©tjr S. B. Bill Htbrarg

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QH81
S53

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Where the Forest Murmurs

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

Pharais : A Romance of the Isles.
The Mountain Lovers : A Romance.
The Sin-Eater, and other Tales.
The Washer of the Ford.
Reissue Shorter Tales, with others.
I. Spiritual Tales.
II. Barbaric Tales.
III. Tragic Romances.

(Reissued by David Nutt. )

The Laughter of Peterkin : Old Celtic Tales

Retold.
From the Hills of Dream : Poems.
The Dominion of Dreams.
The Divine Adventure.
The Winged Destiny.

To appear Shortly.

Torches of Love and Death : Poems Old and

New.
The Immortal Hour : Two Dramas and a

Fragment.

WHERE THE FOREST
MURMURS. NATURE
ESSAYS. BY FIONA
MACLEOD

' There through the branches go the ravens
of unresting thought.' — W. B. Yeats.

LONDON : PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICES
OF < COUNTRY LIFE,' Ltd. TAVISTOCK
STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C., fcf BY
GEORGE NEWNES, Ltd. SOUTHAMPTON
STREET, STRAND, W.C. NEW YORK:

CHARLES SCRIBNERS' SONS

First Edition, October 1906.
Second Impression, September 1907.

' The net-work of words is like a big forest :
it is the cause of curious wanderings.'' — Indian
Saying.

TO
MR. P. ANDERSON GRAHAM

Dear Mr. Graham— To whom so fittingly as to you could I
inscribe this book ? It was you who suggested it ; you who in
Country Life published at intervals, longer or shorter as the errant
spirit of composition moved me, the several papers which make it
one book ; you without whose encouragement and good counsel
this volume would probably not have been written. Then, per-
chance, it might have gone to that Y-Brasil Press in the Country
of the Young wherefrom are issued all the delightful books which,
though possible and welcome in Tir-na-n' Og, are unachieved in this
more difficult world, except in dreams and hopes. It would be good
to have readers among the kindly Shee ... do not the poets there
know an easy time, having only to breathe their thought on to a
leaf and to whisper their music to a reed, and lo the poem is public
from the caverns of Tir-fo-tuinn to the hills of Flatheanas ! . . .
but, till one gets behind the foam yonder, the desire of the heart is
for comrades here. These hours of beauty have meant so much to
me, somewhat in the writing, but much more in the long, incalcul-
able hours and days out of which the writing has risen like the blue
smoke out of woods, that I want to share them with others, who
may care for the things written of as you and I care for them, and
among whom may be a few who, likewise, will be moved to garner
from each day of the eternal pageant one hour of unforgettable
beauty.

FIONA MACLEOD.

CONTENTS

Where the Forest Murmurs

PAGE
1

The Mountain Charm

13

The Clans of the Grass

26

The Tides ....

37

The Hill-Tarn

47

At the Turn of the Year .

56

The Sons of the North Wind

66

St. Bridget of the Shores

16

The Heralds of March .

87

The Tribe of the Plover

99

The Awakener of the Woods

112

The Wild Apple

124

Running Waters

136

The Summer Heralds

146

The Sea-Spell

158

Summer Clouds

168

The Cuckoo's Silence

178

The Coming of Dusk

188

At the Rising of the Moon .

200

ix

Contents. ^ PAGE

The Gardens of the Sea 211

The Milky Way 221

September 232

The Children of Wind and the Clan of Peace . 242

Still Waters ........ 255

The Pleiad-Month ...... 265

The Rainy Hyades ...... 277

Winter Stars. I 290

Winter Stars. II . . . . . .301

Beyond the Blue Septentrions. Two Legends of

the Polar Stars ...... 312

White Weather: A Mountain Reverie . . 327

Rosa Mystica (and Roses of Autumn) . . . 337

The Star of Rest : A Fragment .... 349

Many runes the cold has taught me,
Many lays the rain has brought me,
Other songs the winds have sung me
Many birds from many forests
Oft have sung me lays in concord ;
Waves of sea, and ocean billows,
Music from the many waters,
Music from the whole creation,
Oft have been my guide and master.

The Kalevala.

XI

WHERE THE FOREST MURMURS

It is when the trees are leafless, or when the
last withered leaves rustle in the wintry air,
creeping along the bare boughs like tremulous
mice, or fluttering from the branches like the
tired and starving swallows left behind in the
ebbing tides of migration, that the secret
of the forest is most likely to be surprised.
Mystery is always there. Silence and whispers,
still glooms, sudden radiances, the passage of
wind and idle airs, all these inhabit the forest
at every season. But it is not in their ampli-
tude that great woodlands reveal their secret
life. In the first vernal weeks the wave of
green creates a mist or shimmering veil of
delicate beauty, through which the missel-
thrush calls, and the loud screech of the jay
is heard like a savage trumpet-cry. The woods
then are full of a virginal beauty. There is
intoxication in the light air. The cold azure

I B

Where among the beech -spaces or where the tall
the Forest elms sway in the east wind, is, like the sea,
Murmurs, exquisitely desirable, exquisitely unfamiliar,
inhuman, of another world. Then follow
the days when the violets creep through the
mosses at the base of great oaks, when the
dust of snowbloom on the blackthorn gives
way to the trailing dog-rose, when myriads
of bees among the chestnut-blossoms fill the
air with a continuous drowsy unrest, when
the cushat calls from the heart of the fir,
when beyond the green billowy roof of elm
and hornbeam, of oak and beach, of sycamore
and lime and tardy ash, the mysterious bells
of the South fall through leagues of warm air,
as the unseen cuckoo sails on the long tides
of the wind. Then, in truth, is there magic
in the woods. The forest is alive in its divine
youth. Every bough is a vast plume of joy :
on every branch a sunray falls, or a thrush
sways in song, or the gauzy ephemeridse dance
in rising and falling aerial cones. The wind
moves with the feet of a fawn, with the wings
of a dove, with the passing breath of the white
owl at dusk. There is not a spot where is
neither fragrance nor beauty nor life. From
the tiniest arch of grass and twig the shrew-
mouse will peep : above the shallowest rain-
pool the dragon-fly will hang in miraculous

suspense, like one of the faery javelins of Where
Midir which in a moment could be withheld the Forest
m mid - flight. The squirrel swings from Mumiurs.
branch to branch: the leveret shakes the
dew from the shadowed grass: the rabbits
flitter to and fro like brown beams of life :
the robin, the chaffinch, the ousel, call through
the warm green-glooms : on the bramble-spray
and from the fern-garth the yellow-hammer
reiterates his gladsome single song: in the
cloudless blue fields of the sky the swifts
weave a maze of shadow, the rooks rise and
fall in giddy ascents and descents like black
galleys surmounting measureless waves and
sinking into incalculable gulfs.

Then the forest wearies of this interminable
exuberance, this daily and nightly charm of
exultant life. It desires another spell, the
enchantment of silence, of dreams. One day
the songs cease : the nests are cold. In the
lush meadows the hare sleeps, the corncrake
calls. By the brook the cattle stand, motion-
less, or with long tails rhythmically a-swing
and ears a-twitch above the moist amber-
violet dreamless eyes. The columnar trees are
like phantom -smoke of secret invisible fires.
In the green -glooms of the forest a sigh is
heard. A troubled and furtive moan is audible
m waste indiscoverable places. The thunder-

3

Where time is come. Now in the woods may be
the Forest seen and heard and felt that secret presence
Murmurs. which in the spring months hid behind songs
and blossom, and later clothed itself in dense
veils of green and all the magic of June.
Something is now evident, that was not
evident : somewhat is entered into the forest.
The leaves know it : the bracken knows it :
the secret is in every copse, in every thicket,
is palpable in every glade, is abroad in every
shadow -thridden avenue, is common to the
spreading bough and the leaning branch. It
is not a rumour ; for that might be the wind
stealthily lifting his long wings from glade to
glade. It is not a whisper ; for that might
be the secret passage of unquiet airs, furtive
heralds of the unloosening thunder. It is
not a sigh ; for that might be the breath of
branch and bough, of fern-frond and grass,
obvious in the great suspense. It is an
ineffable communication. It comes along the
ways of silence ; along the ways of sound : its
light feet are on sunrays and on shadows. Like
dew, one knows not whether it is mysteriously
gathered from below or secretly come from
on high : simply it is there, above, around,
beneath.

But the hush is dispelled at last. The
long lances of the rain come slanting through

4

the branches ; they break, as against invisible Where
barriers, and fall in a myriad pattering rush, the Forest
The hoarse mutter ings and sudden crashing Murmurs-
roar of the thunder possess the whole forest.
There are no more privacies, the secrecies are
violated. From that moment the woods are
renewed, and with the renewal the secret spirit
that dwells within them withdraws, is not to
be surprised, is inaudible, indefinitely recedes,
is become remote, obscure, ineffable, incom-
municable. And so, through veils of silence,
and hot noons and husht warm midnights, the
long weeks of July and August go by.

In the woods of September surely the forest-
soul may be surprised, will be the thought of
many. In that month the sweet incessant
business of bird and beast lessens or is at an
end. The woodpecker may still tap at the
boles of gnarled oaks and chestnuts ; the
squirrel is more than ever mischievously gay ;
on frosty mornings, when the gossamer webs
are woven across every bramble, and from
frond to frond of the bronze-stained bracken,
the redbreast tries and retries the poignant
new song he has somehow learned since first
he flaunted his bright canticles of March and
April from the meadow-hedge or the sunned
greenness of the beech-covert. But there is a
general silence, a present suspense, while the

5

Where lime yellows, and the birch takes on her pale
the Forest gold, and oak and sycamore and ash slowly
Murmurs, transmute their green multitudes into a new
throng clad in russet or dull red or sunset-
orange. The forest is full of loveliness : in
her dusky ways faint azure mists gather.
When the fawn leaps through the fern it is no
longer soundlessly : there is a thin dry rustle,
as of a dove brushing swiftly from its fastness
in an ancient yew. One may pass from covert
to covert, from glade to glade, and find the
Secret just about to be revealed . . . some-
where beyond the group of birches, beside that
oak it may be, just behind that isolated thorn.
But it is never quite overtaken. It is as
evasive as moonlight in the hollows of waves.
When present, it is already gone. When
approached, it has the unhasting but irretriev-
able withdrawal of the shadow. In October
this bewildering evasion is still more obvious,
because the continual disclosure is more near
and intimate. When, after autumns of rain
and wind, or the sudden stealthy advent of
nocturnal frosts, a multitude of leaves becomes
sere and wan, and then the leaves strew every
billow of wind like clots of driven foam, or fall
in still wavering flight like flakes of windless
snow, then, it is surely then that the great
surprise is imminent, that the secret and furtive

6

whisper will become a voice. And yet there Where
is something withheld. In November itself the Forest
there are days, weeks even, when a rich Mu™-
autumn survives. The oaks and ashes will
often keep their red and orange till after St.
Luke's Peace ; in sheltered parts of the forest
even the plane, the sycamore, and the chestnut
will flaunt their thin leopard -spotted yellow
bannerets. I remember coming upon a
Spanish chestnut in the centre of a group of
all but leafless hornbeams. There seemed to
be not a leaf missing from that splendid con-
gregation of scarlet and amber and luminous
saffron. A few yards on and even the hardy
beeches and oaks were denuded of all but a
scattered and defeated company of brown or
withered stragglers. Why should that single
tree have kept its early October loveliness
unchanged through those weeks of rain and
wind and frosts of midnight and dawn ? There
was not one of its immediate company but was
in desolate ruin, showing the bare nests high
among the stark boughs. Through the whole
forest the great unloosening had gone. Even
the oaks in hollow places which had kept
greenness like a continual wave suspended
among dull masses of seaweed, had begun to
yield to the vanishing call of the last voices of
summer. Day by day their scattered tribes,

7

Where then whole clans, broke up the tents of home
the Forest and departed on the long mysterious exile.
Murmurs. Yet this sentinel at the Gate of the North
stood undaunted, splendid in warrior array.
The same instinct that impels the soul from
its outward home into the incalculable void
moves the leaf with the imperious desire of the
grey wind. But as, in human life, there are
some who retain a splendid youth far into the
failing regions of grey hair and broken years,
so in the forest life there are trees which seem
able to defy wind and rain and the consuming
feet of frost.

The most subtle charm of the woods in
November is in those blue spaces which lie at
so brief a distance in every avenue of meeting
boughs, under every enclosing branch. This
azure mist which gathers like still faint smoke
has the spell of silent waters, of moonlight, of
the pale rose of serene dawns. It has a light
that is its own, as unique as that unnameable
flame which burns in the core of the rainbow.
The earth breathes it ; it is the breath of the
fallen leaves, the moss, the tangled fern, the
undergrowth, the trees ; it is the breath also
of the windless grey-blue sky that leans so
low. Surely, also, it is the breath of that
other world of which our songs and legends
are so full. It has that mysteriousness, that

8

spell, with which in imagination we endow the Where
noon silences, the eves and dawns of faery the Forest
twilights. Murmurs.

Still, the silence and the witchery of the
forest solitudes in November are of the spell
of autumn. The last enchantment of mid-
winter is not yet come.

It is in 'the dead months' that the forest
permits the last disguises to fall away. The
forest -soul is no longer an incommunicable
mystery. It is abroad. It is a communicable
dream. In that magnificent nakedness it
knows its safety. For the first time it stands
like a soul that has mastered all material
things and is fearless in face of the immaterial
things which are the only life of the spirit.

In these 'dead months' of December and
January the forest lives its own life. It is
not asleep as the poets feign. Sleep has
entered into the forest, has made the deep
silence its habitation : but the forest itself is
awake, mysterious, omnipresent, a creature
seen at last in its naked majesty.

One says lightly, there is no green thing
left. That, of course, is a mere phrase of
relativity. There is always green fern some-
where, even in the garths of tangled yellow-
brown bracken. There is always moss some-
where, hidden among the great serpentine

9

Where roots of the beeches. The ilex will keep its
the Forest dusty green through the harvest winter: the
Murmurs. yew? t|ie CVpress, the holly, have no need of
the continual invasion of the winds and rains
and snows. On the ash and elm the wood-ivy
will hang her spiked leaves. On many of the
oaks the lovely dull green of the mistletoe will
droop in graceful clusters, the cream -white
berries glistening like innumerable pleiads of
pearls. But these are lost in the immense
uniformity of desolation. They are accidents,
interludes. The wilderness knows them, as
the grey wastes of tempestuous seas know a
Avave here and there that lifts a huge ram-
part of jade crowned with snow, or the long
resiliency of gigantic billows which reveal
smooth falling precipices of azure. The waste
itself is one vast desolation, the more grey and
terrible because in the mass invariable.

To go through those winter -aisles of the
forest is to know an elation foreign to the
melancholy of November or to the first fall of
the leaf. It is not the elation of certain days
in February, when the storm- cock tosses his
song among the wild reefs of naked bough
and branch. It is not the elation of March,
when a blueness haunts the myriad unburst
buds, and the throstle builds her nest and calls
to the South. It is not the elation of April,

10

when the virginal green is like exquisite music Where
of life in miraculous suspense, nor the elation the Forest
of May, when the wild rose moves in soft Murmurs-
flame upon the thickets and the returned
magic of the cuckoo is an intoxication, nor
the elation of June, when the merle above the
honeysuckle and the cushat in the green-
glooms fill the hot noons with joy, and when
the long fragrant twilights are thrilled with
the passion of the nightjar. It has not this
rapture nor that delight ; but its elation is an
ecstasy that is its own. It is then that one
understands as one has never understood. It
is then that one loves the mystery one has but
fugitively divined. Where the forest murmurs
there is music : ancient, everlasting. Go to
the winter woods : listen there, look, watch,
and ' the dead months ' will give you a subtler
secret than any you have yet found in the
forest. Then there is always one possible
superb fortune. You may see the woods in
snow. There is nothing in the world more
beautiful than the forest clothed to its very
hollows in snow. That is a loveliness to which
surely none can be insensitive. It is the still
ecstasy of Nature, wherein every spray, every
blade of grass, every spire of reed, every
intricacy of twig, is clad with radiance, and
myriad form is renewed in continual change as

ii

Where though in the passionate delight of the white

the Forest Artificer. Jt is beauty so great and complex

Murmurs. ^ the imagination \s stilled into an aching

hush. There is the same trouble in the soul

as before the starry hosts of a winter night.

12

THE MOUNTAIN CHARM

A famous writer of the eighteenth century
declared that to a civilised mind the moun-
tain solitude was naturally abhorrent. To be
impressed was unavoidable, he allowed ; to
love barrenness and the wilderness, to take
delight in shadow and silence, to find peace
in loneliness, was unnatural. It is humanity
that redeems nature, he added in effect. The
opinion is not one commonly held now, or not
admitted. But many hold it who would not
admit that they so felt or thought. I have
often asked summer wanderers if they have
no wish to see the solitudes in early spring,
when the ptarmigan's wing begins to brown ;
in November, when the rust of the bracken
can loom through the hill-mist like the bronze
shields of the sleeping Fianna ; in December,
when the polar wind frays the peaks into
columns of smoke, the loose, dry snow on the

13

The northward foreheads of ancient summits ; in

Mountain January, when there is white silence, and the
Charm. ^ue fluting shadow of the merlin's wing ; in
March, when in the south glens the cries of
lambs are a lamenting music, and the scream
of the eagle is like a faint bugle-call through
two thousand feet of flowing wind. Few,
however, would really care 'to be away from
home' in those months when snow and wind
and cloud and rain are the continually recurrent
notes in the majestic Mountain Symphony.
6 To see in a picture, to read of in a story or
poem, that is delightful ; but . . . well, one
needs fine weather to enjoy the hills and the
moorlands.' That, in effect, is what I have
commonly heard, or discerned in the evasive
commonplace. It is not so with those who
love the mountain-lands as the cushat loves
the green twilight of beech or cedar, as the
mew loves troubled waters and the weaving of
foam. I remember, a year or so ago, being
impressed by the sincerity of a lowlander
whom I met on the road among the Perth-
shire mountains, in a region where the hills
frowned and there was silence save for the
hoarse sea-murmur of pines and the surge of
a river hidden under boughs of hornbeam
and leaning birch. I forget whence he had
come, but it was from a place where the low

14

lineaments of the fields were hardly more than The
long wave-lines on a calm sea ; the only heights Mountain
were heaps of 'shag' by old mines, scattered arm*
columnar chimney-stacks. The man had trod
far afoot, and was eager for work. I told him
to go on toward the pass for about a mile, and
then to a big farm he would see to his right,
and ask there, and probably he would get
work and good pay. Some three hours later
I was returning by the same road, and again
met the wayfarer, but southward set. I asked
him why he had turned, for I knew labour
was wanted at the farm, and the man was
strong, and seemed willing, and was of decent
mien. " No," he said, " he had not got work
up yonder." I knew he prevaricated, and he
saw it. With sudden candour he added, " It's
no the good man at the farm — nor the work —
nor the pay. It's just this : I'm fair clemmed
at the sight o' yon hills ... eh, but they're
just dreidful. I couldna' abide them. They're
na human. I've felt it all along since I cam
up beyont the Ochils, but it's only the now
I've kent weel I couldna' live here amang
them." " Weel, first and foremost," he added,
when I pressed him further, "it's the silence.
It fair kills me. An' what's more, it would
kill me if I stayed. The wife up yonder gave
me a sup o' milk an' a bannock, an' when I

15

The was at them I sat on a bench an' looked about

Mountain me. Naething but hills, hills, hills : hills an'
Charm. b]ack gloom an» that awfu> siience. An' there

was a burd — a whaup we ca' it in the south-
lands— which fair shook my mind. It went
lamentin' like a grave-bell, an' I heard it long
after it was out o' sicht. Then there wasn't
another sound. Na, na, wark or no wark, I'm
awa' south."

And so the wayfarer set foot to the white
road again, the south spelling home and human
solace to him. Those dreary coal-lands, where
the green grass is wan and the thorn hedge
sombre, and any wandering water illucid and
defiled, those hideous heaps of ' shag,' those
gaunt mine-chimneys, those squalid hamlets
in a populous desolation — these meant ' human
comfort ' to him. Or, if they did not, at least
they gave him somewhat which the mountain
silence denied, which the gathered hills with-
held, which the moorland solitudes overbore
and refuted.

An extreme case, no doubt. But the deep
disquietude of hill silence, of the mountain
solitude, is felt by most habitual dwellers in
towns and thronged communities. There is
no mountain charm for these except the
charm of release, of holiday, of novelty, of
an imagined delight, of contrast, of unwonted

16

air, of unfamiliar aspect. One of the popular The
excursion resorts in the near highlands of Mountain
Argyll and Dumbarton is Loch Goil Head.
A dweller there told me last autumn that of
the hundreds who land every week, and
especially on Saturdays and Fair holidays, and
generally with an impatient eagerness, by far
the greater number soon tire of the loneliness
of the hills a brief way inland, and become
depressed, and with a new and perhaps per-
turbing eagerness seek again the house-clad
ways and the busy shore ; and seem content,
an hour or two before their steamer sails, to
sit where they can see the movement of
familiar life, and turn their back upon the
strangely oppressive loneliness, so perturbingly
remote, so paralyzingly silent.

But for those who love the hills as
comrades, what a spell, what enchantment !
To wander by old grassy ways, old 'pack-
road ' or timeless mountain path ; to go
through the bracken, by grey boulders tufted
with green moss and yellow lichen, and see
nothing but great rounded shoulders or sudden
peaks overhead or beyond, nothing near but
the yellow-hammer or wandering hawk or
raven : to feel the pliant heather underfoot,
and smell the wild thyme, and watch a cloud
trail a purple shadow across the grey-blue

17 c

The slope rising like a gigantic wave from a sea

Mountain of moors, rising and falling against the azure
walls, but miraculously suspended there, a
changeless vision, an eternal phantom : to go
up into solitary passes, where even the June
sunshine is hardly come ere it is gone, where
the corbie screams, and the stag tramples the
cranberry scrub and sniffs the wind blowing
from beyond the scarlet-fruited rowan leaning
from an ancient fallen crag : to see slope
sinking into enveloping slope, and height up-
lifted to uplifting heights, and crags gathered
confusedly to serene and immutable summits :
to come at last upon these vast foreheads, and
look down upon the lost world of green glens
and dusky forests and many waters, to look
down, as it were, from eternity into time . . .
this indeed is to know the mountain charm,
this is enchantment.

For the mountain-lover it would be hard to
choose any pre-eminent season. The highland
beauty appeals through each of the months,
and from day to day. But, for all the glory
of purple heather and dim amethystine slopes,
it is perhaps not the early autumnal mountain
charm, so loved of every one, that ranks first
in one's heart. For myself I think midwinter,
June, and the St. Martin's Summer of late
October, or early November, more intimately

18

compel in charm. And of these, I think June The
is not least. In midwinter the mountains Mountain
have their most ideal beauty. It is an austere
charm, the charm of whiteness and stillness.
It is akin to the ineffable charm of a white
flood of moonshine on a stilled ocean ; but it
has that which the waters do not have, the
immobility of trance. There is nothing more
wonderful in dream -beauty than vast and
snow-bound mountain -solitudes in the dead
of winter. That beauty becomes poignant
when sea-fjords or inland waters lie at the
sheer bases of the white hills, and in the
luminous green or shadowy blue the heights
are mirrored, so that one indeed stands be-
tween two worlds, unknowing the phantom
from the real. There is a dream-beauty also
in that lovely suspense between the last wild
winds of the equinox and ' the snow-bringer,'
that period of hushed farewell which we call
St. Martin's Summer. The glory of the
heather is gone, but the gold and bronze of
the bracken take on an equal beauty. The
birch hangs her still tresses of pale gold, * that
beautiful wild woman of the hills,' as a Gaelic
poet says. The red and russet of rowan and
bramble, the rich hues of the haw, the sloe,
the briony, all the golds and browns and
delicate ambers of entranced autumn are

19

The woven in a magic web. In the mornings, the

Mountain gossamer hangs on every bush of gorse and
juniper. Through the serene air, exquisitely
fresh with the light frosts which from day set
to dawn have fallen idly, rings the sweet and
thrilling song of the robin, that music of
autumn so poignant, so infinitely winsome.
In what lovely words our Elizabethan Chap-
man wrote of the robin, of which we also of
the North speak lovingly as ' St. Colum's
Friend,' ' St. Bride's Sweetheart,' and the
' little brother of Christ ' :

" the bird that loves humans best,

That hath the bugle eyes and ruddy breast,
And is the yellow autumn's nightingale."

But it is in June, I think, that the mountain
charm is most intoxicating. The airs are
lightsome. The hill-mists are seldom heavy,
and only on south- wind mornings do the lovely
grey- white vapours linger among the climbing
corries and overhanging scarps. Many of the
slopes are blue as a winter sky, palely blue,
aerially delicate, from the incalculable myriad
host of the bluebells. The green of the bracken
is more wonderful than at any other time.
When the wind plays upon it the rise and fall
is as the breathing of the green seas among
the caverns of Mingulay or among the savage

20

rock-pools of the Seven Hunters or where the The
Summer Isles lie in the churn of the Atlantic Mountain
tides. Everything is alive in joy. The arm*
young broods exult. The air is vibrant with
the eddies of many wings, great and small.
The shadow-grass sways with the passage of
the shrewmouse or the wings-breath of the
darting swallow. The stillest pool quivers,
for among the shadows of breathless reeds the
phantom javelin of the dragon-fly whirls for a
second from silence to silence. In the morning
the far lamentation of the flocks on the summer
shielings falls like the sound of bells across
water. The curlew and the plover are not
spirits of desolation, but blithe children of the
wilderness. As the afternoon swims in blue
haze and floating gold the drowsy call of the
moorcock stirs the heather-sea. The snorting
of trampling deer may be heard. The land-
rail sweeps the dew from the tall grass and
sends her harsh but summer-sweet cry in long
monotonous echoes, till the air rings with the
resonant krek-crake. And that sudden break
in the silences of the dusk, when . . . beyond
the blossoming elder, or the tangle of wild
roses where the white moths rise and fall in
fluttering ecstasy, or, yonder, by the black-
green juniper on the moorland . . . the low
whirring note of the nightjar vibrates in a

21

The continual passionate iterance ! There, in truth,

Mountain we }mve the passionate whisper of the heart of
Charm. june> that most wonderful, that most thril-
ling of the voices of summer.

It is in June, too, that one mountain charm
in particular may be known with rapt delight.
It is when one can approach mountains whose
outlying flanks and bases are green hills. The
bright green of these under-slopes, these swell-
ing heights and rolling uplands, is never more
vivid. Near, one wonders why grasses so
thick with white daisy and red sorrel and purple
orchis and blue harebell can be green at all !
But that wonderful sea-green of the hills near
at hand gives way soon to the still more
wonderful blue as the heights recede. The
glens and wooded valleys grow paler. Rock
and tree and heather blend. "What colour
is that?" I asked a shepherd once. "The
blueness of blueness," he answered, in Gaelic.
It is so. It is not blue one sees, but the bloom
of blue ; as on a wild plum, it is not the purple
skin we note, but the amethyst bloom of purple
which lies upon it. It is beauty, with its own
loveliness upon it like a breath. Then the blue
deepens, or greys, as the hour and the light
compel. The most rare and subtle loveliness
is when the grey silhouette of the mountain-
ridge, serrated line, or freaked and tormented

22

peaks, or vast unbroken amplitude, sinks into The

the sudden deep clearness of the enveloping Mountain

sky. ' Charm.

Even in June, however, the mountain
charm is not to be sought, as in a last sanctuary,
on the summits of the hills. I believe that to
be a delusion, a confusion, which asserts the
supreme beauty of the views from mountain
summits. I have climbed many hills and not
a few mountains, and, except in one or two
instances (as Hecla in the Hebrides), never
without recognition that, in beauty, one does
not gain, but loses. There are no heights in
Scotland more often climbed by the holiday
mountaineer than Ben Nevis in Argyll and
Goat Fell in the Isle of Arran. Neither, in
beauty or grandeur of view, repays the ascent.
Goat Fell is a hundred times lovelier seen
from the shores or glens of its own lower
slopes, or from a spur of the Eastern Caisteall
Abhaill : the boatmen on the waters of Lome,
the shepherd on the hills of Morven, the way-
farer in the wilds of Appin, they know the
beauty of 'the Sacred Hill' as none knows
it who thinks he has surprised the secret on
the vast brows overhanging the inchoate
wilderness. At its best, we look through a
phantasmal appearance upon a phantasmal
world, and any artist will tell us that the

23

The disappointment is because every object is seen

Mountain m its high light, none in its shadowed portion ;

Charm. that the jn,ect sunlight being over all is

reflected back to us from every surface ; that

the downward vision means a monotony of

light and a monotony of colour.

The supreme charm of the mountain-lands
in June is their investiture with the loveliest
blue air that the year knows, and the entrance-
ment of summer cloud. Small feathery cirrus
or salmon - pink and snow - white cumulus
emerging behind the shoulder of a mountain
or drifting above the vast silent brows have an
infinite beauty. We should be cloud-climbers
rather than mere mountain - climbers ; we
should climb to see the heights recede in con-
tinual fold of loveliness, and the clouds lift
their trailing purple shadows and sail slowly or
hang motionless beyond the eternal buttresses.
And it is but an added poignancy to the sense
of infinite beauty to know that this word
* eternal' is, even for those ancient 'change-
less ' hills, but the idlest hyperbole — as though
one were to call the breaking wave everlasting,
or the blowing seed of the meadows as timeless
as the wind. There is not a vast and lonely
mountain that has not a fallen comrade among
the low undulating ridges of the continual low-
land ; not one of these that has not in turn to

24

feed the white dust of the plain or the sea- The
gathered sand of ancient or as yet unformed Mountain
shores. For the hills pass, even as we, or the arm*
green leaf become sere, or the fruit that ripens
to its fall ; though we speak of them as ever-
lasting, and find the subtlest spell of their
incalculable charm in the overwhelming sense
of their imagined eternity.

25

THE CLANS OF THE GRASS

Of all the miracles of the green world none
surpasses that of the grass. It has many
names, many raiments even, but it is always
that wonderful thing which the poets of all
time have delighted in calling the green hair
of earth. * Soft green hair of the rocks,' says
a Breton poet. Another Celtic poet has used
the word alike for the mosses which clothe
the talons of old trees and for the forests
themselves. No fantastic hyperbole this :
from a great height forests of pine and oak
seem like reaches of sombre grass. To the
shrewmouse the tall grasses of June are green
woods, and the slim stems of the reddening
sorrels are groves of pinetrees. I remember
having read somewhere of a lovely name given
to the grass by the Arabs of the desert . . .
' the Bride of Mahomet.' What lovelier and
more gracious thing in the world, in their
eyes, than this soft cool greenness of the oasis,

26

this emerald carpet below the green shadowy The Clans

roof of waving palms ; and as of all women in °f tne

Grass
the world there could be but one, according to

the old legend, worthy to be the supreme
bride of the Prophet, what poetic name for
her so fitting as this exquisite apparition of
the desert, so beautiful, so evernew in itself,
so welcome for its association with sweet
waters and shade and coolness. A Gaelic
poet calls the grass the Gift of Christ, literally
slender - greenness of Christ (uaineachd - caol
Chriosde), and another has written of how it
it came to be called Green-Peace — both from
an old tale (one of the many ebbed, forgotten
tales of the isles) that, when God had created
the world, Christ said " Surely one thing yet
lacks, My Father : soft greenness for the barren
mountain, soft greenness for rocks and cliffs,
soft greenness for stony places and the wilder-
ness, soft greenness for the airidhs of the poor."
Whereupon God said " Let thy tenderness be
upon these things, O my Son, and thy peace
be upon them, and let the green grass be the
colour of peace and of home " — and thereafter,
says the taleteller, the Eternal Father turned
to the Holy Spirit and said of the Son that
from that hour He should be named the
Prince of Peace, Prionnsa na Sioth-cainnt
canar ris.

27

The Clans Grass is as universal as dew, as common -
of the place as light. That which feels the seawind
Grass. m tjie ioneiiest Hebrides is brother to that
which lies on Himalaya or is fanned by the
hot airs of Asian valleys. That which covers
a grey scarp in Iceland is the same as that on
Adam's Peak in Ceylon, and that which in
myriad is the prairie of the north is in myriad
the pampas of the south ; that whose multitude
covers the Gaelic hills is that whose multitude
covers the Russian steppes. It is of all the
signature of Nature that which to us is nearest
and homeliest. The green grass after long
voyaging, the grass of home-valley or hillside
after long wayfaring, the green grass of the
Psalmist to souls athirst and weary, the grass
of El Dorado to the visionary seeking the
gold of the spirit, the grass of the Fortunate
Isles, of the Hills of Youth, to the poets and
dreamers of all lands and times . . . every-
where and ever has this omnipresent herb that
withereth and yet is continually reborn, been
the eternal symbol of that which passes like a
dream, the symbol of everlasting illusion, and
yet, too, is the symbol of resurrection, of all
the old divine illusion essayed anew, of the
inexplicable mystery of life recovered and
everlastingly perpetrated.

When we speak of grass we generally mean
28

one thing, the small slim green herb which The Clans
carpets the familiar earth. But there are of the
many grasses, from the smooth close-set herb
of our lawns or the sheep -nibbled downy
greenness of mountain-pastures, to the forest-
like groves which sway in the torrid winds of
the south. Of these alone much might be
written. I prefer, however, that name I have
placed at the head of this article — taken, if I
remember rightly, from a poem by the Gaelic
mountain-poet, Duncan Ban Macintyre — and
used in the sense of the original. In this
sense, the Clans of the Grass are not only the
grasses of the pasture, the sand-dune, the
windy down, not only the sorrel-red meadow-
grass or the delicate quaking-grass, but all the
humbler greengrowth which covers the face
of the earth. In this company are the bee-
loved clover, the trailing vetch, the yellow-sea
clover and the sea-pink ; the vast tribe of the
charlock or wild mustard which on showery
days sometimes lights up field or hill-meadow
with yellow flame so translucent that one
thinks a sudden radiant sunflood burns and
abides there. In it too are all the slim peoples
of the reed and rush, by streams and pools and
lochans : of the yellow iris by the sea-loch and
the tall flag by the mountain-tarn : the grey
thistle, the sweet-gale, and all the tribe of the

29

The Clans bog -cotton or canna (ceann-ban-a-mhonaidh,
of the the white head of the hillside, as we call it in
Gaelic), those lovers of the wilderness and
boggy places. With these is the bindweed
that with the salt bent holds the loose shores.
With these are all the shadow-loving clans of
the fern, from the bracken, whose April-green
lightens the glens and whose autumnal bronze
and dull gold make the hillsides so resplendent,
to the stone wort on the dykes, the lady-fern
in the birch-woods, the maidenhair by springs
and falls, the hart's -tongue in caverns, the
Royal fern whose broad fronds are the pride
of heather-waste and morass. The mosses, too,
are from this vast clan of the earth-set, from
the velvet-soft edging of the oak-roots or the
wandering greenness of the swamp to the ashy
tresses which hang on spruce or hemlock or
the grey fringes of the rocks by northern
seas. And with them are the lichens, that
beautiful secret company who love the shadow-
side of trees, and make stones like flowers, and
transmute the barrenness of rock and boulder
with dyes of pale gold and blazing orange, and
umber rich as the brown hearts of tarns, and
pearl -grey delicate as a cushat's breast, and
saffron as yellow-green as the sunset-light after
the clearing of rains. To all these, indeed,
should be added the greater grasses which we

3o

know as wheat and oats, as rye and maize. The Clans
Thus do we come to 'the waving hair of the JJ the
ever- wheeling earth,' and behold the unresting
Mother as in a vision, but with the winds of
space for ever blowing her waving tresses in a
green gladness, or in a shimmer of summer-
gold, or in the bronze splendour of the
autumnal passage.

But the grasses proper, alone: the green
grass itself — what a delight to think of these,
even if the meaning of the title of this paper
be inclusive of them and them only. What
variety, here, moreover. The first spring-
grass, how welcome it is. What lovely
delicacy of green. It is difficult anywhere to
match it. Perhaps the first greening of the
sallow, that lovely hair hung over ponds and
streams or where sloping lawns catch the
wandering airs of the south : or the pale green-
flame of the awakening larch : or the tips of
bursting hawthorn in the hedgerows — perhaps,
these are nearest to it in hue. But with
noonlight it may become almost the pale-
yellow of sheltered primroses, or yellow-green
as the cowslip before its faint gold is minted,
and in the mellowing afternoon it may often
be seen as illuminated (as with hidden delicate
flame) as the pale -emerald candelabra of the
hellebore. How different is the luxuriant

3i

The Clans grass in hollows and combes and along watered
of the meadows in June, often dark as pine-green or
as sunlit jade, and in shadowy places or in
twilight sometimes as lustrously sombre-green
as the obsidian, that precious stone of the
Caucasus now no longer a rarity among us.
How swiftly, too, that changes after the heats
of midsummer, often being threaded with grey
light before the dog-days are spent. More-
over, at any season there is a difference between
down-grass and mountain-grass, between sea-
grass and valley-grass, between moor-grass and
wood-grass. It may be slight, and not in
kind but only in shadowy dissemblances of
texture and hue ; still one may note the
difference. More obvious, of course, is the
difference between, say, April -grass and the
same grass when May or June suffuses it with
the red glow of the seeding sorrel, or between
the sea-grass that has had the salt wind upon
it since its birth, the bent as it is commonly
called, and its brother among the scarps and
cliff-edges of the hills, so marvellously soft and
hairlike for all that it is not long since the
snows have lifted or since sleet and hail have
harried the worn faces of boulder and crag.
Or, again, between even the most delicate
wantonness of the seeding hay, fragrant with
white clover and purple vetch, and the light

32

aerial breathfulness, frail as thistledown, of The Clans
the quaking-grass. How it loves the wood's- °^ tne
edge, this last, or sheltered places by the rass*
hedgerows, the dream - hollows of sloping
pastures, meadow -edges where the cow-
parsley whitens like foam and the meadow-
sweet floats cream white and the white
campions hang in clotted froth over the long-
surge of daisies : or, where, like sloops of
the nautilus on tropic seas, curved blossoms
of the white wild -rose motionlessly suspend
or idly drift, hardly less frail less wantonly
errant than the white bloomy dust of the
dandelion.

Caran-cheami-air-chiith, ' little friend of the
quaking-grass,' is one of the Gaelic names of
the wagtail, perhaps given to it because of a
like tremulous movement, as though invisible
wings of gossamer shook ever in a secret wind.
Or given to it, perhaps, because of a legend
which puts the common grass, the quaking-
grass, the wagtail, the cuckoo, the aspen, and
the lichen in one traditional company. In
the Garden of Gethsemane, so runs the Gaelic
folk-tale as I heard it as a child, all Nature
suddenly knew the Sorrow of Christ. The
dew whispered it : it was communicated in
the dusk : in pale gold and shaken silver it
stole from moon and star into the green dark-

33 D

The Clans ness of cypress and cedar. The grass-blades
of the pUt all their green lips into one breath, and
sighed Peace, Brother ! Christ smiled in His
sorrow, and said, Peace to you for ever. But
here and there among the grasses, as here
and there among the trees, and as here and
there among the husht birds, were those who
doubted, saying, ' It is but a man who lies
here. His sorrow is not our sorrow.' Christ
looked at them, and they were shaken with
the grief of all grief and the sorrow of all
sorrow. And that is why to this day the
quaking-grass and the aspen are forever a-
tremble, and why the wagtail has no rest but
quivers along the earth like a dancing shadow.
But to those mosses of Gethsemane which
did not give out the sympathy of their kin
among the roots of cedar and oak, and to the
cuckoo who rang from her nest a low chime of
All's well! AlVs well! Christ's sorrowful eyes
when He rose at dawn could not be endured.
So the cuckoo rose and flew away across the
Hill of Calvary, ringing through the morning
twilight the bells of sorrow, and from that day
was homeless and without power anywhere
to make a home of her own. As for the
mosses that had refused love, they wandered
away to desolate places and hung out forlorn
flags of orange-red and pale-yellow and faded-

34

Grass.

silver along the grey encampments of the The Clans
rocks. of the

Often I have thought of this when lying in
the mountain-grass beside one of those ancient
lichened boulders which strew our hillsides.
The lichen is the least of the grasses — and let
us use the term in its poetic sense — but how
lovely a thing it is ; almost as lovely in endless
variety of form as the frost-flower. In a sense
they are strangely akin, these two ; the frost-
flower, which is the breath of Beauty itself,
lasting a briefer hour than the noontide dew,
and the moss-flower which the barren rock
sustains through all the changing seasons.

