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Title: Where the forest murmurs : Nature essays
Author: Sharp, William
Language: English
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MURMURS ***
Where the Forest Murmurs
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
PHARAIS: A Romance of the Isles.
THE MOUNTAIN LOVERS: A Romance.
THE SIN-EATER, and other Tales.
THE WASHER OF THE FORD.
REISSUE SHORTER TALES, with others.
I. Spiritual Tales.
II. Barbaric Tales.
III. Tragic Romances.
(_Reissued by David Nutt._)
THE LAUGHTER OF PETERKIN: Old Celtic Tales Retold.
FROM THE HILLS OF DREAM: Poems.
THE DOMINION OF DREAMS.
THE DIVINE ADVENTURE.
THE WINGED DESTINY.
_To appear Shortly._
TORCHES OF LOVE AND DEATH: Poems Old and New.
THE IMMORTAL HOUR: Two Dramas and a Fragment.
WHERE THE FOREST
MURMURS. NATURE
ESSAYS. BY FIONA
MACLEOD
‘There through the branches go the ravens
of unresting thought.’--W. B. YEATS.
LONDON: PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICES
OF ‘COUNTRY LIFE,’ LTD. TAVISTOCK
STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C., & BY
GEORGE NEWNES, LTD. SOUTHAMPTON
STREET, STRAND, W.C. NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNERS’ SONS MCMVI
[Illustration: “To live in beauty--which is put into four words all the
dreams and spiritual efforts of the soul of man.”
Fiona Macleod.]
[Illustration: Who plays the Song of Songs upon the Hills of Dream? It
is said Love is that need-player, for There is no song like his.
But today I saw one, on these still garths of shadow and silence, who
put a hollow reed to his lips and played a white spell of beauty. Then
I knew Love and Sorrow to be one, as in the old myth of Oengus of the
White Birds and The Grey Shadows.
(F. M.)]
[Illustration: “The network of words is like a big forest: it is the
cause of curious wanderings.”
Indian Saying]
TO
MR. P. ANDERSON GRAHAM
DEAR MR. GRAHAM--To whom so fittingly as to you could I inscribe this
book? It was you who suggested it; you who in _Country Life_ published
at intervals, longer or shorter as the errant spirit of composition
moved me, the several papers which make it one book; you without whose
encouragement and good counsel this volume would probably not have been
written. Then, perchance, it might have gone to that Y-Brasil Press in
the Country of the Young wherefrom are issued all the delightful books
which, though possible and welcome in Tir-na-n’ Og, are unachieved in
this more difficult world, except in dreams and hopes. It would be good
to have readers among the kindly Shee ... do not the poets there know
an easy time, having only to breathe their thought on to a leaf and
to whisper their music to a reed, and lo the poem is public from the
caverns of Tir-fo-tuinn to the hills of Flatheanas! ... but, till one
gets behind the foam yonder, the desire of the heart is for comrades
here. These hours of beauty have meant so much to me, somewhat in the
writing, but much more in the long, incalculable hours and days out of
which the writing has risen like the blue smoke out of woods, that I
want to share them with others, who may care for the things written of
as you and I care for them, and among whom may be a few who, likewise,
will be moved to garner from each day of the eternal pageant one hour
of unforgettable beauty.
FIONA MACLEOD.
[Illustration: “I have a long road to travel, but am sustained by joy,
and uplifted by a great hope. I go ... to face the glory of a new day.
I have no fear. I shall not leave all I have loved, for I have that in
me which binds me to this beautiful world, for another life at least,
it may be for many lives. And that within me which dreamed and hoped
shall now more gladly and wonderfully dream, and hope, and seek, and
know, and see ever deeper and farther into the mystery of beauty and
truth. And that within me which _knew_, now _knows_. In the deepest
sense there is no spiritual dream that is not true, no hope that shall
go forever famished, no tears that shall not be gathered into the
brooding skies of compassion, to fall again in healing dews.”
“The Divine Adventure.”
F. M.]
CONTENTS
PAGE
WHERE THE FOREST MURMURS 1
THE MOUNTAIN CHARM 13
THE CLANS OF THE GRASS 26
THE TIDES 37
THE HILL-TARN 47
AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR 56
THE SONS OF THE NORTH WIND 66
ST. BRIDGET OF THE SHORES 76
THE HERALDS OF MARCH 87
THE TRIBE OF THE PLOVER 99
THE AWAKENER OF THE WOODS 112
THE WILD APPLE 124
RUNNING WATERS 136
THE SUMMER HERALDS 146
THE SEA-SPELL 158
SUMMER CLOUDS 168
THE CUCKOO’S SILENCE 178
THE COMING OF DUSK 188
AT THE RISING OF THE MOON 200
THE GARDENS OF THE SEA 211
THE MILKY WAY 221
SEPTEMBER 232
THE CHILDREN OF WIND AND THE CLAN OF PEACE 242
STILL WATERS 255
THE PLEIAD-MONTH 265
THE RAINY HYADES 277
WINTER STARS. I 290
WINTER STARS. II 301
BEYOND THE BLUE SEPTENTRIONS. TWO LEGENDS OF THE POLAR STARS 312
WHITE WEATHER: A MOUNTAIN REVERIE 327
ROSA MYSTICA (AND ROSES OF AUTUMN) 337
THE STAR OF REST: A FRAGMENT 349
Many runes the cold has taught me,
Many lays the rain has brought me,
Other songs the winds have sung me;
Many birds from many forests
Oft have sung me lays in concord;
Waves of sea, and ocean billows,
Music from the many waters,
Music from the whole creation,
Oft have been my guide and master.
_The Kalevala._
[Illustration: “Beauty and solitude, ... these are the shepherd kings
of the imagination, to compel our wandering memories, our thoughts, our
dreams.”
F. M.]
WHERE THE FOREST MURMURS
It is when the trees are leafless, or when the last withered leaves
rustle in the wintry air, creeping along the bare boughs like
tremulous mice, or fluttering from the branches like the tired and
starving swallows left behind in the ebbing tides of migration, that
the secret of the forest is most likely to be surprised. Mystery is
always there. Silence and whispers, still glooms, sudden radiances,
the passage of wind and idle airs, all these inhabit the forest at
every season. But it is not in their amplitude that great woodlands
reveal their secret life. In the first vernal weeks the wave of green
creates a mist or shimmering veil of delicate beauty, through which
the missel-thrush calls, and the loud screech of the jay is heard like
a savage trumpet-cry. The woods then are full of a virginal beauty.
There is intoxication in the light air. The cold azure among the
beech-spaces or where the tall elms sway in the east wind, is, like
the sea, exquisitely desirable, exquisitely unfamiliar, inhuman, of
another world. Then follow the days when the violets creep through
the mosses at the base of great oaks, when the dust of snowbloom
on the blackthorn gives way to the trailing dog-rose, when myriads
of bees among the chestnut-blossoms fill the air with a continuous
drowsy unrest, when the cushat calls from the heart of the fir, when
beyond the green billowy roof of elm and hornbeam, of oak and beach,
of sycamore and lime and tardy ash, the mysterious bells of the South
fall through leagues of warm air, as the unseen cuckoo sails on the
long tides of the wind. Then, in truth, is there magic in the woods.
The forest is alive in its divine youth. Every bough is a vast plume
of joy: on every branch a sunray falls, or a thrush sways in song, or
the gauzy ephemeridæ dance in rising and falling aerial cones. The
wind moves with the feet of a fawn, with the wings of a dove, with the
passing breath of the white owl at dusk. There is not a spot where is
neither fragrance nor beauty nor life. From the tiniest arch of grass
and twig the shrewmouse will peep: above the shallowest rain-pool the
dragon-fly will hang in miraculous suspense, like one of the faery
javelins of Midir which in a moment could be withheld in mid-flight.
The squirrel swings from branch to branch: the leveret shakes the dew
from the shadowed grass: the rabbits flitter to and fro like brown
beams of life: the robin, the chaffinch, the ousel, call through the
warm green-glooms: on the bramble-spray and from the fern-garth the
yellow-hammer reiterates his gladsome single song: in the cloudless
blue fields of the sky the swifts weave a maze of shadow, the rooks
rise and fall in giddy ascents and descents like black galleys
surmounting measureless waves and sinking into incalculable gulfs.
Then the forest wearies of this interminable exuberance, this daily
and nightly charm of exultant life. It desires another spell, the
enchantment of silence, of dreams. One day the songs cease: the nests
are cold. In the lush meadows the hare sleeps, the corncrake calls. By
the brook the cattle stand, motionless, or with long tails rhythmically
a-swing and ears a-twitch above the moist amber-violet dreamless eyes.
The columnar trees are like phantom-smoke of secret invisible fires. In
the green-glooms of the forest a sigh is heard. A troubled and furtive
moan is audible in waste indiscoverable places. The thunder-time is
come. Now in the woods may be seen and heard and felt that secret
presence which in the spring months hid behind songs and blossom, and
later clothed itself in dense veils of green and all the magic of June.
Something is now evident, that was not evident: somewhat is entered
into the forest. The leaves know it: the bracken knows it: the secret
is in every copse, in every thicket, is palpable in every glade, is
abroad in every shadow-thridden avenue, is common to the spreading
bough and the leaning branch. It is not a rumour; for that might be the
wind stealthily lifting his long wings from glade to glade. It is not a
whisper; for that might be the secret passage of unquiet airs, furtive
heralds of the unloosening thunder. It is not a sigh; for that might be
the breath of branch and bough, of fern-frond and grass, obvious in the
great suspense. It is an ineffable communication. It comes along the
ways of silence; along the ways of sound: its light feet are on sunrays
and on shadows. Like dew, one knows not whether it is mysteriously
gathered from below or secretly come from on high: simply it is there,
above, around, beneath.
But the hush is dispelled at last. The long lances of the rain come
slanting through the branches; they break, as against invisible
barriers, and fall in a myriad pattering rush. The hoarse mutterings
and sudden crashing roar of the thunder possess the whole forest.
There are no more privacies, the secrecies are violated. From that
moment the woods are renewed, and with the renewal the secret spirit
that dwells within them withdraws, is not to be surprised, is
inaudible, indefinitely recedes, is become remote, obscure, ineffable,
incommunicable. And so, through veils of silence, and hot noons and
husht warm midnights, the long weeks of July and August go by.
In the woods of September surely the forest-soul may be surprised, will
be the thought of many. In that month the sweet incessant business of
bird and beast lessens or is at an end. The woodpecker may still tap at
the boles of gnarled oaks and chestnuts; the squirrel is more than ever
mischievously gay; on frosty mornings, when the gossamer webs are woven
across every bramble, and from frond to frond of the bronze-stained
bracken, the redbreast tries and retries the poignant new song he
has somehow learned since first he flaunted his bright canticles of
March and April from the meadow-hedge or the sunned greenness of the
beech-covert. But there is a general silence, a present suspense, while
the lime yellows, and the birch takes on her pale gold, and oak and
sycamore and ash slowly transmute their green multitudes into a new
throng clad in russet or dull red or sunset-orange. The forest is full
of loveliness: in her dusky ways faint azure mists gather. When the
fawn leaps through the fern it is no longer soundlessly: there is a
thin dry rustle, as of a dove brushing swiftly from its fastness in an
ancient yew. One may pass from covert to covert, from glade to glade,
and find the Secret just about to be revealed ... somewhere beyond
the group of birches, beside that oak it may be, just behind that
isolated thorn. But it is never quite overtaken. It is as evasive as
moonlight in the hollows of waves. When present, it is already gone.
When approached, it has the unhasting but irretrievable withdrawal
of the shadow. In October this bewildering evasion is still more
obvious, because the continual disclosure is more near and intimate.
When, after autumns of rain and wind, or the sudden stealthy advent
of nocturnal frosts, a multitude of leaves becomes sere and wan, and
then the leaves strew every billow of wind like clots of driven foam,
or fall in still wavering flight like flakes of windless snow, then,
it is surely then that the great surprise is imminent, that the secret
and furtive whisper will become a voice. And yet there is something
withheld. In November itself there are days, weeks even, when a rich
autumn survives. The oaks and ashes will often keep their red and
orange till after St. Luke’s Peace; in sheltered parts of the forest
even the plane, the sycamore, and the chestnut will flaunt their thin
leopard-spotted yellow bannerets. I remember coming upon a Spanish
chestnut in the centre of a group of all but leafless hornbeams. There
seemed to be not a leaf missing from that splendid congregation of
scarlet and amber and luminous saffron. A few yards on and even the
hardy beeches and oaks were denuded of all but a scattered and defeated
company of brown or withered stragglers. Why should that single tree
have kept its early October loveliness unchanged through those weeks of
rain and wind and frosts of midnight and dawn? There was not one of its
immediate company but was in desolate ruin, showing the bare nests high
among the stark boughs. Through the whole forest the great unloosening
had gone. Even the oaks in hollow places which had kept greenness like
a continual wave suspended among dull masses of seaweed, had begun
to yield to the vanishing call of the last voices of summer. Day by
day their scattered tribes, then whole clans, broke up the tents of
home and departed on the long mysterious exile. Yet this sentinel at
the Gate of the North stood undaunted, splendid in warrior array. The
same instinct that impels the soul from its outward home into the
incalculable void moves the leaf with the imperious desire of the grey
wind. But as, in human life, there are some who retain a splendid youth
far into the failing regions of grey hair and broken years, so in the
forest life there are trees which seem able to defy wind and rain and
the consuming feet of frost.
The most subtle charm of the woods in November is in those blue spaces
which lie at so brief a distance in every avenue of meeting boughs,
under every enclosing branch. This azure mist which gathers like still
faint smoke has the spell of silent waters, of moonlight, of the pale
rose of serene dawns. It has a light that is its own, as unique as
that unnameable flame which burns in the core of the rainbow. The
earth breathes it; it is the breath of the fallen leaves, the moss,
the tangled fern, the undergrowth, the trees; it is the breath also of
the windless grey-blue sky that leans so low. Surely, also, it is the
breath of that otherworld of which our songs and legends are so full.
It has that mysteriousness, that spell, with which in imagination we
endow the noon silences, the eves and dawns of faery twilights.
Still, the silence and the witchery of the forest solitudes in November
are of the spell of autumn. The last enchantment of mid-winter is not
yet come.
It is in ‘the dead months’ that the forest permits the last disguises
to fall away. The forest-soul is no longer an incommunicable mystery.
It is abroad. It is a communicable dream. In that magnificent nakedness
it knows its safety. For the first time it stands like a soul that has
mastered all material things and is fearless in face of the immaterial
things which are the only life of the spirit.
In these ‘dead months’ of December and January the forest lives its own
life. It is not asleep as the poets feign. Sleep has entered into the
forest, has made the deep silence its habitation: but the forest itself
is awake, mysterious, omnipresent, a creature seen at last in its naked
majesty.
One says lightly, there is no green thing left. That, of course, is a
mere phrase of relativity. There is always green fern somewhere, even
in the garths of tangled yellow-brown bracken. There is always moss
somewhere, hidden among the great serpentine roots of the beeches.
The ilex will keep its dusty green through the harvest winter: the
yew, the cypress, the holly, have no need of the continual invasion of
the winds and rains and snows. On the ash and elm the wood-ivy will
hang her spiked leaves. On many of the oaks the lovely dull green of
the mistletoe will droop in graceful clusters, the cream-white berries
glistening like innumerable pleiads of pearls. But these are lost in
the immense uniformity of desolation. They are accidents, interludes.
The wilderness knows them, as the grey wastes of tempestuous seas know
a wave here and there that lifts a huge rampart of jade crowned with
snow, or the long resiliency of gigantic billows which reveal smooth
falling precipices of azure. The waste itself is one vast desolation,
the more grey and terrible because in the mass invariable.
To go through those winter-aisles of the forest is to know an elation
foreign to the melancholy of November or to the first fall of the leaf.
It is not the elation of certain days in February, when the storm-cock
tosses his song among the wild reefs of naked bough and branch. It is
not the elation of March, when a blueness haunts the myriad unburst
buds, and the throstle builds her nest and calls to the South. It is
not the elation of April, when the virginal green is like exquisite
music of life in miraculous suspense, nor the elation of May, when
the wild rose moves in soft flame upon the thickets and the returned
magic of the cuckoo is an intoxication, nor the elation of June, when
the merle above the honeysuckle and the cushat in the green-glooms
fill the hot noons with joy, and when the long fragrant twilights are
thrilled with the passion of the nightjar. It has not this rapture
nor that delight; but its elation is an ecstasy that is its own. It
is then that one understands as one has never understood. It is then
that one loves the mystery one has but fugitively divined. Where the
forest murmurs there is music: ancient, everlasting. Go to the winter
woods: listen there, look, watch, and ‘the dead months’ will give you
a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest. Then there
is always one possible superb fortune. You may see the woods in snow.
There is nothing in the world more beautiful than the forest clothed to
its very hollows in snow. That is a loveliness to which surely none can
be insensitive. It is the still ecstasy of Nature, wherein every spray,
every blade of grass, every spire of reed, every intricacy of twig, is
clad with radiance, and myriad form is renewed in continual change as
though in the passionate delight of the white Artificer. It is beauty
so great and complex that the imagination is stilled into an aching
hush. There is the same trouble in the soul as before the starry hosts
of a winter night.
THE MOUNTAIN CHARM
A famous writer of the eighteenth century declared that to a civilised
mind the mountain solitude was naturally abhorrent. To be impressed
was unavoidable, he allowed; to love barrenness and the wilderness,
to take delight in shadow and silence, to find peace in loneliness,
was unnatural. It is humanity that redeems nature, he added in effect.
The opinion is not one commonly held now, or not admitted. But many
hold it who would not admit that they so felt or thought. I have often
asked summer wanderers if they have no wish to see the solitudes in
early spring, when the ptarmigan’s wing begins to brown; in November,
when the rust of the bracken can loom through the hill-mist like the
bronze shields of the sleeping Fianna; in December, when the polar
wind frays the peaks into columns of smoke, the loose, dry snow on
the northward foreheads of ancient summits; in January, when there
is white silence, and the blue flitting shadow of the merlin’s wing;
in March, when in the south glens the cries of lambs are a lamenting
music, and the scream of the eagle is like a faint bugle-call through
two thousand feet of flowing wind. Few, however, would really care
‘to be away from home’ in those months when snow and wind and cloud
and rain are the continually recurrent notes in the majestic Mountain
Symphony. ‘To see in a picture, to read of in a story or poem, that is
delightful; but ... well, one needs fine weather to enjoy the hills
and the moorlands.’ That, in effect, is what I have commonly heard,
or discerned in the evasive commonplace. It is not so with those who
love the mountain-lands as the cushat loves the green twilight of beech
or cedar, as the mew loves troubled waters and the weaving of foam.
I remember, a year or so ago, being impressed by the sincerity of a
lowlander whom I met on the road among the Perthshire mountains, in
a region where the hills frowned and there was silence save for the
hoarse sea-murmur of pines and the surge of a river hidden under boughs
of hornbeam and leaning birch. I forget whence he had come, but it
was from a place where the low lineaments of the fields were hardly
more than long wave-lines on a calm sea; the only heights were heaps
of ‘shag’ by old mines, scattered columnar chimney-stacks. The man had
trod far afoot, and was eager for work. I told him to go on toward
the pass for about a mile, and then to a big farm he would see to his
right, and ask there, and probably he would get work and good pay.
Some three hours later I was returning by the same road, and again met
the wayfarer, but southward set. I asked him why he had turned, for I
knew labour was wanted at the farm, and the man was strong, and seemed
willing, and was of decent mien. “No,” he said, “he had not got work up
yonder.” I knew he prevaricated, and he saw it. With sudden candour he
added, “It’s no the good man at the farm--nor the work--nor the pay.
It’s just this: I’m fair clemmed at the sight o’ yon hills ... eh, but
they’re just dreidful. I couldna’ abide them. They’re na _human_. I’ve
felt it all along since I cam up beyont the Ochils, but it’s only the
now I’ve kent weel I couldna’ live here amang them.” “Weel, first and
foremost,” he added, when I pressed him further, “it’s the silence. It
fair kills me. An’ what’s more, it _would_ kill me if I stayed. The
wife up yonder gave me a sup o’ milk an’ a bannock, an’ when I was at
them I sat on a bench an’ looked about me. Naething but hills, hills,
hills: hills an’ black gloom an’ that awfu’ silence. An’ there was a
burd--a whaup we ca’ it in the southlands--which fair shook my mind. It
went lamentin’ like a grave-bell, an’ I heard it long after it was out
o’ sicht. Then there wasn’t another sound. Na, na, wark or no wark, I’m
awa’ south.”
And so the wayfarer set foot to the white road again, the south
spelling home and human solace to him. Those dreary coal-lands, where
the green grass is wan and the thorn hedge sombre, and any wandering
water illucid and defiled, those hideous heaps of ‘shag,’ those gaunt
mine-chimneys, those squalid hamlets in a populous desolation--these
meant ‘human comfort’ to him. Or, if they did not, at least they gave
him somewhat which the mountain silence denied, which the gathered
hills withheld, which the moorland solitudes overbore and refuted.
An extreme case, no doubt. But the deep disquietude of hill silence, of
the mountain solitude, is felt by most habitual dwellers in towns and
thronged communities. There is no mountain charm for these except the
charm of release, of holiday, of novelty, of an imagined delight, of
contrast, of unwonted air, of unfamiliar aspect. One of the popular
excursion resorts in the near highlands of Argyll and Dumbarton is Loch
Goil Head. A dweller there told me last autumn that of the hundreds
who land every week, and especially on Saturdays and Fair holidays,
and generally with an impatient eagerness, by far the greater number
soon tire of the loneliness of the hills a brief way inland, and become
depressed, and with a new and perhaps perturbing eagerness seek again
the house-clad ways and the busy shore; and seem content, an hour or
two before their steamer sails, to sit where they can see the movement
of familiar life, and turn their back upon the strangely oppressive
loneliness, so perturbingly remote, so paralyzingly silent.
But for those who love the hills as comrades, what a spell, what
enchantment! To wander by old grassy ways, old ‘pack-road’ or
timeless mountain path; to go through the bracken, by grey boulders
tufted with green moss and yellow lichen, and see nothing but great
rounded shoulders or sudden peaks overhead or beyond, nothing near
but the yellow-hammer or wandering hawk or raven: to feel the pliant
heather underfoot, and smell the wild thyme, and watch a cloud trail
a purple shadow across the grey-blue slope rising like a gigantic
wave from a sea of moors, rising and falling against the azure walls,
but miraculously suspended there, a changeless vision, an eternal
phantom: to go up into solitary passes, where even the June sunshine
is hardly come ere it is gone, where the corbie screams, and the stag
tramples the cranberry scrub and sniffs the wind blowing from beyond
the scarlet-fruited rowan leaning from an ancient fallen crag: to see
slope sinking into enveloping slope, and height uplifted to uplifting
heights, and crags gathered confusedly to serene and immutable summits:
to come at last upon these vast foreheads, and look down upon the lost
world of green glens and dusky forests and many waters, to look down,
as it were, from eternity into time ... this indeed is to know the
mountain charm, this is enchantment.
For the mountain-lover it would be hard to choose any pre-eminent
season. The highland beauty appeals through each of the months, and
from day to day. But, for all the glory of purple heather and dim
amethystine slopes, it is perhaps not the early autumnal mountain
charm, so loved of every one, that ranks first in one’s heart. For
myself I think midwinter, June, and the St. Martin’s Summer of late
October, or early November, more intimately compel in charm. And of
these, I think June is not least. In midwinter the mountains have their
most ideal beauty. It is an austere charm, the charm of whiteness
and stillness. It is akin to the ineffable charm of a white flood of
moonshine on a stilled ocean; but it has that which the waters do not
have, the immobility of trance. There is nothing more wonderful in
dream-beauty than vast and snow-bound mountain-solitudes in the dead of
winter. That beauty becomes poignant when sea-fjords or inland waters
lie at the sheer bases of the white hills, and in the luminous green
or shadowy blue the heights are mirrored, so that one indeed stands
between two worlds, unknowing the phantom from the real. There is a
dream-beauty also in that lovely suspense between the last wild winds
of the equinox and ‘the snow-bringer,’ that period of hushed farewell
which we call St. Martin’s Summer. The glory of the heather is gone,
but the gold and bronze of the bracken take on an equal beauty. The
birch hangs her still tresses of pale gold, ‘that beautiful wild woman
of the hills,’ as a Gaelic poet says. The red and russet of rowan and
bramble, the rich hues of the haw, the sloe, the briony, all the golds
and browns and delicate ambers of entranced autumn are woven in a
magic web. In the mornings, the gossamer hangs on every bush of gorse
and juniper. Through the serene air, exquisitely fresh with the light
frosts which from dayset to dawn have fallen idly, rings the sweet
and thrilling song of the robin, that music of autumn so poignant, so
infinitely winsome. In what lovely words our Elizabethan Chapman wrote
of the robin, of which we also of the North speak lovingly as ‘St.
Colum’s Friend,’ ‘St. Bride’s Sweetheart,’ and the ‘little brother of
Christ’:
“... the bird that loves humans best,
That hath the bugle eyes and ruddy breast,
And is the yellow autumn’s nightingale.”
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.
Often I have thought of this when lying in the mountain-grass beside
one of those ancient lichened boulders which strew our hillsides.
The lichen is the least of the grasses--and let us use the term in
its poetic sense--but how lovely a thing it is; almost as lovely in
endless variety of form as the frost-flower. In a sense they are
strangely akin, these two; the frost-flower, which is the breath of
Beauty itself, lasting a briefer hour than the noontide dew, and the
moss-flower which the barren rock sustains through all the changing
seasons.
Who is that Artificer who has subtly and diversely hidden the secret
of rhythm in the lichen of the rock and in the rock’s heart itself; in
the frost-flower, so perfect in beauty that a sunbeam breathes it away;
in the falling star, a snowflake in the abyss, yet with the miraculous
curve in flight which the wave has had, which the bent poplar has had,
which the rainbow has had, since the world began? The grey immemorial
stone and the vanishing meteor are one. Both are the offspring of the
Eternal Passion, and it may be that between the æon of the one and
the less than a minute of the other there shall not, in the divine
reckoning, be more than the throb of a pulse. For who of us can
measure even Time, that the gnat measures as well as we, or the eagle,
or the ancient yew, or the mountain whose granite brows are white with
ages--much less Eternity, wherein Time is but a vanishing pulse?
THE TIDES
I remember that one of the most strange and perturbing pleasures of
my childhood was in watching, from a grassy height, the stealthy
motions of the tides. The fascination never waned, nor has it yet
waned: to-day, as then, I know at times the old thrill, almost the
old fear, when through a white calm or up some sea-loch I watch those
dark involutions, in sudden twists and long serpentine curves, as
the eddies of the tide force their mysterious way. For one thing my
childish imagination was profoundly impressed by the words of an old
islander whom I had asked where the tides came from and what they were
and had they names. We were on the steep slope of a small grassy hill,
and overlooked the eastern end of an island where the troubled waters
of a _caoileas_ or strait to the south met the vast placid reach of
ocean on the north. Through the lustrous green of the Sound, fleckt
with long mauve shadows or clouded here and there with great splatches
of purple-brown; and, again, to the left through the near calm heave
of deep water so blue that as a child I could not understand why the
shells which were washed up from it were not blue also: to right and to
left I saw the sudden furtive motions of the flowing tide. I had often
watched the blind-worm move thus through the coarse sea-grasses, and
again and again had seen the adder dart through the bracken like one
of those terrible living arrows of Faerie of which I had heard: often,
too, I had followed the shadow-swift underwave glide of the hunting
seal: and once, in a deep brown pool in Morven, when I was looking with
trembling hope for the floating hair or dim white face of a kelpie, I
had seen an otter rise from the depths ... rise like a fantastic elfin
face and half-human figure in a dream ... make a soundless sinuous
plunge and in less than a moment vanish utterly, still without sound
or the least ruffling of the brown depths. So, it was natural that I
should associate those mysterious gliding things of the sea with these
sinuous things of the grass and heather and the shadowy pool. They,
too, I thought, were furtive and sinister. There was something as of
the same evil enchantment in their abrupt and inexplicable appearing
and in their soundless departures. Thus it was I felt no surprise when
my old island-friend Sheumais remarked to me:
“They are creatures of the sea.”
“What are they, Sheumais?” I urged; “are they great eels, or adders,
or what? Can they put death on a swimmer? Have you ever caught one?
Have----”
“Ay, for sure they might put death on a swimmer: and by the same token
I will be remembering that Rùaridh Stewart, the Appin poet, has a
_rann_ about them as the Hounds of the Sea.”
“And have they names?”
“For sure, that: _Luath_ (Swift) and _Gorm-Dhu_ (Blue-Black),
_Luath-Donn_ (Fleet-brown-one) and _Braco_ (Speckled), _Rùn-fo-tuinne_
(Underwave Secret) and _Cu-Bhais_ (Hound of Death), and others that I
will be forgetting.”
“But, Sheumais,” I persisted, “are they male-seafolk and women-seafolk
like the seals, and have they little ones, and where do they go, and
where do the big tides come from?”
“Well, well, I will not be knowing that, though, for sure, it is
likely. But as to where they come from, and where they go, there will
be none in all the world who can tell that; no, not one. They will be
just like the wind, that no one knows the road of, behind or before.
Ay, the sea’s just like the grey road: the green road an’ the grey
road, they show no tracks. The wind an’ the tides, they just come an’
they just go. ‘Blind as the wind,’ ‘blind as the tide’ ... ay, it may
be; but not so blind as we are, for they know their way, an’ brightest
noon an’ darkest night, an’ summer an’ winter, an’ calm an’ storm, are
one an’ the same to them.”
It is long ago now since I heard these words from old Sheumais Macleod,
but I am certain (so deeply did they impress my childish imagination,
and sink into a child’s mind) that I repeat them almost exactly. I
had no hesitation in believing in _Gorm-Dhu_ and _Luath-Donn_, and
the rest, and took these names to be real names of actual creatures,
as _Daoine-Vhara_ (folk of the sea) for seals, or as _piocach_ for
the brown saithe I was wont to watch swimming amid the fronds of the
seaweed, or as _sgàdan_ for the flashing herring whose shoals so often
made a dazzle in the offing beyond the strait, and whose radiant scales
glorified as with gems the nets hauled up in the moonshine or in the
pale rose and cowslip-yellow of August dawns.
And, in truth, I am not much the wiser now. There is no great gain in
wisdom in the knowledge that the tides are not mysterious creatures
of the deep, and are nameless as the winds, as homeless as they, as
silent, furtive, as formless, as incalculable almost, as variable. The
old islander knew how to turn into service their comings and goings,
how to meet them when friendly, how to evade them when hostile, how
to wonder continually at their strange beauty, how to reverence the
terrible order of their rhythmic flow and ebb. What matter if, also,
his old-world Gaelic imagination imaged to him these dark forces of the
sea as living creatures; not of flesh and blood as the slim brown seals
who, too, can glide not less swiftly and secretly through dusky green
water-ways; not even of such consistency as the tide-wrack floating
on the wave, or the dim, wandering medusæ which drift like pale,
quenchless fires in the untroubled stillness of the twilit underworld;
but at least of the company of lightning, of fire, of the wind, of
dew, of shadow ... creatures without form as we know form, but animate
with a terrible and mysterious life of their own--a secret brotherhood
among the visible and invisible clans of the world. What matter if,
remembering songs and old tales and incalculable traditions, he thought
of them with names, as the ‘fleet-brown-one,’ as ‘swift-darkness,’ as
‘the dark-courser,’ as ‘the untameable,’ as ‘the hound of death’?
These tell us neither more nor less (to many of us more, not less) than
the abstruse algebraical formulæ of Newton and Laplace. The imagination
does not move like flame among intricate calculations, though the mind
may be compelled and convinced; and some of us at least would learn
more of the tides and their occult nature and laws from an old islesman
telling of _lionadh_ and _srùth-mara_ than from the bewildering maze of
the five-and-fifty columns which the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ devotes
to the subject.
Everywhere this tidal mystery, this beauty of flood and ebb, is to
be seen ... along whatever coasts sea-waters move or wherever they
penetrate. The ‘tideless Mediterranean’ is but a phrase. Even along
the shores of Malta and Sicily there is a perceptible rise and fall,
and at a thousand points between Marseilles or Tangier and Venice or
Cape Matapan the tidal movement is as mysterious and impressive as
among the shoals of Ushant or in the Norsk fjords. There are few places
where the trained eye could not perceive a difference of rise or fall.
I recollect being shown a spot on the Argive coast of the Peloponnesus
where, it was said, the tidal difference was non-existent. On that
very day, a day of windless calm, I noticed a fall of over a foot in
depth. Dark, steep rocks shelved to deep waters, and to all ordinary
appearance there was nothing to indicate the slightest variance between
flow and ebb. Even a Morean Greek declared ‘there is no flood, no ebb,
here.’
But, in our own home-waters, what marvellous changes take place
under the strong continuous pull of the lunar reins. Think of wind
and flood-tide on the Channel coasts, with the strange sound as of
a murmurous host confusedly marching: think of the daily two-fold
flooding of estuaries, and the sinuous invasion of the sea past curving
banks and among remote inland meadows. Are rivers not enhanced in
mystery when through the downward flow a salt serpentine envoy from the
distant sea forces its way, revealing itself in circuitous eddies, in
dark revolving rings, in troubled surface-seethe: bringing to the flags
and rushes, to the leaning grasses and gold kingcup and purple mallow
that salt lip, which a score or half-score miles away had been laid on
the sea-grapes of the bladder-wrack, or on the slow-involving tresses
of the twisting long-weed. Then there is that miraculous halt, when
the cold hand of the tide can reach no farther: when at a boat’s helm
a curl of dark brackish water will indolently lapse, while at the prow
the clear-brown rippling rush will be fresh with gathered rains and
dews and the unsullied issues of wellsprings and sunlit sources.
The tide-flow may be more beautiful and obvious seen from the high
shores of certain estuaries, as, say, from the Falmouth uplands, or
from the hillsides of our narrow Highland sea-lochs, but the mind is
deeplier impressed and the imagination compelled by the more obscure,
menacing, and almost terrifying swift arrivals along vast shallow
estuaries, such as The Wash or the inner reaches of Solway Firth or by
the Sands o’ Dee. With what abrupt turbulence the calms are violated,
with what a gathering sound the invisible host is marshalled, with
what impetuous surge the immeasurable sortie advances! Of a sudden
those little shallows in the sands, those little weed-hung pools
below slippery rocks covered with mussel and dog-whelk, shiver. A
faint undulation thrills the still small world. A shrimp darts from a
sand-mound: a blood-red anemone thrusts out feathered antennæ: now one,
now another shell-fish stirs, lifts, gapes. It is the response of the
obscure, the insignificant, and the silent, to that mighty incalculable
force which is hastening from the fathomless depths and across
countless leagues of the great Sea. Soon the flood will come: perhaps
in furtive swiftness and silence, perhaps with a confused multitudinous
noise among which are inchoate cries and fragmentary bewildering echoes
of muffled songs and chants, perhaps as in charging hordes of wild
sea-horses where the riders are not seen in the dazzle of spray nor
their shouting heard in the tumult of wave dashed against wave and
billow hurled on billow.
To be in some such place ... say, again, where the Breton tide races
against the flank of Normandy and in a few minutes isolates Mont St.
Michel from the mainland; or where the Northumbrian flood pours across
the narrow sands of Lindisfarne; or, more than everywhere else I think,
where the fierce Atlantic tides leap with bewildering surge and clamour
across the vast sea-gates of Uist and rush like a cataract into the
Hebrid Sea ... to be in some such place and at the first mysterious
signals of the oncoming flood, by night, is to meet the unforgettable,
and, as Blake says, to be at one with the eternal mystery.
Flow and ebb, ebb and flow ... it is that ancient inexplicable
mystery, the everlasting and unchanging rhythm which holds star to
star in infinite procession, which lifts and lowers the poles of our
sun-wheeling world, which compels the great oceans to arise and follow
the mysterious bidding of the moon. It is wonderful that the moon
travels along the equator at the rate of a thousand miles an hour: but
more wonderful that these loose, formless, blind and insensate waters
should awake at the touch of that pale hand, should move to it and
follow it as the flocks of the hills to the voice of the shepherd.
Flow and ebb, ebb and flow ... it is the utterance of the divine law,
the eternal word of Order. It is life itself. What life is there, from
the phosphorescent atom in the running wave to the enfranchised soul
stepping westward beyond the twilights of time, that is not subject to
this ineffable rhythmic law. The tides of the world, the tides of life:
the grey sap, the red blood, the secret dews, the tameless seas, birth
and death, the noons and midnights of the mind of man, the evening dusk
and the morning glory of the soul ... one and all move inevitably, and
in one way: in one way come, and go, and come again.
“_Mar a bha,
Mar a tha,
Mar a bhitheas
Gu brath_
* * * * *
_Ri tràgadh,
’S ri lionadh._”
“_As it was,
As it is,
As it shall be
Evermore_
* * * * *
_With the ebb,
With the flow._”
THE HILL-TARN
Isolated, in one of the wildest and loneliest mountain-regions of the
Highlands of Ross, I know a hill-tarn so rarely visited that one might
almost say the shadow of man does not fall across its brown water from
year’s end to year’s end. It lies on the summit of a vast barren hill,
its cradle being the hollow of a crater. Seven mountains encircle
Maoldhu from north, south, east, and west. One of these is split like
a hayfork, and that is why it is called in Gaelic the Prong of Fionn.
Another, whose furrowed brows are dark with the immemorial rheum of the
Atlantic, is called the Organ of Oisin, because at a height of about
two thousand feet it shows on its haggard front a black colonnade of
basalt, where all the winds of the west make a wild and desolate music.
I have heard its lamentation falling across the hill-solitudes and down
through the mountain-glens with a sound as of a myriad confused sobs
and cries, a sound that is now a forlorn ecstasy and now the voice of
the abyss and of immeasurable desolation. Another, that on the east,
is an unscalable cone, from whose crest, when sunrise flames the
serrated crags into a crown of burning bronze, the golden eagle sways
like a slow-rising and slow-falling meteor. All day, save for a brief
hour at noon, shadow dwells about its knees, and never lifts from the
dark grassy lochan at its feet. It is called Maol Athair-Uaibhreach,
the Hill of the Haughty Father: I know not why. ‘The Haughty Father’
is a Gaelic analogue for the Prince of Darkness--son of Saturn, as he
is called in an old poem: ‘God’s Elder Brother,’ as he is named in a
legend that I have met or heard of once only--a legend that He was God
of this world before ‘Mac Greinne’ (lit.: Son of the Sun) triumphed
over him, and drove him out of the East and out of the South, leaving
him only in the West and in the North two ancient forgotten cities of
the moon, that in the West below the thunder of grey seas and that in
the North under the last shaken auroras of the Pole.
It is not easy to reach this tarn of Maoldhu even when the hillways are
known. The mountain-flanks have so vast a sweep, with such wide tracts
of barren declivity, where the loose stones and boulders seem to hang
in the air like a grey suspended fruit though the first tempest will
set them rolling in avalanche; there are so many hidden ravines, and
sudden precipices that lean beneath tangled brows like smooth appalling
faces; on the eastern slopes the mountain-sheep cannot climb more than
halfway; on the south and west the wailing curlews are in continual
flight above wide unfrontiered reaches of peat-bog and quaking morass;
so many crags lead abruptly to long shelving ledges shelterless and
slippery as ice, and twice an abyss of a thousand feet falls sheer from
loose rock covered by treacherous heather for a yard or more beyond the
last gnarled, twisted roots.
But, when it is once reached, is there any solitude in the world more
solitary than here. The tarn, or lochan rather--for if it is not wide
enough to be called a loch it is larger than the ordinary tarn one is
familiar with on high moorlands and among the hills--has no outlook
save to the lonely reach of sky just above it. A serrated crest of
herbless and lifeless precipice circles it. On the lower slopes a rough
grass grows, and here and there a little bog-myrtle may be seen. At one
end a small dishevelled array of reed disputes the water-edge, in thin,
straggling, disconsolate lines. There is nothing else. Sometimes the
ptarmigan will whirr across it, though they do not love crossing water.
Sometimes the shadow of an eagle’s wing darkens the already obscure
depths. But the mountain-sheep never reach this height, and even the
red deer do not come here to drink these still, brown waters: ‘One sees
no antlers where the heather ceases,’ as the shepherds say. The clouds
rise above the crests of the west and pass beyond the crests of the
east: snow, the steel-blue sleet, the grey rains, sweep past overhead.
In summer, a vast cumulus will sometimes for hours overlean the barren
crater and fill the tarn with a snowy wonderland and soft abysses of
rose and violet: sometimes a deep, cloudless azure will transmute it to
a still flame of unruffled, shadowless blue. At night, when it is not a
pit of darkness to which the upper darkness is twilight, it will hold
many stars. For three hours Arcturus will pulsate in it like a white
flame. Other planets will rise, and other stars. Their silver feet
tread the depths in silence. Sometimes the moon thrusts long yellow
lances down into its brooding heart, or will lie on its breast like the
curled horn of the honeysuckle, or, in autumn, like a floating shell
filled with fires of phosphorescence. Sunset never burns there, though
sometimes the flush of the afterglow descends as on soft impalpable
wings from the zenith. At dawn, in midsummer, long scarlet lines will
drift from its midmost to the south and west, like blood-stained shafts
and battle-spears of a defeated aerial host.
Few sounds are heard by that mountain-tarn. The travelling cloud
lets fall no echo of its fierce frost-crashing shards. Dawn and noon
and dusk are quiet-footed as mist. The stars march in silence. The
springing Northern Lights dance in swift fantastic flame, but are
voiceless as the leaping shadows in a wood. Only those other wayfarers
of the mountain-summit, tempest, thunder, the streaming wind, the snow
coming with muffled rush out of the north, wild rains and whirling
sleet, the sharp crackling tread of the hosts of frost: only these
break the silence; or, at times, the cries of ‘the eldest children of
the hill’ as the mountain-Gael calls the eagle, the hill-fox, and the
ptarmigan--the only creatures that have their home above the reach of
the heather and in the grey stony wildernesses where only the speckled
moss and the lichen thrive.
When I was last at this desolate and remote tarn I realised the truth
of that hill-saying. After the farthest oaks on Sliabh Gorm, as the
ridge to the south-west is called and up which alone is a practicable
if rough and often broken way, came scattered groups and then isolated
trees of birch and mountain-ash. Thereafter for a long way the heather
climbed. Then it gave way more and more to bracken. In turn the bracken
broke like the last faint surf against huge boulders and waste stony
places. The grouse called far below. The last deer were browsing
along their extreme pastures, some five hundred to eight hundred feet
below the precipitous bastions of Maoldhu. Higher than they I saw a
circling hawk and three ravens flying slowly against the wind. Then
came the unpeopled wilderness, or so it seemed till I heard the wail of
a solitary curlew (that spirit of the waste, for whom no boggy moors
lie too low and desolate, for whom no mountain-ranges are too high
and wild and solitary), and once, twice, and again in harsh response
but faint against the wind, the barking of a hill-fox and its mate.
All life had ceased, I thought, after that, save an eagle which in a
tireless monotony swung round and round the vast summit of Maoldhu.
But suddenly, perhaps a hundred feet above me, six or seven ptarmigan
rose with a whirr, made a long sailing sweep, and settled (slidingly
and gradually as flounders in shallow waters among grey pebbles and
obscuring sand-furrows) among the lichened boulders and loose disarray
of speckled granite and dark and grey basalt and trap--an ideal cover,
for even a keen following gaze could not discern the living from the
inanimate.
Truly the eagle, the hill-fox, and the ptarmigan are ‘the eldest
children of the hill.’ The stag may climb thus high too at times, for
outlook, or for the intoxication of desolation and of illimitable
vastness; sometimes the hawks soar over the wilderness; even the
mountain-hares sometimes reach and race desperately across these high
arid wastes. But these all come as men in forlorn and lonely lands
climb the grey uninhabitable mountains beyond them, seeking to know
that which they cannot see beneath, seeking often for they know not
what. They are not dwellers there. The stag, that mountain-lover,
cannot inhabit waste rock; the red grouse would perish where the
ptarmigan thrives and is content.
