With this thought I am often consoled as I go my way through gloom and clamour and unloveliness, finding a Providence in places which else seem abandoned in the outer desolation.
Nor is the vast city to be valued only for what it gives, but for its own wonderful self, an obvious point which need not be expanded into a tedious circle. The shy will naturally draw more advantage from so rich a field of contemplation than those who seldom walk alone. In London I often map out a course of wandering which in its varied stages shall remind me of the change in progress or decay of particular arts or industries or different quarters of the town. Reading their meaning in the light of history, I make bare walls speak to me with a personal voice. Let any one but acquaint himself with the styles of ecclesiastical or domestic architecture, or of monuments of the dead, or with the history of the thoroughfares he frequents, and he will be pleasantly constrained to reflection upon those who have gone before him. As he stands in the shadow of an ancient church he will think to himself: "By this very wall Chaucer may have stood." As he walks amid the reverberating ravines which are city streets he will say: "Here along green and silent paths the Roman legionary marched when Hadrian ruled the world." When once the faculty of observation has been awakened to a permanent alertness, the desire to be widely read in history of men and their arts will become irresistible; and through the knowledge gradually ama.s.sed it will be thought a sorry chance if any ramble of wider compa.s.s yield no vision which in comeliness or deformity tells its tale of changing fortune. To appreciate human work, and the conditions under which it is born, is to exult in abounding sympathy with this man"s conquest over things poor in promise, or to condole with that man"s failure to do the best that in him lay.
As I walk by the strand of Thames, my fancy sees upon one flood the gay barge gliding upward to green fields, and the black hull bearing down the prisoner to the Traitors" Gate. If I go up Holborn, I remember that where this traffic now thunders John Gerard tended his Physic Garden when Elizabeth was queen. I know where Sarah Siddons lived; and where William Blake died; and my curious wanderings are now so far extended, that when I turn to the great book of London I seldom find a tedious page. The places where people strove and suffered evoke before me the forms of men and women dead but unforgotten, and if I am alone I am not aware of loneliness.
London is the central wonder, but wonderful also in spirit and suggestion are those old places which ring it round: these I often frequent at every season, and carry their portraits over my heart. Let a man once learn to know them, and his memory shall never starve; he will never forget the hour when first they yielded him up their secret. Many moments of intimate delight do I treasure in remembrance, moments when I was suddenly aware that all previous impressions were the poor gatherings of purblind eyes; but I will only tell you of one, which may suffice to show what riches lie ever open to those who roam in solitude.
It was mid-April and the close of a cloudless day. I had been to the Observatory hill at Greenwich to see the sun set over London, looking for such a transfiguration of the grey city as should reveal its line of warehouses lying along the horizon in a mist of splendour like the walls of the New Jerusalem. So I had seen it before, marvellous and refined in unearthly fire: but to-day, in a sadder mood, and hungering more deeply for the vision, I looked out to the west in vain. For the wind had set in from the east, and driven back upon the town a zone of iron-grey smoke, ragged along its upper edge like a great water blown to spray, but merging below with those gloomy and innumerable buildings. Upon this the sun, which all day had ridden in a clear air, was slowly falling, losing radiance with every minute, until as it approached that gloomy spray it was luminous no more, but a dull red orb whose light, like a flame withdrawn into the consumed heart of coals, glows for awhile beneath a gathering film of grey. In a few minutes it descended, as if sadly and of resolution, into the murky sea, where for a moment its red curves seemed to refine the smoke into translucency; but at last the dun waves gathered upon it dark and voluminous, drowning it so deeply that the clearer sky above was instantly robbed of the wonted after-glow. Some pale reflection there was in the upper heaven, ensuring a time of twilight, but no glory; and smitten with a congruous sadness, I went down to the river. But there, pacing to and fro as if upon a quarter-deck, with the water lapping upon the wall beneath, I lived one of the happy hours of life, redeemed from disappointment, and carried far into a magical world.
The flood tide, which had turned for more than an hour, was now racing down wilful for the sea, though the breeze ruffling its surface seemed to thwart and stay its eager course. And on the surface, indeed, chafed and broken into innumerable ripples, the wind triumphed; but as one looked westwards towards the city, it was clear that the sullen strength of stream and tide had the mastery. For over the broad curving reach, lit like white unburnished silver with the reflection of the pallid sky, there glided forward a line of barges each with every red sail set, and as silent as if they sallied from a besieged city. One by one they hung out their lights, the lamps swaying and casting yellow bars over the quivering water, until in perfect silence all pa.s.sed down before me.
