Page images
PDF
EPUB

the bound of our ambition-like them live, die, and be forgotten. The dreamy silence of those low damp fields increases our melancholy, and the pale and mournful aspect of the willow, prematurely hoary, becomes an emblem of our own fate and condition. It grows not erect and stately like the stern elm, or bold and free like the waving ash, but stooping obliquely over the stream, or, shrinking from its companions with distorted limbs, tells to the morbid and imaginative beholder, a sad tale of early blight, or the rough dealing of rude and adverse winds. The loiterer still lingers, loath to leave a spot where one bitter root may yet remain unappropriated. He listens while he lingers, and thinks he hears the willow whispering its sorrows to the passing gale. The gale blows more freshly, and the willow then seems to sigh and shiver with the newly awakened agonies of despair.

Thus can the distorted eye of melancholy look on every object with a glass of its own colouring, and thus it is possible one of our most common and unimportant trees, naturally growing in the familiar walks of man, in the small enclosure near his door, the green paddock or the luxuriant meadow, may have acquired by the sanction of feeling, not of reason, its peculiar character as an emblem of sorrow and gloom.

The weeping willow, as being more gracefully mournful, might very properly have claimed that attention which has been given to the common and plebeian members of its family; but the weeping willow, while it has in this country fewer natural associations, is burdened and robbed of its poetic character by a great number of such as are neither natural nor pleasing. Could we think of this elegant and picturesque tree only in its most appropriate situation, drooping over the tomb of Napoleon, or could we have beheld this tomb itself, without its infinitely multiplied representations in poonah and every other kind of painting, we might then have enjoyed ideas and sensations connected with it of the most touching and exquisite nature. But, alas! our first failure in drawing has been upon the dangling boughs of the weeping willow; our first sonnet has been addressed to this pathetic tree; our first flourish in fancy needle-work has

depicted a white urn delicately stitched with shining silk, and long green threads suspended over it, in mockery of its drooping branches. But above all, we have seen in the square ells of garden fronting those tall thin dwellings about town, where a squeezed and narrow neighbour jostles up on each side, leaving just room enough for a tin verandah, but no space to breathe or move, still less to think or feel; -we have seen, laden with a summer's dust, the countless little stunted weeping willows that throw aloft, as if in search of purer air, their slender, helpless arms, and would weep, if they could, yea, cry aloud, at this merciless malappropriation of their defenceless beauty.

These impressions must therefore necessarily be obliterated, and others, less vulgar and profane, be deeply impressed upon the mind, before the weeping willow can be established in that rank which it deserves to hold amongst objects whose general associations are poetical.*

Turning from the consideration of such trees as belong to the forest, the field, or the grove, to those which are reared and cultivated for domestic purposes; we find, even here, a world of ideas and associations, which, if not highly poetical, are fraught with the satisfaction of home comforts, and the interest of local attachments. In travelling through a fertile country, thickly peopled, not with the haggard, rude, or careless-looking labourers at the loom, but with a quiet and peaceful peasantry, whose delight is in the gardens, the fields, and the flocks which their fathers tended before them, how beautiful, in the season of their blossom, are the numerous orchards, neatly fenced in, and studding the landscape all over with little islands of rich promise, where the brightest tints of the rose, and the fairest of the lily, mingle with odorous perfume in all the luxuriant profusion of nature! Again, when the harvest is over, and the golden fruit, perfected by a summer's sun, is suspended in variegated clusters from every bough, how delightful is the contemplation

It is a fact now generally known, that the first weeping willow grown in England, was planted in Pope's garden at Twickenham, and is said to have been sent from Turkey, with a present from his friend, Lady Mary Wortley Montague.

1

of that rural and picturesque scene!-how sweetly the ideas it presents to the mind are blended with our love of nature and natural enjoyments, and our gratitude for the bounty and goodness of a gracious Providence.

Descending to the class of inferior trees, or rather plants, our poetical associations increase in proportion as these are more picturesque, graceful, or parasitical; and consequently, are more easily woven into the landscape, either real or imaginary, which forms the subject of contemplation. Amongst such, the common wild heath is by no means the least important; nor are we, on first consideration, aware for how large a proportion of our admiration of mountain scenery we are indebted to the rich purple hue which is thrown by this plant over the rugged sides of the hills, otherwise too cold and stony in their aspect to gratify the eye. With the idea of the heath we connect the path of the lonely traveller, or the silence of untrodden wilds; the haunt of the timid moor fowl, the hum of the wandering bee, or the gush of unseen water in the deep ravines of the mountains, working its way amongst the rocks, through moss, and fern, and matted weeds, until at length it sparkles up in the clear sun-shine, and then goes dancing, and leaping, yet ever murmuring, like a pleased but fretful child, on-on towards the bosom of the silent lake below.

