Simonides--Solon--Esop!--why do such lines of theirs as those assure us they were Sages? The same sentiments are the staple of many a sermon that has soothed sinners into snoring sleep.

Men take refuge even in ocular deception from despair. Over buried beauty, that once glowed with the same passion that consumes themselves, they build a white marble tomb, or a green grass grave, and forget much they ought to remember--all profounder thoughts--while gazing on the epitaph of letters or flowers. 'Tis a vision to their senses, with which Imagination would fain seek to delude Love. And 'tis well that the deception prospers; for what if Love could bid the burial-ground give up or disclose its dead? Or if Love's eyes saw through dust as through air? What if this planet--which men call Earth--were at all times seen and felt to be a cemetery circling round the sun that feeds it with death, and not a globe of green animated with life--even as the dewdrop on the rose's leaf is animated with millions of invisible creatures, wantoning in bliss born of the sunshine and the vernal prime.

Are we sermonising overmuch in this our L'ENVOY to these our misnamed RECREATIONS? Even a sermon is not always useless; the few concluding sentences are sometimes luminous, like stars rising on a dull twilight; the little flower that attracted Park's eyes when he was fainting in the desert, was to him beauteous as the rose of Sharon; there is solemnity in the shadow of quiet trees on a noisy road; a churchyard may be felt even in a village fair; a face of sorrow passes by us in our gaiety, neither unfelt nor unremembered in its uncomplaining calm; and sweet from some still house in the city stir is

"The voice of psalms, the simple song of praise."

We daresay you are a very modest person; but we are all given to self-glorification, private men and public, individuals and nations; and every one Era and Ego has been prouder than another of its respective achievements. To hear the Present Generation speak, such an elderly gentleman as the Past Generation begins to suspect that his personal origin lies hid in the darkness of antiquity; and worse--that he is of the Pechs. Now, we offer to back the Past Generation against the Present Generation, at any feat the Present Generation chooses, and give the long odds. Say Poetry. Well, we bring to the scratch a few champions--such as, Beattie, Cowper, Crabbe, Rogers, Bowles, Burns, Baillie, Campbell, Graham, Montgomery, Scott, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hunt, Hogg, Shelley, Keates, Pollok, Cunningham, Bloomfield, Clare, and _risum teneatis amici_--Ourselves.

"All with waistcoats of red and breeches of blue, And mighty long tails that come swingeing through."

And at sight of the cavalcade--for each poet is on his Pegasus--the champions of the Present Generation, accoutred in corduroy kilts and top-boots, and on animals which, "well do we know, but dare not name,"

wheel to the right-about with "one dismal universal bray," brandishing their wooden sabres, till, frenzied by their own trumpeters, they charge madly a palisade in their own rear, and as dismounted cavalry make good their retreat. This in their strategies is called a drawn battle.

Heroes, alive or dead, of the Past Generation, we bid you hail!

Exceeding happiness to have been born among such Births--to have lived among such Lives--to be buried among such Graves. O great glory to have seen such Stars rising one after another larger and more lustrous--at times, when dilated with delight, more like Moons than Stars--like Seraphs hovering over the earth they loved, though seeming so high up in heaven!

To whom now may the young enthusiast turn as to Beings of the same kind with himself, but of a higher order, and therefore with a love that fears no sin in its idolatry? The young enthusiast may turn to some of the living, but he will think more of others who are gone. The dead know not of his love, and he can hold no communion with the grave. But Poets never die--immortal in their works, the Library is the world of spirits; there they dwell, the same as in the flesh, when by meditation most cleansed and purified--yet with some holy change it seems--a change not in them but in us, who are stilled by the stillness, and attribute something supernatural to the Living Dead.

Since first this Golden Pen of ours--given us by One who meant it but for a memorial--began, many years ago, to let drop on paper a few careless words, what quires so distained--some pages, let us hope, with durable ink--have accumulated on our hands! Some haughty ones have chosen to say rather, how many leaves have been wafted away to wither?