Each in turn attaining the lower bend where the river sweeps northward, went about and stood for the Middles.e.x sh.o.r.e; and then for a moment the wind seemed to overcome the tide, for before the boat could win new way, lying almost broadside across the stream, the breeze held her motionless, like a tired bird on a windy day when it flies out from the shelter of the wood. It was but for a moment, and then the blunt bows glided forward towards the north bank, and another barge succeeded in the gathering gloom.
And so it was until all were pa.s.sed. The departing light drew the colours from the red sails and the silvery brightness from the river; all forms became outlined in black upon what uncertain light remained.
Two men put off in a boat from an anch.o.r.ed ship; the mingled sound of their oars and voices came with subdued tone as if out of an infinite distance. Then the whole reach lay bare and silent for a while, and only the little waves lapping upon the stone steps played an accompaniment to my dream.
The hour and the place compelled to reverie, and memory consenting to their evocative charm, I peopled the still scene with the forms of those who had swayed or shared the fortunes of this land; imperious Elizabeth and gentler Mary, the slight heroic figure with one sleeve pinned empty on the breast, and all those who, going down to their business in deep waters or returning therefrom, have saluted with melancholy or with joy these towers and this wooded hill. I thought of the lads playing beneath these trees, and so inbreathing the spirit of this place that for them there was no career but to follow the river down to ocean, and ocean himself in his circuit of the world. I thought of the veterans returned from that quest, old Argonauts of a later day, now cl.u.s.tering round the Hospital fires and perhaps recalling amid tales of havens and high seas the very morning when they first dropped round the bend and pa.s.sed into the new world beyond. For this Thames is such an avenue and entry into marvellous life that earth can show no greater rival, none more rich in dignity or in the mult.i.tude of its merchandise. And if the flood of that merchandise shall cease, and the stream once more go lonely to the sea or carry coracles, it cannot be again as if it had never borne great ships, or swung the Admiral"s galley on its tide.
It is good for an Englishman to stand here and listen to the brown waters lapping on the old walls and caulked timbers; to hear, as an under murmur, voices of Lechlade and Bablockhythe, for all intervening leagues of wood and meadow not altogether lost: before this persistence and continuity of youth to feel high thoughts stir within him and solemnize the nativity of new resolve. You cannot feel beneath your feet these old stones trodden by the great generations of your own blood and kindred, and not be moved to walk uprightly, to be approved by their shades as one not unworthy of such descent. For whether such worn stones be in the aisle of some great minster, or here, paving this narrow way for hurrying feet, the inspiration is as strong and the thankfulness not other. For this is a place of meridian, the navel of our land and empire; the wind searching its alleys has no usual voice, but as it were a deep and oceanic sound, according with old ballads and stories of the sea.
I lingered leaning upon the rail until the tide had fallen from the wall, tracing along the narrow pebbled foresh.o.r.e a clear marginal line of irregular contour, now sinuous, now straight, but palely luminous like a silver tone on some enamel of old Italy, a line drawn by a master draughtsman, in its inevitable and sure perfection wholly satisfying the eye. With the dark bank it vanished towards the great city, now marked in the upper sky by a hovering brightness of light escaped beyond the smoky rampart to tell the effort of innumerable lamps beneath, all pouring their blurred and vain effulgence to the disdainful stars.
Moreover, the city will give the shy man all the consolations of art, philosophy and literature of which his education or experience may have made him worthy. He can see great pictures or read great books at little cost, and find in them the truest of friends in need. It is so obvious that a solitary of any culture will find relief with such companions, that here I take for granted his resort to their aid, and will only mention two resources from which the real recluse often draws less advantage than he might, I mean orchestral music and the drama. Any man of feeling who hears a great symphony ceases to be self-centred with the first movement; he goes out of himself, and rides upon waves of sound, exalted by this majesty of collective effort. No other music thrills his whole being like this, which sweeps him with all around into the very course of changing fates. In the confluence of dim hopes and pa.s.sions which rise above the harmonies like smoke-wreaths riding the red flame, the soul glows interfluous with other souls and is elated with the inspiration of their presence. He bears arms exulting who never had comrades till now; his will is absorbed in confederate joy and human force unanimous. In this abandonment of the whole being, the diffident know their fellows near, and in the ecstasy of shared emotion learn the full measure of their humanity. Philosophers in all ages have known and taught the power of music in compelling ten thousand to the love of one, and so enn.o.bling an infinite mult.i.tude in the glow of a common emotion.
Sound was the first instinctive language, one for man and winds and waters; and music, which is the development of this primeval converse, leaving to grammars the expression of cold and abstract thought, has gathered about her in her mountain caverns the echoes of all sighs sad or pa.s.sionate, of all inarticulate cries born of aspiration or desire, and there blended them into eternal harmonies which at her word flow forth and join the hearts of men.
