Not uninstructed was the wanderer in the lore that links the human heart to the gracious form and aspects of the Mighty Mother. In early youth he had been intended for the Church, and subsequent years of ungrateful and ungenial toils had not extinguished the fine scholarship that native aptitude for learning had acquired in the humble school of the village in which he was born. He had been ripe for College when the sudden death of his father, who had long been at the head of a great mercantile concern, imposed it upon him, as a sacred duty owed to his mother and his sisters, to embark in trade. Not otherwise could he hope ever to retrieve their fortunes—and for ten years for their sake he was a slave, till ruin set him free. Now he was master of his own destiny—and sought some humble hut in that magnificent scenery, where he might pass a blameless life, and among earth's purest joys prepare his soul for heaven. Many such humble huts had he seen during that one bold, bright, beautiful spring winter-day. Each wreath of smoke from the breathing chimneys, while the huts themselves seemed hardly awakened from sleep in the morning-calm, led his imagination up into the profound peace of the sky. In any one of those dwellings, peeping from sheltered dells, or perched on wind-swept eminences, could he have taken up his abode, and sat down contented at the board of their simple inmates. But in the very delirium of a new bliss, the day faded before him—twilight looked lovelier than dream-land in the reflected glimmer of the snow—and thus had midnight found him, in a place so utterly lonesome in its remoteness from all habitations, that even in summer no stranger sought it without the guidance of someshepherd familiar with the many bewildering passes that stretched away in all directions through among the mountains to distant vales. No more fear or thought had he of being lost in the wilderness, than the ring-dove that flies from forest to forest in the winter season, and, without the aid even of vision, trusts to the instinctive wafting of her wings through the paths of ether.
As he continued gazing on the heavens, the moon all at once lost something of her brightness—the stars seemed fewer in number—and the lustre of the rest as by mist obscured. The blue ethereal frame grew discoloured with streaks of red and yellow—and a sort of dim darkness deepened and deepened on the air, while the mountains appeared higher, and at the same time further off, as if he had been transported in a dream to another region of the earth. A sound was heard, made up of far-mustering winds, echoes from caves, swinging of trees, and the murmur as of a great lake or sea beginning to break on the shore. A few flakes of snow touched his face, and the air grew cold. A clear tarn had a few minutes before glittered with moonbeams, but now it had disappeared. Sleet came thicker and faster, and ere long it was a storm of snow. "O God! my last hour is come!" and scarcely did he hear his own voice in the roaring tempest.
Men have died in dungeons—and their skeletons been found long years afterwards lying on the stone floor, in postures that told through what hideous agonies they had passed into the world of spirits. But no eye saw, no ear heard, and the prison-visitor gathers up, as he shudders, but a dim conviction of some long horror from the bones. One day in spring—long after the snows were melted—except here and there a patch like a flock of sheep on some sunless exposure—a huge Raven rose heavily, as if gorged with prey, before the feet of a shepherd, who, going forward to the spot where the bird had been feeding, beheld a rotting corpse! A dog, itself almost a skeleton, was lying near, and began to whine at his approach. On its collar was the name of its master—a name unknown in that part of the country—and weeks elapsed before any person could be heard of that could tell the history of the sufferer. A stranger came and went—taking the faithful creature with him that had so long watched by the dead—but long beforehis arrival the remains had been interred; and you may see the grave, a little way on from the south gate, on your right hand as you enter, not many yards from the Great Yew-Tree in the churchyard of——, not far from the foot of Ullswater.
Gentle reader! we have given you two versions of the same story—and pray, which do you like the best? The first is the most funny, the second the most affecting. We have observed that the critics are not decided on the question of our merits as a writer; some maintaining that we are strongest in humour—others, that our power is in pathos. The judicious declare that our forte lies in both—in the two united, or alternating with each other. "But is it not quite shocking," exclaims some scribbler who has been knouted in Ebony, "to hear so very serious an affair as the death of a Quaker in the snow among mountains, treated with such heartless levity? The man who wrote that description, sir, of the Ordinary of the Red Tarn Club, would not scruple to commit murder!" Why, if killing a scribbler be murder, the writer of that—this—article confesses that he has more than once committed that capital crime. But no intelligent jury, taking into consideration the law as well as the fact—and it is often their duty to do so, let high authorities say what they will—would for a moment hesitate, in any of the cases alluded to, to bring in a verdict of "Justifiable homicide." The gentleman or lady who has honoured us so far with perusal, knows enough of human life, and of their own hearts, to know also that there is no other subject which men of genius—and who ever denied that we are men of genius?—have been accustomed to view in so many ludicrous lights as this same subject of death; and the reason is at once obvious—yetrecherché—videlicet, Death is, in itself and all that belongs to it, such a sad, cold, wild, dreary, dismal, distracting, and dreadful thing, that at times men talking about it cannot choose but laugh!
Too-hoo—too-hoo—too-whit-too-hoo!—we have got among theOwls. Venerable personages, in truth, they are—perfect Solomons! The spectator, as in most cases of very solemn characters, feels himself at first strongly disposed to commit the gross indecorum of bursting out a-laughing in their face. One does not see the absolute necessity either of man or birdlooking at all times so unaccountably wise. Why will an Owl persist in his stare? Why will a Bishop never lay aside his wig?