How little has been written about these birds of the mountain-brow.
What poetry is in their name, for those who know the hills. They dwell
higher than the highest June-flight of the tireless swift, higher than
the last reaches of the sunrise-leaping larks. Cities might crumble
away in pale clouds of dust, floods might whelm every lowland, great
fires might devour the forests and the red insatiable myriad of flame
lap up the last high frontiers of bracken and climbing heather, and
the ptarmigan would know nothing of it, would not care. Their grey
home would be inviolate. No tempest can drive them forth. Even the
dense snows of January do not starve them out. Do they not mock them
by then taking the whiteness of the snow for their own? They have
nothing to fear save the coming of a black frost so prolonged and
deathly that even the sunfire in the eagle’s blood grows chill, and the
great pinions dare no more face the icy polar breath. ‘They’ll be the
last things alive when the world is cold,’ said an old gillie to me,
speaking of these storm-swept lichen-fed children of the upper-wild.
The same old gillie once saw a strange sight at my mountain-tarn. He
had when a youth climbed Maoldhu to its summit in midwinter, because of
a challenge that he could not do what no other had ever done at that
season. He started before dawn, but did not reach the lochan till a red
fire of sunset flared along the crests. The tarn was frozen deep, and
for all the pale light that dwelled upon it was black as basalt, for a
noon-tempest had swept its surface clear of snow. At first he thought
small motionless icebergs lay in it, but wondered at their symmetrical
circle. He descended as far as he dared, and saw that seven wild-swans
were frozen on the tarn’s face. They had alit there to rest, no doubt:
but a fierce cold had numbed them, and an intense frost of death had
suddenly transfixed each as they swam slowly circlewise as is their
wont. They may have been there for days, perhaps for weeks. A month
later the gillie repeated his arduous and dangerous feat. They were
still there, motionless, ready for flight as it seemed.
How often in thought I have seen that coronal of white swans above
the dark face of that far, solitary tarn: in how many dreams I have
listened to the rustle of unloosening wings, and seen seven white
phantoms rise cloud-like, and like clouds at night drift swiftly into
the dark; and heard, as mournful bells through the solitudes of sleep,
the _honk-honk_ of the wild-swans traversing the obscure forgotten ways
to the secret country beyond sleep and dreams and silence.
AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR
When one hears of ‘the dead months,’ of ‘dead December’ and ‘bleak
January,’ the best corrective is to be found in the coppice or by
the stream-side, by the field-thicket, in the glens, and even on the
wide moors if the snow is not everywhere fallen, a coverlet so dense
and wide that even the juniper has not a green spike to show, or the
dauntless bunting a clean whin-branch to call from on the broomieknowe.
Even the common sayings reveal a knowledge hidden from those to whom
winter is ‘a dead season’ ... and it is a continual surprise to find
how many people believe that from the fall of the leaf or the first
sleet and snow, till the thrush doubles and trebles his note in the
February wet-shine, that bird and insect and all green life have gone,
that all Nature is dead or asleep. Thus, for example, ‘as keen in
the hearing as a winter-plover’ must have been uttered, when first
said, by a watcher of the multiform bird-life of our winter-fields and
fallow lands, one who knew that the same drama of life and death is
enacted in midwinter as in midspring or midsummer, a drama only less
crowded, less complex and less obvious, but not less continual, not
less vital for the actors. Who that has watched the pee-wits seeking
worms on ploughed lands at midwinter, and seen them poise their
delicate heads and listen for the phantom rustle of a worm in this
clod or under yonder fallow, while the greedy but incapable seamews,
inland come from frost bound coasts or on the front of prolonged gales,
hear nothing of ‘the red people’ and trust only to bulk and fierce
beak to snatch the prey from hungry plover-bills ... who that has
seen this can fail to recognise the aptness of the saying, ‘as keen
in the hearing as a winter-plover’? Who that has watched the ebb and
flow of lark-life, resident and immigrant; the troubled winter-days of
the field-travellers (as the familiar word ‘fieldfare’ means) and the
wandering thrushes; the vagrant rooks, the barn-haunting hoodie; the
yellow-hammer flocks and the tribes of the finch; the ample riverside
life, where heron and snipe, mallard and moor-hen, wren and kingfisher,
and even plover and the everywhere adaptable starling are to be found
with ease by quick eyes and careful ears: who that has seen the sudden
apparition of the bat, or the columnar dance of the ephemeridæ, or the
flight of the winter-moth along the dishevelled hedgerows: or who that,
besides the mistletoe and the ivy, the holly and the fir, the box and
the late-flowering clematis, and many other of the green and flowering
clans of the forest and the garden, has noted the midwinter-blooming
shepherd’s purse, healing groundsel, bright chickweed, and red
deadnettle, can think of nature as lifeless at this season? When amid
the rains and storms of December an old gardener, instead of saying
that spring was on the move, remarked to me that ‘’Twill be starling
days soon,’ he gave voice to a truth of observation as impressive as it
is beautiful. For often December has not lapsed before the mysterious
breeding-change of the Vita Nuova, the New Life that spreads like a
flowing wave so early in the coming year will begin to be obvious on
the dun-hued lapwing, on the inland-wandering gull, and even on one or
other of the small ‘clan of the bushes’ more dear and familiar to us.
On none, however, is the change so marked as on the blithe starling,
surely the bird of cheerfulness, for he will sing (does he ever cease
that ever-varying call or flute or whistle of his?) when the lark
cannot rise in the polar air, when the missel-thrush will not throw a
challenge on the wet wind, and long before the most jubilant great-tit
in the forest will ring his early tinkling bell under leafless boughs.
For, even at Christmastide, though rarely perhaps quite so early, the
dark bill will suddenly yellow, and a green and purple sheen will
come over the russet plumage. Already Nature has looked northward
again. And, when she looks, there is at once a first movement of the
infinite sweet trouble of the New Life once more. The Creative Spirit
is come again from the sun-ways of the South. ‘’Twill be starling days
soon’--what is that but a homely way of saying that the old year has
not lapsed before the new year has already stirred with the divine
throes of rebirth. ‘The King is dead: Long live the King!’ is the human
analogue. There is no interregnum. The cuckoo may have fled before the
swallow, the landrail before the wild swan, but during the grey ebb
of autumn ten thousand wings have rustled in the dawn as the migrants
from oversea descend at last on our English and Scottish shores. A
myriad host may have fled at the equinox, or lingered till the wet
winds of the west and the freezing blasts of the north swept them
from November; but on those east winds from Norway and the Baltic,
from Jutland and Friesland, on those south winds leaping upward from
the marshes of Picardy and the Breton heathlands and from all of the
swarm-delivering South behind, on those south-west gales warm with the
soft air of the isles of the west, and wet with the foam over lost Ys
and sunken Lyonesse, what an incalculable host has come hitherward.
Like great fans, the invisible pinions of the Bird-God, that Winged
Spirit whom a Finnish legend images in continual suspense at the Cross
ways of the Four Winds, beat this way and that: so that when already
the lament of the wild-geese in storm-baffled flight from the South
ulules in our norland dawns, clouds of larks are gathered like dust
from the North-Sea lands, and are blown upon our shores, a multitude of
thrush turn westward, the rook and the hoodie rise on the Danish wind,
and yonder shadow drifting over the woods of Norway is none other than
ten thousand fieldfares whose congregation will soon be spilt like rain
upon our fields and pastures.
When is the turn of the year? We have certainly not to wait till the
missel-thrush calls down the wind on the moist south-wester that comes
in February. The changing seasons are indifferent to our calendars.
Autumn may burn the lime and chestnut while Summer is still in her
glory; Summer may steal back upon us through the September haze, or
even after we have heard the dry rustle in the woods of October. We are
familiar with the return of halcyon days when St. Luke’s Peace follows
the wind Euroclydon, or when St. Martin’s summer gleams like a quiet
sunset on the stormy brows of Winter. In mid-December the gnat may
still be seen spinning her dance by the hedgerow, the warmth-loving
bat may still wheel through silent afternoon dusks, the robin will
pitch his blithe song from holly to holly, the hedgesparrow will chase
the winter moth, the chaffinch will challenge the marauding tit. In
January, when the snow-lids open and the blue is seen, a lark will
spray his sudden music from far up in the pale azure, and as the long
notes tinkle and the interwoven song falls down the blue invisible
ways, we almost imagine that sky-glimpse to be the very face of spring.
Thus we have to wait for no day on which to note from the calendar
that the New Year is come, or on which to exclaim that Winter is gone
and Spring has arrived. A day may come, in February, perhaps, when,
suddenly, one will realise, as after sleep one realises one is awake,
that the hands of the South are in the woods, that the eyes of the
South are looking into the white sleep of blossom and flower, that the
breath of the South has awakened love, has stirred music in the hearts
of all the clans of song. But if we had not ourselves been asleep we
should not have waited thus long for the exquisite surprise. We should
have known the divine conspiracy by which the North and South are
lovers, and the West comrade to the East. The conspiracy of the eternal
passion by which power desires power, and dominion lusteth after
dominion: so that all the effort of the North is to touch the lips of
the South, all the dream of the East is to reach the sunset-gardens of
the West. We should have known, when out of December frost or January
snow the redbreast thrilled a canticle of joy, or the russet moth
sought his wingless love in windless flame-set twilights, that the Grey
Lover already felt the breath from those ardent lips. We should have
realised that when across the snow-silence the fieldfares no longer
edged southward, that when on the upland-pasture the lapwing began his
bridal change and in the bare orchard the starling began to glisten
as though he had bathed at the edge of the rainbow, or to wonder, in
some ice-set mirror, at his dun beak now grown yellow as the sheltered
crocus he knows of under the garden-yew ... we should have realised
that while this dark-browed barbarian from the North slept, the fair
woman of the South had passed smiling by, and kissed him as she passed.
The breeding-change that may be seen even before Christmas, the
January stir that becomes so obvious a week or so, or any day, after
the New Year is come, here and now we are at the turn of the year. By
mid-January, even, here and there, the song-thrush and the missel may
have begun to build, and even the great-tit’s bell may tinkle in the
coppice or wind-spared russet oak-glade. Already the snowdrop and the
Christmas-rose, the green-white aconite and the pale winter-iris are
become old acquaintances: many a primrose may have adventured in shy
retreats: any day a wandering minstrel will spill a tinkle of music
from among the first yellow spray of hazel catkins, the hedgesparrow
may unloosen song under the early-opening woodbine-buds, the
corn-bunting may crack his fairy-hammer or the wren try his new-year
flute among the yellowing gorse: any day, at the sight of the first
nomad daisies or the first gay vagrant dandelion, the yellow-hammer may
become a lover and a poet. It is this unchanging ‘any-day’ element
that redeems even the longest and dreariest midwinter; the sense of the
ever-moving ichor in the eternal veins; the inward exultation at the
ever-quickening and ever-slowing, but never-ceasing fans of life and
death.
Yesterday, rain-fog; to-day, frost-mist. But how fascinating each. How
vast and menacing the familiar oaks looked, leaning gigantic over dim
lapsing hedgerows. How phantom-like and processional, the elms stealing
into view one after the other; the birches disclosing tresses wet with
dews from the secret woods they are gliding from to regain the secret
lands beyond the misty river where I can hear the mallard call, like
a sudden tocsin among the falling towers and silent avalanches of
Cloudland.
It is desolate here, where I stand.
“_Cinnidh feanntag’s a ghàradh
’N uair thig faillinn ’san ròs_”
“_Nettles grow in the garden,
While the roses decay._”
A long way off yet till the wood-thrush rings his falling chime from
the April-Tree or French-Broom, as the laburnum is called in some parts
of the Highlands. I know a wood where a great _Bealaidh Fhrangach_
sleeps, to awake months hence in sun-gold beauty. The wood-thrush will
be its flute. Already I have to-day cut a slip from a garden-laburnum,
for a friend who wants ‘a flute of the April-Tree’ (_feadan na Craobh
Abraon_) ... for there is no timber better for the whistlewood of the
bagpipe than this. And what more fit for the Strayed Pan, if perchance
he follow the Phantom Call in the Hills of the North? But see ... the
mist has gone like a haze from blue water. I hear starling-music over
yonder in the _Talamh nan Ramh_, as Ossian calls the Country of the
Woods. _The Flute of the April-Tree_, and snow at my feet! ‘The Flute
of the April-Tree’: it has the yellow and white magic of spring in it.
THE SONS OF THE NORTH WIND
Down thro’ the Northlands
Come the White Brothers,
One clad in foam
And one mailed in water--
Foam white as bear-felt,
Water like coat of mail.
_Snow is the Song of Me_,
Singeth the one;
_Silence the Breath of Me_,
Whispers the other.
So sings a Swedish poet, a lineal descendant of one of the Saga-men
whose songs the vikings carried to the ends of the world of that day.
The song is called ‘The Sons of the North Wind,’ and the allusion is
to an old ballad-saga common in one form or another throughout all the
countries of both the Gall and the Gael ... from Finland to the last of
the island-kingdoms between Ultima Thule and the Gaelic West. The White
Brothers are familiar indeed, though with us they come oftener clothed
with beauty than with terror, with strange and beautiful new life
rather than with the solemnity and dread aspect of death.
Among the Gaelic hills we have a prose variant of ‘The Sons of the
North Wind,’ which I suppose is still told to children by the fireglow
on winter evenings, as, when a child, the present writer was told
it and retold it by the fireglow on many a winter evening when the
crackling fall of icicles from fir-sprays near the window could be
heard, or the sudden shuffle of snow in the declivities of the steep
glen hard-by. The story is generally told as a tale, but sometimes the
teller chants it as a _duan_ or poem. For it is more a poem than a
prose narrative on the lips of Gaelic speakers.
The North Wind had three sons. These Sons of the North Wind were
called White-Feet and White-Wings and White-Hands. When White-Feet
and White-Wings and White-Hands first came into our world from the
invisible palaces, they were so beautiful that many mortals died from
beholding them, while others dared not look, but fled affrighted
into woods or obscure places. So when these three sons of the
Great Chieftain saw that they were too radiant for the eyes of the
earth-bound they receded beyond the gates of the sunset, and took
counsel with the Allfather. When, through the gates of dawn, they came
again they were no longer visible to men, nor, in all the long grey
reaches of the years, has any since been seen of mortal eyes. How are
they known, these Sons of the North Wind? They were known of old, they
are known still, only by the white feet of one treading the waves of
the sea; and by the white rustle and sheen of a myriad tiny plumes as
the other unfolds great pinions above hills and valleys, woodlands and
garths, and the homes of men; and by the white silence of dream that
the third lays upon moving waters, and the windless boughs of trees,
upon the reed by the silent loch, upon the grass by the silent tarn,
upon the bracken by the unfalling hill-stream hanging like a scarf
among the rock and mountain-ash. We know them no more by their ancient
names or in their immortal body, but only thus by the radiance of their
passing, and we call them the Polar Wind, and Snow, and Ice.
It is at this season, in all northern lands, that the miracle of the
snow-change, the new beauty of the snow-world, is transcendent. Truly,
it is miraculous, that change: that new world, what a revelation it
is, showing us the familiar as we have never known it or have of it
but a dreamlike remembrance, showing it to us at times as we can
hardly conceive it. To the continual element of surprise much has to
be attributed, in our country at least. In lands like Scandinavia and
Russia the periodicity and uniformity of the snow-raiment of earth
take much from this element of surprise. Hardly have the inhabitants
grown used to the greenness of grass and sprouting grain and fluttering
leaf, after the long months of a silent whiteness become dreadful as
a shroud, when a grey pall is spun out of the east once more and out
of the north comes the wind of death, and the leaf is gone away on the
polar air, the grain is gathered or withered, the sere grass fades like
wintry grey-green seas fading into continual foam.
Not so with us, who have those visitors, who can be so dread even here,
for so short a time. The dark sword-thrust of the ice, compelling
moving waters to silence and the blue rigour of steel, may reign
for weeks in the Anglian fen-lands. Dense mantles of snow may cover
the hills of the north for months, and the foreheads of Nevis and
Schiehallion be white from the autumnal equinox till cuckoo-cry: for
weeks the hill-fox and the mountain-hare may not drink at the frozen
tarns, the moor-pastures may be lost to deer and sheep, and only the
ptarmigan survive in the waste white places: for a week or two the
boughs of the oak and chestnut, the plumes of the spruce and hemlock,
the tresses of the larch and birch, may bend with the unmelting
snowfall. But, at the worst, it is never long before a wind out of
the south, or from the wet mouth of the west, breathes upon the fens,
and the silence is become a faint stir, a whisper, a rustle; till
the moveless steel is become a film, to be gathered some noon, like
May-dew from the thickets, the autumn-frost from the whin and gorse.
It is never long till the _meh-ing_ of the sheep is again a sweet
lamentation upon the hill-pastures, or till the fox dusts the last
snow from his root-roof in the wintry glen, or till the jay screams in
the woodlands as from fir-plume and oak-bough slip or fall with heavy
thump their unloosened burthens. True, the Sons of the North Wind,
as in the Highland West and North we know so well and often to such
bitter cost, may come to us with suddenness of tempest, raging in their
mysterious wrath, and may long endure, trampling upon life, as, in the
old legend, the gigantic phantom-men of the Northern Lights trample
the souls of the dead condemned to Ifurin, the Gaelic hell. Every year
there is sorrow upon some strath, grief in the glens, lamentation by
hillside and moor. From the Ord of Sutherland to Land’s End there may
be a tale of disaster. Snow-drift, snow-storm, snow-fog may paralyse
communications and bring deep anxiety or irremediable grief to an
incalculable number. Yet, we must admit that even our severest winter
is but a fierce reminder of times long past for us, the times of
the mail-coach, the rude cart, the mountain-pony, that the worst we
ever have is tolerable beside the bleak wretchedness of Pomerania,
the frightful cold of Esthonia, the death-in-life of Muscovy--to say
nothing of lands still more wild and remote.
One cannot say, here is snow at its loveliest, here is ice in a
unique beauty. Frozen lochs by moonlight, frozen fens under the pale
azure of cloudless noons, dark winding rivers, lifeless seemingly in
the grip of frost, traversed by starshine under overhanging boughs,
lagoons where the dark-blue or steel-blue ice mirrors the drifting
cloud or the flying skater, village-ponds, canals, the water-ways of
towns and cities, in all, in each, the radiant miracle is evident.
Like moonshine, this beauty of ice or snow may be omnipresent. If it
inhabits the wilderness, it is fulfilled also in the streets of cities.
Who has not looked out on the sordid thoroughfares of a town, and
seen the poor ignoble disarray of chimney-tops and slated roofs and
crude angles and ornamentations take on a new and entrancing aspect,
so that even the untidy shops and tawdry dwellings assume a crown
of loveliness, and the long, dull, perspectives of monotonous roads
might be the trampled avenues about the gates of fairyland? The most
sordid hamlet in the dreariest manufacturing-region may, suddenly,
awake to a dawn so wonderful in what it reveals that the villagers
might well believe, as in the old folk-tale, that Christ had passed
that way in the night and left the world white and husht, stainlessly
pure. But, of course, we have each of us our preferences. Some love
best to see the long swelling reaches of ploughed lands covered with
new fallen snow not too heavy to hide the wave-like procession of the
hidden furrows. Some love best to look on wide interminable wolds, a
solitude of unbroken whiteness, without even the shadow of a cloud or
the half-light of a grey sky: some, upon familiar pastures now changed
as though in the night the fields had receded into the earth and the
fields of another world had silently sunk into their place: some,
upon mountain-slopes, on whose vast walls the shadows of wheeling
hawks and curlews pass like pale blue scimetars: some, on woodlands,
where from the topmost elm-bough to the lowest fir-plume or outspread
bough of cedar the immaculate soft burthens miraculously suspend. For
myself--after the supreme loveliness of snowy mountain-ranges at dawn
or sunset or moon-glow--I am most entranced by snow in a pine-forest.
The more so if, as in one my mind recreates for me as I write, there
are glades where I can come to a rock whence an over-leaning white
hill may be seen as though falling out of heaven, with white mountains
beyond, white shoulders lapsing on white shoulders, white peaks rising
beyond white peaks, white crests fading into further snowy crests, and,
nearer, it may be, glens sinking into glens, no longer a sombre green,
but as though stilled avalanches awaiting a magician’s unloosening
spell. Once, just there, in just such a place, I saw a wonderful sight.
The January frosts had gone, and February had come in with the soft
sighing of a wind out of the south. The snows faded like morning-mists.
But after three days the north wind came again in the night. At dawn
it veered, and a light snow fell once more, then thick and moist and
flaky, and by noon had changed to rain. But an hour or so later the
polar breath once more came over the brows of the hills, and with
midwinter intensity. The rain was frozen on every bough, on every
branch, on every spray, on every twig, on every leaf, on every frond of
bracken, on every spire of reed, on every blade of grass. The world had
become cased in shining ice, crystalline, exquisite in radiant beauty,
ineffable, as in a trance, the ecstasy of the Unknown Dreamer. At
sundown the vast orb of blood-red flame sank over the glens and burned
among the aisles of the forest. Looking at the ice-mailed wilderness
of bole and bough and branch between me and the sun I saw a forest
of living fire, wherein, as a wind stirred and threw sudden shadows,
phantoms of flame moved to and fro, or stood, terrible children of
light, as though entranced, as though listening, as though looking on
Life or on Death. When at last the flame was all gathered up out of
the west, and an aura of faint rose hung under the first glittering
stars, an extraordinary ocean of yellow spread from the horizons
serrated with immense mauve peninsulas and long narrow grass-green
lagoons. But the mass of the western firmament was yellow, from the
orange-yellow of lichen and the orange-red of the dandelion to the
faint vanishing yellows of cowslip and primrose. How lovely then were
the trees which had been set on fire by the unconsuming flames of the
sunset: what a fairyland, now, of delicate amber and translucent topaz.
What mysterious colonnades, what avenues of lovely light! And then,
later, to turn, and see the chill grey-blue ice-bound trees behind one
filling slowly with moonshine, as the immensity of ocean fills, wave
after wave, at moonrise, when a cloud is slowly uplifted by mysterious
withdrawing airs! Then, truly, was Dreamland no longer a phantasy of
sleep, but a loveliness so great that, like deep music, there could
be no words wherewith to measure it, but only the breathless unspoken
speech of the soul upon whom has fallen the secret dews.
ST. BRIDGET OF THE SHORES
I have heard many names of St. Bridget, most beloved of Gaelic saints,
with whom the month of February is identified ... the month of ‘Bride
min, gentle St. Bride’ ... _Brighid boidheach Muime Chriosd_, Bride
the Beautiful, Christ’s Foster Mother ... but there are three so less
common that many even of my readers familiar with the Highland West
may not know them. These are ‘the Fair Woman of February,’ ‘St. Bride
of the Kindly Fire,’ and ‘St. Bride (or Bridget) of the Shores.’
They are of the Isles, and may be heard in some of the _sgeulachdan
gàidhealach_, or Gaelic tales, still told among seafaring and hill
folk, where the curse of cheap ignoble periodicals is unknown and books
are rare. True, in several of the isles ... Colonsay, Tiree, the Outer
Hebrides ... ‘St. Bride of the Shores’ is not infrequent in songs and
seasonal hymns, for when her signals are seen along the grey beaches,
on the sandy machars, by the meadow path, the glen-track, the white
shore-road, the islanders know that the new year is disclosed at last,
that food, warmth, and gladness are coming out of the south. As ‘the
Fair Woman of February,’ though whatever other designation St. Bride
goes by, she is often revealed. Her humble yellow fires are lit among
the grasses, on the shore-ways, during this month. Everywhere in the
Gaelic lands ‘Candlemas-Queen’ is honoured at this time. _Am Fheill
Bhride_, the Festival of St. Bridget, was till recently a festival
of joy throughout the west, from the Highland Line to the last weedy
shores of Barra or the Lews: in the isles and in the remote Highlands,
still is.
It is an old tale, this association of St. Bridget with February. It
goes further back than the days of the monkish chroniclers who first
attempted to put the disguise of verbal Christian raiment on the most
widely-loved and revered beings of the ancient Gaelic pantheon. Long
before the maiden Brigida (whether of Ireland or Scotland matters
little) made her fame as a ‘daughter of God’; long before to Colum
in Iona or to Patrick ‘the great Cleric’ in Ireland ‘Holy St. Bride’
revealed in a vision the service she had done to Mary and the Child in
far-away Bethlehem in the East; before ever the first bell of Christ
was heard by startled Druids coming across the hills and forest lands
of Gaul, the Gaels worshipped a Brighde or Bride, goddess of women, of
fire, of poetry. When, to-day, a Gaelic islesman alludes to Bridget of
the Songs, or when a woman of South Uist prays to Good St. Bride to
bless the empty cradle that is soon to be filled, or when a shennachie
or teller of tales speaks of an oath taken by Bridget of the Flame,
they refer, though probably unconsciously, to a far older Brighid than
do they who speak with loving familiarity of _Muime Chriosd_, Christ’s
Foster Mother, or _Brighid-nam-Bratta_, St. Bride of the Mantle. They
refer to one who in the dim, far-off days of the forgotten pagan world
of our ancestors was a noble and great goddess. They refer to one to
whom the women of the Gael went with offerings and prayers, as went
the women of ancient Hellas to the temples of Aphroditê, as went the
Syrian women to the altars of Astarte, as went the women of Egypt to
the milk-fed shrines of Isis. They refer to one whom the Druids held
in honour as a torch bearer of the eternal light, a Daughter of the
Morning, who held sunrise in one hand as a little yellow flame, and in
the other held the red flower of fire without which men would be as
the beasts who live in caves and holes, or as the dark _Fómor_ who have
their habitations in cloud and wind and the wilderness. They refer to
one whom the bards and singers revered as mistress of their craft, she
whose breath was a flame, and that flame song: she whose secret name
was fire and whose inmost soul was radiant air, she therefore who was
the divine impersonation of the divine thing she stood for, Poetry.
‘St. Bride of the Kindly Fire,’ of whom one may hear to-day as ‘oh,
just _Bhrighde mìn Muim_ (gentle St. Bride the Foster Mother), she
herself an’ no other,’ is she, that ancient goddess, whom our ancestors
saw lighting the torches of sunrise on the brows of hills, or thrusting
the quenchless flame above the horizons of the sea: whom the Druids
hailed with hymns at the turn of the year, when, in the season we call
February, the firstcomers of the advancing Spring are to be seen on the
grey land or on the grey wave or by the grey shores: whom every poet,
from the humblest wandering singer to Oisìn of the Songs, from Oisìn of
the Songs to Angus Og on the rainbow or to Midir of the Under-world,
blessed, because of the flame she put in the heart of poets as well as
the red life she put in the flame that springs from wood and peat.
None forgot that she was the daughter of the ancient God of the Earth,
but greater than he, because in him there was but earth and water,
whereas in her veins ran the elements of air and fire. Was she not born
at sunrise? On the day she reached womanhood did not the house wherein
she dwelled become wrapped in a flame which consumed it not, though the
crown of that flame licked the high unburning roof of Heaven? In that
hour when, her ancient divinity relinquished and she reborn a Christian
saint, she took the white veil, did not a column of golden light rise
from her head till no eyes could follow it? In that moment when she
died from earth, having taken mortality upon her so as to know a divine
resurrection to a new and still more enduring Country of the Immortal,
were there not wings of fire seen flashing along all the shores of the
west and upon the summits of all Gaelic hills? And how could one forget
that at any time she had but to bend above the dead, and her breath
would quicken, and a pulse would come back into the still heart, and
what was dust would arise and be once more glad.
The Fair Woman of February is still loved, still revered. Few remember
the last fading traditions of her ancient greatness: few, even, know
that she lived before the coming of the Cross: but all love her,
because of her service to Mary in Her travail and to the newborn Child,
and because she looks with eyes of love into every cradle and puts the
hand of peace on the troubled hearts of women: and all delight in her
return to the world after the ninety days of the winter-sleep, when her
heralds are manifest.
What, then, are the insignia of St. Bridget of the Shores? They are
simple. They are the dandelion, the lamb, and the sea-bird popularly
called the oyster-opener. From time immemorial, this humble, familiar
yellow plant of the wayside has been identified with St. Bride. To
this day shepherds, on _Am Fheill Bhrighde_, are wont to hear among
the mists the crying of innumerable young lambs, and this without the
bleating of ewes, and so by that token know that Holy St. Bride has
passed by, coming earthward with her flock of the countless lambs soon
to be born on all the hillsides and pastures of the world. Fisher-folk
on the shores of the west and on the far isles have gladdened at the
first prolonged repetitive whistle of the oyster-opener, for its advent
means that the hosts of the good fish are moving towards the welcoming
coasts once more, that the wind of the south is unloosened, that
greenness will creep to the grass, that birds will seek the bushes,
that song will come to them, and that everywhere a new gladness will
be abroad. By these signs is St. Bridget of the Shores known. One,
perhaps, must live in the remote places, and where wind and cloud, rain
and tempest, great tides and uprising floods are the common companions
of day and night, in order to realise the joy with which things so
simple are welcomed. To see the bright sunsweet face of the dandelion
once more--_an dealan Dhé_, the little flame of God, _am bearnan
Bhrighde_, St. Bride’s forerunner--what a joy this is. It comes into
the grass like a sunray. Often before the new green is in the blade it
flaunts its bright laughter in the sere bent. It will lie in ditches
and stare at the sun. It will climb broken walls, and lean from nooks
and corners. It will come close to the sands and rocks, sometimes will
even join company with the sea-pink, though it cannot find footing
where later the bindweed and the horned poppy, those children of the
seawind who love to be near and yet shrink from the spray of the salt
wave, defy wind and rain. It is worthier the name ‘Traveller’s Joy’
than the wild clematis of the autumnal hedgerows: for its bright yellow
leaps at one from the roadside like a smile, and its homeliness is
pleasant as the gladness of playing children.
It is a herald of Spring that precedes even the first loud flute-like
calls of the missel-thrush. When snow is still on the track of the
three winds of the north it is, by the wayside, a glad companion. Soon
it will be everywhere. Before long the milk-white sheen of the daisy
and the moon-daisy, the green-gold of the tansy, the pale gold of the
gorse and the broom, the yellow of the primrose and wild colchicum,
of the cowslip and buttercup, of the copse-loving celandine and
meadow-rejoicing crowsfoot, all these yellows of first spring will
soon be abroad: but the dandelion comes first. I have known days when,
after midwinter, one could go a mile and catch never a glimpse of this
bright comrade of the ways, and then suddenly see one or two or three,
and rejoice forthwith as though at the first blossom on the blackthorn,
at the first wild-roses, at the first swallow, at the first thrilling
bells of the cuckoo. We are so apt to lose the old delight in familiar
humble things. So apt to ignore what is by the way, just because it is
by the way. I recall a dour old lowland gardener in a loch-and-hill-set
region of Argyll, who, having listened to exclamations of delight
at a rainbow, muttered, “Weel, I juist think naethin ava’ o’ thon
rainbows ... ye can see one whenever you tak the trouble to look for
them hereaboots.” He saw them daily, or so frequently that for him all
beauty and strangeness had faded from these sudden evanescent Children
of Beauty. Beauty has only to be perceptible to give an immediate joy,
and it is no paradoxical extravagance to say that one may receive the
thrilling communication from ‘the little flame of God’ by the homely
roadside as well as from these leaning towers built of air and water
with a mysterious alchemy reveals to us on the cloudy deserts of
heaven. ‘Man is surprised,’ Emerson says, ‘to find that things near
and familiar are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote.’
Certainly no Gaelic lover of St. Bride’s Flower, of the Flower of
February, but rejoices to see its welcome face after the snow and sleet
of winter have first sullenly receded, if only for a time, and to know
that St. Bride of the Shores wears it at her breast, and that when she
throws it broadcast the world is become a green place again and the
quickening sunlight a gladsome reality.
In these desolate far isles where life is so hard, where the grey
winds from the north and east prevail for weeks at a time on the grey
tempestuous seas, and where so much depends on such small things--a
little drift-wood, a few heaps of peat, a few shoal of fish now of one
kind now of another, a few cartloads of seaweed, a rejoicing sound is
that in truth when the _Gille-Bhride_ is heard crying along the shores.
Who that has heard its rapid whirling cry as it darts from haunt
to haunt but will recognise its own testimony to being ‘Servant of
Breed’ (the common pronunciation of the Gaelic Brighid or Bride)--for
does it not cry over and over again with swift incessant iterance,
_Gilly-breed, gilly-breed, gilly-breed, gilly-breed, gilly-breed_.
“White may my milking be,
White as thee;
Thy face is white, thy neck is white,
Thy hands are white, thy feet are white,
For thy sweet soul is shining bright--
O dear to me,
O dear to see,
St. Bridget White!
Yellow may my butter be,
Firm, and round:
Thy breasts are sweet,
Firm, round, and sweet,
So may my butter be:
So may my butter be, O
Bridget Sweet!
Safe thy way is, safe, O
Safe, St. Bride:
May my kye come home at even,
None be fallin’, none be leavin’,
Dusky even, breath-sweet even,
Here, as there, where O
St. Bride thou
Keepest tryst with God in heav’n,
Seest the angels bow
And souls be shriven--
Here, as there, ’tis breath-sweet even
Far and wide--
Singeth thy little maid
Safe in thy shade
Bridget, Bride!”
When the first lambs appear, many are the invocations among the Irish
and Hebridean Gaels to good St. Bride. At the hearth-side, too,
the women, carding wool, knitting, telling tales, singing songs,
dreaming--these know her whether they name her in thought, or have
forgotten what was dear wisdom to their mothers of old. She leans
over cradles, and when babies smile they have seen her face. When the
_cra’thull_ swings in the twilight, the slow rhythm, which is music in
the mother’s ear, is the quiet clapping of her hushing hands. St Bride,
too, loves the byres or the pastures when the kye are milked, though
now she is no longer ‘the Woman of February,’ but simply ‘good St.
Bride of the yellow hair.’
THE HERALDS OF MARCH
Under this heading I had meant to deal with the return of the Plover
and Lapwing, having in mind a Galloway rhyme,
“Whaup, Whimbrel, an’ Plover,
Whan these whustle the worst o’ t’s over!”
But on consideration it was evident that March has so complicated an
orchestral prelude that the name could hardly be given to any one group
of birds. Does not another rhyme go,
“The Lavrock, the Mavis,
The Woodlark, the Plover,
March brings them back
Because Winter is over.”
But March brings back so many birds! There is another bird-rhyme ...
“When the Song-Thrush is ready to laugh,
Ye’ll hear the Woodlark an’ the Wheatear an’ the Chaff.”
Well, the Song-Thrush has been ‘ready to laugh’ a good while back,
now: his ‘laughter’ has already whirled the flute-notes of Spring,
amid branches swelling to leaf-break, but not yet at the greening.
The Chiff-Chaff has been heard on many a common, or on the ridge of
a stone-dyke, or calling from the blackthorn thickets. The Wheatear
has by this time delighted many a superstitious yokel who has caught
his first glimpse of it sitting on a grassy tuft, or on a low spray
of gorse or juniper, or depressed him sorely if he has come upon it
for the first time when seen perched on a stone. But all three are
birds which are with us long before the real Spring is come. With the
missel-thrush on the elm-bole, the song-thrush in the copses, the
blackbird calling from the evergreens, it does not follow, alas! that,
as in the fairy-tale, the north wind has become a feeble old man and
the east wind a silly old wife. Frost and snow and sleet, rain and
flood, and the dull greyness of returned winter, may only too likely
succeed these blithe heralds, have so succeeded, this year, as we know
to our cost. There was jubilation in some places at January-end because
of the early singing of the larks, which here and there had been heard
soon after the New Year; but those who rejoiced untimely at the advent
of spring-weather must have forgot the north-country proverb, ‘As long
as the laverock sings before Candlemas it will greet after it.’
The lark and the blackbird are, in truth, such irresponsible singers,
have such glad irrepressible hearts, that they will sing in the dead of
winter, if only the wind slides through a windless air and the sunshine
is unclouded. Tens of thousands have gone oversea, but thousands
remain; and these are not to be chilled into silence if but the least
excuse be given for the unsealing of the founts of joy. In green
Decembers one may hear the merle’s notes fluting down the wet alleys as
though Christmas were still a long way off; but the wary will recall
another north-country saying akin to that just quoted concerning the
laverock ... ‘When the blackbird sings before Christmas she will cry
before Candlemas.’
So now I shall leave the Tribe of the Plover to a succeeding article,
and, speaking of the skylark and his spring comrades, allude to that
mysterious March wayfaring of the winged people which is so enthralling
a problem in the psychology of bird-life.
The whole problem of Migration is still a mystery, but an enhancement
of this mystery is in the irregularity and incompleteness of the
working out of this all but universal instinct, this inscrutable
rhythmic law. Both the skylark and the blackbird, for example, are
migratory birds, and yet larks and merles by the thousand remain in our
northlands through the winter, and even come to us at that season. The
skylark in particular puzzles the ornithologist. While certain birds
appear and disappear with an astonishing regularity, as though they
heard the pealing of aerial chimes afar off and knew the bells of home
... the swallow, for example; or, again, the tiny gold-crested wren,
in some parts called ‘the woodcock-pilot’ because in two or at most
three days after its appearance the first woodcocks are invariably
seen ... there are others, like the song-thrush, which will pass away
in the great migratory clouds that like withdrawing veils every autumn
carry the winged clans oversea; which will pass so absolutely that
for a hundred miles not one of its kind will be observed, not even
a straggler: and yet, in some other direction, others will be seen
weeks later and perhaps even through the winter. We are all familiar
with the homestay of the Redbreast, and many people believe that it is
not a migrant because of its frequency about our garden-ways even in
the hardest winter: and yet, in incalculable myriads, the redbreast
migrates as far south as the Sahara, and its sweet home-song of the
north may be heard in Greece, by the banks of the Nile, throughout
Palestine even, from the cedars of Lebanon to the valleys about
Jerusalem.
It is the skylark, however, more than any other bird which so often
upsets rules and calculations. Even people who do not observe the ways
of birds must be struck by the numbers of larks which may be met with
in the course of several midwinter walks, by the occasional outbreak
of brief song, even, though snow be upon the wolds and a grey wind
blow through the sere leaves of the oak-coppice or among the desolate
hedgerows; must be the more struck by this, or by mention of it on the
part of others, when they read of the hundreds, sometimes thousands,
of dead larks found on nights of storm or bitter frost, on the rocks
below lighthouses, along the great lines of migration during the season
of the vast inscrutable ebb or of the as vast and inscrutable vernal
arrival. Incalculable hosts leave our shores every autumn, and along
the bleak fen-lands, by wave-set lighthouses, on isles such as Ushant
or Heligoland, thousands of wings flutter and fail; and the host passes
on; and the sea-wave, the fierce gull, the shore-hawk, all the tribe of
the owl, all the innumerable foes which prey upon the helpless, give
scant grace to the weaklings and the baffled and weary. But why should
all this immense congregation have listened to the ancestral cry, and
from meadow and moor and the illimitable dim-sea of the fallowlands
come singly and in flocks and in immense herds and in a cloudlike
multitude, as sheep at the cry of the herdsman, as hounds at the long
ululation of a horn, while thousands of their clan remain deaf to the
mysterious Voice, the imperative silent mandate from oversea? Of these,
again, countless numbers merely move to another region, and mayhap some
cross the salt straits only to return; or as many, it may be, leave
not at all the familiar solitudes, and at most show by cloudy flights
and wild and fluctuating gyrations the heritage of blind instinct,
which, if it cannot be satiated by far pilgrimage, must at least shake
these troubled hearts with sudden inexplicable restlessness. It is
calculated, again, that myriads of skylarks merely use our coasts as
highways on their journey from the far south to the far north ... in
this, too, exemplifying another strange law or manifestation of the
mystery of migration, that the birds which move furthest north in
their vernal arrival are those which penetrate furthest south when
they turn again upon the autumnal wind of exile. Naturalists have
proved, however, that countless hordes of skylarks actually arrive from
Northern Europe to winter in our country. Are these birds moved by a
different instinct from that which impels the majority of their kind?
Have they, through generations following one another in the path of an
accident, forgotten the sunlands of the common ancestral remembrance,
and, having found Britain less snowbound and frostbound than the wastes
of Esthonia and Pomerania, been content, when driven before the icy
east wind, to fare no further than our bleak, and yet, save in the
worst winters, relatively habitable inlands? Again, naturalists have
observed a like movement hitherward in winter from Central Europe.
There may be observed in the early spring as regular an emigration as,
on a perhaps not vaster scale, an incalculable immigration. Apparently,
most if not all of the myriads of skylarks which are undoubtedly with
us throughout the winter are these immigrants from Northern and Central
Europe. Those who come in February and in still greater numbers in
March and April (and the later the arrivals the further north the goal,
it is said) are the ‘strayed revellers’ from the South, the home-bred
birds home again. In our remote Hebrides the nesting season is hardly
over before the island-bred skylarks, so late in coming, are on the
Great South Road once more. What with the habitual two and the not
infrequent three broods raised in a single season, particularly in
Southern England, South-West Scotland, and Ireland, and the enormous
influx of aliens from Northern and Central Europe, our skylark
population is at its highest, not, as most people might think, in May,
or even about the season of the autumnal equinox, but at the beginning
of November, when already the great tides of migration have ebbed.
Another puzzling problem is the rhythmic regularity of the arrivals
and departures of the incomers and the outgoers. For, while the latter
will not take the high-road of the upper air till nightfall or at least
until dusk, the former travel by day: and the goings and comings are
so timed, or to observation appear so timed, that about four o’clock
on a late October day the first cohort of the invaders may in the wide
lonely desert overhead pass the first caravans of the exiles. In March,
again, the two currents may once more meet: the home-bred birds are on
their return, the aliens are on the wing for the hill-pastures and the
vales and uplands of their native countries. This will account for how,
say in the Hebrides, one observer will chronicle the departure of the
skylarks before Summer-end, at the early close there of the nesting
season, and how another, not less accurate, will note the presence
weeks later of larks in apparently as great a number as ever. The
islanders have gone, to seek the south: the newcomers from Scandinavia
have taken their place. But here also, as elsewhere, the conditions of
the weather will be more potent than even the summons of the spirit
of migration: a severe frost will for a time clear a whole region of
the tufted birdeens, a prolonged frost will drive them away from that
region for the winter.
The Lark, then, so often apostrophised as the first voice of Spring,
is by no means specifically the Herald of March. When we see his
brown body breasting the air-waves of the March wind, it may not be
the welcome migrant from the South we see, with greenness in his high
aerial note and the smell of hay and wild roses in the o’ercome of his
song, but a winter-exile from a far mountain-vale in Scandinavia or
from the snowbound wastes of Courland or Westphalia.
The Woodlark, the Chiff-Chaff, and the rest, all are heralds of March.
But as we identify certain birds with certain seasons and certain
qualities ... as the Swallow with April, and the Cuckoo with May, and
the Dove with peace ... so we have come to think of the Mavis and the
Merle, but, above all, of the Skylark as the true heralds of March, the
month when the Flutes of Pan sound from land’s end to land’s end, for
all that tempest and flood, sleet and the polar blast and the bitter
wind of the east, may ravage the coverts of the winged clans.
To write of all the birds who come back to us in the Spring, even so
early as the front of March, would be, here, a mere catalogue, and then
be incomplete. For the hidden places in the woods, in the meadows, in
the hedgerows, on the moors, in the sandy dunes, in the hollowed rocks,
on the ledges over green water and on the wind-scooped foreheads of
cliffs and precipices; everywhere, from the heather-wilderness on the
unsnowed hills to the tangled bent on the little windswept eyot set in
the swing of the tides, the secret homes are waiting, or are already
filled, and glad with that everlasting and unchanging business of the
weaving anew of life which has the constancy of sunrise, the rhythmic
certitude of day and night.