Indeed, that swift responsiveness of feeling which music thus awakes is a gift beyond gems of Golconda; not youth"s swift effusion cheaply given and soon forgotten, but the vibration of a heart stirred in sympathy with some profound note of life, as the dyed pane stirs and quivers when the organ gives forth its deepest tones. Sentiment is a draught of old wine pa.s.sing into the veins and enriching the blood, until in the generous glow all the privations and the stints of loneliness are forgotten. Pure emotion is like righteous anger, which may be lawfully indulged if the sun go not down upon it; and as he who shrinks from all fire of wrath lives but a vaporous life, so he who will never be moved is proud of a poor crustacean strength, like the limpet, winning darkness in exchange for dull stability. As for me, in the propitious hour when the heart longs for expansion, I give it honourable licence, and quicken its unfolding by spells of magical words. At such times I invoke the aid of pa.s.sionate souls, not shrinking even from the vain, provided that they loved greatly and give great expression to their humanity. Such is that wild lover of George Sand whose _Souvenir_, for all its rhetoric, charms like an incantation. The ancients quenched the ashes of the pyre with red wine, as if the blood of the G.o.d-given vine could hearten the spirit that yet hovered near. Over my ashes let no wine be poured, but read me such verses high and valiant, that if my soul yet lingers undelivered from the earth"s attraction it may be regenerated and set free into a braver life.
And let the lonely man be an a.s.siduous frequenter of the playhouse, for the drama will also open the world"s heart to him, and that by a plainer and less elusive speech. Seated in the theatre among his kind, he knows a deeper pleasure than other men; for while to these the changing scene brings remembrance or antic.i.p.ation of familiar things, to him it reveals whole vistas of life which, except in dreams, his feet may never tread.
When the curtain is rung down, and he goes out into the street, for a while at least his existence is transformed. All those front doors aligned in their innumerable sequence, which in daylight or darkness he pa.s.ses when he wanders alone, are now no longer barred against him; they open at the touch of his fancy, and he sees within the light of homeliness, where father, mother, and child weave round warm firesides their close conspiracies of affection. At last he knows what is pa.s.sing behind those bars; like an old family friend he takes his place by the fire and receives as of right the confidences which in his real lonely life never find their way to his ears. He helps the lovers to build their cloudy castles, he reasons away the parents" care, he goes up-stairs with a shaded candle to look in upon the children sleeping.
Good women unlock the jewel-caskets which are their souls; happy maidens are sisterly with him; strong men grapple him to their hearts and call him friend. He that was vagabond has now innumerable homes, and of the faces that fleet by him out of doors there are always some which seem to give him greeting.
These secret and unavowed alliances transfigure the unlovely streets, and light in the cavernous blank houses many a glowing and familiar hearth. As he goes on, careless of distance or direction, he is now inwardly busy with fresh and delightful dreams. He plights his troth and earth is Eden; he imagines brilliant hours for the dream-children who go by his side, holding each of his hands. And if the visions change, and sorrow or sin pa.s.s in over a familiar threshold, what generous abnegation, what pity, what righteous wrath does he not know, until the plastic power of fancy moulds out of this poor recluse a man like other men. Amid these visionary sympathies time goes quickly by, and returning to his voiceless dwelling he has stored up such wealth of dreams that he can even endure the supreme test when the lonely man finds himself sitting in the wan light with no one near him to whom he is dear. Of the strength and peacefulness which bring him safely through that hour of desolation he owes much to the players, who have shot the drab texture of life with an infinity of bright and tender hues, so that he can bear to turn it in his hands and look upon it with a wistful pleasure. I say, then, let the shy man frequent the playhouse, and there facet and burnish his dulled mind until it reflects, if it may not touch, the many-sided world.
For the discipline of sympathy, for the quickened sense of comradeship in work, for the very presence of that unloveliness which compels sympathy, I dwell more months in the town than in the country-side. But remembering what Nature did to save me, and owing her an endless debt of filial duty, I return to her in the summer days, and to make up for the long months of separation cling nearer to her than most of her truant sons. For communion with Nature, the ideal joy of country life, is not attained by the sportsman or the mere player of games, who think of their bodies chiefly, and use as a means to rude physical vigour the end ordained for the fine contentience of body, mind, and spirit. Again I will pa.s.s by the obvious and familiar resources of outdoor life, and speak only of such as men are unaccountably p.r.o.ne to neglect.
There is a way of learning nature which in this wet land is mostly followed by tramps and vagrants; the way of sleeping beneath the stars.