People ignorant of Ornithology will stare like the Bird of Wisdom himself on being told that anOwlis an Eagle. Yet, bating a little inaccuracy, it is so. Eagles, kites, hawks, and owls, all belong to the genus Falco. We hear a great deal too much in poetry of the moping Owl, the melancholy Owl, the boding Owl, whereas he neither mopes nor bodes, and is no more melancholy than becomes a gentleman. We also hear of the Owl being addicted to spirituous liquors; and hence the expression, as drunk as an Owl. All this is mere Whig personality, the Owl being a Tory of the old school, and a friend of the ancient establishments of church and state. Nay, the same political party, although certainly the most shortsighted of God's creatures, taunt the Owl with being blind. As blind as an Owl, is a libel in frequent use out of ornithological society. Shut up Lord Jeffrey himself in a hay-barn with a well-built mow, and ask him in the darkness to catch you a few mice, and he will tell you whether or not the Owl be blind. This would be just as fair as to expect the Owl to see, like Lord Jeffrey, through a case in the Parliament House during daylight. Nay, we once heard a writer in Taylor and Hessey call the Owl stupid, he himself having longer ears than any species of Owl extant. What is the positive character of the Owl may perhaps appear by-and-by; but we have seen that, describing his character by negations, we may say that he resembles Napoleon Buonaparte much more than Joseph Hume or Alderman Wood. He is not moping—not boding—not melancholy—not a drunkard—not blind—not stupid; as much as it would be prudent to say of any man, whether editor or contributor, in her Majesty's dominions.
We really have no patience with people who persist in all manner of misconceptions regarding the character of birds. Birds often appear to such persons, judging from, of, and by themselves, to be in mind and manners the reverse of their real character. They judge the inner bird by outward circumstances inaccurately observed. There is the owl. How little do the people of England know of him—even of him the barn-door and domestic owl—yea, even at this day—wehad almost said the Poets! Shakespeare, of course, and his freres, knew him to be a merry fellow—quite a madcap—and so do now all the Lakers. But Cowper had his doubts about it; and Gray, as every schoolboy knows, speaks of him like an old wife. The force of folly can go no further, than to imagine an owl complaining to the moon of being disturbed by people walking in a country churchyard. And among all our present bardlings, the owl is supposed to be constantly on the eve of suicide. If it were really so, he ought in a Christian country to be pitied, not pelted, as he is sure to be when accidentally seen in sunlight—for melancholy is a misfortune, especially when hereditary and constitutional, as it is popularly believed to be in the Black-billed Bubo, and certainly was in Dr Johnson. In young masters and misses we can pardon any childishness; but we cannot pardon the antipathy to the owl entertained by the manly minds of grown-up English clodhoppers, ploughmen, and threshers. They keep terriers to kill rats and mice in barns, and they shoot the owls, any one of whom we would cheerfully back against the famous Billy. "The very commonest observation teaches us," says the author of the "Gardens of the Menagerie," "that they are in reality the best and most efficient protectors of our cornfields and granaries from the devastating pillage of the swarms of mice and other smallrodents." Nay, by their constant destruction of these petty but dangerous enemies, the owls, he says, "earn an unquestionable title to be regarded as among themost active of the friends of man; a title which only one or two among them occasionally forfeit by their aggressions on the defenceless poultry." Roger or Dolly beholds him in the act of murdering a duckling, and, like other light-headed, giddy, unthinking creatures, they forget all the service he has done the farm, the parish, and the state; he is shotin the act, and nailed, wide-extended in cruel spread-eagle, on the barn-door. Others again call him dull and shortsighted—nay, go the length of asserting that he is stupid—as stupid as an owl. Why, our excellent fellow, when you have the tithe of the talent of the common owl, and know half as well how to use it, you may claim the medal.
