John Wilson

“ Love is life. The unloving merely breathe. A single sweet beat of the heart is token of something spiritual that will be with us again in Paradise. "O, bliss and beauty! are these our feelings"—thought we once in a dream—"all circling in the sunshine—fair-plumed in a flight of doves!" The vision kept sailing on the sky—"to and fro for our delight"—no sound on their wings more than on their breasts; and they melted away in light as if they were composed of light—and in the hush we heard high-up and far-off music—as of an angel's song. ”

“ You sometimes think you hear thunder, though you know that cannot be—but sublimer than thunder is the nameless noise so like that of agonised life—that eddies far and wide around—high and huge above—fear all the while being at the bottom of your heart—an objectless, dim, dreary, undefinable fear, whose troubled presence—if any mortal feeling be so—is sublime. Your imagination is troubled, and dreams of death, but of no single corpse, of no single grave. Nor fear you for yourself—for the Hut in which you thus enjoy the storm is safer than the canopied cliff-calm of the eagle's nest ”

“ O'er thy dim vastness, Skiddaw!—Mist and cloud
Each subject Fell obscured, and rushing blast
To thee made darling music, wild and loud,
Thou Mountain-Monarch! Rain in torrents play'd,
As when at sea a wave is borne to Heaven,
A watery spire, then on the crew dismay'd
Of reeling ship with downward wrath is driven.
I could have thought that every living form
Had fled, or perished in that savage storm,
So desolate the day. To me were given
Peace, calmness, joy: then, to myself I said,
Can grief, time, chance, or elements controul
Man's charter'd pride, the Liberty of Soul? ”

“ Spring clutches you by the hair with the fingers of frost; blashes a storm of sleet in your face, and finishes, perhaps, by folding you in a winding-sheet of snow, in which you would infallibly perish but for a pocket-pistol of Glenlivet.—The day after to-morrow, you behold him—Spring—walking along the firmament, sad, but not sullen—mournful, but not miserable—disturbed, but not despairing—now coming out towards you in a burst of light—and now fading away from you in a gathering of gloom—even as one might figure in his imagination a fallen Angel. ”

“ Not one fowler of fifty thousand has in all his days shot an Eagle. That royal race seems nearly extinct in Scotland. Gaze as you will over the wide circumference of a Highland heaven, calm as the bride's dream of love, or disturbed as the shipwrecked sailor's vision of a storm, and all spring and summer long you may not chance to see the shadow of an Eagle in the sun. The old kings of the air are sometimes yet seen by the shepherds on cliff or beneath cloud; but their offspring are rarely allowed to get full-fledged in spite of the rifle always lying loaded in the shieling. ”

“ Hath left a pensive loveliness;
Fancy has tamed her fairy gleams,
And thy heart broods o'er home-born dreams!
Thy smiles, slow-kindling now and mild,
Shower blessings on a darling child;
Thy motion slow, and soft thy tread,
As if round thy husht infant's bed!—
And when thou speak'st, thy melting tone,
That tells thy heart is all my own,
Sounds sweeter, from the lapse of years,
With the wife's love, the mother's fears!
By thy glad youth, and tranquil prime
Assured, I smile at hoary time!
For thou art doom'd in age to know
The calm that wisdom steals from woe ”

“ The true poet, again, has such potent eyes, that when he lets down the lids, he sees just as well, perhaps better than when they were up; for in that deep, earnest, inward gaze, the fluctuating sea of scenery subsides into a settled calm, where all is harmony as well as beauty—order as well as peace. What though he have been fated, through youth and manhood, to dwell in city smoke? His childhood—his boyhood—were overhung with trees, and through its heart went the murmur of waters. Then it is, we verily believe, that in all poets, is filled with images up to the brim, Imagination's treasury. ”

“ Intensity is its characteristic; and it burns like a flame of fire, too often but to consume. Expansion of the soul is ours, with all its feelings and all its "thoughts, that wander through eternity;" nor needeth then the spirit to have wings, for power is given her, beyond the dove's or the eagle's, and no weariness can touch her on that heavenward flight.
Yet we are all of "the earth earthy," and, young and old alike, must we love and honour our home. Your eyes are bright—ours are dim; but "it is the soul that sees," and "this diurnal sphere" is visible through the mist of tears. ”