So far is this joy from the thoughts of most men, that even George Borrow felt a strange uneasiness when for the first time the darkness descended upon him in the open country. I think we carry with us all our lives that fear of night with which nursery tales inspired our childhood; it reinforces the later more reasoned fear of boisterous weather, or of the men who walk in darkness because their works are evil. We shrink from night as a chill privation of daylight, as a gloom which we must traverse, but not inhabit; the distrust becomes with years instinctive and universal, and the nearest approach to friendly relation with night attained by most of us is a timid liking for the twilight hours. Yet as the sun rises alike upon the just and upon the unjust even so does he descend, and we put a slight upon Providence if we abandon to rogues and rakes that wonderful kingdom of the darkness of which by natural prerogative we are enfranchised. By never using our proper freedom, we give them prescriptive licence of usurpation, so that the hours in which the heavens are nearest to us are become the peculiar inheritance of thieves.
I confess that on the night when first I set out to do without a bedroom I too felt all the force of the traditional mistrust. I heard human whispers in the wind, and saw the shadows of walls and trees as forms of men lurking to spring out against me. The movements of roosting birds startled me as I pa.s.sed; the sudden silences startled me more. And when I had spread my gear on the ground and settled down to rest, the sense of exposure on every side made sleep impossible; time after time I seemed to hear footsteps stealthily approaching; and there was a strangeness pervading everything which to my nervous fancy was simply provocative of apparitions. This lasted many nights; and whether I established myself on the edge of a copse, or in the open gra.s.s, or in a hammock beneath two trees, I continued a prey to the same uneasy wakefulness. But then, as if satisfied of good faith by such perseverance, the night began to wear a friendly aspect, the shadows gave up their ghosts, and the breezes became the expected messengers of slumber.
When the lonely sleeper-out has grown familiar with the moonlight and the darkness, he is admitted into the number of earth"s favoured sons; for lying like a child upon her bosom, he hears her heart beating in the silence, and wakes to see her smiling in her beauty like a queen apparelled. To no man slumber comes more gently than to him; and his uprising is as that of a child exulting in the cloudless day. Health and innocence return to him, and his one sorrow is that he has lived into maturity without continually partaking of these sane and natural delights. Remorse is his that for all these years he has feared the dews and shrunk from the bland night airs; and remembering the needless imprisonment of a hundred chambers, he mourns over the irrecoverable hours which would have rooted his life more deeply in tranquillity and strength. But the June sun is up, and the birds are singing: he strides with light step over the gra.s.s, watching the rabbits play in the glades, and in unison with a host of fellow-creatures singing a welcome to the dawn. When it is time for him to think of home and he comes once more beneath a doorway, he has a mind refreshed by the quietude of dim s.p.a.ce, and a heart replenished with innocence and good-will. He who so sleeps hates no man, and will go upon the dullest way free from petulance or despair. The scent of the rich earth is in his nostrils, and the clearness of morning air has pa.s.sed into his eyes.
I have made my lair in many places since I first kept house with Nature.
I have couched in heather by the pines of hills far above the Suss.e.x Weald; I have lain in dry furrows or on the margin of a copse, or in the parks of the children of fortune, for whose welfare, in grat.i.tude for their unconscious hospitality, I shall ever pray. But of all wild resting-places I have known, the openest are the most delightful. To see the whole sweep of the stars; to lie on the shorn ground free of all that overshadows or encompa.s.ses or confines; to breathe in the great gulf of air; to stretch unhindered limbs--this is an initiation into a new life, a pleasant memory in the long glooms of winter. Let nothing come between you and the stars, that they may look well upon your face, and haply repenting of some ancient unkindliness, draw you at this rebirth a new horoscope of blessing and fair fortune. And if slumber tarries when you lie in an open spot, you may consciously ride the great globe through s.p.a.ce, and like the shepherd watching by his flock in the clear night while star rises after star, grow aware of the great earth rolling to the east beneath you.