The eagles, kites, and hawks, hunt by day. The Owl is the Nimrod of the Night. Then, like one who shall be nameless, he sails about seeking those whom he may devour.To do him justice, he has a truly ghost-like head and shoulders of his own. What horror to the "small birds rejoicing in spring's leafy bowers," fast-locked we were going to say in each other's arms, but sitting side by side in the same cosy nuptial nest, to be startled out of their love-dreams by the great lamp-eyed, beaked face of a horrible monster with horns, picked out of feathered bed, and wafted off in one bunch, within talons, to pacify a set of hissing, and snappish, and shapeless powder-puffs, in the loophole of a barn? In a house where a cat is kept, mice are much to be pitied. They are so infatuated with the smell of a respectable larder, that to leave the premises, they confess, is impossible. Yet every hour—nay, every minute of their lives—must they be in the fear of being leaped out upon by four velvet paws—and devoured with kisses from a whiskered mouth, and a throat full of that incomprehensible music—a purr. Life, on such terms, seems to us anything but desirable. But the truth is, that mice in the fields are not a whit better off. Owls are cats with wings. Skimming along the grass tops, they stop in a momentary hover, let drop a talon, and away with Mus, his wife, and small family of blind children. It is the white, or yellow, or barn, or church, or Screech-Owl, or Gilley-Owlet, that behaves in this way; and he makes no bones of a mouse, uniformly swallowing him alive. Our friend, we suspect, though no drunkard, is somewhat of a glutton. In one thing we agree with him, that there is no sort of harm in a heavy supper. There, however, we are guilty of some confusion of ideas; for what to us, who rise in the morning, seems a supper, is to him who gets up at evening twilight, a breakfast. We therefore agree with him in thinking that there is no sort of harm in a heavy breakfast. After having passed a pleasant night in eating and flirting, he goes to bed betimes about four o'clock in the morning; and, as Bewick observes, makes a blowing hissing noise, resembling the snoring of a man. Indeed nothing can be more diverting to a person annoyed by blue devils, than to look at a white Owl and his wife asleep. With their heads gently inclined towards each other, there they keep snoring away like any Christian couple. Should the one make a pause, the other that instant awakes, and, fearing something may be wrong with his spouse, opens a pair of glimmering winking eyes, and inspects the adjacentphysiognomy with the scrutinising stare of a village apothecary. If all be right, the concert is resumed, the snore sometimes degenerating into a sort of snivel, and the snivel into a blowing hiss. First time we heard this noise was in a churchyard when we were mere boys, having ventured in after dark to catch the minister's colt for a gallop over to the parish capital, where there was a dancing-school ball. There had been a nest of Owls in some hole in the spire; but we never doubted for a moment that the noise of snoring, blowing, hissing, and snapping proceeded from a testy old gentleman that had been buried that forenoon, and had come alive again a day after the fair. Had we reasoned the matter a little, we must soon have convinced ourselves that there was no ground for alarm to us at least; for the noise was like that of some one half stifled, and little likely to heave up from above him a six-feet-deep load of earth—to say nothing of the improbability of his being able to unscrew the coffin from the inside. Be that as it may, we cleared about a dozen of decent tombstones at three jumps—the fourth took us over a wall five feet high within and about fifteen without, and landed us, with a squash, in a cabbage-garden, enclosed on the other three sides by a house and a holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude, thrust out a long duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and swore to blow out our brains if we did not instantly surrender ourselves, and deliver up the corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name, which he knew as well as his own. He was deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his patterero till we had laid down the corpse. He swore that he saw the sack in the moonlight. This was a horse-cloth with which we had intended to saddle the "cowt," and that had remained, during the supernatural agency under which we laboured, clutched unconsciously and convulsively in our grasp. Long was it ere Davie Donald would see us in our true light—but at length he drew on his Kilmarnock nightcap, and coming out with a bouet, let us through the trance and out of the front door, thoroughly convinced, till we read Bewick, that old Southfield was not dead, although in a very bad way indeed. Let this be a lesson to schoolboys not to neglect thescience of natural history, and to study the character of the White Owl.
Owls—both White and common Brown, are not only useful in a mountainous country, but highly ornamental. How serenely beautiful their noiseless flight; a flake of snow is not winnowed through the air more softly-silent! Gliding along the dark shadows of a wood, how spiritual the motion—how like the thought of a dream! And then, during the hushed midnight hours, how jocund the whoop and hollo from the heart of a sycamore—grey rock, or ivied Tower! How the Owls of Windermere must laugh at the silly Lakers, that under the garish eye of day, enveloped in clouds of dust, whirl along in rattling post-shays in pursuit of the picturesque! Why, the least imaginative Owl that ever hunted mice by moonlight on the banks of Windermere, must know the character of its scenery better than any poetaster that ever dined on char at Bowness or Lowood. The long quivering lines of light illumining some sylvan isle—the evening-star shining from the water to its counterpart in the sky—the glorious phenomenon of the double moon—the night-colours of the woods—and, once in the three years perhaps, that loveliest and most lustrous of celestial forms, the lunar rainbow—all these and many more beauteous and magnificent sights are familiar to the Owls of Windermere. And who know half so well as they do the echoes of Furness, and Applethwaite, and Loughrigg, and Landale, all the way on to Dungeon-Gill and Pavey-Ark, Scawfell and the Great Gable, and that sea of mountains, of which every wave has a name? Midnight—when asleep so still and silent—seems inspired with the joyous spirit of the Owls in their revelry—and answers to their mirth and merriment through all her clouds. The Moping Owl, indeed!—the Boding Owl, forsooth!—the Melancholy Owl, you blockhead!—why, they are the most cheerful—joy-portending—and exulting of God's creatures! Their flow of animal spirits is incessant—crowing-cocks are a joke to them—blue devils are to them unknown—not one hypochondriac in a thousand barns—and the Man-in-the-Moon acknowledges that he never heard one of them utter a complaint.