The spiritual secret of our delight in the joyousness of the lark’s
song, or in that of mavis or merle, is because the swift music is a
rapture transcending human utterance. There is not less joy in the
screech of the jay, in the hoarse cry of the cormorant, in the scream
of the gannet poised like a snowflake two thousand feet above the
turbulent surge of blue and white, or green and grey, to its vision
but a vast obscurity of calm filled with phantom life, a calm moveless
seen from that great height, wrinkled only with perplexing interplay of
wave and shadow. These have their joy, and to the open ear _are_ joy;
not less than the merle singing among wet lilac, the mavis calling from
the swaying poplar, the lark flinging the largesse of his golden music
along the high devious azure roads. Can one doubt that this is so ...
that, listening with the inward ear, we must hold as dear the wail of
the curlew, the mournful cry of the lapwing, when on the hill-slope or
in the wild grass these call rejoicingly in life and love and the mute
ecstasy of implicit duty.
As long, however, as we impose our own needs and our own desires on the
indifferent tribes of the earth and air, so long shall we take this or
that comrade of the elements and say it is the voice of Peace, or War,
or Love, or Joy. March, we say, is the month of gladness. A new spirit
is awake, is abroad. The thrush and the blackbird are _our_ clarions
of rejoicing. The lark, supremely, is _our_ lyric of joy.
Joy, the poet tells us, is the Mother of Spring, and of Joy has it
not been said that there is no more ancient God? What fitter symbol
for this divine uplift of the year than this bird whose ecstasy in
song makes the very word Spring an intoxication in our ears? We have
a Gaelic legend that the first word of God spoken to the world became
a lark ... the eternal joy translated into a moment’s ecstasy. But
further back has not Aristophanes told us that the lark existed, not
only before the green grass where it nests or the blue lift into which
it soars, but before Zeus and Kronos themselves, before the Creation,
before Time. It is but a symbol of the divine Joy which is Life: that
most ancient Breath, that Spirit whose least thought is Creation, whose
least motion is Beauty, whose least glance is that eternal miracle
which we, seeing dimly and in the rhythmic rise of the long cadence of
the hours, call by a word of out-welling, of measureless effluence, the
Spring.
THE TRIBE OF THE PLOVER
In the preceding paper I alluded to a Galloway rhyme--
“Whaup, Whimbrel, an’ Plover,
Whan these whustle the worst o’t ’s over.”
By this time the neatherd by Loch Ken and the shepherd among the wilds
of Kirkcudbright, like their kin from the Sussex downs, to the last
_sliabh_ or _maol_ in Sutherland, may repeat the rhyme with safety.
‘The worst o’t ’s over.’ For to-day the curlews cry above the moors,
the whimbrel’s warning note echoes down the long sands o’ Solway, and
everywhere, from the salt bent by the coasts to the loneliest inlands,
the lapwing wails. The Tribe of the Plover is in the land once more,
and so Spring is with us. Not, perhaps, the Spring of the poets, who
look (as Ailil in the old Celtic tale) under boughs of white blossom
to where the sunlight moves like a fawn of gold in a windless land,
where the songs of birds turn to flowers, and where flowers change in
the twilights of dawn into singing birds. Not thus does Spring come
to us in the north. The black-headed gull screaming on the east wind,
restless before his long flight to the wilderness and the grassy homes
of the mating season: the hoodie-crow, weary of the south, heard on
grey mornings when sleet whips the uplands: the troubled fieldfares,
eager for lands oversea: the curlews crying along the Anglian fens and
lamenting over Solway Moss: the mallard calling to his mate in the
chill waters: the shadow of harrier and peregrine from Surrey upland
to the long braes of Lammermuir--these, rather, are the signals of our
bleak northern Spring. What though the song-thrush and the skylark
have long sung, though the wheatear and chiff-chaff have been late in
coming, though the first swallows have not had the word passed on by
the woodpecker, and somewhere in the glens of Greece and Sicily the
cuckoo lingers? How often the first have called _Spring_ to us, and,
while we have listened, the wind has passed from the south to the north
and the rains have become sleet or snow: how often the missel-thrush
has rung-in the tides of blossom, and the woods have but grown darker
with gloom of the east while the first yellow clans along the hedgerows
have been swept by hail. How often, again, the wind of the west has
been fragrant with cowslip and ox-eye, with daffodil and wallflower,
with the pungent growing-odours of barberry and butcher’s-broom and the
unloosening larch, when, indeed, the sallow-blooms have put on their
gold, and the green woodpecker is calling his love-notes in the copses,
and yet the delaying swallow has not been seen north of the Loire or
where the Loiny winds between Moret and the woods of Fontainebleau?
How often the wild-rose has moved in first-flame along the skirts of
hornbeam-hedge or beech-thicket, or the honeysuckle begun to unwind her
pale horns of ivory and moongold, and yet across the furthest elm-tops
to the south the magic summons of the cuckoo has been still unheard in
the windless amber dawn, or when, as in the poet’s tale, the myriad
little hands of Twilight pull the shadows out of the leaves and weave
the evening dark. But when the cry of the plover is abroad we know that
our less ideal yet hardly less lovely and welcome Spring is come at
last: that Winter is old and broken and shuffling north, clinging to
the bleak uplands and windygates: and this, even though Summer tarries
still among the fields of France.
Because of their association with solitary and waste places it is not
strange that these harbingers of Swallow-time should everywhere have
an evil repute. Even amid the unimaginative Sussex or Wilts peasants,
the cry of the curlew, the wail of the lapwing, forebode sorrow, cover
a vague menace: heard, at least, at dusk or at night, or in the grey
gloaming at the edge of day.
The Cornish or Devon moorlander has many wild tales of the whimbrel,
whose swift-repeated whistle hurtling suddenly in lonely places has
given rise to innumerable legends of the Seven Whistlers, the Demon
Huntsmen, the Hunted Souls. In Iona and along the Earraid of Mull,
where the whimbrel or ‘little curlew’ is rarely heard till May, though
it is generally called _Guilbinnach_, a diminutive of the Gaelic
name of the curlew, _Guilbin_ (pronounced sometimes _Kooley-pin_ or
_guley-pin_ and sometimes _gwilley-pin_), a compound word signifying
wailing music, I have heard it called _Guilbhròn_ (Kwillyvrone), Wail
of Sorrow, and again ‘_Keenyvàs_’ or Death-Cry, and once, either in
a tale or poem, by the singular name _Guilchaismeachd_, the Wail of
Warning. Any lowland cottar, from west of Lammermuir to east of
Ballantrae, will ’ken a wheen strange tales o’ the whaup,’ as the
curlew is commonly called north of the Tweed and south of the Highland
Line: and in some parts it is not only the children who shudder at its
cry in lonely places at dusk, fearing ‘the bogle wi’ the lang neb’ like
a pair of tongs, emissary of the Evil One, who gave this bird his long
curved beak so that in the dark he might, like tongs lifting a stray
coal or a nightjar snatching a wandering moth, carry off wrongdoers,
unrepentant sinners, truants, and all naughty children generally. As
for the lapwing, though more familiar than the curlew, and for many of
us associated only with pastures and pleasant wilds, in the countries
of the Gael dark things are whispered of the _Adharcan-luachrach_, or
Little Horn of the Rushes ... thus poetically called from the pretty
tuft of the male _weep_ or _peaseweep_, curving like a horn over the
delicately poised head, and from the bird’s fondness for nesting in
rushy places or among tangled grasses. Is he not said to be one of
the bitter clan who mocked on the day of the Crucifixion, and so
was made homeless for ever, with a cry that should be for ever like
the cry of wandering sorrow? It is of little avail to say that love
among the rushes is as sweet as elsewhere, that the wilderness can
be home, and that the wailing of repentant souls may be no more than
angry vituperations against the hoodie-crow or laughing-gull or other
marauders after lapwing-eggs. Is the _weep_ not a spirit of the waste
that was once human, but lost his soul, and so can never reach heaven
nor yet dwell on earth, but must night and day be restless as the sea,
and wail the long hours away from grey dawn to moonrise, from darkness
to the paling of the stars? So they say, they who know: and who know
with the unshakable surety of the unlettered peasant? In the Gaelic
imagination the lapwing is something stranger and wilder still: a bird
of the ancient world, of the dispossessed gods, nameless in truth
because in truth a god nameless and homeless. The Gaelic poet hears
in its lament the lamentation of what is gone never to come again, of
what long since went away upon the wind, of what is going away on the
wind: and he has called the _weep_ the Birds of the Sorrowful Past. Is
not the lapwing the bird of Dalua, that unknown mysterious god, that
terrible Shadow who is the invisible, inaudible, secret, and dread
divinity of weariness, separation, gloom, sadness, decay, desolation,
madness, despair?
It is not only in our own land that the lapwing and all the tribe of
the plover bear so evil a repute. Not always thus, however: for in some
parts of Germany this plover, I do not know why, is called the Virgin
Mary’s Dove, and is greeted with welcome. Even in Argyll there is a
lost or confused kindly legend, for sometimes when children run along
the moorland mocking the Pibhinn (_pee-veen_ ... the Gaelic equivalent
of the lowland _peaseweep_ and the southern pee-_weet_) they cry
“_Welcome back, welcome back, Pēe-veen, Pee-vēen!
But keep the wind and the rain behind your tail,
Or you’ll never see the fields of heaven again!_...”
or words to that effect. In the East the Mohammedan women have a
beautiful name for this bird ... the Sister of the Brother: and, says
the authority whence in some forgotten reading I took this note, ‘when
these women hear the cry in the evening, they run from their houses
and throw water in the air, that the bird may use it to assuage the
pain of the burn on the top of the head, still marked by some black
feathers.’ This is in allusion to an oriental legend that the lapwing
was once a princess. This princess had a passionate love for a brother
who had long been absent, and when one day she heard that he was on his
return and close at hand and weary, she snatched a bowl of hot milk
from the fire and hastened to meet him. But an evil-wisher, knowing her
great love and how she would not rest till she found her brother, had
misinformed her, and for all the pain on her head caused by the heated
bowl, she ran now this way and now that, continually crying _Brother!
O Brother!_ Hours passed, and then days, and week after week and month
after month the girl vainly sought her loved one. At last, feeling her
strength ebbing, she cried aloud to Allah. Allah, moved by compassion,
gave her wings and changed her into a lapwing or black-plover, the
better to accomplish her purpose. Hence, when the little brown children
on the desert or on the sun-scorched ways of the East look up and see
the lapwings wheeling overhead in long circling flights and sudden
dashes, they hear, in the wailing voices, either the long yearning
or the sudden eager hope in the cry which to their ears sounds as
_Brother! O Brother!_
Perhaps the German name of the Virgin Mary’s Dove is merely a variant
of the Swedish folk-legend concerning the lapwing. The tale goes that
this bird was once one of Mary’s handmaidens, but lost place and
honour because of her theft of a pair of scissors. The punishment
was transformation into a bird with a forked scissor-tail, and to
go out across the fjords and above all the meadows and pastures and
keep crying incessantly _Tyvit-Tyvit-Tyvit_ (_i.e._, I stole them! I
stole them!). I think, however, I have heard or read the same story in
connection with the wagtail. In his interesting book on the _Manners
and Customs of the Russian People_, Mr. Ralston has the following
Slavonic plover-legend. When God had created the earth, and wished
to supply it with seas and lakes and rivers, He ordered the birds to
convey the waters to their appointed places. All obeyed except the
lapwing, whose reason for this indolence and impiety was that it had no
need of seas, lakes, or rivers, to slake its thirst. At that the Lord
waxed wroth, and forbade it and its posterity ever to approach a sea
or stream, and that it might quench its thirst only with that water
which remains in hollows and among stones after rain. So from that time
this sorrowful plover has never ceased its wailing cry of _Peet-peet!_
(_i.e._, Drink! Drink!). In another northern book (Thiel’s _Danish
Traditions_, vol. ii.) there are two lapwing-legends not less homely
than the Russian and the Swedish.
When Christ, says one, was a bairn, He took a walk one day and came to
an old crone who was busy baking. She said she would give Him a new
cake for His trouble, if He would go and split her a little wood for
the oven. Christ did as she wanted, and the old wife put aside a small
bit of dough for the promised cake. When the batch was drawn from the
oven, however, she saw to her surprise and chagrin that the wee bit
cake was equally large with the rest. So again she broke off a small
bit of dough; but again the same thing happened. Hereupon she broke
out with, ‘That’s a vast oure-muckle cake for the likes o’ you; thee’s
get thy cake anither time.’ At this injustice Christ was angered, so
He said to the old crone, ‘I split your wood as you asked me, and you
would not give me the little cake you promised. Now you in turn shall
go and cleave wood, and that, too, as long as the world shall last!’
And with that Our Lord turned her into a _vipa_ (a weep). ‘So the weep
fares betwixt heaven and earth as long as the world lasts; and fare
where she will she says no other words than _Klyf ved! Klyf ved!_’
(_i.e._, Cleave wood! Cleave wood!).
The other Danish plover-tale given by Thiel is one of the familiar
Crucifixion legends. While Christ still hung upon the Cross, three
birds came flying towards Calvary, the Styrkham (the Stork), the
Svalham (the Swallow), and the Pün-ham (Pee-weet). As they flew
overhead each cried a cry. The stork cried, _Styrk ham! Styrk ham!_
(_i.e._, Strengthen Him!), and so has this bird called ever since, and
been under God’s blessing and man’s care. The swallow cried, _Sval ham!
Sval ham!_ (_i.e._, Cool or refresh Him!), and so is evermore known
by that name, and likewise is loved by man and guided by God. But the
weep wheeled about the Cross, shrieking derisively, _Pün ham! Pün ham!_
(_i.e._, Pine Him, make Him suffer!), and so is not only accursed by
men from then till now, but is under God’s ban till the Last Day, after
which the lapwing’s wail will never be heard again.
Although _Guilbinn_, or Wailing Music, is, as I have said, the common
Gaelic name for the Curlew, as the Whaup in the lowlands, it is also
often called the _Crann-toch_, the long-beaked one, or Coulter-neb, as
they say in Dumfries and Galloway. Of the mythical origin of the name
Crann-toch (a very obvious designation, and needing no mythical legend
one would think) I remember hearing a year or so ago from a boatman of
Lismore a wild and romantic legend, but it is too long to quote now.
Few Gaelic tales, few poems, in which are not to be heard the voices of
the wind or the sea or the wailing curlew. We have perhaps no bird more
wild and solitary: a Highland saying places it with the herons and
wild-geese. ‘When a man has shot six herons, six wild-geese, and six
curlews, he may call himself a sportsman.’
When the Golden Plover, or Grey Plover as he is sometimes called,
wheels in Spring above the fallowlands of the North the ploughman
hears in his cry _Plough weel! Sow weel! Harrow weel!_ This beautiful
bird--of whom no poet has written a finer line than Burns in
“The deep-toned plover grey, wild whistling on the hill”--
is not exempt from the common tradition of uncanniness. He, too,
is classed with the dreaded ‘Seven Whistlers’: and from Cornwall
to Iceland he is often vituperated as one of these, or as of the
spectral pack called Gabriel’s Hounds, or as of Odin’s Phantom Chase.
I spoke of a name I had heard in Iona and Mull for the whimbrel, but
applicable also to any plover or curlew ... the _Guilchaismeachd_ or
Wail of Warning, the Alarm Bird so to say: and this repute is held by
the plover in many mining parts of England, where it is said that the
miners will not descend a pit if the ‘Whistlers’ be heard lamenting
overhead. To this day there are many regions not only in our own
country but abroad where the plovers are called the Wandering Jews,
from an old legend that the first of the clan were the transmuted souls
of those Jews who assisted at the Crucifixion. An old woman who gave
me some plovers’ eggs told me in all good faith that the _feadag_ (the
Gaelic name, equivalent to flute-note or mellow whistle) neither ate
nor drank but fed upon the wind ... a superstition said to have been
almost universal in the Middle Ages.
As for many of us, surely they are birds of our love. The cry of the
curlew on the hill, the wail of the lapwing in waste places, have not
these something of the same enthralling spell, the same entrancing
call--the summons to the wilderness, whether that be only to solitude,
or to wild loneliness, or to the lonelier solitudes, the dim limitless
wilderness of the imagination--that the wind has, at night, coming with
rain through woods, or that the sea has, heard in inland hollows, or
when athwart a long shore or among fallen rocks the tide rises on the
breast-swell of coming storm? They call us to the wild.
THE AWAKENER OF THE WOODS
The Spirit of Spring is abroad. There is no one of our island coasts
so lone and forlorn that the cries of the winged newcomers have not
lamented down the wind. There is not an inland valley where small brown
birds from the South have not penetrated, some from Mediterranean
sunlands, some from the Desert, some from the hidden homes on unknown
isles, some from beyond the foam of unfamiliar shores. Not a backwater
surely but has heard the flute of the ouzel, or the loud call of the
mallard. The wren, that sweet forerunner of ‘the little clan of the
bushes’ as we say in Gaelic, _clann bheag’ nam preas_, the robin, the
mavis, the merle, have been heard in every coppice and wildgrowth from
the red combes of the winding Dart to the granite-ledges by the rushing
Spey. From the last Cornish upland to the last brown moor on the Ord
of Sutherland the curlew and the lapwing have wheeled with wailing cry
or long melancholy flutelike whistle. The gorse, whose golden fires
have been lit, has everywhere heard the prolonged sweet plaintive note
of the yellow-hammer. From the greening boughs the woodpeckers call.
The tides of Blossom have begun to flow. The land soon will be
inundated. Already a far and wide forethrow of foam is flung along
the blackthorn hedges. Listen ... that chaffinch’s blithe song comes
from the flowering almond!... that pipit’s brief lay fell past yonder
wild-pear! In the meadows the titlarks are running about looking in
the faces of the daisies, as children love to be told. On the fenlands
and mosses the windy whimper of the redshank is heard like the cry of
a phantom: and like a ‘bogle,’ too, is the perturbing drumming of the
snipe falling swiftly on sloping wings back to the marsh.
The shores, the meadows, the uplands, on each there is a continual
rumour. It is the sound of Spring. Listen ... put your ear to the
throbbing earth that is so soon to become the green world: you will
hear a voice like the voice which miraculously evades in the hollow
curves of a shell. Faint, mysterious, yet ever present, a continual
rhythm. Already rhythm is become a cadence: the birds chant the
strophes, flower and blossom and green leaf yield their subtler
antiphones, the ancient yet ever young protagonist is the heart of man.
Soon the cadence will be a song, a pæan. The hour of the rose and the
honeysuckle will come, the hour of the swallow hawking the grey gnat
above the lilied stream, the hour when the voice of the cuckoo floats
through ancient woods rejoicing in their green youth, that voice which
has in it the magic of all springs, the eternal cry of the renewal of
delight.
True, one may as yet more universally see the feet of Spring, or the
blossom-touch of her hands, in the meadows and by the shores, than
in the woods. She passes by the hedgerows or along the pastures, and
her trail has the sheen of gold. Do not the celandine and the flaming
dandelion, the pale cowslip and delicate crowsfoot, the jonquil and
daffodil, the yellow of the broom and the bee-loved gorse, everywhere
show it? She goes by the upland meadows, and touches the boughs of the
wild-apple or leaning pear, stoops by the quince or the wild-cherry,
and the white foam of the miraculous wind that is in the hollow of
her hand is left upon the branches. The slim gean at the edge of the
woodland catches the spray, the twisted crab is an old woman suddenly
become a lovely girl cream-white and rose-flusht. Or she goes down the
island-shores, or by the brackened coasts of inland lochs, or along
the overhanging brows of streams, or where brooks glide between grassy
banks; or, facing northward, she wanders where the hill-burn falls
from ledge to ledge, or leaps past the outswung roots of mountain-ash
or birch, or steals between peaty grasses where the wren has her nest
in the pendent bramble and the greenfinch calls across the fern. And
wherever she goes the yellow iris is left by her feet, the yellow-white
willow-catkins have become musical with a myriad bees, dust of gold
has fallen into the milk-white snow of the countless clans of the
daisy, tides of an invisible flood have foamed along the hawthorns,
the wild crocus has shone like the spear of Pisarr, the buttercup is
brimmed with golden wine, and even the kingcup-ingots are melted in
the waters--for whence else can come that flowing gold which is blent
with yonder moving emerald that is as the breath of the grass, yonder
floating azure as of drowned speedwells, yonder wandering violet, child
of shadow and the wind, yonder mysterious phantom of pale mauve which
tells that a becalmed cloud-ship drifts on the deeps of heaven.
Nevertheless it is in the woods that the miracle may be more intimately
seen. The Presence perchance is not universally abroad so much as
immediately evident. A hand touched that larch yonder: for why is it
so suddenly green, with a greenness as of a sea-wave, or as the wet
emerald crystal one finds on the sands of Iona, or, rather, with the
softer, moister, the indescribable greenness of the rainbow’s breast?
A foot leaned upon the moss beneath that vast oak, on whose southern
slopes the russet leaves still hang like a multitude of bats along dark
ragged cliffs: for why has the cyclamen suddenly burned in a faint
flame, there; why has the sky suddenly come up through the moss, in
that maze of speedwells? Who rose, yonder, and passed like a phantom
westward? Some one, surely, of the divine race, for the tips of the
sycamore-boughs have suddenly burned with a bronze-hued fire. Who went
suddenly down that mysterious alley of dim columnar pines, stirring the
untrodden silent ways? For, look, the air is full of delicate golden
dust. The wind-wooer has whispered, and the pine tree has loved, and
the seed of the forests to come floats like summer-dust along the
aerial highways.
But what of the Forest-Awakener? Who is he? Her name, is it known of
men? Who can it be but the Wind of the South, that first-born of the
wooing Year and sweetheart Spring? But what if the name be only that
of a bird? Then, surely, it must be the wood-thrush, or perchance
the cushat, or, no, that wandering Summer-herald, the Cuckoo! Not
the skylark, for he is in the sunlight, lost above the pastures: not
the merle, for he is flooding the wayside elms with ancient music of
ever-young love: not the blithe clans of the Finch, for one and all
are gypsies of the open. Perchance, then, the Nightingale? No, he is
a moon-worshipper, the chorister of the stars, the incense-swinger
before the altars of the dawn: and though he is a child of the woods,
he loves the thickets also. Besides, he will not come far north. Are
there not deep woods of silence and dream beyond the banks of the
Tyne? Are there no forest sanctuaries north of the green ramparts
which divide Northumbria from the glens of Tweed and the solitudes of
the shadowy Urr? Are there no inland valleys buried in sea-sounding
woods beyond the green vale of Quair? Alas, the sweet Songmaker from
the South does not think so, does not so dream. In moon-reveries in
the woods of Surrey, in starry serenades along the lanes of Devon, in
lonely nocturnes in the shadowy groves of the New Forest, he has no
thought of more vast, more secret and impenetrable woods through which
move mountain-airs from Schiehallion, chanting winds from the brows of
the Grampians: he has no ancestral memory of the countless battalions
of the red pine which throng the wilds of Argyll or look on the grey
shoreless seas of the west, these green pillars which once covered the
barren braes of Balquhidder, the desolate hill-lands of the Gregara,
and, when the world was young, were wet with the spray of the unquiet
wastes wherein are set the treeless Hebrides.
No, in the north at least, we cannot call the nightingale the
Forest-Awakener. In truth, nowhere in our land. For he comes late when
he comes at all. The great awakening has already happened. Already
in the south the song-thrush, the dandelion, the blackthorn-snow
are old tales: far in Ultima Thule to the north-west the gillebride
has whistled the tidings to Gaelic ears, far in Ultima Thule to the
north-east the Shetlander has rejoiced in that blithest thicket-signal
of spring, the tossed lilt of the wren.
It is of the green woodpecker I speak. We do not know him well, most
of us: but then most of us are alien to the woods. Town-dwellers and
homestayers know little or nothing of the secret signals. It is only
the obvious that they note, and seldom read in the great Script of
Nature anything more than the conventional signature of certain loved
and familiar names and tokens.
It was in the Forest of Fontainebleau I first heard the green
woodpecker called by this delightful name, the Awakener of the Woods,
_le Réveilleur de la Forêt_. My French friend told me it was not a
literary name, as I fancied, but one given by the foresters. And how
apt it is. In the first weeks of March--in the first week of April,
it may be, as the scene moves northward--there is no more delightful,
and certainly no more welcome, sound than the blithe bugle-call of
the green woodpecker calling through the woods for love, and, after
long expectant pauses, hearing love call back in thrilling response,
now a flute-note of gladness, now a challenging clarion-cry. True,
whether in the vast forest of Fontainebleau or in our northern woods,
the woodpecker is not so readily to be heard in the inward solitudes.
He loves the open glades, and commonly the timbered park-land is his
favourite resort. Still, save in the deepest and darkest woods, that
delightful rejoicing note is now everywhere to be heard fluting along
the sunlit ways of the wind. It awakes the forest. When the voice of
the woodpecker is heard it is the hour for Nature to celebrate her own
Ides of March. Elsewhere the song-thrush and the skylark have been
the first heralds. Even in the woods the missel-thrush may have flung
a sudden storm of song out on the cold tides of the wind swaying the
elm-tops like dusky airweed of the upper ocean. But, in the glades
themselves, in the listening coverts, it is the call of the green
woodpecker that has awakened the dreaming forest.
And what an ancient old-world tale Picus could tell. For, in the long
ago, was he not Picus the antique Italiot god. A forest-god he was,
son of ancient Saturn, and himself the father of that beautiful being
of the woods, Faunus. And how far he wandered from Thracian valley and
Sabine oak-grove ... for in that far northern Finland, which to the
Latins was but an unknown remote waste under the star Septentrion, he
and his son reappear, though now his name is Tapio and Faunus is become
Nyyrikki....
“O Nyyrikki, mountain-hero,
Son of Tapio of forests,
Hero with the scarlet headgear,
Notches make along the pathway,
Landmarks upward on the mountain,
That the hunter may not wander.”
Still does Nyyrikki, or Pikker as he was called by the northmen long
before the _Kalevala_ was wrought into Finnish runes, make notches
along the pathways of the woods, still the huntsman on the hillside
sees his signals on the oak-boles. Perhaps to this day the Esthonian
peasant offers in his heart a prayer to Pikker the woodpecker-god,
god of thunder and storm, so god too of the glades and fields where
these can devastate--a prayer such as that which Johann Gutsloff, a
Finnish author of the seventeenth century, cites as the supplication
of an old Esthonian farmer: ‘... Beloved Pikker, we will sacrifice to
thee an ox with two horns and four hoofs, and want to beg you as to
our ploughing and sowing that our straw shall be red as copper and our
grain as yellow as gold. Send elsewhere all thick black clouds over
great swamps, high woods, and wide wastes. But give to us ploughmen and
sowers a fertile season and sweet rain.’
In Gaelic lands many an old name has been dropped from common use,
because thus associated with some shy and yet never-far divinity, and
so too the Finn and the Esth ceased to call the woodpecker Pikker
(a word so strangely like Picus) and thus it is that now the peasant
knows him only as _Tikka_. With the Romans, Picus the god was figured
with a woodpecker on his head, and all of us who have read Pliny will
remember the great store laid by the auspices of Rome on the flight and
direction and general procedure of this forest-traveller. Recently a
sculptor, I know not of what nationality, exhibited in Paris a statue
of the Unknown Pan, and on his shoulder perched a woodpecker. Was
this a reminiscence, or ancestral memory, or the divining vision of
the imagination? I have some fifty pages or more of MS. notes dealing
with the folklore and legendary names and varying ways and habits of
the fascinating woodlander, from his Greek appearance as Pelekas, the
axe-hewer (Aristophanes calls him the oak-striker)--whence no doubt
‘Picus’ and ‘Pikker’ and ‘Peek’ and the rest--to Latin Tindareas,
mortal father of Leda, to the White Woodpecker, the magic bird of
mediæval legend, to ‘der olle Picker,’ the horrible laughing god of
human sacrifice in ancient Prussia, to Pak-a-Pak, ‘the lost lover of
the woman in the oak,’ in a strange tale I heard once in the woods
of Argyll. But of all this I would recall to-day only that tradition
of the woodpecker which describes her (she is a wise-woman in the
folk-tales) as knowing where the spring-wurzel grows, that mysterious
plant of Pan and the sun with which one may open the faces of cliffs
with a breath, as did the deer-mother of Oisìn of the Songs, with which
too one may find the secret ways of Venusberg and behold incalculable
treasure.
For hark!... _Pak-a-Pak_, and the long cry of love! It is answered from
the listening woods! Here must ‘the spring-wurzel’ grow ... here, for
sure, are the green palaces of Venusberg, here, at very hand, are the
incalculable treasures of the awakened Forest.
THE WILD APPLE
The foam of the White Tide of blossom has been flung across the land.
It is already ebbing from the blackthorn hedges; the wild-cherry
herself is no longer so immaculately snow-white. It drifts on the wind
that has wooed the wild-apple. The plum is like a reef swept with surf.
Has not the laurustinus long been as cream-dappled as, later, the elder
will be in every hedgerow or green lane or cottage-garden? Not that
all the tides of blossom are like fallen snow: is not the apple-bloom
itself flushed with the hearts of roses? Think of the flowering almond,
that cloud of shell-heart pink: of the delicate bloom of the peach
that lives on the south wind: of the green-gold of the sallow catkins:
of the blazing yellow of the gorse: of the homely flowering-currant,
which even by mid-March had hung out her gay tangle of pinky blooms: of
the purple-red of the deadnettle in the ditch, and of the ruddy-hued
fallaways of the poplar overhead. I wonder if in most places the
flowering-currant is no more than an ordinary shrub. Here, where I
write, there are several small trees of it, taller than the general
growth of the lilac, tall as the laburnum, though at the time of their
unloosening the one had not revealed her delicate mauve and white,
while the other was still a miser of the countless gold he will now
soon be spreading upon the wind. The pink blooms, carmine-ended where
the five or six unfolded blossoms hang like fruit, droop in a roseal
shower, as innumerous as the golden drops of the laburnum-rain or the
suspended snowflakes of the white lilac themselves. The brown bees
have long discovered this flusht Eden; their drowsily sweet murmurous
drone is as continuous as though these slow-swaying pastures were of
linden-bloom and the hour the heart of summer.
Everywhere the largesse of Spring has followed her first penury in the
scanty snow of the blackthorn on bare boughs. What, by the way, is the
origin of the phrase ‘Blackthorn-sorrow’? I heard it again recently,
as though to say that summer was safely at hand so that now there
was no more fear of the blackthorn sorrow. However, as later I hope
to deal with the complex folklore of the Thorn, I need not let the
subject delay me now, except to say that in the North-West Highlands
I have heard the blackthorn called _Bròn Lochlannach_, the Northman’s
woe, literally Norse or Norland Sorrow or Mourning, ... a legendary
designation to which there is, I believe, a North-German analogue.
The idea here is that the blackthorn sprang from the blood of the
slain Norse invaders, the ‘pagans from Lochlin’ of mediæval Gaelic
story. In many parts of the kingdom it is looked on askance, and cut
sprays of it brought into a house are considered as a menace of ill,
as a death-token even; and it has been surmised that this is due to
some confused memory of a druidical or other early symbolism of the
commingling of winter and summer, in other words of life and death,
in the blackthorn’s blossom-strewn leafless branches. It may be so,
but does not seem to me likely, for by far the greater part of flower
and tree folklore has little to do with such subtle conceptions. Too
many of these are as vague and fantastical as that legend which says
that one must not taste of the root of the peony if a woodpecker be in
sight, or else the penalty may be blindness: a safe prognostication!
It is that other thorn which holds us now, that lovely torch of
blossom which has taken to itself the name of the lovers’-month. Not
that the hawthorn has unchallenged use of May as a name. In Devon the
white lilac is often called the May, and elsewhere too the ‘laylock’
is spoken of as May-bloom. The laurustinus, again, is thus named in
some parts of Somerset, and I have heard lilies-of-the-valley called
May-blossoms. In Scotland I have often heard the hawthorn-in-bloom
called Queen of the May and even Queen of the Meadow, though neither
name properly belongs to it, and the latter is the inalienable title
of the meadowsweet. But of all wild-blossom nothing surpasses in mass
that of the hawthorn. It, truly, is the foam of the groves and hollows.
From the south to the north it flows in a foaming tide. ‘Bride of the
world’ I have heard it called in a Gaelic song, and long ago an ancient
Celtic bard spoke of it lovingly ... ‘white is every green thorn, and
honeysweet.’
But it is of the Apple I want to write just now, she whose coronal of
blossom is surely loveliest of all fruitbearers: Bride of the Wind we
may say--‘Persephone herself’ as a modern Italian poet calls her.
In the Highlands to-day the Apple (_Ubhal_), or the Wild-Apple or
Crab-Apple (_Ubhal-fiadhaich_), is still common in woods and by
stream-sides. The bitter juice of the fruit is still used for sprains
and bruises, and to-day as of old the Gaelic poet has no more frequent
comparison of his sweetheart’s charm than to the delicate-hued,
sweet-smelling apple--_e.g._,
“_Iseabail òg
An òr-fhuilt bhuidhe--
Do ghruaidh mar ròs
’S do phòg mar ubhal,_”
where the poet praises his Isabel of the yellow tresses and rose-flusht
cheek and kissing-mouth sweet as an apple. Once the apple was far more
common in Scotland than it is now. An old authority, Solinus, says
that Moray and all the north-east abounded in the third century with
fruit-bearing apple-trees, and Buchanan even speaks of Inverness-shire
as being unsurpassed for the fruit. Visitors to Iona, to-day, who see
it a sandy treeless isle, may hardly credit that it was once famous for
its apple-orchards, and that too as late as the ninth century, till the
monks of Iona were slain and the orchards destroyed by the ravaging
vikings out of Norway. Beautiful Arran, too, was once lovelier still,
so lovely with apple-blossom and ruddy yellow fruit that it was called
Emhain Abhlach, the Avalon of the Gael.
To come in a waste piece of tangled woods, or on some lapwing-haunted
pasture-edge, or in the heathy wilderness, on the wild-apple in bloom,
is to know one of the most thrilling experiences of the Spring. As a
rule the wild-apple stands solitary. Seen thus, it has often something
of the remote element of dreamland. I came once, in the heart of
a beechwood, on a single tree of laburnum, in full glory of dense
unfallen gold. How did it come to be there, what wind had first brought
it on the tides of birth, what friendly nurture had led the seedling
to the sapling and the sapling to lovely youth? I wondered; but most I
wondered at the sudden beauty, at the unexpected revelation of vistas
other than those of the woodland, at the unloosening of the secret
gates of dreams and the imagination. Faerie stood open. Angus Og,
the Celtic Apollo Chrusokumos, the golden Balder of the Gael, stood
yonder just a moment ago, surely? Yonder, in the sunlit greenness,
Midir of the Dew it was who passed swiftly among the batwings of
disguising shadows? Was that Findabair going like a moonbeam, there
in the sea-caverns of the green leaf? Or was it Fand, whose laughter
the storm-thrush caught, long, long ago? Surely that was an echo of
old forgotten song in the gloom of the beeches? Could it be Fedelm of
the _Sìdhe_, ‘the young girl of the mouth of red berries, with voice
sweeter than the strings of a curved harp, and skin showing like the
snow of a single night’? And there, vanishing in the sunlit cataract of
gold itself, like a rainbow behind falling water, was not that Niamh
of the Golden Tresses? ... Niamh, whose beauty was so great that the
poets of the Other-world and those who died of love for her called her
Love Entangled, she whose beauty filled three hundred years in the
single hour that Fionn thought he was with her, in the days when the
ancient world had suddenly grown old, and the little bell of Patrick
the Christ-Bringer had tinkled sorrow and desolation and passing away
across the Irish hills. Up among the devious green pathways of the
travelling wood what lost king’s voice was that? ...
“Say, down those halls of Quiet
Doth he cry upon his Queen?
Or doth he sleep, contented
To dream of what has been?”
... what poet of long ago, living in a flame of passion still, a
wandering breath for ever, went by on that drowsy wind?--
“Across the world my sorrow flies,
A-hunger for the grey and wistful
Beauty of Feithfailge’s eyes.”
Something of that emotion as of ancestral memories, as of an awakened
past, of an unloosening of the imagination, may well come to any
imaginative nature encountering suddenly a wild-apple in blossom in
some solitary place. To people of a Celtic race or having a dominant
Celtic strain, in particular, perhaps; for to the Gael, the Cymru
and the Breton the Apple-tree is associated with his most sacred
traditional beliefs. Of old it was sacrosanct. It was the Celtic Tree
of Life, what Yggdrasil was to the ancient dreamers of Scandinavia.
He cannot think of it, but of the kingdom of eternal youth: of Emhain
Abhlach, of Y Breasil, of Avalon, of drowned Avillion. It waves over
the lost Edens. In Tir-na-n’Og its boughs, heavy with blossom, hang
above the foam of the last pale waters of doom. The tired islander, who
has put away hunger and weariness and dreams and the old secret desire
of the sword, lays himself down below its branches in Flatheanas,
and hears the wild harpers of Rinn in a drowsy hum like the hum of
wild bees. Grey-haired men and women on the shores of Connemara look
out across the dim wave and see the waving of its boughs. The Breton
peasant, standing at twilight on the rock-strewn beaches of Tregastèl,
will cross himself as he smells the fragrance of apple-blossom coming
from sunken isles across the long rolling billows, and remember,
perhaps, how of old in moonlit nights he has seen his keel drive
through the yielding topmost branches of the woods of Avalon. Many
poets have wandered in the secret valleys of Avillion, and have passed
under boughs heavy with foam of dreams, and have forgotten all things
and been uplifted in joy. In the glens of the Land of Heart’s Desire
the tired singers of the world have become silent under the windless
branches, snow-white in the moonshine, having found the Heart of Song.
The cross and death-coffer of apple-wood, the crown of wild-apple, the
apple-staff, the poet’s tablets of apple-wood, all the apple-myths and
apple-legends, how could one tell of them in a few words. They are in
old songs and old tales of all lands. Our Gaelic literature alone is
fragrant with apple-bloom, is lovely with the flickering shadow of the
apple-leaf, mysterious with symbol of fruit and the apple-wood that
holds life and death in one embrace. Many readers will at once recall
that lovely old tale of Bailê the Sweet-spoken and Ailinn Honeymouth,
whose love was so great that when in their beautiful youth they died
and were buried, one in a grave to the north and one in a grave to
the south, grave-wood grew into grave-wood, and green branches from
the north and the south became one overhanging branch, under which the
winds murmured of passion that winter-death could not kill nor the
hot noons of summer lull into forgetfulness. There is an older and
less-known _sgeul_ of how Ana, that most ancient goddess, the Mother,
after she had fashioned all the gods, and had made man out of rock
and sand and water and the breathing of her breath, made woman out of
the body of a wave of the sea and out of foam of apple-blossom and
out of the wandering wind. And there are many tales that, in this way
or a like way, have in them the mysterious wind of the wild-apple,
many poems on whose shadowy waters float the rose-flusht snow of the
scattered blossoms of dreams and desires. Was not the apple-blossom
first stained through the inappeasable longing of a poet-king, who,
yet living, had reached Y Breasil? Ulad saw there a garth of white
blossom, and of this he gathered, and warmed all night against his
breast, and at dawn breathed into them. When the sunbreak slid a rising
line along the dawn he saw that what had been white blooms, made warm
by his breath and flusht by the beating of his heart, was a woman.
And how at the end Fand became once more a drift of white blossom upon
the deerskin. For, when the longing and the sorrow of all sorrows
in the heart of Ulad wrapt his heart in flame, suddenly a wind-eddy
scattered the blossoms upon the deerskin, so that they wavered hither
and thither, but some were stained by the wandering fires of a rainbow
that drifted out of the rose-red thickets of the dawn.
How far back do these apple-legends go? I know not. But when Aphrodite
was born of the Idalian foam she held an apple in her hand, as Asia
or Eve looked long upon the fruit of life and death in Eden. In Hades
itself was it not the lure and the bitterness of Tantalus? All old
poems and tales, as I have said, have it, whether as legend, or dream,
or metaphor, or as a simile even, as in the seventh-century MS. of the
_Caïn Adamnain_, where Adanman’s old mother cries _mo maccansa suut
amail bis ubull fo’ tuind_ ... ‘my dear son yonder is like an apple on
a wave’: [_i.e._] little is his hold on the earth. And those of us who
have read, and remember, the _Prose Edda_, will recall how Iduna ‘keeps
in a box, Apples, which the gods, when they feel old age approaching,
have only to taste to become young again.’
Is that too a dream, or is there no Ragnarök for the gods to fear?
This at least we know, that as the winter-tide, the death-tide,
eternally recurs, so is the foam-white Dream continually rewoven, so
everlastingly does Spring come again in the green garment that is the
symbol of immortality and wearing the white coronals of blossom which
stand for the soul’s inalienable hope, for the spirit’s incalculable
joy. For Avalon is not a dream. It is with us still. It is here indeed,
though set within no frontiers, and unlimned in any chart. And even the
apples of Iduna grow within reach: the least of us may eat of the fruit
... till the coming of Ragnarök.
RUNNING WATERS
Is it because the wild-wood passion of Pan still lingers in our hearts,
because still in our minds the voice of Syrinx floats in melancholy
music, the music of regret and longing, that for most of us there is
so potent a spell in running waters? We associate them with loneliness
and beauty. Beauty and solitude ... these are still the shepherd-kings
of the imagination, to compel our wandering memories, our thoughts,
our dreams. There is a story of one snatched from the closing hand
of death, who, when asked if he had been oppressed by dark confusion
and terror, answered that he had known no terror and no confusion but
only an all-embracing and intensifying silence, till at the last, deep
within it as in a profound chasm, he had caught the low, continuous
sound of running waters. That I can well believe. At the extremes of
life thought naturally returns to the things that first communicated
to the shaken mind of childhood the sense of mystery, the summons and
the elation of that which reveals in beauty and utters the vibration
of wonder. The first coming of snow, the noise of wind in trees, the
gathering murmur of the tide heard in the night’s darkness and silence,
music or songs borne across water, the first falling meteors with
their terrifying suggestion that all these familiar stellar fires may
likewise at any time be blown abroad by some obscure and awful wind,
the furtive whisperings and inexplicable confused speech of running
waters, of such are these primitive and unforgettable experiences.
The burn, the brook, the rivulet, what memories of them are possessed
by those whose childhood has not been wholly spent in towns, or at
those thronged seaside resorts where the bounteous green life of Nature
is even more absent than in many cities, at least in those which have
their wooded parks, in which there may be flowing or still waters,
where the cushat may be heard among the cedars or beeches, and where,
above the tall elms, the noisy coming and going of rooks seems to the
exile the very voice of the country-side. The linn of brown foaming
water, the amber surge of the hill-stream, the stealthy if swift rush
of the brown flood beloved of the salmon, or the curve and sweep of
the grass-green river flowing between meadows and under alders and past
rocky fastnesses and linking green valleys as a winding snake barred
with emerald, what memories these suggest to every lad or lass, to
every man or woman who has ever thrown a cast or trailed a line, or,
for that matter, who has lain on their leaning banks, book in hand, or
lost in dreams, or wandered the dewy ways at dusk. Does not the very
mention of torrent and cataract and waterfall evoke happy memories? One
can hear the tumultuous surge between heather-held banks, and see the
rock-rooted bracken shake with the ceaseless spray: can see the wild
leap and foaming collapse, so habitual, so orderly in disorder, that
the ring-ousel flies heedlessly from her fragile eggs which a handful
of this whirling water would crush and sweep away: can recall, as in
dreams the mind rebuilds the phantoms of natural imagery, the long,
white, wavering smoke down the sheer slope of some mountain-bastion,
or the filmy yet motionless veils of delicate gauze hung high on the
breasts of silent and remote hills.