In these still hours of night or early dawn there steals upon the charmed mind an Orphic sense of worship and inexplicable joy. For here on bare uplands and wooded hills, where the starlight rains down through the silence, or the day, welling up over the rim of the downs, glides fresh from the lips of ocean, a calm river of light, here is the place of Dionysus, of him born from fire and dew, Zagreus the soul of clean souls and wild lives, his heart a-quiver with vague sadness drawn from all the worlds, Eleutherios, loosener of heart and lip, the regenerator, the absolver, the eternally misunderstood, whose true followers are priests of impa.s.sioned pure life, whose wine is not juice of grapes but the clear air ambient upon the hills. Here when sleep is shamed away by expectant awe, the whole being grows one with all-environing life; personality glides into the stream of cosmic existence, lost and found a thousand times in the trance and ecstasy of dim divine feelings beyond the power of words inexpressible. It is miracle; it is religion; it is a feast of purification above pomps or mysteries, a cleansing ritual without victims and undefiled. In such hours, and in such hours alone, man and things are joined in a supreme utterance of life high and humble, transient and immortal, by which the fellowship of all existences within the universe is made real and significant to the initiate mind. For in the day fences are about us, roofs and towers impend above our heads, we are cribbed in streets and markets, the din of rhetoric or sordid bargaining fills our ears. Or if we withdraw into some still chamber, yet the walls built by hired hands offend, and the doorposts of sapless timber; no high influence can penetrate to us save through the close court of memory, and compared with the breezy starlit meadows, how poor an avenue to the soul is that!
And the exuberant sun of noon distracts, and the mult.i.tude of his beams is troublous, for what does sight avail if the things of the heart"s desire are lost in immeasurable perplexities of light? For in the high day the quivering bright air is more opaque than the dim s.p.a.ces of night, so tranquil and severe, or the glowing kingdoms of the morning.
At the springing of the day the eyes open upon awakening flowers, giving filial heed to the marvellous earth which waits in patience for a human greeting. I like the pa.s.sage in which Chaucer tells how in May-time his couch was spread in an arbour upon the margin of the gra.s.s, that he might wake to see the daisies unfold their petals. Sleeping thus, he also must have known those intervals of slumber when a sense of some impending wonder grows too strong for sleep, and all nature seems calling to high vision. Often I have been thus awakened, not by noise or movement, but as it were by some strange prescience of beauty constraining me to rise and look. Once I was drawn some distance round the corner of a copse, and there, low in the sable-blue of the sky, in a rivalry of intense but dazzling light, the crescent moon hung splendid over against a great constellation which glittered like a carcanet of diamonds. They seemed to speak together as if in some scene or pa.s.sage of celestial drama, nor did I know which was the diviner speech, the moon"s unwavering effulgence or that leaping coruscation of the stars.
Nothing stirred on the right hand or the left, but earth and air were hushed, as if before that colloquy all sound and motion were miraculously holden. Tall trees brown with densest shadows were ma.s.sed upon one side, obscuring half the heaven, and lending by their contrasted gloom that sense of wizardry in natural things which enchants the clear summer nights when the air is still.
This is but one among many visions of which the remembrance makes life worshipful; and it is pity that at the hour of their coming well-nigh all whom they should delight lie chambered within brick walls, lost in sleep or in the mazes of unprofitable thoughts. For these things in their rare appearances are more precious than an hour"s slumber, were it dreamless as a child"s, or all the watches of luxurious unrest. If another summer is given me I hope to take the road when July has come with balmy nights, and wander days at a stretch with all I need upon my shoulders. Then I shall know the real joy of vagrancy, caring little where night finds me, and quickening my steps for nothing and for no man. I shall linger in every glade or on every hill-top which calls to me to stay; I shall tell all the hedgerow flowers, and lean over the gates to watch the foals playing. The brooks shall be my washing-basins, and I shall quench hunger and thirst in the tiled kitchens of lonely farmsteads. If I hear the shriek of a train I shall smile when I think of its cooped and harried pa.s.sengers, and plunge devious into some pathless wood, in whose depths the only sounds are the tap of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r"s bill or the measured axe-strokes of the woodman. I shall fling myself down to rest under what tree I will, and pulling from my pocket the book of my choice, I shall summon a wise and cheerful companion to my side as easily as ever oriental magician called a jinn to do him service. I shall once more be commensal with wild creatures, and wonder that solitude was ever a pain; I shall be healthily disdainful of the valetudinarian who lives to spoil either his body or his soul.
These are the wanderings which henceforward will chiefly suffice to my need. For since I roamed my fill in other continents the gadfly may no longer sting me out of my tranquil haunts. In their youth lonely people suffer more than others from that restlessness which fills the mind with sudden distaste for the present scene, and a fierce longing to be somewhere far away. Others are preserved from it by the love of home; but we, in our poverty of attachment, listen more readily to the depreciating voice.
I remember how deep had always been my longing to look out upon the sea from some Greek island, and how one day, when this desire was granted, and I walked along hills set high above the blue aegean, I was seized with an instant yearning to be instead upon Ranmore Common in Surrey.