But above all other vegetable productions, neither trees nor flowers excepted, the ivy is perhaps the most poetical. And why? not merely because its leaves are "never sere," nor because it hangs in fanciful festoons, glittering yet gloomy, playful yet sad; but because it does what so few things in nature will do-it clings to, and beautifies the ruin -it shrinks not from the fallen column-it covers with its close embrace the rugged face of desolation, and conceals beneath its rich and shining mantle the ravages made by the hand of time-the wreck which the tempest has wrought.

resque form presents, that we naturally connect with this plant the ideas of solemnity which are awakened by reflecting on the awful lapse of time. The ivy, too, is chiefly seen upon the walls of religious houses, either perfect or ruinous, where its heavy clusters of matted leaves, with their deep shadow, afford a shelter and a hiding place for the bat and the owl, and, in the ideas of the irrational or the too imaginative, for other less corporeal beings that flit about in the dusky hours of night. Thus, the ivy acquires a character of mystery and gloom, perhaps, even more poetical than that which strikes us when we see its glittering sprays glancing in the clear light of day, or waving in the wind around the gray turrets of the ruin, and suggesting that simile which has been so frequently the poet's theme, of light words and jocund smiles assumed by the broken-hearted to conceal the withering of the blighted soul.

It would be useless to proceed farther with this minute examination of objects, to each of which a volume of relative ideas might be appropriated. A few examples are sufficient to prove, that with this class of natural productions, the great majority of minds are the same in their associations. Would it might prove something better than a mockery of the loveliness of nature, thus to examine its component parts, and ask why each is charming! Far more delightful would be the task of expatiating upon the whole, of roaming at will upon the hills and through the woods, and embracing at one view, in one ecstatic thought, the unspeakable harmony which reigns through the creation. The pine, the oak, and the elm, may be magnificent in themselvesthe willow, the heath, and the ivy, may each present a picture to the imagination; but what are these considered separately, compared with the ever-varying combination of form and colour, majesty and grace, presented by the forest, or the woodland, the sloping banks of the river, or the leafy dell, where the round and the massive figures are broken by the spiral stem or the feathery foliage that trembles in the passing galewhere the hues that are most vivid, or most delicate, stand forth in clear contrast from the jecting rock and rugged cleft is fringed with a curtain of green tracery, and every glassy stream reflects again, in its stainless mirror, the variety and the magnificence of the surrounding groves? Yet what are words to tell of the perfection of nature, the glories that lie scattered even in our daily path? And what are we, that we should pursue the sordid avocations of life without pausing to admire?

Besides this highly poetical idea, which forces itself upon every feeling mind, the ivy has other associations, deeply interesting in their character. It requires so many years to bring it to the perfection necessary for those masses of foliage, and dark recesses of mysterious gloom, which its most pictu- | depths of sombre shade-where every proIt is, still to speak figuratively, by the light of this fire, that they see what is imperceptible to other eyes. They can discover types and emblems in all created things; and having received in their own minds deep and indelible impressions of beauty and harmony, majesty and awe, can recur to those impressions through the channels which external things afford, and draw from | bodily functions: because the majority of

In order that the harmony of sweet sounds may be distinctly perceived and accommodated to the taste, there must be a peculiar formation of the human ear; nor is it possible for the poetry of any object, even the most beautiful in nature, to be felt or understood without an answering chord in the human heart. There are many rational beings, worthy and estimable in their way, altogether insensible to the unseen or spiritual charm which lies in almost every subject of intellectual contemplation; who gaze upon the ivy-mantled ruin, and behold nothing more than gray walls with a partial covering of green, like the man so aptly described by Wordsworth, when he says

"The primrose by the water's brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."

But there are others, whether happier in this state of being it might not be easy to prove, but certainly more capable of intense and refined enjoyment, who, accustomed to live in a world of thought, and to derive their happiness from remote and impalpable essences of things, rather than from things themselves, cannot look on nature, nor behold any object with which poetical association holds the most distant connexion, but immediately a spark in the train of imagination is kindled, and consciousness, memory, and anticipation, heap fuel on the living fire, which glows through the expansive soul.

thence a never-failing supply of the purest poetical enjoyment.