Who is that Artificer who has subtly and
diversely hidden the secret of rhythm in the
lichen of the rock and in the rock's heart
itself; in the frost-flower, so perfect in beauty
that a sunbeam breathes it away ; in the falling
star, a snowflake in the abyss, yet with the
miraculous curve in flight which the wave has
had, which the bent poplar has had, which the
rainbow has had, since the world began ? The
grey immemorial stone and the vanishing
meteor are one. Both are the offspring of
the Eternal Passion, and it may be that
between the aeon of the one and the less than
a minute of the other there shall not, in the
divine reckoning, be more than the throb of

35

The Clans a pulse. For who of us can measure even
of the Time, that the gnat measures as well as we,
Grass. Qr ^Q eagie> or t|ie ancient yew, or the moun-
tain whose granite brows are white with ages
— much less Eternity, wherein Time is but a
vanishing pulse ?

36

THE TIDES

I remember that one of the most strange and
perturbing pleasures of my childhood was in
watching, from a grassy height, the stealthy
motions of the tides. The fascination never
waned, nor has it yet waned : to-day, as then,
I know at times the old thrill, almost the old
fear, when through a white calm or up some
sea -loch I watch those dark involutions, in
sudden twists and long serpentine curves, as
the eddies of the tide force their mysterious
way. For one thing my childish imagination
was profoundly impressed by the words of an
old islander whom I had asked where the tides
came from and what they were and had they
names. We were on the steep slope of a small
grassy hill, and overlooked the eastern end of
an island where the troubled waters of a caoileas
or strait to the south met the vast placid reach
of ocean on the north. Through the lustrous
green of the Sound, fleckt with long mauve

37

The shadows or clouded here and there with great
Tides, splatches of purple-brown ; and, again, to the
left through the near calm heave of deep
water so blue that as a child I could not
understand why the shells which were washed
up from it were not blue also : to right and to
left I saw the sudden furtive motions of the
flowing tide. I had often watched the blind-
worm move thus through the coarse sea-grasses,
and again and again had seen the adder dart
through the bracken like one of those terrible
living arrows of Faerie of which I had heard :
often, too, I had followed the shadow-swift
underwave glide of the hunting seal : and once,
in a deep brown pool in Morven, when I was
looking with trembling hope for the floating
hair or dim white face of a kelpie, I had seen
an otter rise from the depths . . . rise like a
fantastic elfin face and half-human figure in a
dream . . . make a soundless sinuous plunge
and in less than a moment vanish utterly, still
without sound or the least ruffling of the brown
depths. So, it was natural that I should
associate those mysterious gliding things of
the sea with these sinuous things of the grass
and heather and the shadowy pool. They,
too, I thought, were furtive and sinister.
There was something as of the same evil
enchantment in their abrupt and inexplicable

38

appearing and in their soundless departures. The
Thus it was I felt no surprise when my old Tides,
island-friend Sheumais remarked to me :
"They are creatures of the sea."
" What are they, Sheumais ? " I urged ; " are
they great eels, or adders, or what ? Can they
put death on a swimmer ? Have you ever
caught one ? Have "

"Ay, for sure they might put death on a
swimmer : and by the same token I will be
remembering that Ruaridh Stewart, the Appin
poet, has a rann about them as the Hounds of
the Sea."

" And have they names ? "

"For sure, that : Luath (Swift) and Grorm-
Dhu (Blue-Black), Luath-Donn (Fleet-brown-
one) and Braco (Speckled), Run-fo-tuinne
(Underwave Secret) and Cu-Bhais (Hound of
Death), and others that I will be forgetting."

"But, Sheumais," I persisted, "are they
male-seafolk and women-seafolk like the seals,
and have they little ones, and where do they
go, and where do the big tides come from ? "

" Well, well, I will not be knowing that,
though, for sure, it is likely. But as to where
they come from, and where they go, there will
be none in all the world who can tell that ; no,
not one. They will be just like the wind, that
no one knows the road of, behind or before.

39

The Ay, the sea's just like the grey road : the green
Tides. roaci an' the grey road, they show no tracks.
The wind an' the tides, they just come an
they just go. 'Blind as the wind,' 'blind as
the tide ... ay, it may be ; but not so blind
as we are, for they know their way, an'
brightest noon an' darkest night, an' summer
an' winter, an' calm an' storm, are one an' the
same to them."

It is long ago now since I heard these words
from old Sheumais Macleod, but I am certain
(so deeply did they impress my childish
imagination, and sink into a child's mind) that
I repeat them almost exactly. I had no
hesitation in believing in Gorm-Dhu and
Luath-Donn, and the rest, and took these
names to be real names of actual creatures, as
JDaoine- Vhara (folk of the sea) for seals, or as
piocach for the brown saithe I was wont to
watch swimming amid the fronds of the
seaweed, or as sgadan for the flashing herring
whose shoals so often made a dazzle in the
offing beyond the strait, and whose radiant
scales glorified as with gems the nets hauled
up in the moonshine or in the pale rose and
cowslip-yellow of August dawns.

And, in truth, I am not much the wiser
now. There is no great gain in wisdom in the
knowledge that the tides are not mysterious

40

creatures of the deep, and are nameless as the The
winds, as homeless as they, as silent, furtive, Tides,
as formless, as incalculable almost, as variable.
The old islander knew how to turn into service
their comings and goings, how to meet them
when friendly, how to evade them when hostile,
how to wonder continually at their strange
beauty, how to reverence the terrible order of
their rhythmic flow and ebb. What matter if,
also, his old-world Gaelic imagination imaged
to him these dark forces of the sea as living
creatures ; not of flesh and blood as the slim
brown seals who, too, can glide not less swiftly
and secretly through dusky green water-ways ;
not even of such consistency as the tide-wrack
floating on the wave, or the dim, wandering
medusse which drift like pale, quenchless fires
in the untroubled stillness of the twilit under-
world ; but at least of the company of
lightning, of fire, of the wind, of dew, of
shadow . . . creatures without form as we
know form, but animate with a terrible and
mysterious life of their own — a secret brother-
hood among the visible and invisible clans of
the world. What matter if, remembering songs
and old tales and incalculable traditions, he
thought of them with names, as the 'fleet-
brown-one,' as 'swift-darkness,' as 'the dark-
courser,' as 'the untameable,' as 'the hound

4i

The of death ' ? These tell us neither more nor
Tides. iess (to many of us more, not less) than the
abstruse algebraical formulas of Newton and
Laplace. The imagination does not move like
flame among intricate calculations, though the
mind may be compelled and convinced ; and
some of us at least would learn more of the
tides and their occult nature and laws from an
old islesman telling of lionadh and sruth-mara
than from the bewildering maze of the five-
and-fifty columns which the Encyclopaedia
Britannica devotes to the subject.

Everywhere this tidal mystery, this beauty
of flood and ebb, is to be seen . . . along what-
ever coasts sea-waters move or wherever they
penetrate. The 'tideless Mediterranean' is
but a phrase. Even along the shores of Malta
and Sicily there is a perceptible rise and fall,
and at a thousand points between Marseilles
or Tangier and Venice or Cape Matapan the
tidal movement is as mysterious and impressive
as among the shoals of Ushant or in the Norsk
fjords. There are few places where the
trained eye could not perceive a difference of
rise or fall. I recollect being shown a spot on
the Argive coast of the Peloponnesus where,
it was said, the tidal difference was non-
existent. On that very day, a day of windless
calm, I noticed a fall of over a foot in depth.

42

Dark, steep rocks shelved to deep waters, and The
to all ordinary appearance there was nothing Tides-
to indicate the slightest variance between flow
and ebb. Even a Morean Greek declared
'there is no flood, no ebb, here.'

But, in our own home - waters, what
marvellous changes take place under the
strong continuous pull of the lunar reins.
Think of wind and flood-tide on the Channel
coasts, with the strange sound as of a mur-
murous host confusedly marching : think of
the daily two-fold flooding of estuaries, and
the sinuous invasion of the sea past curving
banks and among remote inland meadows.
Are rivers not enhanced in mystery when
through the downward flow a salt serpentine
envoy from the distant sea forces its way,
revealing itself in circuitous eddies, in dark
revolving rings, in troubled surface - seethe :
bringing to the flags and rushes, to the leaning
grasses and gold kingcup and purple mallow
that salt lip, which a score or half-score miles
away had been laid on the sea-grapes of the
bladder-wrack, or on the slow-involving tresses
of the twisting long-weed. Then there is that
miraculous halt, when the cold hand of the
tide can reach no farther : when at a boat's
helm a curl of dark brackish water will
indolently lapse, while at the prow the clear-

43

The brown rippling rush will be fresh with gathered
Tides. rajns and dews and the unsullied issues of
wellsprings and sunlit sources.

The tide-flow may be more beautiful and
obvious seen from the high shores of certain
estuaries, as, say, from the Falmouth uplands,
or from the hillsides of our narrow Highland
sea-lochs, but the mind is deeplier impressed
and the imagination compelled by the more
obscure, menacing, and almost terrifying swift
arrivals along vast shallow estuaries, such as
The Wash or the inner reaches of Solway
Firth or by the Sands o' Dee. With what
abrupt turbulence the calms are violated, with
what a gathering sound the invisible host is
marshalled, with what impetuous surge the
immeasurable sortie advances ! Of a sudden
those little shallows in the sands, those little
weed-hung pools below slippery rocks covered
with mussel and dog-whelk, shiver. A faint
undulation thrills the still small world. A
shrimp darts from a sand-mound : a blood-red
anemone thrusts out feathered antennse : now
one, now another shell-fish stirs, lifts, gapes.
It is the response of the obscure, the in-
significant, and the silent, to that mighty
incalculable force which is hastening from the
fathomless depths and across countless leagues
of the great Sea. Soon the flood will come :

44

perhaps in furtive swiftness and silence, perhaps The
with a confused multitudinous noise among Tides,
which are inchoate cries and fragmentary
bewildering echoes of muffled songs and
chants, perhaps as in charging hordes of wild
sea-horses where the riders are not seen in the
dazzle of spray nor their shouting heard in the
tumult of wave dashed against wave and
billow hurled on billow.

To be in some such place . . . say, again,
where the Breton tide races against the flank
of Normandy and in a few minutes isolates
Mont St. Michel from the mainland ; or where
the Northumbrian flood pours across the
narrow sands of Lindisfarne ; or, more than
everywhere else I think, where the fierce
Atlantic tides leap with bewildering surge and
clamour across the vast sea-gates of Uist and
rush like a cataract into the Hebrid Sea . . .
to be in some such place and at the first
mysterious signals of the oncoming flood, by
night, is to meet the unforgettable, and, as
Blake says, to be at one with the eternal
mystery.

Flow and ebb, ebb and flow ... it is that
ancient inexplicable mystery, the everlasting
and unchanging rhythm which holds star to
star in infinite procession, which lifts and
lowers the poles of our sun -wheeling world,

45

The which compels the great oceans to arise and
Tides. f0uow the mysterious bidding of the moon.
It is wonderful that the moon travels along
the equator at the rate of a thousand miles an
hour : but more wonderful that these loose,
formless, blind and insensate waters should
awake at the touch of that pale hand, should
move to it and follow it as the flocks of the
hills to the voice of the shepherd.

Flow and ebb, ebb and flow ... it is the
utterance of the divine law, the eternal word
of Order. It is life itself. What life is there,
from the phosphorescent atom in the running
wave to the enfranchised soul stepping west-
ward beyond the twilights of time, that is not
subject to this ineffable rhythmic law. The
tides of the world, the tides of life : the grey
sap, the red blood, the secret dews, the tame-
less seas, birth and death, the noons and
midnights of the mind of man, the evening
dusk and the morning glory of the soul . . .
one and all move inevitably, and in one way :
in one way come, and go, and come again.

" Mar a bha, " As it tvas,
Mar a tha, As it is,

Mar a bhitkeas As it shall be

Gu brath Evermore

Ri tragadh, With the ebb,

'S ri Honadk." With the flow.

46

THE HILL-TARN

Isolated, in one of the wildest and loneliest
mountain-regions of the Highlands of Ross, I
know a hill-tarn so rarely visited that one
might almost say the shadow of man does not
fall across its brown water from year's end to
year's end. It lies on the summit of a vast
barren hill, its cradle being the hollow of a
crater. Seven mountains encircle Maoldhu
from north, south, east, and west. One of
these is split like a hayfork, and that is why
it is called in Gaelic the Prong of Fionn.
Another, whose furrowed brows are dark with
the immemorial rheum of the Atlantic, is called
the Organ of Oisin, because at a height of about
two thousand feet it shows on its haggard
front a black colonnade of basalt, where all the
winds of the west make a wild and desolate
music. I have heard its lamentation falling
across the hill-solitudes and down through the
mountain-glens with a sound as of a myriad

47

The confused sobs and cries, a sound that is now

Hill-Tarn. a forlorn ecstasy and now the voice of the
abyss and of immeasurable desolation. Another,
that on the east, is an unscalable cone, from
whose crest, when sunrise flames the serrated
crags into a crown of burning bronze, the
golden eagle sways like a slow-rising and slow-
falling meteor. All day, save for a brief hour
at noon, shadow dwells about its knees, and
never lifts from the dark grassy lochan at its
feet. It is called Maol Athair-Uaibhreach, the
Hill of the Haughty Father : I know not why.
4 The Haughty Father' is a Gaelic analogue
for the Prince of Darkness — son of Saturn,
as he is called in an old poem : ' God's Elder
Brother,' as he is named in a legend that I
have met or heard of once only — a legend
that He was God of this world before * Mac
Greinne ' (lit. : Son of the Sun) triumphed
over him, and drove him out of the East and
out of the South, leaving him only in the
West and in the North two ancient forgotten
cities of the moon, that in the West below the
thunder of grey seas and that in the North
under the last shaken auroras of the Pole.

It is not easy to reach this tarn of Maoldhu
even when the hillways are known. The
mountain-flanks have so vast a sweep, with
such wide tracts of barren declivity, where the

48

loose stones and boulders seem to hang in the The
air like a grey suspended fruit though the first Hill-Tarn,
tempest will set them rolling in avalanche ;
there are so many hidden ravines, and sudden
precipices that lean beneath tangled brows like
smooth appalling faces ; on the eastern slopes
the mountain-sheep cannot climb more than
halfway ; on the south and west the wailing
curlews are in continual flight above wide
unfrontiered reaches of peat-bog and quaking
morass ; so many crags lead abruptly to long-
shelving ledges shelterless and slippery as ice,
and twice an abyss of a thousand feet falls
sheer from loose rock covered by treacherous
heather for a yard or more beyond the last
gnarled, twisted roots.

But, when it is once reached, is there any
solitude in the world more solitary than here.
The tarn, or lochan rather — for if it is not
wide enough to be called a loch it is larger
than the ordinary tarn one is familiar with on
high moorlands and among the hills — has no
outlook save to the lonely reach of sky just
above it. A serrated crest of herbless and
lifeless precipice circles it. On the lower
slopes a rough grass grows, and here and there
a little bog-myrtle may be seen. At one end
a small dishevelled array of reed disputes the
water-edge, in thin, straggling, disconsolate

49 e

The lines. There is nothing else. Sometimes the

Hill-Tarn, ptarmigan will whirr across it, though they do
not love crossing water. Sometimes the
shadow of an eagle's wing darkens the already
obscure depths. But the mountain -sheep
never reach this height, and even the red deer
do not come here to drink these still, brown
waters : ' One sees no antlers where the
heather ceases,' as the shepherds say. The
clouds rise above the crests of the west and
pass beyond the crests of the east : snow, the
steel-blue sleet, the grey rains, sweep past
overhead. In summer, a vast cumulus will
sometimes for hours overlean the barren crater
and fill the tarn with a snowy wonderland and
soft abysses of rose and violet : sometimes a
deep, cloudless azure will transmute it to a
still flame of unruffled, shadowless blue. At
night, when it is not a pit of darkness to which
the upper darkness is twilight, it will hold
many stars. For three hours Arcturus will
pulsate in it like a white flame. Other planets
will rise, and other stars. Their silver feet
tread the depths in silence. Sometimes the
moon thrusts long yellow lances down into its
brooding heart, or will lie on its breast like the
curled horn of the honeysuckle, or, in autumn,
like a floating shell filled with fires of
phosphorescence. Sunset never burns there,

50

though sometimes the flush of the afterglow The
descends as on soft impalpable wings from the Hill-Tarn,
zenith. At dawn, in midsummer, long scarlet
lines will drift from its midmost to the south
and west, like blood-stained shafts and battle-
spears of a defeated aerial host.

Few sounds are heard by that mountain-
tarn. The travelling cloud lets fall no echo
of its fierce frost-crashing shards. Dawn and
noon and dusk are quiet-footed as mist. The
stars march in silence. The springing Northern
Lights dance in swift fantastic flame, but are
voiceless as the leaping shadows in a wood.
Only those other wayfarers of the mountain-
summit, tempest, thunder, the streaming wind,
the snow coming with muffled rush out of the
north, wild rains and whirling sleet, the sharp
crackling tread of the hosts of frost : only
these break the silence ; or, at times, the cries
of 'the eldest children of the hill5 as the
mountain- Gael calls the eagle, the hill-fox, and
the ptarmigan — the only creatures that have
their home above the reach of the heatner and
in the grey stony wildernesses where only the
speckled moss and the lichen thrive.

When I was last at this desolate and remote
tarn I realised the truth of that hill -saying.
After the farthest oaks on Sliabh Gorm, as
the ridge to the south-west is called and up

5i

The which alone is a practicable if rough and often

Hill-Tarn, broken way, came scattered groups and then
isolated trees of birch and mountain -ash.
Thereafter for a long way the heather climbed.
Then it gave way more and more to bracken.
In turn the bracken broke like the last faint
surf against huge boulders and waste stony
places. The grouse called far below. The
last deer were browsing along their extreme
pastures, some five hundred to eight hundred
feet below the precipitous bastions of Maoldhu.
Higher than they I saw a circling hawk and
three ravens flying slowly against the wind.
Then came the unpeopled wilderness, or so it
seemed till I heard the wail of a solitary curlew
(that spirit of the waste, for whom no boggy
moors lie too low and desolate, for whom no
mountain -ranges are too high and wild and
solitary), and once, twice, and again in harsh
response but faint against the wind, the barking
of a hill-fox and its mate. All life had ceased,
I thought, after that, save an eagle which in
a tireless monotony swung round and round
the vast summit of Maoldhu. But suddenly,
perhaps a hundred feet above me, six or seven
ptarmigan rose with a whirr, made a long
sailing sweep, and settled (slidingly and gradu-
ally as flounders in shallow waters among grey
pebbles and obscuring sand-furrows) among the

52

lichened boulders and loose disarray of speckled The
granite and dark and grey basalt and trap — an Hill-Tarn,
ideal cover, for even a keen following gaze
could not discern the living from the inanimate.

Truly the eagle, the hill-fox, and the ptar-
migan are Hhe eldest children of the hill.'
The stag may climb thus high too at times,
for outlook, or for the intoxication of desola-
tion and of illimitable vastness ; sometimes the
hawks soar over the wilderness ; even the
mountain -hares sometimes reach and race
desperately across these high arid wastes. But
these all come as men in forlorn and lonely
lands climb the grey uninhabitable mountains
beyond them, seeking to know that which they
cannot see beneath, seeking often for they know
not what. They are not dwellers there. The
stag, that mountain-lover, cannot inhabit waste
rock ; the red grouse would perish where the
ptarmigan thrives and is content.

How little has been written about these
birds of the mountain-brow. What poetry is
in their name, for those who know the hills.
They dwell higher than the highest June-flight
of the tireless swift, higher than the last reaches
of the sunrise -leaping larks. Cities might
crumble away in pale clouds of dust, floods
might whelm every lowland, great fires might
devour the forests and the red insatiable myriad

53

The of flame lap up the last high frontiers of bracken

Hill-Tarn. anj climbing heather, and the ptarmigan would
know nothing of it, would not care. Their
grey home would be inviolate. No tempest
can drive them forth. Even the dense snows
of January do not starve them out. Do they
not mock them by then taking the whiteness
of the snow for their own ? They have nothing
to fear save the coming of a black frost so
prolonged and deathly that even the sunfire in
the eagle's blood grows chill, and the great
pinions dare no more face the icy polar breath.
'They'll be the last things alive when the
world is cold,' said an old gillie to me, speaking
of these storm -swept lichen -fed children of
the upper-wild.

The same old gillie once saw a strange sight
at my mountain-tarn. He had when a youth
climbed Maoldhu to its summit in midwinter,
because of a challenge that he could not do
what no other had ever done at that season.
He started before dawn, but did not reach the
lochan till a red fire of sunset flared along the
crests. The tarn was frozen deep, and for all
the pale light that dwelled upon it was black
as basalt, for a noon -tempest had swept its
surface clear of snow. At first he thought
small motionless icebergs lay in it, but
wondered at their symmetrical circle. He

54

descended as far as he dared, and saw that The

seven wild-swans were frozen on the tarn's face. Hill-Tarn.

They had alit there to rest, no doubt : but a

fierce cold had numbed them, and an intense

frost of death had suddenly transfixed each as

they swam slowly circlewise as is their wont.

They may have been there for days, perhaps

for weeks. A month later the gillie repeated

his arduous and dangerous feat. They were

still there, motionless, ready for flight as it

seemed.

How often in thought I have seen that
coronal of white swans above the dark face of
that far, solitary tarn : in how many dreams I
have listened to the rustle of unloosening
wings, and seen seven white phantoms rise
cloud-like, and like clouds at night drift swiftly
into the dark ; and heard, as mournful bells
through the solitudes of sleep, the honk-honk
of the wild -swans traversing the obscure
forgotten ways to the secret country beyond
sleep and dreams and silence.

55

AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR

When one hears of 'the dead months/ of
'dead December' and 'bleak January,' the
best corrective is to be found in the coppice
or by the stream-side, by the field-thicket, in
the glens, and even on the wide moors if the
snow is not everywhere fallen, a coverlet so
dense and wide that even the juniper has not
a green spike to show, or the dauntless bunting
a clean whin -branch to call from on the
broomieknowe. Even the common sayings
reveal a knowledge hidden from those to whom
winter is ' a dead season . . . and it is a
continual surprise to find how many people
believe that from the fall of the leaf or the
first sleet and snow, till the thrush doubles and
trebles his note in the February wet-shine,
that bird and insect and all green life have
gone, that all Nature is dead or asleep. Thus,
for example, 'as keen in the hearing as a
winter-plover ' must have been uttered, when

56

first said, by a watcher of the multiform bird- At the
life of our winter-fields and fallow lands, one Turn of
who knew that the same drama of life and
death is enacted in midwinter as in midspring
or midsummer, a drama only less crowded,
less complex and less obvious, but not less
continual, not less vital for the actors. Who
that has watched the pee-wits seeking worms
on ploughed lands at midwinter, and seen
them poise their delicate heads and listen for
the phantom rustle of a worm in this clod or
under yonder fallow, while the greedy but
incapable seamews, inland come from frost-
bound coasts or on the front of prolonged
gales, hear nothing of 'the red people' and
trust only to bulk and fierce beak to snatch
the prey from hungry plover-bills . . . who
that has seen this can fail to recognise the
aptness of the saying, 'as keen in the hearing
as a winter-plover ' ? Who that has watched
the ebb and flow of lark-life, resident and
immigrant ; the troubled winter-days of the
field-travellers (as the familiar word ' fieldfare '
means) and the wandering thrushes ; the
vagrant rooks, the barn-haunting hoodie ; the
yellow-hammer flocks and the tribes of the
finch ; the ample riverside life, where heron
and snipe, mallard and moor-hen, wren and
kingfisher, and even plover and the everywhere

57

the Year.

At the adaptable starling are to be found with ease
Turn of by quick eyes and careful ears : who that has
seen the sudden apparition of the bat, or the
columnar dance of the ephemeridae, or the
flight of the winter-moth along the dishevelled
hedgerows : or who that, besides the mistletoe
and the ivy, the holly and the fir, the box and
the late-flowering clematis, and many other of
the green and flowering clans of the forest and
the garden, has noted the midwinter-blooming
shepherd's purse, healing groundsel, bright
chickweed, and red deadnettle, can think of
nature as lifeless at this season ? When amid
the rains and storms of December an old
gardener, instead of saying that spring was on
the move, remarked to me that ''Twill be
starling days soon,' he gave voice to a truth
of observation as impressive as it is beautiful.
For often December has not lapsed before the
mysterious breeding-change of the Vita Nuova,
the New Life that spreads like a flowing wave
so early in the coming year will begin to be
obvious on the dun-hued lapwing, on the
inland-wandering gull, and even on one or
other of the small ' clan of the bushes ' more
dear and familar to us. On none, however, is
the change so marked as on the blithe starling,
surely the bird of cheerfulness, for he will sing
(does he ever cease that ever-varying call or

58

flute or whistle of his ?) when the lark cannot At the

rise in the polar air. when the missel-thrush Turn of

• the Year
will not throw a challenge on the wet wind,

and long before the most jubilant great-tit in
the forest will ring his early tinkling bell under
leafless boughs. For, even at Christmastide,
though rarely perhaps quite so early, the dark
bill will suddenly yellow, and a green and
purple sheen will come over the russet
plumage. Already Nature has looked north-
ward again. And, when she looks, there is at
once a first movement of the infinite sweet
trouble of the New Life once more. The
Creative Spirit is come again from the sun-
ways of the South. ' 'Twill be starling days
soon' — what is that but a homely way of
saying that the old year has not lapsed before
the new year has already stirred with the
divine throes of rebirth. * The King is dead :
Long live the King ! ' is the human analogue.
There is no interregnum. The cuckoo may
have fled before the swallow, the landrail
before the wild swan, but during the grey ebb
of autumn ten thousand wings have rustled
in the dawn as the migrants from oversea
descend at last on our English and Scottish
shores. A myriad host may have fled at the
equinox, or lingered till the wet winds of the
west and the freezing blasts of the north swept

59

At the them from November ; but on those east

Turn of winds from Norway and the Baltic, from
the Year

' Jutland and Friesland, on those south winds

leaping upward from the marshes of Picardy
and the Breton heathlands and from all of the
swarm-delivering South behind, on those south-
west gales warm with the soft air of the isles
of the west, and wet with the foam over lost
Ys and sunken Lyonesse, what an incalculable
host has come hither ward. Like great fans,
the invisible pinions of the Bird-God, that
Winged Spirit whom a Finnish legend images
in continual suspense at the Crossways of the
Four Winds, beat this way and that : so that
when already the lament of the wild-geese in
storm -baffled flight from the South ulules in
our norland dawns, clouds of larks are gathered
like dust from the North- Sea lands, and are
blown upon our shores, a multitude of thrush
turn westward, the rook and the hoodie rise
on the Danish wind, and yonder shadow drift-
ing over the woods of Norway is none other
than ten thousand fieldfares whose congrega-
tion will soon be spilt like rain upon our fields
and pastures.

When is the turn of the year ? We have
certainly not to wait till the missel-thrush calls
down the wind on the moist south-wester that
comes in February. The changing seasons are

60

indifferent to our calendars. Autumn may At the
burn the lime and chestnut while Summer is T^y^
still in her glory ; Summer may steal back
upon us through the September haze, or even
after we have heard the dry rustle in the
woods of October. We are familiar with the
return of halcyon days when St. Luke's Peace
follows the wind Euroclydon, or when St.
Martin's summer gleams like a quiet sunset
on the stormy brows of Winter. In mid-
December the gnat may still be seen spinning
her dance by the hedgerow, the warmth-loving
bat may still wheel through silent afternoon
dusks, the robin will pitch his blithe song
from holly to holly, the hedgesparrow will
chase the winter moth, the chaffinch will
challenge the marauding tit. In January,
when the snow-lids open and the blue is seen,
a lark will spray his sudden music from far
up in the pale azure, and as the long notes
tinkle and the interwoven song falls down the
blue invisible ways, we almost imagine that
sky-glimpse to be the very face of spring.

Thus we have to wait for no day on which
to note from the calendar that the New Year
is come, or on which to exclaim that Winter
is gone and Spring has arrived. A day may
come, in February, perhaps, when, suddenly,
one will realise, as after sleep one realises one

61

the Year.

At the is awake, that the hands of the South are in
Turn^of the woods, that the eyes of the South are
looking into the white sleep of blossom and
flower, that the breath of the South has
awakened love, has stirred music in the hearts
of all the clans of song. But if we had not
ourselves been asleep we should not have
waited thus long for the exquisite surprise.
We should have known the divine conspiracy
by which the North and South are lovers, and
the West comrade to the East. The con-
spiracy of the eternal passion by which power
desires power, and dominion lusteth after
dominion : so that all the effort of the North
is to touch the lips of the South, all the dream
of the East is to reach the sunset-gardens of
the West. We should have known, when
out of December frost or January snow the
redbreast thrilled a canticle of joy, or the russet
moth sought his wingless love in windless
flame -set twilights, that the Grey Lover
already felt the breath from those ardent lips.
We should have realised that when across the
snow -silence the fieldfares no longer edged
southward, that when on the upland-pasture
the lapwing began his bridal change and in
the bare orchard the starling began to glisten
as though he had bathed at the edge of the
rainbow, or to wonder, in some ice-set mirror,

62

at his dun beak now grown yellow as the At the

sheltered crocus he knows of under the garden- Tui*n of

the Year
yew ... we should have realised that while

this dark -browed barbarian from the North
slept, the fair woman of the South had passed
smiling by, and kissed him as she passed.

The breeding -change that may be seen
even before Christmas, the January stir that
becomes so obvious a week or so, or any day,
after the New Year is come, here and now we
are at the turn of the year. By mid-January,
even, here and there, the song-thrush and the
missel may have begun to build, and even the
great-tit's bell may tinkle in the coppice or
wind -spared russet oak -glade. Already the
snowdrop and the Christmas-rose, the green-
white aconite and the pale winter- iris are
become old acquaintances : many a primrose
may have adventured in shy retreats : any
day a wandering minstrel will spill a tinkle of
music from among the first yellow spray of
hazel catkins, the hedgesparrow may unloosen
song under the early-opening woodbine-buds,
the corn-bunting may crack his fairy-hammer
or the wren try his new-year flute among the
yellowing gorse : any day, at the sight of the
first nomad daisies or the first gay vagrant
dandelion, the yellow-hammer may become a
lover and a poet. It is this unchanging 'any-

63

At the day ' element that redeems even the longest

Turn of and dreariest midwinter ; the sense of the

the Year. ever-moving ichor in the eternal veins ; the

inward exultation at the ever-quickening and

ever -slowing, but never-ceasing fans of life

and death.

Yesterday, rain - fog ; to - day, frost - mist.
But how fascinating each. How vast and
menacing the familiar oaks looked, leaning
gigantic over dim lapsing hedgerows. How
phantom-like and processional, the elms steal-
ing into view one after the other ; the birches
disclosing tresses wet with dews from the
secret woods they are gliding from to regain
the secret lands beyond the misty river where
I can hear the mallard call, like a sudden
tocsin among the falling towers and silent
avalanches of Cloudland.

It is desolate here, where I stand.

" Cinnidh feanntag 's a ghdradh
'N uair thig faillinn 'san rds''

" Nettles grow in the garden,
While the roses decay."

A long way off yet till the wood-thrush rings
his falling chime from the April-Tree or French-
Broom, as the laburnum is called in some parts
of the Highlands. I know a wood where a
great Bealaidh Fhrangach sleeps, to awake

64

months hence in sun-gold beauty. The wood- At the

thrush will be its flute. Already I have to- Turn of

the Year
day cut a slip from a garden-laburnum, for a

friend who wants 'a flute of the April-Tree'
(feadan na Craobh Abraon) . . . for there is
no timber better for the whistle wood of the
bagpipe than this. And what more fit for
the Strayed Pan, if perchance he follow the
Phantom Call in the Hills of the North ? But
see . . . the mist has gone like a haze from
blue water. I hear starling-music over yonder
in the Talamh nan Ramh, as Ossian calls the
Country of the Woods. The Flute of the April-
Tree, and snow at my feet ! • The Flute of
the April- Tree ' : it has the yellow and white
magic of spring in it.

65

THE SONS OF THE NORTH WIND

Down thro1 the Northlands
Come the White Brothers,
One clad in foam
And one mailed in water —
Foam white as bear-felt,
Water like coat of mail.
Snow is the Song of Me,
Singeth the one ;
Silence the Breath of Me,
Whispers the other.

So sings a Swedish poet, a lineal descendant
of one of the Saga-men whose songs the vikings
carried to the ends of the world of that day.
The song is called ' The Sons of the North
Wind,' and the allusion is to an old ballad-saga
common in one form or another throughout
all the countries of both the Gall and the Gael
. . . from Finland to the last of the island-
kingdoms between Ultima Thule and the Gaelic
West. The White Brothers are familiar indeed,
though with us they come oftener clothed with
beauty than with terror, with strange and

66

beautiful new life rather than with the solemnity The Sons
and dread aspect of death. °J tnel

Among the Gaelic hills we have a prose ^ind
variant of 'The Sons of the North Wind,'
which I suppose is still told to children by the
hreglow on winter evenings, as, when a child,
the present writer was told it and retold it by
the fireglow on many a winter evening when
the crackling fall of icicles from fir-sprays near
the window could be heard, or the sudden
shuffle of snow in the declivities of the steep
glen hard-by. The story is generally told as a
tale, but sometimes the teller chants it as a
duan or poem. For it is more a poem than a
prose narrative on the lips of Gaelic speakers.

The North Wind had three sons. These
Sons of the North Wind were called White-
Feet and White- Wings and White-Hands.
When White-Feet and White- Wings and
White -Hands first came into our world from
the invisible palaces, they were so beautiful
that many mortals died from beholding them,
while others dared not look, but fled affrighted
into woods or obscure places. So when these
three sons of the Great Chieftain saw that they
were too radiant for the eyes of the earth-bound
they receded beyond the gates of the sunset,
and took counsel with the Allfather. When,
through the gates of dawn, they came again

67

The Sons they were no longer visible to men, nor, in all
of the the long grey reaches of the years, has any since
W'd been seen of mortal eyes. How are they
known, these Sons of the North Wind ? They
were known of old, they are known still, only
by the white feet of one treading the waves of
the sea ; and by the white rustle and sheen of
a myriad tiny plumes as the other unfolds great
pinions above hills and valleys, woodlands and
garths, and the homes of men ; and by the white
silence of dream that the third lays upon
moving waters, and the windless boughs of
trees, upon the reed by the silent loch, upon
the grass by the silent tarn, upon the bracken
by the unfailing hill-stream hanging like a scarf
among; the rock and mountain-ash. We know
them no more by their ancient names or in
their immortal body, but only thus by the
radiance of their passing, and we call them the
Polar Wind, and Snow, and Ice.

It is at this season, in all northern lands, that
the miracle of the snow-change, the new beauty
of the snow- world, is transcendent. Truly, it is
miraculous, that change : that new world, what
a revelation it is, showing us the familiar as we
have never known it or have of it but a dream-
like remembrance, showing it to us at times as
we can hardly conceive it. To the continual
element of surprise much has to be attributed,

68

in our country at least. In lands like Scandi- The Sons
navia and Russia the periodicity and uniformity °f tne
of the snow-raiment of earth take much from yj^d
this element of surprise. Hardly have the
inhabitants grown used to the greenness of
grass and sprouting grain and fluttering leaf,
after the long months of a silent whiteness
become dreadful as a shroud, when a grey pall
is spun out of the east once more and out of
the north comes the wind of death, and the
leaf is gone away on the polar air, the grain is
gathered or withered, the sere grass fades like
wintry grey-green seas fading into continual
foam.

Not so with us, who have those visitors, who
can be so dread even here, for so short a time.
The dark sword-thrust of the ice, compelling
moving waters to silence and the blue rigour
of steel, may reign for weeks in the Anglian
fen-lands. Dense mantles of snow may cover
the hills of the north for months, and the
foreheads of Nevis and Schiehallion be white
from the autumnal equinox till cuckoo -cry :
for weeks the hill-fox and the mountain-hare
may not drink at the frozen tarns, the moor-
pastures may be lost to deer and sheep, and
only the ptarmigan survive in the waste white
places : for a week or two the boughs of the
oak and chestnut, the plumes of the spruce

69

The Sons and hemlock, the tresses of the larch and birch,
of the may bend with the unmelting snowfall. But,

Wind a^ ^ne wors^ ** *s never l°ng before a wind out
of the south, or from the wet mouth of the
west, breathes upon the fens, and the silence
is become a faint stir, a whisper, a rustle ; till
the moveless steel is become a film, to be
gathered some noon, like May-dew from the
thickets, the autumn-frost from the whin and
gorse. It is never long till the meh-ing of the
sheep is again a sweet lamentation upon the
hill-pastures, or till the fox dusts the last snow
from his root-roof in the wintry glen, or till the
jay screams in the woodlands as from fir-plume
and oak-bough slip or fall with heavy thump
their unloosened burthens. True, the Sons of
the North Wind, as in the Highland West and
North we know so well and often to such bitter
cost, may come to us with suddenness of
tempest, raging in their mysterious wrath, and
may long endure, trampling upon life, as, in
the old legend, the gigantic phantom-men of
the Northern Lights trample the souls of the
dead condemned to Ifurin, the Gaelic hell.
Every year there is sorrow upon some strath,
grief in the glens, lamentation by hillside and
moor. From the Ord of Sutherland to Land's
End there may be a tale of disaster. Snow-
drift, snow-storm, snow -fog may paralyse

70

communications and bring deep anxiety or The Sons
irremediable grief to an incalculable number, of the
Yet, we must admit that even our severest sjj[n(*
winter is but a fierce reminder of times lonxr
past for us, the times of the mail-coach, the
rude cart, the mountain-pony, that the worst
we ever have is tolerable beside the bleak
wretchedness of Pomerania, the frightful cold
of Esthonia, the death-in-life of Muscovy — to
say nothing of lands still more wild and remote.
One cannot say, here is snow at its loveliest,
here is ice in a unique beauty. Frozen lochs
by moonlight, frozen fens under the pale azure
of cloudless noons, dark winding rivers, lifeless
seemingly in the grip of frost, traversed by
star shine under overhanging boughs, lagoons
where the dark-blue or steel-blue ice mirrors
the drifting cloud or the flying skater, village-
ponds, canals, the water-ways of towns and
cities, in all, in each, the radiant miracle is
evident. Like moonshine, this beauty of ice
or snow may be omnipresent. If it inhabits
the wilderness, it is fulfilled also in the streets
of cities. Who has not looked out on the
sordid thoroughfares of a town, and seen the
poor ignoble disarray of chimney-tops and slated
roofs and crude angles and ornamentations
take on a new and entrancing aspect, so that
even the untidy shops and tawdry dwellings

7i

The Sons assume a crown of loveliness, and the long,
of the dui^ perspectives of monotonous roads might
Wind ^e the trampled avenues about the gates of
fairyland ? The most sordid hamlet in the
dreariest manufacturing-region may, suddenly,
awake to a dawn so wonderful in what it
reveals that the villagers might well believe, as
in the old folk-tale, that Christ had passed that
way in the night and left the world white and
husht, stainlessly pure. But, of course, we
have each of us our preferences. Some love
best to see the long swelling reaches of ploughed
lands covered with new fallen snow not too
heavy to hide the wave-like procession of the
hidden furrows. Some love best to look on
wide interminable wolds, a solitude of unbroken
whiteness, without even the shadow of a cloud
or the half-light of a grey sky : some, upon
familiar pastures now changed as though in
the night the fields had receded into the earth
and the fields of another world had silently
sunk into their place : some, upon mountain-
slopes, on whose vast walls the shadows of
wheeling hawks and curlews pass like pale blue
scimetars : some, on woodlands, where from
the topmost elm-bough to the lowest fir-plume
or outspread bough of cedar the immaculate
soft burthens miraculously suspend. For
myself — after the supreme loveliness of snowy

72

mountain-ranges at dawn or sunset or moon- The Sons
glow — I am most entranced by snow in a pine- °f tne
forest. The more so if, as in one my mind ^yjncj
recreates for me as I write, there are glades
where I can come to a rock whence an over-
leaning white hill may be seen as though falling
out of heaven, with white mountains beyond,
white shoulders lapsing on white shoulders,
white peaks rising beyond white peaks, white
crests fading into further snowy crests, and,
nearer, it may be, glens sinking into glens, no
longer a sombre green, but as though stilled
avalanches awaiting a magician's unloosening
spell. Once, just there, in just such a place, I
saw a wonderful sight. The January frosts
had gone, and February had come in with the
soft sighing of a wind out of the south. The
snows faded like morning -mists. But after
three days the north wind came again in the
night. At dawn it veered, and a light snow
fell once more, then thick and moist and flaky,
and by noon had changed to rain. But an
hour or so later the polar breath once more
came over the brows of the hills, and with
midwinter intensity. The rain was frozen on
every bough, on every branch, on every spray,
on every twig, on every leaf, on every frond of
bracken, on every spire of reed, on every blade
of grass. The world had become cased in

73

Wind.

