The Germ Part 9

'Philip,' she said. He turned, and kissed the sweet lips as they said it.

"But, on the morrow, Elspie kept out of the way of Philip; And, at the evening seat, when he took her hand by the alders, Drew it back, saying, almost peevishly:

"'No, Mr. Philip; I was quite right last night: it is too soon, too sudden, What I told you before was foolish, perhaps,--was hasty.

When I think it over, I am shocked and terrified at it.'"....

"Ere she had spoken two words, had Philip released her fingers; As she went on, he recoiled, fell back, and shook, and shivered.

There he stood, looking pale and ghastly; when she had ended, Answering in a hollow voice:

"'It is true; oh! quite true, Elspie.

Oh! you are always right; oh! what, what, have I been doing?

I will depart to-morrow. But oh! forget me not wholly, Wholly, Elspie, nor hate me; no, do not hate me, my Elspie.'"

"But a revulsion pa.s.sed thro' the brain and bosom of Elspie; And she got up from her seat on the rock, putting by her knitting, Went to him where he stood, and answered:

"'No, Mr. Philip: No; you are good, Mr. Philip, and gentle; and I am the foolish: No, Mr. Philip; forgive me.'

"She stepped right to him, and boldly Took up his hand, and placed it in her's, he daring no movement; Took up the cold hanging hand, up-forcing the heavy elbow.

'I am afraid,' she said; 'but I will;' and kissed the fingers.

And he fell on his knees, and kissed her own past counting......

"As he was kissing her fingers, and knelt on the ground before her, Yielding, backward she sank to her seat, and, of what she was doing Ignorant, bewildered, in sweet mult.i.tudinous vague emotion, Stooping, knowing not what, put her lips to the curl on his forehead.

And Philip, raising himself, gently, for the first time, round her Pa.s.sing his arms, close, close, enfolded her close to his bosom.

"As they went home by the moon, 'Forgive me, Philip,' she whispered: 'I have so many things to talk of all of a sudden, I who have never once thought a thing in my ignorant Highlands.'"

--pp. 39-44.

We may spare criticism here, for what reader will not have felt such poetry? There is something in this of the very tenderness of tenderness; this is true delicacy, fearless and unembarra.s.sed. Here it seems almost captious to object: perhaps, indeed, it is rather personal whim than legitimate criticism which makes us take some exception at "the curl on his forehead;" yet somehow there seems a hint in it of the pet curate.

Elspie's doubts now return upon her with increased force; and it is not till after many conversations with the "teacher" that she allows her resolve to be fixed. So, at last,

"There, upon Sat.u.r.day eve, in the gorgeous bright October, Under that alders knitting, gave Elspie her troth to Philip."

And, after their talk, she feels strong again, and fit to be his.--Then they rise.

"'But we must go, Mr. Philip.'

"'I shall not go at all,' said He, 'If you call me _Mr._ Thank Heaven! that's well over!'

"'No, but it's not,' she said; 'it is not over, nor will be.

Was it not, then,' she asked, 'the name I called you first by?

No, Mr. Philip, no. You have kissed me enough for two nights.

No.--Come, Philip, come, or I'll go myself without you.'

"'You never call me Philip,' he answered, 'until I kiss you.'"

--pp. 47, 48.

David Mackaye gives his consent; but first Hewson must return to College, and study for a year.

His views have not been stationary. To his old scorn for the idle of the earth had succeeded the surprise that overtook him at Balloch: and he would now hold to his creed, yet not as rejecting his experience. Some, he says, were made for use; others for ornament; but let these be so _made_, of a truth, and not such as find themselves merely thrust into exemption from labor. Let each know his place, and take it, "For it is beautiful only to do the thing we are meant for." And of his friend urging Providence he can only, while answering that doubtless he must be in the right, ask where the limit comes between circ.u.mstance and Providence, and can but wish for a great cause, and the trumpet that should call him to G.o.d's battle, whereas he sees

"Only infinite jumble and mess and dislocation, Backed by a solemn appeal, 'For G.o.d's sake, do not stir there.'"

And the year is now out.

"Philip returned to his books, but returned to his Highlands after....

There in the bright October, the gorgeous bright October, When the brackens are changed, and heather blooms are faded, And, amid russet of heather and fern, green trees are bonnie, There, when shearing had ended, and barley-stooks were garnered, David gave Philip to wife his daughter, his darling Elspie; Elspie, the quiet, the brave, was wedded to Philip, the poet.....

So won Philip his bride. They are married, and gone to New Zealand.

Five hundred pounds in pocket, with books and two or three pictures, Tool-box, plough, and the rest, they rounded the sphere to New Zealand.

There he hewed and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit."

--pp. 52-55.

Among the prominent attributes of this poem is its completeness. The elaboration, not only of character and of mental discipline, but of incident also, is unbroken. The absences of all mention of Elspie in the opening scene and again at the dance at Rannoch may at first seem to be a failure in this respect; but second thoughts will show it to be far otherwise: for, in the former case, her presence would not have had any significance for Hewson, and, in the latter, would have been overlooked by him save so far as might warrant a future vague recollection, pre-occupied as his eyes and thoughts were by another.

There is one condition still under which we have as yet had little opportunity of displaying this quality; but it will be found to be as fully carried out in the descriptions of nature. In the first of our extracts the worlds are few, but stand for many.

"Mealy glen, the heart of Lochiel's fair forest, Where Scotch firs are darkest and amplest, and intermingle Grandly with rowan and ash;--in Mar you have no ashes; There the pine is alone or relieved by birch and alder."--p. 22.