But not a few of the gifted--near and afar--have called on us with other voices--reminding us that long ago we were elected, on sight of our credentials--not indeed without a few black balls--into the Brotherhood.

The shelf marked with our initials exhibits some half-dozen volumes only, and has room for scores. It may not be easily found in that vast Library; but, humble member as we are, we feel it now to be a point of honour to make an occasional contribution to the Club. So here is the FIRST SERIES of what we have chosen to call our RECREATIONS. There have been much recasting and remoulding--many alterations, believed by us to have been wrought with no unskilful spirit of change--cruel, we confess, to our feelings, rejections of numerous lucubrations to their father dear--and if we may use such words, not a few new creations, in the same _genial_ spirit in which we worked of old--not always unrewarded by sympathy, which is better than praise.

For kindness shown when kindness was most needed--for sympathy and affection--yea, love itself--for grief and pity not misplaced, though bestowed in a mistaken belief of our condition, forlorn indeed, but not wholly forlorn--for solace and encouragement sent to us from afar, from cities and solitudes, and from beyond seas and oceans, from brethren who never saw our face, and never may see it, we owe a debt of everlasting gratitude; and life itself must leave our heart, that beats not now as it used to beat, but with dismal trepidation, before it forget, or cease to remember as clearly as now it hears them, every one of the many words that came sweetly and solemnly to us from the Great and Good. Joy and sorrow make up the lot of our mortal estate, and by sympathy with them, we acknowledge our brotherhood with all our kind. We do far more. The strength that is untasked, lends itself to divide the load under which another is bowed; and the calamity that lies on the heads of men is lightened, while those who at the time are not called to bear, are yet willing to involve themselves in the sorrow of a brother. So soothed by such sympathy may a poor mortal be, that the wretch almost upbraids himself for transient gleams of gladness, as if he were false to the sorrow which he sighs to think he ought to have cherished more sacredly within his miserable heart.

One word embraces all these pages of ours--Memorials. Friends are lost to us by removal--for then even the dearest are often utterly forgotten.

But let something that once was theirs suddenly meet our eyes, and in a moment, returning from the region of the rising or the setting sun, the friend of our youth seems at our side, unchanged his voice and his smile; or dearer to our eyes than ever, because of some affecting change wrought on face and figure by climate and by years. Let it be but his name written with his own hand on the title-page of a book; or a few syllables on the margin of a favourite passage which long ago we may have read together, "when life itself was new," and poetry overflowed the whole world; or a lock of _her_ hair in whose eyes we first knew the meaning of the word "depth." And if death hath stretched out the absence into the dim arms of eternity--and removed the distance away into that bourne from which no traveller returns--the absence and the distance of her on whose forehead once hung the relic we adore--what heart may abide the beauty of the ghost that doth sometimes at midnight appear at our sleepless bed, and with pale uplifted arms waft over us at once a blessing and a farewell!

Why so sad a word--_Farewell_? We should not weep in wishing welfare, nor sully felicity with tears. But we do weep because evil lies lurking in wait over all the earth for the innocent and the good, the happy and the beautiful; and, when guarded no more by our eyes, it seems as if the demon would leap out upon his prey. Or is it because we are so selfish that we cannot bear the thought of losing the sight of the happiness of a beloved object, and are troubled with a strange jealousy of beings unknown to us, and for ever to be unknown, about to be taken into the very heart, perhaps, of the friend from whom we are parting, and to whom in that fear we give almost a sullen farewell? Or does the shadow of death pass over us while we stand for the last time together on the sea-shore, and see the ship with all her sails about to voyage away to the uttermost parts of the earth? Or do we shudder at the thought of mutability in all created things--and know that ere a few suns shall have brightened the path of the swift vessel on the sea, we shall be dimly remembered--at last forgotten--and all those days, months, and years that once seemed eternal, swallowed up in everlasting oblivion?

With us all ambitious desires some years ago expired. Far rather would we read than write nowadays--far rather than read, sit with shut eyes and no book in the room--far rather than so sit, walk about alone anywhere

"Beneath the umbrage deep That shades the silent world of memory."