The Sons shining ice, crystalline, exquisite in radiant
of the beauty, ineffable, as in a trance, the ecstasy of
$1??}*} the Unknown Dreamer. At sundown the
vast orb of blood-red flame sank over the glens
and burned among the aisles of the forest.
Looking at the ice-mailed wilderness of bole
and bough and branch between me and the
sun I saw a forest of living fire, wherein, as
a wind stirred and threw sudden shadows,
phantoms of flame moved to and fro, or stood,
terrible children of light, as though entranced,
as though listening, as though looking on Life
or on Death. When at last the flame was all
gathered up out of the west, and an aura of
faint rose hung under the first glittering stars,
an extraordinary ocean of yellow spread from
the horizons serrated with immense mauve
peninsulas and long narrow grass-green lagoons.
But the mass of the western firmament was
yellow, from the orange-yellow of lichen and
the orange-red of the dandelion to the faint
vanishing yellows of cowslip and primrose.
How lovely then were the trees which had been
set on fire by the unconsuming flames of the
sunset : what a fairyland, now, of delicate
amber and translucent topaz. What mysterious
colonnades, what avenues of lovely light ! And
then, later, to turn, and see the chill grey-blue
ice-bound trees behind one filling slowly with

74

moonshine, as the immensity of ocean fills, The Sons
wave after wave, at moonrise, when a cloud is °f the
slowly uplifted by mysterious withdrawing m° ?
airs ! Then, truly, was Dreamland no longer
a phantasy of sleep, but a loveliness so great
that, like deep music, there could be no words
wherewith to measure it, but only the breath-
less unspoken speech of the soul upon whom
has fallen the secret dews.

75

ST. BRIDGET OF THE SHORES

I have heard many names of St. Bridget, most
beloved of Gaelic saints, with whom the month
of February is identified . . . the month of
'Bride min, gentle St. Bride' . . . Brigkid
boidheach Muime Chriosd, Bride the Beautiful,
Christ's Foster Mother . . . but there are
three so less common that many even of my
readers familiar with the Highland West may
not know them. These are ' the Fair Woman
of February,' < St. Bride of the Kindly Fire,'
and 'St. Bride (or Bridget) of the Shores.'
They are of the Isles, and may be heard in
some of the sgeulachdan gaidhealach, or Gaelic
tales, still told among seafaring and hill folk,
where the curse of cheap ignoble periodicals
is unknown and books are rare. True, in
several of the isles . . . Colonsay, Tiree, the
Outer Hebrides . . . ' St. Bride of the Shores '
is not infrequent in songs and seasonal hymns,
for when her signals are seen along the grey

76

beaches, on the sandy machars, by the meadow St.
path, the glen-track, the white shore-road, the Bridget
islanders know that the new year is disclosed shores,
at last, that food, warmth, and gladness are
coming out of the south. As 'the Fair
Woman of February,' though whatever other
designation St. Bride goes by, she is often
revealed. Her humble yellow fires are lit
among the grasses, on the shore-ways, during
this month. Everywhere in the Gaelic lands
' Candlemas- Queen ' is honoured at this time.
Am Fheill Bhride, the Festival of St. Bridget,
was till recently a festival of joy throughout
the west, from the Highland Line to the last
weedy shores of Barra or the Lews : in the
isles and in the remote Highlands, still is.

It is an old tale, this association of St.
Bridget with February. It goes further back
than the days of the monkish chroniclers who
first attempted to put the disguise of verbal
Christian raiment on the most widely -loved
and revered beings of the ancient Gaelic
pantheon. Long before the maiden Brigida
(whether of Ireland or Scotland matters little)
made her fame as a ' daughter of God ' ; long
before to Colum in lona or to Patrick 'the
great Cleric' in Ireland 'Holy St. Bride'
revealed in a vision the service she had done
to Mary and the Child in far-away Bethlehem

77

St. in the East ; before ever the first bell of Christ

Bridget was heard by startled Druids coming across

Shores the hills and forGSt lands °f Gau1, the GadS
worshipped a Brighde or Bride, goddess of

women, of fire, of poetry. When, to-day, a

Gaelic islcsman alludes to Bridget of the

Songs, or when a woman of South Uist prays

to Good St. Bride to bless the empty cradle

that is soon to be filled, or when a shennachie

or teller of tales speaks of an oath taken by

Bridget of the Flame, they refer, though

probably unconsciously, to a far older Brighid

than do they who speak with loving familiarity

of Muime Chriosd, Christ's Foster Mother, or

Brigkid-nam-Bratta, St. Bride of the Mantle.

They refer to one who in the dim, far-off days

of the forgotten pagan world of our ancestors

was a noble and great goddess. They refer to

one to whom the women of the Gael went

with offerings and prayers, as went the women

of ancient Hellas to the temples of Aphrodite,

as went the Syrian women to the altars of

Astarte, as went the women of Egypt to the

milk-fed shrines of Isis. They refer to one

whom the Druids held in honour as a torch

bearer of the eternal light, a Daughter of the

Morning, who held sunrise in one hand as a

little yellow flame, and in the other held the

red flower of fire without which men would

78

be as the beasts who live in caves and holes, St.
or as the dark Fomor who have their habita- Bridget
tions in cloud and wind and the wilderness. ?h
They refer to one whom the bards and singers "
revered as mistress of their craft, she whose
breath was a flame, and that flame song : she
whose secret name was fire and whose inmost
soul was radiant air, she therefore who was
the divine impersonation of the divine thing
she stood for, Poetry.

' St. Bride of the Kindly Fire,' of whom
one may hear to-day as 'oh, just Bhrighde
mm Muim (gentle St. Bride the Foster
Mother), she herself an no other,' is she,
that ancient goddess, whom our ancestors saw
lighting the torches of sunrise on the brows of
hills, or thrusting the quenchless flame above
the horizons of the sea : whom the Druids
hailed with hymns at the turn of the year,
when, in the season we call February, the
firstcomers of the advancing Spring are to be
seen on the grey land or on the grey wave or
by the grey shores : whom every poet, from
the humblest wandering singer to Oisin of the
Songs, from Oisin of the Songs to Angus Og
on the rainbow or to Midir of the Under-world,
blessed, because of the flame she put in the
heart of poets as well as the red life she put
in the flame that springs from wood and peat.

79

St. None forgot that she was the daughter of the

Bridget ancient God of the Earth, but greater than

Shores lie' because m mm tliere was but eartn and
water, whereas in her veins ran the elements

of air and fire. Was she not born at sunrise ?

On the day she reached womanhood did not

the house wherein she dwelled become wrapped

in a flame which consumed it not, though the

crown of that flame licked the high unburning

roof of Heaven? In that hour when, her

ancient divinity relinquished and she reborn

a Christian saint, she took the white veil, did

not a column of golden light rise from her

head till no eyes could follow it ? In that

moment when she died from earth, having

taken mortality upon her so as to know a

divine resurrection to a new and still more

enduring Country of the Immortal, were there

not wings of fire seen flashing along all the

shores of the west and upon the summits of

all Gaelic hills ? And how could one forget

that at any time she had but to bend above

the dead, and her breath would quicken, and

a pulse would come back into the still heart,

and what was dust would arise and be once

more glad.

The Fair Woman of February is still loved,

still revered. Few remember the last fading

traditions of her ancient greatness : few, even,

80

know that she lived before the coming of the St.
Cross : but all love her, because of her service Bridget
to Mary in Her travail and to the newborn 1 ^
Child, and because she looks with eyes of love
into every cradle and puts the hand of peace
on the troubled hearts of women : and all
delight in her return to the world after the
ninety days of the winter -sleep, when her
heralds are manifest.

What, then, are the insignia of St. Bridget
of the Shores ? They are simple. They are
the dandelion, the lamb, and the sea-bird
popularly called the oyster-opener. From
time immemorial, this humble, familiar yellow
plant of the wayside has been identified with
St. Bride. To this day shepherds, on Am
Fheill Bhrighde, are wont to hear among the
mists the crying of innumerable young lambs,
and this without the bleating of ewes, and so
by that token know that Holy St. Bride has
passed by, coming earthward with her flock
of the countless lambs soon to be born on all
the hillsides and pastures of the world. Fisher-
folk on the shores of the west and on the far
isles have gladdened at the first prolonged re-
petitive whistle of the oyster-opener, for its
advent means that the hosts of the good fish
are moving towards the welcoming coasts once
more, that the wind of the south is unloosened,

81 G

St. that greenness will creep to the grass, that

Bridget birds will seek the bushes, that song will come
Shores to them, and that everywhere a new gladness
will be abroad. By these signs is St. Bridget
of the Shores known. One, perhaps, must
live in the remote places, and where wind
and cloud, rain and tempest, great tides and
uprising floods are the common companions
of day and night, in order to realise the joy
with which things so simple are welcomed.
To see the bright sunsweet face of the
dandelion once more — an dealan JDhe, the
little flame of God, am bear nan Bhrighde, St.
Bride's forerunner — what a joy this is. It
comes into the grass like a sunray. Often
before the new green is in the blade it flaunts
its bright laughter in the sere bent. It will lie
in ditches and stare at the sun. It will climb
broken walls, and lean from nooks and corners.
It will come close to the sands and rocks,
sometimes will even join company with the
sea-pink, though it cannot find footing where
later the bindweed and the horned poppy,
those children of the seawind who love to be
near and yet shrink from the spray of the salt
wave, defy wind and rain. It is worthier the
name ' Traveller's Joy ' than the wild clematis
of the autumnal hedgerows : for its bright
yellow leaps at one from the roadside like a

82

smile, and its homeliness is pleasant as the St.
gladness of playing children. Bridget

It is a herald of Spring that precedes even authe
the first loud flute-like calls of the missel-
thrush. When snow is still on the track of
the three winds of the north it is, by the
wayside, a glad companion. Soon it will be
everywhere. Before long the milk-white
sheen of the daisy and the moon-daisy, the
green-gold of the tansy, the pale gold of the
gorse and the broom, the yellow of the
primrose and wild colchicum, of the cowslip
and buttercup, of the copse-loving celandine
and meadow-rejoicing crowsfoot, all these
yellows of first spring will soon be abroad :
but the dandelion comes first. I have known
days when, after midwinter, one could go a
mile and catch never a glimpse of this bright
comrade of the ways, and then suddenly see
one or two or three, and rejoice forthwith as
though at the first blossom on the blackthorn,
at the first wild-roses, at the first swallow, at
the first thrilling bells of the cuckoo. We
are so apt to lose the old delight in familiar
humble things. So apt to ignore what is by
the way, just because it is by the way. I
recall a dour old lowland gardener in a loch-
and- hill -set region of Argyll, who, having
listened to exclamations of delight at a rain-

83

St. bow, muttered, "Weel, T juist think naethin

Bridget ava' 0' thon rainbows ... ye can see one
Shores wnenever vou ta^ the trouble to look for
them hereaboots." He saw them daily, or so
frequently that for him all beauty and strange-
ness had faded from these sudden evanescent
Children of Beauty. Beauty has only to be
perceptible to give an immediate joy, and it is
no paradoxical extravagance to say that one
may receive the thrilling communication from

* the little flame of God ' by the homely road-
side as well as from these leaning towers built
of air and water with a mysterious alchemy
reveals to us on the cloudy deserts of heaven.

* Man is surprised,' Emerson says, ' to find that
tilings near and familiar are not less beautiful
and wondrous than things remote.' Certainly
no Gaelic lover of St. Bride's Flower, of the
Flower of February, but rejoices to see its
welcome face after the snow and sleet of
winter have first sullenly receded, if only for
a time, and to know that St. Bride of the
Shores wears it at her breast, and that when
she throws it broadcast the world is become
a green place again and the quickening sun-
light a gladsome reality.

In these desolate far isles where life is so
hard, where the grey winds from the north
and east prevail for weeks at a time on the

84

grey tempestuous seas, and where so much St.
depends on such small things — a little drift- Bridget
wood, a few heaps of peat, a few shoal of fish ^ores
now of one kind now of another, a few cartloads
of seaweed, a rejoicing sound is that in truth
when the Gille-Bhride is heard crying along
the shores. Who that has heard its rapid
whirling cry as it darts from haunt to haunt
but will recognise its own testimony to being
8 Servant of Breed ' (the common pronuncia-
tion of the Gaelic Brighid or Bride) — for does
it not cry over and over again with swift
incessant iterance, Gilly -breed, gilly-breed,
gilly-breed, gilly-breed, gilly-breed.

" White may my milking be,

White as thee ;
Thy face is white, thy neck is white,
Thy hands are white, thy feet are white,
For thy sweet soul is shining bright —

O dear to me,

O dear to see,

St. Bridget White !
Yellow may my butter be,

Firm, and round :
Thy breasts are sweet,
Finn, round, and sweet,
So may my butter be :
So may my butter be, O

Bridget Sweet !
Safe thy way is, safe, O

Safe, St. Bride :

85

3t. May my kye come home at even,

Bridget None be falling none be leaving

of the Dusky even, breath-sweet even,

Shores. Here, as there, where O

St. Bride thou
Keepest tryst with God in heav'n,
Seest the angels bow
And souls be shriven —
Here, as there, 'tis breath-sweet even

Far and wide —
Singeth thy little maid
Safe in thy shade

Bridget, Bride ! "

When the first lambs appear, many are the
invocations among the Irish and Hebridean
Gaels to good St. Bride. At the hearth-side,
too, the women, carding wool, knitting, telling
tales, singing songs, dreaming — these know
her whether they name her in thought, or
have forgotten what was dear wisdom to their
mothers of old. She leans over cradles, and
when babies smile they have seen her face.
When the crathull swings in the twilight, the
slow rhythm, which is music in the mother's
ear, is the quiet clapping of her hushing hands.
St Bride, too, loves the byres or the pastures
when the kye are milked, though now she is
no longer 'the Woman of February,' but
simply 'good St. Bride of the yellow hair.'

86

THE HERALDS OF MARCH

Under this heading I had meant to deal with
the return of the Plover and Lapwing, having
in mind a Galloway rhyme,

" Whaup, Whimbrel, an' Plover,
Whan these whustle the worst o' t's over! "

Tut on consideration it was evident that
March has so complicated an orchestral pre-
lude that the name could hardly be given to
any one group of birds. Does not another
rhyme go,

" The Lavrock, the Mavis,
The Woodlark, the Plover,
March brings them back
Because Winter is over."

But March brings back so many birds ! There
is another bird-rhyme . . .

" When the Song-Thrush is ready to laugh,
Ye'll hear the Woodlark an' the Wheatear an' the Chaff."

Well, the Song-Thrush has been * ready to

87

The laugh ' a good while back, now : his ' laughter '

Heralds nas already whirled the flute-notes of Spring,
arc ' amid branches swelling to leaf-break, but not
yet at the greening. The Chiff-Chaff has been
heard on many a common, or on the ridge of
a stone-dyke, or calling from the blackthorn
thickets. The Wheatear has by this time
delighted many a superstitious yokel who has
caught his first glimpse of it sitting on a
grassy tuft, or on a low spray of gorse or
juniper, or depressed him sorely if he has
come upon it for the first time when seen
perched on a stone. But all three are birds
which are with us long before the real Spring
is come. With the missel-thrush on the elm-
bole, the song-thrush in the copses, the black-
bird calling from the evergreens, it does not
follow, alas! that, as in the fairy-tale, the
north wind has become a feeble old man and
the east wind a silly old wife. Frost and
snow and sleet, rain and flood, and the dull
greyness of returned winter, may only too
likely succeed these blithe heralds, have so
succeeded, this year, as we know to our
cost. There was jubilation in some places
at January -end because of the early singing
of the larks, which here and there had been
heard soon after the New Year ; but those
who rejoiced untimely at the advent of spring-
es

weather must have forgot the north-country The
proverb, 'As long as the laverock sings before Heralds
Candlemas it will greet after it' of March-

The lark and the blackbird are, in truth,
such irresponsible singers, have such glad
irrepressible hearts, that they will sing in the
dead of winter, if only the wind slides through
a windless air and the sunshine is unclouded.
Tens of thousands have gone oversea, but
thousands remain ; and these are not to be
chilled into silence if but the least excuse be
given for the unsealing of the founts of joy.
In green Decembers one may hear the merle's
notes fluting down the wet alleys as though
Christinas were still a long way off; but the
wary will recall another north-country saying
akin to that just quoted concerning the lave-
rock . . . 'When the blackbird sings before
Christmas she will cry before Candlemas.'

So now I shall leave the Tribe of the Plover
to a succeeding article, and, speaking of the
skylark and his spring comrades, allude to
that mysterious March wayfaring of the
winged people which is so enthralling a
problem in the psychology of bird-life.

The whole problem of Migration is still a
mystery, but an enhancement of this mystery
is in the irregularity and incompleteness of the
working out of this all but universal instinct,

89

of March

The this inscrutable rhythmic law. Both the

Heralds^ skylark and the blackbird, for example, are
migratory birds, and yet larks and merles by
the thousand remain in our northlands through
the winter, and even come to us at that season.
The skylark in particular puzzles the orni-
thologist. While certain birds appear and
disappear with an astonishing regularity, as
though they heard the pealing of aerial chimes
afar off and knew the bells of home . . . the
swallow, for example ; or, again, the tiny
gold-crested wren, in some parts called 'the
woodcock- pilot ' because in two or at most
three days after its appearance the first wood-
cocks are invariably seen . . . there are others,
like the song-thrush, which will pass away in
the great migratory clouds that like with-
drawing veils every autumn carry the winged
clans oversea ; which will pass so absolutely
that for a hundred miles not one of its kind
will be observed, not even a straggler : and
yet, in some other direction, others will be
seen weeks later and perhaps even through
the winter. We are all familiar with the
homestay of the Redbreast, and many people
believe that it is not a migrant because of
its frequency about our garden- ways even in
the hardest winter : and yet, in incalculable
myriads, the redbreast migrates as far south

90

as the Sahara, and its sweet home-song of the The
north may be heard in Greece, by the banks **eJ"?^s
of the Nile, throughout Palestine even, from
the cedars of Lebanon to the valleys about
Jerusalem.

It is the skylark, however, more than any
other bird which so often upsets rules and
calculations. Even people who do not observe
the ways of birds must be struck by the
numbers of larks which may be met with in
the course of several midwinter walks, by the
occasional outbreak of brief song, even, though
snow be upon the wolds and a grey wind blow
through the sere leaves of the oak-coppice or
among the desolate hedgerows ; must be the
more struck by this, or by mention of it on
the part of others, when they read of the
hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dead larks
found on nights of storm or bitter frost, on
the rocks below lighthouses, along the great
lines of migration during the season of the
vast inscrutable ebb or of the as vast and in-
scrutable vernal arrival. Incalculable hosts
leave our shores every autumn, and along the
bleak fen -lands, by wave-set lighthouses, on
isles such as Ushant or Heligoland, thousands
of wings flutter and fail ; and the host passes
on; and the sea- wave, the fierce gull, the
shore-hawk, all the tribe of the owl, all the

9i

The innumerable foes which prey upon the help-

Heralds iess> give scant grace to the weaklings and
of March. ^ baffled and weary But wfay should ftU

this immense congregation have listened to the
ancestral cry, and from meadow and moor and
the illimitable dim-sea of the fallowlands come
singly and in flocks and in immense herds and
in a cloudlike multitude, as sheep at the cry
of the herdsman, as hounds at the long ulula-
tion of a horn, while thousands of their clan
remain deaf to the mysterious Voice, the im-
perative silent mandate from oversea ? Of
these, again, countless numbers merely move
to another region, and mayhap some cross the
salt straits only to return ; or as many, it may
be, leave not at all the familiar solitudes, and
at most show by cloudy flights and wild and
fluctuating gyrations the heritage of blind
instinct, which, if it cannot be satiated by far
pilgrimage, must at least shake these troubled
hearts with sudden inexplicable restlessness.
It is calculated, again, that myriads of skylarks
merely use our coasts as highways on their
journey from the far south to the far north
... in this, too, exemplifying another strange
law or manifestation of the mystery of
migration, that the birds which move furthest
north in their vernal arrival are those which
penetrate furthest south when they turn again

92

upon the autumnal wind of exile. Naturalists The
have proved, however, that countless hordes of Heralds
skylarks actually arrive from Northern Europe
to winter in our country. Are these birds
moved by a different instinct from that which
impels the majority of their kind ? Have they,
through generations following one another in
the path of an accident, forgotten the sunlands
of the common ancestral remembrance, and,
having found Britain less snowbound and
frostbound than the wastes of Esthonia and
Pomerania, been content, when driven before
the icy east wind, to fare no further than our
bleak, and yet, save in the worst winters,
relatively habitable inlands ? Again, naturalists
have observed a like movement hitherward in
winter from Central Europe. There may be
observed in the early spring as regular an
emigration as, on a perhaps not vaster scale,
an incalculable immigration. Apparently,
most if not all of the myriads of skylarks
which are undoubtedly with us throughout
the winter are these immigrants from Northern
and Central Europe. Those who come in
February and in still greater numbers in March
and April (and the later the arrivals the
further north the goal, it is said) are the
' strayed revellers ' from the South, the home-
bred birds home again. In our remote

93

The Hebrides the nesting season is hardly over before

Heralds £]ie island-bred skylarks, so late in coming,

of March. . , „ . J c . \ ^ -. to

are on the Great South lioad once more.

What with the habitual two and the not in-
frequent three broods raised in a single season,
particularly in Southern England, South- West
Scotland, and Ireland, and the enormous influx
of aliens from Northern and Central Europe,
our skylark population is at its highest, not,
as most people might think, in May, or even
about the season of the autumnal equinox,
but at the beginning of November, when
already the great tides of migration have
ebbed. Another puzzling problem is the
rhythmic regularity of the arrivals and depar-
tures of the incomers and the outgoers. For,
while the latter will not take the high-road
of the upper air till nightfall or at least until
dusk, the former travel by day : and the goings
and comings are so timed, or to observation
appear so timed, that about four o'clock on a
late October day the first cohort of the in-
vaders may in the wide lonely desert overhead
pass the first caravans of the exiles. In March,
again, the two currents may once more meet :
the home-bred birds are on their return, the
aliens are on the wing for the hill-pastures and
the vales and uplands of their native countries.
This will account for how, say in the Hebrides,

94

one observer will chronicle the departure of The
the skylarks before Summer-end, at the early Heralds
close there of the nesting season, and how
another, not less accurate, will note the
presence weeks later of larks in apparently as
great a number as ever. The islanders have
gone, to seek the south : the newcomers from
Scandinavia have taken their place. But here
also, as elsewhere, the conditions of the weather
will be more potent than even the summons
of the spirit of migration : a severe frost will
for a time clear a whole region of the tufted
birdeens, a prolonged frost will drive them
away from that region for the winter.

The Lark, then, so often apostrophised as the
first voice of Spring, is by no means specifically
the Herald of March. When we see his brown
body breasting the air - waves of the March
wind, it may not be the welcome migrant
from the South we see, with greenness in his
high aerial note and the smell of hay and wild
roses in the o'ercome of his song, but a winter-
exile from a far mountain -vale in Scandinavia
or from the snowbound wastes of Courland or
Westphalia.

The Woodlark, the Chiff-Chaff, and the rest,
all are heralds of March. But as we identify
certain birds with certain seasons and certain
qualities ... as the Swallow with April, and

95

of March.

The the Cuckoo with May, and the Dove with

Heralds peace ... so we have come to think of the
Mavis and the Merle, but, above all, of the Sky-
lark as the true heralds of March, the month
when the Flutes of Pan sound from land's end
to land's end, for all that tempest and flood,
sleet and the polar blast and the bitter wind of
the east, may ravage the coverts of the winged
clans.

To write of all the birds who come back to
us in the Spring, even so early as the front of
March, would be, here, a mere catalogue, and
then be incomplete. For the hidden places in
the woods, in the meadows, in the hedgerows,
on the moors, in the sandy dunes, in the
hollowed rocks, on the ledges over green water
and on the wind-scooped foreheads of cliffs
and precipices ; everywhere, from the heather-
wilderness on the unsnowed hills to the tangled
bent on the little windswept eyot set in the
swing of the tides, the secret homes are wait-
ing, or are already filled, and glad with that
everlasting and unchanging business of the
weaving anew of life which has the constancy
of sunrise, the rhythmic certitude of day and
night.

The spiritual secret of our delight in the
joyousness of the lark's song, or in that of
mavis or merle, is because the swift music is a

96

rapture transcending human utterance. There The
is not less joy in the screech of the jay, in the *leJ?lds
hoarse cry of the cormorant, in the scream of ° arC '
the gannet poised like a snowflake two
thousand feet above the turbulent surge of
blue and white, or green and grey, to its vision
but a vast obscurity of calm filled with phan-
tom life, a calm moveless seen from that
great height, wrinkled only with perplexing
interplay of wave and shadow. These have
their joy, and to the open ear are joy ; not
less than the merle singing among wet lilac,
the mavis calling from the swaying poplar, the
lark flinging the largesse of his golden music
along the high devious azure roads. Can one
doubt that this is so . . . that, listening with
the inward ear, we must hold as dear the wail
of the curlew, the mournful cry of the lapwing,
when on the hill -slope or in the wild grass
these call rejoicingly in life and love and the
mute ecstasy of implicit duty.

As long, however, as we impose our own
needs and our own desires on the indifferent
tribes of the earth and air, so long shall we
take this or that comrade of the elements
and say it is the voice of Peace, or War, or
Love, or Joy. March, we say, is the month
of gladness. A new spirit is awake, is
abroad. The thrush and the blackbird are

97 h

of March.

The our clarions of rejoicing. The lark, supremely,

Heralds^ is our lyric of joy.

Joy, the poet tells us, is the Mother of
Spring, and of Joy has it not been said that
there is no more ancient God ? What fitter
symbol for this divine uplift of the year than
this bird whose ecstasy in song makes the very
word Spring an intoxication in our ears ? We
have a Gaelic legend that the first word of
God spoken to the world became a lark . . .
the eternal joy translated into a moment's
ecstasy. But further back has not Aristo-
phanes told us that the lark existed, not only
before the green grass where it nests or the
blue lift into which it soars, but before Zeus
and Kronos themselves, before the Creation,
before Time. It is but a symbol of the divine
Joy which is Life : that most ancient Breath,
that Spirit whose ieast thought is Creation,
whose least motion is Beauty, whose least
glance is that eternal miracle which we, seeing
dimly and in the rhythmic rise of the long
cadence of the hours, call by a word of out-
welling, of measureless effluence, the Spring.

98

THE TRIBE OF THE PLOVER

In the preceding paper I alluded to a
Galloway rhyme —

" Whaup, Whimbrel, an' Plover,
Whan these whustle the worst o't 's over."

By this time the neatherd by Loch Ken
and the shepherd among the wilds of Kirk-
cudbright, like their kin from the Sussex
downs, to the last sliabh or maol'm Sutherland,
may repeat the rhyme with safety. * The
worst o't 's over.' For to-day the curlews cry
above the moors, the whimbrel's warning note
echoes down the long sands o' Solway, and
everywhere, from the salt bent by the coasts
to the loneliest inlands, the lapwing wails.
The Tribe of the Plover is in the land once
more, and so Spring is with us. Not, perhaps,
the Spring of the poets, who look (as Ailil in
the old Celtic tale) under boughs of white

99

The Tribe blossom to where the sunlight moves like a
of the fawn of gold in a windless land, where the
songs of birds turn to flowers, and where
flowers change in the twilights of dawn into
singing birds. Not thus does Spring come to
us in the north. The black-headed gull scream-
ing on the east wind, restless before his long
flight to the wilderness and the grassy homes
of the mating season : the hoodie-crow, weary
of the south, heard on grey mornings when
sleet whips the uplands : the troubled field-
fares, eager for lands oversea : the curlews
crying along the Anglian fens and lamenting
over Sol way Moss : the mallard calling to his
mate in the chill waters : the shadow of
harrier and peregrine from Surrey upland to
the long braes of Lammermuir — these, rather,
are the signals of our bleak northern Spring.
What though the song-thrush and the skylark
have long sung, though the wheatear and
chiff-chaff have been late in coming, though
the first swallows have not had the word
passed on by the woodpecker, and somewhere
in the glens of Greece and Sicily the cuckoo
lingers ? How often the first have called
Spring to us, and, while we have listened, the
wind has passed from the south to the north
and the rains have become sleet or snow : how
often the missel-thrush has rung-in the tides

ioo

of blossom, and the woods have but grown The Tribe

darker with gloom of the east while the first °^ the

yellow clans along the hedgerows have been over*

swept by hail. How often, again, the wind of the

west has been fragrant with cowslip and ox-eye,

with daffodil and wallflower, with the pungent

growing -odours of barberry and butcher's-

broom and the unloosening larch, when,

indeed, the sallow-blooms have put on their

gold, and the green woodpecker is calling his

love-notes in the copses, and yet the delaying

swallow has not been seen north of the Loire

or where the Loiny winds between Moret and

the woods of Fontainebleau ? How often the

wild-rose has moved in first-flame along the

skirts of hornbeam-hedge or beech-thicket, or

the honeysuckle begun to unwind her pale

horns of ivory and moongold, and yet across

the furthest elm-tops to the south the magic

summons of the cuckoo has been still unheard

in the windless amber dawn, or when, as in the

poet's tale, the myriad little hands of Twilight

pull the shadows out of the leaves and weave

the evening dark. But when the cry of the

plover is abroad we know that our less ideal

yet hardly less lovely and welcome Spring is

come at last : that Winter is old and broken

and shuffling north, clinging to the bleak

uplands and windygates : and this, even

IOI

Plover.

The Tribe though Summer tarries still among the fields

of the of France.

Because of their association with solitary
and waste places it is not strange that these
harbingers of Swallow-time should everywhere
have an evil repute. Even amid the un-
imaginative Sussex or Wilts peasants, the cry
of the curlew, the wail of the lapwing,
forebode sorrow, cover a vague menace :
heard, at least, at dusk or at night, or in the
grey gloaming at the edge of day.

The Cornish or Devon moorlander has
many wild tales of the whimbrel, whose swift-
repeated whistle hurtling suddenly in lonely
places has given rise to innumerable legends
of the Seven Whistlers, the Demon Huntsmen,
the Hunted Souls. In Iona and along the
Earraid of Mull, where the whimbrel or ' little
curlew ' is rarely heard till May, though it is
generally called Gruilbinnach, a diminutive of
the Gaelic name of the curlew, Guilbin
(pronounced sometimes Kooley-pin or guley-
pin and sometimes gwilley-pin), a compound
word signifying wailing music, I have heard
it called Guilbhron (Kwillyvrone), Wail of
Sorrow, and again ' Keenyvlis ' or Death-Cry,
and once, either in a tale or poem, by the
singular name Guilchaismeachd, the Wail of
AVarning. Any lowland cottar, from west of

102

Lammermuir to east of Ballantrae, will ' ken The Tribe
a wheen strange tales o' the whaup,' as the of the
curlew is commonly called north of the Tweed over*
and south of the Highland Line : and in some
parts it is not only the children who shudder
at its cry in lonely places at dusk, fearing ' the
bogle wi1 the lang neb ' like a pair of tongs,
emissary of the Evil One, who gave this bird
his long curved beak so that in the dark he
might, like tongs lifting a stray coal or a
nightjar snatching a wandering moth, carry
off wrongdoers, unrepentant sinners, truants,
and all naughty children generally. As for
the lapwing, though more familiar than the
curlew, and for many of us associated only
with pastures and pleasant wilds, in the
countries of the Gael dark things are whispered
of the Adharcan-luachrach, or Little Horn of
the Rushes . . . thus poetically called from
the pretty tuft of the male weep or peaseweep,
curving like a horn over the delicately poised
head, and from the bird's fondness for nesting
in rushy places or among tangled grasses. Is
he not said to be one of the bitter clan who
mocked on the day of the Crucifixion, and so
was made homeless for ever, with a cry that
should be for ever like the cry of wandering
sorrow ? It is of little avail to say that love
among the rushes is as sweet as elsewhere,

103

The Tribe that the wilderness can be home, and that the
of the wailing of repentant souls may be no more
oven than angry vituperations against the hoodie-
crow or laughing-gull or other marauders after
lapwing-eggs. Is the weep not a spirit of the
waste that was once human, but lost his soul,
and so can never reach heaven nor yet dwell
on earth, but must night and day be restless
as the sea, and wail the long hours away from
grey dawn to moonrise, from darkness to the
paling of the stars ? So they say, they who
know : and who know with the unshakable
surety of the unlettered peasant? In the
Gaelic imagination the lapwing is something
stranger and wilder still : a bird of the ancient
world, of the dispossessed gods, nameless in
truth because in truth a god nameless and
homeless. The Gaelic poet hears in its lament
the lamentation of what is gone never to come
again, of what long since went away upon the
wind, of what is going away on the wind : and
he has called the weep the Birds of the
Sorrowful Past. Is not the lapwing the
bird of Dalua, that unknown mysterious god,
that terrible Shadow who is the invisible,
inaudible, secret, and dread divinity of weari-
ness, separation, gloom, sadness, decay, desola-
tion, madness, despair ?

It is not only in our own land that the
104

lapwing and all the tribe of the plover bear so The Tribe
evil a repute. Not always thus, however : for °* the
in some parts of Germany this plover, I do over-
not know why, is called the Virgin Mary's
Dove, and is greeted with welcome. Even in
Argyll there is a lost or confused kindly legend,
for sometimes when children run along the
moorland mocking the Pibhinn (pee-veen . . .
the Gaelic equivalent of the lowland peaseweep
and the southern -pee-weet) they cry

" Welcome back, welcome back, Pee-veen, Pee-veen I
But keep the wind and the rain behind your tail,
Or you'll never see the fields of heaven again ! ..."

or words to that effect. In the East the
Mohammedan women have a beautiful name
for this bird . . . the Sister of the Brother :
and, says the authority whence in some
forgotten reading I took this note, 'when
these women hear the cry in the evening, they
run from their houses and throw water in the
air, that the bird may use it to assuage the
pain of the burn on the top of the head, still
marked by some black feathers.' This is in
allusion to an oriental legend that the lapwing-
was once a princess. This princess had a
passionate love for a brother who had long-
been absent, and when one day she heard that
he was on his return and close at hand and

105

Plover.

The Tribe weary, she snatched a bowl of hot milk from
of the the fire and hastened to meet him. But an
evil-wisher, knowing her great love and how
she would not rest till she found her brother,
had misinformed her, and for all the pain on
her head caused by the heated bowl, she ran
now this way and now that, continually crying
Brother! O Brother! Hours passed, and
then days, and week after week and month
after month the girl vainly sought her loved
one. At last, feeling her strength ebbing, she
cried aloud to Allah. Allah, moved by
compassion, gave her wings and changed her
into a lapwing or black-plover, the better to
accomplish her purpose. Hence, when the
little brown children on the desert or on the
sun-scorched ways of the East look up and see
the lapwings wheeling overhead in long circling
flights and sudden dashes, they hear, in the
wailing voices, either the long yearning or the
sudden eager hope in the cry which to their
ears sounds as Brother ! O Brother !

Perhaps the German name of the Virgin
Mary's Dove is merely a variant of the Swedish
folk-legend concerning the lapwing. The tale
goes that this bird was once one of Mary's
handmaidens, but lost place and honour because
of her theft of a pair of scissors. The punish-
ment was transformation into a bird with a

1 06

forked scissor -tail, and to go out across the The Tribe
fjords and above all the meadows and pastures °f the
and keep crying incessantly T*yvit- Tyvit- Tyvit
(i.e., I stole them ! I stole them !). I think,
however, I have heard or read the same story
in connection with the wagtail. In his in-
teresting book on the Manners and Customs
of the Russian People, Mr. Ralston has the
following Slavonic plover-legend. When God
had created the earth, and wished to supply it
with seas and lakes and rivers, He ordered the
birds to convey the waters to their appointed
places. All obeyed except the lapwing, whose
reason for this indolence and impiety was that
it had no need of seas, lakes, or rivers, to slake
its thirst. At that the Lord waxed wroth,
and forbade it and its posterity ever to
approach a sea or stream, and that it might
quench its thirst only with that water which
remains in hollows and among stones after
rain. So from that time this sorrowful
plover has never ceased its wailing cry of
Peet-peet! (i.e., Drink! Drink!). In another
northern book (Thiel's Danish Traditions,
vol. ii.) there are two lapwing -legends not
less homely than the Russian and the Swedish.
When Christ, says one, was a bairn, He
took a walk one day and came to an old crone
who was busy baking. She said she would

107

The Tribe give Him a new cake for His trouble, if He
of the would go and split her a little wood for the

over' oven. Christ did as she wanted, and the old
wife put aside a small bit of dough for the
promised cake. When the batch was drawn
from the oven, however, she saw to her surprise
and chagrin that the wee bit cake was equally
large with the rest. So again she broke off a
small bit of dough ; but again the same thing
happened. Hereupon she broke out with,
' That's a vast oure-muckle cake for the likes
o' you ; thee's get thy cake anither time.' At
this injustice Christ was angered, so He said
to the old crone, ' I split your wood as you
asked me, and you would not give me the little
cake you promised. Now you in turn shall
go and cleave wood, and that, too, as long as
the world shall last!' And with that Our
Lord turned her into a vipa (a weep). 'So
the weep fares betwixt heaven and earth as
long as the world lasts ; and fare where she
will she says no other words than Klyfved!
Klyfvedf {i.e., Cleave wood ! Cleave wood !).
The other Danish plover -tale given by
Thiel is one of the familiar Crucifixion legends.
While Christ still hung upon the Cross, three
birds came flying towards Calvary, the Styrk-
ham (the Stork), the Svalham (the Swallow),
and the Pun-ham (Pee-weet). As they flew

108

overhead each cried a cry. The stork cried, The Tribe

Styrk ham! Styrk ham! {i.e., Strengthen of the

Him !), and so has this bird called ever since, Ploven

and been under God's blessing and man's care.

The swallow cried, Sval ham! Sval ham! (i.e.,

Cool or refresh Him !), and so is evermore

known by that name, and likewise is loved by

man and guided by God. But the weep

wheeled about the Cross, shrieking derisively,

Pun ham! Pun ham! (i.e., Pine Him, make

Him suffer !), and so is not only accursed by

men from then till now, but is under God's

ban till the Last Day, after which the lapwing's

wail will never be heard again.

Although Guilbinn, or Wailing Music, is,
as I have said, the common Gaelic name for
the Curlew, as the Whaup in the lowlands, it
is also often called the Crann-toch, the long-
beaked one, or Coulter -neb, as they say in
Dumfries and Galloway. Of the mythical
origin of the name Crann-toch (a very obvious
designation, and needing no mythical legend
one would think) I remember hearing a year
or so ago from a boatman of Lismore a wild
and romantic legend, but it is too long to
quote now. Few Gaelic tales, few poems, in
which are not to be heard the voices of the
wind or the sea or the wailing curlew. We
have perhaps no bird more wild and solitary :

109

Plover.

The Tribe a Highland saying places it with the herons
of the an(j wild-geese. 'When a man has shot six

herons, six wild-geese, and six curlews, he
may call himself a sportsman.'

When the Golden Plover, or Grey Plover
as he is sometimes called, wheels in Spring
above the fallowlands of the North the
ploughman hears in his cry Plough noeel! Sow
zveelf Harrow weel! This beautiful bird — of
whom no poet has written a finer line than
Burns in

"The deep-toned plover grey, wild whistling on the hill " —

is not exempt from the common tradition of
uncanniness. He, too, is classed with the
dreaded ' Seven Whistlers ' : and from Corn-
wall to Iceland he is often vituperated as one
of these, or as of the spectral pack called
Gabriel's Hounds, or as of Odin's Phantom
Chase. I spoke of a name I had heard in
Iona and Mull for the whimbrel, but applicable
also to any plover or curlew . . . the Guilchais-
meachd or Wail of Warning, the Alarm Bird
so to say : and this repute is held by the
plover in many mining parts of England,
where it is said that the miners will not
descend a pit if the * Whistlers ' be heard
lamenting overhead. To this day there are
many regions not only in our own country

no

but abroad where the plovers are called the The Tribe

of the
Plover.

