is not the purple skin we note, but the amethyst bloom of purple which lies upon it. It is beauty, with its own loveliness upon it like a breath. Then the blue deepens, or greys, as the hour and the light compel. The most rare and subtle loveliness is when the grey silhouette of the mountain-ridge, serrated line, or freaked and tormented peaks, or vast unbroken amplitude, sinks into the sudden deep clearness of the enveloping sky.

Even in June, however, the mountain charm is not to be sought, as in a last sanctuary, on the summits of the hills. I believe that to be a delusion, a confusion, which asserts the supreme beauty of the views from mountain summits. I have climbed many hills and not a few mountains, and, except in one or two instances (as Hecla in the Hebrides), never without recognition that, in beauty, one does not gain, but loses. There are no heights in Scotland more often climbed by the holiday mountaineer than Ben Nevis in Argyll and Goat Fell in the Isle of Arran. Neither, in beauty or grandeur of view, repays the ascent. Goat Fell is a hundred times lovelier seen from the shores or glens of its own lower slopes, or from a spur of the Eastern Caisteall Abhaill: the boatmen on the waters of Lorne, the shepherd on the hills of Morven, the wayfarer in the wilds of Appin, they know the beauty of ‘the Sacred Hill’ as none knows it who thinks he has surprised the secret on the vast brows overhanging the inchoate wilderness. At its best, we look through a phantasmal appearance upon a phantasmal world, and any artist will tell us that the disappointment is because every object is seen in its high light, none in its shadowed portion; that the direct sunlight being over all is reflected back to us from every surface; that the downward vision means a monotony of light and a monotony of colour.

The supreme charm of the mountain-lands in June is their investiture with the loveliest blue air that the year knows, and the entrancement of summer cloud. Small feathery cirrus or salmon-pink and snow-white cumulus emerging behind the shoulder of a mountain or drifting above the vast silent brows have an infinite beauty. We should be cloud-climbers rather than mere mountain-climbers; we should climb to see the heights recede in continual fold of loveliness, and the clouds lift their trailing purple shadows and sail slowly or hang motionless beyond the eternal buttresses. And it is but an added poignancy to the sense of infinite beauty to know that this word ‘eternal’ is, even for those ancient ‘changeless’ hills, but the idlest hyperbole—as though one were to call the breaking wave everlasting, or the blowing seed of the meadows as timeless as the wind. There is not a vast and lonely mountain that has not a fallen comrade among the low undulating ridges of the continual lowland; not one of these that has not in turn to feed the white dust of the plain or the sea-gathered sand of ancient or as yet unformed shores. For the hills pass, even as we, or the green leaf become sere, or the fruit that ripens to its fall; though we speak of them as everlasting, and find the subtlest spell of their incalculable charm in the overwhelming sense of their imagined eternity.

THE CLANS OF THE GRASS

Of all the miracles of the green world none surpasses that of the grass. It has many names, many raiments even, but it is always that wonderful thing which the poets of all time have delighted in calling the green hair of earth. ‘Soft green hair of the rocks,’ says a Breton poet. Another Celtic poet has used the word alike for the mosses which clothe the talons of old trees and for the forests themselves. No fantastic hyperbole this: from a great height forests of pine and oak seem like reaches of sombre grass. To the shrewmouse the tall grasses of June are green woods, and the slim stems of the reddening sorrels are groves of pinetrees. I remember having read somewhere of a lovely name given to the grass by the Arabs of the desert ... ‘the Bride of Mahomet.’ What lovelier and more gracious thing in the world, in their eyes, than this soft cool greenness of the oasis, this emerald carpet below the green shadowy roof of waving palms; and as of all women in the world there could be but one, according to the old legend, worthy to be the supreme bride of the Prophet, what poetic name for her so fitting as this exquisite apparition of the desert, so beautiful, so evernew in itself, so welcome for its association with sweet waters and shade and coolness. A Gaelic poet calls the grass the Gift of Christ, literally slender-greenness of Christ (uaineachd-caol Chriosde), and another has written of how it came to be called Green-Peace—both from an old tale (one of the many ebbed, forgotten tales of the isles) that, when God had created the world, Christ said “Surely one thing yet lacks, My Father: soft greenness for the barren mountain, soft greenness for rocks and cliffs, soft greenness for stony places and the wilderness, soft greenness for the airidhs of the poor.” Whereupon God said “Let thy tenderness be upon these things, O my Son, and thy peace be upon them, and let the green grass be the colour of peace and of home”—and thereafter, says the taleteller, the Eternal Father turned to the Holy Spirit and said of the Son that from that hour He should be named the Prince of Peace, Prionnsa na Sioth-cainnt canar ris.