Shall we live? or "like beasts and common people die?" There is something harsh and grating in the collocation of these words of the "Melancholy Cowley;" yet he meant no harm, for he was a kind, good creature as ever was born, and a true genius. He there has expressed concisely, but too abruptly, the mere fact of their falling alike and together into oblivion. Far better Gray's exquisite words,

"On some fond breast the parting soul relies!"

The reliance is firm and sure; the "fond breast" is faithful to its trust, and dying, transmits it to another; till after two or three transmissions--holy all, but fainter and dimmer--the pious tradition dies, and all memorial of the love and the delight, the pity and the sorrow, is swallowed up in vacant night.

Posthumous Fame! Proud words--yet may they be uttered in a humble spirit. The common lot of man is, after death--oblivion. Yet genius, however small its sphere, if conversant with the conditions of the human heart, may vivify with indestructible life some happy delineations, that shall continue to be held dear by successive sorrowers in this vale of tears. If the _name_ of the delineator continue to have something sacred in its sound--obscure to the many as it may be, or non-existent--the hope of such posthumous fame is sufficient to one who overrates not his own endowments. And as the hope has its root in love and sympathy, he who by his writings has inspired towards himself when in life, some of these feelings in the hearts of not a few who never saw his face, seems to be justified in believing that even after final obliteration of _Hic jacet_ from his tombstone, his memory will be regarded with something of the same affection in his REMAINS.

REMARKS

ON THE

SCENERY OF THE HIGHLANDS.

REMARKS

ON THE

SCENERY OF THE HIGHLANDS.

[Professor Wilson's "Remarks on the Scenery of the Highlands" were first published as a Preface to _Swan's Select Views of the Lakes of Scotland_, 2d edition, 1836. They were not included originally in the "Recreations of Christopher North;" but the harmony of their tone and spirit seemed to recommend them as an appropriate sequel to that work; and accordingly they are now reprinted as such. The thanks of the Editor and Publishers of Professor Wilson's writings are due to the Messrs Fullarton, the proprietors of "Swan's Views,"

for the liberal manner in which they have placed this valuable article at their disposal.]

In no other country does nature exhibit herself in more various forms of beauty and sublimity, than in the North of England and the Highlands of Scotland. This is acknowledged by all who, having studied their character, and become familiar with the feelings it inspires, have compared the effects produced on their minds by our own mountainous regions, with what they have experienced among the scenery of the Alps.

There, indeed, all objects are on so vast a scale, that we are for a while astonished as we gaze on the gigantic; and all other emotions are sunk in an overwhelming sense of awe that prostrates the imagination.

But on recovering from its subjection to the prodigious, that faculty everywhere recognises in those mighty mountains of dark forests, glittering glaciers, and regions of eternal snow--infinite all--the power and dominion of the Sublime. True that all these are but materials for the mind to work on, and that to its creative energy nature owes much of that grandeur which seems to be inherent in her own forms; yet surely she in herself is great, and there is a regality belonging of divine right to such a monarch as Mont Blanc.