But what say ye to an Owl, not only like an eagle in plumage, but equal to the largest eagle in size—and therefore named, from the King of Birds, theEagle Owl. Mr Selby! you have done justice to the monarch of the Bubos. We hold ourselves to be persons of tolerable courage, as the world goes—but we could not answer for ourselves showing fight with such a customer, were he to waylay us by night in a wood. In comparison, Jack Thurtell looked harmless. No—that bold, bright-eyed murderer, with Horns on his head like those on Michael Angelo's statue of Moses, would never have had the cruel cowardice to cut the weasand, and smash out the brains of such a miserable wretch as Weare! True, he is fond of blood—and where's the harm in that? It is his nature. But if there be any truth in the science of Physiognomy—and be that of Phrenology what it will, most assuredly there is truth in it—the original of that Owl, for whose portrait the world is indebted to Mr Selby, and Sir Thomas Lawrence never painted a finer one of Prince or Potentate of any Holy or Unholy Alliance, must have despised Probert from the very bottom of his heart. No prudent Eagle but would be exceedingly desirous of keeping on good terms with him—devilish shy, i' faith, of giving him any offence by the least hauteur of manner, or the slightest violation of etiquette. An Owl of this character and calibre is not afraid to show his horns at mid-day on the mountain. The Fox is not over and above fond of him—and his claws can kill a cub at a blow. The Doe sees the monster sitting on the back of her fawn, and, maternal instinct overcome by horror, bounds into the brake, and leaves the pretty creature to its fate. Thank Heaven, he is, in Great Britain, a rare bird! Tempest-driven across the Northern Ocean from his native forests in Russia, an occasional visitant he "frightens this isle from its propriety," and causes a hideous screaming through every wood he haunts. Some years ago, one was killed in the upland moors in the county of Durham—and, of course, paid a visit to Mr Bullock's Museum. Eagle-like in all its habits, it builds its nest on high rocks—sometimes on the loftiest trees—and seldom lays more than two eggs. One is one more than enough—and we who fly by night trust never to fall in with a live specimen of the Strix-Bubo of Linnæus.
But largest and loveliest of all the silent night-gliders—the$1! Gentle reader—if you long to see hispicture, we have told you where it may be found;—and in the College Museum, within a glass vase on the central table in the Palace of Stuffed Birds, you may admire his outward very self—the semblance of the Owl he was when he used to eye the moon shining over the Northern Sea:—but if you would see the noble and beautiful Creature himself, in all his living glory, you must seek him through the long summer twilight among the Orkney or the Shetland Isles. The Snowy Owl dearly loves the snow—and there is, we believe, a tradition among them, that their first ancestor and ancestress rose up together from a melting snow-wreath on the very last day of a Greenland winter, when all at once the bright fields reappear. The race still inhabits that frozen coast—being common, indeed, through all the regions of the Arctic Circle. It is numerous on the shores of Hudson's Bay, in Norway, Sweden, and Lapland—but in the temperate parts of Europe and America "rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno."
We defy all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe; and what countless cross-legged fractional parts of men—who, like the beings of whom they are constituents, are thought to double their numbers every thirty years—must not the four quarters of the earth, in their present advanced state of civilisation, contain!—we defy, we say, all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe to construct such a surtout as that of the Snowy Owl, covering him, with equal luxury and comfort, in summer's heat and winter's cold. The elements, in all their freezing fury, cannot reach the body of the bird through that beautiful down-mail. Well guarded are the opening of those great eyes. Neither the driving dust, nor the searching sleet, nor the sharp frozen snow-stour, give him the ophthalmia. Gutta Serena is to him unknown—no Snowy Owl was ever couched for cataract—no need has he for an oculist, should he live an hundred years; and were they to attempt any operation on his lens or iris, how he would hoot at Alexander and Wardrope!
Night, doubtless, is the usual season of his prey; but he does not shun the day, and is sometimes seen hovering unhurt in the sunshine. The red or black grouse flies as if pursued by a ghost; but the Snowy Owl, little slower than the eagle, in dreadful silence overtakes his flight, and then death is sudden and sure. Hawking is, or was, a noble pastime—and we have now prevented our eyes from glancing at Jer-falcon, Peregrine, or Goshawk; but Owling, we do not doubt, would be noways inferior sport; and were it to become prevalent in modern times, as Hawking was in times of old, why, each lady, as Venus already fair, with an Owl on her wrist, would look as wise as Minerva.
But our soul sickens at all those dreams of blood! and fain would turn away from fierce eye, cruel beak, and tearing talon—war-weapons of them that delight in wounds and death—to the contemplation of creatures whose characteristics are the love of solitude—shy gentleness of manner—the tender devotion of mutual attachment—and, in field or forest, a lifelong passion for peace.
Welcome then theRing-Dove—theQuest—orCushat, for that is the very bird we have had in our imagination. There is his full-length portrait, stealthily sketched as the Solitary was sitting on a tree. You must catch him napping, indeed, before he will allow you an opportunity of colouring him on the spot from nature. It is not that he is more jealous or suspicious of man's approach than other bird; for never shall we suffer ourselves to believe that any tribe of the descendants of the Dove that brought to the Ark the olive tidings of reappearing earth, can in their hearts hate or fear the race of the children of man. But Nature has made the Cushat a lover of the still forest-gloom; and therefore, when his lonesome haunts are disturbed or intruded on, he flies to some yet profounder, some more central solitude, and folds his wing in the hermitage of a Yew, sown in the time of the ancient Britons.