Grass is as universal as dew, as commonplace as light. That which feels the seawind in the loneliest Hebrides is brother to that which lies on Himalaya or is fanned by the hot airs of Asian valleys. That which covers a grey scarp in Iceland is the same as that on Adam’s Peak in Ceylon, and that which in myriad is the prairie of the north is in myriad the pampas of the south; that whose multitude covers the Gaelic hills is that whose multitude covers the Russian steppes. It is of all the signature of Nature that which to us is nearest and homeliest. The green grass after long voyaging, the grass of home-valley or hillside after long wayfaring, the green grass of the Psalmist to souls athirst and weary, the grass of El Dorado to the visionary seeking the gold of the spirit, the grass of the Fortunate Isles, of the Hills of Youth, to the poets and dreamers of all lands and times ... everywhere and ever has this omnipresent herb that withereth and yet is continually reborn, been the eternal symbol of that which passes like a dream, the symbol of everlasting illusion, and yet, too, is the symbol of resurrection, of all the old divine illusion essayed anew, of the inexplicable mystery of life recovered and everlastingly perpetrated.

When we speak of grass we generally mean one thing, the small slim green herb which carpets the familiar earth. But there are many grasses, from the smooth close-set herb of our lawns or the sheep-nibbled downy greenness of mountain-pastures, to the forest-like groves which sway in the torrid winds of the south. Of these alone much might be written. I prefer, however, that name I have placed at the head of this article—taken, if I remember rightly, from a poem by the Gaelic mountain-poet, Duncan Ban Macintyre—and used in the sense of the original. In this sense, the Clans of the Grass are not only the grasses of the pasture, the sand-dune, the windy down, not only the sorrel-red meadow-grass or the delicate quaking-grass, but all the humbler greengrowth which covers the face of the earth. In this company are the bee-loved clover, the trailing vetch, the yellow-sea clover and the sea-pink; the vast tribe of the charlock or wild mustard which on showery days sometimes lights up field or hillmeadow with yellow flame so translucent that one thinks a sudden radiant sunflood burns and abides there. In it too are all the slim peoples of the reed and rush, by streams and pools and lochans: of the yellow iris by the sea-loch and the tall flag by the mountain-tarn: the grey thistle, the sweet-gale, and all the tribe of the bog-cotton or canna (ceann-bàn-a-mhonaidh, the white head of the hillside, as we call it in Gaelic), those lovers of the wilderness and boggy places. With these is the bindweed that with the salt bent holds the loose shores. With these are all the shadow-loving clans of the fern, from the bracken, whose April-green lightens the glens and whose autumnal bronze and dull gold make the hillsides so resplendent, to the stonewort on the dykes, the lady-fern in the birch-woods, the maidenhair by springs and falls, the hart’s-tongue in caverns, the Royal fern whose broad fronds are the pride of heather-waste and morass. The mosses, too, are from this vast clan of the earth-set, from the velvet-soft edging of the oak-roots or the wandering greenness of the swamp to the ashy tresses which hang on spruce or hemlock or the grey fringes of the rocks by northern seas. And with them are the lichens, that beautiful secret company who love the shadow-side of trees, and make stones like flowers, and transmute the barrenness of rock and boulder with dyes of pale gold and blazing orange, and umber rich as the brown hearts of tarns, and pearl-grey delicate as a cushat’s breast, and saffron as yellow-green as the sunset-light after the clearing of rains. To all these, indeed, should be added the greater grasses which we know as wheat and oats, as rye and maize. Thus do we come to ‘the waving hair of the ever-wheeling earth,’ and behold the unresting Mother as in a vision, but with the winds of space for ever blowing her waving tresses in a green gladness, or in a shimmer of summer-gold, or in the bronze splendour of the autumnal passage.