Yet at that moment a life"s ambition was being fulfilled; I stood in a scene of incomparable beauty, gazing down on those deep azure waters whose voice is always to me as a lament for wandering Odysseus; the lower slopes were rich with olive trees, powdering with silver the tilled lands round a beautiful monastery lying there in its enchanted rest. Dark cypresses rose amid white walls of villages, by the contrast of their gloom making all bright colours glorious; away to the left, where the sh.o.r.e verged westward tracing inimitable curves between field and sea, lay slumbering a little white town with minarets and walled gardens and tiny haven--a very place for Argonauts; and yet my thoughts turned to the chalk downs of England and honeysuckle crowning the unfruitful hollies. _Sed quia semper abest quod aves praesentia temnis_;--Such desire has distracted Roman minds; the perversity is very old; and perhaps only children find no disillusion in the accomplishment of a dream.
For our feet have one country and our dreams another, and there is no constancy in us. It is not alone in the bartering of one earthly scene for its fellow that we suffer the sick thirst of change; but into the rarest hour of achieved ideal to which hope promised her supreme satisfaction, the same wayward longing will often find a way; as in a sacred place amid the purest and most exquisite meditations of the soul, there will suddenly flit inexplicable shadows of irreverence, with echoes of incongruous voices from the abandoned world.
But now as the years pa.s.s and the penury of human love has made the home woods and fields more dear, I feel that this unrest is drawing to its end. For as the seasons pa.s.s over the uplands and the meadows, clothing them with new splendours between the seed-time and the harvest, no vision rises upon the memory dearer and more beneficent than theirs. As the lover"s fancy dwells upon the image of his beloved in this or that environment, and thus or thus arrayed, so I see the woods and fields in the various glories of the year and know not in which garb I love them best. They have heard my laments, my confidences, all my broken resolves: they are bound to me by so pure and intimate an affection that all those grander wonders of the world should never draw me again from this allegiance. Not for the vision of Himalaya piercing the heaven, or the sunsets of Sienna, or the moonlight on the Taj Mahal, or for any other beauty or any wonder shall I weary of the cornfields framed in elms or the great horses turning in the furrow against the evening sky.
For with the growth of years our desires wander less, and are mercifully contracted to the scope of our wearying powers. We haunt the same old places and want the same old things, dwelling amongst them with an increasing constancy of devotion. For we find that year by year the old places and things are not really the same; something has touched them in our absence; strange still agencies have intervened, long silences of dissolution and the ineluctable fate of change. And so that perfect sameness which we find unattainable takes on the quality of ideal and demands the grown man"s devotion, as the change that is forbidden casts its resistless spell over the guarded and tethered child. The eyes of youth are on the far end of the vista, those of age upon the near; the old horse that has drawn the coulter through the clay is glad for the four hedges of the paddock which irk the growing colt"s desire. When Richard Jefferies was asked why he walked the same lane day after day, at first he was at a loss for a reply; but gradually the reason became clear to him. It was because he had become aware of the iron law: _Nothing twice_: he wanted the same old and loved things not twice but endlessly; he was yearly more eager to be with them, and paint indelibly upon his memory their delicate quiet beauty, their soft and perishable charm.
That is how I also feel, as with the return of summer I wander out into the old meadows and climb the familiar hills; I find myself hoping that nothing is changed, and am stirred with sweet anxieties of reminiscence.
And surely within the enchanted boundaries of the counties where I ramble, there is variety which not the hundred eyes of Argus could exhaust. These fields and woodlands in high summer feast all the senses with a surfeit of delights. How good it is to exercise in all its range the fine mechanism of the body, suffering each part of it to indulge its own hunger after beauty; to feel the texture of petals, and draw the long gra.s.ses through the fingers; to breathe an air laden with the scent of blossoms, pa.s.sing from uplands fragrant with bean-flowers into untilled regions odorous with pines; to hear the birds" chorus at sunrise and the distant sound of reaping; to see innumerable marvels; the belts of clover mantling wine-dark in the wind; the poppies in the standing corn, the carmine yew-stems on the downs; above you the soft grey clouds delicately floating; below you, as the day declines, some distant lonely water emerging in its glory to be the mirror and refuge of all heaven"s light; to remember the gorse and broom and look forward to the royal purple of the heather--all this is a consummation of pure life, a high, sensuous pleasure penetrating to the inmost soul, and of such exceeding price that to disdain its offerings or to pa.s.s incurious before them, is to live in the blindness of the tribe of Genseric.
In such wanderings the mind is filled with slow and seasonable thoughts, lasting as the trees and buildings of the country-side. Old deliberate contemplations, perceptions after long regard ingathered from abundant nature, theories leisurely compacted in sunshine or storm, to stand in the fields of memory, crowned with beauty by the indulgent years. So in the visible meadows stand the ancient barns, with roofs of umber tiles parcel-gilded with old gold of lichen, and crowning their seasoned timbers "as naturally as leaves"; restful structures of a quiet age, capacious of dim s.p.a.ce, unvexed by the glare of a hundred summers.