It is the Stock-Dove, we believe, not the Ring-Dove, from whom are descended all the varieties of the races of Doves. What tenderer praise can we give them all, than that the Dove is the emblem of Innocence, and that the name of innocence—not of frailty—is Woman? When Hamlet said the reverse, he was thinking, you know, of the Queen—not of Ophelia. Is not woman by nature chaste as the Dove—as the Dove faithful? Sitting all alone with her babe in her bosom, is she not as a Dove devoted to her own nest? Murmureth she not a pleasant welcome to her wearied home-returned husband, even like the Dove among the woodlands when her mate re-alights on the pine? Should her spouse be taken from her and disappear, doth not her heart sometimes break, as they say it happens to the Dove? But oftener far, findeth not the widowthat her orphans are still fed by her own hand, that is filled with good things by Providence; till grown up, and able to shift for themselves, away they go—just as the poor Dove lamenteth for her mate in the snare of the fowler, yet feedeth her young continually through the whole day, till away too go they—alas, in neither case, perhaps, ever more to return!
We dislike all favouritism, all foolish and capricious partiality for particular bird or beast; but dear, old, sacred associations, willtellupon all one thinks or feels towards any place or person in this world of ours, near or remote. God forbid we should criticise the Cushat! We desire to speak of him as tenderly as of a friend buried in our early youth. Too true it is, that often and oft, when schoolboys, have we striven to steal upon him in his solitude, and to shoot him to death. In morals, and in religion, it would be heterodox to deny that the will is as the deed. Yet in cases of high and low-way robbery and murder, there does seem, treating the subject not in philosophical but popular style, to be some little difference between the two; at least we hope so, for otherwise we can with difficulty imagine one person not deserving to be ordered for execution, on Wednesday next, between the hours of eight and nine ante-meridian. Happily, however, for our future peace of mind, and not improbably for the whole confirmation of our character, our Guardian Genius—(every boy has one constantly at his side, both during school and play hours, though it must be confessed sometimes a little remiss in his duty, for the nature even of angelical beings is imperfect)—always so contrived it, that with all our cunning we never could kill a Cushat. Many a long hour—indeed whole Saturdays—have we lain perdue among broom and whins, the beautiful green and yellow skirting of sweet Scotia's woods, watching his egress or ingress, our gun ready cocked, and finger on trigger, that on the flapping of his wings not a moment might be lost in bringing him to the ground. But couch where we might, no Cushat ever came near our insidious lair. Now and then a Magpie—birds who, by the by, when they suspect you of any intention of shooting them, are as distant in their manners as Cushats themselves, otherwise as impudent as Cockneys—would come, hopping in continual tail-jerks, with his really beautiful plumage, if one could bring oneself to think it so, and then sport the pensive within twenty yards of the muzzleof Brown-Bess, impatient to let fly. But our soul burned, our heart panted for a Cushat; and in that strong fever-fit of passion, could we seek to slake our thirst for that wild blood with the murder of a thievish eavesdropper of a Pye? The Blackbird, too, often dropt out of the thicket into an open glade in the hazel-shaws, and the distinctness of his yellow bill showed he was far within shot-range. Yet, let us do ourselves justice, we never in all our born days dreamt of shooting a Blackbird—him that scares away sadness from the woodland twilight gloom, at morn or eve; whose anthem, even in those dim days when Nature herself it might be well thought were melancholy, forceth the firmament to ring with joy. Once "the snow-white cony sought its evening meal," unconscious of our dangerous vicinity, issuing with erected ears from the wood edge. That last was, we confess, such a temptation to touch the trigger, that had we resisted it we must have been either more or less than boy. We fired; and kicking up his heels, doubtless in fright, but as it then seemed to us, during our disappointment, much rather in frolic—nay, absolute derision—away bounced Master Rabbit to his burrow, without one particle of soft silvery wool on sward or bush, to bear witness to our unerring aim. As if the branch on which he had been sitting were broken, away then went the crashing Cushat through the intermingling sprays. The free flapping of his wings was soon heard in the air above the tree-tops, and ere we could recover from our almost bitter amazement, the creature was murmuring to his mate on her shallow nest—a far-off murmur, solitary and profound—to reach unto which, through the tangled mazes of the forest, would have required a separate sense, instinct, or faculty, which we did not possess. So, skulking out of our hiding-place, we made no comment on the remark of homeward-plodding labourer, who had heard the report, and now smelt the powder—"Cushats are geyan kittle birds to kill"—but returned, with our shooting-bag as empty as our stomach, to the Manse.