Wandering Jews, from an old legend that the 2f.the

first of the clan were the transmuted souls of
those Jews who assisted at the Crucifixion.
An old woman who gave me some plovers'
eggs told me in all good faith that the feadag
(the Gaelic name, equivalent to flute-note or
mellow whistle) neither ate nor drank but fed
upon the wind ... a superstition said to have
been almost universal in the Middle Ages.

As for many of us, surely they are birds of
our love. The cry of the curlew on the hill,
the wail of the lapwing in waste places, have
not these something of the same enthralling
spell, the same entrancing call — the summons
to the wilderness, whether that be only to
solitude, or to wild loneliness, or to the
lonelier solitudes, the dim limitless wilderness
of the imagination — that the wind has, at
night, coming with rain through woods, or
that the sea has, heard in inland hollows, or
when athwart a long shore or among fallen
rocks the tide rises on the breast -swell of
coming storm ? They call us to the wild.

in

THE AWAKENER OF THE
WOODS

The Spirit of Spring is abroad. There is no
one of our island coasts so lone and forlorn
that the cries of the winged newcomers have
not lamented down the wind. There is not
an inland valley where small brown birds from
the South have not penetrated, some from
Mediterranean sunlands, some from the Desert,
some from the hidden homes on unknown
isles, some from beyond the foam of unfamiliar
shores. Not a backwater surely but has heard
the flute of the ouzel, or the loud call of the
mallard. The wren, that sweet forerunner of
'the little clan of the bushes' as we say in
Gaelic, clann bheag nam preas, the robin, the
mavis, the merle, have been heard in every
coppice and wildgrowth from the red combes
of the winding Dart to the granite-ledges by
the rushing Spey. From the last Cornish
upland to the last brown moor on the Ord of

I 12

Sutherland the curlew and the lapwing have The
wheeled with wailing cry or long melancholy Awakener
flutelike whistle. The gorse, whose golden \Voods
fires have been lit, has everywhere heard the
prolonged sweet plaintive note of the yellow-
hammer. From the greening boughs the
woodpeckers call.

The tides of Blossom have begun to flow.
The land soon will be inundated. Already
a far and wide forethrow of foam is flung
along the blackthorn hedges. Listen . . .
that chaffinch's blithe song comes from the
flowering almond ! . . . that pipit's brief lay
fell past yonder wild-pear ! In the meadows
the titlarks are running about looking in the
faces of the daisies, as children love to be
told. On the fenlands and mosses the
windy whimper of the redshank is heard like
the cry of a phantom : and like a * bogle,'
too, is the perturbing drumming of the snipe
falling swiftly on sloping wings back to the
marsh.

The shores, the meadows, the uplands, on
each there is a continual rumour. It is the
sound of Spring. Listen . . . put your ear
to the throbbing earth that is so soon to be-
come the green world : you will hear a voice
like the voice which miraculously evades in the
hollow curves of a shell. Faint, mysterious,

113 1

The yet ever present, a continual rhythm. Already

Awakener that rhythm is become a cadence : the birds
?^.th^ chant the strophes, flower and blossom and
green leaf yield their subtler antiphones, the
ancient yet ever young protagonist is the
heart of man. Soon the cadence will be a
song, a paean. The hour of the rose and the
honeysuckle will come, the hour of the swallow
hawking the grey gnat above the lilied stream,
the hour when the voice of the cuckoo floats
through ancient woods rejoicing in their green
youth, that voice which has in it the magic of
all springs, the eternal cry of the renewal of
delight.

True, one may as yet more universally see
the feet of Spring, or the blossom-touch of
her hands, in the meadows and by the shores,
than in the woods. She passes by the hedge-
rows or along the pastures, and her trail has
the sheen of gold. Do not the celandine and
the flaming dandelion, the pale cowslip and
delicate crowsfoot, the jonquil and daffodil,
the yellow of the broom and the bee-loved
gorse, everywhere show it ? She goes by the
upland meadows, and touches the boughs of
the wild-apple or leaning pear, stoops by the
quince or the wild-cherry, and the white foam
of the miraculous wind that is in the hollow
of her hand is left upon the branches. The

114

slim gean at the edge of the woodland catches The
the spray, the twisted crab is an old woman Awakener
suddenly become a lovely girl cream-white and Woods
rose-flusht. Or she goes down the island-
shores, or by the brackened coasts of inland
lochs, or along the overhanging brows of
streams, or where brooks glide between grassy
banks ; or, facing northward, she wanders
where the hill-burn falls from ledge to ledge,
or leaps past the outswung roots of mountain-
ash or birch, or steals between peaty grasses
where the wren has her nest in the pendent
bramble and the greenfinch calls across the
fern. And wherever she goes the yellow iris
is left by her feet, the yellow-white willow-
catkins have become musical with a myriad
bees, dust of gold has fallen into the milk-
white snow of the countless clans of the daisy,
tides of an invisible flood have foamed along
the hawthorns, the wild crocus has shone like
the spear of Pisarr, the buttercup is brimmed
with golden wine, and even the kingcup-ingots
are melted in the waters — for whence else can
come that flowing gold which is blent with
yonder moving emerald that is as the breath of
the grass, yonder floating azure as of drowned
speedwells, yonder wandering violet, child of
shadow and the wind, yonder mysterious
phantom of pale mauve which tells that a

"5

The becalmed cloud-ship drifts on the deeps of

Awakener heaven.

Woods Nevertheless it is in the woods that the

miracle may be more intimately seen. The
Presence perchance is not universally abroad
so much as immediately evident. A hand
touched that larch yonder : for why is it so
suddenly green, with a greenness as of a sea-
wave, or as the wet emerald crystal one finds
on the sands of Iona, or, rather, with the
softer, moister, the indescribable greenness of
the rainbow's breast ? A foot leaned upon the
moss beneath that vast oak, on whose southern
slopes the russet leaves still hang like a multi-
tude of bats along dark ragged cliffs : for why
has the cyclamen suddenly burned in a faint
flame, there ; why has the sky suddenly come
up through the moss, in that maze of speed-
wells ? Who rose, yonder, and passed like a
phantom westward ? Some one, surely, of
the divine race, for the tips of the sycamore-
boughs have suddenly burned with a bronze-
hued fire. Who went suddenly down that
mysterious alley of dim columnar pines, stirring
the untrodden silent ways ? For, look, the air
is full of delicate golden dust. The wind-wooer
has whispered, and the pine tree has loved,
and the seed of the forests to come floats like
summer-dust along the aerial highways.

116

But what of the Forest- Awakener ? Who The
is he ? Her name, is it known of men ? Who Awakener
can it be but the Wind of the South, that Woods
first-born of the wooing Year and sweetheart
Spring ? But what if the name be only that
of a bird ? Then, surely, it must be the wood-
thrush, or perchance the cushat, or, no, that
wandering Summer-herald, the Cuckoo ! Not
the skylark, for he is in the sunlight, lost above
the pastures : not the merle, for he is flooding
the wayside elms with ancient music of ever-
young love : not the blithe clans of the Finch,
for one and all are gypsies of the open. Per-
chance, then, the Nightingale ? No, he is a
moon- worshipper, the chorister of the stars, the
incense-swinger before the altars of the dawn :
and though he is a child of the woods, he loves
the thickets also. Besides, he will not come
far north. Are there not deep woods of
silence and dream beyond the banks of the
Tyne ? Are there no forest sanctuaries north
of the green ramparts which divide North um-
bria from the glens of Tweed and the solitudes
of the shadowy Urr ? Are there no inland
valleys buried in sea-sounding woods beyond
the green vale of Quair ? Alas, the sweet
Songmaker from the South does not think so,
does not so dream. In moon-reveries in the
woods of Surrey, in starry serenades along

117

The the lanes of Devon, in lonely nocturnes in the

Awakener shadowy groves of the New Forest, he has
W^d no thought of more vast, more secret and
impenetrable woods through which move
mountain -airs from Schiehallion, chanting
winds from the brows of the Grampians : he
has no ancestral memory of the countless
battalions of the red pine which throng the
wilds of Argyll or look on the grey shoreless
seas of the west, these green pillars which
once covered the barren braes of Balquhidder,
the desolate hill-lands of the Gregara, and,
when the world was young, were wet with the
spray of the unquiet wastes wherein are set
the treeless Hebrides.

No, in the north at least, we cannot call
the nightingale the Forest -Awakener. In
truth, nowhere in our land. For he comes
late when he comes at all. The great
awakening has already happened. Already
in the south the song-thrush, the dandelion, the
blackthorn -snow are old tales: far in Ultima
Thule to the north-west the gillebride has
whistled the tidings to Gaelic ears, far in
Ultima Thule to the north-east the Shetlander
has rejoiced in that blithest thicket-signal of
spring, the tossed lilt of the wren.

It is of the green woodpecker I speak.
We do not know him well, most of us : but

118

then most of us are alien to the woods. The
Town -dwellers and homestayers know little Awakener
or nothing of the secret signals. It is only ^r00^
the obvious that they note, and seldom read
in the great Script of Nature anything more
than the conventional signature of certain
loved and familiar names and tokens.

It was in the Forest of Fontainebleau I
first heard the green woodpecker called by
this delightful name, the Awakener of the
Woods, le Reveilleur de la Foret. My
French friend told me it was not a literary
name, as I fancied, but one given by the
foresters. And how apt it is. In the first
weeks of March — in the first week of April,
it may be, as the scene moves northward —
there is no more delightful, and certainly no
more welcome, sound than the blithe bugle-
call of the green woodpecker calling through
the woods for love, and, after long expectant
pauses, hearing love call back in thrilling
response, now a flute-note of gladness, now a
challenging clarion -cry. True, whether in the
vast forest of Fontainebleau or in our northern
woods, the woodpecker is not so readily to be
heard in the inward solitudes. He loves the
open glades, and commonly the timbered
park-land is his favourite resort. Still, save
in the deepest and darkest woods, that

119

The delightful rejoicing note is now everywhere

Awakener to be heard fluting along the sunlit ways of

Woods the wind> Jt awakes the f°rest- When the
voice of the woodpecker is heard it is the
hour for Nature to celebrate her own Ides of
March. Elsewhere the song-thrush and the
skylark have been the first heralds. Even in
the woods the missel-thrush may have flung
a sudden storm of song out on the cold tides
of the wind swaying the elm-tops like dusky
air weed of the upper ocean. But, in the
glades themselves, in the listening coverts,
it is the call of the green woodpecker that has
awakened the dreaming forest.

And what an ancient old-world tale Picus
could tell. For, in the long ago, was he not
Picus the antique Italiot god. A forest-god
he was, son of ancient Saturn, and himself
the father of that beautiful being of the
woods, Faunus. And how far he wandered
from Thracian valley and Sabine oak -grove
. . . for in that far northern Finland, which
to the Latins was but an unknown remote
waste under the star Septentrion, he and his
son reappear, though now his name is Tapio
and Faunus is become Nyyrikki . . .

" O Nyyrikki, mountain-hero,
Son of Tapio of forests,
Hero with the scarlet headgear,
I 20

Notches make along the pathway, The

Landmarks upward on the mountain, Awakener

That the hunter may not wander." of the

Woods.
Still does Nyyrikki, or Pikker as he was called

by the northmen long before the Kalevala
was wrought into Finnish runes, make notches
along the pathways of the woods, still the
huntsman on the hillside sees his signals on
the oak -boles. Perhaps to this day the
Esthonian peasant offers in his heart a prayer
to Pikker the woodpecker-god, god of thunder
and storm, so god too of the glades and fields
where these can devastate — a prayer such as
that which Johann Gutsloff, a Finnish author
of the seventeenth century, cites as the
supplication of an old Esthonian farmer :
' . . . Beloved Pikker, we will sacrifice to
thee an ox with two horns and four hoofs, and
want to beg you as to our ploughing and
sowing that our straw shall be red as copper
and our grain as yellow as gold. Send
elsewhere all thick black clouds over great
swamps, high woods, and wide wastes. But
give to us ploughmen and sowers a fertile
season and sweet rain/

In Gaelic lands many an old name has been
dropped from common use, because thus as-
sociated with some shy and yet never -far
divinity, and so too the Finn and the Esth

121

The ceased to call the woodpecker Pikker (a word

Awakener so strangely like Picus) and thus it is that now
Woods ^ie Peasant knows him only as Tikka. With
the Romans, Picus the god was figured with
a woodpecker on his head, and all of us who
have read Pliny will remember the great store
laid by the auspices of Rome on the flight
and direction and general procedure of this
forest -traveller. Recently a sculptor, I know
not of what nationality, exhibited in Paris a
statue of the Unknown Pan, and on his
shoulder perched a woodpecker. Was this a
reminiscence, or ancestral memory, or the
divining vision of the imagination ? I have
some fifty pages or more of MS. notes dealing
with the folklore and legendary names and
varying ways and habits of the fascinating
woodlander, from his Greek appearance as
Pelekas, the axe-hewer (Aristophanes calls him
the oak-striker) — whence no doubt ' Picus '
and 'Pikker' and 'Peek' and the rest — to
Latin Tindareas, mortal father of Leda, to
the White Woodpecker, the magic bird of
mediaeval legend, to ' der olle Picker,' the
horrible laughing god of human sacrifice in
ancient Prussia, to Pak-a-Pak, ' the lost lover
of the woman in the oak,' in a strange tale I
heard once in the woods of Argyll. But of all
this I would recall to-day only that tradition of

122

the woodpecker which describes her (she is a The
wise -woman in the folk -tales) as knowing Awakener
where the spring-wurzel grows, that mys- Woods,
terious plant of Pan and the sun with which
one may open the faces of cliffs with a breath,
as did the deer -mother of Oisin of the Songs,
with which too one may find the secret ways
of Venusberg and behold incalculable treasure.
For hark ! . . . Pak-a-Pak, and the long
cry of love ! It is answered from the listening
woods ! Here must ' the spring-wurzel ' grow
. . . here, for sure, are the green palaces of
Venusberg, here, at very hand, are the incal-
culable treasures of the awakened Forest.

123

THE WILD APPLE

The foam of the White Tide of blossom has
been flung across the land. It is already
ebbing from the blackthorn hedges ; the wild-
cherry herself is no longer so immaculately
snow-white. It drifts on the wind that has
wooed the wild -apple. The plum is like a
reef swept with surf. Has not the laurustinus
long been as cream -dappled as, later, the elder
will be in every hedgerow or green lane or
cottage - garden ? Not that all the tides of
blossom are like fallen snow : is not the apple-
bloom itself flushed with the hearts of roses ?
Think of the flowering almond, that cloud of
shell-heart pink : of the delicate bloom of the
peach that lives on the south wind : of the
green-gold of the sallow catkins : of the blazing-
yellow of the gorse : of the homely flowering-
currant, which even by mid-March had hung
out her gay tangle of pinky blooms : of the
purple-red of the deadnettle in the ditch, and

124

of the ruddy -hued fallaways of the poplar The Wild
overhead. I wonder if in most places the Apple,
flowering-currant is no more than an ordinary
shrub. Here, where I write, there are several
small trees of it, taller than the general growth
of the lilac, tall as the laburnum, though at
the time of their unloosening the one had not
revealed her delicate mauve and white, while
the other was still a miser of the countless
gold he will now soon be spreading upon the
wind. The pink blooms, carmine-ended where
the five or six unfolded blossoms hang like
fruit, droop in a roseal shower, as innumerous
as the golden drops of the laburnum-rain or
the suspended snowflakes of the white lilac
themselves. The brown bees have long dis-
covered this flusht Eden ; their drowsily sweet
murmurous drone is as continuous as though
these slow -swaying pastures were of linden-
bloom, and the hour the heart of summer.

Everywhere the largesse of Spring has
followed her first penury in the scanty snow
of the blackthorn on bare boughs. What, by
the way, is the origin of the phrase * Black-
thorn-sorrow ' ? I heard it again recently, as
though to say that summer was safely at hand
so that now there was no more fear of the
blackthorn sorrow. However, as later I hope
to deal with the complex folklore of the Thorn,

125

The Wild I need not let the subject delay me now, ex-
Apple. cept to say that in the North-West Highlands
I have heard the blackthorn called Bron
Lochlannach, the Northman's woe, literally
Norse or Norland Sorrow or Mourning, . . .
a legendary designation to which there is, I
believe, a North-German analogue. The idea
here is that the blackthorn sprang from the
blood of the slain Norse invaders, the ' pagans
from Lochlin ' of mediaeval Gaelic story. In
many parts of the kingdom it is looked on
askance, and cut sprays of it brought into a
house are considered as a menace of ill, as a
death-token even ; and it has been surmised
that this is due to some confused memory of a
druidical or other early symbolism of the com-
mingling of winter and summer, in other
words of life and death, in the blackthorn's
blossom-strewn leafless branches. It may be
so, but does not seem to me likely, for by far
the greater part of flower and tree folklore
has little to do with such subtle conceptions.
Too many of these are as vague and fantastical
as that legend which says that one must not
taste of the root of the peony if a woodpecker
be in sight, or else the penalty may be blind-
ness : a safe prognostication !

It is that other thorn which holds us now,
that lovely torch of blossom which has taken

126

to itself the name of the lovers'-month. Not The Wild
that the hawthorn has unchallenged use of Apple.
May as a name. In Devon the white lilac is
often called the May, and elsewhere too the
'laylock' is spoken of as May-bloom. The
laurustinus, again, is thus named in some
parts of Somerset, and I have heard lilies of-
the-valley called May-blossoms. In Scotland
I have often heard the hawthorn -in -bloom
called Queen of the May and even Queen of
the Meadow, though neither name properly
belongs to it, and the latter is the inalienable
title of the meadowsweet. But of all wild-
blossom nothing surpasses in mass that of the
hawthorn. It, truly, is the foam of the groves
and hollows. From the south to the north
it flows in a foaming tide. ' Bride of the
world ' I have heard it called in a Gaelic song,
and long ago an ancient Celtic bard spoke of
it lovingly . . . 'white is every green thorn,
and honey sweet.'

But it is of the Apple I want to write just
now, she whose coronal of blossom is surely
loveliest of all fruitbearers : Bride of the
Wind we may say — 'Persephone herself as
a modern Italian poet calls her.

In the Highlands to-day the Apple ( Ubhal),
or the Wild -Apple or Crab -Apple (Ubhal-
fiadhaick), is still common in woods and by

127

The Wild stream-sides. The bitter juice of the fruit is

Apple. still used for sprains and bruises, and to-day

as of old the Gaelic poet has no more frequent

comparison of his sweetheart's charm than to

the delicate-hued, sweet-smelling apple — e.g.,

" Iseabail dg

An or-fhuilt bhuidhe —
Do ghruaidh mar ros
'S do phdg mar ubhal,"

where the poet praises his Isabel of the yellow
tresses and rose-flusht cheek and kissing-mouth
sweet as an apple. Once the apple was far
more common in Scotland than it is now. An
old authority, Solinus, says that Moray and all
the north-east abounded in the third century
with fruit-bearing apple-trees, and Buchanan
even speaks of Inverness-shire as being un-
surpassed for the fruit. Visitors to Iona,
to-day, who see it a sandy treeless isle, may
hardly credit that it was once famous for its
apple-orchards, and that too as late as the
ninth century, till the monks of Iona were
slain and the orchards destroyed by the
ravaging vikings out of Norway. Beautiful
Arran, too, was once lovelier still, so lovely
with apple-blossom and ruddy yellow fruit that
it was called Emhain Abhlach, the Avalon of
the Gael.

To come in a waste piece of tangled woods,
128

or on some lapwing-haunted pasture-edge, or The Wild
in the heathy wilderness, on the wild-apple in APPle-
bloom, is to know one of the most thrilling
experiences of the Spring. As a rule the wild-
apple stands solitary. Seen thus, it has often
something of the remote element of dreamland.
I came once, in the heart of a beechwood, on
a single tree of laburnum, in full glory of dense
unfallen gold. How did it come to be there,
what wind had first brought it on the tides of
birth, what friendly nurture had led the seed-
ling to the sapling and the sapling to lovely
youth ? I wondered ; but most I wondered
at the sudden beauty, at the unexpected
revelation of vistas other than those of the
woodland, at the unloosening of the secret
gates of dreams and the imagination. Faerie
stood open. Angus Og, the Celtic Apollo
Chrusokumos, the golden Balder of the Gael,
stood yonder just a moment ago, surely ?
Yonder, in the sunlit greenness, Midir of the
Dew it was who passed swiftly among the bat-
wings of disguising shadows ? Was that
Findabair going like a moonbeam, there in
the sea-caverns of the green leaf? Or was it
Fand, whose laughter the storm-thrush caught,
long, long ago ? Surely that was an echo of
old forgotten song in the gloom of the beeches ?
Could it be Fedelm of the Sid/ie, s the young

129 K

The Wild girl of the mouth of red berries, with voice
Apple. sweeter than the strings of a curved harp, and
skin showing like the snow of a single night ' ?
And there, vanishing in the sunlit cataract of
gold itself, like a rainbow behind falling water,
was not that Niamh of the Golden Tresses ?
. . . Niamh, whose beauty was so great that
the poets of the Other-world and those who
died of love for her called her Love Entangled,
she whose beauty filled three hundred years in
the single hour that Fionn thought he was
with her, in the days when the ancient world
had suddenly grown old, and the little bell of
Patrick the Christ-Bringer had tinkled sorrow
and desolation and passing away across the
Irish hills. Up among the devious green path-
ways of the travelling wood what lost king's
voice was that ? . . .

" Say, down those halls of Quiet

Doth he cry upon his Queen ?
Or doth he sleep, contented

To dream of what has been ? "

. . . what poet of long ago, living in a flame
of passion still, a wandering breath for ever,
went by on that drowsy wind ? —

" Across the world my sorrow flies,
A-hunger for the grey and wistful
Beauty of Feithfailge's eyes."
130

Something of that emotion as of ancestral The Wild
memories, as of an awakened past, of an un- Apple,
loosening of the imagination, may well come
to any imaginative nature encountering sud-
denly a wild-apple in blossom in some solitary
place. To people of a Celtic race or having a
dominant Celtic strain, in particular, perhaps ;
for to the Gael, the Cymru and the Breton
the Apple-tree is associated with his most
sacred traditional beliefs. Of old it was sacro-
sanct. It was the Celtic Tree of Life, what
Yggdrasil was to the ancient dreamers of
Scandinavia. He cannot think of it, but of
the kingdom of eternal youth : of Emhain
Abhlach, of Y Breasil, of Avalon, of drowned
Avillion. It waves over the lost Edens. In
Tir-na-n'Og its boughs, heavy with blossom,
hang above the foam of the last pale waters
of doom. The tired islander, who has put
away hunger and weariness and dreams and
the old secret desire of the sword, lays himself
down below its branches in Flatheanas, and
hears the wild harpers of Rinn in a drowsy
hum like the hum of wild bees. Grey -haired
men and women on the shores of Connemara
look out across the dim wave and see the
waving of its boughs. The Breton peasant,
standing at twilight on the rock-strewn beaches
of Tregastel, will cross himself as he smells the

!3i

The Wild fragrance of apple-blossom coming from sunken
Apple. is]es across the long rolling billows, and re-
member, perhaps, how of old in moonlit nights
he has seen his keel drive through the yielding
topmost branches of the woods of Avalon.
Many poets have wandered in the secret
valleys of Avillion, and have passed under
boughs heavy with foam of dreams, and have
forgotten all things and been uplifted in joy.
In the glens of the Land of Heart's Desire
the tired singers of the world have become
silent under the windless branches, snow-white
in the moonshine, having found the Heart of
Song.

The cross and death-coffer of apple-wood,
the crown of wild-apple, the apple-staff, the
poet's tablets of apple-wood, all the apple-
myths and apple-legends, how could one tell
of them in a few words. They are in old
songs and old tales of all lands. Our Gaelic
literature alone is fragrant with apple-bloom,
is lovely with the flickering shadow of the
apple-leaf, mysterious with symbol of fruit
and the apple- wood that holds life and death
in one embrace. Many readers will at once
recall that lovely old iale of Baile the Sweet-
spoken and Ailinn Honeymouth, whose love
was so great that when in their beautiful youth
they died and were buried, one in a grave to

132

the north and one in a grave to the south, The Wild
grave-wood grew into grave-wood, and green Apple,
branches from the north and the south became
one overhanging branch, under which the winds
murmured of passion that winter-death could
not kill nor the hot noons of summer lull into
forgetfulness. There is an older and less-
known sgeul of how Ana, that most ancient
goddess, the Mother, after she had fashioned
all the gods, and had made man out of rock
and sand and water and the breathing of her
breath, made woman out of the body of a
wave of the sea and out of foam of apple-
blossom and out of the wandering wind. And
there are many tales that, in this way or a
like way, have in them the mysterious wind
of the wild - apple, many poems on whose
shadowy waters float the rose-flusht snow of
the scattered blossoms of dreams and desires.
Was not the apple - blossom first stained
through the inappeasable longing of a poet-
king, who, yet living, had reached Y Breasil ?
Ulad saw there a garth of white blossom, and
of this he gathered, and warmed all night
against his breast, and at dawn breathed into
them. When the sunbreak slid a rising line
along the dawn he saw that what had been
white blooms, made warm by his breath and
flusht by the beating of his heart, was a

133

The, Wild woman. And how at the end Fand became
Apple. once m0re a drift of white blossom upon the
deerskin. For, when the longing and the
sorrow of all sorrows in the heart of Ulad
wrapt his heart in flame, suddenly a wind-eddy
scattered the blossoms upon the deerskin, so
that they wavered hither and thither, but
some were stained by the wandering fires of
a rainbow that drifted out of the rose-red
thickets of the dawn.

How far back do these apple-legends go ?
I know not. But when Aphrodite was born
of the Idalian foam she held an apple in her
hand, as Asia or Eve looked long upon the
fruit of life and death in Eden. In Hades
itself was it not the lure and the bitterness of
Tantalus ? All old poems and tales, as I have
said, have it, whether as legend, or dream, or
metaphor, or as a simile even, as in the
seventh-century MS. of the Cain Adamnain,
where Adamnan's old mother cries mo maccan-
sa sunt amail bis ubull fd tuind . . . 'my dear
son yonder is like an apple on a wave ' : [i.e.]
little is his hold on the earth. And those of
us who have read, and remember, the Prose
Edda, will recall how Iduna ' keeps in a box,
Apples, which the gods, when they feel old
age approaching, have only to taste to become
young again.'

134

Is that too a dream, or is there no Rag- The Wild
narok for the gods to fear ? This at least we Apple,
know, that as the winter-tide, the death -tide,
eternally recurs, so is the foam-white Dream
continually rewoven, so everlastingly does
Spring come again in the green garment that
is the symbol of immortality and wearing the
white coronals of blossom which stand for the
soul's inalienable hope, for the spirit's in-
calculable joy. For Avalon is not a dream.
It is with us still. It is here indeed, though
set within no frontiers, and unlimned in any
chart. And even the apples of Iduna grow
within reach : the least of us may eat of the
fruit . . . till the coming of Ragnarok.

135

RUNNING WATERS

Is it because the wild -wood passion of Pan
still lingers in our hearts, because still in our
minds the voice of Syrinx floats in melancholy
music, the music of regret and longing, that
for most of us there is so potent a spell in
running waters ? We associate them with
loneliness and beauty. Beauty and solitude
. . . these are still the shepherd -kings of
the imagination, to compel our wandering
memories, our thoughts, our dreams. There
is a story of one snatched from the closing
hand of death, who, when asked if he had
been oppressed by dark confusion and terror,
answered that he had known no terror and no
confusion but only an all-embracing and in-
tensifying silence, till at the last, deep within
it as in a profound chasm, he had caught the
low, continuous sound of running waters.
That I can well believe. At the extremes of
life thought naturally returns to the things

*36

that first communicated to the shaken mind Running
of childhood the sense of mystery, the summons Waters,
and the elation of that which reveals in
beauty and utters the vibration of wonder.
The first coming of snow, the noise of wind in
trees, the gathering murmur of the tide heard
in the night's darkness and silence, music or
songs borne across water, the first falling
meteors with their terrifying suggestion that
all these familiar stellar fires may likewise at
any time be blown abroad by some obscure
and awful wind, the furtive whisperings and
inexplicable confused speech of running waters,
of such are these primitive and unforgettable
experiences.

The burn, the brook, the rivulet, what
memories of them are possessed by those whose
childhood has not been wholly spent in towns,
or at those thronged seaside resorts where the
bounteous green life of Nature is even more
absent than in many cities, at least an those
which have their wooded parks, in which there
may be flowing or still waters, where the cushat
may be heard among the cedars or beeches,
and where, above the tall elms, the noisy
coming and going of rooks seems to the exile
the very voice of the country-side. The linn
of brown foaming water, the amber surge of
the hill-stream, the stealthy if swift rush of the

*37

Running brown flood beloved of the salmon, or the curve
Waters. and sweep of the grass -green river flowing
between meadows and under alders and past
rocky fastnesses and linking green valleys as a
winding snake barred with emerald, what
memories these suggest to every lad or lass,
to every man or woman who has ever thrown
a cast or trailed a line, or, for that matter, who
has lain on their leaning banks, book in hand,
or lost in dreams, or wandered the dewy ways
at dusk. Does not the very mention of
torrent and cataract and waterfall evoke happy
memories ? One can hear the tumultuous
surge between heather-held banks, and see the
rock -rooted bracken shake with the ceaseless
spray : can see the wild leap and foaming
collapse, so habitual, so orderly in disorder,
that the ring- ousel flies heedlessly from her
fragile eggs which a handful of this whirling
water would crush and sweep away : can recall,
as in dreams the mind rebuilds the phantoms
of natural imagery, the long, white, wavering
smoke down the sheer slope of some mountain-
bastion, or the filmy yet motionless veils of
delicate gauze hung high on the breasts of
silent and remote hills.

What differences there are in these running
waters. We hear much of ' blue ' rivers, of
the silver flood of azure, and so forth. But

138

few rivers or brooks or burns are blue. Their Running
azure colour is a mirage wrought by distance Waters,
and the angle of vision, affected by the play
of wind, by the quality of light, by the blue-
ness of the sky. Every German poet has
sung of the blue Danube, the blue Rhine.
These rivers have no quality of blueness, save
by reflection from above, at a distance, and at
a certain angle of vision. Waters flowing
from the Lake of Geneva and from the Lake
of Lucerne are blue even on grey days and if
looked at on the shadow -side of a bridge.
We have many grey-blue and blue-white and
azure-shadowed running waters, but we have
more that are grass-green and far more that
are dappled hazel and nut-brown and golden-
brown and amber-shot black-brown. It is
not easy to say which of these running waters
one loves best : nor need one, nor should one
try. It would be like thinking of a garden-
close filled with wallflower and mignonette,
carnations and sweet -peas, dark violets and
yellow pansies and blue love-in-a-mist, white
tulips and lilies-of-the-valley and white roses,
damask rose and the flusht morning-glory and
the pink moss-rose and brier and eglantine,
and saying which is best of these, which
loveliest, which the most dear to the mind
as well as to the eyes. But, still, we have

139

Running doubtless each some happy choice, some
Waters, hidden predilection. That will depend on
memories and associations. I read some-
where recently that a certain traveller could
not anywhere find, could nowhere recall, any
stream or river for him so poetical, so lovely
in quiet beauty as the Yorkshire Ouse. My
knowledge of that river is restricted to a brief
intimacy at and near York, and my recollec-
tion of it is of a broad turbid stream between
muddy banks. But that does not interfere
with the giving full credit to that traveller's
loyal affection. He would remember the
Ouse among the sands of Egypt or by the
yellow flow of the Hooghly or perhaps by the
surge of some great river as the Mississippi,
and it would flow through his mind in a
serene pastoral beauty, bluer than any river
that ever flowed in our grey North, and in a
changeless light of May or June, with calling
cuckoo and thridding swallow unmindful of
seasons that come and go, and with green flag
and tufted reed and trailing willow-branch as
unfading as the memories to which they are
for evermore wed. It would not be the Ouse
that you or I look at from the muddy banks
on a dull November day, or catch a glimpse
of as the North Express whirls by. It would
be the Ouse of boyhood and youth and the

140

heart filled with a sweet trouble, perplext by Running
a strange ache. It would be the Ouse at its Waters,
loveliest, on a rare day, in an hour of the
hours, flowing in midsummer- air fragrant
with meadow-hay and wild-roses. It would
be an Ouse more beautiful still : it would be
subtly present in * the quiet waters ' of the
Psalmist, wherever the painter limned that
delicate unrest, wherever the poet sang of the
Stream's Secret. It would be, for him, the
archetype of the flowing stream : the river.

And so, each will have his preference, if it
be only one of temperament rather than of
sentiment. The deep, broad, swirling river
has its incalculable fascination. Its mysterious
volume, so great a flood from perhaps so in-
significant a source, from mayhap some shallow
pool among stagnant marsh-lands with nothing
of stir or motion but the hovering dragon-fly,
the wheeling and wailing lapwing, and the
slow, voiceless passage of wayfaring cloud :
its devious way, like an interminable procession
or the continuous winding column of an army
seen from a great height : its arrivals and
departures at quiet towns and noisy and de-
filing cities : its destiny, its ultimate blending
with the devouring tide and the overrunning
wave ... all this has become the common-
place of the poet and the romancist. Thames

141

Running filled with every craft possible to be seen
Waters, betwixt the Nore and Oxford; the Forth,
winding in still loops under the walls of
Stirling and grey Cambuskenneth ; the Clyde,
running past the hills of Dumbarton and
Argyll, already salt with the sea-flood pouring
in by the ocean-gates of Arran and Ailsa ; the
deep flood of Tay or Shannon ; these, and
others, will always have a host to praise and
magnify. But many of us will dream rather
of chalk-streams in Devon, of the rippling
amber-yellow flood of Derwent in the Peakland
valleys, of Tweed and Teviot, of slow streams
among woods and bright rivers going like
cold flame through wide straths and lowlands :
of small narrow waters whose very names are
wedded to beauty and to 'old, unhappy, far-
off things,' Otterbourne, the Water of Urr,
the Water of Quair, Allan Water. Above
all will some of us think of those peat-stained
bracken-dyed burns, that leap and dance and
sing down the steep ways of rock and heather
in the Scotland of our love.

For my own part I find myself in so great
agreement with a friend, who expresses better
than I can do the love and haunting spell of
the brown hill- water (which is neither a river
nor exactly a stream nor yet a rivulet, but
with something of each and more of what in

142

the lowlands is a brook and in the highlands Running
a burn, yet than the one is swifter and than Waters,
the other is less debonair and impetuous) that
I have been constrained to ask leave to let it
appear here as a natural close of running
waters at the end of this brief paper on a
theme in whose very title lie old music and
dream and subtly incalculable spell.

The Hill-Water

There is a little brook,

I love it well :

It hath so sweet a sound

That even in dreams my ears could tell

Its music anywhere.

Often I wander there,

And leave my book

Unread upon the ground,

Eager to quell

In the hush'd air

That dwells above its flowing forehead fair

All that about my heart hath wound

A trouble of care :

Or, it may be, idly to spell

Its runic music rare,

And with its singing soul to share

Its ancient lore profound :

For sweet it is to be the echoing shell

That lists and inly keeps that murmurous miracle.

About it all day long
In this June-tide
There is a myriad song.

H3

Running From every side

Waters. There comes a breath, a hum, a voice :

The hill-wind fans it with a pleasant noise

As of sweet rustling things

That move on unseen wings,

And from the pinewood near

A floating whisper oftentimes I hear,

As when, o'er pastoral meadows wide,

Stealeth the drowsy music of a weir.

The green reeds bend above it ;

The soft green grasses stoop and trail therein ;

The minnows dart and spin ;

The purple-gleaming swallows love it :

And, hush, its innermost depths within,

The vague prophetic murmur of the linn !

But not in summertide alone

I love to look

Upon this rippling water in my glen .

Most sweet, most dear my brook,

And most my own,

When the grey mists shroud every ben,

And in its quiet place

The stream doth bare her face

And lets me pore deep down into her eyes,

Her eyes of shadowy grey

Wherein from day to day

My soul is spellbound with a new surmise,

Or doth some subtler meaning trace

Reflected from unseen invisible skies.

Dear mountain-solitary, dear lonely brook,
Of hillside rains and dews the fragrant daughter,
Sweet, sweet thy music when I bend above thee,
When in thy fugitive face I look :
144

Yet not the less I love thee, Running;

When, far away, and absent from thee long, Waters.

I yearn, my dark hill-water,

I yearn, I strain to hear thy song,

Brown, wandering water,

Dear, murmuring water !

145

THE SUMMER HERALDS

If the cuckoo, the swallow, and the nightjar
be pre-eminently the birds of Summer (though,
truly, the swift, the flycatcher, and the corn-
crake have as good a title) the rear-guard of
Spring may be said to be the house-martin, the
cushat, and the turtle. Even the delaying
wheatear, or the still later butcher-bird may
have come, and yet Sweep -Sweep may not
have been heard about the eaves of old houses
or under and over the ruined clay of last year's
nests ; the cushat's voice may not have become
habitual in the greening woods ; and the tire-
less wings of the turtle may not have been
seen clipping the invisible pathways between
us and the horizons of the south. But, when
these come, we know that Spring has traversed
the whole country, and is now standing ankle-
deep in thrift and moondaisies in the last rocky
places fronting the north sea. No one doubts
that summer is round the corner when the

146

flycatcher hawks the happy hunting-grounds The
of the apple-blossom, when the swift wheels ^^
over the spire of the village church, and when
the wild-dove is come again. The first call
of the cuckoo unloosened the secret gates.
We are across the frontier in that first gloam-
ing when we hear

The clamour musical of culver wings
Beating the soft air of the dewy dusk.

To these familiar and loved harbingers from
the south should be added yet another welcome
friend who comes to us in the rear-guard of
the Spring, though, rather, we should say he
becomes visible now, for the Bat has never
crossed the seas. The house-martin has not
had time to forget the sands of Africa before
her wing has dusked the white pansies on the
sunside of old redbrick English manors : but
the bat has only to stretch his far stronger yet
incalculably less enduring pinions and then
loop through the dusk from ivied cave or tree-
hollow or the sombre silences of old barns,
ruined towers, or ancient belfries sheltered
from rain and wind.

The Awakening of the Bat . . . yes, that
too is a sign that Spring has gone by, singing
on her northward way and weaving coronals
of primrose and cowslip, or from her unfolded

H7

The lap throwing clouds of blossom on this haw-

Summer thorn or on this apple-orchard, or where the
era s* wind-a-quiver pear leans over the pasture from
the garden-edge, or where in green hollows the
wild-cherry holds the nest of a speckled thrush.
She will be gone soon. Before the cuckoo's
sweet bells have jangled she will be treading
the snows of yesteryear. But no, she never
leaves the circling road, Persephone, Earth's
loveliest daughter. Onward forever she goes,
young, immortal, singing the greening song of
her ancient deathless magic far down below
the horizons, beyond the lifting line of the
ever upwelling world. And already Summer
is awake. She hears the nightjar churring
from the juniper to his mate on the hawthorn-
bough, and in the dew among the green corn
or from the seeding pastures the crek-crake!
crek-crake! of the ambiguous landrail. This
morning, when she woke, the cushats were
calling from the forest-avenues, the bumble-
bee droned in the pale horns of the honey-
suckle, and from a thicket newly covered with
pink and white blossoms of the wild -rose a
proud mavis saw her younglings at last take
flight on confident wing.

A (good symbol, that of the Awakening of
the Bat. Darkness come out of the realm of
sleep and dreams : the realm itself filled with

148

the west wind and the dancing sunlight, sleep The
put away like a nomad's winter-tent and dreams Summer
become realities. Often I have wondered how era s*
it is that so little is commonly known of the
bat-lore of our own and other races. Doubt-
less there is some book which deals with this
lore. There may be some familiar one for
aught I know, but I have never met with or
heard of it.