Those are the very regions of sublimity, and if brought into immediate comparison with them in their immense magnitude, the most magnificent scenery of our own country would no doubt seem to lose its character of greatness. But such is not the process of the imagination in her intercourse with Nature. To her sufficient for the day is the good thereof; and on each new glorious sight being shown to her eyes, she employs her God-given power to magnify or irradiate what she beholds, without diminishing or obscuring what she remembers. Thus, to her all things in nature hold their own due place, and retain for ever their own due impressions, aggrandised and beautified by mutual reaction in those visionary worlds, which by a thought she can create, and which as they arise are all shadowy representations of realities--new compositions in which the image of the earth we tread is reflected fairer or greater than any realities, but not therefore less, but more true to the spirit of nature. It is thus that Poets and Painters at once obey and control their own inspirations. They visit all the regions of the earth, but to love, admire, and adore; and the greatest of them all, native to our soil, from their travel or sojourn in foreign lands, have always brought home a clearer insight into the character of the scenery of their own, a profounder affection for it all, and a higher power of imaging its attributes in colours or in words. In our poetry, more than in any other, nature sees herself reflected in a magic mirror; and though many a various show passes processionally along its lustre, displaying the scenery of "lands and seas, whatever clime the sun's bright circle warms," among them all there are none more delightful or elevating to behold, than those which genius, inspired by love, has framed of the imagery, which in all her pomp and prodigality heaven has been pleased to shower, through all seasons, on our own beautiful island. It is not for us to say whether our native Painters, or the "old masters," have shown the greatest genius in landscape; but if the palm must be yielded to them whose works have been consecrated by a reverence, as often, perhaps, superstitious as religious, we do not fear to say that their superiority is not to be attributed in any degree to the scenery on which they exercised the art its beauty had inspired. Whatever may be the associations connected with the subjects of their landscapes--and we know not why they should be higher or holier than those belonging to innumerable places in our own land--assuredly in themselves they are not more interesting or impressive; nay, though none who have shared with us the spirit of the few imperfect sentences we have now written, will, for a moment, suppose us capable of instituting an invidious comparison between our own scenery and that of any other country, why should we hesitate to assert that our own storm-loving Northern Isle is equally rich in all kinds of beauty as the sunny South, and richer far in all kinds of grandeur, whether we regard the forms or colouring of nature--earth, sea, or air,--

"Or all the dread magnificence of heaven."

What other region in all the world like that of the Lakes in the North of England! And yet how the true lover of nature, while he carries along with him its delightful character in his heart, and can so revive any spot of especial beauty in his imagination, as that it shall seem in an instant to be again before his very eyes, can deliver himself up, after the lapse of a day, to the genius of some savage scene in the Highlands of Scotland, rent and riven by the fury of some wild sea-loch! Not that the regions do not resemble one another, but surely the prevailing spirit of the one--not so of the other--is a spirit of joy and of peace.

Her mountains, invested, though they often be, in gloom--and we have been more than once benighted during day, as a thunder-cloud thickened the shadows that for ever sleep in the deepest dungeons of Helvellyn--are yet--so it seems to us--such mountains as in nature ought to belong to "merry England." They boldly meet the storms, and seen in storms, you might think they loved the trouble; but pitch your tent among them, and you will feel that theirs is a grandeur that is congenial with the sunshine, and that their spirit fully rejoices in the brightness of light. In clear weather, verdant from base to summit, how majestic their repose! And as mists slowly withdraw themselves in thickening folds up along their sides, the revelation made is still of more and more of the beautiful--arable fields below--then coppice woods studded with standard trees--enclosed pastures above and among the woods--broad breasts of close-nibbled herbage here and there adorned by rich dyed rocks, that do not break the expanse--till the whole veil has disappeared, and, lo! the long lofty range, with its wavy line, rising and sinking so softly in the blue serenity perhaps of an almost cloudless sky. Yet though we have thus characterised the mountains by what we have always felt to be the pervading spirit of the region, chasms and ravines, and cliffs and precipices, are there; in some places you see such assemblages as inspire the fear that quakes at the heart, when suddenly struck in the solitude with a sense of the sublime; and though we have called the mountains green--and during Spring and Summer, in spite of frost or drought, they are green as emerald--yet in Autumn they are many-coloured, and are girdled with a glow of variegated light, that at sunset sometimes seems like fire kindled in the woods.