And if you ask what profit is here for one who must do battle in the loud world, study for a while the artifice and industrious policy of plants by which they attract to themselves the visitants they need or with most masterful defence repel the importunate advance, and you will return to the societies of men, even to their parliaments, enriched with arts of prudence beyond the practice of Machiavel. Examine the dog-rose upon the hedge, how by putting forth thorns it raises itself to the light and ranges irresistible along the leafy parapets; see how the flowers adapt their form and colour to the convenience of the bee or the predilections of the bird; consider the furze armed with spines against browsing muzzles, and be near when it casts its seed wide upon the earth; and then say if among states or governments there is a wiser economy or an intelligence more provident of its end. I myself have the conceit that if time, revoking my sentence of superannuation, should restore my lost years and add youth to the wisdom learned along the hedges, even I, a very profitless weed, should not again so uncivilly decay, but flower to another June and see my seed multiply around me.
Perhaps, if that might be, I should strive to learn thoroughly, and bring science to bear upon experience. But, as I am, cla.s.sifications and dissections are repellent to my fancy. I cannot get to the hearts of flowers by any Linnaean approach, but go rather by the old animistic way, still honoured by Milton through his Genius of the Woods:
"When evening gray doth rise I fetch my round, Over the mount and all this hallowed ground, And early, ere the breath of odorous morn Awakes the slumbering leaves."
So I greet the blossoms of hill and upland and water-meadow, knowing them all by their country names, and sometimes fancying that they know me back: all that is lacking is the tutelary power to guard their growth and prolong their bright and fragrant lives. What fine old names they have, great with the blended dignities of literary and rural lore; archangel, tormentil, rosa solis or sun-dew, h.o.r.ehound, Saracen"s wound-wort, melilot or king"s clover, pellitory of Spain! I cannot coldly divide so fine a company into bare genera and species, but imagine for them high genealogies and alliances by an imaginative method of my own: to me the lily and the onion shall never be connections.
If I must read books on flowers, I take down such a one as Nicholas Culpeper"s _Complete Herbal_, written from "my house in Spitalfields next the Red Lion, September 5th, 1653." For here is a man who attempers science with the quaintest fancies after the manner of his generation, and delightfully misinterprets the real affinity of the flowers and the heavens. "He that would know the operation of the herbs must look up to the stars astrologically," says this master; and so to him briony is "a furious martial plant," and brank ursine "an excellent plant under the dominion of the moon." Of rosemary he says, "the sun claims privilege in it, and it is under the celestial ram," and of viper"s bugloss, "it is a most gallant herb of the sun." The bay-tree rouses him to real eloquence, though not for Apollo"s sake. "It is a tree of the sun and under the celestial sign of Leo, and resists witchcraft very potently, as also all the evils that old Saturn can do to the body of man; for neither witch nor devil, thunder nor lightning will hurt a man in the place where a bay-tree is."
Reading in this old book of the ordinance and virtues of the familiar herbs, I escape from the severities of botanical science into a maze of queer fancies, well suited to those retrospective hours when we love best what we least believe. And by the pleasant suggestion of astrology I am led on to contemplate the starry heavens, which I do in the ancient pastoral way, peopling them with mythical forms and connecting them with the seasonable changes of rustic toil. I forget for the moment all the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler, and see eye to eye with Cleostratus of Tenedos who nightly watched the stars from the sacred slopes of Ida.
Much as the companionships of nature have meant for me, I would not have any man content himself with these alone. It is not right to live the slave of Pales, or become the rhapsode of docks and nettles. To be all for the lower life, were it the fairest, is derogation; and Har and Heva before they may enter into their kingdom of the flowers must first be fallen spirits. But continually in the interludes of human endeavour to rebathe the mind at these clear wells does indeed exceedingly purify and strengthen against the returning and imminent encounter. Those long retreats at Walden may not often be repeated, for man is either risen too high or too far fallen to live well in the sole company of animals and flowers. What sociologists call the consciousness of kind is as vital to man as the consciousness of self; and to pine for adoption into an alien kind is vain on this side transmigration.
Not seldom my wanderings in town and country lead me to quiet churchyards, or to those vast cemeteries where the living have established the dead in avenues and streets of tombs after their drear suburban fashion. Solitude has ever persuaded to the contemplation of death, and in these silent places I feel no shock of sadness but am rather possessed by a familiar spirit of peace. As I wander from path to path, my fancy is not lamed by mournful thoughts, but finds suggestion amid the poor laconic histories by which these headstones appeal to him that pa.s.ses by.