Recently I tried in vain to get some such
book dealing with the folklore and mythology
of the bat. And yet in the traditional lore of
all countries there are many allusions to this
'blind bird of the dusk.' The Greeks, the
Romans, the Celts of Europe, the westering
Gaels, had many legends and superstitions
connected with it. To-day the Finn, the
Magyar, the Basque and the island Gael
keep some of the folklore that has ebbed
away from other nations, or become confused
or remembered only by old folk in old out-of-
the-way places. Somewhere I have notes of
several bat-legends and fragments of bat-lore
collected once for a friend, who after all went
'to hunt the bat' before he could use them.
That was the phrase which started the quest.
He had read it, or heard it I think, and wrote
to me asking if I had ever heard the phrase
' to hunt the bat ' as synonymous with death.

149

The I have heard it once or twice in the last few
Summer years, and once in a story where the teller,
era s' speaking of an outlaw who was a great deer-
hunter in the wilds of Inverness, was found
dead ' with the fork of an ash-root through
his breast, pinned like a red fox he was, and
he by that time hunting the bat in the black
silence.' It would be inapposite, here, to
linger on this theme, but I am tempted to
record one or two of these bat-lore fragments
which I recall : and perhaps, from the scarcity
of such traditional flotsam and jetsam, some
readers and bat-lovers may be interested.

The bat, commonly called in Gaelic an
ialtag, or dialtag, though even in the one
Shire of Argyll at least six other common
names might as likely be heard, is occasionally
poetically called the Bad liar an- dim, the dark
wandering one. I remember being told that
the reason of the name was as follows. In
the early days of the world the bat was blue
as the kingfisher and with a breast white as
that of the swallow, and its eyes were so large
and luminous that because of this and its
whirling flight its ancient name was a name
signifying 'flash-fire' — though now become,
with the Gaelic poet who told me this, dealan-
dhu badhalaiche ckoille, 'the little black wander-
ing flame of the woods.' But on the day of

*5Q

the Crucifixion the bat mocked at the agony The
of the Saviour, and while the redbreast was ^umi?der
trying to pull out a thorn, now from Christ's
hand, now from His foot, the bat whirled to
and fro crying, 'See how lovely I am! See
how swift I am!' Christ turned His eyes
and looked at it, and the blue and the white
went out of the bat like the ebbing wave out
of a pool, and it became blind and black and
whirled away till it met the rising of night
and was drowned in that darkness for ever-
more. And that is why the bat is seen in
the dusk and at night, and wheels to and fro
in such aimless wandering flight, with his thin
almost inaudible voice crying, * See how blind
I am ! See how ugly I am ! '

From the same source I had dealan-dhu
bats, the little black flame (or flash) of death,
and a still stranger note to the effect that bats
are the offspring of lightning and smitten
trees : the connection being more obvious to
Gaelic ears, because dealan-bas is one of the
names of lightning.

The other name I heard as a child, and it
long puzzled me. Beuban - an - A thar - Uai -
bhreach: literally, the malformed one of the
Haughty Father. Now why should the bat
be called beuban, a thing spoiled, wilfully
malformed? 'An t1 Athair Uaibhreach ' (of

151

The which an athar is the genitive) is one of the

Summer evasive names used by the Gael for Satan
era s. ^ \\\&t proud and glorious angel, the

Father of Evil, who fell from his high estate
through ineonquerabie pride. Why, then,
was the bat the malformed creature of Satan ?
It was years afterwards before I had the story
told me, for my old nurse (from whom I heard
the phrase) did not think the tale fitting for a
child's ears. When Judas hanged himself on
a tree, so the tale ran, and his soul went out
lamenting on the wind, the Haughty Father
flung that wretched spirit contemptuously
back into the world. But first he twisted it
and altered it four hundred and forty -four
times, till it was neither human nor bird nor
beast, but was likest a foul rat with leathern
wings. * Stay there till the last day,' he said,
'in blindness and darkness, and be accursed
for ever' . . . and that is why the bat (the
triollachan dhorcliadas, 'the little waverer of
the dark,' or triollachan fheasgair, or little
waverer of the dusk, as a more merciful
legend has it) flies as he does, maimed, blind,
accursed and feared, and shrieking in his
phantom voice Gu la bais ! Gu Id bais !
('till the day of death' . . . i.e., the Last
Day).

In some parts of Argyll the bat is said to
152

live for three generations of an eagle, six The
generations of a stag, and nine generations of Summer
a man. With less poetic exactitude I have era
been told that it lives thirteen years in flight
and thirty -three years in all ! . . . though
equally authentic information avers that the
average life of the bat is twenty-one years.
A forester told me once that he did not think
any bat lived longer than nine years, but he
thought fifteen as likely as nine. On the
other hand, he himself spoke, and as though
for all he knew it might well be so, of an
old tradition that a bat lives to a hundred
years. This, I may add, I have heard again
and again. The other day a fisherman from
the island of Lismore gave the unexpected
answer : ' How old will the ialtag be ?
Well, now, just exactly what the age of
Judas was the hour he kissed Christ and
betrayed Him, and not a day more and not a
day less.' Nothing explicit as to that,
however, could be obtained. A gardener
told me once a rhyme about how to get at
the age of man, but I have forgotten it except
that it was to the effect that a losgunn (a
toad) was twice the age of an easgunn (an
eel), and that a dialtag (bat) was twice the
age of a losgunn, and that am fiad/i (the stag)
was twice the age of a dialtag, 'and put ten

153

The to that and you'll have the allotted age of

Summer man' [i.e., an eel is supposed to live about
era as. seven vears to seven and a half years : a frog
or toad to about fifteen : a bat to about
thirty : a deer to about sixty. I should add,
however, that my informant was not sure if in
the third instance it wasn't a iolair (eagle)
instead of a deer].

One of the strangest English names for the
bat (among over a score only less strange) is
the Athern-bird — a Somerset term, I believe,
whose meaning I do not know.

But now to return to the rear-guard of
Spring of whom we spoke first. Yet the
folklore of the house -martin is so familiar
that it need not be alluded to. We all know
that it is time to think of summer when the
martin clings once more to her last year's
clay-house under the eaves.

It is when the wild-doves are heard in the
woods that one realises the Spring- Summer
borderland is being crossed. When the
cushat calls, all the clans of the bushes are at
home, runs a Highland saying : meaning that
every mavis and merle and finch is busy with
hatching the young brood, or busier still
feeding the callow nestlings. But when the
voice of the turtle is heard in the land, then
Summer has come over the sea on the south

154

wind, and is weaving roses for her coronal and The
will be with us while we are yet unaware. Summer

What a quantity of old lore one might era s'
collect about the dove, and as for the allusions
in ancient and modern literature they must be
legion — from the familiar Scriptural phrase
about the turtle to Chaucer's 'the wedded
turtil with her hearte trewe,' from Greek
myth or Roman poem to Tennyson's 'moan
of doves in immemorial elms.' Doubtless
much of the dove-lore is so well known that
it would be superfluous to repeat it here. As
the symbol of peace, of the Spirit, the dove
herself is universally familiar. The turtle is
also a symbol of mourning, and of old, as
among the oak-groves of Dodona or before the
fane of Hierapolis, was held sacred as the bird
of prophecy, of the soul, and of the life after
death. It is because of the loving faithfulness
of the cushat that this bird was long ago dedi-
cated to Venus ; and it was because Venus
presided over both birth and death that the
dove became associated of old with scenes so
opposite as marriage festivals and funeral rites.
We are all familiar with the legend that the
soul of a dying person may be seen departing
like a flying dove, and so it was that even a
tame pigeon came to be an unwelcome sight
at the window where any one lay in serious

155

The illness. In a word, the peasant-invalid might

Summer take the bird to be a death-messenger, the bird
Heralds

' of the grave. The most singular of these folk-

superstitions, I think, is that in whose exercise

a living pigeon used to be placed on the head

of a dying man in order to attract the pain to

the bird and so ease the sufferer. One wonders

what became of the unfortunate pigeon.

The strangest of the northern legends is
that Swedish one which makes the wild-dove
the confidant of Baldur, the Scandinavian god
of song and beautiful love, before he died 'the
white death ' when the ancient world receded
for ever at the advent of Christ. Still do they
murmur in the woods of the immortal passion,
the deathless love of the old gods, they who
long ago passed away one knows not whither,
with Baldur going before them harping, and
singing a strange song. One Gaelic poetic
name for the cushat is poetry itself ; Caoirean-
na-coille, 'the murmur of the woods.' The
subtlest legend is that old world Finnish
identification of Aino the dove -maiden and
Vaino, the male -Venus of the North, like
Venus sea-born, like Venus the offspring of
Zeus and Destiny, and as Aino or Vaino now
the singer, now the presiding deity at marriage
festival or during the lamentations for the dead.

How little we know of this Vaino of the

156

Kalevala, or of that not less mysterious ancient The
Teutonic nature-god Wunsch, or of our Gaelic Summer
Angus Og, son of heaven and earth ; each of ra s*
whom has the wild -dove for his own, his
symbol and his mortal image. Each wove
grass and plants and greenness of trees out of
the earth and the rain, out of the sunshine and
the wind ; each spun flowers out of dew and
moonlight and the rose and saffron of dawns
and sunsets. Each, too, created strength in
the hearts of men and power in their bodies,
and wove beauty on the faces of women and
children. Each became, thus, the god of
happiness, of youth, of joy. And to each,
finally, the doves were dedicated as their sacred
birds, their mortal image among the illusions
of the world. So here we pass back, pass away
from the later tradition of mourning and
death, to the old joyousness of Spring, of
Spring who creates grass and plant and flower,
the strength of men and the beauty of women
and the gladness of children, Spring who turns
when the apple -blossom fades and lets loose
the doves of Summer.

157

THE SEA-SPELL

Old magical writers speak of the elemental
affinity which is the veiled door in each of us.
Find that door, and you will be on the secret
road to the soul, they say in effect. Some
are children of fire, and some of air, some are
of earth, and some of water. They even re-
solve mortal strength and weakness, our virtue
and our evil, into the movement of these
elements. This virtue, it is of fire: this quality,
it is of air : this frailty, it is of water. How-
soever this may be, some of us are assuredly
of that ancient clan in whose blood, as an old
legend has it, is the water of the sea. Many
legends, many poems, many sayings tell of the
Chloinn-na-Mhara, the children of the sea. I
have heard them from fishermen, from inland-
shepherds, from moorlanders in inland solitudes
where the only visitors from the mysterious
far-off deep are the wandering sea-mews or
the cloud that has climbed out of the south.

158

Some tell of the terror of the sea, some of its The

mysteriousness, some of the evil and of the Sea-Spell.

evil things that belong to it and are in it, some

of its beauty, some of its fascination (as the

Greeks of old-time told of the sirens, who

were the voices and fatal music and the strange

and perilous loveliness of alien waters), some

of the subtle and secret spell deep-buried in

the hearts of certain men and women, the

Chloinn-na-Mhara, a spell that will brood

there, and give no peace, but will compel the

spirit to the loneliness of the wind, and the

outward life to the wayward turbulence of the

wave. More than two thousand years ago

the great Pindar had these in mind when

he wrote of that strange tribe among men

'who scorn the things of home, and gaze

on things that are afar off, and chase a

cheating prey with hopes that shall never be

fulfilled.'

Elsewhere I have written much of this sea-
spell, of the Bronavara (to Anglicise an island
word), or Sorrow of the Sea, and do not wish
to write here of that strange passion or sinister
affinity : but of that other and happier Spell
of the Sea which so many of us feel, with
pleasure always, with delight often, at times
with exultation, as though in our very heart
were the sharp briny splash of the blue wave

J59

The tossing its white crest, or of the green billow

Sea-Spell, falling like a tower of jade in a seething flood.
But, first, I recall that old legend to which I
have alluded. Perhaps some folklorist may
recognise it as gathered out of the drift
common to many shores, may trace it even
to those Asian inlands where so many of our
most ancient tales mysteriously arose ; but I
have nowhere met with it in print, nor seen
nor heard allusion to it, other than in a crude
fashioning on the lips of simple Gaelic folk,
nor even there for years upon years. There
were once four cities (the Western Gael will
generally call them Gorias and Falias, Finias
and Murias), the greatest and most beautiful
of the cities of those ancient tribes of beauty,
the offspring of angels and the daughters of
earth. The fair women were beautiful, but
lived like flowers, and like flowers faded and
were no more, for they were filled with happi-
ness, as cups of ivory filled with sunlit dancing
wine, but were soulless. Eve, that sorrowful
loveliness, was not yet born. Adam was not
yet lifted out of the dust of Eden. Finias
was the gate of Eden to the South, Murias to
the West : in the North, Falias was crowned
by a great star : in the East, Gorias, the city
of gems, flashed like sunrise. There the death-
less clan of the sky loved the children of Lilith.

1 60

On the day when Adam uttered the sacred The
name and became king of the world, a great Sea-Spell,
sighing was heard in Gorias in the East and in
Finias in the South, in Murias in the West
and in Falias in the North : and when morn
was come the women were no more awakened
by the stirring of wings and the sunrise-flight
of their angelic lovers. They came no more.
And when Eve awoke by the side of Adam,
and he looked on her, and saw the immortal
mystery in the eyes of this mortal loveliness,
lamentations and farewells and voices of twi-
light were heard in Murias by the margin of
the sea and in Gorias high -set among her
peaks ; in the secret gardens of Falias, and
where the moonlight hung like a spear above
the towers of Finias upon the great plain.
The children of Lilith were gone away upon
the wind, as lifted dust, as dew, as shadow, as
the unreturning leaf. Adam rose, and bade
Eve go to the four solitudes, and bring back
the four ancient secrets of the world. So Eve
went to Gorias, and found nothing there but
a flame of fire. She lifted it and hid it in her
heart. At noon she came to Finias, and
found nothing there but a spear of white light.
She took it and hid it in her mind. At dusk
she came to Falias, and found nothing there but
a star in the darkness. She hid the darkness,

161 M

The and the star within the darkness, in her womb.

Sea-Spell. At moonrise she came to Murias, by the shores
of the ocean. There she saw nothing but a
wandering light. So she stooped, and lifted a
wave of the sea and hid it in her blood. And
when Eve was come again to Adam, she gave
him the flame she had found in Gorias, and the
spear of light she had found in Finias. ' In
■ Falias,' she said, * I found that which I cannot
give, but the darkness I have hidden shall be
your darkness, and the star shall be your star.'
'Tell me what you found in Murias by the
sea ? ' asked Adam. ' Nothing,' answered Eve.
But Adam knew that she lied. 'I saw a
wandering light,' she said. He sighed, and
believed. But Eve kept the wave of the sea
hidden in her blood. So has it been that a
multitude of women have been homeless as
the wave, and their heritage salt as the sea :
and that some among their sons and daughters
have been possessed by that vain cold fire, and
that inappeasable trouble, and the restlessness
of water. So it is that to the end of time
some shall have the salt sea in the blood,
and the troubled wave in the heart, and be
homeless.

But thoughts like these, legends like these,
are for the twilight hour, or for the silent
people who live in isles and remote places.

162

For most of us, for those of us who do not The
dwell by lonely shores and seldom behold the Sea-Spell,
sea but in the quiet seasons, it is either a
delight or an oppression. Some can no more
love it, or can have any well-being or com-
posure near it, than others can be well or
content where vast moors reach from skyline
to skyline, or amid the green solemnities of
forests, or where stillness inhabits the hollows
of hills. But for those who do love it, what
a joy it is ! The Sea . . . the very words
have magic. It is like the sound of a horn
in woods, like the sound of a bugle in the
dusk, like the cry of wind leaping the long
bastions of silence. To many of us there
is no call like it, no other such clarion of
gladness.

But when one speaks of the sea it is as
though one should speak of summer or winter,
of spring or autumn. It has many aspects : it
is not here what it is yonder, yonder it is not
what it is afar off: here, even, it is not in
August what it is when the March winds,
those steel-blue coursers, are unleashed ; the
grey-green calms of January differ from the
purple-grey calms of September, and November
leaning in mist across the dusk of wavering
horizons is other than azure-robed and cirrus-
crowned May moving joyously across a glorious

163

The tossing wilderness of blue and white. The

Sea-Spell. b]ue sea frothed with wind has ever been a
salutation of joy. iEschylos sounded the note of
rapture which has since echoed through poetry
and romance : that ' multitudinous laughter '
struck a vibration which time has never dulled
nor lessened. It has been an exultation above
all in the literatures of the north. Scandinavian
poetry is full of the salt brine ; there is not a
viking-saga that is not wet with the spray of
surging seas. Through all the primitive tales
and song's of the Gael one feels the intoxication
of the blue wine of the running wave. In the
Icelandic sagas it is like a clashing of shields.
It calls through the Ossianic chants like a tide.
Every Gaelic song of exile has the sound of it,
as in the convolutions of a shell. The first
Gaelic poet rejoiced at the call of the sea, and
bowed before the chanting of a divine voice.
In his madness, Cuchulain fought with the
racing billows on the Irish Coast, striving with
them as joy-intoxicated foes, laughing against
their laughter : to the dark waves of Coruisk,
in the Isle of Skye, he rushed with a drawn
sword, calling to these wise warriors of the
sea to advance in their proud hosts that he
might slay them. Sigurd and Brynhild,
Gunhild and Olaf, Torquil and Swaran and
Haco, do they not sound like the names

164

of waves ? How good that old - world The

rejoicing in the great green wilderness of Sea-Spell.

waters, in the foam-swept blue meads, in the

cry of the wind and the chant of the billows

and the sharp sting of flying scud ? It is of

to-day also. A multitude of us rejoice as those

of old rejoiced, though we have changed in so

much with all the incalculable change of the

years. To-day as then the poets of the isles

. . . the poet in the heart of each of us who

loves the glory and beauty and in any degree

feels the strong spell of the sea . . . answer to

that clarion-music : as in this Evoe ! by one

of the latest among them : —

" Oceanward, the sea-horses sweep magnificently, champing
and whirling white foam about their green flanks, and tossing on
high their manes of sunlit rainbow-gold, dazzling white and
multitudinous far as sight can reach.

" 0, champing horses of my soul, toss, toss on high your sun-
lit manes, your manes of rainbow-gold, dazzling-white and
multitudinous, for I too rejoice, rejoice ! "

And who of us will forget that great English
poet of to-day, that supreme singer of —

" Sky, and shore, and cloud, and waste, and sea,"

who has written so often and so magically of
the spell of the sea and of the elation of those
who commit themselves to the sway and
rhythm of its moving waters : —

165

The " The grey sky gleams and the grey seas glimmer,

Sea-Spell. P&le ar|d sweet as a dream's delight,

As a dream's where darkness and light seem dimmer,

Touched by dawn or subdued by night.
The dark wind, stern and sublime and sad,
Swings the rollers to westward, clad
With lustrous shadow that lures the swimmer,
Lures and lulls him with dreams of light.

" Light, and sleep, and delight, and wonder,
Change, and rest, and a charm of cloud,
Fill the world of the skies whereunder
Heaves and quivers and pants aloud
All the world of the waters, hoary
Now, but clothed with its own live glory,
That mates the lightning and mocks the thunder
With light more living and word more proud.

" A dream, and more than a dream, and dimmer
At once and brighter than dreams that flee,

The moment's joy of the seaward swimmer
Abides, remembered as truth may be.

Not all the joy and not all the glory

Must fade as leaves when the woods wax hoary ;

For there the downs and the sea-banks glimmer,
And here to south of them swells the sea."

What swimmer too, who loves this poet, but
will recall the marvellous sea -shine line in
* Thalassius ' :

" Dense water-walls and clear dusk waterways . . .
The deep divine dark dayshine of the sea "

It is this exquisite miracle of transparency

1 66

which gives the last secret of beauty to water. The
All else that we look upon is opaque : the Sea-Spell,
mountain in its sundown purple or noon-azure,
the meadows and fields, the gathered greenness
of woods, the loveliness of massed flowers, the
myriad wonder of the universal grass, even the
clouds that trail their shadows upon the hills
or soar so high into frozen deeps of azure that
they pass shadowless like phantoms or the
creatures of dreams — the beauty of all these is
opaque. But the beauty of water is that it is
transparent. Think if the grass, if the leaves
of the tree, if the rose and the iris and the pale
horns of the honeysuckle, if the great mountains
built of grey steeps of granite and massed
purple of shadow were thus luminous, thus
transparent ! Think if they, too, as the sea,
could reflect the passage of saffron-sailed and
rose-flusht argosies of cloud, or mirror as in
the calms of ocean the multitudinous undula-
tion of the blue sky ! This divine translucency
is but a part of the Sea-Spell, which holds us
from childhood to old age in wonder and
delight, but that part is its secret joy, its
incommunicable charm.

167

SUMMER CLOUDS

For one who has lived so much among the
hills and loves the mountain solitude it may
seem strange to aver that the most uplifting
and enduring charm in Nature is to be found
in amplitude of space. Low and rolling lands
give what no highlands allow. If in these the
miraculous surprise of cloud is a perpetual new
element of loveliness, it is loveliness itself that
unfolds when an interminable land recedes from
an illimitable horizon, and, belonging to each
and yet remote from either, clouds hang like
flowers, or drift like medusge, or gather
mysteriously as white bergs in the pale azure
of arctic seas.

We are apt to be deceived by the formal
grandeur of mountains, by the massed colours
and contours of upbuilded heights, whether
lying solitarily like vast sleeping saurians, or
gathered in harmonious, if tumultuous, disarray.
There is a beauty that is uniquely of the hills.

168

The mountain lands have that which no low- Summer
land has. But in that company we shall not Clouds,
find what the illimitable level lands will afford,
what inhabits the wilderness, what is the
revelation of the desert, what is the lovely
magic of the horizons of the sea. By the
sombre reaches of the Solway, in the fen-
lands of East Anglia, in the immensity of
the great bog which cinctures Ireland, in the
illimitable lowland from Flanders to the last
brine-whitened Frisian meadows, I have seen
a quality of aerial beauty that I have not in
like loveliness elsewhere found. Who that
in mid-ocean has long watched the revelation
of distance and the phantasmagoria of cloud
during serene days, or from island shores
looked across limitless waters till the far
blue line seemed lifted to the purple-shadowed
bases of leaning palaces, can think of an excel-
ling loveliness ? Who that has seen the four-
fold azure, in east and west, in north and
south, over the desert, and watched the secret
veils of a single pavilion of rose-flusht cumulus
slowly be undone, till the vision is become a
phantom, and the phantom is become a dream,
and the dream is become a whiteness and still-
ness deep -sinking into fathomless blue, can
forget that the impassive beauty of the
wilderness is more searching and compelling

169

Summer than the continual miracle of wind-swept Alp

Clouds. and cloud-shadowed highland ; that it has, in

its majesty of silence and repose, that which

is perpetual on the brows of Andes and does

not pass from Himalaya ?

Perhaps in sheer beauty of pictorial isolation
clouds are most lovely when viewed above sea
horizons, from shores of islands, or promon-
tories, or remote headlands. In the South
this beauty is possibly more dream - like,
more poignantly lovely, than in the North.
Certainly, I have nowhere known cloud
beauty excelling that in the Mediterranean
and Ionian seas, viewed from the Spanish
coast, from the Balearic Isles, over against
the mountain-bastions of Sardinia and Corsica,
from the headlands of Sicily, where Ithaka
and Zante are as great galleys in a magic
ocean, where for weeks at midsummer the
wine-dark waters are untroubled between the
cliffs of Hellas and the sands of Alexandria.
Perhaps. It is difficult to say of any region
that there beauty is more wonderfully revealed
than elsewhere. It comes, and is present, and
is upgathered ; as the wind, that has no home,
that the shaken reed knows, that crumbles the
crests of ancient hills ; as the rainbow, which is
the same aerial flame upon Helicon, upon Ida,
on the green glen of Aghadoe, on the steeps

170

of Hecla in the Hebrides, that gives majesty Summer
and wonder to the village green, and delivers Clouds,
mystery on the horizons of the frequented
common. It is like light, whose incalculable
arrivals are myriad, but which when most
steadfast is most dreamlike, a phantom : as
moonlight on the mysterious upturned face
of great woods ; or as when, on illimitable
moors, the dew glistens on the tangled bent
and pale flood of orchis where the lapwings
nest ; or in golden fire, as when at the solstice
the sorrel in the meadows and the tansy in
the wastes and the multitude of the dandelion
are transmuted into a mirage of red and yellow
flame ; or in rippling flood of azure and silver,
when the daysprings loosen ; or in scarlet and
purple and chrysoprase, when the South is as
a clouded opal and the West is the silent con-
flagration of the world. There is not a hidden
glen among the lost hills, there is not an
unvisited shore, there is not a city swathed
in smoke and drowned in many clamours,
where light is not a continual miracle, where
from dayset to dawn, from the rising of the
blue to the gathering of shadow, the wind is
not habitual as are the reinless, fierce, unswerv-
ing tides of the sea. Beauty, and Light, and
Wind : they who are so common in our com-
panionship and so continual in mystery, are

171

Summer as one in this — that none knows whence the
Clouds. one or the other is come, or where any has
the last excellence or differs save in the vibra-
tion of ecstasy, or whither the one or the
other is gone, when the moment, on whose
wings it came or on whose brows it stood
revealed, is no longer Eternity speaking the
language of Time, but the silence of what is
already timeless and no more.

It has been said, less wisely than disdainfully,
that the chief element of beauty is destroyed
when one knows the secret of semblance.
Clouds, then, are forfeit in loveliness when
one knows the causes of their transformation,
their superb illusion ? Not so. Has the rose
lost in beauty, has she relinquished fragrance,
for all that we have learned of her blind roots,
the red ichor in her petals, the green pigment
in her stem, her hunger that must be fed in
coarse earth, her thirst that must be quenched
in rain and dew, her desire that must mate
with light ? Is the rainbow the less a lovely
mystery because we know that it is compact
of the round, colourless raindrops such as fall
upon us in any shower? Is the blue of an
unclouded sky the less poignant for us if we
know that the sunlight which inhabits it is
there, not the yellow or red or suffused white
which we discern, but itself an ineffable azure ;

172

that, there, the sun itself is not golden or Summer
amber or bronze, but violet-blue ? Clouds.

I remember it was complained once of
something I wrote ... in effect, that cloud
was the visible breathing, the suspended breath
of earth . . . that the simile was as inept as
it was untrue. None who knows how cloud
is formed will dispute the truth in similitude :
as to disillusion, can that be 'unpoetic' which
is so strange and beautiful a thing ? The
breath of a little child born in the chill of
dawn, the breath of old age fading into the
soon untroubled surface of the mirror held
against silent lips, the breath of the shepherd
on the hills, of the seamen on dark nights
under frost-blue stars, the breath of cows on
the morning pastures, of the stag panting by
the tarn, the breath of woods, of waters, of
straths, of the plains, of the brows of hills, the
breath of the grass, the breathing of the
tremulous reed and the shaken leaf . . . are
not these the continual vapour of life ; and
what is cloud but the continual breath of our
most deep and ancient friend, the brown earth,
our cradle, our home, and our haven ?

If any reader wish to feel the invisible
making of the cloud that shall afterward rise
on white wings or stream like a banner from
mountain-bastions, let him stand on the slopes

173

Summer of a furrowed hill in this midsummer season.

Clouds. He will then feel the steady, upflowing tide of
the warm air from the low-lying glens and
valleys, a constant tepid draught, the breath
of the earth. It will not be long before the
current which shook yonder rose-flusht briar,
which swayed these harebells as foam is blown,
which lifted yonder rowan-branch and softly
trampled this bracken underfoot, is gathered
by scaur and sudden corrie to the sheer scarps
of the mountain-summit, to be impelled thence,
as a geyser is thrown from an imperious fount,
high into the cold and windy solitude. There
it may suddenly be transmuted to an incalcul-
able host of invisible ice-needles, and become
cirrus ; to float like thistledown, or to be in-
numerably scattered in wisps and estrays, or
long ' grey-mares'-tails,' or dispersed like foam
among vast, turbulent shallows. Or it may keep
to the lee-side of the mountain-summit, and
stretch far like a serrated sword, or undulat-
ingly extend like a wind-narrowed banner,
covering as a flag the climbing armies of pine
and boulder and the inscrutable array of
shadow.

Cirrus . . . what a beauty there is in the
familiar name : what beauty of association for
all who love the pageant of cloud, and, loving,
know somewhat of the science of the meteor-

174

ologist. It is not alone in this : memory and Summer
imagination are alike stirred by the names of Clouds,
the three other of the four main divisions of
Cloud — the Cumulus, the Stratus, the Nimbus.
From the grey and purple of earthward
nimbus to the salmon-pink bastions of the
towering cumuli, those unloosened mountains
of the middle air, those shifting frontiers of
the untravelled lands of heaven, and thence to
the dazzling whiteness of the last frozen pin-
nacles of cirrus, all loveliness of colour may be
found. Neither brush of painter nor word of
poet can emulate those apparitions of gold and
scarlet, of purple and emerald, of opal and
saffron and rose. There every shade of dove-
brown and willow-grey, every subterfuge of
shadow and shine, can be seen.

The cloud-lover will know that these four
great divisions are but terms of convenience.
There are intervening children of beauty.
Betwixt the earth-held, far-reaching nimbus
and the climbing cumulus, whose forehead is
so often bathed in the rarest fires of sunset, is
the cumulo-nimbus. Between the cumulus
and the stratus, whose habitual grey robe can
be so swiftly made radiant in yellow and
orange and burning reds, is the strato-cumulus :
a sombre clan in the upper wilderness, heavy
with brooding rains, moving in dark folds, less

175

Summer persuaded of the great winds which may drive
Clouds, the as silent seeming stratus, some ten thousand
feet higher it may be, at the lightning speed
of the eagle. Between the stratus and cirrus
there are the cirro-cumulus and the cirro-
stratus. The former is in one form as
commonly welcome as beautiful, the familiar
* mackerel-sky,' harbinger of fair weather — in
another, it is the soft dappled sky that moon-
light will turn into the most poignant loveli-
ness, a wilderness of fleecy hillocks and
delicate traceries. The latter is that drift-ice
or broken-up snow-field enmassing which is so
familiar. Both march from horizon to horizon
in ordered majesty, though when they seem
like idle vapours motionlessly suspended along
the blue walls of heaven they are rustling their
sheaves of frost-fire armour, are soaring to
more than twenty thousand feet above the
earth, and are surging onward with impetuous
rush at the rate of from seventy to eighty
miles an hour.

I have called them the children of beauty.
But these children of cloud are many. In
each division, in each subdivision, there is
again complex division. In a Gaelic story or
poem -saga they are called 'the Homeless
Clan.' It is a beautiful name. But they are
not homeless whom the great winds of the

176

upper world eternally shepherd, who have Summer
their mortal hour in beauty and strength and Clouds,
force, and, instead of the havens and graves
and secret places of the creatures of earth,
know a divine perpetual renewal.

177 N

THE CUCKOOS SILENCE

There is silence now in the woods. That
spirit of the south wind, that phantom voice
of the green tides of May, has passed : that
which was a wandering dream is become a
haunting memory. Whence is the cuckoo
come, whither does the cuckoo go ? When
our leaves grow russet and the fern clothes
herself in bronze and pale gold, what land
hears that thrilling call in ancient groves, or
above old unvisited forests, or where arid
declivities plunge into the gathering sands of
the desert ? Whither is gone Sinlinda, the
summer bird, as the Esthonians call her : she
who has been a voice in the far Orkneys (a
daughter, it may be, of that cuckoo -queen
who bore Modred to King Arthur, Modred
the Pict who afterward wrought so great evil
upon Arthur and his knights), or cried the
sighing of vain love above the hills of the
Gael, or in Sweden swung on the north wind

i78

as the sorg-gok, uttering 'sorrow,' or floated The

out of the east as the tr'6$te-g'6k, calling ' con- Cuckoo's

Silencp
solation ' ? When Finland loses her, and the

Baltic peasant no more counts with dread the

broken cries, and she has passed from the Irish

valleys, so that men and women are safe for

another year from the wildness of wild love,

whither is she gone ? Like a dream her voice

fades from Broceliande, is heard no more by

Fontarabia, has no echo in the wood of Vallom-

brosa. In the last reaches of the Danube she

no longer mocks love ; above the Siberian

steppe the exile no more hears her ironic Go !

Go ! : from the dim Campagna she is lifted

into silence, sospir d amove : she is not heard

across the waters of Corinth from that fallen

temple where Zeus took her form upon him,

nor is the shadow of her wings in that wild

mountain-valley of Mykenai, where Agamemnon

and Clytaimnestra sleep, where once the marble

statue of divine Hera stood bearing on a

sceptre her perilous image. Where, then, is

she gone, she who from the dim Asian valleys

to the Aztec wilderness, from one world to

another, is the mysterious voice of wandering

love ; she who is, in one place, to be hailed

with hymns of gladness, in another to be

hearkened to with bowed head or averted eyes ?

For thus it is, even to-day, among the ancient

179

The remnant in Mexico and the Californian wilds,

Cuckoo's wno hear with terror that foreboding flute-like
1 ence. vojce canjng Qut of the unseen world : thus it
was in the Himalayan solitudes of old when
the Sanskrit villagers hailed the cuckoo as a
divine messenger, Kakila, the bird who knows
all things, not only what has happened, but
what shall happen.

She has troubled many minds, this wanderer.
It could not be otherwise. What mysterious
music, this, when through the grey lands
of the north the south wind went laughing
on a vast illimitable surge of green and foam
of blossom ? One morning, when the missel-
thrush was silent and even the skylarks sank
through the hazy stillness, a far cry would be
heard, a sound from the unknown, a bell out
of heaven. It would float bodiless through
the blue air, or call softly like an imprisoned
echo in the coverts of grey cloud. Then
those who heard would know that Summer
had ceased from wearing her robe of white
and green and yellow, and with sun-browned
hands was gathering roses for her May garland,
her June coronal. The bird of love is come.
The sighing heart, the beating pulse, know it.
She is come, voice out of the sea, voice across
waters, Aphrodite of sound. Long, long ago
this voice, this dim -remembered myth, was

180

transmuted into Orpheus in the south, into The
Lemminkainen by the singers of the Kalevala, Cuckoo's
into Sigurd across the Scandinavian fjords, ence*
into Kukkolind along the Esthonian wastes
into Cuchulaind among the Irish hills, into
Coohoolin beside the foam of the Hebrides.
My old nurse had a Gaelic song I have for-
gotten, all save its refrain, which was

" Gu-Gu, Gii-Gu,
A cuisilin a-gkraidh,
Cuisilin mo-chridhe ! "

" Cuckoo ! Cuckoo !
0 pulse of love,
Pulse of my heart ! "

In the first movement of the oran the singer
called to the cuckoo to come, * Blue-bird of
love.' Why 'blue-bird' I am unaware, though
among the Finns and Esths 'blue-bird' is a
poetic analogue for the cuckoo. In the second
lift of the oran, the singer cried, ' It is come,
it is come, bird of love, bird of joy.' In the
third fall the singer crooned, ' It is gone, bird
of sorrow, bird of foam, bird of the grey wind/
And after each the swift and passionate or
long, melancholy, and sorrowful refrain

«Gu-Gii! Gii-Gii!
0 cushleen a-ghray
Cushleen mo-chree ! "

181

The ' The returning one ' the cuckoo is called in an

Cuckoo's old saga. It is the ancient mystery, Love, the
Silence. gon of Earth : the wildwood brother of him,
that other Love, who puts aside the green
branches of home to long for the shining stars,
who sighs unappeased by white breasts and
dreams of one beautiful and far-off, made of
the wandering rainbow, of the dew, of the
fragrance of flowers. The one comes with the
green wind and goes with the grey wind : the
other puts on blindness as divine vision, and
deafness as a sacred veil, and wooes Psyche.

All old primitive tales know the advent of
this mysterious bird. Was not, as I have said,
the divine Hera herself wooed thus by Zeus ?
In that ancient Heraion, in the heart of the
Peloponnesos which Pausanias saw, he tells us
of a statue of the goddess whose sceptre bore
the image of this spring-born voice of eternal
love and eternal illusion. The people loved it
not, for in their eyes the story covered an evil
thing : but the priests bowed before an ancient
mystery, and the poets smiled, and the
musicians paused and wondered and struck a
new vibrant note. In every country there are
oldtime tales of the cuckoo with the attributes
of a god, or demigod, or at least of magic and
illusion. When, in the great Northern saga,
Ilmarinen, the son of Wonder smith and the

182

Air, goes north to woo the snow-bound princess The

. . . what but another lovely metaphor of Cuckoo's

Spring calling to the North to cover herself w

with the snow-blossom of betrothal and the

roses and honeysuckles of procreant love . . .

he orders thus the outbringing of his sleigh :

" Take the fleetest of my racers,
Put the grey steed in the harness,
Hitch him to my sledge of magic :
Place six cuckoos on the break-board,
Seven blue-birds on the crossbow,
Thus to charm the northland maidens,
Thus to make them look and listen
As the cuckoos call and echo."

The wind, that grey steed, fleetest of racers,
the calling of cuckoos, the northland maidens
charmed to silence among awakening fields or
amid the first green stirring of grass-blades
and pointed leaf: is not llmarinen, son of
Wondersmith and the Air, the veritable
cuckoo-god ?

If ever the cuckoo-myth find its historian
one will learn how widespread and basic it is.
We follow it from Orpheus himself to the
myth of Saturn and Rhea, to that of Faunus
and Fauna, to Siegfried in the north, to
Cuchulain in the west — for the famous hero
of the Gaels is, for all the bardic legends as
to Setanta being Cu-chulain, the hound of

183

The Culain, as unmistakably a cuckoo-god as his

Cuckoo's Finnish or Esthonian namesake, Kukkolind.
The base of all is the divine inspiration, the
mysterious wandering Breath, the incalculable
Word, 'the heroic cuckoo,' who awakens the
green world, the world of blossom and leaf and
the songs of birds and the sap in the trees and
the mounting warmth in the blood, who, as
the chroniclers say, * rouses the enchanted
maid of spring from her long sleep.' Of all
these, whether it be Faunus, or Kullervo, or
Kalevipoeg, or the Son of Mananan, or Cuchu-
lain, the same thing may be said : they are
bringers of Spring, champions of the sun,
rhapsodes of the immemorial ecstasy, bacchids
of the ancient intoxication.

One of the loveliest of these mythopceic
dreams I heard first, at the break of June, years
ago, at Strachur of Loch Fyne, in a season
of cloudless blue by day and mellow amber
by night, and when in the long-delaying dusk
the voices of many cuckoos floated across the
narrow loch from the shadowy woods of
Claondiri. It was of Manan, the son of that
ancient Manan the Gaelic Poseidon ; and how
he went to the north to woo his beautiful
sister, and strew her way with the petals of
wild-rose, and fill her ears with the songs of
birds, and the sighing of waters, and the

184

longing of the wind of the west. But that I The
have told, and am more fully telling, elsewhere. Cuckoo's
Two summers ago, on the Sound of Morven,
I was told a fragmentary legend of Conlay
(Connleach), the son of Cuchulain, when a
youth in Skye, and how he went to Ireland
and, all unwitting, fought to the death with
his father — as in the Greek tale of Oidipous, as
in the Persian tale of Sohrab : and, unknowing
relevancy or keeping to the ancestral word,
the teller emphasised this old myth-tale of the
cuckoo that knows not and is not known by
its own offspring, by adding, * Aye, it was a
meeting of cuckoos, that : father and son, the
one not knowing the other any more than a
cuckoo on the wind knows father or mother,
brother or sister.'

Of all the cuckoo-tales there is none lovelier
than that told of our Gaelic hero in 'The
Wooing of Blathmaid.' This sleeping queen
or lost princess, whose name signifies
'Blossom,' lives on a remote island. With the
Gaelic teller this island will be the Isle of Man,
home of Mananan, that ancient god whose cold
hands grope blindly along the shores of the
world : with the Swede or Finn or Esth it will
be that other city set among cold forgotten
waters, that other Mana. Cuchulain loves
Blathmaid, and their wooing is so sweet that

185

The fragrance comes into flowers, and birds break

Cuckoo's jnt0 song. The voice of Cuchulain is the music
Silence

of the world. Blathmaid hears it, awakes,

moves to it in wondering joy. But a rival
lord, Curoi the king, carries Blathmaid away.
Cuchulain is left bound, and shorn of his long
yellow hair. But he regains his strength and
freedom, and follows Blathmaid. Her sign to
him from the dun where she is kept a prisoner
is milk poured into the water that makes a gulf
between the fortress and the leaning banks. In
the end, Curoi is slain or driven away ; Blath-
maid hears the call of Cuchulain, and wanders
into the beautiful green world with her lover.
Here, every touch is symbolical. Cuchulain is
the breath of returning life, Spring, symbolised
in the Cuckoo, that * child of air ' as the old
northland poet calls his dream. Blathmaid is
the awakening world : Blossom. Curoi is the
wind of autumn, the fierce and silent magician
Winter. The milk is but the emblem of
melting streams, of the fluent sap.