The larger Vales are all serene and cheerful, and among the sylvan knolls with which their wide levels highly cultivated are interspersed, cottages, single or in groups, are frequent, of an architecture always admirably suited to the scenery, because in a style suggested not by taste or fancy, which so often disfigure nature to produce the picturesque, but resorted to for sake of the uses and conveniences of in-door life, to weather-fend it in storms, and in calm to give it the enjoyment of sunshine. Many of these dwellings are not what are properly called cottages, but Statesmen's houses, of ample front, with their many roofs, overshadowed by a stately grove, and inhabited by the same race for many generations. All alike have their suitable gardens, and the porches of the poorest are often clustered with roses; for everywhere among these hills, even in minds the most rude and uncultivated, there is a natural love of flowers. The villages, though somewhat too much modernised in those days of improvement, and indeed not a few of them with hardly any remains now of their original architecture--nothing old about them but the church tower, perhaps the parsonage--are nevertheless generally of a pleasing character, and accordant, if not with the great features of nature, which are unchanged and unchangeable, with the increased cultivation of the country, and the many villas and ornamented cottages that have risen and are rising by every lake and river side. Rivers indeed, properly so called, there are none among these mountains; but every vale, great and small, has at all times its pure and undefiled stream or rivulet; every hill has its hundreds of evanescent rills, almost every one its own perennial torrent flowing from spring, marsh, or tarn; and the whole region is often alive with waterfalls, of many of which, in its exquisite loveliness, the scenery is fit for fairy festivals--and of many, in its horrid gloom, for gatherings of gnomes revisiting the glimpses of the moon from their subterraneous prisons. One lake there is which has been called "wooded Winandermere, the river lake;" and there is another--Ulswater--which you might imagine to be a river too, and to have come flowing from afar: the one excelling in isles, and bays, and promontories, serene and gentle all, and perfectly beautiful; the other, matchless in its majesty of cliff and mountain, and in its old forests, among whose hoary gloom is for ever breaking out the green light of young generations, and perpetual renovation triumphing over perpetual decay. Of the other lakes--not river-like--the character may be imagined even from that we have faintly described of the mountains:--almost every vale has its lake, or a series of lakes--and though some of them have at times a stern aspect, and have scenes to show almost of desolation, descending sheer to the water's edge, or overhanging the depth that looks profounder in the gloom, yet even these, to eyes and hearts familiar with their spirit, wear a sweet smile which seldom passes away: witness Wastwater--with its huge single mountains, and hugest of all the mountains of England, Scawfell, with its terrific precipices--which, in the accidents of storm, gloom, or mist, has seemed, to the lonely passer-by, savage in the extreme--a howling or dreary wilderness--but in its enduring character, is surrounded with all quiet pastoral imagery, the deep glen in which it is imbedded being, in good truth, the abode of Sabbath peace. That hugest mountain is indeed the centre from which all the vales irregularly diverge; the whole circumjacent region may be traversed in a week; and though no other district of equal extent contains such variety of the sublime and beautiful, yet the beautiful is so prevalent, that we feel its presence, even in places where it is overpowered; and on leaving "The Lakes," our imagination is haunted and possessed with images, not of dread, but of delight.

We have sometimes been asked, whether the North of England or the Highlands of Scotland should be visited first; but, simple as the question seems, it is really one which it is impossible to answer; though we suspect it would equally puzzle Scotchman or Englishman to give a sufficient reason for his wishing to see any part of any other country before he had seen what was best worth seeing in his own. His own country ought to be, and generally is, dearest to every man. There, if nothing forbid, he should not only begin his study of nature, but continue his education in her school, wherever it may happen to be situated, till he has taken his first degree. We believe that the love of nature is strong in the hearts of the inhabitants of our Island. And how wide and profound may that knowledge of nature be, which the loving heart has acquired, without having studied her anywhere but within the Four Seas! The impulses that make us desire to widen the circle of our observation, are all impulses of delight and love; and it would be strange indeed, did they not move us, first of all, towards whatever is most beautiful belonging to our own land. Were it otherwise, it would seem as if the heart were faithless to the home-affections, out of which, in their strength, spring all others that are good; and it is essential, we do not doubt, to the full growth of the Love of Country, that we should all have our earliest imaginative delights associated with our native soil. Such associations will for ever keep it loveliest to our eyes; nor is it possible that we can ever as perfectly understand the character of any other; but we can afterwards transfer and transfuse our feelings in imagination kindled by our own will; and the beauty, born before our eyes, among the banks and braes of our childhood, and then believed to be but there, and nothing like it anywhere else in all the world, becomes a golden light, "whose home is everywhere," which if we do not darken it, will shine unshadowed in the dreariest places, till "the desert blossom like the rose."