What differences there are in these running waters. We hear much of
‘blue’ rivers, of the silver flood of azure, and so forth. But few
rivers or brooks or burns are blue. Their azure colour is a mirage
wrought by distance and the angle of vision, affected by the play of
wind, by the quality of light, by the blueness of the sky. Every German
poet has sung of the blue Danube, the blue Rhine. These rivers have
no quality of blueness, save by reflection from above, at a distance,
and at a certain angle of vision. Waters flowing from the Lake of
Geneva and from the Lake of Lucerne are blue even on grey days and if
looked at on the shadow-side of a bridge. We have many grey-blue and
blue-white and azure-shadowed running waters, but we have more that
are grass-green and far more that are dappled hazel and nut-brown and
golden-brown and amber-shot black-brown. It is not easy to say which
of these running waters one loves best: nor need one, nor should one
try. It would be like thinking of a garden-close filled with wallflower
and mignonette, carnations and sweet-peas, dark violets and yellow
pansies and blue love-in-a-mist, white tulips and lilies-of-the-valley
and white roses, damask rose and the flusht morning-glory and the
pink moss-rose and brier and eglantine, and saying which is best of
these, which loveliest, which the most dear to the mind as well as to
the eyes. But, still, we have doubtless each some happy choice, some
hidden predilection. That will depend on memories and associations. I
read somewhere recently that a certain traveller could not anywhere
find, could nowhere recall, any stream or river for him so poetical,
so lovely in quiet beauty as the Yorkshire Ouse. My knowledge of that
river is restricted to a brief intimacy at and near York, and my
recollection of it is of a broad turbid stream between muddy banks. But
that does not interfere with the giving full credit to that traveller’s
loyal affection. He would remember the Ouse among the sands of Egypt
or by the yellow flow of the Hooghly or perhaps by the surge of some
great river as the Mississippi, and it would flow through his mind in
a serene pastoral beauty, bluer than any river that ever flowed in our
grey North, and in a changeless light of May or June, with calling
cuckoo and thridding swallow unmindful of seasons that come and go,
and with green flag and tufted reed and trailing willow-branch as
unfading as the memories to which they are for evermore wed. It would
not be the Ouse that you or I look at from the muddy banks on a dull
November day, or catch a glimpse of as the North Express whirls by.
It would be the Ouse of boyhood and youth and the heart filled with
a sweet trouble, perplext by a strange ache. It would be the Ouse at
its loveliest, on a rare day, in an hour of the hours, flowing in
midsummer-air fragrant with meadow-hay and wild-roses. It would be an
Ouse more beautiful still: it would be subtly present in ‘the quiet
waters’ of the Psalmist, wherever the painter limned that delicate
unrest, wherever the poet sang of the Stream’s Secret. It would be, for
him, the archetype of the flowing stream: _the_ river.
And so, each will have his preference, if it be only one of temperament
rather than of sentiment. The deep, broad, swirling river has its
incalculable fascination. Its mysterious volume, so great a flood from
perhaps so insignificant a source, from mayhap some shallow pool among
stagnant marsh-lands with nothing of stir or motion but the hovering
dragon-fly, the wheeling and wailing lapwing, and the slow, voiceless
passage of wayfaring cloud: its devious way, like an interminable
procession or the continuous winding column of an army seen from a
great height: its arrivals and departures at quiet towns and noisy and
defiling cities: its destiny, its ultimate blending with the devouring
tide and the overrunning wave ... all this has become the commonplace
of the poet and the romancist. Thames filled with every craft possible
to be seen betwixt the Nore and Oxford; the Forth, winding in still
loops under the walls of Stirling and grey Cambuskenneth; the Clyde,
running past the hills of Dumbarton and Argyll, already salt with the
sea-flood pouring in by the ocean-gates of Arran and Ailsa; the deep
flood of Tay or Shannon; these, and others, will always have a host to
praise and magnify. But many of us will dream rather of chalk-streams
in Devon, of the rippling amber-yellow flood of Derwent in the Peakland
valleys, of Tweed and Teviot, of slow streams among woods and bright
rivers going like cold flame through wide straths and lowlands: of
small narrow waters whose very names are wedded to beauty and to
‘old, unhappy, far-off things,’ Otterbourne, the Water of Urr, the
Water of Quair, Allan Water. Above all will some of us think of those
peat-stained bracken-dyed burns, that leap and dance and sing down the
steep ways of rock and heather in the Scotland of our love.
For my own part I find myself in so great agreement with a friend, who
expresses better than I can do the love and haunting spell of the brown
hill-water (which is neither a river nor exactly a stream nor yet a
rivulet, but with something of each and more of what in the lowlands
is a brook and in the highlands a burn, yet than the one is swifter
and than the other is less debonair and impetuous) that I have been
constrained to ask leave to let it appear here as a natural close of
running waters at the end of this brief paper on a theme in whose very
title lie old music and dream and subtly incalculable spell.
“THE HILL-WATER
“There is a little brook,
I love it well:
It hath so sweet a sound
That even in dreams my ears could tell
Its music anywhere.
Often I wander there,
And leave my book
Unread upon the ground,
Eager to quell
In the hush’d air
That dwells above its flowing forehead fair
All that about my heart hath wound
A trouble of care:
Or, it may be, idly to spell
Its runic music rare,
And with its singing soul to share
Its ancient lore profound:
For sweet it is to be the echoing shell
That lists and inly keeps that murmurous miracle.
“About it all day long
In this June-tide
There is a myriad song.
From every side
There comes a breath, a hum, a voice:
The hill-wind fans it with a pleasant noise
As of sweet rustling things
That move on unseen wings,
And from the pinewood near
A floating whisper oftentimes I hear,
As when, o’er pastoral meadows wide,
Stealeth the drowsy music of a weir.
The green reeds bend above it;
The soft green grasses stoop and trail therein;
The minnows dart and spin;
The purple-gleaming swallows love it:
And, hush, its innermost depths within,
The vague prophetic murmur of the linn!
“But not in summertide alone
I love to look
Upon this rippling water in my glen:
Most sweet, most dear my brook,
And most my own,
When the grey mists shroud every ben,
And in its quiet place
The stream doth bare her face
And lets me pore deep down into her eyes,
Her eyes of shadowy grey
Wherein from day to day
My soul is spellbound with a new surmise,
Or doth some subtler meaning trace
Reflected from unseen invisible skies.
“Dear mountain-solitary, dear lonely brook,
Of hillside rains and dews the fragrant daughter,
Sweet, sweet thy music when I bend above thee,
When in thy fugitive face I look:
Yet not the less I love thee,
When, far away, and absent from thee long,
I yearn, my dark hill-water,
I yearn, I strain to hear thy song,
Brown, wandering water,
Dear, murmuring water!”
WILLIAM SHARP
THE SUMMER HERALDS
If the cuckoo, the swallow, and the nightjar be pre-eminently the birds
of Summer (though, truly, the swift, the flycatcher, and the corncrake
have as good a title) the rear-guard of Spring may be said to be the
house-martin, the cushat, and the turtle. Even the delaying wheatear,
or the still later butcher-bird may have come, and yet _Sweep-Sweep_
may not have been heard about the eaves of old houses or under and over
the ruined clay of last year’s nests; the cushat’s voice may not have
become habitual in the greening woods; and the tireless wings of the
turtle may not have been seen clipping the invisible pathways between
us and the horizons of the south. But, when these come, we know that
Spring has traversed the whole country, and is now standing ankle-deep
in thrift and moondaisies in the last rocky places fronting the north
sea. No one doubts that summer is round the corner when the flycatcher
hawks the happy hunting-grounds of the apple-blossom, when the swift
wheels over the spire of the village church, and when the wild-dove is
come again. The first call of the cuckoo unloosened the secret gates.
We are across the frontier in that first gloaming when we hear
“The clamour musical of culver wings
Beating the soft air of the dewy dusk.”
W. S.
To these familiar and loved harbingers from the south should be added
yet another welcome friend who comes to us in the rear-guard of the
Spring, though, rather, we should say he becomes visible now, for the
Bat has never crossed the seas. The house-martin has not had time to
forget the sands of Africa before her wing has dusked the white pansies
on the sunside of old redbrick English manors: but the bat has only to
stretch his far stronger yet incalculably less enduring pinions and
then loop through the dusk from ivied cave or tree-hollow or the sombre
silences of old barns, ruined towers, or ancient belfries sheltered
from rain and wind.
The Awakening of the Bat ... yes, that too is a sign that Spring has
gone by, singing on her northward way and weaving coronals of primrose
and cowslip, or from her unfolded lap throwing clouds of blossom on
this hawthorn or on this apple-orchard, or where the wind-a-quiver
pear leans over the pasture from the garden-edge, or where in green
hollows the wild-cherry holds the nest of a speckled thrush. She will
be gone soon. Before the cuckoo’s sweet bells have jangled she will be
treading the snows of yesteryear. But no, she never leaves the circling
road, Persephone, Earth’s loveliest daughter. Onward forever she goes,
young, immortal, singing the greening song of her ancient deathless
magic far down below the horizons, beyond the lifting line of the ever
upwelling world. And already Summer is awake. She hears the nightjar
churring from the juniper to his mate on the hawthorn-bough, and in the
dew among the green corn or from the seeding pastures the _crek-crāke!
crek-crāke!_ of the ambiguous landrail. This morning, when she woke,
the cushats were calling from the forest-avenues, the bumble-bee droned
in the pale horns of the honeysuckle, and from a thicket newly covered
with pink and white blossoms of the wild-rose a proud mavis saw her
younglings at last take flight on confident wing.
A good symbol, that of the Awakening of the Bat. Darkness come out
of the realm of sleep and dreams: the realm itself filled with the
west wind and the dancing sunlight, sleep put away like a nomad’s
winter-tent and dreams become realities. Often I have wondered how it
is that so little is commonly known of the bat-lore of our own and
other races. Doubtless there is some book which deals with this lore.
There may be some familiar one for aught I know, but I have never met
with or heard of it.
Recently I tried in vain to get some such book dealing with the
folklore and mythology of the bat. And yet in the traditional lore
of all countries there are many allusions to this ‘blind bird of the
dusk.’ The Greeks, the Romans, the Celts of Europe, the westering
Gaels, had many legends and superstitions connected with it. To-day
the Finn, the Magyar, the Basque and the island Gael keep some of the
folklore that has ebbed away from other nations, or become confused or
remembered only by old folk in old out-of-the-way places. Somewhere I
have notes of several bat-legends and fragments of bat-lore collected
once for a friend, who after all went ‘to hunt the bat’ before he could
use them. That was the phrase which started the quest. He had read
it, or heard it I think, and wrote to me asking if I had ever heard
the phrase ‘to hunt the bat’ as synonymous with death. I have heard
it once or twice in the last few years, and once in a story where the
teller, speaking of an outlaw who was a great deer-hunter in the wilds
of Inverness, was found dead ‘with the fork of an ash-root through his
breast, pinned like a red fox he was, and he by that time hunting the
bat in the black silence.’ It would be inapposite, here, to linger on
this theme, but I am tempted to record one or two of these bat-lore
fragments which I recall: and perhaps, from the scarcity of such
traditional flotsam and jetsam, some readers and bat-lovers may be
interested.
The bat, commonly called in Gaelic _an ialtag_, or _dialtag_, though
even in the one Shire of Argyll at least six other common names
might as likely be heard, is occasionally poetically called the
_Bàdharan-dhu_, the dark wandering one. I remember being told that
the reason of the name was as follows. In the early days of the world
the bat was blue as the kingfisher and with a breast white as that of
the swallow, and its eyes were so large and luminous that because of
this and its whirling flight its ancient name was a name signifying
‘flash-fire’--though now become, with the Gaelic poet who told me this,
_dealan-dhu badhalaiche choille_, ‘the little black wandering flame of
the woods.’ But on the day of the Crucifixion the bat mocked at the
agony of the Saviour, and while the redbreast was trying to pull out
a thorn, now from Christ’s hand, now from His foot, the bat whirled
to and fro crying, ‘See how lovely I am! See how swift I am!’ Christ
turned His eyes and looked at it, and the blue and the white went out
of the bat like the ebbing wave out of a pool, and it became blind and
black and whirled away till it met the rising of night and was drowned
in that darkness for evermore. And that is why the bat is seen in the
dusk and at night, and wheels to and fro in such aimless wandering
flight, with his thin almost inaudible voice crying, ‘See how blind I
am! See how ugly I am!’
From the same source I had _dealan-dhu bais_, the little black flame
(or flash) of death, and a still stranger note to the effect that bats
are the offspring of lightning and smitten trees: the connection being
more obvious to Gaelic ears, because _dealan-bàs_ is one of the names
of lightning.
The other name I heard as a child, and it long puzzled me.
_Beuban-an-Athar-Uaibhreach:_ literally, the malformed one of the
Haughty Father. Now why should the bat be called _beuban_, a thing
spoiled, wilfully malformed? ‘An t’ Athair Uaibhreach’ (of which _an
athar_ is the genitive) is one of the evasive names used by the Gael
for Satan ... for that proud and glorious angel, the Father of Evil,
who fell from his high estate through inconquerable pride. Why, then,
was the bat the malformed creature of Satan? It was years afterwards
before I had the story told me, for my old nurse (from whom I heard
the phrase) did not think the tale fitting for a child’s ears. When
Judas hanged himself on a tree, so the tale ran, and his soul went out
lamenting on the wind, the Haughty Father flung that wretched spirit
contemptuously back into the world. But first he twisted it and altered
it four hundred and forty-four times, till it was neither human nor
bird nor beast, but was likest a foul rat with leathern wings. ‘Stay
there till the last day,’ he said, ‘in blindness and darkness, and
be accursed for ever’ ... and that is why the bat (the _triollachan
dhorchadas_, ‘the little waverer of the dark,’ or _triollachan
fheasgair_, or little waverer of the dusk, as a more merciful legend
has it) flies as he does, maimed, blind, accursed and feared, and
shrieking in his phantom voice _Gu la’ bais! Gu la’ bais!_ (‘till the
day of death’ ... _i.e._, the Last Day).
In some parts of Argyll the bat is said to live for three generations
of an eagle, six generations of a stag, and nine generations of a man.
With less poetic exactitude I have been told that it lives thirteen
years in flight and thirty-three years in all! ... though equally
authentic information avers that the average life of the bat is
twenty-one years. A forester told me once that he did not think any bat
lived longer than nine years, but he thought fifteen as likely as nine.
On the other hand, he himself spoke, and as though for all he knew it
might well be so, of an old tradition that a bat lives to a hundred
years. This, I may add, I have heard again and again. The other day a
fisherman from the island of Lismore gave the unexpected answer: ‘How
old will the _ialtag_ be? Well, now, just exactly what the age of Judas
was the hour he kissed Christ and betrayed Him, and not a day more
and not a day less.’ Nothing explicit as to that, however, could be
obtained. A gardener told me once a rhyme about how to get at the age
of man, but I have forgotten it except that it was to the effect that a
_losgunn_ (a toad) was twice the age of an _easgunn_ (an eel), and that
a _dialtag_ (bat) was twice the age of a _losgunn_, and that _am fiadh_
(the stag) was twice the age of a _dialtag_, ‘and put ten to that and
you’ll have the allotted age of man’ [_i.e._, an eel is supposed to
live about seven years to seven and a half years: a frog or toad to
about fifteen: a bat to about thirty: a deer to about sixty. I should
add, however, that my informant was not sure if in the third instance
it wasn’t a _iolair_ (eagle) instead of a deer].
One of the strangest English names for the bat (among over a score only
less strange) is the Athern-bird--a Somerset term, I believe, whose
meaning I do not know.
But now to return to the rear-guard of Spring of whom we spoke first.
Yet the folklore of the house-martin is so familiar that it need not
be alluded to. We all know that it is time to think of summer when the
martin clings once more to her last year’s clay-house under the eaves.
It is when the wild-doves are heard in the woods that one realises the
Spring-Summer borderland is being crossed. When the cushat calls, all
the clans of the bushes are at home, runs a Highland saying: meaning
that every mavis and merle and finch is busy with hatching the young
brood, or busier still feeding the callow nestlings. But when the voice
of the turtle is heard in the land, then Summer has come over the sea
on the south wind, and is weaving roses for her coronal and will be
with us while we are yet unaware.
What a quantity of old lore one might collect about the dove, and
as for the allusions in ancient and modern literature they must be
legion--from the familiar Scriptural phrase about the turtle to
Chaucer’s ‘the wedded turtil with her heartë trewe,’ from Greek myth or
Roman poem to Tennyson’s ‘moan of doves in immemorial elms.’ Doubtless
much of the dove-lore is so well known that it would be superfluous to
repeat it here. As the symbol of peace, of the Spirit, the dove herself
is universally familiar. The turtle is also a symbol of mourning,
and of old, as among the oak-groves of Dodona or before the fane of
Hierapolis, was held sacred as the bird of prophecy, of the soul, and
of the life after death. It is because of the loving faithfulness of
the cushat that this bird was long ago dedicated to Venus; and it was
because Venus presided over both birth and death that the dove became
associated of old with scenes so opposite as marriage festivals and
funeral rites. We are all familiar with the legend that the soul of a
dying person may be seen departing like a flying dove, and so it was
that even a tame pigeon came to be an unwelcome sight at the window
where any one lay in serious illness. In a word, the peasant-invalid
might take the bird to be a death-messenger, the bird of the grave. The
most singular of these folk-superstitions, I think, is that in whose
exercise a living pigeon used to be placed on the head of a dying man
in order to attract the pain to the bird and so ease the sufferer. One
wonders what became of the unfortunate pigeon.
The strangest of the northern legends is that Swedish one which makes
the wild-dove the confidant of Baldur, the Scandinavian god of song
and beautiful love, before he died ‘the white death’ when the ancient
world receded for ever at the advent of Christ. Still do they murmur
in the woods of the immortal passion, the deathless love of the old
gods, they who long ago passed away one knows not whither, with Baldur
going before them harping, and singing a strange song. One Gaelic
poetic name for the cushat is poetry itself; _Caoirean-na-coille_, ‘the
murmur of the woods.’ The subtlest legend is that old world Finnish
identification of Aino the dove-maiden and Vaino, the male-Venus of
the North, like Venus sea-born, like Venus the offspring of Zeus and
Destiny, and as Aino or Vaino now the singer, now the presiding deity
at marriage festival or during the lamentations for the dead.
How little we know of this Vaino of the _Kalevala_, or of that not
less mysterious ancient Teutonic nature-god Wunsch, or of our Gaelic
Angus Og, son of heaven and earth; each of whom has the wild-dove for
his own, his symbol and his mortal image. Each wove grass and plants
and greenness of trees out of the earth and the rain, out of the
sunshine and the wind; each spun flowers out of dew and moonlight and
the rose and saffron of dawns and sunsets. Each, too, created strength
in the hearts of men and power in their bodies, and wove beauty on the
faces of women and children. Each became, thus, the god of happiness,
of youth, of joy. And to each, finally, the doves were dedicated as
their sacred birds, their mortal image among the illusions of the
world. So here we pass back, pass away from the later tradition of
mourning and death, to the old joyousness of Spring, of Spring who
creates grass and plant and flower, the strength of men and the beauty
of women and the gladness of children, Spring who turns when the
apple-blossom fades and lets loose the doves of Summer.
THE SEA-SPELL
Old magical writers speak of the elemental affinity which is the veiled
door in each of us. Find that door, and you will be on the secret road
to the soul, they say in effect. Some are children of fire, and some
of air, some are of earth, and some of water. They even resolve mortal
strength and weakness, our virtue and our evil, into the movement of
these elements. This virtue, it is of fire: this quality, it is of air:
this frailty, it is of water. Howsoever this may be, some of us are
assuredly of that ancient clan in whose blood, as an old legend has
it, is the water of the sea. Many legends, many poems, many sayings
tell of the Chloinn-na-Mhara, the children of the sea. I have heard
them from fishermen, from inland-shepherds, from moorlanders in inland
solitudes where the only visitors from the mysterious far-off deep
are the wandering sea-mews or the cloud that has climbed out of the
south. Some tell of the terror of the sea, some of its mysteriousness,
some of the evil and of the evil things that belong to it and are in
it, some of its beauty, some of its fascination (as the Greeks of
old-time told of the sirens, who were the voices and fatal music and
the strange and perilous loveliness of alien waters), some of the
subtle and secret spell deep-buried in the hearts of certain men and
women, the Chloinn-na-Mhara, a spell that will brood there, and give no
peace, but will compel the spirit to the loneliness of the wind, and
the outward life to the wayward turbulence of the wave. More than two
thousand years ago the great Pindar had these in mind when he wrote of
that strange tribe among men ‘who scorn the things of home, and gaze
on things that are afar off, and chase a cheating prey with hopes that
shall never be fulfilled.’
Elsewhere I have written much of this sea-spell, of the _Brònavara_
(to Anglicise an island word), or Sorrow of the Sea, and do not wish
to write here of that strange passion or sinister affinity: but of
that other and happier Spell of the Sea which so many of us feel,
with pleasure always, with delight often, at times with exultation,
as though in our very heart were the sharp briny splash of the blue
wave tossing its white crest, or of the green billow falling like
a tower of jade in a seething flood. But, first, I recall that old
legend to which I have alluded. Perhaps some folklorist may recognise
it as gathered out of the drift common to many shores, may trace it
even to those Asian inlands where so many of our most ancient tales
mysteriously arose; but I have nowhere met with it in print, nor seen
nor heard allusion to it, other than in a crude fashioning on the lips
of simple Gaelic folk, nor even there for years upon years. There were
once four cities (the Western Gael will generally call them Gorias and
Falias, Finias and Murias), the greatest and most beautiful of the
cities of those ancient tribes of beauty, the offspring of angels and
the daughters of earth. The fair women were beautiful, but lived like
flowers, and like flowers faded and were no more, for they were filled
with happiness, as cups of ivory filled with sunlit dancing wine, but
were soulless. Eve, that sorrowful loveliness, was not yet born. Adam
was not yet lifted out of the dust of Eden. Finias was the gate of Eden
to the South, Murias to the West: in the North, Falias was crowned
by a great star: in the East, Gorias, the city of gems, flashed like
sunrise. There the deathless clan of the sky loved the children of
Lilith. On the day when Adam uttered the sacred name and became king
of the world, a great sighing was heard in Gorias in the East and in
Finias in the South, in Murias in the West and in Falias in the North:
and when morn was come the women were no more awakened by the stirring
of wings and the sunrise-flight of their angelic lovers. They came no
more. And when Eve awoke by the side of Adam, and he looked on her,
and saw the immortal mystery in the eyes of this mortal loveliness,
lamentations and farewells and voices of twilight were heard in Murias
by the margin of the sea and in Gorias high-set among her peaks; in the
secret gardens of Falias, and where the moonlight hung like a spear
above the towers of Finias upon the great plain. The children of Lilith
were gone away upon the wind, as lifted dust, as dew, as shadow, as the
unreturning leaf. Adam rose, and bade Eve go to the four solitudes,
and bring back the four ancient secrets of the world. So Eve went to
Gorias, and found nothing there but a flame of fire. She lifted it and
hid it in her heart. At noon she came to Finias, and found nothing
there but a spear of white light. She took it and hid it in her mind.
At dusk she came to Falias, and found nothing there but a star in the
darkness. She hid the darkness, and the star within the darkness, in
her womb. At moonrise she came to Murias, by the shores of the ocean.
There she saw nothing but a wandering light. So she stooped, and lifted
a wave of the sea and hid it in her blood. And when Eve was come again
to Adam, she gave him the flame she had found in Gorias, and the spear
of light she had found in Finias. ‘In Falias,’ she said, ‘I found that
which I cannot give, but the darkness I have hidden shall be your
darkness, and the star shall be your star.’ ‘Tell me what you found
in Murias by the sea?’ asked Adam. ‘Nothing,’ answered Eve. But Adam
knew that she lied. ‘I saw a wandering light,’ she said. He sighed,
and believed. But Eve kept the wave of the sea hidden in her blood. So
has it been that a multitude of women have been homeless as the wave,
and their heritage salt as the sea: and that some among their sons
and daughters have been possessed by that vain cold fire, and that
inappeasable trouble, and the restlessness of water. So it is that to
the end of time some shall have the salt sea in the blood, and the
troubled wave in the heart, and be homeless.
But thoughts like these, legends like these, are for the twilight
hour, or for the silent people who live in isles and remote places.
For most of us, for those of us who do not dwell by lonely shores and
seldom behold the sea but in the quiet seasons, it is either a delight
or an oppression. Some can no more love it, or can have any well-being
or composure near it, than others can be well or content where vast
moors reach from skyline to skyline, or amid the green solemnities of
forests, or where stillness inhabits the hollows of hills. But for
those who do love it, what a joy it is! _The Sea_ ... the very words
have magic. It is like the sound of a horn in woods, like the sound of
a bugle in the dusk, like the cry of wind leaping the long bastions of
silence. To many of us there is no call like it, no other such clarion
of gladness.
But when one speaks of the sea it is as though one should speak of
summer or winter, of spring or autumn. It has many aspects: it is not
here what it is yonder, yonder it is not what it is afar off: here,
even, it is not in August what it is when the March winds, those
steel-blue coursers, are unleashed; the grey-green calms of January
differ from the purple-grey calms of September, and November leaning
in mist across the dusk of wavering horizons is other than azure-robed
and cirrus-crowned May moving joyously across a glorious tossing
wilderness of blue and white. The blue sea frothed with wind has ever
been a salutation of joy. Æschylos sounded the note of rapture which
has since echoed through poetry and romance: that ‘multitudinous
laughter’ struck a vibration which time has never dulled nor lessened.
It has been an exultation above all in the literatures of the north.
Scandinavian poetry is full of the salt brine; there is not a
viking-saga that is not wet with the spray of surging seas. Through all
the primitive tales and songs of the Gael one feels the intoxication of
the blue wine of the running wave. In the Icelandic sagas it is like a
clashing of shields. It calls through the Ossianic chants like a tide.
Every Gaelic song of exile has the sound of it, as in the convolutions
of a shell. The first Gaelic poet rejoiced at the call of the sea, and
bowed before the chanting of a divine voice. In his madness, Cuchulain
fought with the racing billows on the Irish Coast, striving with them
as joy-intoxicated foes, laughing against their laughter: to the dark
waves of Coruisk, in the Isle of Skye, he rushed with a drawn sword,
calling to these wise warriors of the sea to advance in their proud
hosts that he might slay them. Sigurd and Brynhild, Gunhild and Olaf,
Torquil and Swaran and Haco, do they not sound like the names of
waves? How good that old-world rejoicing in the great green wilderness
of waters, in the foam-swept blue meads, in the cry of the wind and
the chant of the billows and the sharp sting of flying scud? It is of
to-day also. A multitude of us rejoice as those of old rejoiced, though
we have changed in so much with all the incalculable change of the
years. To-day as then the poets of the isles ... the poet in the heart
of each of us who loves the glory and beauty and in any degree feels
the strong spell of the sea ... answer to that clarion-music: as in
this _Evoë!_ by one of the latest among them:--
“_Oceanward, the sea-horses sweep magnificently, champing and whirling
white foam about their green flanks, and tossing on high their manes
of sunlit rainbow-gold, dazzling white and multitudinous far as sight
can reach._
“_O, champing horses of my soul, toss, toss on high your sunlit manes,
your manes of rainbow-gold, dazzling-white and multitudinous, for I
too rejoice, rejoice!_”
And who of us will forget that great English poet of to-day, that
supreme singer of--
“_Sky, and shore, and cloud, and waste, and sea,_”
who has written so often and so magically of the spell of the sea and
of the elation of those who commit themselves to the sway and rhythm of
its moving waters:--
“The grey sky gleams and the grey seas glimmer,
Pale and sweet as a dream’s delight,
As a dream’s where darkness and light seem dimmer,
Touched by dawn or subdued by night.
The dark wind, stern and sublime and sad,
Swings the rollers to westward, clad
With lustrous shadow that lures the swimmer,
Lures and lulls him with dreams of light.
“Light, and sleep, and delight, and wonder,
Change, and rest, and a charm of cloud,
Fill the world of the skies whereunder
Heaves and quivers and pants aloud
All the world of the waters, hoary
Now, but clothed with its own live glory,
That mates the lightning and mocks the thunder
With light more living and word more proud.
* * * * *
“A dream, and more than a dream, and dimmer
At once and brighter than dreams that flee,
The moment’s joy of the seaward swimmer
Abides, remembered as truth may be.
Not all the joy and not all the glory
Must fade as leaves when the woods wax hoary;
For there the downs and the sea-banks glimmer,
And here to south of them swells the sea.”
What swimmer too, who loves this poet, but will recall the marvellous
sea-shine line in ‘Thalassius’:
“Dense water-walls and clear dusk waterways ...
The deep divine dark dayshine of the sea----”
It is this exquisite miracle of transparency which gives the last
secret of beauty to water. All else that we look upon is opaque: the
mountain in its sundown purple or noon-azure, the meadows and fields,
the gathered greenness of woods, the loveliness of massed flowers,
the myriad wonder of the universal grass, even the clouds that trail
their shadows upon the hills or soar so high into frozen deeps of
azure that they pass shadowless like phantoms or the creatures of
dreams--the beauty of all these is opaque. But the beauty of water is
that it is transparent. Think if the grass, if the leaves of the tree,
if the rose and the iris and the pale horns of the honeysuckle, if the
great mountains built of grey steeps of granite and massed purple of
shadow were thus luminous, thus transparent! Think if they, too, as
the sea, could reflect the passage of saffron-sailed and rose-flusht
argosies of cloud, or mirror as in the calms of ocean the multitudinous
undulation of the blue sky! This divine translucency is but a part of
the Sea-Spell, which holds us from childhood to old age in wonder and
delight, but that part is its secret joy, its incommunicable charm.
SUMMER CLOUDS
For one who has lived so much among the hills and loves the mountain
solitude it may seem strange to aver that the most uplifting and
enduring charm in Nature is to be found in amplitude of space. Low and
rolling lands give what no highlands allow. If in these the miraculous
surprise of cloud is a perpetual new element of loveliness, it is
loveliness itself that unfolds when an interminable land recedes from
an illimitable horizon, and, belonging to each and yet remote from
either, clouds hang like flowers, or drift like medusæ, or gather
mysteriously as white bergs in the pale azure of arctic seas.
We are apt to be deceived by the formal grandeur of mountains, by
the massed colours and contours of upbuilded heights, whether lying
solitarily like vast sleeping saurians, or gathered in harmonious,
if tumultuous, disarray. There is a beauty that is uniquely of the
hills. The mountain lands have that which no lowland has. But in
that company we shall not find what the illimitable level lands will
afford, what inhabits the wilderness, what is the revelation of the
desert, what is the lovely magic of the horizons of the sea. By the
sombre reaches of the Solway, in the fen-lands of East Anglia, in the
immensity of the great bog which cinctures Ireland, in the illimitable
lowland from Flanders to the last brine-whitened Frisian meadows, I
have seen a quality of aerial beauty that I have not in like loveliness
elsewhere found. Who that in mid-ocean has long watched the revelation
of distance and the phantasmagoria of cloud during serene days, or
from island shores looked across limitless waters till the far blue
line seemed lifted to the purple-shadowed bases of leaning palaces,
can think of an excelling loveliness? Who that has seen the four-fold
azure, in east and west, in north and south, over the desert, and
watched the secret veils of a single pavilion of rose-flusht cumulus
slowly be undone, till the vision is become a phantom, and the phantom
is become a dream, and the dream is become a whiteness and stillness
deep-sinking into fathomless blue, can forget that the impassive beauty
of the wilderness is more searching and compelling than the continual
miracle of wind-swept Alp and cloud-shadowed highland; that it has, in
its majesty of silence and repose, that which is perpetual on the brows
of Andes and does not pass from Himalaya?
Perhaps in sheer beauty of pictorial isolation clouds are most
lovely when viewed above sea horizons, from shores of islands, or
promontories, or remote headlands. In the South this beauty is possibly
more dream-like, more poignantly lovely, than in the North. Certainly,
I have nowhere known cloud beauty excelling that in the Mediterranean
and Ionian seas, viewed from the Spanish coast, from the Balearic
Isles, over against the mountain-bastions of Sardinia and Corsica, from
the headlands of Sicily, where Ithaka and Zante are as great galleys in
a magic ocean, where for weeks at midsummer the wine-dark waters are
untroubled between the cliffs of Hellas and the sands of Alexandria.
Perhaps. It is difficult to say of any region that there beauty is more
wonderfully revealed than elsewhere. It comes, and is present, and is
upgathered; as the wind, that has no home, that the shaken reed knows,
that crumbles the crests of ancient hills; as the rainbow, which is the
same aerial flame upon Helicon, upon Ida, on the green glen of Aghadoe,
on the steeps of Hecla in the Hebrides, that gives majesty and wonder
to the village green, and delivers mystery on the horizons of the
frequented common. It is like light, whose incalculable arrivals are
myriad, but which when most steadfast is most dreamlike, a phantom: as
moonlight on the mysterious upturned face of great woods; or as when,
on illimitable moors, the dew glistens on the tangled bent and pale
flood of orchis where the lapwings nest; or in golden fire, as when
at the solstice the sorrel in the meadows and the tansy in the wastes
and the multitude of the dandelion are transmuted into a mirage of red
and yellow flame; or in rippling flood of azure and silver, when the
daysprings loosen; or in scarlet and purple and chrysoprase, when the
South is as a clouded opal and the West is the silent conflagration
of the world. There is not a hidden glen among the lost hills, there
is not an unvisited shore, there is not a city swathed in smoke and
drowned in many clamours, where light is not a continual miracle, where
from dayset to dawn, from the rising of the blue to the gathering
of shadow, the wind is not habitual as are the reinless, fierce,
unswerving tides of the sea. Beauty, and Light, and Wind: they who are
so common in our companionship and so continual in mystery, are as
one in this--that none knows whence the one or the other is come, or
where any has the last excellence or differs save in the vibration of
ecstasy, or whither the one or the other is gone, when the moment, on
whose wings it came or on whose brows it stood revealed, is no longer
Eternity speaking the language of Time, but the silence of what is
already timeless and no more.
It has been said, less wisely than disdainfully, that the chief element
of beauty is destroyed when one knows the secret of semblance. Clouds,
then, are forfeit in loveliness when one knows the causes of their
transformation, their superb illusion? Not so. Has the rose lost in
beauty, has she relinquished fragrance, for all that we have learned
of her blind roots, the red ichor in her petals, the green pigment in
her stem, her hunger that must be fed in coarse earth, her thirst that
must be quenched in rain and dew, her desire that must mate with light?
Is the rainbow the less a lovely mystery because we know that it is
compact of the round, colourless raindrops such as fall upon us in any
shower? Is the blue of an unclouded sky the less poignant for us if we
know that the sunlight which inhabits it is there, not the yellow or
red or suffused white which we discern, but itself an ineffable azure;
that, there, the sun itself is not golden or amber or bronze, but
violet-blue?
I remember it was complained once of something I wrote ... in effect,
that cloud was the visible breathing, the suspended breath of earth ...
that the simile was as inept as it was untrue. None who knows how cloud
is formed will dispute the truth in similitude: as to disillusion,
can that be ‘unpoetic’ which is so strange and beautiful a thing? The
breath of a little child born in the chill of dawn, the breath of old
age fading into the soon untroubled surface of the mirror held against
silent lips, the breath of the shepherd on the hills, of the seamen on
dark nights under frost-blue stars, the breath of cows on the morning
pastures, of the stag panting by the tarn, the breath of woods, of
waters, of straths, of the plains, of the brows of hills, the breath of
the grass, the breathing of the tremulous reed and the shaken leaf ...
are not these the continual vapour of life; and what is cloud but the
continual breath of our most deep and ancient friend, the brown earth,
our cradle, our home, and our haven?
If any reader wish to _feel_ the invisible making of the cloud that
shall afterward rise on white wings or stream like a banner from
mountain-bastions, let him stand on the slopes of a furrowed hill
in this midsummer season. He will then feel the steady, upflowing
tide of the warm air from the low-lying glens and valleys, a constant
tepid draught, the breath of the earth. It will not be long before
the current which shook yonder rose-flusht briar, which swayed these
harebells as foam is blown, which lifted yonder rowan-branch and softly
trampled this bracken underfoot, is gathered by scaur and sudden corrie
to the sheer scarps of the mountain-summit, to be impelled thence, as
a geyser is thrown from an imperious fount, high into the cold and
windy solitude. There it may suddenly be transmuted to an incalculable
host of invisible ice-needles, and become cirrus; to float like
thistledown, or to be innumerably scattered in wisps and estrays, or
long ‘grey-mares’-tails,’ or dispersed like foam among vast, turbulent
shallows. Or it may keep to the lee-side of the mountain-summit, and
stretch far like a serrated sword, or undulatingly extend like a
wind-narrowed banner, covering as a flag the climbing armies of pine
and boulder and the inscrutable array of shadow.
_Cirrus_ ... what a beauty there is in the familiar name: what beauty
of association for all who love the pageant of cloud, and, loving, know
somewhat of the science of the meteorologist. It is not alone in this:
memory and imagination are alike stirred by the names of the three
other of the four main divisions of Cloud--the Cumulus, the Stratus,
the Nimbus. From the grey and purple of earthward nimbus to the
salmon-pink bastions of the towering cumuli, those unloosened mountains
of the middle air, those shifting frontiers of the untravelled lands
of heaven, and thence to the dazzling whiteness of the last frozen
pinnacles of cirrus, all loveliness of colour may be found. Neither
brush of painter nor word of poet can emulate those apparitions of gold
and scarlet, of purple and emerald, of opal and saffron and rose. There
every shade of dove-brown and willow-grey, every subterfuge of shadow
and shine, can be seen.
The cloud-lover will know that these four great divisions are but terms
of convenience. There are intervening children of beauty. Betwixt
the earth-held, far-reaching nimbus and the climbing cumulus, whose
forehead is so often bathed in the rarest fires of sunset, is the
cumulo-nimbus. Between the cumulus and the stratus, whose habitual grey
robe can be so swiftly made radiant in yellow and orange and burning
reds, is the strato-cumulus: a sombre clan in the upper wilderness,
heavy with brooding rains, moving in dark folds, less persuaded of
the great winds which may drive the as silent seeming stratus, some
ten thousand feet higher it may be, at the lightning speed of the
eagle. Between the stratus and cirrus there are the cirro-cumulus and
the cirro-stratus. The former is in one form as commonly welcome as
beautiful, the familiar ‘mackerel-sky,’ harbinger of fair weather--in
another, it is the soft dappled sky that moonlight will turn into the
most poignant loveliness, a wilderness of fleecy hillocks and delicate
traceries. The latter is that drift-ice or broken-up snow-field
enmassing which is so familiar. Both march from horizon to horizon in
ordered majesty, though when they seem like idle vapours motionlessly
suspended along the blue walls of heaven they are rustling their
sheaves of frost-fire armour, are soaring to more than twenty thousand
feet above the earth, and are surging onward with impetuous rush at the
rate of from seventy to eighty miles an hour.
I have called them the children of beauty. But these children of cloud
are many. In each division, in each subdivision, there is again complex
division. In a Gaelic story or poem-saga they are called ‘the Homeless
Clan.’ It is a beautiful name. But they are not homeless whom the great
winds of the upper world eternally shepherd, who have their mortal
hour in beauty and strength and force, and, instead of the havens and
graves and secret places of the creatures of earth, know a divine
perpetual renewal.
THE CUCKOO’S SILENCE
There is silence now in the woods. That spirit of the south wind, that
phantom voice of the green tides of May, has passed: that which was
a wandering dream is become a haunting memory. Whence is the cuckoo
come, whither does the cuckoo go? When our leaves grow russet and the
fern clothes herself in bronze and pale gold, what land hears that
thrilling call in ancient groves, or above old unvisited forests, or
where arid declivities plunge into the gathering sands of the desert?
Whither is gone Sinlinda, the summer bird, as the Esthonians call her:
she who has been a voice in the far Orkneys (a daughter, it may be,
of that cuckoo-queen who bore Modred to King Arthur, Modred the Pict
who afterward wrought so great evil upon Arthur and his knights), or
cried the sighing of vain love above the hills of the Gael, or in
Sweden swung on the north wind as the _sorg-gök_, uttering ‘sorrow,’
or floated out of the east as the _tröste-gök_, calling ‘consolation’?
When Finland loses her, and the Baltic peasant no more counts with
dread the broken cries, and she has passed from the Irish valleys,
so that men and women are safe for another year from the wildness of
wild love, whither is she gone? Like a dream her voice fades from
Broceliande, is heard no more by Fontarabia, has no echo in the wood
of Vallombrosa. In the last reaches of the Danube she no longer mocks
love; above the Siberian steppe the exile no more hears her ironic
_Go! Go!_: from the dim Campagna she is lifted into silence, _sospir’
d’ amore_: she is not heard across the waters of Corinth from that
fallen temple where Zeus took her form upon him, nor is the shadow of
her wings in that wild mountain-valley of Mykenai, where Agamemnon
and Clytaimnestra sleep, where once the marble statue of divine Hera
stood bearing on a sceptre her perilous image. Where, then, is she
gone, she who from the dim Asian valleys to the Aztec wilderness, from
one world to another, is the mysterious voice of wandering love; she
who is, in one place, to be hailed with hymns of gladness, in another
to be hearkened to with bowed head or averted eyes? For thus it is,
even to-day, among the ancient remnant in Mexico and the Californian
wilds, who hear with terror that foreboding flute-like voice calling
out of the unseen world: thus it was in the Himalayan solitudes of old
when the Sanskrit villagers hailed the cuckoo as a divine messenger,
_Kakila_, the bird who knows all things, not only what has happened,
but what shall happen.
She has troubled many minds, this wanderer. It could not be otherwise.
What mysterious music, this, when through the grey lands of the north
the south wind went laughing on a vast illimitable surge of green and
foam of blossom? One morning, when the missel-thrush was silent and
even the skylarks sank through the hazy stillness, a far cry would be
heard, a sound from the unknown, a bell out of heaven. It would float
bodiless through the blue air, or call softly like an imprisoned echo
in the coverts of grey cloud. Then those who heard would know that
Summer had ceased from wearing her robe of white and green and yellow,
and with sun-browned hands was gathering roses for her May garland, her
June coronal. The bird of love is come. The sighing heart, the beating
pulse, know it. She is come, voice out of the sea, voice across waters,
Aphroditê of sound. Long, long ago this voice, this dim-remembered
myth, was transmuted into Orpheus in the south, into Lemminkainen
by the singers of the Kalevala, into Sigurd across the Scandinavian
fjords, into Kukkolind along the Esthonian wastes into Cuchulaind among
the Irish hills, into Coohoolin beside the foam of the Hebrides. My old
nurse had a Gaelic song I have forgotten, all save its refrain, which
was
“_Gù-Gù, Gù-Gù,
A cuisilin a-ghràidh,
Cuisilin mo-chrìdhe!_”
“_Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
O pulse of love,
Pulse of my heart!_”
In the first movement of the _oran_ the singer called to the cuckoo to
come, ‘Blue-bird of love.’ Why ‘blue-bird’ I am unaware, though among
the Finns and Esths ‘blue-bird’ is a poetic analogue for the cuckoo.
In the second lift of the _oran_, the singer cried, ‘It is come, it is
come, bird of love, bird of joy.’ In the third fall the singer crooned,
‘It is gone, bird of sorrow, bird of foam, bird of the grey wind.’ And
after each the swift and passionate or long, melancholy, and sorrowful
refrain
“_Gù-Gù! Gù-Gù!
O cushleen a-ghrày
Cushleen mo-chree!_”
‘The returning one’ the cuckoo is called in an old saga. It is the
ancient mystery, Love, the son of Earth: the wildwood brother of him,
that other Love, who puts aside the green branches of home to long for
the shining stars, who sighs unappeased by white breasts and dreams of
one beautiful and far-off, made of the wandering rainbow, of the dew,
of the fragrance of flowers. The one comes with the green wind and goes
with the grey wind: the other puts on blindness as divine vision, and
deafness as a sacred veil, and wooes Psyche.
All old primitive tales know the advent of this mysterious bird. Was
not, as I have said, the divine Hera herself wooed thus by Zeus? In
that ancient Heraion, in the heart of the Peloponnesos which Pausanias
saw, he tells us of a statue of the goddess whose sceptre bore the
image of this spring-born voice of eternal love and eternal illusion.