But the grasses proper, alone: the green grass itself—what a delight to think of these, even if the meaning of the title of this paper be inclusive of them and them only. What variety, here, moreover. The first spring-grass, how welcome it is. What lovely delicacy of green. It is difficult anywhere to match it. Perhaps the first greening of the sallow, that lovely hair hung over ponds and streams or where sloping lawns catch the wandering airs of the south: or the pale green-flame of the awakening larch: or the tips of bursting hawthorn in the hedgerows—perhaps, these are nearest to it in hue. But with noonlight it may become almost the pale-yellow of sheltered primroses, or yellow-green as the cowslip before its faint gold is minted, and in the mellowing afternoon it may often be seen as illuminated (as with hidden delicate flame) as the pale-emerald candelabra of the hellebore. How different is the luxuriant grass in hollows and combes and along watered meadows in June, often dark as pine-green or as sunlit jade, and in shadowy places or in twilight sometimes as lustrously sombre-green as the obsidian, that precious stone of the Caucasus now no longer a rarity among us. How swiftly, too, that changes after the heats of midsummer, often being threaded with grey light before the dog-days are spent. Moreover, at any season there is a difference between down-grass and mountain-grass, between sea-grass and valley-grass, between moor-grass and wood-grass. It may be slight, and not in kind but only in shadowy dissemblances of texture and hue; still one may note the difference. More obvious, of course, is the difference between, say, April-grass and the same grass when May or June suffuses it with the red glow of the seeding sorrel, or between the sea-grass that has had the salt wind upon it since its birth, the bent as it is commonly called, and its brother among the scarps and cliff-edges of the hills, so marvellously soft and hairlike for all that it is not long since the snows have lifted or since sleet and hail have harried the worn faces of boulder and crag. Or, again, between even the most delicate wantonness of the seeding hay, fragrant with white clover and purple vetch, and the light aerial breathfulness, frail as thistledown, of the quaking-grass. How it loves the wood’s-edge, this last, or sheltered places by the hedgerows, the dream-hollows of sloping pastures, meadow-edges where the cow-parsley whitens like foam and the meadowsweet floats creamwhite and the white campions hang in clotted froth over the long surge of daisies: or, where, like sloops of the nautilus on tropic seas, curved blossoms of the white wild-rose motionlessly suspend or idly drift, hardly less frail less wantonly errant than the white bloomy dust of the dandelion.

Caran-cheann-air-chrith, ‘little friend of the quaking-grass,’ is one of the Gaelic names of the wagtail, perhaps given to it because of a like tremulous movement, as though invisible wings of gossamer shook ever in a secret wind. Or given to it, perhaps, because of a legend which puts the common grass, the quaking-grass, the wagtail, the cuckoo, the aspen, and the lichen in one traditional company. In the Garden of Gethsemane, so runs the Gaelic folk-tale as I heard it as a child, all Nature suddenly knew the Sorrow of Christ. The dew whispered it: it was communicated in the dusk: in pale gold and shaken silver it stole from moon and star into the green darkness of cypress and cedar. The grass-blades put all their green lips into one breath, and sighed Peace, Brother! Christ smiled in His sorrow, and said, Peace to you for ever. But here and there among the grasses, as here and there among the trees, and as here and there among the husht birds, were those who doubted, saying, ‘It is but a man who lies here. His sorrow is not our sorrow.’ Christ looked at them, and they were shaken with the grief of all grief and the sorrow of all sorrow. And that is why to this day the quaking-grass and the aspen are forever a-tremble, and why the wagtail has no rest but quivers along the earth like a dancing shadow. But to those mosses of Gethsemane which did not give out the sympathy of their kin among the roots of cedar and oak, and to the cuckoo who rang from her nest a low chime of All’s well! All’s well! Christ’s sorrowful eyes when He rose at dawn could not be endured. So the cuckoo rose and flew away across the Hill of Calvary, ringing through the morning twilight the bells of sorrow, and from that day was homeless and without power anywhere to make a home of her own. As for the mosses that had refused love, they wandered away to desolate places and hung out forlorn flags of orange-red and pale-yellow and faded-silver along the grey encampments of the rocks.