For our own parts, before we beheld one of "the beautiful fields of England," we had walked all Scotland thorough, and had seen many a secret place, which now, in the confusion of our crowded memory, seem often to shift their uncertain ground; but still, wherever they glimmeringly reappear, invested with the same heavenly light in which, long ago, they took possession of our soul. And now, that we are almost as familiar with the fair sister-land, and love her almost as well as Scotland's self, not all the charms in which she is arrayed, and they are at once graceful and glorious, have ever for a day withdrawn our deeper dreams from the regions where,

"In life's morning march, when our spirit was young,"

unaccompanied but by our own shadow in the wilderness, we first heard the belling of the red-deer and the eagle's cry.

In those days there was some difficulty, if not a little danger, in getting in among some of the noblest regions of our Alps. They could not be traversed without strong personal exertion; and a solitary pedestrian excursion through the Grampians was seldom achieved without a few incidents that might almost have been called adventures. It is very different now; yet the _Genius Loci_, though tamed, is not subdued; and they who would become acquainted with the heart of the Highlands, will have need of some endurance still, and must care nothing about the condition of earth or sky. Formerly, it was not possible to survey more than a district or division in a single season, except to those unenviable persons who had no other pursuit but that of amusement, and waged a weary war with time. The industrious dwellers in cities, who sought those solitudes, for a while to relieve their hearts from worldly anxieties, and gratify that love of nature which is inextinguishable in every bosom that in youth has beat with its noble inspirations, were contented with a week or two of such intercommunion with the spirit of the mountains, and thus continued to extend their acquaintance with the glorious wildernesses, visit after visit, for years. Now the whole Highlands, western and northern, may be commanded in a month. Not that any one who knows what they are, will imagine that they can be exhausted in a lifetime. The man does not live who knows all worth knowing there; and were they who made the Trigonometrical Survey to be questioned on their experiences, they would be found ignorant of thousands of sights, any one of which would be worth a journey for its own sake. But now steam has bridged the Great Glen, and connected the two seas.

Salt-water lochs the most remote and inaccessible, it has brought within reach of a summer-day's voyage. In a week a joyous company can gather all the mainland shores, leaving not one magnificent bay uncircled; and, having rounded St Kilda and

"the Hebride Isles, Placed far amid the melancholy main,"

and heard the pealing anthem of waves in the cave-cathedral of Staffa, may bless the bells of St Mungo's tolling on the first Sabbath.

Thousands and tens of thousands, who, but for those smoking sea-horses, had never been beyond view of the city spires, have seen sights which, though passing by almost like dreams, are not like dreams forgotten, but revive of themselves in memory and imagination; and, when the heart is weary with the work of the hand, quicken its pulses with a sudden pleasure that is felt like a renovation of youth.

All through the interior, too, how many hundreds of miles of roads now intersect regions not long ago deemed impracticable!--firm on the fen, in safety flung across the chasm--and winding smoothly amidst shatterings of rocks, round the huge mountain bases, and down the glens once felt as if interminable, now travelled almost with the speed of the raven's wing!

In the Highlands now, there is no _Terra Incognita_. But there are many places yet well worth seeing, which it is not easy for all men to find, and to which every man must be his own guide. It is somewhat of a selfish feeling, indeed, but the pride is not a mean one, with which the solitary pedestrian sits down to contemplate some strange, or wild, or savage scene, or some view of surpassing sweetness and serenity, so far removed from the track of men that he can well believe for a time that his eyes have been the first to behold it, and that for them alone it has now become a visible revelation. The memory of such places is sometimes kept as a secret which we would not communicate but to a congenial friend. They are hallowed by those mysterious "thoughts that, like phantoms, trackless come and go;" no words can tell another how to find his way thither; and were we ourselves to seek to return, we should have to trust to some consciousness mysterious as the instinct of a bird that carries it through the blind night to the place of its desire.