The people loved it not, for in their eyes the story covered an evil
thing: but the priests bowed before an ancient mystery, and the poets
smiled, and the musicians paused and wondered and struck a new vibrant
note. In every country there are oldtime tales of the cuckoo with the
attributes of a god, or demigod, or at least of magic and illusion.
When, in the great Northern saga, Ilmarinen, the son of Wondersmith
and the Air, goes north to woo the snow-bound princess ... what but
another lovely metaphor of Spring calling to the North to cover herself
with the snow-blossom of betrothal and the roses and honeysuckles of
procreant love ... he orders thus the outbringing of his sleigh:
“Take the fleetest of my racers,
Put the grey steed in the harness,
Hitch him to my sledge of magic:
Place six cuckoos on the break-board,
Seven blue-birds on the crossbow,
Thus to charm the northland maidens,
Thus to make them look and listen
As the cuckoos call and echo.”
The wind, that grey steed, fleetest of racers, the calling of cuckoos,
the northland maidens charmed to silence among awakening fields or
amid the first green stirring of grass-blades and pointed leaf: is not
Ilmarinen, son of Wondersmith and the Air, the veritable cuckoo-god?
If ever the cuckoo-myth find its historian one will learn how
widespread and basic it is. We follow it from Orpheus himself to the
myth of Saturn and Rhea, to that of Faunus and Fauna, to Siegfried
in the north, to Cuchulain in the west--for the famous hero of the
Gaels is, for all the bardic legends as to Setanta being Cu-chulain,
the hound of Culain, as unmistakably a cuckoo-god as his Finnish
or Esthonian namesake, Kukkolind. The base of all is the divine
inspiration, the mysterious wandering Breath, the incalculable Word,
‘the heroic cuckoo,’ who awakens the green world, the world of blossom
and leaf and the songs of birds and the sap in the trees and the
mounting warmth in the blood, who, as the chroniclers say, ‘rouses the
enchanted maid of spring from her long sleep.’ Of all these, whether
it be Faunus, or Kullervo, or Kalevipoeg, or the Son of Mananan, or
Cuchulain, the same thing may be said: they are bringers of Spring,
champions of the sun, rhapsodes of the immemorial ecstasy, bacchids of
the ancient intoxication.
One of the loveliest of these mythopœic dreams I heard first, at
the break of June, years ago, at Strachur of Loch Fyne, in a season
of cloudless blue by day and mellow amber by night, and when in the
long-delaying dusk the voices of many cuckoos floated across the
narrow loch from the shadowy woods of Claondiri. It was of Manan,
the son of that ancient Manan the Gaelic Poseidon; and how he went
to the north to woo his beautiful sister, and strew her way with the
petals of wild-rose, and fill her ears with the songs of birds, and
the sighing of waters, and the longing of the wind of the west. But
that I have told, and am more fully telling, elsewhere. Two summers
ago, on the Sound of Morven, I was told a fragmentary legend of Conlay
(Connleach), the son of Cuchulain, when a youth in Skye, and how he
went to Ireland and, all unwitting, fought to the death with his
father--as in the Greek tale of Oidipous, as in the Persian tale of
Sohrab: and, unknowing relevancy or keeping to the ancestral word, the
teller emphasised this old myth-tale of the cuckoo that knows not and
is not known by its own offspring, by adding, ‘Aye, it was a meeting of
cuckoos, that: father and son, the one not knowing the other any more
than a cuckoo on the wind knows father or mother, brother or sister.’
Of all the cuckoo-tales there is none lovelier than that told of our
Gaelic hero in ‘The Wooing of Blathmaid.’ This sleeping queen or lost
princess, whose name signifies ‘Blossom,’ lives on a remote island.
With the Gaelic teller this island will be the Isle of Man, home of
Mananan, that ancient god whose cold hands grope blindly along the
shores of the world: with the Swede or Finn or Esth it will be that
other city set among cold forgotten waters, that other Mana. Cuchulain
loves Blathmaid, and their wooing is so sweet that fragrance comes
into flowers, and birds break into song. The voice of Cuchulain is
the music of the world. Blathmaid hears it, awakes, moves to it in
wondering joy. But a rival lord, Curoi the king, carries Blathmaid
away. Cuchulain is left bound, and shorn of his long yellow hair. But
he regains his strength and freedom, and follows Blathmaid. Her sign
to him from the dun where she is kept a prisoner is milk poured into
the water that makes a gulf between the fortress and the leaning banks.
In the end, Curoi is slain or driven away; Blathmaid hears the call of
Cuchulain, and wanders into the beautiful green world with her lover.
Here, every touch is symbolical. Cuchulain is the breath of returning
life, Spring, symbolised in the Cuckoo, that ‘child of air’ as the
old northland poet calls his dream. Blathmaid is the awakening world:
Blossom. Curoi is the wind of autumn, the fierce and silent magician
Winter. The milk is but the emblem of melting streams, of the fluent
sap.
But now, as I write, already midsummer is gone. The cuckoo is silent.
The country-folk still think it is become a hawk. The old Cymric
_Gwalchmei_ (the cuckoo-son of Arthur and twin brother of Modred)
is, Professor Rhys tells us, but an analogue of the Hawk of May. So,
once more, we see the incalculable survival of tradition. Some say
that the wandering clan has dispersed on the four winds. The sweet
mysterious voice will be heard no more in the world till the wind of
the south crosses the sea next far-off Spring, and the sound of the
wings of swallows is come again. But ‘the bird of the sevens’ is not
yet gone. Seven weeks from the coming of the Voice to the hunger of the
fledgeling; seventeen weeks, and the fledgeling has left foster-parents
and gone out upon the wind; seven and twenty weeks, and the bird fades
away from the woodlands like mist.
It is gone: Midsummer, the songs of birds, the ‘wandering Voice.’
Already, with that old insatiate passion of the soul, we long for
Blathmaid, so soon taken from us: long for that divine call to youth
and love: long for Spring that shall come again, though it shall be
but a sweet wandering voice, the call of the unknown, the promise of
the unfulfilled. For we thirst for that invisible mystery whose voice
floats above the veils of the world, and we would drink again of the
old wonder and the old illusion.
THE COMING OF DUSK
At all seasons the coming of dusk has its spell upon the imagination.
Even in cities it puts something of silence into the turmoil, something
of mystery into the commonplace aspect of the familiar and the
day-worn. The shadow of the great change that accompanies the passage
of day is as furtive and mysterious, as swift and inevitable, amid
the traffic of streets as in aisles of the forest, or in glens and on
hills, on shores, or on the sea. It is everywhere the hour of suspense.
Day has not receded into the confused past, already a shadow in
eternity, and night has not yet come out of the unknown. Instinctively
one feels as though crossing an invisible bridge over a gulf, perchance
with troubled glances at the already dimming shore behind, or with
dreaming eyes or watchful or expectant gaze on the veiled shore upon
which we are almost come. In winter one can see dusk advancing like a
mountain-shadow. In lonely places there is something ominous, menacing
in the swift approach of the early winter-dusk, further gloomed perhaps
by the oncome of snow or rain or of a soughing wind moving out of low
congregated cloud. In thronged streets it is not less swift, not less
sombre, but the falling veils have hardly been secretly unloosened
before they are punctuated by the white or yellow flare of the
street-lamps. Hardly is breathing-space, there, between the stepping
out of day and the stepping into night. The fear of darkness, which
possesses towns like a great dread, has broken the spell with ten
thousand lights: as the mind of man, which likewise dreads the naked
darkness of thought and the white, remote, passionless stars of the
spirit, hastens to hide its shadowy dusks and brooding nights with a
myriad frail paper lanterns that a flying hand of rain will extinguish
or a breath of wind carry in a moment to the outer darkness.
But whatever hold upon the imagination the winter dusk may have,
however subtle a spell there may be in the gloamings of autumn, surely
the coming of dusk has at no other time the enchantment of the long
midsummer eves. It is then that one feels to the utmost the magic
influences of the dimsea or dimsee, to use the beautiful old English
west-country word. The further north one is the longer the suspense,
the more magical the slow gradual recession of the day-glow from vast
luminous skies, the slow swimming into the earthward gloaming of
incalculable shadow. What a difference between the lands of the south
and the light-lingering countries of the north! The sudden night comes
to the shores of Mediterranean while the rose of the west yet flames
against the Cornish headlands, and the Sicilian wave is dark while the
long green billow washing over Lyonesse is still a wandering fire under
cloudy banks of amethyst. And, in turn, shadow has come out of the sea
upon Wales and fallen upon the upland watercourses from the norland
fells, while in the Gaelic isles purple and gold cloths are still piled
deep upon the fiery threshold of the sunset: and when the last isles
themselves are like velvet-dark barques afloat in a universe of opal
and pale yellow and faint crimson, a radiant sun still blooms like a
flower of fire among the white pinnacles of wandering berg and the
everlasting walls of ice.
In June the coming of dusk is the audible movement of summer. The day
is so full of myriad beauty, so full of sound and fragrance, that it
is not till the hour of the dew that one may hear the breathing of
the miraculous presence. The birds, who still sing early in the month,
and many even of those whose songs follow the feet of May begin a
new love-life at the coming of June, are silent: though sometimes,
in the south, the nightingale will still suddenly put the pulse of
song into the gloaming, though brieflier now; and elsewhere the
night-loving thrush will awake, and call his long liquid notes above
the wild-growth of honeysuckle and brier. At the rising of the moon
I have heard the cuckoos calling well after the date when they are
supposed to be silent, and near midnight have known the blackcap fill
a woodland hollow in Argyll with a music as solitary, as intoxicating,
as that of a nightingale in a Surrey dell. The thrush, the blackbird,
the blackcap, the willow-warbler and other birds may often be heard
singing in the dusk, or on moonlit nights, in a warm May: and doubtless
it is for this reason that many people declare they have heard the
nightingale even in regions where that bird never penetrates. Often,
too, the nightingale’s song is attributed to the blackcap, and even
to the thrush or merle, simply because heard by day, for there seems
to be a common idea that this bird will not sing save at dusk or in
darkness or in the morning twilight. I doubt if the nightingale ever
sings in actual darkness, though the bird is most eager just before
and at dawn, at moonlit or starlit dusk, or at full moon, it may be
heard at any hour of the day. I have heard the song and watched the
singer at full noon, and that not in deep woods but in a copse by the
wayside. Strange that both name and legend survive in lands where
the nightingale is now unseen. There is no question but that it was
once plentiful, or at any rate often seen, in the Western Highlands;
though now, it is said, not a bird of its tribe has crossed the Solway
since the Union! It is still spoken of in Argyll and elsewhere, and
not confusedly with any other woodlander. In no country has it a
lovelier name than the Gaelic _Ros-an-Ceol_, the Rose of Music. I
have heard it spoken of as the _smiol_ or _smiolach_, the _eosag_,
and the _spideag_, though this latter name, perhaps the commonest, is
misleading, as it is applied to one or two other songsters. In Iona,
Colonsay, Tiree, and other isles, I have heard the robin alluded to
as the _spideag_. I remember the drift, but cannot recall the text
of a Gaelic poem where the nightingale (for neither in literary nor
legendary language is any other bird indicated by ‘Ros-an-Ceol’) is
called the Sister of Sorrow, with an allusion to a singular legend,
which in some variant or another I believe is also found in the
Austrian highlands, parts of Germany, and elsewhere, to the effect that
if a nightingale come ‘with Song upon it’ into the room of a sleeping
person, that person will go mad, or that if the eyes of a nightingale
found dead or slain be dissolved in any liquid, the drinker will become
blind. I have heard, too, a tale (though the bird was there alluded to
as the _smeorach-oidhche_ or ‘night-thrush’) where the nightingale,
the owl, and the bat are called moon-children, the Moon-Clan; three
birds, it is said, with three animals of the land and three of the
water, three fish, three insects, three trees, three plants, three
flowers, and three stones were thrown to the earth as a farewell gift
the day the Moon died. Among the three birds the teller included the
bat, and I daresay there are many who still regard the bat as a bird.
The three animals of land and water were the weasel, the badger, and
the fox, the seal, the otter, and the kelpie (_sic_). The three fish
were the fluke, the eel, and the moon-glistered herring. The three
insects were the white moth, the grey gnat, and the cockchafer. The
three trees were the ash, the thorn, and the elder. The three plants
were the ivy, the moon-fern or bracken, and the mistletoe. The three
flowers were the meadowsweet, the white water-lily, and the ‘lusavone’
(? _Lus-Mhonaidh_...? Bog-cotton). The three stones were, I think,
granite, basalt, and trap, though I am uncertain about the second and
still more so about the third, which was called _clach-liath_, ‘the
grey stone.’
But though in the north the nightingale is no longer a haunter of the
dusk, the other clans of the night are to be met with everywhere,
‘from the Rhinns of Islay to the Ord of Sutherland’ as the Highland
saying goes in place of the wider ‘from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.’
First and foremost is the owl. But of the owl and the nightjar and the
midsummer night I wish to speak in a succeeding paper. The corncrake
will next occur to mind.
The cry of the landrail is so like its popular name that one cannot
mistake it. Some naturalists say the resemblance to the croaking of
the frog may mislead the unwary, but there is an altogether different
musical beat or emphasis in the call of the rail, a different quality
of sound, a different energy; and it is difficult to understand how
any ear familiar with nocturnal sounds could err in detecting the
monotonously uniform _krex-krex_ of the bull-frog from the large,
air-swimming, harshly musical _crek-crāke_, with the singular suspense
so often to be noted after the first syllable. For all its harshness
there are few sounds of the summer-dusk so welcome. It speaks of heat:
of long shadow-weaving afternoons: of labour ceased, of love begun,
of dreams within dreams. The very memory of it fills the mind as with
silent garths of hay, with pastures ruddy with sorrel, lit by the last
flusht glow or by the yellow gold of the moon, paling as it rises. The
white moth is out; the dew is on the grass, the orchis, the ghostly
clover; the flittermouse is here, is yonder, is here again; a late
mallard flies like a whirring bolt overhead, or a homing cushat cleaves
the air-waves as with rapid oars. As a phantom, a white owl drifts
past and greys into the dusk, like flying foam into gathering mist. In
the dew-moist air an innumerable rumour becomes a monotone: the breath
of life, suppressed, husht, or palpitant. A wilderness of wild-roses
has been crushed, and their fragrance diffused among the dove-grey
and harebell-blue and pansy-purple veils of twilight: or is it a
wilderness of honeysuckle; or of meadowsweet; or of the dew-wet hay; or
lime-blossom and brier, galingale and the tufted reed and the multitude
of the fern? It is fragrance, ineffable, indescribable: odour born
under the pale fire of the moon, under the lance-thrusting whiteness
of the Evening Star.
But before rain the persistent cry of the corncrake becomes loud,
raucous, with a rasping intensity. The bird is commonly said to be a
ventriloquist, but this I greatly doubt. I have watched the rail in
many places, often within a few yards, more than once from the flat
summit of a huge boulder set in the heart of a hillmeadow of grass and
sorrel. Not once have I heard ‘the King of the quails’ unmistakably
throw his voice a few score of yards away. Often a _crek-crāke_ has
resounded, and at some distance away, just as I have seen the stooping
body of the _dreaun_ (or _traon_ or _treun-ri-treun_) slide through the
grassy tangle almost at my feet: but the cry was not identical with
that which a moment before I had heard, and surely it was not only
distance but the difference of sex and the pulse of love which softened
it to a musical call. Once, however, watching unseen from the boulder I
have spoken of, I saw and heard a landrail utter its _crake_ in three
ways, first and for over a minute with its head to one side while it
moved jerkingly this way and that, then for a few seconds (perhaps
four or five times) with its head apparently thrown back, and then
after a minute or two’s silence and after a brief rapid run forward
with out-thrust neck and lowered head, as though calling along the
ground. In no instance was the call thrown as though from a distance,
but unmistakably from where the bird moved or crouched. There had been
no response to the first, a single echo-like _crek-crāke_ followed the
second, but to the third there came almost simultaneously calls from at
least three separate regions.
Nor is the rail so invariably shy, so heedful of cover, as commonly
averred. With silence and patience it may often be discerned before
the seeding grass is too dense or the corn high. In a lonely place on
the east shore of West Loch Tarbert in Cantire I have seen several
corncrakes leave cover as fearlessly as those two other ‘sacred’ or
‘blessed’ birds, the lark and the red grouse, will leave the shelter
of heather-clutch or grassy tussock: and one morning I was awaked at
dawn by so near and insistent an iterance of the singular call that I
rose and looked out, to discover three corncrakes awkwardly perched on
a low rabbit-fence, while I counted four others running to and fro in
the rough dew-glistered grass just beyond. Here, by the way, a crofter
spoke of the landrail as the _cearrsach_, a name I have not elsewhere
heard and am not sure of the meaning, unless it is ‘the lumpy’ or
‘awkward one’; while an English factor knew it as the grass-drake or
meadow-drake, and again as the night-crow--the latter obviously a
survival from the Anglo-Saxon ‘myghte-crake’ or a name re-given from
like association of ideas. The same shrewd farmer quite believed that
a corncrake is governor and leader of each flock of quails, at any
rate in the season of migration--an idea held by the Greeks of old
and retained by the Greek and Sicilian quail-shooters of to-day, and
obviously widespread, as the Germans call the landrail the quail-king
(_Wachtelkonig_), the French ‘_le roi des cailles_,’ the Italians
‘_il re di quaglie_,’ and the Spaniards ‘_el rey de las cordonices_.’
However, if he had been a Gael he could have spoken of the quail only
by hearsay most likely, for it is very rare in the Highlands, and for
myself I have never seen one there. Its name (_garra-gart_ or _gartan_)
is not unique; and the common term _muir-eun_ is solely biblical,
‘sea-bird’ or ‘bird-from-oversea,’ because of the allusion in Numbers
xii. 31.
But the dew is heavy on the grass: the corncrake calls: on a cloudy
juniper the nightjar churrs: the fhionna or white moth wavers above the
tall spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is now a grey-violet
dusk. At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down the
moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-apart and low-set stars
pulsate as though about to fall, but continuously regather their
tremulous white rays. The night of summer is come.
AT THE RISING OF THE MOON
‘The dew is heavy on the grass: the corncrake calls: on a cloudy
juniper the nightjar churrs: the fhionna or white moth wavers above the
tall spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is now a grey-violet
dusk. At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down the
moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-apart and low-set stars
pulsate as though about to fall, but continuously regather their
tremulous white rays. The night of summer is come.’
With these words I ended my preceding article, ‘The Coming of Dusk.’
There was not space there to speak of other, of so many of those
nocturnal things which add so much to the mystery and spell of the
short nights of summer: the arrowy throw of the bat, a shadowy javelin
flung by a shadowy hand against a shadowy foe; the nightjar, the dusky
clans of the owl, moonrise at sea or among pinewoods, the dance of
the moths round certain trees, the faint woven cadence of the wheeling
gnat-columns, the sudden scream of the heron or the wailing of seafowl,
or the mournful noise of the moon-restless lapwing, wind in the grass,
wind in the hollows of woods, wind among the high corries of the hills.
These and a hundred other sounds and sights fill the summer-darkness:
the hill-fox barking at the moonshine, the heather-cock in defiance
of alarm, deer panting among the bracken, the splash of herring or
mackerel on the moonlit breast of the bay, dogs baying a long way off
and from farmstead to farmstead. One could not speak of all these
things, or of the hundred more. In the meadows, in woods, on upland
pastures, from beech-thicket to pine-forest, on the moors, on the
hills, in the long valleys and the narrow glens, among the dunes and
sea-banks and along wave-loud or wave-whispering shores, everywhere the
midsummer-night is filled with sound, with fragrance, with a myriad
motion. It is an exquisite unrest: a prolonged suspense, to the dayworn
as silence is, yet is not silence, though the illusion is wrought
out of the multitudinous silences which incalculably intersperse the
continuous chant of death, the ceaseless hymn of life.
Everywhere, but far north in particular, the summer night has a
loveliness to which the least sensitive must in some degree yield,
creates a spell which must trouble even a dulled imagination, as
moonlight and the faintest rippling breath will trouble unquickened
pools into a sudden beauty. It is a matter of temperament, of mood and
circumstance rather, where one would find oneself, at the rising of
the moon, in the prolonged twilights of summer. To be in a pinewood
shelving to a calm sea breaking in continuous foam: or among mountain
solitudes, where all is a velvety twilight deepening to a green
darkness, till the sudden moon rests athwart one hill-shoulder like a
bronze shield, and then slowly is lifted and dissolves into an amber
glow along all the heights: or on great moors, where one can see for
leagues upon leagues, and hear nothing but the restless crying of the
curlew, the screech of a heron, the abrupt unknown cries and fugitive
sounds and momentary stealthy rustlings of nocturnal solitudes.
Or, again, on a white roadway passing through beech-woods: or on a
gorse-set common, with the churring of a nightjar filling the dusk
with the unknown surge and beat in one’s own heart: or on the skirts
of thatched hamlets, where a few lights linger, with perhaps the loud
breathing and trampling of cattle: or in a cottage-garden, with
mignonette and cabbage-roses and ghostly phlox, or dew-fragrant with
musk and southernwood: or in an old manor-garden, with white array of
lilies that seem to have drunk moonlight, and damask and tea-rose in
odorous profusion, with the honey-loving moths circling from moss-rose
to moss-rose, and the night-air delaying among tall thickets of
sweet-pea. Or, it may be, on quiet sea-waters, along phantom cliffs,
or under mossed and brackened rocky wastes: or on a river, under
sweeping boughs of alder and willow, the great ash, the shadowy beech.
But each can dream for himself. Memory and the imagination will create
dream-pictures without end.
Of all these midsummer-night creatures alluded to here or in the
preceding article there may be none more allied to poetic association
than the nightjar, but surely there is none more interesting than
the owl itself, that true bird of the darkness. That phantom-flight,
that silent passage as from the unseen to the unseen, that singular
cry, whether a boding scream or a long melancholy hoot or a prolonged
too-whoo, how blent they are with one’s associations of the warm husht
nights of summer. But is not the nightjar also of the same tribe?
Fern-owl is a common name; also jar-owl, heather-owl. I have heard it
called the heather-bleat, though probably that name commonly indicates
the snipe. How well I remember from childhood that puzzling riddle
“_The bat, the bee, the butterflee, the cuckoo and the gowk,
The heather-bleat, the mire-snipe; how many birds is that?_”
I was never ‘taken-in’ by the first three, but as I had been told or
had somehow discovered that the cuckoo was often companioned by the
meadow-pipit I thought the latter must be the ‘gowk.’ So I guessed
‘four,’ taking the heather-bleat to be the nightjar: and it was long
before I discovered that the answer was two, for only the cuckoo and
the snipe were really named.
I wonder how many names the Owl has! Those alone which, like the
archetypal name, derive from the old root-word _ul_ (to howl or
hoot or screech), must run to some thirty to forty at least, from
the Anglo-Saxon ‘hule’ and later ‘ullet’ to the familiar ‘hoolet’
or ‘hoolit’ or ‘howlet,’ or, again, the still current south English
‘ullud,’ ‘ullot,’ or ‘ullyet.’ We have many Gaelic names also, as
(for the snowy or barn owl) ‘cailleach-bhan,’ the white auld wife,
or ‘cailleach-oidhche,’ the night-witch; or (for the tawny owl)
‘bodach-oidhche,’ the night-bogle; or (for the screech-owl) the
onomatopœic ‘corra-sgriachaig,’ or several terms meaning ‘long-eared’
or ‘horned’; and three or four designations, either onomatopœic, as
perhaps ‘ulacan’ (though both in sound and meaning it is the same as
the southland ‘hooligan’), or adaptations of the Teutonic root-word, as
‘Olcadan’ or ‘ullaid.’ The name ‘yogle’ may be heard along the Lothian,
Yorkshire, and East Anglian coast-lands, and is doubtless a ‘lift’ from
the Danish ‘Katyugle’ or ‘Katogle’: indeed ‘catyogle,’ ‘catogle,’ and
‘catyool’ (with the quaint by-throw ‘cherubim’) occur in several parts
of England. In Clydesdale I have often heard the horned owl called the
‘luggie’ (long-ears). Some names with probably only local meaning I
do not understand, as for example, the ‘Wite’ (not the adjective, but
possibly the old word for churchyard and even church); the ‘padge’ or
‘pudge’ of Leicestershire; the Jack-baker, billy-wix, and the eastland
‘will-a-wix.’ (Is this the cry of the young owl awaiting food?)
The ‘jilly,’ which I heard once at or near Windermere, is probably
a corruption of the Gaelic ‘gheal’ (white), as many north-Celtic
names survive in that region. Our commonest name in the Highlands is
‘comhachag’ (co-achak) probably as onomatopœic a term as ‘cuach’ or
‘cuthag’ (coo-ak) for the cuckoo, or ‘fitheach’ (_fee-ak_) for the
raven. It is said that the longest poem on the Owl in any language is
in Gaelic. The _Oran na Comhachaig_ or Song of the Owl was composed by
an aged Highland bard named Donald Finlay somewhere about three hundred
years ago--about 1590 says one local account, though I do not know on
what authority: _a rinn Domhnull Mac Fhionnlaidh nan Dan, sealgair ’us
bard ainmeil Abrach, mu thiomchioll 1590_ (done by Donald Finlay of the
Songs, the celebrated Lochaber huntsman and poet, in or about 1590). I
have again and again heard the second of its sixty-seven--in another
version seventy--quatrains quoted in support of the theory that an owl
lives at least a hundred years; some are credited with far greater age:
“_’S co-aoise mise do’n daraig,
Bha na fhaillain ann sa choinnich,
’S ioma linn a chuir mi romham,
’S gur mi comhachag bhochd na sroine._”
(I am old as the oak ... lit. ‘the ancientness upon me is that of the
oak’ ... whose mossy roots spread wide: many a race have I seen come
and go: and still I am the lonely owl of Srona.)
In every country the owl is a bird of mourning. It is also the bird
of night pre-eminently (what a pity the old-English owl-light as a
variant for twilight has become obsolete); the bird of moonlight or the
Moon; the bird of Silence, of Ruin, of the Grave, of Death. In some
places a dead owl is still transfixed to the outside of a door, to
avert lightning. Perhaps it is for the same reason that a caged owl is
held to be a dangerous co-inmate of a house during a thunderstorm. A
thousand legends have woven this sombre raiment of associations, though
the owl’s only distinction from other birds of prey is that it can
see in the dark and is nocturnal in habit. It loves solitary places,
because there undisturbed, but is not all darkness solitary? In Syria
the peasant calls the owl ‘the mother of ruins,’ which is poetically
apt, as is the German ‘the sorrowing mother,’ but our northern
‘night-witch’ and the grim Breton ‘soul-harrier’ (surely a survival of
the Greek idea of the owl as a soul-guide) are unjust to an inoffensive
bird whose concern is not with souls and graves and ruins but with
rats and mice. A German naturalist has even, I remember, written to
prove that the owl is pre-eminently a bird of love, of single-hearted
devotion, ‘the dove of the night’: and there is a Danish poem about
‘the Silver-Spinner’ weaving a thin invisible web in the dusk wherein
to entangle and bring close the hearts of lovers. Old Donald Finlay of
the Songs must have had some such idea in his mind when in his Song of
the Owl he makes the bird say in effect, ‘I may be old and forlorn, but
am not to be blamed for that: neither of rapine nor of lies have I ever
been guilty: is there a grave anywhere that I have ever violated? and
to the mate of my choice have I ever been faithless?’
This name of the Silver-Spinner, however, though often in Germany,
Scandinavia, and our own country associated with the poetic legend
alluded to, is really a romantic derivative from the ancient connection
of the small owl with the Maiden Maid goddess who presided over
spinning as one of her foremost womanly attributes. ‘The Woman’s
Bird,’ as the small owl is sometimes called, deserves the name, for
in almost every language ancient and modern, except English and
Finnish, its name is feminine. The sacred bird of Athens or the Lesbian
Nyctimenê is still ‘the woman’s bird’ among the Australian aborigines:
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Icelandic, Vendish, German, French,
Hungarian, all afford the same sex-indication. The great white owl,
however, is the bird of heroes, wanderers, the night-foray, war,
lightning, desolation, solitude, and death. It is said, I know not how
demonstrated or traced, that the name Ulysses is but the variant of
the Etruscan _Ulixé_ or Sikulian _Oulixes_, words supposed to indicate
the ululation of the owl’s cry (in Italy I have heard the name of the
sweet and plaintive little _aziola_ or _aziolo_ derived from the same
source): and that it was given to the Homeric hero because he was the
first to adventure sea-voyaging on moonlit nights, because he too was
a night-wanderer. But unless Ulixé or Oulixes be older than the Greek
name, what of Odysseus? In like fashion some speculative philologists
derive ‘Pallas’ from the Turanian owl-name _Pöllö_.
I heard a singular fragment of owl-folklore once on the island of
Arran. The narrator said the white owl had seven distinct hoots,
but all I need recall here is that the seventh was when the ‘Reul
Fheasgair’ ceased to be the Evening Star and became the ‘Reul na
Maidne,’ the Day-Star. Was this a memory of some myth associating the
owl with the otherworld (or darkness or moontide or Night) disclosed
every eve at the opening of the Gates of Dusk?... the time of sleep and
dreams, of strange nocturnal life, of silence and mystery, between the
soft white fire of the Vesper Star, the star of Labour as the Bretons
call it, meaning that with its advent the long day’s labour ceases, and
its cold serenity when it has climbed the ramparts of the midsummer
night, and, as Phosphoros, the Day-Star, Son of the Morning, flashes
like a lance-point against the milky onflood of the dawn?
THE GARDENS OF THE SEA
(A MIDSUMMER NOON’S DREAM)
I recall a singular legend, where heard, where read, I do not remember,
nor even am I sure of what race the offspring, of what land the
denizen. It was to the effect that, in the ancient days of the world,
flowers had voices, had song to them as the saying is: and that there
were kingdoms among these populations of beauty, and that in the
course of ages (would they be flower-æons, and so of a measure in
time different from our longer or shorter periods?) satraps revolted
against the dominion of the Rose, and tropical princes led new hosts,
and scarlet forest-queens filled the jungle and the savannah with their
chants of victory. And the end was a conflict so great that even the
isles of the sea were shaken by it, and the pale green moss of polar
rocks whispered of the great world-war of the peoples of Flowry. At
last, after the shadow-flitting passage of an æon, the gods were roused
from their calm, and, looking down into the shaken mirror of the world,
beheld all their dreams and visions and desires no longer children of
loveliness and breaths of song. In these æons while they had slept in
peace the Empire of Flowry had come to a dissolution: race fought with
race, tribe with tribe, clan with clan. Among all the nations there
was a madness for supremacy, so that the weed in the grass and the
flame-crowned spire of the aloe were at one in a fierce discontent and
a blind lust of dominion. Thereupon the gods pondered among themselves.
Kronos, who had been the last to wake and was already drowsy with
old immemorial returning slumber, murmured: ‘A divine moment, O ye
Brotherhood of Eternity, is a long time wherein to be disturbed by the
mortal reflection of our dreams and the passions and emotions of our
enchanted hearts.’
And as all the calm-eyed Immortals agreed, Kronos sighed out the
mandate of silence, and turning his face to Eternity was again among
the august dreams of the Everlasting Ones.
In that long moment--for there in the other world it was but a
brief leaning on their elbows of the drowsy gods while the fans of
Immortal Sleep for a second stayed the vast waves of Peace--the divine
messengers, or were they the listening powers and dominions of the
earth, fulfilled destiny. From every flower-nation, from every people
by far waters, from every tribe in dim woods and the wilderness,
from every clan habiting the most far hills beyond the ever-receding
pale blue horizons, song was taken as stars are pluckt away from the
Night by the grey fingers of the Dawn. The Rose breathed no more a
flusht magic of sound; the Lily no more exhaled a foamwhite cadence.
Silence was come upon the wild chant of orchids in old, forgotten
woods; stillness upon the tinkling cymbals of the little hands of the
dim, myriad, incalculable host of blossom; a hush upon the songs of
meadow-flowers; a spell upon the singing of honeysuckles in the white
dews at the rising of the moon. Everywhere, from all the green tribes,
from all the glowing nations of Flowry, from each and every of the
wandering folk of the Reed, the Moss, and the Lichen, from all the
Clans of the Grass, the added loveliness of song was taken. Silence
fell upon one and all: a strange and awful stillness came upon the
woods and valleys. It was then that the God of Youth, wandering through
the hushed world, took the last song of a single rose that in a secret
place had not yet heard the common doom, and with his breath gave it a
body, and a pulse to its heart, and fashioned for it a feather-covering
made of down of the bog-cotton and the soft undersides of alder-leaf
and olive. Then, from a single blade of grass that still whispered in
a twilight hollow, he made a like marvel, to be a mate to the first,
and sent out both into the green world, to carry song to the woods and
the valleys, the hills and the wildernesses, the furthest shores, the
furthest isles. Thus was the nightingale created, the first bird, the
herald of all the small clans of the bushes that have kept wild-song in
the world, and are our delight.
But in the hearts of certain of the green tribes a sullen anger
endured. So the mysterious Hand which had taken song and cadence away
punished these sullen ones. From some, fragrance also was taken.
There were orchid-queens of forest-loveliness from whom all fragrance
suddenly passed like smoke: there were white delicate phantoms among
the grasses, from whom sweet odour was lifted as summer dew: there were
nomads of the hillways and gypsies of the plain to whom were given the
rankness of the waste, the smell of things evil, of corruption, of
the grave. But to some, beautiful rebels of the peoples of the Reed,
the Grass, and the Fern, the doom went out that henceforth their place
should be in the waters ... the running waters of streams and rivers,
the quiet waters of pools and lakes, the troubled waters of the seas
along the coasts of the world, the ocean depths.
And that is how amid the salt bite of the homeless wave there grew the
Gardens of the Sea. That is how it came about that the weed trailed in
running waters, and the sea-moss swayed in brackish estuaries, and the
wrack clung or swam in tangles of olive-brown and green and soft and
dusky reds.
What a long preamble to the story of how the Seaweeds were once
sweet-smelling blooms of the shores and valleys! Of how the flowers of
meadow and woodland, of the sun-swept plain and the shadowy hill, had
once song as well as sweet odours: how, of these, many lost not only
fragrance but innocent beauty: and how out of a rose and a blade of
grass and a breath of the wind the first birds were made, the souls of
the green earth, winged, and voiced.
To-day I sit amongst deep, shelving rocks by the shore, in a desolate
place where basaltic cliffs shut away the familiar world, and where,
in front, the otherworld of the sea reaches beyond sight to follow
the lifted wave against the grey skyline, or is it the grey lip of
the fallen horizon? Looking down I can perceive the olive-brown and
green seaweed swaying in the slow movement of the tide. Like drifted
hair, the long thin filaments of the Mermaid’s Locks (_Chorda Filum_)
sinuously twist, intertwine, involve, and unfold. It is as though a
seawoman rose and fell, idly swam or idly swung this way and that,
asleep on the tide: nothing visible of her wave-grey body but only her
long fatal hair, that so many a swimmer has had cause to dread, from
whose embrace so many a swimmer has never risen. In the rock-set pools
the flesh-hued fans of the dulse indolently stir. Wave-undulated over
them are fronds of a lovely green weed, delicate, transparent: above
these, two phantom fish, rock-cod or saithe, float motionless.
Idly watching, idly dreaming thus, I recall part of a forgotten poem
about the woods of the sea, and the finned silent creatures that are
its birds: and how there are stags and wolves in these depths, long
hounds of the sea, mermen and merwomen and seal-folk. Others, too, for
whom we have no name, we being wave-blind and so unable to discern
these comers and goers of the shadow. Also, how old sea-divinities
lie there asleep, and perilous phantoms come out of sunken ships and
ancient weed-grown towns; and how there roams abroad, alike in the
flowing wave and along the sheer green-darkening bodiless walls, an
incalculable Terror that may be manifold, the cold implacable demons of
the deep, or may be One, that grey timeworn Death whom men have called
Poseidon and Mananan and by many names.
What a mysterious world this Tir-fo-Tuinn, this Land-Under-Wave. How
little we know of it, for all that wise men have told us concerning
the travelling tides, of currents as mysteriously steadfast in their
comings and goings as the comets that from age to age loom briefly
upon the stellar roads: how little, though they have put learned
designations to a thousand weeds, and given names to ten thousand
creatures to whom the whole world of man and all his hopes and dreams
are less than a phantom, less than foam. The Gaelic poet who said
that the man who goes to Tir-fo-Tuinn goes into another world, where
the human soul is sand, and God is but the unloosened salt, tells us
as much as the scientist who probes the ocean-mud and reveals dim
crustacean life where one had believed to be only a lifeless dark.
Above the weed-held palaces of Atlantis, over the soundless bells
of Ys, above where Lyonesse is gathered in a foamless oblivion, the
plummet may sink and lift a few broken shells, the drag-net may bring
to the surface an unknown sea-snail or such a microscopic green Alga as
that _Halosphoera viridis_ which science has discovered in the great
depths beyond the reach of sunlight: but who can tell, perchance how
few who care to know, what Love was, long ago, when there were poets
in Lyonesse: what worship was served by white-robed priests among the
sunken fanes of Ys: what dreams withstayed and what passions beset the
noble and the ignoble in drowned Atlantis, what empires rose and fell
there, what gods were lauded and dethroned, and for how long Destiny
was patient.
Even in the little pools that lie shoreward of the Gardens of the Sea
what beauty there is, what obscure life, what fascinating ‘other-world’
association. This piece of kelp is at once _Fucus vesiculosus_ and the
long fingers of the Cailliach-Mhara, the Sea-Witch. This great smooth
frond is ... I do not know, or forget: but it is the kale of Manan,
in sea-groves of which that Shepherd pastures his droves of uncouth
sea-swine. This green tracery has a Greek or Latin name, but in legend
it is called the Mermaid’s Lace. This little flame-like crest of
undulating wrack has a designation longer than itself, but in tales of
faerie we know it to be that of which the caps of the pool-elves are
fashioned.
In the Isles seaweed has many local names, but is always mainly divided
into Yellow Tails, Dark Tails, and Red Tails (_Feamainn bhuidhe_,
_feamainn dubh_, and _feamainn dearg_). The first comprise all the
yellowish, light-brown, and olive-brown seaware; the second all the
dark-green, and also all green wrack; the third, the red. The common
seaware or kelp or tang (_Fucus vesiculosus_) is generally called
_propach_, or other variant signifying tangled: and the bladder-wrack,
_feamainn bholgainn_ or _builgeach_, ‘baggy-tails.’ I have at times
collected many local names of these weeds, and not a few superstitions
and legends. Naturally, the most poetic of these are connected with the
_Chorda filum_ or Dead Man’s Hair, which has a score of popular names,
from ‘corpsy-ropes’ to the occasional Gaelic _gillemu lunn_, which may
be rendered ‘the wave’s gillie’ or ‘servant of the wave’: with the
drifted gulf-weed, whose sea-grapes are called _uibhean sìthein_, fairy
eggs, and are eagerly sought for: and with the _duileasg_, or dulse.
Even to this day, in remote parts, an ancient seaweed-rite survives
in the propitiatory offerings (now but a pastime of island children)
to the Hebridean sea-god Shony at Samhein (Hallowmass). This Shony,
whose favours were won by a cup of ale thrown into the sea in the dark
of the night, is none other than Poseidon, Neptune, Manan; for he is
the Scandinavian sea-god _Sjoni_, viking-brought from Lochlin in the
far-off days when the Summer-sailors raided and laid waste the Gaelic
Isles.
It is singular how rarely seaweed has entered into the nomenclature and
symbology of peoples, how seldom it is mentioned in ancient literature.
Among our Gaelic clans there is only one (the M’Neil) which has seaware
as a badge. Greek art has left us a few seaweed-filleted heads of
Gorgons, and to sea-wrack the Latin poets have once or twice made but
passing and contemptuous allusion. In the Bible (‘whaur ye’ll find
everything frae a bat to a unicorn,’ as an old man said to me once)
there is one mention of it only, in Jonah’s words: ‘The depths closed
me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.’
THE MILKY WAY
With the first sustained breath of frost the beauty of the Galaxy
becomes the chief glory of the nocturnal skies. But in midsummer even
what amplitude of space, what infinite depths it reveals, and how
mysterious that filmy stardrift blown like a streaming banner from
behind the incalculable brows of an unresting Lord of Space, one
of those Sons of the Invisible, as an oriental poet has it, whose
ceaseless rush through eternity leaves but this thin and often scarce
visible dust, ‘delicate as the tost veil of a dancing girl swaying
against the wind.’ Perhaps no one of our poets, and poetry ancient
and modern and of every country and race is full of allusions to the
Galaxy, has more happily imaged it in a single line than Longfellow has
done in
“Torrent of light and river of the air.”
As a river, or as a winding serpent, or as a stellar road, it has
imaginatively been conceived by almost every people, though many
races have delighted in the bestowal of a specific name, as though it
were not an aggregation of star-clusters and nebulæ, but a marvellous
creature of the heavens, as, perhaps, we may conceive the Great Bear,
or Orion, or moons-beset Jupiter, or Saturn among his mysterious rings.
Thus in the Book of Job it is called the Crooked Serpent; the Hindûs of
Northern India call it the Dove of Paradise (Swarga Duari), though they
have or had a still finer name signifying the Court of God; and the
Polynesians give it the strange but characteristic designation, ‘The
Long, Blue, Cloud-Eating Shark.’
Last night I watched the immense tract for a long time. There was
frost in the air, for I saw that singular pulsation which rightly or
wrongly is commonly held to be an optical illusion, the aspect as of
a pulse, or of an undulating motion of life such as one might dimly
perceive in the still respiration of some sleeping saurian. There
appeared to be countless small stars, and in the darker spaces the
pale vaporous drift became like the trail of phosphorescence in the
wake of a vessel: at times it seemed almost solid, a road paven with
diamonds and the dust of precious stones, with flakes as of the
fallen plumage of wings--truly _Arianrod_, the Silver Road, as the
Celts of old called it. Of course it was no more than a fantasy of the
dreaming imagination, but it seemed to me more than once that as a vast
indefinite sigh came from the windless but nevertheless troubled sea
there was a corresponding motion in that white mysterious Milky Way, so
infinitely remote. It was as though the Great Snake--as so many bygone
peoples called and as many submerged races still call the Galaxy--lay
watching from its eternal lair that other Serpent of Ocean which
girdles the rolling orb of our onward-rushing Earth: and breathed in
slow mysterious response: and, mayhap, sighed also into the unscanned
void a sigh infinitely more vast, a sigh that would reach remote
planets and fade along the gulfs of incalculable shores.
As winter comes, the Milky Way takes on a new significance for pastoral
and other lonely peoples, for shepherds and fisher-folk above all.
Songs and poems and legends make it familiar to everyone. A hundred
tales own it as a mysterious background, as Brocéliande is the
background of a hundred Breton ballads, or as Avalon is the background
of a hundred romances of the Cymric and Gaelic Celt. The Hebridean
islanders seldom look at it on still frosty nights without in the long
idle hours recalling some old name or allusion, some ancient _rann_ or
_oran_, some _duan_ or _iorram_ of a later day, related to the mystery
and startling appealing beauty of the Silver Road. It has many names on
the lips of these simple men, who have little learning beyond the Bible
and what life on the waters and life in the hearts of other simple
men and women have taught them. Sometimes these names are beautiful,
as ‘Dust of the World’ (or universe, _an domhain_) or the ‘Kyle of
the Angels’ (the Strait or Sound): sometimes apt and natural, as ‘the
Herring Way,’ and ‘the Wake’: sometimes legendary, as ‘the Road of the
Kings’ (the old gods, from Fionn back to the Tuatha Dedannan) or as
‘the Pathway of the Secret People’: sometimes sombre or grotesque, as
‘The Shroud’ or as ‘the Bag of the Great Miller.’