But now, as I write, already midsummer is
gone. The cuckoo is silent. The country-folk
still think it is become a hawk. The old
Cymric Gwalchmei (the cuckoo-son of Arthur
and twin brother of Modred) is, Professor Rhys
tells us, but an analogue of the Hawk of May.
So, once more, we see the incalculable survival

186

of tradition. Some say that the wandering The
clan has dispersed on the four winds. The Cuckoo's
sweet mysterious voice will be heard no more 1 ence'
in the world till the wind of the south crosses
the sea next far-off Spring, and the sound of
the wings of swallows is come again. But
* the bird of the sevens ' is not yet gone.
Seven weeks from the coming of the Voice
to the hunger of the fledgeling ; seventeen
weeks, and the fledgeling has left foster-parents
and gone out upon the wind ; seven and twenty
weeks, and the bird fades away from the wood-
lands like mist.

It is gone : Midsummer, the songs of birds,
the 'wandering Voice.' Already, with that
old insatiate passion of the soul, we long for
Blathmaid, so soon taken from us : long for
that divine call to youth and love : long for
Spring that shall come again, though it shall
be but a sweet wandering voice, the call of the
unknown, the promise of the unfulfilled. For
we thirst for that invisible mystery whose voice
floats above the veils of the world, and we
would drink again of the old wonder and the
old illusion.

187

THE COMING OF DUSK

At all seasons the coming of dusk has its spell
upon the imagination. Even in cities it puts
something of silence into the turmoil, some-
thing of mystery into the commonplace aspect
of the familiar and the day- worn. The shadow
of the great change that accompanies the
passage of day is as furtive and mysterious, as
swift and inevitable, amid the traffic of streets
as in aisles of the forest, or in glens and on
hills, on shores, or on the sea. It is every-
where the hour of suspense. Day has not
receded into the confused past, already a
shadow in eternity, and night has not yet come
out of the unknown. Instinctively one feels
as though crossing an invisible bridge over a
gulf, perchance with troubled glances at the
already dimming shore behind, or with dream-
ing eyes or watchful or expectant gaze on the
veiled shore upon which we are almost come.
In winter one can see dusk advancing like a

188

mountain-shadow. In lonely places there is The
something ominous, menacing in the swift Cf°j?in?
approach of the early winter -dusk, further
gloomed perhaps by the oncome of snow or
rain or of a soughing wind moving out of low
congregated cloud. In thronged streets it is
not less swift, not less sombre, but the falling
veils have hardly been secretly unloosened
before they are punctuated by the white or
yellow flare of the street-lamps. Hardly is
breathing-space, there, between the stepping
out of day and the stepping into night. The
fear of darkness, which possesses towns like
a great dread, has broken the spell with ten
thousand lights : as the mind of man, which
likewise dreads the naked darkness of thought
and the white, remote, passionless stars of the
spirit, hastens to hide its shadowy dusks and
brooding nights with a myriad frail paper
lanterns that a flying hand of rain will ex-
tinguish or a breath of wind carry in a moment
to the outer darkness.

But whatever hold upon the imagination
the winter dusk may have, however subtle a
spell there may be in the gloamings of autumn,
surely the coming of dusk has at no other time
the enchantment of the long midsummer eves.
It is then that one feels to the utmost the
magic influences of the dimsea or dimsee, to use

:i89

of Dusk.

The the beautiful old English west-country word.

9?!™n?> The further north one is the longer the sus-
pense, the more magical the slow gradual
recession of the day-glow from vast luminous
skies, the slow swimming into the earthward
gloaming of incalculable shadow. What a
difference between the lands of the south and
the light-lingering countries of the north ! The
sudden night comes to the shores of Mediter-
ranean while the rose of the west yet flames
against the Cornish headlands, and the Sicilian
wave is dark while the long green billow wash-
ing over Lyonesse is still a wandering fire under
cloudy banks of amethyst. And, in turn,
shadow has come out of the sea upon Wales
and fallen upon the upland watercourses from
the norland fells, while in the Gaelic isles
purple and gold cloths are still piled deep upon
the fiery threshold of the sunset : and when
the last isles themselves are like velvet-dark
barques afloat in a universe of opal and pale
yellow and faint crimson, a radiant sun still
blooms like a flower of fire among the white
pinnacles of wandering berg and the everlasting
walls of ice.

In June the coming of dusk is the audible
movement of summer. The day is so full of
myriad beauty, so full of sound and fragrance,
that it is not till the hour of the dew that one

190

may hear the breathing of the miraculous The
presence. The birds, who still sing early in Coming
the month, and many even of those whose ° us '
songs follow the feet of May begin a new love-
life at the coming of June, are silent : though
sometimes, in the south, the nightingale will
still suddenly put the pulse of song into the
gloaming, though brieflier now ; and elsewhere
the night-loving thrush will awake, and call
his long liquid notes above the wild-growth of
honeysuckle and brier. At the rising of the
moon I have heard the cuckoos calling well
after the date when they are supposed to be
silent, and near midnight have known the
blackcap fill a woodland hollow in Argyll with
a music as solitary, as intoxicating, as that of
a nightingale in a Surrey dell. The thrush,
the blackbird, the blackcap, the willow-warbler
and other birds may often be heard singing in
the dusk, or on moonlit nights, in a warm
May : and doubtless it is for this reason
that many people declare they have heard the
nightingale even in regions where that bird
never penetrates. Often, too, the nightingale's
song is attributed to the blackcap, and even
to the thrush or merle, simply because heard
by day, for there seems to be a common idea
that this bird will not sing save at dusk or in
darkness or in the morning twilight. I doubt

191

The if the nightingale ever sings in actual darkness,

fD1^ anc* tnough tne bird is most eager just before
"" and at dawn, at moonlit or starlit dusk, or at
full moon, it may be heard at any hour of the
day. I have heard the song and watched the
singer at full noon, and that not in deep woods
but in a copse by the wayside. Strange that
both name and legend survive in lands where
the nightingale is now unseen. There is no
question but that it was once plentiful, or at
any rate often seen, in the Western Highlands ;
though now, it is said, not a bird of its tribe
has crossed the Solway since the Union ! It
is still spoken of in Argyll and elsewhere, and
not confusedly with any other woodlander.
In no country has it a lovelier name than the
Gaelic Ros-an-Ceol, the Rose of Music. I
have heard it spoken of as the smiol or smiolach,
the eosag, and the spideag, though this latter
name, perhaps the commonest, is misleading,
as it is applied to one or two other songsters.
In Iona, Colonsay, Tiree, and other isles, I
have heard the robin alluded to as the spideag.
I remember the drift, but cannot recall the
text of a Gaelic poem where the nightingale
(for neither in literary nor legendary language
is any other bird indicated by * Ros-an-Ceol ')
is called the Sister of Sorrow, with an allusion
to a singular legend, which in some variant or

192

another I believe is also found in the Austrian The
highlands, parts of Germany, and elsewhere, Coming
to the effect that if a nightingale come ' with ° us '
Song upon it' into the room of a sleeping-
person, that person will go mad, or that if the
eyes of a nightingale found dead or slain be
dissolved in any liquid, the drinker will become
blind. I have heard, too, a tale (though the
bird was there alluded to as the smeorach-
oidhche or ' night-thrush ') where the nightin-
gale, the owl, and the bat are called moon-
children, the Moon -Clan; three birds, it is
said, with three animals of the land and three
of the water, three fish, three insects, three
trees, three plants, three flowers, and three
stones were thrown to the earth as a farewell
gift the day the Moon died. Among the
three birds the teller included the bat, and I
daresay there are many who still regard the
bat as a bird. The three animals of land and
water were the weasel, the badger, and the
fox, the seal, the otter, and the kelpie (sic).
The three fish were the fluke, the eel, and the
moon -glistered herring. The three insects
were the white moth, the grey gnat, and the
cockchafer. The three trees were the ash, the
thorn, and the elder. The three plants were
the ivy, the moon-fern or bracken, and the
mistletoe. The three flowers were the meadow-

193 o

of Dusk.

The sweet, the white water-lily, and the ' lusavone '
Coming (? Liis-3fhonaidh . . .? Bog-cotton). The
three stones were, I think, granite, basalt, and
trap, though I am uncertain about the second
and still more so about the third, which was
called clach-liath, ' the grey stone.'

But though in the north the nightingale is
no longer a haunter of the dusk, the other
clans of the night are to be met with every-
where, 'from the Rhinns of Islay to the Ord
of Sutherland' as the Highland saying goes
in place of the wider 'from Land's End to
John o' Groats.' First and foremost is the
owl. But of the owl and the nightjar and
the midsummer night I wish to speak in a
succeeding paper. The corncrake will next
occur to mind.

The cry of the landrail is so like its popular
name that one cannot mistake it. Some
naturalists say the resemblance to the croak-
ing of the frog may mislead the unwary,
but there is an altogether different musical
beat or emphasis in the call of the rail, a
different quality of sound, a different energy ;
and it is difficult to understand how any ear
familiar with nocturnal sounds could err in
detecting the monotonously uniform krex-kreoc
of the bull -frog from the large, air-swimming,
harshly musical crek-crake, with the singular

194

suspense so often to be noted after the first The
syllable. For all its harshness there are few Coming
sounds of the summer-dusk so welcome. It ° us '
speaks of heat : of long shadow-weaving after-
noons : of labour ceased, of love begun, of
dreams within dreams. The very memory of
it fills the mind as with silent garths of hay,
with pastures ruddy with sorrel, lit by the
last flusht glow or by the yellow gold of the
moon, paling as it rises. The white moth is
out ; the dew is on the grass, the orchis, the
ghostly clover ; the flittermouse is here, is
yonder, is here again ; a late mallard flies like
a whirring bolt overhead, or a homing cushat
cleaves the air-waves as with rapid oars. As
a phantom, a white owl drifts past and greys
into the dusk, like flying foam into gathering
mist. In the dew-moist air an innumerable
rumour becomes a monotone : the breath of
life, suppressed, husht, or palpitant. A wilder-
ness of wild-roses has been crushed, and their
fragrance diffused among the dove-grey and
harebell-blue and pansy-purple veils of twi-
light : or is it a wilderness of honeysuckle ; or
of meadowsweet ; or of the dew-wet hay ; or
lime-blossom and brier, galingale and the tufted
reed and the multitude of the fern ? It is
fragrance, ineffable, indescribable : odour born
under the pale fire of the moon, under the

195

of Dusk.

The lance -thrusting whiteness of the Evening

Coming star.

But before rain the persistent cry of the
corncrake becomes loud, raucous, with a
rasping intensity. The bird is commonly said
to be a ventriloquist, but this I greatly doubt.
I have watched the rail in many places, often
within a few yards, more than once from the
flat summit of a huge boulder set in the heart
of a hillmeadow of grass and sorrel. Not once
have I heard * the King of the quails ' un-
mistakably throw his voice a few score of
yards away. Often a crek-crake has resounded,
and at some distance away, just as I have
seen the stooping body of the dreaun (or tracm
or treun-ri-treiin) slide through the grassy
tangle almost at my feet : but the cry was not
identical with that which a moment before
I had heard, and surely it was not only dis-
tance but the difference of sex and the pulse
of love which softened it to a musical call.
Once, however, watching unseen from the
boulder I have spoken of, I saw and heard a
landrail utter its crake in three ways, first and
for over a minute with its head to one side
while it moved jerkingly this way and that,
then for a few seconds (perhaps four or five
times) with its head apparently thrown back,
and then after a minute or two's silence and

196

after a brief rapid run forward with out-thrust The

Com
of Dusk.

neck and lowered head, as though calling along ^PJ™11?

the ground. In no instance was the call
thrown as though from a distance, but un-
mistakably from where the bird moved or
crouched. There had been no response to
the first, a single echo-like crek-crdke followed
the second, but to the third there came
almost simultaneously calls from at least three
separate regions.

Nor is the rail so invariably shy, so heedful
of cover, as commonly averred. With silence
and patience it may often be discerned before
the seeding grass is too dense or the corn high.
In a lonely place on the east shore of West
Loch Tarbert in Cantire I have seen several
corncrakes leave cover as fearlessly as those
two other ' sacred ' or ' blessed ' birds, the
lark and the red grouse, will leave the shelter
of heather-clutch or grassy tussock : and one
morning I was awaked at dawn by so near
and insistent an iterance of the singular call
that I rose and looked out, to discover three
corncrakes awkwardly perched on a low rabbit-
fence, while I counted four others running to
and fro in the rough dew-glistered grass just
beyond. Here, by the way, a crofter spoke
of the landrail as the cearrsach, a name I have
not elsewhere heard and am not sure of the

197

of Dusk.

The meaning, unless it is 'the lumpy' or 'awk-

Cpming ward one ' ; while an English factor knew it
as the grass-drake or meadow-drake, and again
as the night-crow — the latter obviously a sur-
vival from the Anglo-Saxon ' myghte-crake '
or a name re-given from like association of
ideas. The same shrewd farmer quite believed
that a corncrake is governor and leader of each
flock of quails, at any rate in the season of
migration — an idea held by the Greeks of old
and retained by the Greek and Sicilian quail-
shooters of to-day, and obviously wide-spread,
as the Germans call the landrail the quail-king
( Wachtelkonig), the French ' le vol des cailles,'
the Italians ' il re di quaglie,' and the Spaniards
* el rey de las cordonices.' However, if he had
been a Gael he could have spoken of the quail
only by hearsay most likely, for it is very rare
in the Highlands, and for myself I have never
seen one there. Its name (garra-gart or
gartan) is not unique ; and the common term
muir-eun is solely biblical, 'sea-bird' or 'bird-
from- oversea,' because of the allusion in
Numbers xii. 31.

But the dew is heavy on the grass : the
corncrake calls : on a cloudy juniper the night-
jar churrs : the fhionna or white moth wavers
above the tall spires of the foxglove. The
midsummer eve is now a grey -violet dusk.

198

At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from The
the earth. Down the moist velvety ledges of Coming
the dark a few far -apart and low- set stars
pulsate as though about to fall, but continu-
ously regather their tremulous white rays.
The night of summer is come.

199

AT THE RISING OF THE MOON

' The dew is heavy on the grass : the corncrake
calls : on a cloudy juniper the nightjar churrs :
the fhionna or white moth wavers above the tall
spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is
now a grey-violet dusk. At the rising of the
moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down
the moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-
apart and low-set stars pulsate as though about
to fall, but continuously regather their tremu-
lous white rays. The night of summer is
come.'

With these words I ended my preceding
article, 'The Coming of Dusk.' There was
not space there to speak of other, of so many
of those nocturnal things which add so much
to the mystery and spell of the short nights of
summer : the arrowy throw of the bat, a
shadowy javelin flung by a shadowy hand
against a shadowy foe ; the nightjar, the dusky
clans of the owl, moonrise at sea or among

200

pinewoods, the dance of the moths round At the
certain trees, the faint woven cadence of the RisinS of
wheeling gnat-columns, the sudden scream of e 00n"
the heron or the wailing of seafowl, or the
mournful noise of the moon-restless lapwing,
wind in the grass, wind in the hollows of
woods, wind among the high corries of the
hills. These and a hundred other sounds and
sights fill the summer-darkness : the hill-fox
barking at the moonshine, the heather-cock in
defiance of alarm, deer panting among the
bracken, the splash of herring or mackerel on
the moonlit breast of the bay, dogs baying a
long way off and from farmstead to farmstead.
One could not speak of all these things, or of
the hundred more. In the meadows, in woods,
on upland pastures, from beech-thicket to pine-
forest, on the moors, on the hills, in the long
valleys and the narrow glens, among the dunes
and sea-banks and along wave-loud or wave-
whispering shores, everywhere the midsummer-
night is filled with sound, with fragrance, with
a myriad motion. It is an exquisite unrest : a
prolonged suspense, to the day worn as silence
is, yet is not silence, though the illusion is
wrought out of the multitudinous silences
which incalculably intersperse the continuous
chant of death, the ceaseless hymn of life.
Everywhere, but far north in particular, the
201

At the summer night has a loveliness to which the

Rising of jeas^ sensitive must in some degree vielcL
the Moon. . „ ,. , , ,

creates a spell which must trouble even a

dulled imagination, as moonlight and the
faintest rippling breath will trouble un-
quickened pools into a sudden beauty. It
is a matter of temperament, of mood and
circumstance rather, where one would find
oneself, at the rising of the moon, in the
prolonged twilights of summer. To be in a
pinewood shelving to a calm sea breaking in
continuous foam : or among mountain soli-
tudes, where all is a velvety twilight deepening
to a green darkness, till the sudden moon rests
athwart one hill-shoulder like a bronze shield,
and then slowly is lifted and dissolves into an
amber glow along all the heights : or on great
moors, where one can see for leagues upon
leagues, and hear nothing but the restless
crying of the curlew, the screech of a heron,
the abrupt unknown cries and fugitive sounds
and momentary stealthy rustlings of nocturnal
solitudes. Or, again, on a white roadway
passing through beech-woods : or on a gorse-
set common, with the churring of a nightjar
filling the dusk with the unknown surge and
beat in one's own heart : or on the skirts of
thatched hamlets, where a few lights linger,
with perhaps the loud breathing and trampling

202

of cattle : or in a cottage-garden, with mignon- At the
ette and cabbage-roses and ghostly phlox, or Rising of
dew -fragrant with musk and southernwood : e oon'
or in an old manor-garden, with white array of
lilies that seem to have drunk moonlight, and
damask and tea-rose in odorous profusion, with
the honey-loving moths circling from moss-rose
to moss-rose, and the night-air delaying among
tall thickets of sweet-pea. Or, it may be, on
quiet sea-waters, along phantom cliffs, or under
mossed and brackened rocky wastes : or on
a river, under sweeping boughs of alder and
willow, the great ash, the shadowy beech.
But each can dream for himself. Memory and
the imagination will create dream -pictures
without end.

Of all these midsummer -night creatures
alluded to here or in the preceding article
there may be none more allied to poetic
association than the nightjar, but surely there
is none more interesting than the owl itself,
that true bird of the darkness. That phantom-
flight, that silent passage as from the unseen
to the unseen, that singular cry, whether a
boding scream or a long melancholy hoot or a
prolonged too-whoo, how blent they are with
one's associations of the warm husht nights of
summer. But is not the nightjar also of the
same tribe? Fern-owl is a common name;

203

At the also jar-owl, heather- owl. I have heard it

Rising- of called the heather-bleat, though probably that
the Moon. , . -,. . .V • u

name commonly indicates the snipe. How

well I remember from childhood that puzzling

riddle

" The bat, the bee, the bidterfiee, the cuckoo and the gowk,
The heather-bleat, the mire-snipe ; how many birds is that ?"

I was never * taken-in ' by the first three, but
as I had been told or had somehow discovered
that the cuckoo was often companioned by the
meadow-pipit I thought the latter must be the
'gowk.' So I guessed 'four,' taking the
heather-bleat to be the nightjar : and it was
long before I discovered that the answer was
two, for only the cuckoo and the snipe were
really named.

I wonder how many names the Owl has !
Those alone which, like the archetypal name,
derive from the old root-word ul (to howl or
hoot or screech), must run to some thirty to
forty at least, from the Anglo-Saxon 'hule'
and later 'ullet' to the familiar 'hoolet' or
6 hoolit ' or ' howlet,' or, again, the still current
south English < ullud,' < ullot,' or < ullyet' We
have many Gaelic names also, as (for the
snowy or barn owl) * cailleach-bhan,' the white
auld wife, or ' cailleach-oidhche,' the night-
witch ; or (for the tawny owl) « bodach-oidhche,'

204

the night-bogle ; or (for the screech-owl) the At the
onomatopoeic ' corra-sgriachaig,' or several Rising of
terms meaning ' long-eared ' or * homed ' ; and e Moon*
three or four designations, either onomatopoeic,
as perhaps * ulacan ' (though both in sound and
meaning it is the same as the southland
'hooligan'), or adaptations of the Teutonic
root- word, as * Olcadan ' or ' ullaid.' The
name ' yogle ' may be heard along the Lothian,
Yorkshire, and East Anglian coast-lands, and
is doubtless a 'lift' from the Danish ' Kat-
yugle' or 'Katogle': indeed 'catyogle,' 'cat-
ogle,' and ' catyool ' (with the quaint by-throw
'cherubim') occur in several parts of England.
In Clydesdale I have often heard the horned
owl called the 'luggie' (long -ears). Some
names with probably only local meaning I do
not understand, as for example, the ' Wite '
(not the adjective, but possibly the old word
for churchyard and even church) ; the 'padge'
or ' pudge ' of Leicestershire ; the Jack-baker,
billy-wix, and the eastland ' will-a-wix.' (Is
this the cry of the young owl awaiting food ?)
The 'jilly,' which I heard once at or near
Windermere, is probably a corruption of the
Gaelic 'gheaF (white), as many north-Celtic
names survive in that region. Our commonest
name in the Highlands is ' comhachag ' (co-ach-
ak) probably as onomatopoeic a term as ' cuach '

205

At the or 'cuthag' (coo-ak) for the cuckoo, or 'fitheach'
Rising of (fee-ak) for the raven. It is said that the
the Moon. , . *u r\ 1 ■ i

longest poem on the Owl in any language is

in Gaelic. The Or an na Comhachaig or Song
of the Owl was composed by an aged Highland
bard named Donald Finlay somewhere about
three hundred years ago — about 1590 says one
local account, though I do not know on what
authority : a rinn Domhnull Mac Fhionnlaidh
nan Dan, sealgair \cs bard ainmeil Abrach,
mu thiomchioll 1590 (done by Donald Finlay
of the Songs, the celebrated Lochaber hunts-
man and poet, in or about 1590). I have again
and again heard the second of its sixty-seven —
in another version seventy — quatrains quoted
in support of the theory that an owl lives at
least a hundred years ; some are credited with
far greater age :

" 'S co-aoise mise don daraig,
Bha na fhaillain ann sa ckoinnich,
'S ioma linn a chuir mi romham,
'S gar mi comhachag bhochd na sroine"

(I am old as the oak . . . lit. 'the ancient-
ness upon me is that of the oak ' . . . whose
mossy roots spread wide : many a race have
I seen come and go : and still I am the lonely
owl of Srona.)

In every country the owl is a bird of
206

mourning. It is also the bird of night pre- At the
eminently (what a pity the old-English owl- Rising of
light as a variant for twilight has become
obsolete) ; the bird of moonlight or the Moon ;
the bird of Silence, of Ruin, of the Grave, of
Death. In some places a dead owl is still
transfixed to the outside of a door, to avert
lightning. Perhaps it is for the same reason
that a caged owl is held to be a dangerous
co-inmate of a house during a thunderstorm.
A thousand legends have woven this sombre
raiment of associations, though the owl's only
distinction from other birds of prey is that it
can see in the dark and is nocturnal in habit.
It loves solitary places, because there undis-
turbed, but is not all darkness solitary ? In
Syria the peasant calls the owl 'the mother
of ruins,' which is poetically apt, as is the
German 'the sorrowing mother,' but our
northern ' night- witch ' and the grim Breton
* soul-harrier ' (surely a survival of the Greek
idea of the owl as a soul-guide) are unjust to
an inoffensive bird whose concern is not with
souls and graves and ruins but with rats and
mice. A German naturalist has even, I
remember, written to prove that the owl is
pre-eminently a bird of love, of single-hearted
devotion, ' the dove of the night ' : and there
is a Danish poem about ' the Silver-Spinner '

207

At the weaving a thin invisible web in the dusk
Rising of wherein to entangle and bring close the hearts
the Moon. of ^^^ OM Donald Finlay 0f the Songs

must have had some such idea in his mind
when in his Song of the Owl he makes the
bird say in effect, * I may be old and forlorn,
but am not to be blamed for that : neither of
rapine nor of lies have I ever been guilty : is
there a grave anywhere that I have ever
violated ? and to the mate of my choice have
I ever been faithless ? '

This name of the Silver- Spinner, however,
though often in Germany, Scandinavia, and
our own country associated with the poetic
legend alluded to, is really a romantic deriva-
tive from the ancient connection of the small
owl with the Maiden Maid goddess who pre-
sided over spinning as one of her foremost
womanly attributes. 'The Woman's Bird,'
as the small owl is sometimes called, deserves
the name, for in almost every language ancient
and modern, except English and Finnish, its
name is feminine. The sacred bird of Athens
or the Lesbian Nyctimene is still 'the
woman's bird' among the Australian abori-
gines : Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Ice-
landic, Vendish, German, French, Hungarian,
all afford the same sex-indication. The great
white owl, however, is the bird of heroes,

208

wanderers, the night -foray, Avar, lightning, At the
desolation, solitude, and death. It is said, I Rising of
know not how demonstrated or traced, that the Moon-
the name Ulysses is but the variant of the
Etruscan TJlixe or Sikulian Oulioces, words
supposed to indicate the ululation of the owl's
cry (in Italy I have heard the name of the
sweet and plaintive little aziola or aziolo
derived from the same source) : and that it
was given to the Homeric hero because he
was the first to adventure sea -voyaging on
moonlit nights, because he too was a night-
wanderer. But unless Ulixd or Oulixes be
older than the Greek name, what of Odysseus ?
In like fashion some speculative philologists
derive 'Pallas' from the Turanian owl-name
Polio.

I heard a singular fragment of owl -folklore
once on the island of Arran. The narrator
said the white owl had seven distinct hoots,
but all I need recall here is that the seventh
was when the ' Reul Fheasgair ' ceased to be
the Evening Star and became the ' Reul na
Maidne,' the Day-Star. Was this a memory
of some myth associating the owl with the
otherworld (or darkness or moontide or Night)
disclosed every eve at the opening of the Gates
of Dusk ? . . . the time of sleep and dreams,
of strange nocturnal life, of silence and mystery,

209 p

At the between the soft white fire of the Vesper Star,

SeMgoon the Star °f Labour as the Bretons call it,
' meaning that with its advent the long day's
labour ceases, and its cold serenity when it
has climbed the ramparts of the mid-summer
night, and, as Phosphoros, the Day-Star, Son
of the Morning, flashes like a lance -point
against the milky onflood of the dawn ?

2IO

THE GARDENS OF THE SEA

(a midsummer noon's dream)

I recall a singular legend, where heard, where
read, I do not remember, nor even am I sure
of what race the offspring, of what land the
denizen. It was to the effect that, in the
ancient days of the world, flowers had voices,
had song to them as the saying is : and
that there were kingdoms among these popula-
tions of beauty, and that in the course of ages
(would they be flower -geons, and so of a
measure in time different from our longer
or shorter periods ?) satraps revolted against
the dominion of the Rose, and tropical princes
led new hosts, and scarlet forest-queens filled
the jungle and the savannah with their chants
of victory. And the end was a conflict so
great that even the isles of the sea were
shaken by it, and the pale green moss of polar
rocks whispered of the great world-war of the

211

The peoples of Flowry. At last, after the shadow-
Gardens flitting passage of an aeon, the gods were
Sea roused from their calm, and, looking down

into the shaken mirror of the world, beheld all
their dreams and visions and desires no longer
children of loveliness and breaths of song. In
these aeons while they had slept in peace the
Empire of Flowry had come to a dissolution :
race fought with race, tribe with tribe, clan
with clan. Among all the nations there was
a madness for supremacy, so that the weed in
the grass and the flame-crowned spire of the
aloe were at one in a fierce discontent and a
blind lust of dominion. Thereupon the gods
pondered among themselves. Kronos, who
had been the last to wake and was already
drowsy with old immemorial returning slumber,
murmured : 6 A divine moment, O ye Brother-
hood of Eternity, is a long time wherein to
be disturbed by the mortal reflection of our
dreams and the passions and emotions of our
enchanted hearts/

And as all the calm-eyed Immortals agreed,
Kronos sighed out the mandate of silence, and
turning his face to Eternity was again among
the august dreams of the Everlasting Ones.

In that long moment — for there in the
other world it was but a brief leaning on their
elbows of the drowsy gods while the fans of

212

Immortal Sleep for a second stayed the vast The
waves of Peace — the divine messengers, or Gardens
were they the listening powers and dominions Sea**
of the earth, fulfilled destiny. From every *"
flower-nation, from every people by far waters,
from every tribe in dim woods and the wilder-
ness, from every clan habiting the most far
hills beyond the ever - receding pale blue
horizons, song was taken as stars are pluckt
away from the Night by the grey fingers of the
Dawn. The Rose breathed no more a flusht
magic of sound ; the Lily no more exhaled
a foamwhite cadence. Silence was come upon
the wild chant of orchids in old, forgotten
woods ; stillness upon the tinkling cymbals
of the little hands of the dim, myriad, incalcul-
able host of blossom ; a hush upon the songs
of meadow-flowers ; a spell upon the singing
of honeysuckles in the white dews at the
rising of the moon. Everywhere, from all the
green tribes, from all the glowing nations of
Flowry, from each and every of the wandering
folk of the Reed, the Moss, and the Lichen,
from all the Clans of the Grass, the added
loveliness of song was taken. Silence fell
upon one and all : a strange and awful stillness
came upon the woods and valleys. It was
then that the God of Youth, wandering
through the hushed world, took the last song

213

The of a single rose that in a secret place had not
Gardens yet heard the common doom, and with his
Sea breath gave it a body, and a pulse to its heart,

and fashioned for it a feather-covering made
of down of the bog-cotton and the soft under-
sides of alder-leaf and olive. Then, from a
single blade of grass that still whispered in a
twilight hollow, he made a like marvel, to be
a mate to the first, and sent out both into the
green world, to carry song to the woods and
the valleys, the hills and the wildernesses, the
furthest shores, the furthest isles. Thus was
the nightingale created, the first bird, the
herald of all the small clans of the bushes that
have kept wild-song in the world, and are our
delight.

But in the hearts of certain of the green
tribes a sullen anger endured. So the mys-
terious Hand which had taken song and
cadence away punished these sullen ones.
From some, fragrance also was taken. There
were orchid -queens of forest -loveliness from
whom all fragrance suddenly passed like
smoke : there were white delicate phantoms
among the grasses, from whom sweet odour
was lifted as summer dew : there were nomads
of the hillways and gypsies of the plain to
whom were given the rankness of the waste,
the smell of things evil, of corruption, of the

214

grave. But to some, beautiful rebels of the The
peoples of the Reed, the Grass, and the Fern, Gardens
the doom went out that henceforth their place qf the
should be in the waters . . . the running waters *"
of streams and rivers, the quiet waters of pools
and lakes, the troubled waters of the seas
along the coasts of the world, the ocean
depths.

And that is how amid the salt bite of the
homeless wave there grew the Gardens of the
Sea. That is how it came about that the
weed trailed in running waters, and the sea-
moss swayed in brackish estuaries, and the
wrack clung or swam in tangles of olive-brown
and green and soft and dusky reds.

What a long preamble to the story of how
the Seaweeds were once sweet-smelling blooms
of the shores and valleys ! Of how the flowers
of meadow and woodland, of the sun-swept
plain and the shadowy hill, had once song as
well as sweet odours : how, of these, many lost
not only fragrance but innocent beauty : and
how out of a rose and a blade of grass and a
breath of the wind the first birds were made,
the souls of the green earth, winged, and
voiced.

To-day I sit amongst deep, shelving rocks
by the shore, in a desolate place where basaltic
cliffs shut away the familiar world, and where,

215

The in front, the otherworld of the sea reaches
Gardens beyond sight to follow the lifted wave against
gea the grey skyline, or is it the grey lip of the

fallen horizon ? Looking down I can perceive
the olive-brown and green seaweed swaying in
the slow movement of the tide. Like drifted
hair, the long thin filaments of the Mermaid's
Locks {Chorda Fihan) sinuously twist, inter-
twine, involve, and unfold. It is as though a
seawoman rose and fell, idly swam or idly
swung this way and that, asleep on the tide :
nothing visible of her wave-grey body but
only her long fatal hair, that so many a
swimmer has had cause to dread, from whose
embrace so many a swimmer has never risen.
In the rock-set pools the flesh-hued fans of
the dulse indolently stir. Wave-undulated
over them are fronds of a lovely green weed,
delicate, transparent : above these, two phan-
tom fish, rock- cod or saithe, float motionless.

Idly watching, idly dreaming thus, I recall
part of a forgotten poem about the woods of
the sea, and the finned silent creatures that are
its birds : and how there are stags and wolves
in these depths, long hounds of the sea, mer-
men and merwomen and seal -folk. Others,
too, for whom we have no name, we being
wave-blind and so unable to discern these
comers and goers of the shadow. Also, how

216

old sea-divinities lie there asleep, and perilous The
phantoms come out of sunken ships and Gardens
ancient weed -grown towns; and how there gfthe
roams abroad, alike in the flowing wave and *"
along the sheer green-darkening bodiless walls,
an incalculable Terror that may be manifold,
the cold implacable demons of the deep, or
may be One, that grey timeworn Death whom
men have called Poseidon and Mananan and
by many names.

What a mysterious world this Tir-fo-Tuinn,
this Land- Under- Wave. How little we know
of it, for all that wise men have told us con-
cerning the travelling tides, of currents as
mysteriously steadfast in their comings and
goings as the comets that from age to age
loom briefly upon the stellar roads : how little,
though they have put learned designations to
a thousand weeds, and given names to ten
thousand creatures to whom the whole world
of man and all his hopes and dreams are less
than a phantom, less than foam. The Gaelic
poet who said that the man who goes to Tir-
fo-Tuinn goes into another world, where the
human soul is sand, and God is but the
unloosened salt, tells us as much as the scientist
who probes the ocean-mud and reveals dim
crustacean life where one had believed to be
only a lifeless dark. Above the weed-held

217

The palaces of Atlantis, over the soundless bells of
Gardens Ys, above where Lyonesse is gathered in a
gea foamless oblivion, the plummet may sink and

lift a few broken shells, the drag-net may
bring to the surface an unknown sea-snail
or such a microscopic green Alga as that
Halosphoera viridis which science has dis-
covered in the great depths beyond the reach
of sunlight : but who can tell, perchance how
few who care to know, what Love was, long
ago, when there were poets in Lyonesse : what
worship was served by white- robed priests
among the sunken fanes of Ys : what dreams
withstayed and what passions beset the noble
and the ignoble in drowned Atlantis, what
empires rose and fell there, what gods were
lauded and dethroned, and for how long
Destiny was patient.

Even in the little pools that lie shoreward
of the Gardens of the Sea what beauty there
is, what obscure life, what fascinating * other-
world ' association. This piece of kelp is at
once Fucus vesiculosus and the long fingers of
the Cailliach-Mhara, the Sea- Witch. This
great smooth frond is ... I do not know, or
forget : but it is the kale of Manan, in sea-
groves of which that Shepherd pastures his
droves of uncouth sea-swine. This green
tracery has a Greek or Latin name, but in

218

legend it is called the Mermaid's Lace. This The
little flame-like crest of undulating wrack has Gardens
a designation longer than itself, but in tales of gea e
faerie we know it to be that of which the caps
of the pool-elves are fashioned.

In the Isles seaweed has many local names,
but is always mainly divided into Yellow
Tails, Dark Tails, and Red Tails (Feamainn
bhuidhe, feamainn dub/i, and feamainn dearg).
The first comprise all the yellowish, light-
brown, and olive -brown seaware ; the second
all the dark-green, and also all green wrack ;
the third, the red. The common seaware or
kelp or tang (Fucus vesiculosus) is generally
called propach, or other variant signifying
tangled : and the bladder - wrack, feamainn
bholgainn or builgeach, ' baggy-tails.' I have
at times collected many local names of these
weeds, and not a few superstitions and legends.
Naturally, the most poetic of these are con-
nected with the Chorda filum or Dead Man's
Hair, which has a score of popular names, from
' corpsy-ropes ' to the occasional Gaelic gille-
mu lunn, which may be rendered * the wave's
gillie ' or * servant of the wave ' : with the
drifted gulf-weed, whose sea-grapes are called
uibhean sithein, fairy eggs, and are eagerly
sought for : and with the duileasg, or dulse.
Even to this day, in remote parts, an ancient

219

The seaweed - rite survives in the propitiatory

Gar

oft:

Sea

Gardens offerings (now but a pastime of island children)
to the Hebridean sea-god Shony at Samhein

(Hallowmass). This Shony, whose favours
were won by a cup of ale thrown into the sea
in the dark of the night, is none other than
Poseidon, Neptune, Manan ; for he is the
Scandinavian sea -god Sjoni, viking -brought
from Lochlin in the far - off days when the
Summer - sailors raided and laid waste the
Gaelic Isles.

It is singular how rarely seaweed has
entered into the nomenclature and symbology
of peoples, how seldom it is mentioned in
ancient literature. Among our Gaelic clans
there is only one (the M'Neil) which has sea-
ware as a badge. Greek art has left us a few
seaweed-filleted heads of Gorgons, and to sea-
wrack the Latin poets have once or twice made
but passing and contemptuous allusion. In
the Bible ('whaur yell find everything frae a
bat to a unicorn,' as an old man said to me
once) there is one mention of it only, in
Jonah's words : ' The depths closed me round
about, the weeds were wrapped about my
head.'

220

THE MILKY WAY

With the first sustained breath of frost the
beauty of the Galaxy becomes the chief glory
of the nocturnal skies. But in midsummer
even what amplitude of space, what infinite
depths it reveals, and how mysterious that
filmy stardrift blown like a streaming banner
from behind the incalculable brows of an
unresting Lord of Space, one of those Sons
of the Invisible, as an oriental poet has it,
whose ceaseless rush through eternity leaves
but this thin and often scarce visible dust,
'delicate as the tost veil of a dancing girl
swaying against the wind.' Perhaps no one
of our poets, and poetry ancient and modern
and of every country and race is full of allu-
sions to the Galaxy, has more happily imaged
it in a single line than Longfellow has done in

" Torrent of light and river of the air."

As a river, or as a winding serpent, or as a

221

The stellar road, it has imaginatively been con-
Milky ceived by almost every people, though many
y* races have delighted in the bestowal of a
specific name, as though it were not an
aggregation of star- clusters and nebulas, but
a marvellous creature of the heavens, as,
perhaps, we may conceive the Great Bear,
or Orion, or moons-beset Jupiter, or Saturn
among his mysterious rings. Thus in the
Book of Job it is called the Crooked Serpent ;
the Hindus of Northern India call it the Dove
of Paradise (Swarga Duari), though they have
or had a still finer name signifying the Court
of God ; and the Polynesians give it the
strange but characteristic designation, ' The
Long, Blue, Cloud-Eating Shark.'

Last night I watched the immense tract
for a long time. There was frost in the air,
for I saw that singular pulsation which rightly
or wrongly is commonly held to be an optical
illusion, the aspect as of a pulse, or of an
undulating motion of life such as one might
dimly perceive in the still respiration of some
sleeping saurian. There appeared to be count-
less small stars, and in the darker spaces the
pale vaporous drift became like the trail of
phosphorescence in the wake of a vessel : at
times it seemed almost solid, a road paven
with diamonds and the dust of precious stones,

222

with flakes as of the fallen plumage of wings The
— truly Aritnirod, the Silver Road, as the Milky
Celts of old called it. Of course it was no ay"
more than a fantasy of the dreaming imagina-
tion, but it seemed to me more than once that
as a vast indefinite sigh came from the wind-
less but nevertheless troubled sea there was a
corresponding motion in that white mysterious
Milky Way, so infinitely remote. It was as
though the Great Snake — as so many bygone
peoples called and as many submerged races
still call the Galaxy — lay watching from its
eternal lair that other Serpent of Ocean which
girdles the rolling orb of our onward-rushing
Earth : and breathed in slow mysterious
response : and, mayhap, sighed also into
the unscanned void a sigh infinitely more
vast, a sigh that would reach remote planets
and fade along the gulfs of incalculable
shores.

As winter comes, the Milky Way takes on
a new significance for pastoral and other lonely
peoples, for shepherds and fisher-folk above all.
Songs and poems and legends make it familiar
to everyone. A hundred tales own it as a
mysterious background, as Broceliande is the
background of a hundred Breton ballads, or
as Avalon is the background of a hundred
romances of the Cymric and Gaelic Celt.