THE POETRY OF ANIMALS.

WHILE flowers, and trees, and plants in general afford an immense fund of interest to the contemplative beholder, the animal kingdom, yet scarcely touched upon in these pages, is, perhaps, equally fertile in poetical associations. From the reflections of the melancholy Jacques upon the wounded deer, down to the pretty nursery fable of "The Babes in the Wood," the same natural desire to associate with our own the habits and feelings of the more sensitive and amiable of the inferior animals is observable, as well in the productions of the sublimest, as the simplest poet.

Burns' "Address to a Mouse," proves to us with how much genuine pathos a familiar and ordinary subject may be invested. No mind which had never bathed in the fountain of poetry itself-whose remotest attributes had not been imbued with this ethereal principle as with a living fire, could have ventured upon such a theme. In common hands, a moral drawn from a mouse, and clothed in the language of verse, would have been little better than a burlesque, or a baby's song at best; but in these beautiful and touching lines, so perfect is the adaptation of the language to the subject-so evident, without ostentation, the deep feeling of the bard himself, that the moral flows in with a natural simplicity which cannot fail to charm the most fastidious reader.

The lines in which Cowper describes himself as a "stricken deer," are also affecting in the extreme; but as my object is not to quote instances, but to examine why certain things are pre-eminently poetical, we will proceed to the considerations of a few individual subjects; first premising, that animals obtain the character of being so in a greater degree in proportion as we imagine them to possess such qualities as are most elevated or refined in ourselves, and in a less degree as we become familiarized with their

our ideas, in connexion with them, must then be of a gross material character, just as we may speak in poetry, of the "wild boar of the wilderness," while the tame hog of the sty is a thing wholly forbidden.

The elephant is allowed to be the most sagacious of the brute creation; but his sagacity is celebrated chiefly in anecdotes of trick and cunning, which qualities being the very reverse of what is elevated or noble in human nature, he possesses, in spite of his curious formation and majestic power, little claim to poetical interest.

The dog very properly stands next in the scale of intellect; and so far as faithful attachment is a rare and beautiful trait in the character both of man and brute, the dog may be said to be poetical; but we are too !familiar with this animal to regard him with the reverence which his good qualities might

seem to demand. We feed him on crusts

and garbage; or we see him hungered until he becomes greedy, and neglected until he becomes servile, and spurned until he threatens a vengeance which he dares not execute.

The claims of the horse to the general admiration of mankind are too well understood to need our notice here, especially as they have already been examined in a former chapter. To the horse belong no associations with ideas of what is gross or mean. His most striking attribute is power; and the ardour with which he enters into the excitement of the chase, or the battle, gives him a character so nearly approaching to what is most admired in the human species, that the ancients delighted to represent this noble animal, not as he is, but with distended nostrils, indicating a courage almost more than animal, with eyes animated with mental as well as physical energy, and with the broad intellectual forehead of a man.

The ass is certainly less poetical than picturesque; but, still, it is poetical in its patient endurance of suffering, in its association with the wandering outcasts from society whose tents are in the wilderness, and whose "lodging is on the cold ground," in its humble appetites, and in its unrepining submission to the most abject degradation. Let us hope that the patience of the ass arises from its own insensibility, and that its sufferings, though frequent, are attended with little |

acuteness of sensation; but they are sufferings still, borne with a meekness that looks so much like the Christian virtue, resignation, that, in contemplating the hard condition of this degraded animal, the heart is softened with feelings of sorrow and compassion, and we long to rescue it from the yoke of the oppressor.

I have often thought there was something peculiarly affecting in the character of the young ass something almost saddening to the soul, in its sudden starts of short-lived frolic. In its appearance there is a strange unnatural mixture of infant glee, with a mournful and almost venerable gravity. Its long melancholy ears are in perfect contrast with its innocent and happy face. It seems to have heard, what is seldom heard in extreme youth, the sad forebodings of its latter days; and when it crops the thistle, and sports among the briers, it appears to be with the vain hope of carrying the spirit of joy along with it, through the after vicissitudes of its hard and bitter lot.

