Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

rend as religion. The river, robbed of all the magnificence with which imagination blackened and whitened it, as it moved unseen through the woods-unseen, but in one bright bend here-one sullen stretch there-one deadened cataract, steaming and gleaming yonder through its oak-canopy, now rolls on disenchanted through the light of common day; and you may see ladies, and ladies' maids, with green parasols, hunting butterflies all by themselves, or flirting with dragoon officers, and undergraduates from Oxford. That mile-long elm avenue- -a cathedral in which a hundred thousand penitentials might have prayed-is swept away in the reformation, and you now approach the modern mansion, (for the old hall is down or deserted,) circuitously, after the fashion of one of the representatives of the people making a speech in parliament, who prefers taking two hours to reach a conclusion at which he might have arrived by driving on straight forward, in about five minutes and a half, going at the accelerated but not unreasonable rate of eight miles an hour. Perhaps an old kirk, or church be it—the very parish one is found to be too near the house; for, though faint, and far off, still when the atmosphere is clear, and the wind west, you can hear the voice of psalms; and therefore that the silence of Sabbath may not be rudely disturbed, the kirk or church, with spire or tower, is swept away, and its burial-ground, so inoffensive with its "low memorials still erected nigh," shut up-but nothat may not be for the poor parishioners will insist on laying their bones beside those of their forefathers; and surely a few funerals in the year-say a score at the most-need not spoil the rich man's appetite for dinnerif appetite he otherwise would have had; nor may the holy bell that used to toll to prayer now be heard with its little cracked tinkling, so much louder is the gong that summons to lunch or tiffin, and sets the flunkies afloat through all the staircases from parlour to pantry, from Moll, the peony-rose of the kitchen, to Louisa, the white lily of the drawing-room, languishing and luxury being alike the order of the day, from cellar to garret; for in high life, both above and below stairs,

"Love is heaven, and heaven is love."

Let all people, then, beware of dealers in the picturesque; for they are universally greedy, and generally ignorant, and may do more harm in a week than nature can repair in a year. Get some painter of genius, like Andrew Wilson, or William Allan, or John Watson Gordon, or Hugh Williams, or Alexander Nasmyth, or Mr. Thomson of Duddingstone, to come sauntering out with his portfolio, and take up his abode for a few days in your friendly house, strolling about with you during the forenoons among the banks and braes, and beautifying the paper during the evenings with fair creations of taste and fancy, prophetic of the future beauties and glories that shall ere long be overshadowing your estate. They will not scare the naiads, the dryads, and the hamadryads, from their old haunted nooks-the fairies will not fly their approach, any more than the rooks and herons-in every pool and tarn, nature will behold herself not only in undiminished but in heightened charms-Flora will walk hand in hand with Pomona, and the two together will smile sweetly on old Father Pan, roaming in all his original hairiness in the forests. And haply you may have among your friends some poet

"Who murmurs near the hidden brooks
A music sweeter than their own;"

Him you may consult, at close of his noontide revery, and from his sown words will spring up all varieties of grace, loveliness, and majesty, till every woodland murmur breathes of poetry, and poetry brightens from the heaven of every tree-and-cloud-shadowed water, asleep within the silence of the solitary woods.

Of the multitude of thoughts within us, we know not one more cheering than the belief, that the world is, and ever must be, in a state of very great ignorance about all those things that are of most avail to human use or pleasure. There is a perpetual flux and reflux-ebb and flow of all things on the face of this our pleasant earth. Look up to the hill-side, and you see the waterline of beauty, parallel to that on the opposite green range, telling that long ago a loch filled the valley, till it burst the mound that confined it, and away it flowed on, in a river, to the sea.

Look on

those ruins, apparently of houses-inland now, it may be said yet shells are to be gathered still round the garden wall, touched in the olden time by the foot of the flowing Neptune. Or look into that lucid bay, and you will see the roofs and chimney-tops of what once were cottagescottages that stood at night on the shore, twinkling like stars; while on the silvery sands between them and the sea the fishermen dried their nets. All this is at once melancholy and consoling, to be thought of alternately with a smile and a tear. Then for the march of intellect, it is fortunately often retrograde; for, if it were not, intellect would march on to the utmost possible length of its tether— break the tether—and fall over "the back of beyond." But intellect has more sense; and, therefore, may be often seen suddenly ordering the whole army to halt, light and heavy brigades alike, going into winter quarters,-encamping on the spot, or perhaps falling back upon the wagons and commissariat. Thus it is impossible that the grand campaign can ever come to an end till the stars slacken in their courses, and the sun is kicked out of that solar system of his, where he is seen "outshining like a visible god, the path on which he trode,"-kicked out of his own solar system, just like a football.

Thus, to return to trees. Trees have been planted for these six thousand years and upwards, and yet were some forester who planted, long before the Christian era, the palm-trees by the wells of Palestine-or the cedars from Lebanon along the banks of the brook Kedron-to open his eyes to a perusal of Monteath's Forest Guide, we do not believe that the good old Jew would think the Galwegian a whit wiser than himself-or that he would even think Sir Walter had worked a miracle in that famous article of his on Planting, No. 72, of that thriving journal the Quarterly Review. Though we think we could point out a few rather important mistakes in the moral wisdom of Solomon, yet we perfectly agree with him in his apothegm, "that there is nothing new under the sun." That Solomon knew both the theory and practice of transplanting old trees, we are not without good reason for believing; though, at the same time, could we suppose him, by a bold anachronism, to have visited Allanton along with the

Committee of the Highland Society, to see and report on the wonders wrought there by Sir Henry Steuart, Bart., we have no doubt that he would have lifted up his hands in no little astonishment, and confessed, that in all his transplantings, from the cedar on Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall, he had never beheld such a sudden and fairy enchantment, not even raised by his own magical ring that built Balbec and Syrian Tadmor in the desert, as that now overshading that park and its own swan-frequented loch.

[blocks in formation]

WE had once intended to entitle our leading article, "Characters of Living Poets."

*

*

*

After dashing off the concluding words of our essay, ("the most glorious age of British Poetry,") our thoughts began to wander away, by some fine associations, into the woods of our childhood, "Bards of Scotland! Birds of Scotland!" and at that very moment, we heard the loud, clear, mellow, bold song of the BLACKBIRD. There he flits along upon a strong wing, with his yellow bill visible in distance, and disappears in the silent wood. Not long silent. It is a spring-day in our imagination,—his claywall nest holds his mate at the foot of the silver-fir, and he is now perched on its pinnacle. That thrilling hymn will go vibrating down the stem till it reaches her brooding breast. The whole vernal air is filled with the murmur and the glitter of insects,—but the blackbird's song is over all other symptoms of love and life, and seems to call upon the leaves to unfold into beauty. It is on that one treetop, conspicuous among many thousands on the fine breast of wood, where, here and there, the pine mingles not unmeetly with the prevailing oak,-that the forest-minstrel sits in his inspiration. The rock above is one which we have often climbed. There lies the glorious loch and all its islands—one dearer than the rest to eye and imagination, with its old religious house,-year after year crumbling away unheeded into more entire ruin! Far away, a sea of mountains, with all their billowing summits distinct in the sky, and now uncertain and changeful as the clouds! Yonder castle stands well on the peninsula among the

« ZurückWeiter »