223

The The Hebridean islanders seldom look at it
Milky on still frosty nights without in the long idle
ay* hours recalling some old name or allusion,
some ancient rami or oran, some duan or
iorram of a later day, related to the mystery
and startling appealing beauty of the Silver
Road. It has many names on the lips of
these simple men, Avho have little learning
beyond the Bible and what life on the waters
and life in the hearts of other simple men and
women have taught them. Sometimes these
names are beautiful, as ' Dust of the World '
(or universe, an domhain) or the * Kyle of the
Angels ' (the Strait or Sound) : sometimes apt
and natural, as 'the Herring Way,' and 'the
Wake ' : sometimes legendary, as ' the Road
of the Kings ' (the old gods, from Fionn back
to the Tuatha Dedannan) or as 'the Pathway
of the Secret People ' : sometimes sombre or
grotesque, as ' The Shroud ' or as ' the Bag of
the Great Miller.'

There is especial interest for us, of course,
in the legendary associations of the Anglo-
Saxon and Scandinavian and Celtic or Gaelic
peoples. These, in common with the majority
of western nations, image the Milky Way
more as a ' road ' or ' street ' than as a serpent
or than as a river — though the Norse have
their Midhgardhsormr, connected in associa-

224

tion with the JVeltum- Spanner (' Stretcher- The
round-the- World') or Ocean-Stream. w^

I do not know when the Milky Way as a
designation first came into common English
use. Possibly there is no prior mention to
that in Chaucer's Hous of Fame :

" Se yonder, lo, the Galaxye,

Which men clepeth the Milky Wey "

— an allusion which certainly points to already
familiar usage. It is now, I fancy, almost
universal. Perhaps the old translator Eden
was among the first to popularise it, with his
rendering of the Latin Via Lactis and Via
Lactea as ' the Mylke way ' and * Mylke whyte
way.' There has been no need to derive the
term from the Italian Via lattea or the French
Vote lactee, since Eden's use and Chaucer's
preceded that of any French poet or romancist.
Certainly the phrase became part of our
literature after it passed golden from the mint
of Milton (paraphrasing Ovid) —

" Broad and ample road whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars, as stars to thee appear
Seen in the Galaxy, that milky way
Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest
Powdered with stars. ..."

It is rarely now alluded to as the Galaxy, and

225 Q

The probably never by unlettered people. In most
Milky parts of England for centuries, and it is said
ay" in many parts still, the common designation is
'The Way of Saint James.' This has a
singular correspondence in the name popular
among the French peasants, ' the Road of Saint
Jacques of Compostella.' Originally a like
designation was common in Spain, though for
a thousand years the popular epithet runs El
Camino de Santiago, after the Warrior-Saint
of the Iberian peoples. I am told that 'the
Way of Saint James ' is common in certain
counties of England, but I have never heard
it, nor do I wholly recall the reason of this
particular nomenclature. In some form the
road - idea continually recurs. How many
readers of these notes will know that the
familiar ' Watling Street ' — that ancient
thoroughfare from Chester through the heart
of London to Dover — was also applied to this
Galaxy that perchance they may look at
to-night from quiet country-side, or village, or
distant towns, or by the turbulent seas of our
unquiet coasts, or by still waters wherein
the reflection lies and scintillates like a
phantom phosphorescence. Watling Street
does not sound a poetic equivalent for the
Milky Way, but it has a finer and more
ancient derivation than 'the Way of Saint

226

James.' The word goes back to Hoveden's The
6 Watlinga-Strete,' itself but slightly anglicised Milky
from the Anglo - Saxon Waetlinga Straet, ay"
where the words mean the Path of the Waet-
lings, the giant sons of King Waetla, pos-
sibly identical with the giant Sons of Turenn
of ancient Gaelic legend, heroes who went out
to achieve deeds impossible to men, and
traversed earth and sea and heaven itself in
their vast epical wanderings. Another curious
old English name of the Galaxy, of great beauty
in its significance, is 'Walsyngham Way.'
Why the Galaxy should be so called might well
puzzle us, were it not explained by the fact that
up till near the middle of the sixteenth century
one of the most common English names of the
Virgin Mary was ' Our Lady of Walsyngham,'
from the fact that the Blessed Mother's chief
shrine in the country was at Walsyngham
Abbey in Norfolk. Further, as 'the Way
to Walsyngham ' in common parlance signified
the road to the earthly tabernacle of Mary,
so 'Walsyngham Way,' as applied to the
Galaxy, signified the celestial road to the virgin
Mother in heaven. Much more barbaric is a
name for the Milky Way still to be heard
in Celtic Wales, Caer Gwydyon, the Castle
or Fortress of Gwython. This Gwython or
Gwydyon was a kind of Merlin Sylvestris.

227

The He was known as the Enchanter, the Wizard
Milky as we would say now, and was feared on this
ay account, and because he was the son of Don,
King of the Otherworld, Lord of the Secret
People, the * fairies ' of later tradition. Like
Grania, the beautiful wife of Fionn, whose
elopement with Dermid and their subsequent
epical odyssey is the subject of one of the
greatest and to this day most popular of
Gaelic legendary romances, the wife of Gwy-
thon fled from his following vengeance from
land to land, across seas, over mountains, 'to
the ends of the earth,' and at last with her
faery lover dared the vast untrodden ways of
the remote skies. But long before they could
reach Arcturus, or whatever the star or planet
to which they fled, Gwython overtook them,
led by the dust which these mortal if semi-
divine fugitives made along the soundless dark
blue roads of heaven. He slew them and their
winged horses and their aerial hounds, and
standing on the verge of space flung the heads
and limbs and bodies into infinitude. Hence
the meteors and falling stars which at the
season of the autumnal equinox and at the
approach of winter may still be seen whirling
adown the bastions of high heaven. So terrible
in tragedy, so titanic the deed, that to all
eternity, or as long as our world endures, the

228

phantom iteration of that mighty vengeance The
shall commemorate the inappeasable anger of ^ilky
Gwython the Enchanter. Is there not con-
vincing evidence in the unpassing dust of that
silent highway of the doomed lovers . . . the
dust of the trampled star- way that no wind of
space has blown to this side or to that, that no
alchemy of sun or moon has burned up or like
dew dissolved ?

Besides ' Watling Street,' our Anglo-Saxon
forebears had Iringes Weg or Wee and Bil-
Iduris Weg ; Iringe and Eil-Idun having been
famous descendants of the Waetla already
alluded to. They were warders of the Bridge
of Asgard, the Scandinavian Heaven. In time
this Asgard-Bridge came to be given as a
name to the Milky Way . . . though the
later poets applied the epithet also to the
Rainbow. Readers of Grimm's Teutonic
Mythology will remember that he cites many
collateral instances. Thus the Vikings knew
the Galaxy as Wuotanes Straza, or ' Woden's
Street ' ; the Dutch have in common use
Vronelden Street, 'the women's Street'; and
the German peasants commonly call it Jakob's
Weg. The Westphalian term is singular and
suggestive, 'Weather Street' One wonders
if there is any common idea that weather is in
any way as closely associated with the Milky

229

The Way as are the vernal floods and the autumnal
^llky rains with the Pleiades. Probably the bestowal
y* of the name is due to the fact that when the
Galaxy is clear and bright and scintillant the
weather is serene and dry. A more poetic
designation is that of the Finns, who delight
in the term Linnunrata, the Birds' Way,
either from an old Finnish and Esthonian
legend that once by a miracle all the songs of
all the birds of the world were turned into a
cloud of snow-white tiny wings, or from the
more likely belief that it is the road of winged
spirits on their passage from earth to heaven.
This is, of course, a very ancient conception.
The ancient Hindus revealed it in the phrase
* the Path of Ahriman ' : the ancient Norse as
' the Path of the Ghosts ' going to Valhalla :
the ancient Gaels as the Hero-Way, leading
from Earth to Flatheanas, the Abode of Eternal
Youth. It is strange and suggestive that not
only the North American aborigines called it
'the Trail to Ponemah' (the Hereafter), but
that people so rude as the Eskimo and the
Bushmen of South Africa call it ' the Ashen
Path,' the road of fire-ember signals, for the
ghosts of the dead. Even the Patagonians
speak of the Milky Way as the white pampas
where their dead are immortal huntsmen
rejoicing in the pursuit of countless ostriches.

230

But of all popular names I do not think any The
is more apt and pleasant than that common to ??3 y
the Swedish peasantry, who call the Galaxy
Winter Gatan — i.e., ' Winter Street.' It is
the Winter Street we must all travel some
day, if the old poets say true, when the green
grass grows on our quiet beds, when the
loudest wind will not fret the silence in our
tired minds, and when day and night are
become old forgotten dreams. May we too
find it the Pathway of Peace . . . not the
least beautiful of the names of the Milky
Way, not the least beautiful of the legends
connected with that lovely wonder of our
nocturnal skies.

231

SEPTEMBER

September : the very name has magic. In
an old book, half in Latin half in English,
about the months, which I came upon in a
forgotten moth-eaten library years ago, and in
part copied, and to my regret have not seen
or heard of since, or anywhere been able to
trace, I remember a singular passage about
this month. Much had been said about the
flowers of ' these golden weekes that doe lye
between the thunderous heates of summer
and the windy gioomes of winter ' ; of those
flowers and plants which bloom in gardens,
and those, as the harebell and poppy and late-
flowering gorse, which light the green garths
of meadow and woodland ; as the bryony,
which trails among the broken copses and
interweaves the ruddy masses of bramble ; as
the traveller's-joy, which hangs its frail wreaths
of phantom -snow along the crests of every
hedgerow of beech and hornbeam. Of the

232

changing colours of the trees, too, the old Sep-
writer had much to say : of the limes * that tember.
become wan and spotted as a doe,' of the
mountain-ash 'that has its long fingers dyed
redd and browne,' of ' the wyche-elme whose
gold is let loose on the wind after nighte-
frosts and cold dawnes.' Nor did he forget
that 'greate beautie of mistes' which we all
know; and he reached eloquence when he
spoke of the apple-orchards and of the wall-
fruits of 'olde manor-gardenns ' — 'the peache
that women and poetes doe make the queene
of fruites,' ' the rich glowe and savour of the
apricock,' 'the delicate jargonell that keepes
the sweetes of France in olde warme English
gardenns.' Of wild-fruit, also, he had dainty
words and phrases. Blackberries, * the darke-
blue bilberry,' the sloe 'whose excellent
purple bloode maketh so fine a comfort,' ' the
dusky clustres of the hasel,' ' the green-smockt
fllberte,' and so forth. Even upon mushrooms
he had words of sun and wind and dew, so
lightsome were they, ardent and joyous, with
a swift movement— as though writ by one
who remembered gathering 'musherooms' in
a sun-sweet dawn after a night of heavy dews,
in company with another who laughed often
in gladness and was dearest and fairest of all
dear and fair things. ' Howbeit,' he added,

233

Sep- after sorrowing that 'many doe feare these
tember. goodly musherooms as poysonis dampe weedes,'
'this dothe in nowise abate the exceedynge
excellence of Goddes providence that out of
the grasse and dewe where nothing was, and
where onlie the lytell worme turned in his
sporte, come as at the shaky nge of bells these
delicate meates.'

Then, after some old-world lore about 'the
wayes of nature with beastes and byrdes ' in
this month, he goes further afield. 'And
this monthe,' he says, 'is the monthe of
dreames, and when there is a darke (or secret)
fyre in the heartes of poetes, and when the god
of Love is fierce and tyrannick in imaginings
and dreames, and they doe saye in deedes also,
yett not after the midwaye of the monthe ;
butt whye I know not.'

We hear so much of the poet-loved and
poet- sung month of May, and the very name
of June is sweet as its roses and white lilies
and lavender, that it is become a romantic
convention to associate them with 'dreames'
and the 'tyrannick' season of 'the god of
Love.' But I am convinced that the old
Elizabethan or Jacobean naturalist was right.
May and June are months of joy, but Sep-
tember is the month of ' dreames ' and ' darke
fyre.' Ask those who love nature as the poet

234

is supposed to love her, with something of Sep-
ecstasy perhaps, certainly with underglow of tember.
passion : ask those in whom the imagination is
as a quickening and waning but never absent
flame : ask this man who travels from month
to month seeking what he shall never find, or
this woman whose memories and dreams are
many, howsoever few her hopes . . . and the
chance will be that if asked to name the month
of the heart's love, it will be September. I
do not altogether know why this should be so,
if so it is. There is that in June which has a
time-defying magic : May has her sweet affini-
ties with Spring in the human heart : in April
are the flutes of Pan : March is stormy with
the clarions of the winds : October can be wild
with all wildness or be the calm mirror of the
passing of the loveliness of the green -world.
There is not a month that has not its own
signal beauty, so that many love best February,
because through her surge of rains appear days
of blue wonder, with the song of the missel-
thrush tost like spray from bare boughs — or
November, because in the grey silence one
may hear the fall of the sere leaves, and see
mist and wan blueness make a new magic
among deserted woods — or January, when all
the visible world lies in a white trance, strange
and still and miraculous as death transfigured

235

Sep- to a brief and terrible loveliness on the face of
tember. one suddenry quiet from the fever of youth
and proud beauty. There is not a month
when the gold of the sun and the silver of the
moon are not woven, when the rose of sunset
does not lie upon hills which reddened to
the rose of dawn, when the rainbow is not
let loose from the tangled nets of rain and
wind, when the morning-star and the evening-
star do not rise and set.

And yet, for some, there is no month that
has the veiled magic of September.

'The month of peace,' 'the month of
beauty,' it is called in many Gaelic songs and
tales; and often, 'Summer-end.' I remember
an old rami, perhaps still said or sung before
the peat-fires, that it was in this month God
created Peace ; again, an island-tale of Christ
as a shepherd and the months as sheep strayed
upon the hills of time. The Shepherd went
out upon the hills, and gathered them one by
one, and led them to the fold : but, before the
fold was reached, a great wind of snow came
down out of the corries, and on the left a wild
flood arose, and on the narrow path there was
room only, and that hardly, for the Shepherd.
So He looked to see which one of the twelve
He might perchance save, by lifting it in His
strong arms and going with it alone to the

236

fold. He looked long, for all were the children Sep-
of His Father. Then He lifted September, tember.
saying, ' Even so, because thou art the month
of fulfilment, and because thy secret name is
Peace.' But when He came out of the dark-
ness to the fold, the Shepherd went back
between the wild lips of flood and tempest,
and brought to the fold June, saying, ' Because
thy secret name is Joy ' : and, in turn, one by
one, He brought each to the fold, saying unto
each, in this order, 'May, because thy secret
name is Love'; 'April, because thou art made
of tears and laughter ' ; ' July, because thou
art Beauty ' ; ' August, thou quiet Mother ' ;
' October, because thy name is Content ' ;
' March, because thy name is Strife ' ; * Febru-
ary, because thy name is Hope ' ; ' November,
because thy name is Silence ' ; ' January,
because thou art Death ' ; and at the last,
' December, whom I have left to the end, for
neither tempest could whelm nor flood drown
thee, for thy name is the Resurrection and
the Life.'

And when the tale was told, some one
would say, 'But how, then, was September
chosen first ? '

And the teller would say, ' Because its
secret name is Peace, and Peace is the secret
name of Christ.'

237

Sep- It is no wonder the poets have loved so

tember. We\\ this month whose name has in it all the
witchery of the North. There is the majesty
of the hill-solitudes in it, when the moorlands
are like a purple sea. It has the freshness of
the dew- white bramble- copses, of the bracken
become russet and pale gold, of the wandering
frostfire along the highways of the leaf, that
mysterious breath whose touch is silent flame.
It is the month when the sweet, poignant
second-song of the robin stirs the heart as a
child's gladness among tears. 'The singer
of September,' a Gaelic poet calls it, and
many will recall the lovely lines of the old
half- forgotten Elizabethan poet on the bird

" That hath the bugle eyes and ruddy breast
And is the yellow autumn's nightingale."

It is strange how much bird-lore and beast-
lore lie with September. The moor- cock,
the stag, the otter, the sea-wandering salmon,
the corncrake, and the cuckoo and the swift,
I know not how many others, have their tale
told or their farewell sung to the sound and
colour of September. The poets have loved it
for the unreturning feet of Summer whose
vanishing echoes are in its haunted aisles, and
for the mysterious silences of the veiled
arrivals of Winter. It is the month of the
year's fulflllings —

238

" Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Sep-

Close-bosom'd friend of the maturing sun." tember.

And yet there are other Septembers than
the Septembers of memory, than the Sep-
tembers of the imagination. For three years
past the month has come with rains from the
sea and cold winds out of the east and north.
The robin's song has been poignantly sweet as
of yore, but the dream -glow has been rare
upon the hill and valley, and in the woods and
on the moor-slopes the leaf has hung bannerets
of dusky yellow, and the bracken burned dully
without amber and flamelit bronze. This
year, though, there has been some return of
those September days which we believe in
while yet a long way off, as we believe in
May, as we feel assured of June. This last
June was truly a month of roses, and in May
the east wind slept : but last year the roses
trailed along flooded byways, and the east
wind nipped bud and blossom through the
bleak days of 'the merry month,' and a
colourless and forlorn September must have
chilled even that ' darke fyre in the heartes of
poetes' of which the old naturalist wrote.
There have been days of peace this year, and
of the whole beauty of Summer-end. In the
isles, among the hills, on forest lands and
uplands, and by the long plains and valleys of

239

Sep- the south, the September blue — which is part
tember. a flame of azure and part a haze of the dust of
pearls — has lain over land and sea like a
benediction. How purple the western moors,
what depths of floating violet and pale trans-
lucencies of amethyst on the transfigured
mountains. What loveliness of pale blue mist
in the hollows of quiet valleys ; what richness
of reds and ambers where the scarlet-fruited
ash hangs over the unruffled brown pool ; what
profuse gold and ungathered amber where the
yellow gorse climbs the hillside and the armies
of the bracken invade every windy solitude.
How lovely those mornings when the dew is
frost -white and the gossamer is myriad in
intricate interlacings that seem woven of
aerial diamond -dust. What peace in that
vast serenity of blue where not the smallest
cloud is seen, where only seaward the gannet
may hang immeasurably high like a winged
star, or, above inland pastures, the windhover
poise in his miraculous suspense.

But, alas, only 'days.' It has not been
the September of the heart's desire, of the
poet's dream. The advance - guard of the
equinox has again and again come in force :
the grey wind has wailed from height to
height, and moaned among the woods. Even
in the gardens the wall-fruits have hardly given

240

the wonted rich warmth, though the apples Sep-
have made a brave show. Yesterday there tember.
was a hush in the wind ; a delicate frost
lingered after a roseflusht dawn ; and the in-
ward light came out of the heather, the bracken
and the gorse, out of the yellow limes and the
amber planes and the changing oaks, and upon
the hillside turned the great pine on the
further crag into a column of pale gold and
made the lichened boulders like the half-sunken
gates of buried cities of topaz and jasper and
chalcedony. But to-day vast masses of sombre
cloud have been swung inland from the
Atlantic, and the gale has the wild mournful
sough that we look for in the dark months.
It is in the firelight that one must recapture
September. It lies hidden in that warm heart,
amid the red and yellow flowers of flame : and
in that other heart, which, also, has its ' darke
fyre,' that heart in whose lands lit by neither
sun nor moon are the secret glens where old
dreams live again, and where the dreams of
the hour are radiant in their new wonder and
their new beauty.

241

R

THE CHILDREN OF WIND AND
THE CLAN OF PEACE

I was abroad on the moors one day in the
company of a shepherd, and we were talking
of the lapwing that were plentiful there, and
were that day wailing continuously in an
uneasy wavering flight. I had seen them
act thus, in this excess of alarm, in this pro-
longed restless excitement, when the hill-
falcons were hovering overhead in the nesting
season : and, again, just before the unloosening
of wind and rain and the sudden fires of the
thundercloud. But John Logan the shepherd
told me that now it was neither coming light-
nings nor drifting hawk nor eagle that made
all this trouble among the 'peewits.' "The
wind's goin' to mak' a sudden veer," he said —
adding abruptly a little later, " an' by the same
token we'll have rain upon us soon."

I looked at the cold blue of the sky, and
at the drift of the few clouds trailing out

242

of the east or south-east, and could see no The
sign of any change of wind or likelihood of Children

" What makes you think that ? " I asked. Clan of

" Weel," he answered literally, " I don't Peace,
think it. It's the peewits an' the craws that ken
swifter than oursels ; it's they that tell, an' I
think they're better at the business than thae
folk wha haver awa' in the papers, an are
sometimes richt because they canna help it
an' oftener wrang because it's maistly guess-
work."

" Well, what do the peewits and the crows
say ? — though I haven't seen crow or rook or
corbie for the last hour."

" Thae peewits an' a' the plovers are a' the
same. If the win's gaun to leap out of the
east intae the sooth -wast, or slide quickly
from the north intae the wast, they'll gang
on wheelin' an' wailin' like yon for an hour
or mair, an' that afore there's the least sign
o' a change. An' as for the craws . . . weel,
if ye had been lookin' up a wee whilie ago ye'd
'a seen a baker's dozen go by, slantin' on the
edge o' the win', like boats before a stiff breeze.
Aye, an' see there ! . . . there's a wheen mair
comin' up overhead."

I glanced skyward, and saw some eight or
ten rooks flying high and evidently making for

243

The the mountain-range about two miles away to

Children our ieft.

and the " ^Ve see tnat • • • tnae falling birds ? "

Clan of " Yes," I answered, noticing a singular occa-

Peace. sional fall in the general steady flight, as though
the suddenly wheeling bird had been shot :
" and what o' that, John ? "

"It's just this: when ye see craws flyin'
steady like that an' then yince in a while
drapping oot like yon, ye may tak' it as
meanin' there's heavy rain no that great way
aff : onyways, when ye see the like when thae
black deils are fleein' straight for the hills, ye
maun feel sure frae the double sign that ye'll
hae a good chance o' being drookit afore twa-
three hours."

One question led to another, and I heard
much crow and corbie lore from John Logan,
some of it already familiar to me and some
new to me or vaguely half- known — as the
legend that the corbies or ravens, and with
them all the crow-kind, were originally white,
but at the time of the Deluge were turned
sooty -black because the head of the clan,
when sent out by Noah from the Ark, did
not return, but stayed to feed on the bodies
of the drowned. "So the blackness of death
was put on them, as my old mother has it in
her own Gaelic."

244

" Your old mother, John ? " I queried sur- The

prisedly : " I did not know you had any one Children
\ J ,., „ J J of Wind

at your croft. ^ and the

" Aye, but I have that, though she's a poor Clan of
frail auld body an' never gangs further frae Peace.
the hoose than the byre an' the hen-yaird.
If ye want to hear more aboot thae birds
an' the auld stories forenenst them, she'd mak1
you welcome, an' we'd be glad an' prood to
offer ye tea : an' I'll just tell ye this, that
ye'll gie her muckle pleasure if ye'll hae a
crack wi' her in the Gaelic, an' let her tell
her auld tales in't. She's Hielan', ye ken :
tho' my faither was oot o' Forfar, Glen Isla
way. She's never got hold o' the English yet
varra weel, an' to my sorrow I've never learnt
the auld tongue, takin' after my faither in
that, dour lowland body as he was. I ken
enough to follow her sangs, an' a few words
forbye, just enough to gie us a change as ye
micht say."

I gladly accepted the shepherd's courteous
offer ; and so it was that an hour later we
found ourselves at Scaur -van, as his croft
was called, from its nearness to a great
bleached crag that rose out of the heather
like a light-ship in a lonely sea. By this time,
his prognostications — or those rather of the
wheeling and wailing lapwings, and the moun-

245

The tain-flying rooks — had come true. Across the

SnSr^f w^e des°late moors a grey wind soughed

and the m0Llrn^uWy from the south-west, driving before

Clan of it long slanting rains and sheets of drifting

Peace. mist. I was glad to be out of the cold wet,

and in the warm comfort of a room lit with

a glowing peat-fire on which lay one or two

spurtling logs of pine.

A dear old woman rose at my entrance. I
could see she was of great age, because her
face was like a white parchment seamed with
a myriad wrinkles, and her hands were so sere
and thin that they were like wan leaves of
October. But she was fairly active, and her
eyes were clear — and even, if the expression
may be used, with a certain quiet fire in their
core — and her features were comely, with a
light on them as of serene peace. The old-
fashioned white mutch she wore enhanced this
general impression, and I remember smiling
to myself at the quaint conceit that old Mrs.
Logan was like a bed-spirit of ancient slumber
looking out from an opening of frilled white
curtains.

It was pleasant to sit and watch her, as
with deft hands she prepared the tea and laid
on the table scones and butter and grey farrels
of oatcake, while, outside, the wet wind
moaned and every now and then a swirl of

246

rain splashed against the narrow panes of the The
window, in whose inset stood three pots of Children
geranium whose scarlet flowers caught the red °nd t|"
flicker of the fire-flaucht and warmed the grey Clan of
dusk gathering without. Peace.

Later, we began to speak of the things of
which her son John and I had talked on the
moor : and then of much else in connection
with the legendary lore of the birds and beasts
of the hills and high moorlands.

As it was so much easier for her (and so
far more vivid and idiomatic) she spoke in
Gaelic, delighted to find one who could under-
stand the ancient speech : for in that part of
the country, though in the Highlands, no
Gaelic is spoken, or only a few words or
phrases connected with sport, sheep-driving,
and the like. I had won her heart by saying
to her soon after the tea — up to which time
she had spoken in the slow and calculated but
refined Highland-English of the north-west —
Tha mi cinnteach gu bheil sibh aois mhbr . . .
'I am sure that you have the great age on
you.' She had feared that because I had 'the
English way ' I would not know, or remember,
or care to remember, the old tongue : and she
took my hand and stroked it while she said
with a quiet dignity of pleasure, Is taitneach
learn nach 'eil yur Gaidhlig air meirgeadh . . .

247

The (in effect) ' It is well pleased I am that your

Children Gaelic has not become rusty.'
and the ^ was a^er the tea-things had been set
Clan of aside, and old Mrs. Logan had said reverently,
Peace. larr amend beannachadh (' Let us ask a bless-
ing '), that she told me, among other legendary
things and fragments of old natural -history
folklore, the following legend (or holy Christ-
mas tale, as she called it) as to how the first
crows were black and the first doves white.

I will tell it as simply but also with what
beauty I can, because her own words, which I
recall only as the fluctuating remembrance
from a dream and so must translate from the
terms of dream into the terms of prose,
though simple were beautiful with ancient
idiom.

Thus she began : — Feumaidh sinn dol air
ar n-ais dliith ficliead ceud bliadhna, which is
to say, ' We must go back near two thousand
{lit: twenty hundred) years.'

Yes, it is nigh upon twenty hundred years
that we must go back. It was in the last
month of the last year of the seven years'
silence and peace. When would that be, you
ask ? Surely what other would it be than the
seven holy years when Jesus the Christ was a
little lad. Do you not remember the lore of

248

the elders ? . . . that in the first seven years The
of the life of the young Christ there was peace Children
in the world, and that the souls of men were ° d /J1
like souls in a dream, and that the hearts of Clan of
women were at rest. In the second seven Peace,
years it is said that the world was like an
adder that sloughs its skin : for there was
everywhere a troubled sense of new things to
come. So wide and far and deep was this,
that men in remote lands began moving across
swamps and hills and deserts ; that the wild
beasts shifted their lairs and moaned and cried
in new forests and upon untrodden plains ;
that the storks and swallows in their migration
wearied their wings in high, cold, untravelled
ways ; that the narwhals and great creatures
of the deep foamed through unknown seas ;
that the grasses of the world wandered and
inhabited hills ; that many waters murmured
in the wilderness and that many waters
mysteriously sank from pools and wellsprings.
In the third seven years, men even on the last
ocean-girdled shores were filled with further
longing, and it is said that new stars were
flung into the skies and ancient stars were
whirled away, like dust and small stones
beneath the wheels of a chariot. It was at
the end of the third seven years that a Face
looked out of Heaven, and that from the

249

The edges of the world men heard a confused and

Children dreadful sound rising from the Abyss. Though
and the ^ne grea^ an(^ the sma^ are the same, it is the
Clan of great that withdraws from remembrance and
Peace, the small that remains, and that may be why
men have grown old with time, and have
forgotten, and remember only the little things
of the common life : as that in these years the
Herring became the king of all fishes, because
his swift gleaming clan carried the rumour of
great tidings to the uttermost places of ocean ;
as that in these years the little fly became king-
over lions and panthers and eagles and over all
birds and beasts, because it alone of all created
things had remained tameless and fearless ; as
that in these years the wild-bees were called
the clan of wisdom, because they carried the
Word to every flower that grows and spread
the rumour on all the winds of the world ; as
that in these years the Cuckoo was called the
Herald of God, because in his voice are heard
the bells of Resurrection.

But, as I was saying, it was in the last
month of the last year of the seven years'
silence and peace : the seventh year in the
mortal life of Jesus the Christ. It was on the
twenty-fifth day of that month, the day of His
holy birth.

It was a still day. The little white flowers
250

that were called Breaths of Hope and that The
we now call Stars of Bethlehem were so hushed Children
in quiet that the shadows of moths lay on and ^
them like the dark motionless violet in the Clan of
hearts of pansies. In the long swards of Peace,
tender grass the multitude of the daisies were
white as milk faintly stained with rlusht dews
fallen from roses. On the meadows of white
poppies were long shadows blue as the blue
lagoons of the sky among drifting snow-white
moors of cloud. Three white aspens on the
pastures were in a still sleep : their tremulous
leaves made no rustle, though there was a
soundless wavering fall of little dusky shadows,
as in the dark water of a pool where birches
lean in the yellow hour of the frostflre. Upon
the pastures were ewes and lambs sleeping,
and yearling kids opened and closed their onyx
eyes among the garths of white clover.

It was the Sabbath, and Jesus walked alone.
When He came to a little rise in the grass He
turned and looked back at the house where His
parents dwelled. Joseph sat on a bench, with
bent shoulders, and was dreaming with fixt
gaze into the west, as seamen stare across the
interminable wave at the pale green horizons
that are like the grassy shores of home. Mary
was standing, dressed in long white raiment,
white as a lily, with her right hand shading

251

The her eyes as she looked to the east, dreaming
Ch^.ren }ier dream.

and the ^ne youn& Christ sighed, but with the love

Clan of of all love in His heart. " So shall it be till
Peace, the day of days," He said aloud ; " even so
shall the hearts of men dwell among shadows
and glories, in the West of passing things : even
so shall that which is immortal turn to the
East and watch for the coming of Joy through
the Gates of Life."

At the sound of His voice He heard a
sudden noise as of many birds, and turned and
looked beyond the low upland where He stood.
A pool of pure water lay in the hollow, fed
by a ceaseless wellspring, and round it and
over it circled birds whose breasts were grey
as pearl and whose necks shone purple and
grass-green and rose. The noise was of their
wings, for though the birds were beautiful they
were voiceless and dumb as flowers.

At the edge of the pool stood two figures,
whom He knew to be of the angelic world
because of their beauty, but who had on them
the illusion of mortality so that the child did
not know them. But He saw that one was
beautiful as Night, and one beautiful as
Morning.

He drew near.

"I have lived seven years," He said, "and
252

I wish to send peace to the far ends of the The
world." Children

" Tell your secret to the birds," said one. and the

" Tell your secret to the birds," said the Clan of
other. Peace-

So Jesus called to the birds.

" Come," He cried ; and they came.

Seven came flying from the left, from the
side of the angel beautiful as Night. Seven
came flying from the right, from the side of
the angel beautiful as Morning.

To the first He said : " Look into my heart."

But they wheeled about Him, and with
new-found voices mocked, crying, " How could
we see into your heart that is hidden" . . .
and mocked and derided, crying, "What is
Peace ! . . . Leave us alone ! Leave us
alone ! "

So Christ said to them :

" I know you for the birds of Ahriman, who
is not beautiful but is Evil. Henceforth ye
shall be black as night, and be children of the
winds."

To the seven other birds which circled
about Him, voiceless, and brushing their wings
against His arms, He cried :

" Look into my heart."

And they swerved and hung before Him in
a maze of wings, and looked into His pure

253

The heart : and, as they looked, a soft murmurous

Children sound came from them, drowsy-sweet, full of

and the Peace : an(^ as they hung there like a breath

Clan of in frost they became white as snow.

Peace. «Ye are the Doves of the Spirit," said

Christ, " and to you I will commit that which

ye have seen. Henceforth shall your plumage

be white and your voices be the voices of

peace."

The young Christ turned, for He heard
Mary calling to the sheep and goats, and knew
that dayset was come and that in the valleys
the gloaming was already rising like smoke
from the urns of the twilight. When He
looked back He saw by the pool neither the
Son of Joy nor the Son of Sorrow, but seven
white doves were in the cedar beyond the
pool, cooing in low ecstasy of peace and
awaiting through sleep and dreams the rose-
red pathways of the dawn. Down the long
grey reaches of the ebbing day He saw seven
birds rising and falling on the wind, black as
black water in caves, black as the darkness of
night in old pathless woods.

And that is how the first doves became
white, and how the first crows became black
and were called by a name that means the
clan of darkness, the children of the wind.

254

STILL WATERS

Perhaps at no season of the year is the beauty
of still waters at once so obvious and so ethereal
as in Autumn. All the great painters of
Nature have realised this crowning secret of
their delicate loveliness. Corot exclaimed to
a friend who was in raptures about one of his
midsummer river scenes . . . 'Yes, yes, but
to paint the soul of October, voila mon ideal!"
Daubigny himself, that master of slow winding
waters and still lagoons, declared that if he had
to be only one month out of his studio it
would have to be October, ' for then you can
surprise Nature when she is dreaming, then
you may learn her most evanescent and most
exquisite secrets.' And our own Millais, when
he was painting * Chill October ' near Murthly,
in Perthshire, wrote that nothing had ever
caused him so much labour, if nothing had ever
given him so much pleasure, in the painting,
' for Nature now can be found in a trance, and

255

Still you can see her as she is.' A friend of the
Waters, late Keeley Halswelle told me that this able
artist (who was originally a 'figure' and
'subject' painter) remarked to him that he
had never realised the supreme charm of
autumnal Nature among still waters till he
found himself one day trying to translate to
his canvas the placid loveliness of the wide,
shallow reaches of the Avon around Christ-
church. Doubtless many other painters,
French and Dutch and English, have felt thus,
and been glad to give their best to the inter-
pretation of the supreme charm of still waters
in autumn. What would Venice be without
them . . . Amsterdam . . . Holland . . .
Finland . . . Sweden ? Imagine Scotland
without this water-beauty, from Loch Ken to
Loch Maree, from the Loch of the Yowes
to the ' thousand- waters ' of Benbecula : or
Ireland, where the white clouds climbing out
of the south may mirror themselves in still
waters all day till they sink beyond the Lough
of Shadows in the silent north.

The phrase is as liberal as 'running
water.' That covers all inland waters
in motion, from the greatest rivers to
the brown burn of the hillside, from the
melting of the snows in fierce spate to the
swift invasion and troubled floods of the

256

hurrying and confined tides. So ' still waters ' Still
covers lakes and mountain-lochs, shallow meres, Waters,
lagoons, the reaches of slow rivers, lochans,
tarns, the dark brown pools in peat-moors, or
the green -blue pools in open woods and
shadowy forests, the duckweed-margined ponds
at the skirts of villages, the lilied ponds of
old manor-garths and of quiet gardens, asleep
beneath green canopies or given over to the
golden carp and the dragon-fly beneath mossed
fountains or beyond time-worn terraces. Often,
too, and in February and October above all,
the low - lying lands are flooded, and the
bewildered little lives of the pastures crowd
the hedgerows and copses. Sometimes for
days, motionless, these mysterious lake-arrivals
abide under the grey sky, sometimes a week or
weeks pass before they recede. The crow
flying home at dusk sees the pale cloud and the
orange afterglow reflected in an inexplicable
mirror where of late the grey -green grass and
brown furrow stretched for leagues : the
white owl, hawking the pastures after dusk,
swoops so low on his silent wings that he veers
upward from a ghostly flying image under-
neath, as a bat at sundown veers from the
phantom of its purblind flight.

Delicate haze, cloud-dappled serenity, and
moonlight are the three chief qualities of

257 s

Still beauty in the charm of still waters. It is a
Waters. matter of temperament, of the hour and occa-
sion also no doubt, whether one prefer those
where another dream-world, that of human
life, companions them in the ineffable suspense
of the ideal moment, the moment where the
superfluous recedes and silence and stillness
consummate the miraculous vision. Those
moonlit lagoons of Venice, which become
scintillating floods of silver or lakes of delicate
gold, where the pole-moored sandolo thrusts
a black wedge of shadow into the motionless
drift, while an obscure figure at the prow idly
thrums a mandolin or hums drowsily a can-
zonnetto $ amove ; those twilit canals where old
palaces lean and look upon their ancient beauty
stilled and perfected in sleep ; how unforget-
table they are, how they thrill even in remem-
brance. In the cities of Holland, how at one
are the old houses with the mirroring canals,
in still afternoons when quiet light warms the
red wall, and dwells on the brown and scarlet
clematis in the cool violet and amber hollows
of the motionless water wherein the red wall
soundlessly slips and indefinitely recedes, hiding
an undiscovered house of shadow with silent
unseen folk dreaming out across invisible
gardens. There are ancient towns like this in
England also, as between Upsala and Elsinore

258

to where old chateaux in Picardy guard the Still
pollarded marais or deserted Breton manoirs Waters,
stand ghostly at the forest-end of untra versed
meres.

These have their charm. But have they
for us the intimate and unchanging spell of
the lakes and meres and other still waters of
our own land ? Nothing, one might think,
could be more beautiful than to see in the
Lake of Como the cypresses of Bellaggio and
the sloping gardens of Cadenabbia meeting in
a new underwater wonderland : or to see
Mont Blanc, forty miles away, sleeping in
snow-held silence in the blue depths of Lac
Leman : or to see Pilatus and a new city
of Lucerne mysteriously changed and yet
familiarly upbuilded among the moving green
lawns and azure avenues of the Lake of the
Four Cantons. And yet leaning boulders of
granite, yellow with lichen and grey with
moss and deep-based among swards of heather
and the green nomad bracken, will create a
subtler magic in the brown depths of any
Highland loch. There is a subtler spell in
the solitary tarn, where the birch leans out
of the fern and throws an intricate tracery of
bough and branch into the unmoving wave,
where the speckled trout and the speckled
mavis meet as in the strange companion-

259

Still ships of dreams. Enchantment lies amid
Waters, the emerald glooms of pine and melancholy
spruce, when a dream-world forest under-
neath mirrors the last sunset-gold on bronze
cones, and enfolds the one white wandering
cloud miraculously stayed at last between two
columnar green spires, flawless as sculptured
jade.

Is this because, in the wilderness, we re-
cover something of what we have lost ? . . .
because we newly find ourselves, as though
surprised into an intimate relationship of
which we have been unaware or have in-
differently ignored ? What a long way the
ancestral memory has to go, seeking, like a
pale sleuth-hound among obscure dusks and
forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost trails
of the soul. It is not we only, you and I,
who look into the still waters of the wilder-
ness and lonely places, and are often dimly
perplext, are often troubled we know not how
or why : some forgotten reminiscence in us is
aroused, some memory not our own but yet
our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that have
immemorially sunk in ancient dust move
furtively along obscure corridors in our brain,
the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the
primitive hillman or woodlander communicates
again with old forgotten intimacies and the

260

secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. This Still
is no fanciful challenge of speculation. In Waters,
the order of psychology it is as logical as in
the order of biology is the tracing of our
upright posture or the deft and illimitable use
of our hands, from unrealisably remote periods
wherein the pioneers of man reached slowly
forward to inconceivable arrivals.

But whatever primitive wildness, whatever
ancestral nearness we recover in communion
with remote Nature, there is no question as
to the fascination of beauty exercised by the
still waters of which we speak, of their en-
during spell. What lovelier thing in Nature
than, on a serene and cloudless October day,
to come upon a small lake surrounded by tall
elms of amber and burnished bronze, by beech
and maple and sycamore cloudy with superb
fusion of orange and scarlet and every shade
of red and brown, by limes and aspens
tremulous with shaken pale gold ? Beautiful
in itself, in rare and dreamlike beauty, the
woods become more beautiful in this silent
marriage with placid waters, take on a beauty
more rare, a loveliness more dreamlike. There
is a haze which holds the fluent gold of the
air. Silence is no longer quietude as in June ;
or a hushed stillness, as in the thunder-laden
noons of July or August ; but a soundless

261

Still suspense wherein the spirit of the world,
Waters, suddenly at rest, sleeps and dreams.