"Why do the birds sing on Sunday?" said once a little boy to us—and we answered him in a lyrical ballad, which we have lost. But although the birds certainly do sing on Sunday—behaviour that with our small gentle Calvinist, who dearly loved them, caused some doubts of their being so innocent as during the week-days they appeared to be—wecannot set down their fault to the score of ignorance. Is it in the holy superstition of the world-wearied heart that man believes the inferior creatures to be conscious of the calm of the Sabbath, and that they know it to be the day of our rest? Or is it that we transfer the feeling of our inward calm to all the goings-on of Nature, and thus imbue them with a character of reposing sanctity, existing only in our own spirits? Both solutions are true. The instincts of those creatures we know only in their symptoms and their effects, in the wonderful range of action over which they reign. Of the instincts themselves—as feelings or ideas—we know not anything, nor ever can know; for an impassable gulf separates the nature of those that may be to perish, from ours that are to live for ever. But their power of memory, we must believe, is not only capable of minutest retention, but also stretches back to afar—and some power or other they do possess, that gathers up the past experience into rules of conduct that guide them in their solitary or gregarious life. Why, therefore, should not the birds of Scotland know the Sabbath-day? On that day the Water-Ouzel is never disturbed by angler among the murmurs of his own waterfall; and, as he flits down the banks and braes of the burn, he sees no motion, he hears no sound about the cottage that is the boundary of his furthest flight—for "the dizzying mill-wheel rests." The merry-nodding rooks, that in spring-time keep following the very heels of the ploughman—may they not know it to be Sabbath, when all the horses are standing idle in the field, or taking a gallop by themselves round the head-rig? Quick of hearing are birds—one and all—and in every action of their lives are obedient to sounds. May they not, then—do they not connect a feeling of perfect safety with the tinkle of the small kirk-bell? The very jay himself is not shy of people on their way to worship. The magpie, that never sits more than a minute at a time in the same place on a Saturday, will on the Sabbath remain on the kirkyard wall with all the composure of a dove. The whole feathered creation know our hours of sleep. They awake before us; and ere the earliest labourer has said his prayers, have not the woods and valleys been ringing with their hymns? Why, therefore, may not they, who know, each week-day, the hour of our lying down and our rising up, know also the day of our general rest? The animals whoselot is labour, shall they not know it? Yes; the horse on that day sleeps in shade or sunshine without fear of being disturbed—his neck forgets the galling collar, "and there are forty feeding like one," all well knowing that their fresh meal on the tender herbage will not be broken in upon before the dews of next morning, ushering in a new day to them of toil or travel.
So much for our belief in the knowledge, instinctive or from a sort of reason, possessed by the creatures of the inferior creation of the heaven-appointed Sabbath to man and beast. But it is also true that we transfer our inward feelings to their outward condition, and with our religious spirit imbue all the ongoings of animated and even inanimated life. There is always a shade of melancholy, a tinge of pensiveness, a touch of pathos, in all profound rest. Perhaps because it is so much in contrast with the turmoil of our ordinary being. Perhaps because the soul, when undisturbed, will, from the impulse of its own divine nature, have high, solemn, and awful thoughts. In such state, it transmutes all things into a show of sympathy with itself. The church-spire, rising high above the smoke and stir of a town, when struck by the sun-fire, seems, on a market-day, a tall building in the air, that may serve as a guide to people from a distance flocking into the bazaars. The same church-spire, were its loud-tongued bell to call from aloft on the gathering multitude below, to celebrate the anniversary of some great victory, Waterloo or Trafalgar, would appear to stretch up its stature triumphantly into the sky—so much the more triumphantly, if the standard of England were floating from its upper battlements. But to the devout eye of faith, doth it not seem to express its own character, when on the Sabbath it performs no other office than to point to heaven?
So much for the second solution. But independently of both, no wonder that all nature seems to rest on the Sabbath; for it doth rest—all of it, at least, that appertains to man and his condition. If the Fourth Commandment be kept—at rest is all the household—and all the fields round it are at rest. Calm flows the current of human life, on that gracious day, throughout all the glens and valleys of Scotland, as a stream that wimples in the morning sunshine, freshened but not flooded with the soft-falling rain of a summer night. Thespiral smoke-wreath above the cottage is not calmer than the motion within. True, that the wood warblers do not cease their songs; but the louder they sing, the deeper is the stillness. And what perfect blessedness, when it is only joy that is astir in rest!
Loud-flapping Cushat! it was thou that inspiredst these solemn fancies; and we have only to wish thee, for thy part contributed to our Recreations, now that the acorns of autumn must be well-nigh consumed, many a plentiful repast, amid the multitude of thy now congregated comrades, in the cleared stubble lands—as severe weather advances, and the ground becomes covered with snow, regales undisturbed by fowler, on the tops of turnip, rape, and other cruciform plants, which all of thy race affect so passionately—and soft blow the sea-breezes on thy unruffled plumage, when thou takest thy winter's walk with kindred myriads on the shelly shore, and for a season minglest with gull and seamew—apart every tribe, one from the other, in the province of its own peculiar instinct—yet all mysteriously taught to feed or sleep together within the roar or margin of the main.
Sole-sitting Cushat! We see thee through the yew-tree's shade, on some day of the olden time, but when or where we remember not—for what has place or time to do with the vision of a dream? That we see thee is all we know, and that serenely beautiful thou art! Most pleasant is it to dream, and to know we dream! By sweet volition we keep ourselves half asleep and half awake; and all our visions of thought, as they go swimming along, partake at once of reality and imagination. Fiction and truth—clouds, shadows, phantoms and phantasms—ether, sunshine, substantial forms and sounds that have a being, blending together in a scene created by us, and partly impressed upon us, and which one motion of the head on the pillow may dissolve, or deepen into more oppressive delight! In some such dreaming state of mind are we now; and, gentle reader, if thou art broad awake, lay aside the visionary volume, or read a little longer, and likely enough is it that thou too mayest fall half asleep. If so, let thy drowsy eyes still pursue the glimmering paragraphs—and wafted away wilt thou feel thyself to be into the heart of a Highland forest, that knows no bounds but those of the uncertain sky.
