Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66, No 405, July 1849

SEWARD.

Over and gone. How breathable the atmosphere!

NORTH.

In the Forests of the Marquis and of Monzie, the horns of the Red-deer are again in motion. In my mind's eye – Harry – I see one – an enormous fellow – bigger than the big stag of Benmore himself – and not to be so easily brought to perform, by particular desire, the part of Moriens – giving himself a shake of his whole huge bulk, and a caive of his whole wide antlery – and then leading down from the Corrie, with Platonic affection, a herd of Hinds to the greensward islanded among brackens and heather – a spot equally adapted for feed, play, rumination, and sleep. And the Roes are glinting through the glades – and the Fleece are nibbling on the mountains' glittering breast – and the Cattle are grazing, and galloping, and lowing on the hills – and the furred folk, who are always dry, come out from crevices for a mouthful of the fresh air; and the whole four-footed creation are jocund – are happy!

BULLER.

What a picture!

NORTH.

And the Fowls of the Air – think ye not the Eagle, storm-driven not unalarmed along that league-long face of cliff, is now glad at heart, pruning the wing that shall carry him again, like a meteor, into the subsided skies?

BULLER.

What it is to have an imagination! Worth all my Estate.

NORTH.

Let us exchange.

BULLER.

Not possible. Strictly entailed.

NORTH.

Dock.

BULLER.

Mno.

NORTH.

And the little wren flits out from the back door of her nest – too happy she to sing – and in a minute is back again, with a worm in her mouth, to her half-score gaping babies – the sole family in all the dell. And the seamews, sore against their will driven seawards, are returning by ones and twos, and thirties, and thousands, up Loch-Etive, and, dallying with what wind is still alive above the green transparency, drop down in successive parties of pleasure on the silver sands of Ardmatty, or lured onwards into the still leas of Glenliver, or the profounder quietude of the low mounds of Dalness.

SEWARD.

My fancy is contented to feed on what is before my eyes.

BULLER.

Doff, then, the Flying Dutchman.

NORTH.

And thousands of Rills, on the first day of their apparent existence, are all happy too, and make me happy to look on them leaping and dancing down the rocks – and the River Etive rejoicing in his strength, from far Kingshouse all along to the end of his journey, is happiest of them all; for the storm that has swollen has not discoloured him, and with a pomp of clouds on his breast, he is flowing in his expanded beauty into his own desired Loch.

SEWARD.

Gaze with me, my dear sir, on what lies before our eyes.

NORTH.

The Rainbow!

BULLER.

Four miles wide, and half a mile broad.

NORTH.

Thy own Rainbow, Cruachan – from end to end.

SEWARD.

Is it fading – or is it brightening? – no, it is not fading – and to brighten is impossible. It is the beautiful at perfection – it is dissolving – it is gone.

BULLER.

I asked you, sir, have the Poets well handled Thunder?

NORTH.

I was waiting for the Rainbow. Many eyes besides ours are now regarding it – many hearts gladdened – but have you not often felt, Seward, as if such Apparitions came at a silent call in our souls – that we might behold them – and that the hour – or the moment – was given to us alone! So have I felt when walking alone among the great solitudes of Nature.

SEWARD.

Lochawe is the name now for a dozen little lovely lakes! For, lo! as the vapours are rising, they disclose, here a bay that does not seem to be a bay, but complete in its own encircled stillness, – there a bare grass island – yes, it is Inishail – with a shore of mists, – and there, with its Pines and Castle, Freoch, as if it were Loch Freoch, and not itself an Isle. Beautiful bewilderment! but of our own creating! – for thus Fancy is fain to dally with what we love – and would seek to estrange the familiar – as if Lochawe in its own simple grandeur were not all-sufficient for our gaze.

BULLER.

Let me try my hand. No – no – no – I can see and feel, have an eye and a heart for Scenery, as it is called, but am no hand at a description. My dear, sweet, soft-breasted, fair-fronted, bright-headed, delightful Cruachan – thy very name, how liquid with open vowels – not a consonant among them all – no Man-Mountain Thou – Thou art the Lady of the Lake. I am in love with Thee – Thou must not think of retiring from the earth – Thou must not take the veil – off with it – off with it from those glorious shoulders – and come, in all Thy loveliness, to my long – my longing arms!

SEWARD.

Is that the singing of larks?

NORTH.

No larks live here. The laverock is a Lowland bird, and loves our brairded fields and our pastoral braes; but the Highland mountains are not for him – he knows by instinct that they are haunted – though he never saw the shadow nor heard the sugh of the eagle's wing.

SEWARD.

The singing from the woods seems to reach the sky. They have utterly forgotten their fear; or think you, sir, that birds know that what frightened them is gone, and that they sing with intenser joy because of the fear that kept them mute?

NORTH.

The lambs are frisking – and the sheep staring placidly at the Tents. I hear the hum of bees – returned – and returning from their straw-built Citadels. In the primal hour of his winged life, that wavering butterfly goes by in search of the sunshine that meets him; and happy for this generation of ephemerals that they first took wing on the afternoon of the day of the Great Storm.

BULLER.

How have the Poets, sir, handled thunder and lightning?

NORTH.

BULLER.

You recite well, sir, and Latin better than English – not so sing-songy – and as sonorous: then Virgil, to be sure, is fitter for recitation than any Laker of you all —

NORTH.

I am not a Laker – I am a Locher.

BULLER.

Tweedledum – Tweedledee.

NORTH.

That means the Tweed and the Dee? Content. One might have thought, Buller, that our Scottish Critics would have been puzzled to find a fault in that strain —

BULLER.

It is faultless; but not a Scotch critic worth a curse but yourself —

NORTH.

I cannot accept a compliment at the expense of all the rest of my countrymen. I cannot indeed.

BULLER.

Yes, you can.

NORTH.

There was Lord Kames – a man of great talents – a most ingenious man – and with an insight —

BULLER.

I never heard of him – was he a Scotch Peer?

NORTH.

One of the Fifteen. A strained elevation – says his Lordship – I am sure of the words, though I have not seen his Elements of Criticism for fifty years —