There is especial interest for us, of course, in the legendary
associations of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian and Celtic or Gaelic
peoples. These, in common with the majority of western nations, image
the Milky Way more as a ‘road’ or ‘street’ than as a serpent or than
as a river--though the Norse have their _Midhgardhsormr_, connected in
association with the _Weltum-Spanner_ (‘Stretcher-round-the-World’) or
Ocean-Stream.
I do not know when the Milky Way as a designation first came into
common English use. Possibly there is no prior mention to that in
Chaucer’s _Hous of Fame_:
“_Se yonder, lo, the Galaxyë,
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey_”
--an allusion which certainly points to already familiar usage. It is
now, I fancy, almost universal. Perhaps the old translator Eden was
among the first to popularise it, with his rendering of the Latin _Via
Lactis_ and _Via Lactea_ as ‘the Mylke way’ and ‘Mylke whyte way.’
There has been no need to derive the term from the Italian _Via lattea_
or the French _Voie lactée_, since Eden’s use and Chaucer’s preceded
that of any French poet or romanticist. Certainly the phrase became
part of our literature after it passed golden from the mint of Milton
(paraphrasing Ovid)--
“Broad and ample road whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars, as stars to thee appear
Seen in the Galaxy, that milky way
Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest
Powdered with stars....”
It is rarely now alluded to as the Galaxy, and probably never by
unlettered people. In most parts of England for centuries, and it is
said in many parts still, the common designation is ‘The Way of Saint
James.’ This has a singular correspondence in the name popular among
the French peasants, ‘the Road of Saint Jacques of Compostella.’
Originally a like designation was common in Spain, though for a
thousand years the popular epithet runs _El Camino de Santiago_, after
the Warrior-Saint of the Iberian peoples. I am told that ‘the Way of
Saint James’ is common in certain counties of England, but I have
never heard it, nor do I wholly recall the reason of this particular
nomenclature. In some form the road-idea continually recurs. How
many readers of these notes will know that the familiar ‘Watling
Street’--that ancient thoroughfare from Chester through the heart of
London to Dover--was also applied to this Galaxy that perchance they
may look at to-night from quiet country-side, or village, or distant
towns, or by the turbulent seas of our unquiet coasts, or by still
waters wherein the reflection lies and scintillates like a phantom
phosphorescence. Watling Street does not sound a poetic equivalent
for the Milky Way, but it has a finer and more ancient derivation
than ‘the Way of Saint James.’ The word goes back to Hoveden’s
‘Watlinga-Strete,’ itself but slightly anglicised from the Anglo-Saxon
_Waetlinga Straet_, where the words mean the Path of the Waetlings,
the giant sons of King Waetla, possibly identical with the giant Sons
of Turenn of ancient Gaelic legend, heroes who went out to achieve
deeds impossible to men, and traversed earth and sea and heaven itself
in their vast epical wanderings. Another curious old English name of
the Galaxy, of great beauty in its significance, is ‘Walsyngham Way.’
Why the Galaxy should be so called might well puzzle us, were it not
explained by the fact that up till near the middle of the sixteenth
century one of the most common English names of the Virgin Mary was
‘Our Lady of Walsyngham,’ from the fact that the Blessed Mother’s chief
shrine in the country was at Walsyngham Abbey in Norfolk. Further, as
‘the Way to Walsyngham’ in common parlance signified the road to the
earthly tabernacle of Mary, so ‘Walsyngham Way,’ as applied to the
Galaxy, signified the celestial road to the virgin Mother in heaven.
Much more barbaric is a name for the Milky Way still to be heard in
Celtic Wales, _Caer Gwydyon_, the Castle or Fortress of Gwython. This
Gwython or Gwydyon was a kind of Merlin Sylvestris. He was known as
the Enchanter, the Wizard as we would say now, and was feared on this
account, and because he was the son of Don, King of the Otherworld,
Lord of the Secret People, the ‘fairies’ of later tradition. Like
Grania, the beautiful wife of Fionn, whose elopement with Dermid and
their subsequent epical odyssey is the subject of one of the greatest
and to this day most popular of Gaelic legendary romances, the wife of
Gwython fled from his following vengeance from land to land, across
seas, over mountains, ‘to the ends of the earth,’ and at last with her
faery lover dared the vast untrodden ways of the remote skies. But
long before they could reach Arcturus, or whatever the star or planet
to which they fled, Gwython overtook them, led by the dust which these
mortal if semi-divine fugitives made along the soundless dark blue
roads of heaven. He slew them and their winged horses and their aerial
hounds, and standing on the verge of space flung the heads and limbs
and bodies into infinitude. Hence the meteors and falling stars which
at the season of the autumnal equinox and at the approach of winter may
still be seen whirling adown the bastions of high heaven. So terrible
in tragedy, so titanic the deed, that to all eternity, or as long as
our world endures, the phantom iteration of that mighty vengeance
shall commemorate the inappeasable anger of Gwython the Enchanter. Is
there not convincing evidence in the unpassing dust of that silent
highway of the doomed lovers ... the dust of the trampled star-way that
no wind of space has blown to this side or to that, that no alchemy of
sun or moon has burned up or like dew dissolved?
Besides ‘Watling Street,’ our Anglo-Saxon forbears had _Iringes Weg_
or _Wec_ and _Bil-Idun’s Weg_; Iringe and Bil-Idun having been famous
descendants of the Waetla already alluded to. They were warders of the
Bridge of Asgard, the Scandinavian Heaven. In time this Asgard-Bridge
came to be given as a name to the Milky Way ... though the later poets
applied the epithet also to the Rainbow. Readers of Grimm’s _Teutonic
Mythology_ will remember that he cites many collateral instances. Thus
the Vikings knew the Galaxy as _Wuotanes Straza_, or ‘Woden’s Street’;
the Dutch have in common use _Vronelden Street_, ‘the women’s Street’;
and the German peasants commonly call it _Jakob’s Weg_. The Westphalian
term is singular and suggestive, ‘Weather Street.’ One wonders if there
is any common idea that weather is in any way as closely associated
with the Milky Way as are the vernal floods and the autumnal rains
with the Pleiades. Probably the bestowal of the name is due to the fact
that when the Galaxy is clear and bright and scintillant the weather
is serene and dry. A more poetic designation is that of the Finns, who
delight in the term _Linnunrata_, the Birds’ Way, either from an old
Finnish and Esthonian legend that once by a miracle all the songs of
all the birds of the world were turned into a cloud of snow-white tiny
wings, or from the more likely belief that it is the road of winged
spirits on their passage from earth to heaven. This is, of course,
a very ancient conception. The ancient Hindûs revealed it in the
phrase ‘the Path of Ahriman’: the ancient Norse as ‘the Path of the
Ghosts’ going to Valhalla: the ancient Gaels as the Hero-Way, leading
from Earth to Flatheanas, the Abode of Eternal Youth. It is strange
and suggestive that not only the North American aborigines called it
‘the Trail to Ponemah’ (the Hereafter), but that people so rude as
the Eskimo and the Bushmen of South Africa call it ‘the Ashen Path,’
the road of fire-ember signals, for the ghosts of the dead. Even the
Patagonians speak of the Milky Way as the white pampas where their dead
are immortal huntsmen rejoicing in the pursuit of countless ostriches.
But of all popular names I do not think any is more apt and pleasant
than that common to the Swedish peasantry, who call the Galaxy _Winter
Gatan_--_i.e._, ‘Winter Street.’ It is the Winter Street we must all
travel some day, if the old poets say true, when the green grass grows
on our quiet beds, when the loudest wind will not fret the silence
in our tired minds, and when day and night are become old forgotten
dreams. May we too find it the Pathway of Peace ... not the least
beautiful of the names of the Milky Way, not the least beautiful of the
legends connected with that lovely wonder of our nocturnal skies.
SEPTEMBER
September: the very name has magic. In an old book, half in Latin
half in English, about the months, which I came upon in a forgotten
moth-eaten library years ago, and in part copied, and to my regret
have not seen or heard of since, or anywhere been able to trace, I
remember a singular passage about this month. Much had been said about
the flowers of ‘these golden weekes that doe lye between the thunderous
heates of summer and the windy gloomes of winter’; of those flowers
and plants which bloom in gardens, and those, as the harebell and
poppy and late-flowering gorse, which light the green garths of meadow
and woodland; as the bryony, which trails among the broken copses and
interweaves the ruddy masses of bramble; as the traveller’s-joy, which
hangs its frail wreaths of phantom-snow along the crests of every
hedgerow of beech and hornbeam. Of the changing colours of the trees,
too, the old writer had much to say: of the limes ‘that become wan
and spotted as a doe,’ of the mountain-ash ‘that has its long fingers
dyed redd and browne,’ of ‘the wyche-elme whose gold is let loose on
the wind after nighte-frosts and cold dawnes.’ Nor did he forget that
‘greate beautie of mistes’ which we all know; and he reached eloquence
when he spoke of the apple-orchards and of the wall-fruits of ‘olde
manor-gardenns’--‘the peache that women and poetes doe make the queene
of fruites,’ ‘the rich glowe and savour of the apricock,’ ‘the delicate
jargonell that keepes the sweetes of France in olde warme English
gardenns.’ Of wild-fruit, also, he had dainty words and phrases.
Blackberries, ‘the darke-blue bilberry,’ the sloe ‘whose excellent
purple bloode maketh so fine a comfort,’ ‘the dusky clustres of the
hasel,’ ‘the green-smockt filberte,’ and so forth. Even upon mushrooms
he had words of sun and wind and dew, so lightsome were they, ardent
and joyous, with a swift movement--as though writ by one who remembered
gathering ‘musherooms’ in a sun-sweet dawn after a night of heavy dews,
in company with another who laughed often in gladness and was dearest
and fairest of all dear and fair things. ‘Howbeit,’ he added, after
sorrowing that ‘many doe feare these goodly musherooms as poysonis
dampe weedes,’ ‘this dothe in nowise abate the exceedynge excellence of
Goddes providence that out of the grasse and dewe where nothing was,
and where onlie the lytell worme turned in his sporte, come as at the
shakynge of bells these delicate meates.’
Then, after some old-world lore about ‘the wayes of nature with beastes
and byrdes’ in this month, he goes further afield. ‘And this monthe,’
he says, ‘is the monthe of dreames, and when there is a darke (or
secret) fyre in the heartes of poetes, and when the god of Love is
fierce and tyrannick in imaginings and dreames, and they doe saye in
deedes also, yett not after the midwaye of the monthe; butt whye I know
not.’
We hear so much of the poet-loved and poet-sung month of May, and
the very name of June is sweet as its roses and white lilies and
lavender, that it is become a romantic convention to associate them
with ‘dreames’ and the ‘tyrannick’ season of ‘the god of Love.’ But
I am convinced that the old Elizabethan or Jacobean naturalist was
right. May and June are months of joy, but September is the month of
‘dreames’ and ‘darke fyre.’ Ask those who love nature as the poet is
supposed to love her, with something of ecstasy perhaps, certainly
with underglow of passion: ask those in whom the imagination is as a
quickening and waning but never absent flame: ask this man who travels
from month to month seeking what he shall never find, or this woman
whose memories and dreams are many, howsoever few her hopes ... and the
chance will be that if asked to name the month of the heart’s love, it
will be September. I do not altogether know why this should be so, if
so it is. There is that in June which has a time-defying magic: May has
her sweet affinities with Spring in the human heart: in April are the
flutes of Pan: March is stormy with the clarions of the winds: October
can be wild with all wildness or be the calm mirror of the passing
of the loveliness of the green-world. There is not a month that has
not its own signal beauty, so that many love best February, because
through her surge of rains appear days of blue wonder, with the song
of the missel-thrush tost like spray from bare boughs--or November,
because in the grey silence one may hear the fall of the sere leaves,
and see mist and wan blueness make a new magic among deserted woods--or
January, when all the visible world lies in a white trance, strange and
still and miraculous as death transfigured to a brief and terrible
loveliness on the face of one suddenly quiet from the fever of youth
and proud beauty. There is not a month when the gold of the sun and the
silver of the moon are not woven, when the rose of sunset does not lie
upon hills which reddened to the rose of dawn, when the rainbow is not
let loose from the tangled nets of rain and wind, when the morning-star
and the evening-star do not rise and set.
And yet, for some, there is no month that has the veiled magic of
September.
‘The month of peace,’ ‘the month of beauty,’ it is called in many
Gaelic songs and tales; and often, ‘Summer-end.’ I remember an old
_rann_, perhaps still said or sung before the peat-fires, that it was
in this month God created Peace; again, an island-tale of Christ as a
shepherd and the months as sheep strayed upon the hills of time. The
Shepherd went out upon the hills, and gathered them one by one, and
led them to the fold: but, before the fold was reached, a great wind
of snow came down out of the corries, and on the left a wild flood
arose, and on the narrow path there was room only, and that hardly,
for the Shepherd. So He looked to see which one of the twelve He might
perchance save, by lifting it in His strong arms and going with it
alone to the fold. He looked long, for all were the children of His
Father. Then He lifted September, saying, ‘Even so, because thou art
the month of fulfilment, and because thy secret name is Peace.’ But
when He came out of the darkness to the fold, the Shepherd went back
between the wild lips of flood and tempest, and brought to the fold
June, saying, ‘Because thy secret name is Joy’: and, in turn, one by
one, He brought each to the fold, saying unto each, in this order,
‘May, because thy secret name is Love’; ‘April, because thou art made
of tears and laughter’; ‘July, because thou art Beauty’; ‘August, thou
quiet Mother’; ‘October, because thy name is Content’; ‘March, because
thy name is Strife’; ‘February, because thy name is Hope’; ‘November,
because thy name is Silence’; ‘January, because thou art Death’; and at
the last, ‘December, whom I have left to the end, for neither tempest
could whelm nor flood drown thee, for thy name is the Resurrection and
the Life.’
And when the tale was told, some one would say, ‘But how, then, was
September chosen first?’
And the teller would say, ‘Because its secret name is Peace, and Peace
is the secret name of Christ.’
It is no wonder the poets have loved so well this month whose name
has in it all the witchery of the North. There is the majesty of the
hill-solitudes in it, when the moorlands are like a purple sea. It has
the freshness of the dew-white bramble-copses, of the bracken become
russet and pale gold, of the wandering frostfire along the highways of
the leaf, that mysterious breath whose touch is silent flame. It is
the month when the sweet, poignant second-song of the robin stirs the
heart as a child’s gladness among tears. ‘The singer of September,’ a
Gaelic poet calls it, and many will recall the lovely lines of the old
half-forgotten Elizabethan poet on the bird
“That hath the bugle eyes and ruddy breast
And is the yellow autumn’s nightingale.”
It is strange how much bird-lore and beast-lore lie with September. The
moorcock, the stag, the otter, the sea-wandering salmon, the corncrake,
and the cuckoo and the swift, I know not how many others, have their
tale told or their farewell sung to the sound and colour of September.
The poets have loved it for the unreturning feet of Summer whose
vanishing echoes are in its haunted aisles, and for the mysterious
silences of the veiled arrivals of Winter. It is the month of the
year’s fulfillings--
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close-bosom’d friend of the maturing sun.”
And yet there are other Septembers than the Septembers of memory, than
the Septembers of the imagination. For three years past the month
has come with rains from the sea and cold winds out of the east and
north. The robin’s song has been poignantly sweet as of yore, but the
dream-glow has been rare upon the hill and valley, and in the woods
and on the moor-slopes the leaf has hung bannerets of dusky yellow,
and the bracken burned dully without amber and flamelit bronze. This
year, though, there has been some return of those September days which
we believe in while yet a long way off, as we believe in May, as we
feel assured of June. This last June was truly a month of roses, and
in May the east wind slept: but last year the roses trailed along
flooded byways, and the east wind nipped bud and blossom through the
bleak days of ‘the merry month,’ and a colourless and forlorn September
must have chilled even that ‘darke fyre in the heartes of poetes’ of
which the old naturalist wrote. There have been days of peace this
year, and of the whole beauty of Summer-end. In the isles, among
the hills, on forest lands and uplands, and by the long plains and
valleys of the south, the September blue--which is part a flame of
azure and part a haze of the dust of pearls--has lain over land and
sea like a benediction. How purple the western moors, what depths of
floating violet and pale translucencies of amethyst on the transfigured
mountains. What loveliness of pale blue mist in the hollows of quiet
valleys; what richness of reds and ambers where the scarlet-fruited ash
hangs over the unruffled brown pool; what profuse gold and ungathered
amber where the yellow gorse climbs the hillside and the armies of
the bracken invade every windy solitude. How lovely those mornings
when the dew is frost-white and the gossamer is myriad in intricate
interlacings that seem woven of aerial diamond-dust. What peace in that
vast serenity of blue where not the smallest cloud is seen, where only
seaward the gannet may hang immeasurably high like a winged star, or,
above inland pastures, the windhover poise in his miraculous suspense.
But, alas, only ‘days.’ It has not been the September of the heart’s
desire, of the poet’s dream. The advance-guard of the equinox has
again and again come in force: the grey wind has wailed from height to
height, and moaned among the woods. Even in the gardens the wall-fruits
have hardly given the wonted rich warmth, though the apples have made
a brave show. Yesterday there was a hush in the wind; a delicate frost
lingered after a roseflusht dawn; and the inward light came out of the
heather, the bracken and the gorse, out of the yellow limes and the
amber planes and the changing oaks, and upon the hillside turned the
great pine on the further crag into a column of pale gold and made the
lichened boulders like the half-sunken gates of buried cities of topaz
and jasper and chalcedony. But to-day vast masses of sombre cloud have
been swung inland from the Atlantic, and the gale has the wild mournful
sough that we look for in the dark months. It is in the firelight that
one must recapture September. It lies hidden in that warm heart, amid
the red and yellow flowers of flame: and in that other heart, which,
also, has its ‘darke fyre,’ that heart in whose lands lit by neither
sun nor moon are the secret glens where old dreams live again, and
where the dreams of the hour are radiant in their new wonder and their
new beauty.
THE CHILDREN OF WIND AND THE CLAN OF PEACE
I was abroad on the moors one day in the company of a shepherd, and
we were talking of the lapwing that were plentiful there, and were
that day wailing continuously in an uneasy wavering flight. I had seen
them act thus, in this excess of alarm, in this prolonged restless
excitement, when the hill-falcons were hovering overhead in the nesting
season: and, again, just before the unloosening of wind and rain and
the sudden fires of the thundercloud. But John Logan the shepherd told
me that now it was neither coming lightnings nor drifting hawk nor
eagle that made all this trouble among the ‘peewits.’ “The wind’s goin’
to mak’ a sudden veer,” he said--adding abruptly a little later, “an’
by the same token we’ll have rain upon us soon.”
I looked at the cold blue of the sky, and at the drift of the few
clouds trailing out of the east or south-east, and could see no sign
of any change of wind or likelihood of rain.
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“Weel,” he answered literally, “I don’t think it. It’s the peewits
an’ the craws that ken swifter than oursels; it’s they that tell, an’
I think they’re better at the business than thae folk wha haver awa’
in the papers, an’ are sometimes richt because they canna help it an’
oftener wrang because it’s maistly guesswork.”
“Well, what do the peewits and the crows say?--though I haven’t seen
crow or rook or corbie for the last hour.”
“Thae peewits an’ a’ the plovers are a’ the same. If the win’s gaun to
leap out of the east intae the sooth-wast, or slide quickly from the
north intae the wast, they’ll gang on wheelin’ an’ wailin’ like yon for
an hour or mair, an’ that afore there’s the least sign o’ a change. An’
as for the craws ... weel, if ye had been lookin’ up a wee whilie ago
ye’d ’a seen a baker’s dozen go by, slantin’ on the edge o’ the win’,
like boats before a stiff breeze. Aye, an’ see there! ... there’s a
wheen mair comin’ up overhead.”
I glanced skyward, and saw some eight or ten rooks flying high and
evidently making for the mountain-range about two miles away to our
left.
“D’ye see that ... thae falling birds?”
“Yes,” I answered, noticing a singular occasional fall in the general
steady flight, as though the suddenly wheeling bird had been shot: “and
what o’ that, John?”
“It’s just this: when ye see craws flyin’ steady like that an’ then
yince in a while drapping oot like yon, ye may tak’ it as meanin’
there’s heavy rain no that great way aff: onyways, when ye see the like
when thae black deils are fleein’ straight for the hills, ye maun feel
sure frae the double sign that ye’ll hae a good chance o’ being drookit
afore twa-three hours.”
One question led to another, and I heard much crow and corbie lore from
John Logan, some of it already familiar to me and some new to me or
vaguely half-known--as the legend that the corbies or ravens, and with
them all the crow-kind, were originally white, but at the time of the
Deluge were turned sooty-black because the head of the clan, when sent
out by Noah from the Ark, did not return, but stayed to feed on the
bodies of the drowned. “So the blackness of death was put on them, as
my old mother has it in her own Gaelic.”
“Your old mother, John?” I queried surprisedly: “I did not know you had
any one at your croft.”
“Aye, but I have that, though she’s a poor frail auld body an’ never
gangs further frae the hoose than the byre an’ the hen-yaird. If ye
want to hear more aboot thae birds an’ the auld stories forenenst them,
she’d mak’ you welcome, an’ we’d be glad an’ prood to offer ye tea: an’
I’ll just tell ye this, that ye’ll gie her muckle pleasure if ye’ll hae
a crack wi’ her in the Gaelic, an’ let her tell her auld tales in’t.
She’s Hielan’, ye ken: tho’ my faither was oot o’ Forfar, Glen Isla
way. She’s never got hold o’ the English yet varra weel, an’ to my
sorrow I’ve never learnt the auld tongue, takin’ after my faither in
that, dour lowland body as he was. I ken enough to follow her sangs,
an’ a few words forbye, just enough to gie us a change as ye micht say.”
I gladly accepted the shepherd’s courteous offer; and so it was that
an hour later we found ourselves at Scaur-vàn, as his croft was
called, from its nearness to a great bleached crag that rose out of
the heather like a light-ship in a lonely sea. By this time, his
prognostications--or those rather of the wheeling and wailing lapwings,
and the mountain-flying rooks--had come true. Across the wide desolate
moors a grey wind soughed mournfully from the south-west, driving
before it long slanting rains and sheets of drifting mist. I was glad
to be out of the cold wet, and in the warm comfort of a room lit with a
glowing peat-fire on which lay one or two spurtling logs of pine.
A dear old woman rose at my entrance. I could see she was of great
age, because her face was like a white parchment seamed with a myriad
wrinkles, and her hands were so sere and thin that they were like
wan leaves of October. But she was fairly active, and her eyes were
clear--and even, if the expression may be used, with a certain quiet
fire in their core--and her features were comely, with a light on them
as of serene peace. The old-fashioned white mutch she wore enhanced
this general impression, and I remember smiling to myself at the quaint
conceit that old Mrs. Logan was like a bed-spirit of ancient slumber
looking out from an opening of frilled white curtains.
It was pleasant to sit and watch her, as with deft hands she prepared
the tea and laid on the table scones and butter and grey farrels of
oatcake, while, outside, the wet wind moaned and every now and then
a swirl of rain splashed against the narrow panes of the window, in
whose inset stood three pots of geranium whose scarlet flowers caught
the red flicker of the fire-flaucht and warmed the grey dusk gathering
without.
Later, we began to speak of the things of which her son John and I
had talked on the moor: and then of much else in connection with the
legendary lore of the birds and beasts of the hills and high moorlands.
As it was so much easier for her (and so far more vivid and idiomatic)
she spoke in Gaelic, delighted to find one who could understand
the ancient speech: for in that part of the country, though in the
Highlands, no Gaelic is spoken, or only a few words or phrases
connected with sport, sheep-driving, and the like. I had won her
heart by saying to her soon after the tea--up to which time she had
spoken in the slow and calculated but refined Highland-English of the
north-west--_Tha mi cinnteach gu bheil sibh aois mhòr_ ... ‘I am sure
that you have the great age on you.’ She had feared that because I had
‘the English way’ I would not know, or remember, or care to remember,
the old tongue: and she took my hand and stroked it while she said with
a quiet dignity of pleasure, _Is taitneach leam nach ’eil ’ur Gàidhlig
air meirgeadh_ ... (in effect) ‘It is well pleased I am that your
Gaelic has not become rusty.’
It was after the tea-things had been set aside, and old Mrs. Logan had
said reverently, _Iarramaid beannachadh_ (‘Let us ask a blessing’),
that she told me, among other legendary things and fragments of old
natural-history folklore, the following legend (or holy Christmas tale,
as she called it) as to how the first crows were black and the first
doves white.
I will tell it as simply but also with what beauty I can, because her
own words, which I recall only as the fluctuating remembrance from a
dream and so must translate from the terms of dream into the terms of
prose, though simple were beautiful with ancient idiom.
Thus she began:--_Feumaidh sinn dol air ar n’-ais dlùth fichead ceud
bliadhna_, which is to say, ‘We must go back near two thousand (_lit_:
_twenty hundred_) years.’
* * * * *
Yes, it is nigh upon twenty hundred years that we must go back. It
was in the last month of the last year of the seven years’ silence
and peace. When would that be, you ask? Surely what other would it be
than the seven holy years when Jesus the Christ was a little lad. Do
you not remember the lore of the elders? ... that in the first seven
years of the life of the young Christ there was peace in the world, and
that the souls of men were like souls in a dream, and that the hearts
of women were at rest. In the second seven years it is said that the
world was like an adder that sloughs its skin: for there was everywhere
a troubled sense of new things to come. So wide and far and deep was
this, that men in remote lands began moving across swamps and hills and
deserts; that the wild beasts shifted their lairs and moaned and cried
in new forests and upon untrodden plains; that the storks and swallows
in their migration wearied their wings in high, cold, untravelled
ways; that the narwhals and great creatures of the deep foamed through
unknown seas; that the grasses of the world wandered and inhabited
hills; that many waters murmured in the wilderness and that many waters
mysteriously sank from pools and wellsprings. In the third seven years,
men even on the last ocean-girdled shores were filled with further
longing, and it is said that new stars were flung into the skies and
ancient stars were whirled away, like dust and small stones beneath
the wheels of a chariot. It was at the end of the third seven years
that a Face looked out of Heaven, and that from the edges of the world
men heard a confused and dreadful sound rising from the Abyss. Though
the great and the small are the same, it is the great that withdraws
from remembrance and the small that remains, and that may be why men
have grown old with time, and have forgotten, and remember only the
little things of the common life: as that in these years the Herring
became the king of all fishes, because his swift gleaming clan carried
the rumour of great tidings to the uttermost places of ocean; as that
in these years the little fly became king over lions and panthers and
eagles and over all birds and beasts, because it alone of all created
things had remained tameless and fearless; as that in these years the
wild-bees were called the clan of wisdom, because they carried the Word
to every flower that grows and spread the rumour on all the winds of
the world; as that in these years the Cuckoo was called the Herald of
God, because in his voice are heard the bells of Resurrection.
But, as I was saying, it was in the last month of the last year of the
seven years’ silence and peace: the seventh year in the mortal life of
Jesus the Christ. It was on the twenty-fifth day of that month, the day
of His holy birth.
It was a still day. The little white flowers that were called Breaths
of Hope and that we now call Stars of Bethlehem were so hushed in
quiet that the shadows of moths lay on them like the dark motionless
violet in the hearts of pansies. In the long swards of tender grass
the multitude of the daisies were white as milk faintly stained with
flusht dews fallen from roses. On the meadows of white poppies were
long shadows blue as the blue lagoons of the sky among drifting
snow-white moors of cloud. Three white aspens on the pastures were in a
still sleep: their tremulous leaves made no rustle, though there was a
soundless wavering fall of little dusky shadows, as in the dark water
of a pool where birches lean in the yellow hour of the frostfire. Upon
the pastures were ewes and lambs sleeping, and yearling kids opened and
closed their onyx eyes among the garths of white clover.
It was the Sabbath, and Jesus walked alone. When He came to a little
rise in the grass He turned and looked back at the house where His
parents dwelled. Joseph sat on a bench, with bent shoulders, and was
dreaming with fixt gaze into the west, as seamen stare across the
interminable wave at the pale green horizons that are like the grassy
shores of home. Mary was standing, dressed in long white raiment, white
as a lily, with her right hand shading her eyes as she looked to the
east, dreaming her dream.
The young Christ sighed, but with the love of all love in His heart.
“So shall it be till the day of days,” He said aloud; “even so shall
the hearts of men dwell among shadows and glories, in the West of
passing things: even so shall that which is immortal turn to the East
and watch for the coming of Joy through the Gates of Life.”
At the sound of His voice He heard a sudden noise as of many birds, and
turned and looked beyond the low upland where He stood. A pool of pure
water lay in the hollow, fed by a ceaseless wellspring, and round it
and over it circled birds whose breasts were grey as pearl and whose
necks shone purple and grass-green and rose. The noise was of their
wings, for though the birds were beautiful they were voiceless and dumb
as flowers.
At the edge of the pool stood two figures, whom He knew to be of the
angelic world because of their beauty, but who had on them the illusion
of mortality so that the child did not know them. But He saw that one
was beautiful as Night, and one beautiful as Morning.
He drew near.
“I have lived seven years,” He said, “and I wish to send peace to the
far ends of the world.”
“Tell your secret to the birds,” said one.
“Tell your secret to the birds,” said the other.
So Jesus called to the birds.
“Come,” He cried; and they came.
Seven came flying from the left, from the side of the angel beautiful
as Night. Seven came flying from the right, from the side of the angel
beautiful as Morning.
To the first He said: “Look into my heart.”
But they wheeled about Him, and with new-found voices mocked, crying,
“How could we see into your heart that is hidden” ... and mocked and
derided, crying, “What is Peace!... Leave us alone! Leave us alone!”
So Christ said to them:
“I know you for the birds of Ahriman, who is not beautiful but is Evil.
Henceforth ye shall be black as night, and be children of the winds.”
To the seven other birds which circled about Him, voiceless, and
brushing their wings against His arms, He cried:
“Look into my heart.”
And they swerved and hung before Him in a maze of wings, and looked
into His pure heart: and, as they looked, a soft murmurous sound came
from them, drowsy-sweet, full of peace: and as they hung there like a
breath in frost they became white as snow.
“Ye are the Doves of the Spirit,” said Christ, “and to you I will
commit that which ye have seen. Henceforth shall your plumage be white
and your voices be the voices of peace.”
The young Christ turned, for He heard Mary calling to the sheep and
goats, and knew that dayset was come and that in the valleys the
gloaming was already rising like smoke from the urns of the twilight.
When He looked back He saw by the pool neither the Son of Joy nor the
Son of Sorrow, but seven white doves were in the cedar beyond the pool,
cooing in low ecstasy of peace and awaiting through sleep and dreams
the rose-red pathways of the dawn. Down the long grey reaches of the
ebbing day He saw seven birds rising and falling on the wind, black as
black water in caves, black as the darkness of night in old pathless
woods.
* * * * *
And that is how the first doves became white, and how the first crows
became black and were called by a name that means the clan of darkness,
the children of the wind.
STILL WATERS
Perhaps at no season of the year is the beauty of still waters at
once so obvious and so ethereal as in Autumn. All the great painters
of Nature have realised this crowning secret of their delicate
loveliness. Corot exclaimed to a friend who was in raptures about one
of his midsummer river scenes ... ‘Yes, yes, but to paint the soul of
October, _voilà mon idéal_!’ Daubigny himself, that master of slow
winding waters and still lagoons, declared that if he had to be only
one month out of his studio it would have to be October, ‘for then you
can surprise Nature when she is dreaming, then you may learn her most
evanescent and most exquisite secrets.’ And our own Millais, when he
was painting ‘Chill October’ near Murthly, in Perthshire, wrote that
nothing had ever caused him so much labour, if nothing had ever given
him so much pleasure, in the painting, ‘for Nature now can be found in
a trance, and you can see her as she is.’ A friend of the late Keeley
Halswelle told me that this able artist (who was originally a ‘figure’
and ‘subject’ painter) remarked to him that he had never realised the
supreme charm of autumnal Nature among still waters till he found
himself one day trying to translate to his canvas the placid loveliness
of the wide, shallow reaches of the Avon around Christchurch. Doubtless
many other painters, French and Dutch and English, have felt thus,
and been glad to give their best to the interpretation of the supreme
charm of still waters in autumn. What would Venice be without them ...
Amsterdam ... Holland ... Finland ... Sweden? Imagine Scotland without
this water-beauty, from Loch Ken to Loch Maree, from the Loch of the
Yowes to the ‘thousand-waters’ of Benbecula: or Ireland, where the
white clouds climbing out of the south may mirror themselves in still
waters all day till they sink beyond the Lough of Shadows in the silent
north.
The phrase is as liberal as ‘running water.’ That covers all inland
waters in motion, from the greatest rivers to the brown burn of the
hillside, from the melting of the snows in fierce spate to the swift
invasion and troubled floods of the hurrying and confined tides. So
‘still waters’ covers lakes and mountain-lochs, shallow meres, lagoons,
the reaches of slow rivers, lochans, tarns, the dark brown pools in
peat-moors, or the green-blue pools in open woods and shadowy forests,
the duckweed-margined ponds at the skirts of villages, the lilied ponds
of old manor-garths and of quiet gardens, asleep beneath green canopies
or given over to the golden carp and the dragon-fly beneath mossed
fountains or beyond time-worn terraces. Often, too, and in February and
October above all, the low-lying lands are flooded, and the bewildered
little lives of the pastures crowd the hedgerows and copses. Sometimes
for days, motionless, these mysterious lake-arrivals abide under the
grey sky, sometimes a week or weeks pass before they recede. The crow
flying home at dusk sees the pale cloud and the orange afterglow
reflected in an inexplicable mirror where of late the grey-green grass
and brown furrow stretched for leagues: the white owl, hawking the
pastures after dusk, swoops so low on his silent wings that he veers
upward from a ghostly flying image underneath, as a bat at sundown
veers from the phantom of its purblind flight.
Delicate haze, cloud-dappled serenity, and moonlight are the three
chief qualities of beauty in the charm of still waters. It is a matter
of temperament, of the hour and occasion also no doubt, whether one
prefer those where another dream-world, that of human life, companions
them in the ineffable suspense of the ideal moment, the moment where
the superfluous recedes and silence and stillness consummate the
miraculous vision. Those moonlit lagoons of Venice, which become
scintillating floods of silver or lakes of delicate gold, where
the pole-moored _sandolò_ thrusts a black wedge of shadow into the
motionless drift, while an obscure figure at the prow idly thrums a
mandolin or hums drowsily a _canzonnetto d’amore_; those twilit canals
where old palaces lean and look upon their ancient beauty stilled and
perfected in sleep; how unforgettable they are, how they thrill even in
remembrance. In the cities of Holland, how at one are the old houses
with the mirroring canals, in still afternoons when quiet light warms
the red wall, and dwells on the brown and scarlet clematis in the cool
violet and amber hollows of the motionless water wherein the red wall
soundlessly slips and indefinitely recedes, hiding an undiscovered
house of shadow with silent unseen folk dreaming out across invisible
gardens. There are ancient towns like this in England also, as between
Upsala and Elsinore to where old châteaux in Picardy guard the
pollarded marais, or deserted Breton manoirs stand ghostly at the
forest-end of untraversed meres.
These have their charm. But have they for us the intimate and
unchanging spell of the lakes and meres and other still waters of our
own land? Nothing, one might think, could be more beautiful than to
see in the Lake of Como the cypresses of Bellaggio and the sloping
gardens of Cadenabbia meeting in a new underwater wonderland: or to
see Mont Blanc, forty miles away, sleeping in snow-held silence in the
blue depths of Lac Léman: or to see Pilatus and a new city of Lucerne
mysteriously changed and yet familiarly upbuilded among the moving
green lawns and azure avenues of the Lake of the Four Cantons. And yet
leaning boulders of granite, yellow with lichen and grey with moss and
deep-based among swards of heather and the green nomad bracken, will
create a subtler magic in the brown depths of any Highland loch. There
is a subtler spell in the solitary tarn, where the birch leans out of
the fern and throws an intricate tracery of bough and branch into the
unmoving wave, where the speckled trout and the speckled mavis meet as
in the strange companionships of dreams. Enchantment lies amid the
emerald glooms of pine and melancholy spruce, when a dream-world forest
underneath mirrors the last sunset-gold on bronze cones, and enfolds
the one white wandering cloud miraculously stayed at last between two
columnar green spires, flawless as sculptured jade.
Is this because, in the wilderness, we recover something of what we
have lost? ... because we newly find ourselves, as though surprised
into an intimate relationship of which we have been unaware or have
indifferently ignored? What a long way the ancestral memory has to go,
seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound among obscure dusks and forgotten
nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul. It is not we
only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the wilderness and
lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are often troubled we know
not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence in us is aroused, some
memory not our own but yet our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that
have immemorially sunk in ancient dust move furtively along obscure
corridors in our brain, the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the
primitive hillman or woodlander communicates again with old forgotten
intimacies and the secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no
fanciful challenge of speculation. In the order of psychology it is
as logical as in the order of biology is the tracing of our upright
posture or the deft and illimitable use of our hands, from unrealisably
remote periods wherein the pioneers of man reached slowly forward to
inconceivable arrivals.
But whatever primitive wildness, whatever ancestral nearness we recover
in communion with remote Nature, there is no question as to the
fascination of beauty exercised by the still waters of which we speak,
of their enduring spell. What lovelier thing in Nature than, on a
serene and cloudless October day, to come upon a small lake surrounded
by tall elms of amber and burnished bronze, by beech and maple and
sycamore cloudy with superb fusion of orange and scarlet and every
shade of red and brown, by limes and aspens tremulous with shaken pale
gold? Beautiful in itself, in rare and dreamlike beauty, the woods
become more beautiful in this silent marriage with placid waters, take
on a beauty more rare, a loveliness more dreamlike. There is a haze
which holds the fluent gold of the air. Silence is no longer quietude
as in June; or a hushed stillness, as in the thunder-laden noons of
July or August; but a soundless suspense wherein the spirit of the
world, suddenly at rest, sleeps and dreams.
The same ineffable peace broods over all still waters: on the
meres of Hereford, on the fens of East Anglia, on lochs heavy with
mountain-shadow, on the long grey Hebridean sheets where the call of
the sea-wind or the sea-wave is ever near.
Truly there must be a hidden magic in them, as old tales tell. I
recall one where the poets and dreamers of the world are called ‘the
children of pools.’ The poet and dreamer who so called them must have
meant by his metaphor those who look into the hearts of men and into
the dim eyes of Life, troubled by the beauty and mystery of the world,
insatiable in longing for the ineffable and the unattainable. So, long
ago, even ‘ornamental waters’ may have been symbols of the soul’s
hunger and thirst, emblems of the perpetual silence and mystery of his
fugitive destiny!
Somewhere, I think it is in the _Kalevala_, occurs the beautiful
metaphor of still waters, ‘the mirrors of the world.’ Whoever the
ancient singer was who made the phrase, he had in his heart love for
still waters as well as the poet’s mind. The secret of their beauty
is in that image. It may be a secret within a secret, for the mirror
may disclose a world invisible to us, may reflect what our own or an
ancestral memory dimly recalls, may reveal what the soul perceives and
translates from its secret silences into symbol and the mysterious
speech of the imagination.
_Still waters_; it has the inward music that lies in certain words ...
amber, ivory, foam, silence, dreams; that lies often in some marriage
of words ... moonlight at sea, wind in dark woods, dewy pastures, old
sorrowful things: that dwells in some names of things, as chrysoprase;
or in some combination of natural terms and associations, as wind and
wave; or in some names of women and dreams, Ruth, Alaciel, Imogen,
Helen, Cleopatra; or in the words that serve in the courts of music
... cadence, song, threnody, epithalamion, viol, flute, prelude,
fugue. One can often evade the heavy airs of the hours of weariness by
the spell of one of these wooers of dreams. _Foam_--and the hour is
gathered up like mist, and we are amid “perilous seas in faëry lands
forlorn”: _Wind_--and the noises of the town are like the humming of
wild bees in old woods, and one is under ancient boughs, listening, or
standing solitary in the dusk by a forlorn shore with a tempestuous
sea filling the darkness with whispers and confused rumours and
incommunicable things: _Ruth_--and sorrow and exile are become
loveliness: _Helen_--and that immemorial desire is become _our_ desire,
and that phantom beauty is become _our_ dream and _our_ passion. _Still
Waters_--surely through that gate the mind may slip away from the
tedious and unwelcome, and be alone among forests where the birch leans
and dreams into an amber-brown pool, or by a mountain-lake where small
white clouds lie like sleeping birds, or on moonlit lagoons where the
reed and the reed’s image are as one, and the long mirrors are unshaken
by any wandering air, unvisited but by the passing soundless shadows of
travelling wings.
THE PLEIAD-MONTH
From the Persian shepherd to the shepherd on the hills of Argyll--in a
word, from the remote East to the remote West--November is known, in
kindred phrase, as the Pleiad-Month.
What a world of legend, what a greater world of poetry and old romance,
centres in this little group of stars. ‘The meeting-place in the skies
of mythology and science,’ as they have been called by one of our chief
astronomers. From time immemorial this remote starry cluster has been
associated with festivals and solemnities, with auguries and destinies.
On November 17, the day of the midnight culmination of the Pleiades,
the great Festival of Isis was begun at Busiris: in ancient Persia,
on that day, no petition was presented in vain to the King of Kings:
and on the first of the month the midnight rites of our own ancestral
Druids were connected with the rising of the Pleiades. To-day the
South Sea Islanders of the Society and Tonga Isles divide the year by
their seaward rising and setting. The _Matarii i nia_, or season of
the ‘Pleiades Above,’ begins when in the evening this stellar group
appears on the horizon, and while they remain above it: the _Matarii i
raro_, or season of the ‘Pleiades Below,’ begins when after sunset they
are no longer visible, and endures till once again they appear above
the horizon. The most spiritual and the most barbaric races are at one
in considering them centres of the divine energy. The Hindûs imaged
them as Flame, typical of Agni, God of Fire, the Creative Energy: the
several Persian words, from the ancient _Perv_ or the _Parur_ of Hafiz
or the _Parwin_ of Omar Khayyam--derive from _Peru_, a word signifying
‘The Begetters’: and we know that the Greeks oriented to them or
to their _lucida_ not only the first great temple of Athenê on the
Acropolis, but its successor four hundred years later, the Hecatompedon
of 1150 B.C., and seven hundred years later the Parthenon on the same
side. [The great shrine of Dionysos at Athens, the still earlier
Asclepieion at Epidaurus, and the temple of Poseidon at Sunium, looked
towards the Pleiades at their setting.] But far removed from these are
the Malays and Pacific islanders, who more vaguely and crudely revere
‘the central fires,’ and even so primitive and remote a people as the
Abipones of the Paraguay River country worship them as their Great
Spirit--_Groaperikie_, or Grandfather--and chant hymns of joy to this
Pleiad-Allfather when, after the vernal Equinox, the mysterious cluster
once more hangs visible in the northern sky.
It would be impossible, in a brief paper, to cover the ground of
the nomenclature, of the literature, of scientific knowledge and
speculation concerning the Pleiades. A long chapter in a book might
be given to Alcyone alone--that bright particular star of which it
has been calculated that, in comparison, our Sun would sink to a star
below the tenth magnitude. Indeed, though the imagination strains after
the astronomer’s calm march with dazzled vision, our solar brilliancy
is supposed to be surpassed by some sixty to seventy of the Pleiadic
group, for all that our human eyes have from time immemorial seen
therein only a small cluster of tiny stars, the ‘seven’ of Biblical and
poetic and legendary lore, from ‘the Seven Archangels’ to the popular
‘Hen and her six chicks.’ Alcyone, that terrible torch of the ultimate
heavens, is eighty-three times more refulgent than that magnificent
star Sirius, which has been called the ‘Glory of the South’: a thousand
times larger than our Sun. I do not know how Merope and Taygeta, Celeno
and Atlas are, but Maia, that shaking loveliness of purest light, has
been calculated to be four hundred times larger than the Sun, and
Electra about four hundred and eighty times larger. When one thinks
of this mysterious majesty, so vast that only the winged imagination
can discern the illimitable idea, all words fail: at most one can but
recall the solemn adjuration of the shepherd-prophet Amos, ‘_Seek Him
that maketh Pleiades and Orion_,’ or the rapt ecstasy of Isaiah, ‘_O
day star, son of the morning_.’