“ Far gleams the Lake, as in the light of day,
Or when, from mountain-top, the setting sun,
Ere yet his earth-delighting course is run,
Sheds on the slumbering wave a purple ray.
A bright'ning verdure runs o'er every field,
As if by potent necromancer shed,
And a dark wood is suddenly reveal'd,
A glory resting on its ancient head.
And oh! what radiant beauty doth invest
Our tent that seems to feel a conscious pride,
Whiter by far than any cygnet's breast,
Or cygnet's shadow floating with the tide. ”

“ What mean we by the word old? All these men are old in three lights—they lived to a raven age—long long ago—and we heard tell of them in our youth. Their glory dawned on us in a dream of life's golden prime—and far away seems now that dawn, as if in another world beyond a million seas! In that use of the word "old," far from us is all thought of dotage or decay. Old are those great personages as the stars are old; a heaven there is in which are seen shining, for ever young, all the most ancient spiritual "orbs of Song." ”

“ Yet die it may, and leave thee blameless. The time may come when that bosom, now thy Elysium, will awaken not, with all its heaving beauty, one single passionate or adoring sigh. Those eyes, that now stream agitation and bliss into thy throbbing heart, may, on some not very distant day, be cold to thy imagination as the distant and unheeded stars. That voice, now thrilling through every nerve, may fall on thy ear a disregarded sound. Other hopes, other fears, other troubles, may possess thee wholly—and that more than angel of Heaven seem to fade away into a shape of earth's most common clay. ”

“ Have you studied, in silence and solitude, the low, strange, and spirit-like whisperings, that often, when bird and bee are mute, come and go, here and there, now from crag, now from coppice, and now from moor, all over the sultry stillness of the clouded landscape? Have you listened among mountains to the voice of streams, till you heard them prophesying change? Have you so mastered the occult science of mists, as that you can foretell each proud or fair Emergency, and the hour when grove, precipice, or plain, shall in sudden revelation be clothed with the pomp of sunshine? ”

“ Beautiful is it by nature, with its bays, and fields, and woods, as any isle that sees its shadow in the deeps; but human sorrows have steeped it in eternal gloom, and terribly is it haunted to our imagination. Here no woodman's hut peeps from the glade—here are not seen the branching antlers of the deer moving among the boughs that stir not—no place of peace is this where the world-wearied hermit sits penitent in his cell, and prepares his soul for Heaven. Its inhabitants are a woeful people, and all its various charms are hidden from their eyes, or seen in ghastly transfiguration ”

“ In truth, we know not well why we should ever leave thee, for thou art the Darling of all the Seasons; and Winter, so churlish elsewhere, is ever bland to thee, and, daily alighting in these gardens, loves to fold and unfold, in the cool sunshine, the stainless splendour of his pale-plumaged wings. But we are no hermit. Dear to us though Nature be, here, hand-in-hand with Art walking through our peaceful but not unpeopled Policy, a voice comes to us from the city-heart—winning us away from the stillness of solitude into the stir of life. ”

“ What more poetical life can there be than that of the men with whom we are now quaffing the barley-bree? They live with the moon and stars. All the night winds are their familiars. If there be such things as ghosts, and fairies, and apparitions—and that there are, no man who has travelled much by himself after sunset will deny, except from the mere love of contradiction—they see them; or when invisible, which they generally are, hear them—here—there—everywhere—in sky, forest, cave, or hollow-sounding world immediately beneath their feet. ”

“ Smiles from old Laurence Logan, the Seceder, were like rare sun-glimpses in the gloom—and made the hush of his house pleasant as a more cheerful place; for through the restraint laid on reverent youth by feeling akin to fear, the heart ever and anon bounded with freedom in the smile of the old man's eyes. Plain was his own apparel—a suit of the hodden-grey. His wife, when in full dress, did not remind us of a Quakeress, for a Quakeress then had we never seen—but we often think now, when in company with a still, sensible, cheerful, and comely-visaged matron of that sect, of her of Logan Braes. ”