It is with most men a natural desire to take their last rest in some green G.o.d"s acre, far from the smoke and turmoil of towns, lying in a fair s.p.a.ce amid a small company, where there is a wide prospect of tilled lands, and the reapers cut the swathes against the very churchyard wall. And this is my most usual aspiration; yet there are times when I would not shrink in thought from the Valley of Ezekiel, and would be content to be written a mere number in some city of the dead, where at last after all the loneliness of life I should no longer be kept apart, but be gathered to my fellows where they lie in their thousands, and be received a member of their society. And though I well know that it matters not a c.u.mmin-seed whether my bones are washed to and fro on the bed of the sea or my ashes cast to the winds of heaven, yet I humour this fancy, and find a quiet pleasure in the thought that death at least may end this isolation.
And what if the propinquity of these poor remains be gage and promise of a sympathy of souls unveiled and unhidden by false semblances of the body? Then should death indeed be the crown of a long desire and give me at the last the fellowship into which life denied initiation. Surely, as Coleridge dreamed, there is a s.e.x in souls, which, disengaged from the coa.r.s.e companionship of the flesh, shall see into each other"s crystal deeps. Thence, in new life, when the last recondite secret is withholden no longer, there shall come forth those qualities and powers that enn.o.bled man and woman in mortality; they shall come forth in all their several strength and beauty, divinely animate, and reflecting upon each other bright rays and soft colours invisible upon these misty oceans of our navigation.
It is not terrible to think, at times, on death, for that _danse macabre_ which troubled the fancy of our forefathers is now danced out, and the silent figure that knocks at every door comes not as a grinning skeleton but as one of more gentle countenance than any art can express.
The natural change, which to William Blake was but the pa.s.sing out of one room into another, is well personified in the merciful figure with the kind eyes, coming at the sounded hour to lead away into quietness.
My solitude has taught me to know well those n.o.ble efforts which art has made to lift from our bowed backs the burden of the fear of death: I like to look upon that youthful Thanatos carved upon a column from the temple of the Ephesian Diana, and every year the red leaves of autumn persuade my steps to that village rich in elms where lived one who also saw death so, and laboured to draw the frightened eyes of men from the hour-gla.s.s and the skull to the gracious vision of the deliverer and friend. There hands which were dear to him have raised a place of leave-taking upon a green slope, a house of farewell set upon the sh.o.r.e to receive the last pledges from the living to the absolved and unburdened dead.
When first I saw Compton it was a cloudless noon in August, the day of days in which to come alone into this silent place. Out of the fiery heat beaten from wall and path like a blinding spray of light, it is a pa.s.sage into a dimness of cool s.p.a.ce, an air glaucous as the shade of olives. There from the circuit of a dome look down kind faces of immortal youth, in form and habit too tranquil for our life, but made homely to us by the mercy in their eyes, and some quality of the white soft hands which draws all weariness and all pain towards them. To me it was as though some furious struggle in the waves were over, and swooning out of life I had awakened upon a floor of translucent ocean, where, in a gracious and tempered light, beings of a compa.s.sion too intense for earth, each with a gesture that was not yet a touch, were charming all the bruises of the lost battle away. Surely this is true vision of things to come, and to such mercy we shall awaken. It cannot be that when the eyes reopen they shall see the forms of dark apparitors, or that the ears shall hear aeacus and Rhadamanthys speaking in dim halls their cold, irrevocable dooms. No, but there shall be a pause and respite upon the way from one to another life, and none may be conceived more grateful than this rest, as it were a sojourn beneath waters of Eunoe, where a flood of dear memories foreboding good shall absolve us from the mortal sin of fear.
Turning back over these pages, I am conscious that I have failed to give real experiences their proper life. Describing solitude I have been dull; I have fixed the rushing flames of emotion in poor flamboyant lines. I have written far more than any reader but yourself will have cared to follow; but now at any rate the confession is over, and in the future I shall work, and use my sight for a worthier end than introspection. It has been said that the tale of any life is interesting if sincerely told; and it may be that the most ordinary lives have the advantage, because it is the common experience which touches most hearts. For the greater part mine has been a common life, unglorified by hazards in the field, or bright fulfilment of ambition; it had been better for its peace if it might wholly have kept the comfortable, usual way.
I sometimes wonder whether the printing of these pages will reveal to me any kinsmen in affliction, for such there must be going westward alone, and I wish that for a moment we might foregather as we pa.s.s, to compare the marvels of our isolation. Then perhaps I might be urged to higher effort, hearing stories more pitiful than mine, tales of silent courage under ban of excommunion to shame me from the very thought of despair.