A Gaelic poet has called them the Lords of Water, saying (though under
different names, from the Gaelic mythology) that Alcyone controls the
seas and the tides, that Electra is mistress of flood, that Taygeta
and Merope and Atlas dispense rains and augment rivers and feed the
well-springs, and that Maia’s breath falls in dew. The detail is
fanciful; the central thought is in accord with legend and old wisdom.
I do not know how far back the connection of the Pleiades with water,
particularly rains and the rising of rivers, has been traced. It runs
through many ancient records. True, in one place, Hesiod speaks of
‘retreating from the burning heat of the Pleiades,’ and mention has
already been made of the Hindû association of them with ‘Flame.’ But
Hesiod’s allusion is a seasonal trope, and natural to one living in
a warm country where the coming of the autumnal rains coincides with
days of sweltering closeness and heat. Moreover, Hesiod himself uses
equally deftly other popular imagery as it occurs to him, speaking
of the Pleiades, as Homer speaks, as Atlas-born; and again (with
Pindar, Simonides and others) likening them to rock-pigeons flying
from the Hunter Orion, doubtless from earliest mention of them in
ancient legend as a flock of doves, or birds; and again as ‘the Seven
Virgins’ and ‘the Virgin stars’--thus at one with his contemporary, the
Hebrew Herdsman-prophet Amos, who called them by a word rendered in
the Authorised Version of the Bible as ‘the seven stars.’ As for the
Hindû symbol, it must be remembered that fire was the supreme sacred
and primitive element, and that every begetter of life in any form
would naturally be thus associate. The Hindûs called the Pleiad-Month
(October-November) _Kartik_, and the reason of the great star-festival
_Dībalī_, the Feast of Lamps, was to show gratitude and joy, after
the close of the wet season, for the coming of the Pleiad-days of
dry warmth and beauty. The ‘sweet influences’ of the Pleiades thus
indicated will come more familiarly to many readers in Milton’s
“the grey
Dawn and the Pleiades before him danc’d,
Shedding sweet influence,...”
This ancient custom, the ‘Feast of Lamps,’ of the Western Hindûs
survives to-day in the ‘Feast of Lanterns’ in Japan, though few
Europeans seem to perceive any significance in that popular festival.
In general, however, we find the advent of the Pleiades concurrent,
both in ancient and modern tradition, with springs and rains and
floods: with the renewal of life. Thus the comment in the old
_Breeches_ Bible, opposite the mention of ‘the mystic seven’ in that
supreme line in Job: ‘which starres arise when the sunne is in Taurus,
which is the spring time, and bring flowres.’ A Latin poet, indeed,
used _Pliada_ as a synonym of showers. Again and again we find them
as the _Vergiliae_, Companions of the Spring. They are intimately
connected too with traditions of the Deluge: and in this association,
perhaps also with that of submerged Atlantis, it is suggestive to
note that early in the sixteenth century Cortez heard in that remote,
mysterious Aztec otherworld to which he penetrated, a very ancient
tradition of the destruction of the world in some past age at the time
of their midnight culmination. A long way thence to Sappho, who marked
the middle of the night by the setting of those wild-doves of the
sky! Or, a century later, to Euripides, who calls them _Aetos_, our
‘Altair,’ the nocturnal timekeepers.
But to return to that mystery of seven. Although some scholars derive
the word ‘Pleiades’ or ‘Pliades,’ and in the singular ‘Plias,’ from
the Greek word _plein_, ‘to sail,’ because (to quote an eminent living
authority) ‘the heliacal rising of the group in May marked the opening
of navigation to the Greeks, as its setting in the late autumn did
the close’--and though others consider that the derivation is from
_pleios_, the epic form of the Greek word for ‘full,’ or, in the
plural, ‘many’--and so to the equivalent ‘a cluster,’ corresponding
to the Biblical _Kimāh_ and the Arabic _Al Thuruyya_, the Cluster,
the Many Little Ones--it is perhaps more likely that a less learned
and ordinary classical reader may be nearer the mark in considering
the most probable derivation to be from Pleione, the nymph of Greek
mythology--‘Pleione, the mother of the seven sisters,’ as she was
called of old. Such an one, too, may remember that certain Greek poets
alluded to the Pleiades as the seven doves that carried ambrosia to
the infant Zeus.[1] To this day, indeed, a common English designation
for the group is ‘the Seven Sisters’: and lovers of English poetry
will hardly need to be reminded of kindred allusions, from Chaucer’s
‘Atlantes doughtres sevene’ to Milton’s ‘the seven Atlantic sisters’
(reminiscent here, of course, of Virgil’s ‘Eoae Atlantides’) or to
Keats’ ‘The Starry Seven, old Atlas’ children.’ The mediæval Italians
had ‘the seven doves’ again (_sette palommiele_), and to-day their
compatriots speak of the ‘seven dovelets.’ It would be tiresome to go
through the popular Pleiad-nomenclature of all the European races,
and a few instances will equally indicate the prevalence, since the
Anglo-Saxon _sifunsterri_. Miles Coverdale, in the first complete
English Bible, comments on the passage in Job, ‘these vii. starres, the
clocke henne with her chickens’; and to-day in Dorset, Devon, and other
English counties ‘the Hen and her Chickens’ is a popular term, as it
is, in effect, with the Wallachians, and indeed, with or without the
number seven, throughout Europe. The long continuity and vast range of
this association with seven may be traced from the ancient Celtic ‘The
Seven Hounds’ to the still more ancient ‘seven beneficent sky-spirits
of the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta’ or to the again more ancient ‘Seven
Sisters of Industry’ of remote Chinese folklore. This feminine allusion
in presumably the oldest mention of a popular designation for the
Pleiades is the more singular from the kindred thought of the Roman
writer Manilius--‘The narrow Cloudy Train of female stars’ ... _i.e._,
no doubt, Pleione and her daughters.
[1] On reading recently a work on mythological ornithology by Mr.
D’Arcy Thompson I noticed that he traces the word Botrus, equivalent to
a Bunch of Grapes (as the younger Theon likened the Pleiades) to οἰνάς,
a dove, so called from its purple-red breast like wine, οἶνος, and
naturally referred to a bunch of grapes; or perhaps because the bird
appeared in migration at the time of the Vintage. [And see his further
evidence of Cilician coins.]
Nor, again, is it possible to record the many picturesque or homely
Pleiad-designations, ancient and modern, in literature and folklore.
What range, indeed, to cover ... since we should have to go back to
two thousand years B.C. to recover that fine name, General of the
Celestial Armies! It would be tempting to range through the poets of
all lands. Think of such lovely words as those from the _Mu’allakāt_,
as translated by Sir William Jones: ‘It was the hour when the Pleiades
appeared in the firmament like the folds of a silken sash variously
decked with gems’: or that line in Graf’s translation of Sadi’s
_Gulistân_ ... ‘as though the tops of the trees were encircled by
the necklace of the Pleiades’: or, or our own day, of a verse such as
Roscoe Thayer’s:
“slowly the Pleiades
Dropt like dew from bough to bough of the cinnamon trees,”
or lines such as that familiar but ever beautiful couplet in _Locksley
Hall_:
“Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.”
As for many of the names, what store of old thought and legend they
enshrine. ‘Seamen’s starres’ our own King Jamie called them, after
the popular use. The Finns call them ‘the Sieve,’ and the Provençals
‘the mosquito net,’ and the Italians ‘the Battledore.’ With the
nomad Arabs they are ‘the Herd of Camels.’ Peoples so apart as the
ancient Arabians, the Algerian Berbers of to-day, and the Dyaks of
Borneo, have placed in them the seat of immortality. Races as widely
severed as the Hebridean Gaels and certain Indian tribes have called
them ‘the Dancers’: to the Solomon Islanders they are ‘a group of
girls,’ and (strange, among so primitive and savage a race) the
Australian aborigines thought of them as ‘Young Girls playing to Young
Men dancing.’ There is perhaps no stranger name than our Gaelic
_Crannarain_ (though _Grioglachan_ or _Meanmnach_ is more common),
_i.e._, the baker’s peel or shovel, from an old legend about a Baker
and his wife and six daughters, itself again related to a singular
Cuckoo myth.
But an end to this long excerpting from ‘starry notes’! In a later
chapter, too, I propose to write of ‘Winter Stars,’ and the Great
Bear, and Orion, and the Milky Way--and I must take warning in time to
condense better and write ‘more soothly’ as Chaucer has it. So, now,
let me end with a quotation from Mr. D’Arcy Thompson’s preface to his
_Greek Birds_, to which I have alluded in a footnote. ‘As the White
Doves came from Babylon or the Meleagrian Birds from the further Nile,
so over the sea and the islands came Eastern legends and Eastern names.
And our Aryan studies must not blind us to the presence in an Aryan
tongue of these immigrants from Semitic and Egyptian speech, or from
the nameless and forgotten language that was spoken by the gods.’
Food for thought there, and in many of the other alluded-to clues of
old forgotten faiths and peoples, for the Pleiad-Month!
What ages, what rise and fall of kingdoms and great empires, since the
Arabian shepherd looked up from the illimitable desert and called this
dim cluster, this incalculable congregation of majesty and splendour,
_Al Najm_, ‘the Constellation’ ... ‘_the_ Constellation’: since the
first wandering Bedouins halted in the moonlit Sahara to bow before
_Al Wasat_, the Central One: since the poets of the Zend-Avesta hailed
the overlordship of the Holy Seven! And still they rise, and set,
changeless, mysterious. Still the old wonder, the old reverence lives
... for not long ago I heard a tale told by a Gaelic story-teller who
spoke of the Pleiades as the Seven Friends of Christ, and named them
newly as Love, Purity, Courage, Tenderness, Faith, Joy, and Peace.
THE RAINY HYADES
“Where is the star Imbrifer? Let us adore it.”
Years ago I remember coming upon this mysterious phrase in a poem or
poetic drama by a French writer. The pagans, led by a priest, then
went into the woods; and, in a hollow made of a hidden place swept by
great boughs, worshipped a moist star. I forget whether the scourge of
drought ended then, and if winds lifted the stagnant branches, if rains
poured through the leaves and mosses and reached the well-springs. I
recall only the invocation, and some faint and broken memory of the
twilight-procession of bitter hearts and wild voices, weary of vain
lamentation and of unanswered prayers to sleeping or silent gods. But
often I wondered as to Imbrifer, that dark lord with the sonorous name.
Was he a Gaulish divinity, or, as his name signals, a strayed Latin?
And was he, as our Manan of the West, a sea-deity, or a divinity of
the clouds, clothed, like the shepherd Angus Sunlocks, in mist, so as
the more secretly to drive before him down the hidden ways of heaven
the myriad hosts of the rain? Or had he an angelic crest, with wings
of unfalling water, as a visionary once portrayed for me a likeness of
Midir, that ancient Gaelic god at whose coming came and still come the
sudden dews, or whose presence or the signs of whose passage would be
revealed and still are revealed by the white glisten on thickets and
grasses, by the moist coolness on the lips of leaf and flower.
The name, too, or one very like it, I heard once in a complicated
(and, alas, for the most part forgotten) tale of the Kindred of
Manan, the Poseidon of the Gael: remembered because of the singular
companionship of three or four other Latin-sounding names, which the
old Schoolmaster-teller may have invented or himself introduced, or
mayhap had in the sequence of tradition from some forgotten monkish
reciter of old. Aquarius and either Cetus or Delphinius (quaintly
given as the Pollack, the porpoise) were of the astronomical company,
I remember--and Neptheen or Nepthuinn (Neptune), notwithstanding his
oneness with Manan’s self.
But Imbrifer had faded from my mind, as though washed away by one of
his waves of rain or obliterated by one of his dense mists, till the
other day. Then, as it happened, I came upon the name once more, in
a Latin quotation in an old book. So, he was of the proud Roman clan
after all! and, by the context, clearly a divinity of the autumnal
rains, and of those also that at the vernal equinox are as a sound of
innumerable little clapping hands.
Could he be an astronomical figure, a Zodiacal prince of dominion, I
wondered. In vain I searched through all available pages connected with
the Hyades, the Stars of Water: in vain, the chronicles of Aquarius,
of Cetus and the Dolphin, of Hydra and Pisces and Argo, that proud
Ship of March. But last night, sitting by the fire and hearing the
first sleet of winter whistle through the dishevelled oaks and soughing
firs, when I was idly reading and recalling broken clues in connection
with the astrological ‘House of Seturn,’ suddenly, in pursuit of a
cross-reference to some detail in connection with the constellation
of Capricorn, I encountered Imbrifer once more. ‘Imbrifer, the
Rain-Bringing One.’
So, then, he is more than an obscure divinity of the woods and of
remote ancestral clans! Greater even than Midir of the Dews, one of
the great Lords of Death: greater than the Greek Poseidon or the Gaelic
Manan, heaven-throned among the older gods though seen of mortals only
on gigantic steeds of ocean, vast sea-green horses with feet of running
waves and breasts of billows. For he is no other than one of the
mightiest of the constellations, Capricorn itself! The name, in a word,
is but one of several more or less obscure or forgotten analogues of
this famous constellation, concerning which the first printed English
astrological almanac (1386) has ‘whoso is born in Capcorn schal be
ryche and wel lufyd’!
Imbrifer himself ... or itself ... is certainly not ‘wel lufyd’ on many
of these October and November days of floods and rains! _Imbrifer_
... the very name is a kind of stately, Miltonic, autumnal compeer of
our insignificant (and, in Scotland, dreaded!) rain-saint of July,
Swithin of dubious memory! It would add dignity to the supplication or
imprecation of the sleet-whipt citizen of Edinburgh or the rain-and-mud
splashed wayfarer in London, during the wet and foggy days of November,
if, instead of associating the one or the other with ‘the weather’
or ‘our awful climate’ he could invoke or abjure so imposing and
grandiloquent an abstraction as ‘Imbrifer’!
Truly a fit Constellation of late autumn, Capricornus.
“Thy Cold, for Thou o’er Winter Signs dost reign,
Pullst back the Sun....”
as a bygone astronomical versifier has it. Perhaps he had in mind
Horace’s ‘tyrannus Hesperiae Capricornus undae,’ who in turn may have
recalled an earlier poet still, English’d thus:
“... Then grievous blasts
Break southward on the Sea, when coincide
The _Goat_ and _Sun_: and then a heaven-sent cold.”
Many of us will remember with a thrill Milton’s magnificent image
“... Thence down amain
As deep as Capricorn,”
and others will recall the often-quoted line of Dante in the _Paradiso_
(relative to the Sun’s entrance into Capricorn between January 18 and
February 14).
“_The horn of the Celestial Goat doth touch the Sun._”
May and November are the two ‘fatal’ months with the Celtic peoples:
the first because of the influence of the Queen of Faerie (she has
many names), and the second because of Midir, who sleeps in November,
or, as another legend has it, ‘goes away’ in that month. In that month
too the Daughter of Midir has departed on her long quest of her brother
Aluinn Og (is this a legend or a confused traditionary remembrance, or
a mytho-poeic invention.... I have come upon it once only), to find him
asleep under the shaken fans of the Northern Lights, and to woo him
with pale arctic fires, and auroras, and a faint music wrought out of
the murmur of polar airs on a harp made of a seal’s breast-bone. It is
but in another guise the old Greek legend of Persephone in the Kingdom
of Aidoneus. Again, it is in November that the touch of Dalua, the
Secret Fool or the Accursed of the Everlasting Ones, gives death. Once
more, it is in November that Lîr holds his great banquet, a banquet
that lasts three months, in Tir-fo-tuinn, the Country under the waves.
In one way or another all these dreams are associated with the sea,
with water and the Winter Solstice. By different ways of thought, of
tradition, and of dreaming phantasy, the minds of this race or that
people, of these scattered tribes or those broken clans, have reached
the same strange goals of the imagination. The spell of Capricorn
may be of the Waters of all time, since the Horned Goat of our Celtic
forbears, the ‘Buccan Horn’ of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, the Latin
‘Imbrifer’ or ‘Gelidus’ or ‘Sea-Goat’ (in several variants), the Greek
‘Athalpees’ or the commoner term signifying a Horned Goat, the ancient
Egyptian Chnemu, God of the Waters, the perhaps as ancient Aztec
Cipactli, imaged like the narwhal, the Chinese Mo Ki and the Assyrian
Munaxa, both signifying Goat Fish--and so forth, East and West, in the
dim past and the confused present,--are all directly or indirectly
associated with the element of Water, with the Sea, or rains, storm and
change and subtle regeneration. The Greek writers called the allied
constellation of Aquarius Hydrochoüs, the Water-Pourer, in mythological
connection (a Latin commentator avers) with Deucalion and the great
Flood, that many believe to have been an ancestral memory of the Deluge
which submerged Atlantis. The Anglo-Saxons gave it the same name, ‘se
waeter-gyt.’ There is a Breton legend in connection with Ys, that dim
Celtic remembrance of vanished Lyonesse or drowned Atlantis, to the
effect (for I know it only in modern guise) that on the fatal night
when King Gradlon saw his beautiful city unloosened to the devouring
waves by Dahut the Red, his Daughter, the Stars of water shook a fiery
rain upon land and sea and that the floods of heaven fell, from the
wake of the Great Galley (the Great Bear) to the roots of the unseen
tree that bears the silver Apples (the Pleiades), and as far as the
hidden Wellsprings (_the Constellation of Capricorn_) and The Mansion
of the White King (the Constellation of Aquarius)--the White King being
water personified.
Nearly all the ancient Greek and Asian analogues for the last named,
Aquarius, relate to water. One of the few old-world exceptions was that
Roman Zodiac on which the constellation figured as a peacock, symbol
of Hêrê (Juno), because that in her month Gamelion (part January, part
February) the sun enters this sign. The Greek Islanders of Ceos called
it Aristaeus, in memory of a native Rain Bringer. Another name was
Cecrops, because the Cicada or Field-cricket is nourished by the dews
and has its eggs hatched by the vernal rains. It would be wearisome to
collate superfluous instances. Enough, now, that the Arab, the Persian,
the Syrian and the Israelite, were at one with the Hellene and the
Anglo-Saxon in the designation of the Water-Pourer, or an equivalent
such as the Arabian _Al Dalw_, the Well-Bucket: that in China of old
its sign was recognised as a symbol of the Emperor Tchoun Hin, the
Chinese Deucalion: and that still among the astrologers of Central Asia
and Japan it has for emblem the Rat, the far-Asiatic ideograph for
water. Strange too that Star-Seers so remote as the Magi of the East
and the Druids of the West should centrate their stellar science on
this particular constellation. And, once more, not less strange that
alike by the banks of the Euphrates where it was called the Star of
Mighty Destiny, on the Arabian Sands, where it was called the Fortune
of all Fortune, and in the Druidic woods of the Gaul and the Gael where
too it symbolised Fortune, a star of its group should be the Star of
Fortune--the group alluded to by Dante in the _Purgatorio_:
“... geomancers their Fortuna Major
See in the Orient before the dawn ...”
Again, is it tradition or coincidence that the Platonists of old held
‘the stairs of Capricorn’ to be the stellar way by which the souls
of men ascended to heaven, so that the constellation became known as
the Gate of the Gods, and that to-day the astrologers and mystics of
the West share the same belief? Even the Caer Arianrod of our Celtic
forbears--the Silver Road, as generally given though obviously very
loosely ... and may not the name more likely, especially in connection
with a basic legend of the constellation of Corona Borealis, be the
‘Mansion of Ariand’ (Ariadne)? ... though commonly applied to the Milky
Way or less often to the Northern Crown, is sometimes in its modern
equivalent used to designate Capricorn. Naturally, to astrologers, this
Constellation with that of Aquarius, is of greatest import, for at a
certain time ‘the House of Saturn’ is here to be discerned.
It is a drop from such sounding names as these to ‘the Skinker.’ Yet by
this name our English forefathers probably knew in common speech the
constellation of Aquarius. At any rate a Mr. Cock, ‘Philomathemat,’ in
a rare book of some 200 years ago, _Meteorologiae_, speaks of Aquarius
by this singular name, and as though it were the familiar and accepted
designation: ‘Jupiter in the Skinker opposed by Saturn in the Lion
did raise mighty South-west Winds.’ Here again in this old English
word, meaning a tapster, we have an analogue of the Water-Pourer, that
universal Zodiacal sign of Aquarius.
But for all that Horace, and following him James Thomson in the
_Seasons_ (‘Winter’), say of ‘Fierce Aquarius staining the inverted
year,’ the constellation is more associated with the rain-tides of
spring. It is then, too, in mid-February to mid-March, that, following
its passage through Capricorn, the Sun enters it--so that ‘benign’ and
not ‘fierce’ becomes the apt epithet.
All these ‘watery constellations’--Aquarius, Capricorn, Cetus, the
Dolphin, Hydra, Pisces--are set aside, in the mouths of poets and in
the familiar lore of the many, for the Hyades, that lovely sestet of
Taurus which in these winter-months are known to all of us, where they
flash and dance south-east of the Silver Apples of childhood’s sky--the
clustered Pleiades. They have become the typical stars of the onset
of winter--the Lords of Rain--‘sad companions of the turning year’ as
an old Roman poet calls them, ‘the seaman-noted Hyades’ of Euripides,
‘the Boar-Throng’ (feeders on the mast brought down in late October
and November by the autumnal rains) of our Anglo-Saxon fathers, the
‘Storm-Star’ of Pliny, the Moist Daughters of Spenser, so much more
familiar to us in Tennyson’s
“Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea.”
Of old the whole group was called Aldebaran, but now we recognise in
that name only the superb star whose pale-rose flame lights gloriously
‘the cold forehead of the wintry sky’ to quote an undeservedly
forgotten poet. And now, Aldebaran stands apart in Taurus, and the six
storm-stars are torches set apart.
Well, the Season of the Rainy Hyades has come. The Water-Pourer, the
Whale and swift Dolphin, Pisces (‘Leaders of the Celestial Host’ and
‘the Diadem of November’), Hydra the Water-Snake, every Rain-Star, from
flashing Corona, Bride of the White Hawk, to the far southern torch of
splendid Achernar in Eridanus the Celestial River, all have lent the
subtle influences of the first of the Elements, Water. In the mystic’s
language, we are now in the season when the soul may least confusedly
look into its life as in a shaken mirror, and when the spirit may ‘look
before and after.’ For, they tell us, in the occult sense, we are the
Children of Water.
To-night, looking at the Hyades, dimmed in a vaporous haze foretelling
coming storm, as yet afar off, I find myself, I know not why, and in
a despondency come I know not whence, thinking of and repeating words
I read to-day in a translation of the _Bhagavad Gita_:--‘I am in the
hearts of all. Memory and Knowledge, and the loss of both, are all
from Me. There are two entities in this world, the Perishable and the
Imperishable. All creatures are the Perishable and the unconcerned One
is the Imperishable.’
The unconcerned One!
WINTER STARS
I
To know in a new and acute way the spell of the nocturnal skies, it
is not necessary to go into the everlasting wonder and fascination of
darkness with an astronomer, or with one whose knowledge of the stars
can be expressed with scholarly exactitude. For the student it is
needful to know, for example, that the Hyades are Alpha, Delta, Eeta,
etc., of _Tauri_, and lie 10° south-east of the Pleiades. But as one
sits before the fireglow, with one’s book in hand to suggest or one’s
memory to remind, it is in another way as delightful and as fascinating
to repeat again to oneself how Tennyson in _Ulysses_ speaks of this
stellar cluster as
“Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vext the dim sea....”
or how Christopher Marlowe wrote of them
“As when the seaman sees the Hyades
Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds,
Auster and Aquilon with wingëd steeds....”
to recall how Spenser alludes to them as ‘the Moist Daughters,’ or
how our Anglo-Saxon ancestors called them ‘the Boar-Throng.’ One
must know that Alpha of Boötes is the astronomical signature of the
greater Arcturus, but how much it adds to the charm of this star’s
interest for us to learn that among its popular names are the Herdsman,
the Bear-Watcher, the Driver of the Wain, and to know why these now
familiar names were given and by whom. One may grasp the significance
of the acquired knowledge that this vast constellation of Boötes
stretches from the constellation of Draco to that of Virgo, and the
numeration of its degrees in declination and ascension, and (if one may
thus choose between the 85 and the 140 of astronomers) that it contains
a hundred stars visible to the naked eye. But, for some of us at least,
there is something as memorable, something as revealing, in a line such
as that of the Persian poet Hafiz, as paraphased by Emerson,
“Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear”--
or that superb utterance of Carlyle in _Sartor Resartus_,
“What thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his Hunting Dogs over the
zenith in their leash of sidereal fire?”
Not, I may add in parenthesis, that the seekers after astronomical
knowledge should depend on the poets and romancers for even an
untechnical accuracy. Literature, alas, is full of misstatements
concerning the moon and stars. Few poets are accurate as Milton is
magnificently accurate, his rare slips lying within the reach of a
knowledge achieved since his day: or as Tennyson is accurate. Carlyle
himself, quoted above in so beautiful a passage, has made more than one
strange mistake for (as he once aspired to be) a student astronomer:
not only, as in one instance, making the Great Bear for ever revolve
round Boötes, but, in a famous passage in his _French Revolution_,
speaking of Orion and the Pleiades glittering serenely over
revolutionary Paris on the night of 9th August 1792, whereas, as some
fact-loving astronomer soon pointed out, Orion did not on that occasion
rise till daybreak. It has been said of the Moon, in fiction, that
her crescents and risings and wanings are to most poets and novelists
apparently an inexplicable mystery, an unattainable knowledge. Even a
writer who was also a seaman and navigator, Captain Marryat, writes in
one of his novels of a waning crescent moon seen in the early evening.
The great Shakespeare himself wrote of the Pole Star as immutable, as
the one unpassing, the one fixt and undeviating star--
“... constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and lasting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.”
This was, of course, ignorance of what has since been ascertained, and
not uninstructedness or mere hearsay. Possibly, too, he had in mind
rather that apparent unchanging aloofness from the drowning sea-horizon
to which Homer alludes in the line beautifully translated ‘Arctos,
sole star that never bathes in the ocean wave’ ... of which, no doubt,
our great poet had read in the quaint delightful words of Chaucer
(rendering Boetius)--‘Ne the sterre y-cleped “the Bere,” that enclyneth
his ravisshinge courses abouten the soverein heighte of the worlde, ne
the same sterre Ursa nis never-mo wasshen in the depe westrene see, ne
coveitith nat to deyen his flaumbe in the see of the occian, al-thogh
he see other sterres y-plounged in the see.’
That constellation ‘y-cleped the Bere,’ how profoundly it has impressed
the imagination of all peoples. In every age, in every country, our
kindred on lonely lands, on lonely seas, from caverns and camp-fires
and great towers, have watched it ‘incline its ravishing courses’ about
the Mountain of the North, ‘coveting not’ to drown its white fires in
the polar seas. Here, however, it is strange to note the universality
of the Ursine image with the Greeks and Romans and the nations of the
South, and the universality with the Teutonic peoples of designations
such as the Wain and the Plough. It was not till the Age of Learning
set in among the Northern peoples that the classic term came into
common use. Thus in a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon manual of astronomy
the writer, in adopting the Greek Arctos (still used occasionally
instead of the Bear), adds ‘which untaught men call Carleswæn,’ that
is Charles’s Wain, the Waggon. A puzzling problem is why a designation
which primarily arose from an association of the early Greeks
concerning Arkas, their imaginary racial ancestor, with Kallisto his
mother, who had been changed into a great bear in the heavens, should
also suggest itself to other peoples, to races so remote in all ways
as the North American Indians. Yet before the white man had visited
the tribes of North America the red men called the constellation by
names signifying a bear. The historian Bancroft has proved that alike
among the Algonquins of the Atlantic and of the Mississippi, among the
Eastern Narragansett nations and among the nations of the Illinois, the
Bear was the accepted token.
Boötes, the Great Bear, the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor, these great
constellations, with their splendid beacons Arcturus, the Triones or
the Seven Hounds of the North, and the Pole Star--
“By them, on the deep,
The Achaians gathered where to sail their ships”--
and in like fashion all the races of man since Time was have ‘gathered’
the confusing ways of night on all lonely seas and in all lonely lands.
But best of all, to know this spell of the nocturnal skies, one
should be in the company of fisher-folk or old seamen or shepherds,
perchance unlettered but wise in traditional lore and leal to the
wisdom of their fathers. How much more I value what I have heard
from some shepherd on the wide dark moors, or from some islesman in
a fishing-coble or drifting wherry, on moonless nights filled with a
skyey ‘phosphorescence’ as radiant as that a-dance and a-gleam in the
long seethe of the wake of a ship, than what I have found concerning
scientific star-names in books of astronomy. Nothing that I have
since learned of ‘the Pointers’ has impressed me so much as what I
learned as a child of ‘the Hounds of Angus,’ nor, in later and fuller
knowledge of Polaris, has the child’s first knowledge of the mystery
and wonder of ‘the Star of Wisdom,’ as pointed out and tale-told by an
old Hebridean fisherman, or of ‘the House of Dreams,’ as sung to me in
a forgotten ballad by a Gaelic woman of Argyll, been surpassed.
It was they--herdsmen and mariners, the wayfarer, the nomad, the
desert-wanderer--who, of old, gave these names to which the nations
have grown used. It was with the nomad that astronomy began. The
Chaldæan shepherd, the Phœnician mariner, studied the stars and named
them and the great constellations which group themselves from horizon
to horizon in the nocturnal skies. They perceived strange symmetries,
symbolic images, grotesque resemblances. The same instinct made the
Arab of the Desert call the Pleiades the Herd of Camels, made the
Akkadian call them the Wild Doves, made the Celtic hunter call them
the Pack of Hounds, made the Teuton peasant call them the Hen and
Chickens, made the Australian savage call them (in conjunction with
the Bear) Young Girls playing to Young Men dancing: the same instinct,
this, as made the ancient poet of the Zend-Avesta call them the Seven
Beneficent Spirits, or made the modern poet of _Locksley Hall_ liken
them to a swarm of fireflies, or made the Gaelic poet of to-day image
them as the Herring-Net. In a word, the instinct of poetry: which is as
deep as hunger and thirst, as deep as love, as deep as fear, as deep
as the desire of life. The instinct of the imagination to clothe the
mysterious and the inexplicable in the raiment of the familiar or of
recognisable and intimate symbol.
How infinitely it adds to the beauty of star-names such as Aldebaran,
Alcyone, Polaris, to know that to the swarthy nomads of the desert
it imaged itself as one following in a skyey desert, a camel-driver
tracking lost camels, a hound following a quarry, a warrior following a
foe, a holy pilgrim tracking the difficult ways of God, so that no name
seemed to them so apt as _Al Dabarān_, the Follower: or to know that
to the pastoral Akkadians or the early tillers and hunters of sea-set
Greece, looking at the Pleiades in winter, Alcyone in its lovely group
suggested the Nest of the Halcyon, the summer-bird who had flown to
the remote depths of the sky to sit and brood there on a windless
wave-unreached nest till once again ‘the Halcyon days’ of calm settled
on land and sea: or to know that to our own seafaring folk of old, the
men who voyaged perilously in small and frail craft without compass and
with little knowledge of the mysterious laws of the mysterious forces
of earth and sea and heaven, Polaris was the one unchanging skyey
beacon, the steadfast unswerving North Star; and, so, lovingly called
by our old Saxon forbears the _Scipsteorra_, the Ship-Star, and by the
Elizabethan seafarers the Lodestar or Pilot-Star, and by the Hebridean
fishermen the Home-Star, and by others the Star of the Sea.
“Constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go.
Star of the Pole! and thou dost see them set.
Alone in thy cold skies,
Thou keep’st thy old unmoving station yet
Nor join’st the dances of that glittering train,
Nor dipp’st thy virgin orb in the blue western main.
On thy unaltering blaze
The half-wrecked mariner, his compass lost,
Fixes his steady gaze,
And steers, undoubting, to the friendly coast;
And they who stray in perilous wastes by night
Are glad when thou dost shine to guide their footsteps right.”
The same spirit which animated Bryant when he wrote these verses in
his beautiful ‘Hymn to the North Star,’ or made one of the Gaelic
island-poets allude to it as the Star of Compassion, prevailed with
these Chaldæan shepherds and Arabian nomads of old. They gave the
familiar or beautiful names of love or intimate life, and in exchange
the taciturn face of heaven lost its terrifying menace of silence,
and the Night became a comrade, became the voice of the poets, of the
sages, of the prophets and seers, the silver gateways of the Unknown.
The Hunter, the Herdsman, the Bear-Watcher, the Driver of the Wain--how
much more we love Boötes, or, as Chaucer called the constellation, ‘ye
sterres of Arctour,’ because of these simple names. The Herdsman, the
Hunter, ... the words strike the primitive music. The youth of the
world is in them. In these few letters what infinite perspectives, what
countless images. The Golden Age lies hid in their now impenetrable
thickets. Through their branches we may look at the tireless hunter
of to-day on the interminable pampas, at the bowed trailer in the dim
savannahs of the Amazon, at the swarthy nomad on the wastes of Sahara
guarding his camels like ships becalmed in a vast sea of sand, or may
see the solitary mountain-shepherd in the hill-wildernesses of Spain or
Italy, or the Northern herdsman toiling against wind and snow on our
Gaelic hills.
Here also is the romance of the stars, as well as that deeper and
perturbing romance which is disclosed to us in the revelations of
science. That sense of incalculable distances, of immeasurable periods,
of unknown destinies and amazing arrivals, which haunts the imagination
of the astronomer when he looks beyond the frontiers of ascertained
knowledge, half-doubting perhaps whether even that be not a terrible
illusory logic, is also here. One goes back, as in thought one recedes
into the beautiful, impassioned wonderland of childhood. One seems to
see mankind itself as a child, gone but a little way even yet, looking
up trustfully or fearfully to the mysterious mother-eyes of a Face it
cannot rightly discern, in its breath being Immortality, Eternity in
its glance, and on its brows Infinitude.
WINTER STARS
II
Of all winter stars surely the most familiar is Polaris, the Pole Star
or Lodestar: of all winter Constellations, the Plough, the Little
Dipper (to give the common designations), Orion, and the lovely cluster
of the Pleiades, are, with the Milky Way, the most commonly observed
stellar groups. One of our old Scottish poets, Gawain Douglas, writing
towards the close of the fifteenth or early in the sixteenth century,
thus quaintly brought them into conjunction--
“Arthurys hous, and Hyades betaikning rane,
Watling strete, the Home and the Charlewane,
The fiers Orion with his goldin glave.”
Here possibly he has taken Arcturus for Polaris. Of old, the Lodestar
and Arcturus (or, as often given in the North, ‘Arturus’ or ‘Arthur’
... a word itself signifying the Great or Wondrous Bear) were often
confused. Sometimes, too, Arcturus stood for the whole constellation of
Ursa Major--or, as we commonly call it, the Plough or the Wain, as, for
example, in Scott’s lines:
“Arthur’s slow wain his course doth roll,
In utter darkness, round the Pole.”
But it is obvious Gawain Douglas did not mean this to be understood,
for in the second line he speaks of ‘Charlewane,’ _i.e._, Charles’s
Wain ... the Wain or Waggon being then, as it still is among
country-folk, even more familiar a term than the Great Bear or than the
Plough itself. Probably, then, he had in mind the Pole Star, the ‘House
of Arthur’ of the ancient British. His choice of the ‘rain-betokening
Hyades’ may be taken here as including the Pleiades, these ‘greater
seven’ in whom centres so much poetry and old legend. A previous paper
has been devoted to the Milky Way, so that there is no need to explain
why Watling Street should be analogous with the Galaxy. The ‘Horne’ is
the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor. Than ‘fierce Orion with his glistering
sword’ there is no constellation so universally familiar. If, then, to
this category of the old Scottish poet, we add the star Aldebaran,
and the constellation of Taurus or the Bull, we have more than enough
Winter Lights to consider in one chapter.
Having already, however, dealt with ‘the watery constellations’ we can
be the more content now to ignore Alcyone, Maia, Taygeta, Electra,
and the other Pleiadic stars of Taurus. This great constellation is
one of the earliest in extant astronomical records: the earliest,
it is believed. The stellar image of a Bull has occurred to many
nations since the designation first arose among the ancient Cretans
or Akkadians--if, indeed, in its origin it was not immeasurably more
remote. East and West, in the deserts of the South and among the grey
isles of the North, ‘the Bull’ was recognised. To-day the Scottish
peasant still calls it ‘the Steer,’ as his German kinsman does in _der
Stier_, his French kinsman in _le Taureau_, his Spanish or Italian
kinsman in _Toro_. When certain of the Greeks and Latins used _Keráon_
and _Cornus_ instead of _Tauros_ and _Taurus_, they said merely the
same thing--the Horned One. Virgil, as many will remember, utilises the
image in the first ‘Georgic’:
“When with his golden horns bright Taurus opes
The year....”
just as a poet of our own time, in a beautiful ‘Hymn to Taurus,’ writes:
“... I mark, stern Taurus, through the twilight grey
The glinting of thy horn
And sullen front, uprising large and dim
Bent to the starry Hunter’s sword at bay.”
Among our own ancestors, the Druids made Taurus an object of worship,
the Tauric Festival having been one of the great events of the year,
signalised when the sun first entered the imagined frontiers of this
constellation. To-day, among the homesteads of our Scottish lowlands,
the farm-folk tell of the Candlemas Bull who may be seen to rise in the
gloaming on New Year’s Eve and move slowly to the dark pastures which
await his coming.
The particular stellar glory of this constellation is Aldebaran. This
beautiful star has appealed to the imagination of all peoples. I do
not know what were its earliest Celtic or Anglo-Saxon names. But as
in Gaelic it is sometimes called ‘the Hound,’ this term may well be a
survival from ancient days. If so, there is an interesting relation
with the primitive Arabic name by which it is all but universally
known. Aldebaran is _Al Dabarān_, the Follower: and, figuratively,
a follower could hardly be better symbolised than by a hound. I
recall a Gaelic poem on a legendary basis where the analogy is still
further emphasised, for there Aldebaran is called ‘the Hound of the
Pleiades,’ which is exactly what the Arabian astronomers implied in
‘the Follower.’ Another interesting resemblance is between ‘the red
hound’ of the Gaelic poet and legend and the _Rohinī_ of the Hindûs,
that word signifying ‘a red deer’ ... in each case the ruddy gleam of
the star having suggested the name. Probably it was this characteristic
which led Ptolemy to apply to the star the name ‘Lampadias’ or the
Torch-Bearer. In the narration of folk-tales I have more than once or
twice heard Aldebaran alluded to as the star of good fortune, of ‘the
golden luck.’ With us it is pre-eminently a winter-star, and may be
seen at its finest from the latter part of January till the approach of
the vernal equinox. Some idea of its luminosity may be gained from the
fact that this is thrice the outflow of the Pole Star. How often I have
stood on a winter’s night, and watched awhile this small red ‘torch’
burning steadfastly in the unchanging heavens, and thought of its vast
journeys, of that eternal, appalling procession through the infinite
deeps: how often I have felt the thrill of inexplicable mystery when,
watching its silent fire in what appears an inexorable fixity, I recall
what science tells us, that it is receding from our system at an all
but unparalleled velocity, a backward flight into the unknown at the
rate of thirty miles a second.
It would be hopeless to attempt here even the briefest account of the
primitive and diverse nomenclature, the mythology, the folklore of
Orion ... the Winter-Bringer, as this constellation is called in an
old Scandinavian saga, identical thus with the marginal reading in the
Geneva Bible relative to the reference to Orion in Job--‘which starre
bringeth in winter,’ an allusion to its evening appearance at the
season of cold and storms. For these things are writ in the records
of a hundred nations. They are alive in the poetry of all peoples.
Centuries before our era, when Thebes was the greatest city of Greece,
the poetess Corinna sang of this great Warrior, the Great Hunter,
whose nightly course was so glorious above the dusky lands and waters
of Hellas. Long after Pindar and the Greek poets, Catullus and Horace
gave it a like preeminence in Latin literature. In our own poetry, many
surely will recall from _Paradise Lost_:
“... when with fierce winds Orion arm’d
Hath vext the Red-sea coast, whose waves o’erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry....”
or Tennyson’s beautiful line in _Locksley Hall_:
“Great Orion sloping slowly to the west....”
or, it may be, that epic of ‘Orion’ upon which is based Richard Hengist
Horne’s claim to remembrance--or, once more, Matthew Arnold’s fine
allusion to Sirius and Orion in _Sohrab and Rustum_:
“... the Northern Bear,
Who from her frozen height with jealous eye
Confronts the Dog and Hunter in the South.”
Before Catullus or Pindar the Egyptians had identified Orion both with
Horus and Osiris. Among the peoples of Israel the poets acclaimed
the constellation as Nimrod, ‘the mighty Hunter’ (or by another
term signifying the Giant), ‘bound to the sky for rebellion against
Jehovah.’ Among the Celtic races it has had kindred names, sometimes
abstract, sometimes personal, as the Gaelic Fionn. A year or so ago I
was told a sea-tale of the Middle Isles, in which was an allusion to
this constellation as The Bed of Diarmid. This is of especial interest,
because of its connection with Fionn or Finn, the Nimrod, the great
Hunter of the Gael. But in this story (a modern, not an ancient tale,
though with more than one strange old survival) the major position
is not held by Fionn, but by the Alban-Gaelic hero Diarmid, who is
represented as succumbing under the spear thrust in his left side by
the enraged Fionn, at last in grips with the daring chieftain who had
robbed him of Grania. When questioned, my informant said he had heard
a variant of this attribution, and that the constellation was an image
of Diarmid with Grania hanging to his side in a swoon, because she and
her lover have been overtaken by the wrath of Fionn ... though from the
description I could not make out whether the latter indicated the star
Sirius, or the rival constellation of the Great Bear. The Gaels of old
called Orion _Caomai_, a name said to signify the Armed King: while the
_Gall_ (the Scandinavian races) applied the name _Orwandil_, but with
what signification I do not know, though I have read somewhere that it
stood for Hero, or for an heroic personage.
Of the chief stars in Orion there is not space here to speak. But
of the splendid Rigel--as affluent in the mysterious science of the
astrologer as in nocturnal light--pearly Anilam, of the Belt or
Sword--ominous Bellatrix--ruddy-flamed Betelgeuze--of these alone one
might write much ... as one might write much of the Girdle or Staff
itself, what Scott in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ calls ‘Orion’s
studded belt.’ It has a score of popular names, from the Danish Frigge
Rok (Freya’s Distaff) to the seamen’s ‘Yard-arm,’ as, collectively, its
three great stars have all manner of names in different countries, from
the Magi, or the Three Kings or the Three Marys, to The Rake of the
French Rhinelanders or the Three Mowers of the Silesian peasant.
Those who have studied the mythology and folklore of the Pleiades will
remember how universally the numeral seven is associated with their
varying nomenclature. But there was, and still is among primitive
peoples, not infrequent confusion in the use of ‘The Seven Stars’ as a
specific name. Although from China to Arabia, from India and Persia to
the Latin countries of the South, the term almost invariably designates
the Pleiades, in the folklore of many Western nations it is used for
the seven planets, and in many Northern races it is often used for the
seven brilliant stars of the Great Bear. Even the Biblical allusion
to ‘The Seven Stars,’ as our own Anglo-Saxon ancestral _Sifunsterri_,
does not necessarily indicate the Pleiades: many consider the seven
great planets to be meant. There is a Shetland rune, common to all
the north isles and to be heard in Iceland and Norway, known as the
rune of sevens, and of which one of the invocatory lines is ‘And by
da seven shiners.’ All kinds of interpretation have explained this,
from the obvious ‘seven planets,’ or else the Pleiades, to the Seven
Candlesticks of Revelation and I know not what besides. I have again
and again asked fisher-folk or others from the Orkneys and Shetlands,
and in all but one or two instances the answer has clearly indicated
the Great Bear, occasionally Polaris and the Ursine Arcturus and their
nearest brilliant ‘shiners.’ Again, _Crannarain_, one of the Gaelic
names for the Pleiades, is, perhaps, as often applied to the Great
Bear: the curious legend of the Baker’s Shovel, implied in the Gaelic
term, fitting equally.