Away from our remembrance fades the noisy world of men into a silent glimmer—and now it is all no more than a mere faint thought. On—on—on! through briery brake—matted thicket—grassy glade—On—on—on! further into the Forest! What a confusion of huge stones, rocks, knolls, all tumbled together into a chaos—not without its stern and sterile beauty! Still are there, above, blue glimpses of the sky—deep though the umbrage be, and wide-flung the arms of the oaks, and of pines in their native wilderness gigantic as oaks, and extending as broad a shadow. Now the firmament has vanished—and all is twilight. Immense stems, "in number without number numberless,"—bewildering eye and soul—all still—silent—steadfast—and so would they be in a storm. For what storm—let it rage aloft as it might, till the surface of the forest toss and roar like the sea—could force its path through these many million trunks? The thunder-stone might split that giant there—how vast! how magnificent!—but the brother by his side would not tremble; and the sound—in the awful width of the silence—what more would it be than that of the woodpecker alarming the insects of one particular tree!
Poor wretch that we are!—to us the uncompanioned silence of the solitude hath become terrible. More dreadful is it than the silence of the tomb; for there, often arise responses to the unuttered soliloquies of the pensive heart. But this is as the silence, not of Time, but of Eternity. No burial heaps—no mounds—no cairns! It is not as if man had perished here, and been forgotten; but as if this were a world in which there had been neither living nor dying. Too utter is the solitariness even for the ghosts of dead! For they are thought to haunt the burial-places of what once was their bodies—the chamber where the spirit breathed its final farewell—the spot of its transitory love and delight, or of its sin and sorrow—to gaze with troubled tenderness on the eyes that once they worshipped—with cold ear to drink the music of the voices long ago adored; and in all their permitted visitations, to express, if but by the beckoning of the shadow of a hand, some unextinguishable longing after the converse of the upper world, even within the gates of the grave.
A change comes over us. Deep and still as is the solitude, we are relieved of our awe, and out of the forest-gloom ariseimages of beauty that come and go, gliding as on wings, or, statue-like, stand in the glades, like the sylvan deities to whom of old belonged, by birthright, all the regions of the woods. On—on—on!—further into the Forest!—and let the awe of imagination be still further tempered by the delight breathed even from any one of the lovely names sweet-sounding through the famous fables of antiquity. Dryad, Hamadryad! Faunus! Sylvanus!—Now, alas! ye are but names, and no more! Great Pan himself is dead, or here he would set up his reign. But what right has such a dreamer to dream of the dethroned deities of Greece? The language they spoke is not his language; yet the words of the great poets who sang of gods and demigods, are beautiful in their silent meanings as they meet his adoring eyes; and, mighty Lyrists! has he not often floated down the temple-crowned and altar-shaded rivers of your great Choral Odes?
On—on—on!—further into the Forest!—unless, indeed, thou dreadest that the limbs that bear on thy fleshy tabernacle may fail, and the body, left to itself, sink down and die. Ha! such fears thou laughest to scorn; for from youth upwards thou hast dallied with the wild and perilous: and what but the chill delight in which thou hast so often shivered in threatening solitude brought thee here! These dens are not dungeons, nor are we a thrall. Yet if dungeons they must be called—and they are deep, and dark, and grim—ten thousand gates hath this great prison-house, and wide open are they all. So on—on—on!—further into the Forest! But who shall ascend to its summit? Eagles and dreams. Round its base we go, rejoicing in the new-found day, and once more cheered and charmed with the music of birds. Say whence came, ye scientific world-makers, these vast blocks of granite? Was it fire or water, think ye, that hung in air the semblance of yon Gothic cathedral, without nave, or chancel, or aisle—a mass of solid rock? Yet it looks like the abode of Echoes; and haply when there is thunder, rolls out its lengthening shadow of sound to the ear of the solitary shepherd afar off on Cairngorm.
On—on—on!—further into the Forest! Now on all sides leagues of ancient trees surround us, and we are safe as in the grave from the persecuting love or hatred of friends or foes. The sun shall not find us by day, nor the moon bynight. Were our life forfeited to what are called the laws, how could the laws discover the criminal? How could they drag us from the impenetrable gloom of this sylvan sanctuary? And if here we chose to perish by suicide or natural death—and famine is a natural death—what eye would ever look on our bones? Raving all; but so it often is with us in severest solitude—our dreams will be hideous with sin and death.