“ A man leaves a town for a few months, and goes with his wife and family, and a travelling library, into some solitary glen. Friends are perpetually visiting him from afar, or the neighbouring gentry leaving their cards, while his servant-boy rides daily to the post-village for his letters and newspapers. And call you that solitude? The whole world is with you, morning, noon, and night. But go by yourself, without book or friend, and live a month in this hut at the head of Glenevis. Go at dawn among the cliffs of yonder pine-forest, and wait there till night hangs her moon-lamp in heaven. ”

“ It meets our ear like the sound of psalms from some unseen dwelling among the woods or hills, at which the wayfarer or wanderer stops on his journey, and feels at every pause a holier solemnity in the silence of nature. Such poetry is indeed got by heart; and memory is then tenacious to the death, for her hold on what she loves is strengthened as much by grief as by joy; and, when even hope itself is dead—if, indeed, hope ever dies—the trust is committed to despair. Words are often as unforgetable as voiceless thoughts; they become very thoughts themselves, and are what they represent. ”

“ For you see but Cruachan. He is the master-spirit. Call him the noblest of Scotland's Kings. His subjects are princes; and gloriously they range around him, stretching high, wide, and far away, yet all owing visible allegiance to him, their sole and undisputed sovereign. The setting and the rising sun do him homage. Peace loves—as now—to dwell within his shadow; but high among the precipices are the halls of the storms. Green are the shores as emerald. But the dark heather with its purple bloom sleeps in sombre shadow over wide regions of dusk, and there is an austere character in the cliffs. ”

“ In dry, the pearly waters are singing among the freshened flowers—so that the trout, if he chooses, may breakfast upon bees. In wet, they grow, it is true, dark and drumly—and at midnight, when heaven's candles are put out, loud and oft the angry spirit of the water shrieks. But Aurora beholds her face in the clarified pools and shallows—far and wide glittering with silver or with gold. All the banks and braes reappear green as emerald from the subsiding current—into which look with the eye of an angler, and you behold a Fish—a twenty-pounder—steadying himself—like an uncertain shadow ”

“ Commune with your own soul, and be still. Let the images of departed years rise, phantom-like, of their own awful accord from the darkness of your memory, and pass away into the wood-gloom or the mountain-mist. Will conscience dread such spectres? Will you quake before them, and bow down your head on the mossy root of some old oak, and sob in the stern silence of the haunted place? Thoughts, feelings, passions, spectral deeds, will come rushing around your lair, as with the sound of the wings of innumerous birds—ay, many of them, like birds of prey, to gnaw your very heart. ”

“ Time is not felt—and one might dream that the Day was to endure for ever. Yet the great river rolls on in the light—and why will he leave those lovely inland woods for the naked shores? Why—responds some voice—hurry we on our own lives—impetuous and passionate far more than he with all his cataracts—as if anxious to forsake the regions of the upper day for the dim place from which we yet recoil in fear—the dim place which imagination sometimes seems to see even through the sunshine, beyond the bourne of this our unintelligible being, stretching sea-like into a still more mysterious night! ”

“ We feel, O Heron! that there is not only humanity—but poetry, in our being. Imagination haunts and possesses us in our pastimes, colouring them even with serious, solemn, and sacred light—and thou assuredly hast something priest-like and ancient in thy look—and about thy light-blue plume robes, which the very elements admire and reverence—the waters wetting them not—nor the winds ruffling—and moreover we love thee—Heron—for the sake of that old castle, beside whose gloom thou utteredst thy first feeble cry! A Ruin nameless, traditionless—sole, undisputed property of Oblivion! ”

“ What a dear kind soul of a critic is old Christopher North! Watering the flowers of poetry, and removing the weeds that might choke them—letting in the sunshine upon them, and fencing them from the blast—proclaiming where the gardens grow, and leading boys and virgins into the pleasant alleys—teaching hearts to love and eyes to see their beauty, and classifying, by the attributes it has pleased nature to bestow on the various orders, the plants of Paradise—This is our occupation—and the happiness of witnessing them all growing in the light of admiration is our reward. ”