The cow is poetical, not from any quality inherent, or even imagined to be inherent in itself, but from its invariable association with rich pastures and verdant meadows, and as an almost indispensable ornament to pictures of quiet rural scenery. Time was when the cow was poetical from her association with rosy maidens tripping over the dewy lawn, and village swains tuning the rustic reed; but since the high magnifier of modern investigation has been applied to pastoral subjects, milkmaids have been pronounced to be too homely for the poet's theme; village swains have been detected in fustian garments; and both, with their flocks, and their herds, and with pastoral poetry altogether, have been dismissed from the theatre of intellectual entertainment.

Nothing, however, that has yet been effected by the various changes to which taste is liable, has destroyed the poetical character of the deer. Our associations with the deer are far removed from every thing gross or familiar; we think of it only as a free denizen of the woods, swift in its movements, graceful in its elastic step, delicate in all its perceptions, and tremblingly alive to the dangers which threaten it on every hand. We imagine it retiring from the broad clear

light of day, into the seclusion of the mountain glen; stooping in silence and solitude to drink of the pure waters in their bubbling and melodious flow; gazing on through the rocky defile, or in amongst the weedy hollows on the banks of the stream, with its clear calm eye, that looks too full of love and tenderness to be betrayed, yet ever watchful, from an instinctive sense of the multiplied calamities which assail the innocent and helpless; listening to the slightest sound of earth or air, the rustling of the spray that springs back from the foot of the fairy songster, or the fall of the leaf that flickers from bough to bough; and then-as the zephyr swells, and the gathering breeze comes like a voice through the leafy depths of the forest-bounding over the mossy turf, and away along the sides of the mountainaway to join the browsing herd, and give them intelligence of an approaching, but unseen foe. Or, when the chase is ended, and the wounded deer returns to pant away its parting breath in the same glen where it gambolled upon the dewy grass, a careless and sportive fawn, he comes back with weary foot and bleeding bosom, to slake his burning thirst in the same fountain where so often he has bathed his vigorous and elastic limbs. The woods are still peaceful, the birds sing on, regardless of his groans, the stream receives the life-blood from his wound, his brethren of the faithless herd again are browsing on the distant hills, and alone in his mortal agony he weeps and dies.

But of all the animal creation, birds have ever been the poet's favourite theme. In the beauty of their form and plumage, in their soaring flight, in their sensitiveness and timidity, and in the lightness and vividness of their movements, there is something to our conceptions so intimately connected with spirituality, that we can readily sympathize with the propensity of the imaginative, to imbody, in these gentle and ethereal beings, the souls of their departed friends; and of the superstitious, to regard them as winged messengers laden with the irrevocable decrees of an oracular fate.

It is a curious fact, that, in our ideal personifications of angelic forms, we do not perceive that they lose any thing of their intellectual or celestial character, by having

appended to them the entire wings of a bird. Whether, from this association, we have learned to consider birds as less material than other animals, or whether, from the aerial flight of birds, the artist and the poet have learned to represent angelic beings as borne along the fields of air on feathery wings, it is certain that the capacity of flight || loses none of its poetical sublimity and grace, by being connected in our notions with the only means of which we have any knowledge.

Birds, in their partiality for the haunts of man, offer a striking appeal to the sensitive and benevolent mind. Why should they cast themselves into the path of the destroyer, or expose their frail habitations to the grasp of his unsparing hand? Is it that they feel some "inly touch of love" for their imperious master, or that they seek from his power what his mercy too often denies? or would they ask, in the day of their distress, for the sparings of his plenty, and pay him back with the rich melody of their summer songs? Whatever may be the cause, they flock around him, as if the manly privilege of destruction had never been exercised upon their defenceless community. Yet, mark how well they know the nature of creation's lord. They tremble at his coming, they flutter in his grasp, they look askance upon him from the bough, they regard him with perpetual suspicion, and, above all, some of their species will forsake their beloved and carefully constructed habitations, if he has but profaned them with his touch. It can be no want of parental affection which drives them to this unnatural alternative, for how diligently have they toiled, with what exquisite ingenuity have they constructed their children's home, how faithfully have they watched, how patiently have they waited for the fulfilment of their hopes! Yet, in one fatal moment, the silken cord that strung together their secret joys is broken. Another spring may renew their labours and their loves, but they know it not. Their all was centred in that narrow point, and to them the hopes and the labours of a whole life are lost. The delicacy of perception which enables them to detect the slightest intrusion upon the sacred mysteries of their nest, gives them a character of

« PreviousContinue »