Hideous, said we, with sin and death? Thoughts that came flying against us like vultures, like vultures have disappeared, disappointed of their prey, and afraid to fix their talons in a thing alive. Hither—by some secret and sacred impulse within the soul, that often knoweth not the sovereign virtue of its own great desires—have we been led as into a penitentiary, where, before the altar of nature, we may lay down the burden of guilt or remorse, and walk out of the Forest a heaven-pardoned man. What guilt?—O my soul! canst thou think of Him who inhabiteth eternity, and ask what guilt? What remorse?—For the dereliction of duty every day since thou received'st from Heaven the understanding of good and of evil. All our past existence gathers up into one dread conviction, that every man that is born of woman is a sinner, and worthy of everlasting death. Yet with the same dread conviction is interfused a knowledge, clear as the consciousness of present being, that the soul will live for ever. What was the meaning, O my soul! of all those transitory joys and griefs—of all those fears, hopes, loves, that so shook, each in its own fleeting season, the very foundations on which thy being in this life is laid? Anger, wrath, hatred, pride, and ambition—what are they all but so many shapes of sin coeval with thy birth? That sudden entrance of heaven's light into the Forest, was like the opening of the eye of God! And our spirit stands ashamed of its nakedness, because of the foulness and pollution of sin. But the awful thoughts that have travelled through its chambers have ventilated, swept, and cleansed them—and let us break away from beneath the weight of confession.
Conscience! Speak not of weak and fantastic fears—of abject superstitions—and of all that wild brood of dreams that have for ages been laws to whole nations; though we might speak of them—and, without violation of the spirit of true philosophy, call upon them to bear testimony to the truth.But think of the calm, purified, enlightened, and elevated conscience of the highest natures—from which objectless fear has been excluded—and which hears, in its stillness, the eternal voice of God. What calm celestial joy fills all the being of a good man, when conscience tells him he is obeying God's law! What dismal fear and sudden remorse assail him, whenever he swerves but one single step out of the right path that is shining before his feet! It is not a mere selfish terror—it is not the dread of punishment only that appals him—for, on the contrary, he can calmly look on the punishment which he knows his guilt has incurred, and almost desires that it should be inflicted, that the incensed power may be appeased. It is the consciousness of offence that is unendurable—not the fear of consequent suffering; it is the degradation of sin that his soul deplores—it is the guilt which he would expiate, if possible, in torments; it is the united sense of wrong, sin, guilt, degradation, shame, and remorse, that renders a moment's pang of the conscience more terrible to the good than years of any other punishment—and it thus is the power of the human soul to render its whole life miserable by its very love of that virtue which it has fatally violated. This is a passion which the soul could not suffer—unless it were immortal. Reason, so powerful in the highest minds, would escape from the vain delusion; but it is in the highest minds where reason is most subjected to this awful power—they would seek reconcilement with offended Heaven by the loss of all the happiness that earth ever yielded—and would rejoice to pour out their heart's blood if it could wipe away from the conscience the stain of one deep transgression! These are not the high-wrought and delusive states of mind of religious enthusiasts, passing away with the bodily agitation of the dreamer; but they are the feelings of the loftiest of men's sons—and when the troubled spirit has escaped from their burden, or found strength to support it, the conviction of their reasonableness and of their awful reality remains; nor can it be removed from the minds of the wise and virtuous, without the obliteration from the tablets of memory of all the moral judgments which conscience has there recorded.
It is melancholy to think that even in our own day, a philosopher, and one of high name too, should have spokenslightingly of the universal desire of immortality, as no argument at all in proof of it, because arising inevitably from the regret with which all men must regard the relinquishment of this life. By thus speaking of the desire as a delusion necessarily accompanying the constitution of mind which it has pleased the Deity to bestow on us, such reasoners but darken the mystery both of man and of Providence. But this desire of immortality is not of the kind they say it is, nor does it partake, in any degree, of the character of a blind and weak feeling of regret at merely leaving this present life. "I would not live alway," is a feeling which all men understand—but who can endure the momentary thought of annihilation? Thousands, and tens of thousands—awful a thing as it is to die—are willing to do so—"passing through nature to eternity"—nay, when the last hour comes, death almost always finds his victim ready, if not resigned. To leave earth, and all the light both of the sun and of the soul, is a sad thought to us all—transient as are human smiles, we cannot bear to see them no more—and there is a beauty that binds us to life in the tears of tenderness that the dying man sees gushing for his sake. But between that regret for departing loves and affections, and all the gorgeous or beautiful shows of this earth—between that love and the dread of annihilation, there is no connection. The soul can bear to part with all it loves—the soft voice—the kindling smile—the starting tear—and the profoundest sighs of all by whom it is beloved; but it cannot bear to part with its existence. It cannot even believe the possibility of that which yet it may darkly dread. Its loves—its passions—its joys—its agonies arenot itself. They may perish, but it is imperishable. Strip it of all it has seen, touched, enjoyed, or suffered—still it seems to survive; bury all it knew, or could know in the grave—but itself cannot be trodden down into the corruption. It sees nothing like itself in what perishes, except in dim analogies that vanish before its last profound self-meditation—and though it parts with its mortal weeds at last, as with a garment, its life is felt at last to be something not even in contrast with the death of the body, but to flow on like a flood, that we believe continues still to flow after it has entered into the unseen solitude of some boundless desert.