Of the Great Bear, of the North Star, however, I have already spoken.
Of Polaris itself, indeed, there is more than enough to draw upon.
Years ago I began an MS. book called ‘The Book of the North Star,’
and from my recollection of it (for at the moment of writing I am far
from my books) I should say there is enough folklore and legend and
various interest connected with this star wherefrom to evolve a volume
solely devoted to it. It is strange that ‘the Lamp of the North’ should
have so fascinated all the poets from the time of Homer till to-day,
and yet that all have dwelled in the same illusion as to its absolute
steadfastness. Nevertheless, Homer’s
“Arctos, sole star that never bathes in the ocean wave”
has both poetic truth and the truth of actuality.
It is a relief to put aside notes and pen and paper, and to go out and
look up into the darkness and silence, to those ‘slow-moving palaces
of wandering light’ of which one has been writing. How overwhelmingly
futile seems not only the poor written word, but even the mysterious
pursuit of the far-fathoming thought of man. By the sweat of the brow,
by the dauntless pride of the mind, we mortal creatures have learned
some of the mysteries of the coming and going in infinitude of these
incalculable worlds, of their vast procession from the unknown to
the unknown. Then, some night, one stands solitary in the darkness,
and feels less than the shadow of a leaf that has passed upon the
wind, before these still, cold, inevitable, infinitely remote yet
overwhelmingly near Children of Immortality.
BEYOND THE BLUE SEPTENTRIONS
TWO LEGENDS OF THE POLAR STARS
The star Septentrion is, for the peoples of the North and above all
for the shepherd, the seaman and the wayfarer, the star of stars. A
hundred legends embody its mystery, its steadfast incalculable service,
its unswerving isolation over the Pole. Polaris, the North Star, the
Pole-Star, the Lodestar, the Seaman’s Star, the Star of the Sea, the
Gate of Heaven, Phœnice, Cynosure, how many names, in all languages,
at all times. The Mongolian nomad called it the Imperial Ruler of
Heaven: the Himalayan shepherd, Grahadāra, the Pivot of the Planets:
the Arab knows it as the Torch of Prayer, burning for ever at the
portal of the heavenly Mecca. It shines through all literature, since
(and indeed long before) Euripides wrote his superb verse of how the
two great Northern constellations which encircle Polaris, Ursa Major
and Ursa Minor, the two ‘swift-wandering’ Bears, ‘guard the Atlantean
Pole,’ till a poet of our own time wrote the less majestic but not less
lovely line relating to these constellations which gives the title to
this paper. In all ages, too, the dreaming mind of man has imagined
here the Throne of the Gods, the Seat of the Mighty, the last Portal
of the Unknown. It is the Flatheansas of our Gaelic ancestors, the
ultimate goal of the heroic spirit: the Himinbiorg, or Hill of Heaven,
of the Norsemen of old, and the abode of Heimdallr, the guardian of the
bridge Bifröst (the Rainbow) which unites Asgard the Everlasting with
that brief whirling phantom, the Earth. It is Albordy, ‘the dazzling
mountain on which was held the Assembly of the Gods’ of the ancient
Teutonic peoples: the mysterious Mount Mēru, the seat of the gods, of
the Aryan dreamers of old, and the Hindû sages of later time: ‘the
holy mountain of God’ alluded to in Ezekiel--so, at least, it has been
surmised.
‘The blue Septentrions’ ... Boötes with Arcturus, the Great Bear, the
Lesser Bear, the Pointers or the Northern Hounds, the North Star ...
what legend, what poetry, what romance, what wonder belongs to these
stars and constellations which guard the marches of the Arctic North.
To the mass of what is already extant, what need to add further matter?
And yet there is ever new justification in that continual need of the
soul to hear over and over again and in ever-varying ways even the most
fragmentary runes or sagas of this unfathomably mysterious stellar
universe which encloses us with Silence and Beauty and Wonder, the
three Veils of God--as the Hebridean islesman, the Irish Gael of the
dreaming west, and the Arab of the Desert alike have it.
I have elsewhere spoken of the legendary association of Arthur (the
Celtic-British King and the earlier mythical Arthur, semi-divine, and
at last remote and celestial) with Arcturus, that lovely Lamp of the
North, the glory of Boötes. But now, I may add what there I had to omit.
In all European lands, and above all in the countries of the West,
there is none without its legend of King Arthur. The Bretons claim him
as theirs, and the places of his passage and exploit are familiar,
though only the echo, only the phantom of a great fame ever reached
Arvôr. In the Channel and Scilly Isles the story runs that there is
Lyonesse, and that Arthur sleeps in a cavern of the seas. The Cornish
folk and their kindred of Somerset and Devon believe there is not a
rood of ground between Camelot and Tintagel where the great King has
not dwelt or passed. Wales calls him her son, and his chivalry her
children, and the Cymric poets of a thousand mabinogion have sung his
heroic fame. Clydesdale, that more ancient home of the Cymri, has dim
memories older than what Taliesin sang: Arthur’s Seat hangs above
Edinburgh, a city so old that a thousand years ago its earlier name
was forgotten; and from the Sidlaw to the Ochil, from blue Demyat to
grey Schiehallion, old names and broken tradition preserve the obscure
trails of a memory fallen into oblivion, but not so fallen that the
names of Arthur and Queen Guinevere and wild-eyed Merlin of the Woods
have ceased to stir the minds of the few who still care for the things
that moved our fathers from generation to generation. The snow of the
Grampians have not stayed the wandering tale: and there are still a
few old people who recall at times, in the winter story-telling before
farm-kitchen fires, how the fierce Modred, King of the North, made
Queen Gwannolê his own, and how later, in a savage revenge, Arthur
condemned her to be torn asunder by wild horses. Lancelot passes from
the tale before it crosses the Border, and as it goes north (or is it
not that as it comes south?) Merlin is no more a courtier but a wild
soothsayer of the woods, Queen Wanders or Gwannolê or Guinevere is
tameless as a hawk, and Arthur himself, though a hero and great among
his kind, is of the lineage of fire and sword.
Where is Joyeuse Gard? Some say it is in the isle Avillion off the
Breton shores: some that it is in Avalon, under the sacred hill of
Glastonbury: some that it is wet with the foam of Cornish Seas: others
aver that it lies in fathomless silence under the sundown wandering
wave and plunging tide. Another legend tells that it leaned once upon
the sea from some lost haven under Berwick Law, perhaps where North
Berwick now is, or where Dirleton looks across to Fidra, or where the
seamews on ruined Tantallon scream to the Bass.
Arthur himself has a sleeping-place (for nowhere is he dead, but
sleeps, awaiting a trumpet-call) in ‘a lost land’ in Provence, in
Spain, under the waters of the Rhine. To-day one may hear from
Calabrian shepherd or Sicilian fisherman that the Great King sleeps in
a deep hollow underneath the Straits of Messina. And strangest of all
(if not a new myth of the dreaming imagination, for I have not been
able to trace the legend beyond a modern Slavonic ballad) among the
Carpathian Highlands is a nameless ancient tomb lost in a pine-forest,
where at mid-winter a bear has been seen to rise, walking erect like
a man, crowned with a crown of iron and gold holding a single shining
stone magnificent as the Pole Star, and crying in a deep voice, ‘_I am
Arthur of the West, who shall yet be king of the World_.’
Strange indeed, for here among the debris of the lost history of
Arthur, that vast shadowy kingly figure whose only kingdom may have
been the soul of primitive races, and whose sword may have been none
other than the imagination that is for ever on its beautiful and
perilous quest, here among that débris of legend scattered backward
from the realms of the north across Europe is one, remote as it is,
which brings us back to the early astronomical myth which identifies
the great Celtic champion with the chief constellation of the north.
But as I have heard this fragment of our old lost mythology related
in a way I have not seen in any book, I will give it here altered but
slightly if at all from one of the countless legends told to me in my
childhood.
* * * * *
At sunset the young son of the great King Pendragon came over the
brow of a hill that stepped forward from a dark company of mountains
and leaned over the shoreless sea which fills the west and drowns the
north. All day he had been wandering alone, his mind heavy with wonder
over many things. He had heard strange tales of late, tales about his
heroic father and the royal clan, and how they were not as other men,
but half divine. They were not gods, he knew, for they could be slain
in battle or could die with the crowding upon them of many years:
but they were more terrible in battle than were the greatest of men,
and they had vision and knowledge beyond the vision and knowledge of
the druids, and were lordly beyond all men in mien and the beauty of
courtesy, and lived beyond the common span of years, and had secret
communion with the noble and invisible company. He had heard, too, of
his destiny: that he, too, was to be a great king, as much greater than
Pendragon, than Pendragon was above all the kings of the world. What
was Destiny, he wondered. Then, again, he turned over and over in his
mind all the names he could think of that he might choose for his own:
for the time was come for him to put away the name of his childhood and
to take on that by which he should be known among men.
He came over the brow of the hill, and out of the way of the
mountain-wind, and, being tired, lay down among the heather and stared
across the grey wilderness of the sea. The sun set, and the invisible
throwers of the nets trailed darkness across the waves and up the wild
shores and over the faces of the cliffs. Stars climbed out of shadowy
abysses, and the great chariots of the constellations rode from the
west to the east and from the north to the south. His eyes closed,
but when he opened them again to see if a star quivering on the verge
of the horizon had in that brief moment sprung like a deer above the
drowning wave or had sunk like a white seabird passing out of sight, he
saw a great and kingly figure standing beside him. So great in stature,
so splendid in kingly beauty was the mysterious one who had so silently
joined him, that he thought this must be one of the gods.
“Do you not know me, my son?” said the kingly stranger.
The boy looked at him in awe and wonder, but unrecognisingly.
“Do you not know me, my son?” he heard again ... “for I am your father
Pendragon. But my home is yonder, and there I go before long, and that
is why I have come to you as a vision in a dream ...” and, as he spoke,
he pointed to the constellation of the _Arth_, or Bear, which nightly
prowls through the vast abysses of the polar sky.
When the boy turned his gaze from the great constellation which hung
in the dark wilderness overhead, he saw that he was alone again. While
he yet wondered in great awe at what he had seen and heard, he felt
himself float like a mist and become like a cloud, and, as a cloud,
rise beyond the brows of the hills, and ascend the invisible stairways
of the sky.
When for minutes that were as hours he had moved thus mysteriously into
the pathless and unvisited realms of the air, he saw that he had left
the highest clouds like dust on a valley-road after one has climbed to
the summit of a mountain: nor could he see the earth save as a blind
and obscure thing that moved between the twilights of night and dawn.
It seemed to him thereafter that a swoon came over him, in which he
passed beyond the far-off blazing fires of strange stars. At last,
suddenly, he stood on the verge of Arth, or Arth Uthyr, the Great Bear.
There he saw, with the vision of immortal not of mortal eyes, a company
of most noble and majestic figures seated at what he thought a circular
abyss but which had the semblance of a vast table. Each of these seven
great knights or lordly kings had a star upon his forehead, and these
were the stars of the mighty constellation of the Bear which the boy
had seen night after night from his home among the mountains by the sea.
It was with a burning throb at his heart that he recognised in the King
of all these kings no other than himself.
While he looked, in amazement so great that he could hear the pulse
of his heart, as in the silence of a wood one hears the tapping of a
woodpecker, he saw this mighty phantom-self rise till he stood towering
over all there, and heard a voice as though an ocean rose and fell
through the eternal silences.
“Comrades in God,” it said, “the time is come when that which is great
shall become small.”
And when the voice was ended, the mighty figure faded into the blue
darkness, and only a great star shone where the uplifted dragon-helm
had brushed the roof of heaven. One by one the white lords of the sky
followed in his mysterious way, till once more were to be seen only the
stars of the Bear.
The boy-king dreamed that he fell as a falling meteor, and then that
he floated over land and sea as a cloud, and then that he sank as mist
upon the hills of his own land.
A noise of wind stirred in his ears, and he felt the chill dew creep
over his hands like the stealthy cold lip of the tide. He rose
stumblingly, and stood, staring around him. He was on the same spot,
under the brow of the hill that looked over the dim shoreless seas, now
obscure with the dusk. He glanced upward and saw the stars of the Great
Bear in their slow majestic march round the Pole. Then he remembered.
He went slowly down the hillside, his mind heavy with thought. When he
was come to the place of the King his father, lo, Pendragon and all his
fierce chivalry came out to meet him, for the archdruid had foretold
that the great King to be had received his mystic initiation among the
holy silence of the hills.
“I am no more Snowbird the child,” the boy said, looking at them
fearlessly, and as though already King. “Henceforth I am Arth-Uthyr,[2]
for my place is in the Great Bear which we see yonder in the north.”
[2] Pronounced _Arth-Uir_, or _Arth-Ur_. In ancient British _Arth_
means Bear, and _Uthyr_ great, wondrous.
So all there acclaimed him as Arthur, the wondrous one of the stars,
the Great Bear.
“I am old,” said Pendragon, “and soon you shall be King, Arthur my son.
So ask now a great boon of me and it shall be granted to you.”
Then Arthur remembered his dream.
“Father and King,” he said, “when I am the King after you I shall make
a new order of knights, who shall be strong and pure as the Immortal
Ones, and be tender as women, and simple as little children. But first
I ask of you seven flawless virgin knights to be of my chosen company.
To-morrow let the wood-wrights make for me a round daïs or table such
as that where we eat our roasted meats and drink from the ale-horns,
but round and of a size whereat I and my chosen knights may sit at
ease.”
The King listened, and all there.
“So be it,” said the King.
Then Arthur chose the seven flawless virgin knights, and called them to
him.
“Ye are now Children of the Great Bear,” he said, “and comrades and
liegemen to me, Arthur, who shall be King of the West. And ye shall
be known as the Knights of the Round Table. But no man shall make a
mock of that name and live: and in the end that name shall be so great
in the mouths and minds of men that they shall consider no glory of
the world to be so great as to be the youngest and frailest of that
knighthood.”
* * * * *
And that is how Arthur, the son of Pendragon, who three years later
became King of the West, read the Rune of the Stars that are called the
Great Bear, and took their name upon him, and from the strongest and
purest and noblest of the land made Knighthood, such as the world had
not seen, such as the world since has not known.
* * * * *
Very different, a cruder legend of the Polestar, the drift of which I
heard some months ago from a fisherman of Ross, ‘foregathered with’ in
the Sound of Morvern.
One day, Finn, before he was born the King of the West, a thousand
years earlier than that and maybe thousands more on the top of that
thousand, went hunting a great bear beyond the highest mountains in
Ross and Sutherland. It came to the Ord, and then, seeing there was no
more land, it went into the sea with an awesome plunge, like Iceland
in the story before it swam away from Scotland, so that the fish were
knocked out of the nets and the fishing cobles were thrown on the
shores like buckies, and the tides ran like hares till they leaped into
the sea again at the rocks of Wick and over Cromarty Cliffs. Aye, it is
said a green wave ran right through the great Kirk at Inverness; and
that away across the lands of Mackenzie and Chisholm, of Fraser and
Gordon, a storm of foam blew like snow against the towers and steeples
of Aberdeen. At least all this might well have been, if in those old
ancient days there had been any Aberdeen or Inverness to see it, or if
there were cobles and nets then, as, for all you or I or the wind know,
there may have been. Well, the Bear swam away due north, and Finn after
it and his great hounds Luath and Dorch. It took them a month to come
up with it, and then it was among mountains of solid ice with the sea
between hard as granite. Then it came to the place where there’s an
everlasting Rainbow. The Bear climbed this, to jump to the other side
of the Pole, but Luath ran up one side and Dorch the other and Finn
hurled his great shining spears, one after the other: so that down the
bear came with a rush, and so great was the noise and stramash that the
icebergs melted, and out flew thousands of solanders and grey swans and
scarts and God knows what all, every kind of bird that is with a web to
its foot. The hounds fell into the water, and the Bear lay on a floe
like a wounded seal, but Finn never moved an inch but put spear after
spear into the Bear. “Well, you’re dead now,” he said; “and if you’re
not, you ought to be,” he added, seeing that the Bear was up again and
ready to be off.
“This can’t go on,” said God Allfather, so He swung a noose and sagged
up the Bear into the black Arctic sky. But the hounds hung on to
its tail, and so were carried up too. And as for Finn, he took the
hero-leap, and with one jump was on the Pole, and with the next was in
the Northman’s Torch (_Arcturus_), and with the third was on the Hill
of Heaven itself. And that’s where he went back to on the day he died
after his three hundred years of mortal life. He’s never moved since,
and he won’t move again, till Judgment Day. And by the same token, you
can see the Great Bear prowling round the Pole still, and Finn the
Watchman never letting him go by, night or day, day or night, and far
away down are the two Hounds that herd the Great Bear and his mate.
And when these come too near, Finn hurls his spears, and that’s when
we see the Northern Lights. And behind the streamers and the auroras
and the rainbows and the walls of ice Finn looks into the Garden of
Eden--Paradise as they say, just the Flatheanas of the old tales, the
old songs. And who would be doubting it?
WHITE WEATHER
A MOUNTAIN REVERIE
To be far north of the Highland Line and among the mountains, when
winter has not only whitened the hill-moors but dusted the green roofs
of every strath and corrie, may not have for many people the charm of
the southward flight. But to the hill-born it is a call as potent as
any that can put the bittersweet ache into longing hearts. There is
peace there: and silence is there: and, withal, a beauty that is not
like any other beauty. The air and wind are auxiliary; every cloud or
mist-drift lends itself to the ineffable conspiracy; the polar breath
itself is a weaver of continual loveliness often more exquisitely
delicate than the harebell, often incalculable or immeasurable, or
beautiful with strangeness, as moonlight on great waters, or the
solitary torch of Jupiter burning his cold flame in the heart of a
mountain-tarn. There is no soundlessness like it. And yet the silence
is relative; is, in a word, but an imagination laid upon an illusion.
If there is no wind on the moor, there may be a wandering air among the
lower heights. If so, many hollows of rocks, caverns lost in bracken,
caves of hill-fox and badger, sudden ledges haunted by the daw and the
hoodie and filled with holes as though the broken flutes of the dead
forgotten giants of old tales, will make a low but audible music: a
lifting and falling sighing, with singular turnings upon itself of an
obscure chant or refrain, that just as one thinks is slipping into this
side knowledge and is almost on the edge of memory, slides like rain
along that edge and vanishes, vague as an unremembered fragrance. Or if
the suspense be so wide that not a breath moves lower than where the
corries climb towards the very brows of the mountains, one will surely
hear, far up among the time-hollowed scarps and weather-sculptured
scaurs, that singular sound which can sink to a whimpering, as of
unknown creatures or lost inhuman clans strayed and bewildered, or can
be as though unseen nomads were travelling the mountain-way with songs
and strange flutes and thin wailing fifes, or can rise to a confused
tumult as of embattled hosts, or to a crying and a lamentation more
desperate than the cries of men and a lamenting as of that mysterious
and dreaded clan, the Grey Children of the Wind. The wind, in truth, is
almost always to be heard, near or far. Sometimes the eye may learn,
where the ear fails: as when one is in a glen or strath or on a shore
or moor, and, looking up, may see smoke rising from the serrated crests
or the curving sky-lines, like the surf of vast billows--to realise
soon, that this volcanic apparition means no more than that vast
volumes of driven snow are being lifted by the north wind and whirled
against and over the extreme mountain-bastions. _Trath chaidleas ’s
a ghleann an t-àile_, ‘when the air sleeps in the glens,’ goes a
Gaelic saying, ‘you may hear the wind blowing in the high corries _mar
chaithream chlàr_,’ like the symphony of harps.
Then, too, it is rare that the snowy wilderness is without voice of
mountain torrent, for even when frost holds the hill-world in a grip
so terrible that the smaller birds cannot fly in the freezing air,
there are rushing burns of so fierce a spate that the hands-of-ice are
whirled aside like foam, and the brown wave leaps and dashes from rock
to rock, from granite ledge to peaty hollow, from brief turbulent
channels to chasms and crevasses whence ceaselessly ascends the damp
smell of churned surge, above which as ceaselessly rises a phantom
spray. Again, there is that strange, continual earth-movement, the
alarm of all unfamiliar wayfarers. Who suddenly unloosened that rush
of rock and earth yonder? What enemy moved that boulder that leapt
and hurtled and crashed downward and beyond, but a score yards away?
Of what elfin-artillery are those rattling stones the witness? What
hand, in the silence, thrust itself through the snow and crumbled that
old serrated ledge, where, a week ago, the red deer stood sniffing
the wind, where, yesterday perhaps, the white ptarmigan searched the
heather?
Moreover we are in the domain of the eagle, the raven, and the corbie.
They are seldom long silent there. And that sudden call on the wind?
... what but the Merry Folk, _Clann Aighean Siubhlach_, the Wandering
Deer-Clan, passing like drifting shadows over white heather-pastures
lost to view? It is long since the love-belling of the stags made
musical the mountain-side: was not ‘the Silence of the Deer’ the first
sign of winter come again? But that cry was the cry of hunger--a _guth
accaimeach_, a sobbing voice, as once I heard a prosaic roadmender
unprosaically and with kindly sympathy allude to the winter-bleat of
the snow-famished deer. And that other bleating: of sheep left upon
the hills, and overtaken by the White Weather. How goes the sound,
the translated echo of their mournful iteration, that is now a long
ululation of lament and now a rising and falling bleating as of
confused words? The same roadmender I speak of said--after himself
lamenting in sympathy _tha’m fuachd a muigh’s a staigh an diugh ..._
‘the cold is outside and inside to-day’--that it went like this: _Tha
sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr, tha sinn cèarr’s gun fhios againn!_... ‘We
are astray, we are astray, we are astray and have lost our bearings!’
Up here everything may have a snow-change ‘into something rich and
rare.’ It was in a hill-solitude, in white weather such as this, that,
for example, I heard from an old shepherd names for the eagle, the
corbie, and the ptarmigan that I had not elsewhere heard, nor have
seen in print, though for long now I have been collecting all whenever
and wherever chance permits the Gaelic and Lowland names of birds and
animals. The corbie he called _An t-Eun Acarachd_, the Merciless,
literally, ‘the bird without compassion,’ no doubt with thought of its
love for young lambs or its savage lust for the eyes of stricken or
dying sheep. The ptarmigan he called _An t-Eun_ (_Adhar_ or _Aidhre_),
the bird of the snow or frost--though this is but a variant, of course,
of the more familiar _Sneacag_ or _Eun-an-Sneachel_. When he spoke of
the eagle simply as _An t-Eun Mòr_, the great bird, that seemed less
noteworthy, but when he added, _Abù! An t-Eun Mòr Abù_, I was puzzled.
I thought he meant _aboo_ to simulate the _Iolair’s_ cry, though it
sounded much more like the muffled hoot of the great owl than the
eagle’s screech. He said he remembered that was the eagle’s name in
an old tale he had often heard his mother tell when he was a child. I
never thought of it as _Abù_, however, till one day I came upon this
word in a Gaelic dictionary and found it entered as being an ancient
war-cry of the Gael. Truly, a fit survival, for a wild slogan that has
ages ago died away from the Gaelic hills: to live still among these
desolate mountains, around those wind-tortured scarps and scaurs, in
the scream of the golden eagle. The old man had a special bird-name for
most of the birds he spoke of or about which I asked him. Doubtless
he was as good a naturalist and with as good a right to make names as
any ornithologist who would know what the old man could not know, and
would be familiar with common and other names that would be unfamiliar
there among the far hills, or, at least, to the old mountaineer, for
whom the hill-birds were the best of company. For the curlew, for
instance, though he knew the common Scots name, Whaup, he had the
good name _An t-Eun Chaismeachd_, ‘the bird of alarm’--how good a
name (though perhaps equally applicable to the grey plover, the green
whistler, or the lapwing) must be obvious to all who have walked the
moorland or travelled the hillside. And where an islesman or a man of
the mainland coasts would, for swiftness, use a comparison such as _cho
luath ri sgadan_, ‘as swift as a herring,’ he would say, _cho luath ris
nafeadag_, ‘as swift as the plover.’
White Weather, he said, was always first ‘called’ by the linnet,
the ‘heather lintie’ so loved of Scots song-writers, to which he
gave several names (‘out of a good ten that will be known to any one
whatever’), one a curious blend of Scots-Gaelic, _Shilfe-monaidh_
(_i.e._, the moor--chaffinch), another a pretty name, _Breacan-Beithe_,
‘little speckled one of the birch.’ But even he, for all his
hill-wisdom, could not tell me why it is that when the lapwing come
again after the great winter-end storm about mid-March, welcome
pioneers of the Spring that is stealing slowly up through the glens
and straths of the south, they always, if they nest on the slope of a
hillside, choose the east side for their unsheltered homes and where
to lay their eggs. Do they so love the bleak wind of the east? Hardly
any bird takes so little trouble with the nest: often it is but the
frost-hardened delve of a cow’s hoof, a tangle of bent, or the hollow
of a misplaced stone. I have heard that this is truer of the mainland
than of the isles, but I have not found it so. Last March or April I
remember that on the long, low-hilled and mainly ‘upland’ island where
I then was, not a single lapwing’s nest but was on the east slope of
grassy brae or sloping moor or pasture. But though he could not say
a word on so strange, almost so inexplicable a habit, he could be
positive as to the age of the eagle, and especially as to one aged
_iolair_ that he often saw on Maol-Aitionnach, the great hill that was
half the world and more to him: namely, that the king-bird lived to
be three hundred years. And he computed it thus: that an eagle lives
three times less than an oak, and three times more than a deer. There
is a familiar proverb that ‘_Tri aois feidh aois firein; tri aois
firein aois crsoibh dharaich_,’ ‘Thrice the age of a deer, the age of
an eagle’ (‘ferain,’ ‘fireun,’ and ‘fiolair’ are variants of ‘iolair,’
whose more ancient name is ‘antar’ (_an t-ar_), one of the oldest
names in the Gaelic language); ‘thrice the age of an eagle, the age
of an oak.’ The stag lives a hundred years, or so it is universally
believed: therefore the eagle lives three hundred, and the oak’s age is
at least nine hundred years. I recall, in connection with the eagle,
a singular saying which I heard many years ago and have not since
heard or anywhere encountered, to the effect that between dusk and
dawn a bat’s flight will be the equivalent of a thousand miles, that
between dawn and dusk a swallow will cover a thousand miles, and that a
thousand miles is the measure of an eagle’s flight between sunrise and
sunset.
Well, I must leave Maol-Aitionnach, and the snow-held hills.
Everywhere, now, the White Weather may have spread. Far south,
listeners may hear the _honk-honk_ of the travelling solander, that
most musical and thrilling of all nocturnal sounds or of winter-dawns:
or, like phantom-voices from the world of dreams, the _kuilliyak-ee,
kuilliyak-o_ of the wild swans, the _Clann righ fo gheasan_, the
Enchanted sons of Kings, who, as they wheel through the snowy twilight
under the dawn-star may remember the dim lands of the north, and a
great mountain that rises among white and silent hills and looks down
upon a black tarn I know of, so dark in the grip of black-frost, and
so strangely spared of the snow, that not a white wing rests there, or
floats overhead, but is mirrored as an enchanted sail in an enchanted
sea.
ROSA MYSTICA
(AND ROSES OF AUTUMN)
... _Rosa Sempiterna
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
Odor di lode al Sol._...
Sitting here, in an old garden by the sea, it is difficult for me to
realise that the swallow has gone on her long flight to the South,
that last night I heard countless teal flying overhead, and before
dawn this morning the mysterious _honk-honk_ of the wild-geese. A
white calm prevails. A sea of faint blue and beaten silver, still
molten, still luminous as with yet unsubdued flame, lies motionless
beneath an immeasurable dome of a blue as faint, drowned in a universal
delicate haze of silver-grey and pearl. But already a change to pale
apple-green and mauve is imminent. A single tern flashes a lonely wing
along a grey-green line that may be where sky and sea meet, or may
be the illusion of the tide refluent from green depths. On the weedy
rocks I cannot see even a sleeping seamew: on the havened stretch of
yellow-white sand a dotterel runs to and fro in sudden aimless starts,
but as suddenly is still, is all but unseen with her breast against a
rock covered with the blue-bloom of mussels, and now is like a shadow
licked up by twilight.
Along the husht garden-ways beside me and behind me are roses, crimson
and yellow, sulphur-white and pale carnation, the blood-red damask,
and a trailing-rose, brought from France, that looks as though it were
live flame miraculously stilled. It is the hour of the rose. Summer
has gone, but the phantom-summer is here still. A yellow butterfly
hangs upon a great drooping Marechal Niel: two white butterflies
faintly flutter above a corner-group of honey-sweet roses of Provence.
A late hermit-bee, a few lingering wasps, and the sweet, reiterated,
insistent, late-autumn song of the redbreast. That is all. It is the
hour of the rose.
“_C’est l’heure de la rose
L’heure d’ambre et flamme,
Quand dans mon àme
Je sens une Blanche Rose Éclose._”
To-night the sea-wind will go moaning from the west into the dark
north: before dawn a steely frost will come over the far crests of
the hills. To-morrow the garden will be desolate: a garden of phantom
dreams. They have waited long, spell-bound! but the enchantment
is fallen; in a few hours all shall be a remembrance. What has so
marvellously bloomed thus late, so long escaped devastating wind and
far-drifting rains and the blight of the sea, will pass in a night.
Already, a long way off, I hear a singular, faint, humming sound,
like stifled bees. So ... the foam of storm is on the skerries of the
seaward isles. Already from the north, a faint but gathering chill
comes on the slanting wings of twilight. I rise with a sigh, thinking
of an old forgotten refrain in an old forgotten poem:
“_Ged tha thu ’n diugh ’a d’aibheis fhuar,
Bha thu nair ’a d’aros righ_--”
“(_Though thou art to-day a cold ruin
Thou wert once the dwelling of a king._)”
In the long history of the Rose, from the time when the Babylonians
carried sceptres ornamented now with this flower now with the apple
or lotus, to the coming of the Damask Rose into England in the time
of Henry VII.: from the straying into English gardens, out of the
Orient, of that lovely yellow cabbage-rose which first came into notice
shortly after Shakespeare’s death, or from Shakespeare’s own ‘Provençal
rose,’ which is no other than the loved and common cabbage-rose of our
gardens: from the combes of Devon to the straths of Sutherland, to that
little clustering rose which flowered in Surrey meads in the days of
Chaucer and has now wandered so far north that the Icelander can gather
it in his brief hyperborean summer: from Keats’ musk-rose--
“The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves--”
to that Green Rose which for more than half a century has puzzled the
rose-lover and been a theme of many speculations ... a thousand wise
and beautiful things have been said of this most loved of flowers and
not a few errors been perpetuated.
What has become of the Blue Roses to which in 1800 a French writer,
Guillemeau, alludes as growing wild near Turin? They are no less
phantoms than some of the rose-allusions which the poet has made
sacrosanct, that to the Rhetorician have become an accepted convention.
Again, we are told and retold that the cult of the rose is a modern
and not an ancient sentiment. Even, it is said, the allusions of the
Latin poets are not those of lovers and enthusiasts. It is the Rose of
Catullus, we are reminded, that blooms in the old Italic literature,
the flower of festival, of Venus and Bacchus, alluded to more for its
associations and its decorative value than for love borne to it or
enthusiasm lit by it as by a fragrant flame.
All this may be so, and yet I am not persuaded that the people of
ancient days did not love this flower of flowers as truly as, if
perhaps differently than, we do. It is true that the ancients do not
appear to have regarded nature, either in the abstract or in the
particular, in the way characteristic of peoples of modern times and
above all of our own time. But literary allusiveness does not reveal
the extent or the measure of the love of objects and places. It is
almost inconceivable, for example, that so beauty-loving a people as
the Greeks did not delight in the rose. The fact that only a mere
handful of roses may be culled from all the poetry of Hellas, here a
spray from Sappho, a wine-flusht cluster from Anacreon, a dew-wet bloom
from Theocritus, a few wild-roses from the Anthology, an epithet from
Homer, an image from Simonides or Pindar, a metaphor in some golden
mouth, this paucity--so singular compared with the Rose of Poetry
in our English speech, from Chaucer’s ‘Rose of Rhone’ to Mr. Yeats’s
‘Rose on the Rood of Time,’ loved and sung through a thousand years.
Such paucity does not necessarily mean that only a few poets casually
alluded to this supreme flower, and that it was unnoticed or unloved of
the many. Doubtless rose-chaplets were woven for lovers, and children
made coronals, and at mourning ceremonies and marriage festivals these
flowers were strewn. The very fact that Sappho called the rose the
queen of flowers showed that it was distinguished from and admired
among even the violets, pre-eminently the flowers of Athens. That she
likened a young maiden to a rose is as indicative as when an Arab poet
likens his love to a delicate green palm, or as when a northern poet
speaks of her as a pine-tree swaying in the wind or a wave dancing on
the sea.
Then, again, the Rose would not have been consecrated to Venus, as
an emblem of beauty: to Eros, as an emblem of love: to Aurora, as an
emblem of Youth: and to Harpocrates, as an emblem of silence: if this
symbolic usage were not such as would seem fit and natural. That roses,
too, were in general demand is evident alone from their far-famed
culture and the great trade in them at Paestum, the Lucanian town
colonised by the Greek Sybarites five hundred years B.C. All mediæval
and later literature is full of the beauty and fragrance of the rose,
but were it not so, one could infer that the flower was held in high
esteem from the fact that it has for ages been the wont of the Popes
to have a golden rose exquisitely finished, and, when consecrated, to
present it to some Catholic monarch as a token of special regard. Thus
it seems to me that were there not a single allusion to the rose by
any great poet from Homer to Sappho, from Anacreon to Theocritus, we
might yet discern the love of the ancient Greeks for this flower from,
let us say, a single surviving phrase such as the anonymous lovely
epitaphial prayer-poem in the Anthology:--‘May many flowers grow on
this newly-built tomb; not the dried-up Bramble, or the red flower
loved by goats; but Violets and Marjoram, and the Narcissus growing in
water; and around thee may all Roses grow.’
In Persia and the East, from Hindustân to Palestine, from remotest Asia
to Abyssinia and Barbary, the Rose has ever been loved and honoured.
Sâdi of the Rose-garden and many another has sung of it with ecstasy.
The Hindû god Indra, even Buddha himself, suffered for robbing a
paradisaical garden of a rose. How suggestive it is, that the Eve of
the Aztec garden of Eden sinned, not for plucking an apple but a rose:
it was a fatal rose, too, that the Eve of primitive Mexican legend
gathered to her undoing and that of all her descendants.
What innumerable legends centre round this flower. In every country and
in either hemisphere, north of the Equator, the poet and the myth-maker
and the legend-weaver have occupied their imaginations to enhance its
beauty, to deepen its significance.
Long ago Bion told how the rose sprang from the blood of the wounded
Adonis, the supreme type of beauty, and of the tears of Venus. An older
Hellenic legend declares that the rose was originally white, till Eros,
dancing among the gods, upset a goblet of nectar upon Venus’s flower,
which thereupon became red. Christian legend, on the other hand, would
have it that the red rose sprang from the brands which had been lighted
at Bethlehem to burn to death a Christian virgin-martyr. Remote from
Syria as from Greece, the Scandinavian legend arose that this flower
was white till Baldur, the god of Youth and Love, bled at the coming of
Christ--akin to which is a Gaelic legend, that the flower was white
till a drop of Christ’s blood fell from the Cross ... a variant of
which is that the robin, who plucked at the thorns in Christ’s forehead
till they stained its breast red, leaned exhausted against a wild
white-rose on Calvary, which ever after was red as blood. I do not know
the origin of the legend save that it is Teutonic in its present colour
and shape, of how the Crown of Thorns was woven of the Briar-Rose,
and how the drops that fell from the thorns became blood-hued blooms.
Teutonic also, I think, is the legend that Judas made a ladder of the
rose-briar with which to reach the closed doors of heaven: hence why it
is that the name Judas-Stairs is given to the Briar in some parts of
Germany to this day, and why the scarlet hips are called _Judasbeeren_.
Most beautiful of surviving rose-customs is that akin to what is still
done in some remote parts of Europe, the placing of an apple into the
hand of a dead child, so that the little one may have something to
play with in Paradise. I know of a dead Irish girl into whose right
hand was placed a white rose, and of a drowned fisherman in whose hand
was placed a red rose, symbols of spiritual rebirth and of deathless
youth. Against this must be set the strange and widespread aversion
to throwing a rose into a grave, or even letting one fall or be
lowered there. (‘It is throwing red life away’ it was explained to me
once,--with the grim addition, ‘and Death will at once be hungry for
more of the rose-thrower.’)
Again, I recall an old legend of the last rose of summer, long anterior
to the familiar song so named: a legend of how at Samhain (Hallowmass)
when of old was held the festival of summer ended and of winter
begun, a young Druid brought a rose to the sunward Stones and, after
consecration and invocation, threw it into the sea.
To-day, sitting in my old garden amid many roses, and looking westward
across a waveless, a moveless sea, now of faint apple-green and
fainter mauve lost in a vast luminous space of milky, violet-shadowed
translucency, I dream again that old dream, and wonder what its portent
then, what its ancient significance, of what the symbol now, the
eternal and unchanging symbol. For nothing is more strange than the
life of natural symbols. We may discern in them a new illusion, a new
meaning: the thought we slip into them may be shaped to a new desire
and coloured with some new fantasy of dreams or of the unspoken and
nameless longing in the heart: but the symbol has seen a multitude of
desires come and go like shadows, has been troubled with many longings
and baffled wings of the veiled passions of the soul, and has known
dreams, many dreams, dreams as the uncounted sand, the myriad wave, the
illimitable host of cloud, rain that none hath numbered. The Symbol
of the Lily has been the chalice of the world’s tears; the symbol of
the Rose, the passion of uplifted hearts and of hearts on fire; in the
symbol of the Cross has dwelled, like fragrance in a flower, the human
Soul. The salt, mutable, and yet unchanging sea has been the phantom in
which empires have seen Time like a shadow, the mirage by which kings
have wept and nations been amorous in a great pride. The Wind, that no
man has seen, on whose rushing mane no hand has been laid, and in whose
mouth has been set no bridle since the world swung out of chaos on
chariots of flame, ... has not that solitary and dread creature of the
deeps been fashioned in our minds to an image of the Everlasting, and
in our hearts been shaped to the semblance of a Spirit?
A rose, laid on a stone-altar in the sunfire, and thrown into the
sea, with strange hymns, with supplication ... what a symbol this of
the desires that do not die with nations, the longings that outlive
peoples, the grass of prayer that Time has trampled upon and left and
forever leaves green and virginal?
To give that, that lovely fragrant flame of the old material earth, to
the altars of the bowed spirit: to clothe it in the fire of heaven: to
commit it to the unassuaged thirst of the everlasting graves of the
sea.--Surely, here, an image of that Rosa Mundi which has been set
upon the forehead of the world since time was, that Rose of Beauty,
that Rose of Time, that Rose of the world which the passion of the
soul has created as a prayer to the Inscrutable: the Rose of the Soul,
of you, of me, of all that have been, of all that are, of all unborn,
that we lay upon our places of prayer, and offer to the Secret Fires,
and commit to desolation, and sorrow, and the salt and avid hunger of
Death? What came of that mystical wedding, of the world we know and the
world we do not know, by that rose of the spirit, committed thus in so
great a hope, so great a faith? The Druid is not here to tell. Faith
after Faith has withered like a leaf. But still we stand by ancestral
altars, still offer the Rose of our Desire to the veiled Mystery,
still commit this our symbol to the fathomless, the everlasting, the
unanswering Deep.
THE STAR OF REST
A FRAGMENT
_REST_--what an OCEANIC word! I have been thinking of this
unfathomable, unpenetrable word with mingled longing, and wonder, and
even awe.
What depths are in it, what infinite spaces, what vast compassionate
sky, what tenderness of oblivion, what husht awakenings, what quiet
sinkings and fadings into peace.
Waking early, I took the word as one might take a carrier-dove and
loosed it into the cloudy suspense of the stilled mind--and it rose
again and again in symbolic cloud-thought, now as an infinite green
forest murmurous with a hidden wind, now in some other guise and once
as Ecstasy herself, listening.
_Dear soft, sweet breath of the hills,
Good-night!_
[Illustration:
“... _a change
from dream of Beauty, to
Beauty_.”
_F. M._]
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
SOME PRESS NOTICES
“Not beauty alone, but that element of strangeness in beauty which
Mr. Pater rightly discerned as the inmost spirit of romantic art--it
is this which gives to Miss Macleod’s work its peculiar æsthetic
charm.”--_Mr. Ashcroft Noble._
* * * * *
“Miss Macleod is a poet. Her prose _is_ prose--it is a poet’s prose....
She excels in the very quality most Celtic literature so signally
wants--namely, _form_.... But more than a sense of form is evident in
her stories. She has the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the attentive
spirit, the brooding mind. She has caught and construed into sweet
words all the magical beauty of the themes, nor has she shrunk from
their horror; and in almost all one is conscious of that unknown
something that ‘moves in the shadow of life.’ ‘It is Destiny,’ she
tells us, ‘that is the Protagonist in the Celtic drama.’”--_To-day._
* * * * *
“Miss Macleod’s genius has long been recognised as representing
most completely the revival of the Celtic spirit in modern English
literature.”--_The Manchester Guardian._
* * * * *
“Miss Macleod is a Celt of the Celts; her theme is the ancient trouble
of her race.... She appeals to a little clan of her own, to whom the
wild bees of the spirit come, as secret wings in the dark, with the
sound and breath of forgotten things. To that clan _The Winged Destiny_
will be more than welcome. It shows in abundance all the writer’s usual
qualities of charm and manner.... Criticism bends before the magic
glamour of the north, where the sea foam is white and the skies are
dark with cloud and wind. The land of the Gael is something rare and
apart; and rare and apart, judge it as you will, is the art of Fiona
Macleod.”--_The Glasgow Herald._
* * * * *
“What I admire in the work of Miss Fiona Macleod is her infinite
sympathy for all that is beautiful, either in what we usually call
inanimate nature, or in the deeds and words of men. She too--and
this is no mean compliment--respects her own gift, and bestows it
royally.”--_Country Life._
* * * * *
“‘There is no mystery in them, or anywhere, except the eternal mystery
of beauty’--and Miss Macleod certainly possesses the master key to the
heart of that mystery.”--_The Daily Chronicle._
* * * * *
“Miss Macleod persuades one more than ever that she is the possessor of
that rare and precious thing, genius.... Her work has energy, passion,
beauty, and sweetness.”--_The National Observer._
* * * * *
“‘J’avais le sentiment de l’infini et de l’éternel et de là mes
sourires pour les choses qui passent. Mais l’Esprit ne passe point.’
Cette belle phrase de Renan s’applique assez exactment à l’auteur de
_The Winged Destiny_, Miss Fiona Macleod. Ce livre qui s’est ‘dressé
comme un fantôme hors des bois hautés’ a le charme indicible des
précédents œuvres de cet auteur. Miss Macleod a quelque chose de
visionnaire et d’indéfini, d’étrangement mélancolique, de profondément
émouvant.... Tout cela, c’est bien ‘le rêve de la vie vue en beauté,’
et voir les choses dans leur beauté c’est les voir dans leur vérité,
comme l’a dit Matthew Arnold.”--_Le Mercure de France._
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation errors have been fixed.
A couple of instances of repeated words have been fixed.
Page 58: “dear and familar to us” changed to “dear and familiar to us”
Page 225: “French poet or romancist” changed to “French poet or
romanticist”
Page 344: “to enchance its beauty” changed to “to enhance its beauty”
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