In the next mere sound and the names go far towards the entire effect; but not so far as to induce any negligence in essential details:

"As, at return of tide, the total weight of ocean, Drawn by moon and sun from Labrador and Greenland, Sets in amain in the open s.p.a.ce betwixt Mull and Scarfa, Heaving, swelling, spreading, the might of the mighty Atlantic; There into cranny and slit of the rocky cavernous bottom Settles down; and with dimples huge the smooth sea-surface Eddies, coils, and whirls, and dangerous Corryvreckan."--p. 52.

Two more pa.s.sages, and they must suffice as examples. Here the isolation is perfect; but it is the isolation, not of the place and the actors only; it is, as it were, almost our own in an equal degree;

"Ourselves too seeming Not as spectators, accepted into it, immingled, as truly Part of it as are the kine of the field lying there by the birches."

"There, across the great rocky wharves a wooden bridge goes, Carrying a path to the forest; below,--three hundred yards, say,-- Lower in level some twenty-five feet, thro' flats of shingle, Stepping-stones and a cart-track cross in the open valley.

But, in the interval here, the boiling pent-up water Frees itself by a final descent, attaining a bason Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror; Beautiful there for the color derived from green rocks under; Beautiful most of all where beads of foam uprising Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness.

Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch-boughs, Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway, Still more concealed from below by wood and rocky projection.

You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water, Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the G.o.ddess of bathing."--

"So they bathed, they read, they roamed in glen and forest; Far amid blackest pines to the waterfall they shadow, Far up the long long glen to the loch, and the loch beyond it Deep under huge red cliffs, a secret."

In many of the images of this poem, as also in the volume "Ambarvalia," the joint production of Clough and Thomas Burbidge, there is a peculiar moderness, a reference distinctly to the means and habits of society in these days, a recognition of every-day fact, and a willingness to believe it as capable of poetry as that which, but for having once been fact, would not now be tradition. There is a certain special character in pa.s.sages like the following, the familiarity of the matter blending with the remoteness of the form of metre, such as should not be overlooked in attempting to estimate the author's mind and views of art:

"Still, as before (and as now), b.a.l.l.s, dances, and evening parties,....

Seemed like a sort of unnatural up-in-the-air balloon work,....

As mere gratuitous trifling in presence of business and duty As does the turning aside of the tourist to look at a landscape Seem in the steamer or coach to the merchant in haste for the city."

--p. 12.

"I was as one that sleeps on the railway; one who, dreaming, Hears thro' his dream the name of his home shouted out,--hears and hears not, Faint, and louder again, and less loud, dying in distance,-- Dimly conscious, with something of inward debate and choice, and Sense of [present] claim and reality present; relapses, Nevertheless, and continues the dream and fancy, while forward, Swiftly, remorseless, the car presses on, he knows not whither."

--p.38.

Indeed, the general adaptation of the style to the immediate matter, the alternation of the poetic and the familiar, with a certain mixture even of cla.s.sical phrase and allusion, is highly appropriate, and may almost be termed constant, except in occasional instances where more poetry, and especially more conception and working out of images, is introduced than squares with a strict observance of nature. Thus the lines quoted where Elspie applies to herself the incident of "the high new bridge" and "the great key-stone in the middle" are succeeded by others (omitted in our extract) where the idea is followed into its details; and there is another pa.s.sage in which, through no less than seventeen lines, she compares herself to an inland stream disturbed and hurried on by the mingling with it of the sea's tide. Thus also one of the most elaborate descriptions in the poem,--an episode in itself of the extremest beauty and finish, but, as we think, clearly misplaced,--is a picture of the dawn over a great city, introduced into a letter of Philip's, and that, too, simply as an image of his own mental condition. There are but few poets for whom it would be superfluous to reflect whether pieces of such-like mere poetry might not more properly form part of the descriptive groundwork, and be altogether banished from discourse and conversation, where the greater amount of their intrinsic care and excellence becomes, by its position, a proportionally increasing load of disregard for truthfulness.

For a specimen of a peculiarly n.o.ble spirit which pervades the whole work, we would refer the reader to the character of Arthur Audley, unnecessary to the story, but most important to the sentiment; for a comprehensive instance of minute feeling for individuality, to the narrative of Lindsay and the corrections of Arthur on returning from their tour.

"He to the great _might have been_ upsoaring, sublime and ideal; He to the merest _it was_ restricting, diminishing, dwarfing;"

For pleasant ingenuity, involving, too, a point of character, to the final letter of Hobbes to Philip, wherein, in a manner made up of playful subtlety and real poetical feeling, he proves how "this Rachel and Leah is marriage."

"The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich" will not, it is to be feared, be extensively read; its length combined with the metre in which it is written, or indeed a first hasty glance at the contents, does not allure the majority even of poetical readers; but it will not be left or forgotten by such as fairly enter upon it. This is a poem essentially thought and studied, if not while in the act of writing, at least as the result of a condition of mind; and the author owes it to the appreciations of all into whose hands it shall come, and who are willing to judge for themselves, to call it, should a second edition appear, by its true name;--not a trifle, but a work.

That public attention should have been so little engaged by this poem is a fact in one respect somewhat remarkable, as contrasting with the notice which the "Ambarvalia" has received. Nevertheless, independently of the greater importance of "the Bothie" in length and development, it must, we think, be admitted to be written on sounder and more matured principles of taste,--the style being sufficiently characterized and distinctive without special prominence, whereas not a few of the poems in the other volume are examples rather of style than of thought, and might be held in recollection on account of the former quality alone.

Her First Season