The same ineffable peace broods over all
still waters : on the meres of Hereford, on the
fens of East Anglia, on lochs heavy with
mountain-shadow, on the long grey Hebridean
sheets where the call of the sea-wind or the
sea- wave is ever near.

Truly there must be a hidden magic in
them, as old tales tell. I recall one where the
poets and dreamers of the world are called
'the children of pools.' The poet and
dreamer who so called them must have meant
by his metaphor those who look into the
hearts of men and into the dim eyes of Life,
troubled by the beauty and mystery of the
world, insatiable in longing for the ineffable
and the unattainable. So, long ago, even
' ornamental waters ' may have been symbols
of the soul's hunger and thirst, emblems of the
perpetual silence and mystery of his fugitive
destiny !

Somewhere, I think it is in the Kalevala,
occurs the beautiful metaphor of still waters,
' the mirrors of the world.' Whoever the
ancient singer was who made the phrase, he
had in his heart love for still waters as well as
the poet's mind. The secret of their beauty
is in that image. It may be a secret within a

262

secret, for the mirror may disclose a world Still
invisible to us, may reflect what our own or Waters,
an ancestral memory dimly recalls, may reveal
what the soul perceives and translates from
its secret silences into symbol and the
mysterious speech of the imagination.

Still waters ; it has the inward music that
lies in certain words . . . amber, ivory, foam,
silence, dreams ; that lies often in some
marriage of words . . . moonlight at sea,
wind in dark woods, dewy pastures, old
sorrowful things : that dwells in some names
of things, as chrysoprase ; or in some combina-
tion of natural terms and associations, as
wind and wave ; or in some names of women
and dreams, Ruth, Alaciel, Imogen, Helen,
Cleopatra ; or in the words that serve in the
courts of music . . . cadence, song, threnody,
epithalamion, viol, flute, prelude, fugue. One
can often evade the heavy airs of the hours
of weariness by the spell of one of these wooers
of dreams. Foam — and the hour is gathered
up like mist, and we are amid " perilous seas
in faery lands forlorn " : Wind—^vA the noises
of the town are like the humming of wild bees
in old woods, and one is under ancient boughs,
listening, or standing solitary in the dusk by
a forlorn shore with a tempestuous sea filling
the darkness with whispers and confused

263

Still rumours and incommunicable things : Ruth —
Waters. anj sorrow and exile are become loveliness :
Helen — and that immemorial desire is become
our desire, and that phantom beauty is become
our dream and our passion. Still Waters —
surely through that gate the mind may slip
away from the tedious and unwelcome, and
be alone among forests where the birch leans
and dreams into an amber-brown pool, or by
a mountain-lake where small white clouds lie
like sleeping birds, or on moonlit lagoons
where the reed and the reed's image are as
one, and the long mirrors are unshaken by
any wandering air, unvisited but by the
passing soundless shadows of travelling wings.

264

THE PLEIAD-MONTH

From the Persian shepherd to the shepherd
on the hills of Argyll — in a word, from the
remote East to the remote West — November
is known, in kindred phrase, as the Pleiad-
Month.

What a world of legend, what a greater
world of poetry and old romance, centres in
this little group of stars. ' The meeting-place
in the skies of mythology and science,' as
they have been called by one of our chief
astronomers. From time immemorial this
remote starry cluster has been associated with
festivals and solemnities, with auguries and
destinies. On November 17, the day of the
midnight culmination of the Pleiades, the great
Festival of Isis was begun at Busiris : in ancient
Persia, on that day, no petition was presented
in vain to the King of Kings : and on the first
of the month the midnight rites of our own
ancestral Druids were connected with the

265,

The rising of the Pleiades. To-day the South Sea
Pleiad- Islanders of the Society and Tonga Isles
divide the year by their seaward rising and
setting. The Matarii i nia, or season of the
' Pleiades Above,' begins when in the evening
this stellar group appears on the horizon, and
while they remain above it : the Matarii i
raro, or season of the w Pleiades Below,' begins
when after sunset they are no longer visible,
and endures till once again they appear above
the horizon. The most spiritual and the most
barbaric races are at one in considering them
centres of the divine energy. The Hindus
imaged them as Flame, typical of Agni, God of
Fire, the Creative Energy : the several Persian
words, from the ancient Perv or the Pamir of
Hafiz or the Parwin of Omar Khayyam—
derive from Peru, a word signifying 'The
Begetters ' : and we know that the Greeks
oriented to them or to their lucida not only
the first great temple of Athene on the
Acropolis, but its successor four hundred years
later, the Hecatompedon of 1150 B.C., and
seven hundred years later the Parthenon on
the same side. [The great shrine of Dionysos
at Athens, the still earlier Asclepieion at
Epidaurus, and the temple of Poseidon at
Sunium, looked towards the Pleiades at their
setting.] But far removed from these are the

266

Malays and Pacific islanders, who more vaguely The
and crudely revere 'the central fires,' and Pleiad-
even so primitive and remote a people as the Month*
Abipones of the Paraguay liiver country wor-
ship them as their Great Spirit — Groaperikie,
or Grandfather — and chant hymns of joy to
this Pleiad -Allfather when, after the vernal
Equinox, the mysterious cluster once more
hangs visible in the northern sky.

It would be impossible, in a brief paper, to
cover the ground of the nomenclature, of the
literature, of scientific knowledge and specula-
tion concerning the Pleiades. A long chapter
in a book might be given to Alcyone alone —
that bright particular star of which it has been
calculated that, in comparison, our Sun would
sink to a star below the tenth magnitude.
Indeed, though the imagination strains after
the astronomer's calm march with dazzled
vision, our solar brilliancy is supposed to be
surpassed by some sixty to seventy of the
Pleiadic group, for all that our human eyes
have from time immemorial seen therein only
a small cluster of tiny stars, the 'seven' of
Biblical and poetic and legendary lore, from
4 the Seven Archangels ' to the popular ' Hen
and her six chicks.' Alcyone, that terrible
torch of the ultimate heavens, is eighty-three
times more refulgent than that magnificent

267

The star Sirius, which has been called the 'Glory
Pleiad- 0f the South ' : a thousand times larger than
on ' our Sun. I do not know how Merope and
Taygeta, Celeno and Atlas are, but Maia,
that shaking loveliness of purest light, has
been calculated to be four hundred times
larger than the Sun, and Electra about four
hundred and eighty times larger. When one
thinks of this mysterious majesty, so vast that
only the winged imagination can discern the
illimitable idea, all words fail : at most one
can but recall the solemn adjuration of the
shepherd -prophet Amos, 'Seek Him that
maketh Pleiades and Orion? or the rapt
ecstasy of Isaiah, ' O day star, son of the
morning'

A Gaelic poet has called them the Lords
of Water, saying (though under different
names, from the Gaelic mythology) that
Alcyone controls the seas and the tides, that
Electra is mistress of flood, that Taygeta and
Merope and Atlas dispense rains and augment
rivers and feed the well-springs, and that Maia's
breath falls in dew. The detail is fanciful ;
the central thought is in accord with legend
and old wisdom. I do not know how far back
the connection of the Pleiades with water,
particularly rains and the rising of rivers, has
been traced. It runs through many ancient

268

records. True, in one place, Hesiod speaks The
of * retreating from the burning heat of the ^Jeiad"
Pleiades,' and mention has already been made
of the Hindu association of them with 'Flame.'
But Hesiod's allusion is a seasonal trope, and
natural to one living in a warm country where
the coming of the autumnal rains coincides
with days of sweltering closeness and heat.
Moreover, Hesiod himself uses equally deftly
other popular imagery as it occurs to him,
speaking of the Pleiades, as Homer speaks, as
Atlas-born ; and again (with Pindar, Simonides
and others) likening them to rock-pigeons flying
from the Hunter Orion, doubtless from earliest
mention of them in ancient legend as a flock
of doves, or birds ; and again as « the Seven
Virgins ' and ' the Virgin stars ' — thus at one
with his contemporary, the Hebrew Herdsman-
prophet Amos, who called them by a word
rendered in the Authorised Version of the
Bible as 'the seven stars.' As for the Hindu
symbol, it must be remembered that fire was
the supreme sacred and primitive element, and
that every begetter of life in any form would
naturally be thus associate. The Hindus called
the Pleiad-Month (October-November) Kartik,
and the reason of the great star-festival Dlbali,
the Feast of Lamps, was to show gratitude and
joy, after the close of the wet season, for the

269

The coming of the Pleiad-days of dry warmth and
Pleiad- beauty. The ' sweet influences ' of the Pleiades
' thus indicated will come more familiarly to
many readers in Milton's

" the grey
Dawn and the Pleiades before him danc'd,
Shedding sweet influence, . . ."

This ancient custom, the ' Feast of Lamps,'
of the Western Hindus survives to-day in the
* Feast of Lanterns ' in Japan, though few
Europeans seem to perceive any significance
in that popular festival.

In general, however, we find the advent of
the Pleiades concurrent, both in ancient and
modern tradition, with springs and rains and
floods : with the renewal of life. Thus the
comment in the old Breeches Bible, opposite
the mention of 'the mystic seven' in that
supreme line in Job : ' which starres arise when
the sunne is in Taurus, which is the spring
time, and bring flowres.' A Latin poet, in-
deed, used Pliada as a synonym of showers.
Again and again we find them as the Vergiliae,
Companions of the Spring. They are inti-
mately connected too with traditions of the
Deluge : and in this association, perhaps also
with that of submerged Atlantis, it is suggestive
to note that early in the sixteenth century
Cortez heard in that remote, mysterious Aztec

270

otherworld to which he penetrated, a very The
ancient tradition of the destruction of the ^Jeia^"
world in some past age at the time of their
midnight culmination. A long way thence to
Sappho, who marked the middle of the night
by the setting of those wild-doves of the sky !
Or, a century later, to Euripides, who calls
them Aetos, our * Altair,' the nocturnal
timekeepers.

But to return to that mystery of seven.
Although some scholars derive the word
'Pleiades1 or 'Pliades,' and in the singular
6 Plias,' from the Greek word plein, * to sail,'
because (to quote an eminent living authority)
' the heliacal rising of the group in May marked
the opening of navigation to the Greeks, as its
setting in the late autumn did the close ' — and
though others consider that the derivation is
from pleios, the epic form of the Greek word
for * full,' or, in the plural, ' many ' — and so to
the equivalent ' a cluster,' corresponding to the
Biblical Kimah and the Arabic Al Tkuruyya,
the Cluster, the Many Little Ones— it is
perhaps more likely that a less learned and
ordinary classical reader may be nearer the
mark in considering the most probable deriva-
tion to be from Pleione, the nymph of Greek
mythology — ' Pleione, the mother of the seven
sisters,' as she was called of old. Such an one,

271

Month.

The too, may remember that certain Greek poets
;iei^" alluded to the Pleiades as the seven doves that
carried ambrosia to the infant Zeus.1 To this
day, indeed, a common English designation for
the group is 'the Seven Sisters ' : and lovers of
English poetry will hardly need to be reminded
of kindred allusions, from Chaucer's ' Atlantes
doughtres sevene ' to Milton's ' the seven
Atlantic sisters' (reminiscent here, of course,
of Virgil's 'Eoae Atlantides') or to Keats'
'The Starry Seven, old Atlas' children.' The
mediaeval Italians had ' the seven doves ' again
(sette palommiele), and to-day their compatriots
speak of the 'seven dovelets.' It would be
tiresome to go through the popular Pleiad-
nomenclature of all the European races, and a
few instances will equally indicate the preval-
ence, since the Anglo-Saxon sifunsterri. Miles
Coverdale, in the first complete English Bible,
comments on the passage in Job, 'these vii.
starres, the clocke henne with her chickens ' ;
and to-day in Dorset, Devon, and other
English counties ' the Hen and her Chickens '
is a popular term, as it is, in effect, with the

1 On reading recently a work on mythological ornithology by
Mr. D'Arcy Thompson I noticed that he traces the word Botrus,
equivalent to a Bunch of Grapes (as the younger Theon likened
the Pleiades) to obds, a dove, so called from its purple-red breast
like wine, olvos, and naturally referred to a bunch of grapes ; or
perhaps because the bird appeared in migration at the time of the
Vintage. [And see his further evidence of Cilician coins.]

272

Wallachians, and indeed, with or without the The
number seven, throughout Europe. The long P1eiad-
continuity and vast range of this association on '
with seven may be traced from the ancient
Celtic ' The Seven Hounds ' to the still more
ancient ' seven beneficent sky-spirits of the
Vedas and the Zend-Avesta' or to the again
more ancient * Seven Sisters of Industry ' of
remote Chinese folklore. This feminine
allusion in presumably the oldest mention
of a popular designation for the Pleiades is the
more singular from the kindred thought of the
Roman writer Manilius — ' The narrow Cloudy
Train of female stars'. . . i.e., no doubt,
Pleione and her daughters.

Nor, again, is it possible to record the many
picturesque or homely Pleiad -designations,
ancient and modern, in literature and folklore.
What range, indeed, to cover . . . since we
should have to go back to two thousand years
B.C. to recover that fine name, General of the
Celestial Armies ! It would be tempting to
range through the poets of all lands. Think
of such lovely words as those from the
Muattakat, as translated by Sir William
Jones : ' It was the hour when the Pleiades
appeared in the firmament like the folds of a
silken sash variously decked with gems ' : or
that line in Grafs translation of Sadi's Giulistdii

273 T

The ... 'as though the tops of the trees were
Pleiad- encircled by the necklace of the Pleiades ' : or,
' of our own day, of a verse such as Roscoe
Thayer's :

" slowly the Pleiades
Dropt like dew from bough to bough of the cinnamon trees,"

or lines such as that familiar but ever beautiful
couplet in Locksley Hall :

" Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow
shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid."

As for many of the names, what store of old
thought and legend they enshrine. ' Seamen's
starres ' our own King Jamie called them, after
the popular use. The Finns call them 'the
Sieve,' and the Provencals ' the mosquito net,'
and the Italians * the Battledore.' With the
nomad Arabs they are 'the Herd of Camels.'
Peoples so apart as the ancient Arabians, the
Algerian Berbers of to-day, and the Dyaks
of Borneo, have placed in them the seat
of immortality. Races as widely severed
as the Hebridean Gaels and certain Indian
tribes have called them ' the Dancers ' : to the
Solomon Islanders they are ' a group of girls,'
and (strange, among so primitive and savage
a race) the Australian aborigines thought of
them as ' Young Girls playing to Young Men

274

dancing.' There is perhaps no stranger name The
than our Gaelic Crannarain (though Griog- ^Jeiad"
lachan or Meanmnach is more common), i.e.,
the baker's peel or shovel, from an old legend
about a Baker and his wife and six daughters,
itself again related to a singular Cuckoo myth.

But an end to this long excerpting from
* starry notes ' ! In a later chapter, too, I pro-
pose to write of * Winter Stars,' and the
Great Bear, and Orion, and the Milky Way —
and I must take warning in time to condense
better and write ' more soothly ' as Chaucer
has it. So, now, let me end with a quotation
from Mr. D'Arcy Thompson's preface to his
Greek Birds, to which I have alluded in a
footnote. 'As the White Doves came from
Babylon or the Meleagrian Birds from the
further Nile, so over the sea and the islands
came Eastern legends and Eastern names.
And our Aryan studies must not blind us to
the presence in an Aryan tongue of these
immigrants from Semitic and Egyptian speech,
or from the nameless and forgotten language
that was spoken by the gods.'

Food for thought there, and in many of the
other alluded-to clues of old forgotten faiths
and peoples, for the Pleiad-Month !

What ages, what rise and fall of kingdoms
and great empires, since the Arabian shepherd

275

The looked up from the illimitable desert and called
Pleiad- this dim cluster, this incalculable congregation
' of majesty and splendour, Al Najm, 'the Con-
stellation . . . ' the Constellation ' : since the
first wandering Bedouins halted in the moonlit
Sahara to bow before Al Wasat, the Central
One : since the poets of the Zend-Avesta hailed
the overlordship of the Holy Seven ! And
still they rise, and set, changeless, mysterious.
Still the old wonder, the old reverence lives
. . . for not long ago I heard a tale told
by a Gaelic story-teller who spoke of the
Pleiades as the Seven Friends of Christ, and
named them newly as Love, Purity, Courage,
Tenderness, Faith, Joy, and Peace.

276

THE RAINY HYADES

" Where is the star Irabrifer ? Let us adore it."

Years ago I remember coming upon this
mysterious phrase in a poem or poetic drama
by a French writer. The pagans, led by
a priest, then went into the woods ; and, in
a hollow made of a hidden place swept by
great boughs, worshipped a moist star. I
forget whether the scourge of drought ended
then, and if winds lifted the stagnant branches,
if rains poured through the leaves and mosses
and reached the well-springs. I recall only
the invocation, and some faint and broken
memory of the twilight-procession of bitter
hearts and wild voices, weary of vain lamenta-
tion and of unanswered prayers to sleeping or
silent gods. But often I wondered as to
Imbrifer, that dark lord with the sonorous
name. Was he a Gaulish divinity, or, as his
name signals, a strayed Latin ? And was he,
as our Manan of the West, a sea-deity, or a

277

Hyades.

The divinity of the clouds, clothed, like the
Rainy shepherd Angus Sunlocks, in mist, so as the
more secretly to drive before him down the
hidden ways of heaven the myriad hosts of the
rain ? Or had he an angelic crest, with wings
of unfailing water, as a visionary once por-
trayed for me a likeness of Midir, that ancient
Gaelic god at whose coming came and still
come the sudden dews, or whose presence or
the signs of whose passage would be revealed
and still are revealed by the white glisten on
thickets and grasses, by the moist coolness on
the lips of leaf and flower.

The name, too, or one very like it, I heard
once in a complicated (and, alas, for the most
part forgotten) tale of the Kindred of Manan,
the Poseidon of the Gael : remembered be-
cause of the singular companionship of three or
four other Latin-sounding names, which the
old Schoolmaster-teller may have invented
or himself introduced, or mayhap had in the
sequence of tradition from some forgotten
monkish reciter of old. Aquarius and either
Cetus or Delphinius (quaintly given as the
Pollack, the porpoise) were of the astronomi-
cal company, I remember — and Neptheen or
Nepthuinn (Neptune), notwithstanding his
oneness with Manan's self.

But Imbrifer had faded from my mind, as
278

though washed away by one of his waves of The
rain or obliterated by one of his dense mists, Rainy
till the other day. Then, as it happened, I Hyades-
came upon the name once more, in a Latin
quotation in an old book. So, he was of the
proud Roman clan after all ! and, by the
context, clearly a divinity of the autumnal
rains, and of those also that at the vernal
equinox are as a sound of innumerable little
clapping hands.

Could he be an astronomical figure, a
Zodiacal prince of dominion, I wondered. In
vain I searched through all available pages
connected with the Hyades, the Stars of
Water : in vain, the chronicles of Aquarius,
of Cetus and the Dolphin, of Hydra and
Pisces and Argo, that proud Ship of March.
But last night, sitting by the fire and hearing
the first sleet of winter whistle through the
dishevelled oaks and soughing firs, when I was
idly reading and recalling broken clues in
connection with the astrological ' House of
Seturn,' suddenly, in pursuit of a cross-
reference to some detail in connection with the
constellation of Capricorn, I encountered
Imbrifer once more. ' Imbrifer, the Rain-
Bringing One.'

So, then, he is more than an obscure
divinity of the woods and of remote ancestral

279

The clans ! Greater even than Midir of the Dews,
Rainy one 0f ^e great Lords of Death : greater than
' the Greek Poseidon or the Gaelic Manan,
heaven-throned among the older gods though
seen of mortals only on gigantic steeds of
ocean, vast sea-green horses with feet of
running waves and breasts of billows. For he
is no other than one of the mightiest of the
constellations, Capricorn itself ! The name, in
a word, is but one of several more or less
obscure or forgotten analogues of this famous
constellation, concerning which the first printed
English astrological almanac (1386) has ' whoso
is born in Capcorn schal be ryche and wel
lufyd ' !

Imbrifer himself ... or itself ... is
certainly not 'wel lufyd' on many of these
October and November days of floods and
rains ! Imbrifer . . . the very name is a kind
of stately, Miltonic, autumnal compeer of our
insignificant (and, in Scotland, dreaded !) rain-
saint of July, S within of dubious memory !
It would add dignity to the supplication or
imprecation of the sleet- whipt citizen of
Edinburgh or the rain-and-mud splashed way-
farer in London, during the wet and foggy
days of November, if, instead of associating
the one or the other with 'the weather' or
'our awful climate' he could invoke or abjure

280

so imposing and grandiloquent an abstraction The
as < Imbrifer ' ! Rainy

Truly a fit Constellation of late autumn, Hyades-
Capricornus.

" Thy Cold, for Thou o'er Winter Signs dost reign,
Pullst back the Sun . . ."

as a bygone astronomical versifier has it.
Perhaps he had in mind Horace's 'tyrannus
Hesperiae Capricornus undae,' who in turn may
have recalled an earlier poet still, English'd
thus :

" . , . Then grievous blasts
Break southward on the Sea, when coincide
The Goat and Sun : and then a heaven-sent cold.''

Many of us will remember with a thrill
Milton's magnificent image

"... Thence down amain
As deep as Capricorn,"

and others will recall the often-quoted line of
Dante in the Paradiso (relative to the Sun's
entrance into Capricorn between January 18
and February 14).

" The horn of the Celestial Goat doth touch the Sun.'"

May and November are the two * fatal '
months with the Celtic peoples : the first

281

The because of the influence of the Queen of
Rainy Faerie (she has many names), and the second
Hyades. because 0f Midir, who sleeps in November,
or, as another legend has it, 'goes away' in
that month. In that month too the Daughter
of Midir has departed on her long quest of her
brother Aluinn Og (is this a legend or a con-
fused traditionary remembrance, or a mytho-
poeic invention ... I have come upon it
once only), to find him asleep under the
shaken fans of the Northern Lights, and to
woo him with pale arctic fires, and auroras,
and a faint music wrought out of the murmur
of polar airs on a harp made of a seal's breast-
bone. It is but in another guise the old
Greek legend of Persephone in the Kingdom
of Aidoneus. Again, it is in November that
the touch of Dalua, the Secret Fool or the
Accursed of the Everlasting Ones, gives death.
Once more, it is in November that Lir holds
his great banquet, a banquet that lasts three
months, in Tir-fo-tuinn, the Country under
the waves. In one way or another all these
dreams are associated with the sea, with water
and the Winter Solstice. By different ways
of thought, of tradition, and of dreaming
phantasy, the minds of this race or that
people, of these scattered tribes or those
broken clans, have reached the same strange

282

goals of the imagination. The spell of Capri- The
corn may be of the Waters of all time, since **ainJ
the Horned Goat of our Celtic forebears, the
' Buccan Horn ' of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors,
the Latin ' Imbrifer ' or ' Gelidus ' or * Sea-
Goat ' (in several variants), the Greek * Athal-
pees ' or the commoner term signifying a
Homed Goat, the ancient Egyptian Chnemu,
God of the Waters, the perhaps as ancient
Aztec Cipactli, imaged like the narwhal, the
Chinese Mo Ki and the Assyrian Munaxa,
both signifying Goat Fish — and so forth,
East and West, in the dim past and the
confused present, — are all directly or indirectly
associated with the element of Water, with
the Sea, or rains, storm and change and subtle
regeneration. The Greek writers called the
allied constellation of Aquarius Hydrochous,
the Water-Pourer, in mythological connection
(a Latin commentator avers) with Deucalion
and the great Flood, that many believe to have
been an ancestral memory of the Deluge which
submerged Atlantis. The Anglo-Saxons gave
it the same name, 'se waeter-gyt.1 There is
a Breton legend in connection with Ys, that
dim Celtic remembrance of vanished Lyonesse
or drowned Atlantis, to the effect (for I know
it only in modern guise) that on the fatal night
when King Gradlon saw his beautiful city

283

The unloosened to the devouring waves by Dahut
gainy the Red, his Daughter, the Stars of water
'" shook a fiery rain upon land and sea and that
the floods of heaven fell, from the wake of the
Great Galley (the Great Bear) to the roots of
the unseen tree that bears the silver Apples
(the Pleiades), and as far as the hidden Well-
springs (the Constellation of Capricorn) and The
Mansion of the White King (the Constellation
of Aquarius) — the White King being water
personified.

Nearly all the ancient Greek and Asian
analogues for the last named, Aquarius, relate
to water. One of the few old-world exceptions
was that Roman Zodiac on which the constella-
tion figured as a peacock, symbol of Here
(Juno), because that in her month Gamelion
(part January, part February) the sun enters
this sign. The Greek Islanders of Ceos called
it Aristaeus, in memory of a native Rain
Bringer. Another name was Cecrops, because
the Cicada or Field-cricket is nourished by
the dews and has its eggs hatched by the
vernal rains. It would be wearisome to
collate superfluous instances. Enough, now,
that the Arab, the Persian, the Syrian and
the Israelite, were at one with the Hellene
and the Anglo-Saxon in the designation of
the Water-Pourer, or an equivalent such as

284

the Arabian Al Dalw, the Well-Bucket : that The
in China of old its sign was recognised as a Rainy
symbol of the Emperor Tchoun Hin, the ya
Chinese Deucalion : and that still among the
astrologers of Central Asia and Japan it has
for emblem the Rat, the far- Asiatic ideograph
for water. Strange too that Star- Seers so
remote as the Magi of the East and the
Druids of the West should centrate their
stellar science on this particular constellation.
And, once more, not less strange that alike by
the banks of the Euphrates where it was
called the Star of Mighty Destiny, on the
Arabian Sands, where it was called the Fortune
of all Fortune, and in the Druidic woods of
the Gaul and the Gael where too it symbolised
Fortune, a star of its group should be the Star
of Fortune — the group alluded to by Dante in
the Purgatorio :

"... geomancers their Fortuna Major
See in the Orient before the dawn ..."

Again, is it tradition or coincidence that
the Platonists of old held 'the stairs of
Capricorn ' to be the stellar way by which the
souls of men ascended to heaven, so that the
constellation became known as the Gate of
the Gods, and that to-day the astrologers and
mystics of the West share the same belief?

285

The Even the Caer Arianrod of our Celtic forebears
Rainy — tne Silver Road, as generally given though
y ' obviously very loosely . . . and may not the
name more likely, especially in connection
with a basic legend of the constellation of
Corona Borealis, be the ' Mansion of Ariand '
(Ariadne) ? . . . though commonly applied to
the Milky Way or less often to the Northern
Crown, is sometimes in its modern equivalent
used to designate Capricorn. Naturally, to
astrologers, this Constellation with that of
Aquarius, is of greatest import, for at a certain
time 'the House of Saturn ' is here to be
discerned.

It is a drop from such sounding names as
these to ' the Skinker.' Yet by this name our
English forefathers probably knew in common
speech the constellation of Aquarius. At
any rate a Mr. Cock, * Philomathemat,' in a
rare book of some 200 years ago, Meteorologiae,
speaks of Aquarius by this singular name, and
as though it were the familiar and accepted
designation : ' Jupiter in the Skinker opposed
by Saturn in the Lion did raise mighty South-
west Winds.' Here again in this old English
word, meaning a tapster, we have an analogue
of the Water-Pourer, that universal Zodiacal
sign of Aquarius.

But for all that Horace, and following him
286

James Thomson in the Seasons ('Winter'), The
say of ' Fierce Aquarius staining the inverted ^ainJ
year,' the constellation is more associated with
the rain-tides of spring. It is then, too, in
mid-February to mid-March, that, following
its passage through Capricorn, the Sun enters
it — so that ' benign ' and not ' fierce ' becomes
the apt epithet.

All these 'watery constellations' — Aquarius,
Capricorn, Cetus, the Dolphin, Hydra, Pisces
— are set aside, in the mouths of poets and in
the familiar lore of the many, for the Hyades,
that lovely sestet of Taurus which in these
winter-months are known to all of us, where
they flash and dance south-east of the Silver
Apples of childhood's sky — the clustered
Pleiades. They have become the typical
stars of the onset of winter — the Lords of
Rain — 'sad companions of the turning year'
as an old Roman poet calls them, ' the seaman-
noted Hyades' of Euripides, 'the Boar-
Throng' (feeders on the mast brought down
in late October and November by the
autumnal rains) of our Anglo-Saxon fathers,
the 'Storm-Star ' of Pliny, the Moist Daughters
of Spenser, so much more familiar to us in
Tennyson's

" Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea."

287

The Of old the whole group was called Aldebaran,
Rainy Dut nQw we recognise in that name only the
superb star whose pale-rose flame lights
gloriously 'the cold forehead of the wintry
sky' to quote an undeservedly forgotten
poet. And now, Aldebaran stands apart in
Taurus, and the six storm -stars are torches
set apart.

Well, the Season of the Rainy Hyades has
come. The Water-Pourer, the Whale and
swift Dolphin, Pisces (' Leaders of the
Celestial Host ' and 'the Diadem of November'),
Hydra the Water-Snake, every Rain-Star, from
flashing Corona, Bride of the White Hawk,
to the far southern torch of splendid Achernar
in Eridanus the Celestial River, all have lent
the subtle influences of the first of the
Elements, Water. In the mystic's language,
we are now in the season when the soul may
least confusedly look into its life as in a shaken
mirror, and when the spirit may 'look before
and after.' For, they tell us, in the occult
sense, we are the Children of Water.

To-night, looking at the Hyades, dimmed
in a vaporous haze foretelling coming storm,
as yet afar off, I find myself, I know not why,
and in a despondency come I know not
whence, thinking of and repeating words I
read to-day in a translation of the Bhagavad

Gita : — ' I am in the hearts of all. Memory The
and Knowledge, and the loss of both, are all Rainy
from Me. There are two entities in this world, Hyades-
the Perishable and the Imperishable. All
creatures are the Perishable and the un-
concerned One is the Imperishable.'
The unconcerned One !

289 u

WINTER STARS

I

To know in a new and acute way the spell of
the nocturnal skies, it is not necessary to go
into the everlasting wonder and fascination
of darkness with an astronomer, or with one
whose knowledge of the stars can be expressed
with scholarly exactitude. For the student it
is needful to know, for example, that the
Hyades are Alpha, Delta, Eeta, etc., of Tauri,
and lie 10° south-east of the Pleiades. But as
one sits before the fireglow, with one's book
in hand to suggest or one's memory to remind,
it is in another way as delightful and as fascin-
ating to repeat again to oneself how Tennyson
in Ulysses speaks of this stellar cluster as

"Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vext the dim
sea . . ."

or how Christopher Marlowe wrote of them

290

" As when the seaman sees the Hyades Winter

Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds, Stars

Auster and Aquilon with winged steeds ..."

to recall how Spenser alludes to them as ■ the
Moist Daughters,' or how our Anglo-Saxon
ancestors called them 'the Boar-Throno-.'
One must know that Alpha of Bootes is the
astronomical signature of the greater Arcturus,
but how much it adds to the charm of this
stars interest for us to learn that among its
popular names are the Herdsman, the Bear-
Watcher, the Driver of the Wain, and to
know why these now familiar names were
given and by whom. One may grasp the
significance of the acquired knowledge that
this vast constellation of Bootes stretches from
the constellation of Draco to that of Virgo, and
the numeration of its degrees in declination and
ascension, and (if one may thus choose between
the 85 and the 140 of astronomers) that it
contains a hundred stars visible to the naked
eye. But, for some of us at least, there is
something as memorable, something as reveal-
ing, in a line such as that of the Persian poet
Hafiz, as paraphrased by Emerson,

" Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear" —

or that superb utterance of Carlyle in Sartor
Resartus,

291

Winter " What thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his Hunting
Stars. Dogs over the zenith in their leash of sidereal fire ? "

Not, I may add in parenthesis, that the seekers
after astronomical knowledge should depend
on the poets and romancers for even an
untechnical accuracy. Literature, alas, is full
of misstatements concerning the moon and
stars. Few poets are accurate as Milton is
magnificently accurate, his rare slips lying
within the reach of a knowledge achieved
since his day : or as Tennyson is accurate.
Carlyle himself, quoted above in so beautiful a
passage, has made more than one strange
mistake for (as he once aspired to be) a student
astronomer : not only, as in one instance,
making the Great Bear for ever revolve round
Bootes, but, in a famous passage in his French
Revolution, speaking of Orion and the Pleiades
glittering serenely over revolutionary Paris on
the night of 9th August 1792, whereas, as some
fact-loving astronomer soon pointed out, Orion
did not on that occasion rise till daybreak.
It has been said of the Moon, in fiction, that
her crescents and risings and wanings are to
most poets and novelists apparently an inex-
plicable mystery, an unattainable knowledge.
Even a writer who was also a seaman and
navigator, Captain Marryat, writes in one of
his novels of a waning crescent moon seen in

292

the early evening. The great Shakespeare Winter
himself wrote of the Pole Star as immutable, Stars,
as the one unpassing, the one fixt and un-
deviating star —

" . . . constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and lasting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament."

This was, of course, ignorance of what has
since been ascertained, and not uninstructed-
ness or mere hearsay. Possibly, too, he had
in mind rather that apparent unchanging
aloofness from the drowning sea -horizon to
which Homer alludes in the line beautifully
translated ' Arctos, sole star that never bathes
in the ocean wave ... of which, no doubt,
our great poet had read in the quaint delightful
words of Chaucer (rendering Boetius) — 'Ne
the sterre y-cleped " the Bere," that enclyneth
his ravisshinge courses abouten the soverein
heighte of the worlde, ne the same sterre Ursa
nis never-mo wasshen in the depe westrene see,
ne coveitith nat to deyen his flaumbe in the
see of the occian, al-thogh he see other sterres
y-plounged in the see.'

That constellation ' y-cleped the Bere,' how
profoundly it has impressed the imagination of
all peoples. In every age, in every country,
our kindred on lonely lands, on lonely seas,

293

Winter from caverns and camp-fires and great towers,
Stars, have watched it ' incline its ravishing courses '
about the Mountain of the North, 'coveting
not ' to drown its white fires in the polar seas.
Here, however, it is strange to note the
universality of the Ursine image with the
Greeks and Romans and the nations of the
South, and the universality with the Teutonic
peoples of designations such as the Wain and
the Plough. It was not till the Age of
Learning set in among the Northern peoples
that the classic term came into common use.
Thus in a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon manual
of astronomy the writer, in adopting the Greek
Arctos (still used occasionally instead of the
Bear), adds ' which untaught men call Carles-
wsen/ that is Charles's Wain, the V\Taggon.
A puzzling problem is why a designation which
primarily arose from an association of the early
Greeks concerning Arkas, their imaginary
racial ancestor, with Kallisto his mother, who
had been changed into a great bear in the
heavens, should also suggest itself to other
peoples, to races so remote in all ways as the
North American Indians. Yet before the
white man had visited the tribes of North
America the red men called the constellation
by names signifying a bear. The historian
Bancroft has proved that alike among the

294

Algonquins of the Atlantic and of the Mis- Winter
sissippi, among the Eastern Narragansett Stars,
nations and among the nations of the Illinois,
the Bear was the accepted token.

Bootes, the Great Bear, the Little Dipper
or Ursa Minor, these great constellations, with
their splendid beacons Arcturus, the Triones
or the Seven Hounds of the North, and the
Pole Star —

" By them, on the deep,
The Achaians gathered where to sail their ships " —

and in like fashion all the races of man since
Time was have ' gathered ' the confusing ways
of night on all lonely seas and in all lonely
lands.

But best of all, to know this spell of the
nocturnal skies, one should be in the company
of fisher-folk or old seamen or shepherds, per-
chance unlettered but wise in traditional lore
and leal to the wisdom of their fathers. How
much more I value what I have heard from
some shepherd on the wide dark moors, or
from some islesman in a fishing-coble or drift-
ing wherry, on moonless nights filled with a
skyey * phosphorescence ' as radiant as that
a-dance and a-gleam in the long seethe of
the wake of a ship, than what I have found
concerning scientific star-names in books of
astronomy. Nothing that I have since learned

295

Winter of * the Pointers ' has impressed me so much
Stars. as what I learned as a child of 'the Hounds
of Angus,' nor, in later and fuller knowledge
of Polaris, has the child's first knowledge of
the mystery and wonder of 'the Star of
Wisdom,' as pointed out and tale-told by an
old Hebridean fisherman, or of 'the House of
Dreams,' as sung to me in a forgotten ballad
by a Gaelic woman of Argyll, been surpassed.
It was they — herdsmen and mariners, the
wayfarer, the nomad, the desert -wanderer —
who, of old, gave these names to which the
nations have grown used. It was with the
nomad that astronomy began. The Chaldasan
shepherd, the Phoenician mariner, studied the
stars and named them and the great constella-
tions which group themselves from horizon to
horizon in the nocturnal skies. They perceived
strange symmetries, symbolic images, grotesque
resemblances. The same instinct made the
Arab of the Desert call the Pleiades the Herd
of Camels, made the Akkadian call them the
Wild Doves, made the Celtic hunter call them
the Pack of Hounds, made the Teuton peasant
call them the Hen and Chickens, made the
Australian savage call them (in conjunction
with the Bear) Young Girls playing to Young
Men dancing : the same instinct, this, as made
the ancient poet of the Zend-Avesta call them

296

the Seven Beneficent Spirits, or made the Winter
modern poet of Locksley Hall liken them Stars.
to a swarm of fireflies, or made the Gaelic
poet of to-day image them as the Herring-
Net. In a word, the instinct of poetry :
which is as deep as hunger and thirst, as deep
as love, as deep as fear, as deep as the desire
of life. The instinct of the imagination to
clothe the mysterious and the inexplicable in
the raiment of the familiar or of recognisable
and intimate symbol.

How infinitely it adds to the beauty of star-
names such as Aldebaran, Alcyone, Polaris,
to know that to the swarthy nomads of the
desert it imaged itself as one following in a
skyey desert, a camel -driver tracking lost
camels, a hound following a quarry, a warrior
following a foe, a holy pilgrim tracking the
difficult ways of God, so that no name seemed
to them so apt as Al Dabaran, the Follower :
or to know that to the pastoral Akkadians or
the early tillers and hunters of sea-set Greece,
looking at the Pleiades in winter, Alcyone in
its lovely group suggested the Nest of the
Halcyon, the summer-bird who had flown to
the remote depths of the sky to sit and brood
there on a windless wave-unreached nest till
once again < the Halcyon days ' of calm settled
on land and sea : or to know that to our own

297

Winter seafaring folk of old, the men who voyaged
Stars, perilously in small and frail craft without
compass and with little knowledge of the
mysterious laws of the mysterious forces of
earth and sea and heaven, Polaris was the
one unchanging skyey beacon, the steadfast
unswerving North Star ; and, so, lovingly
called by our old Saxon forebears the Scip-
steorra, the Ship-Star, and by the Elizabethan
seafarers the Lodestar or Pilot-Star, and by
the Hebridean fishermen the Home- Star, and
by others the Star of the Sea.

" Constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go.
Star of the Pole ! and thou dost see them set.

Alone in thy cold skies,
Thou keep'st thy old unmoving station yet
Nor join'st the dances of that glittering train,
Nor dipp'st thy virgin orb in the blue western main.

On thy unaltering blaze
The half-wrecked mariner, his compass lost,

Fixes his steady gaze,
And steers, undoubting, to the friendly coast ;
And they who stray in perilous wastes by night
Are glad when thou dost shine to guide their footsteps
right."

The same spirit which animated Bryant when
he wrote these verses in his beautiful ' Hymn
to the North Star,' or made one of the
Gaelic island-poets allude to it as the Star of
Compassion, prevailed with these Chaldasan

298

shepherds and Arabian nomads of old. They Winter
gave the familiar or beautiful names of love Stars,
or intimate life, and in exchange the taciturn
face of heaven lost its terrifying menace of
silence, and the Night became a comrade,
became the voice of the poets, of the sages,
of the prophets and seers, the silver gateways
of the Unknown.

The Hunter, the Herdsman, the Bear-
Watcher, the Driver of the Wain — how much
more we love Bootes, or, as Chaucer called
the constellation, 'ye sterres of Arctour,'
because of these simple names. The Herds-
man, the Hunter, . . . the words strike the
primitive music. The youth of the world is
in them. In these few letters what infinite
perspectives, what countless images. The
Golden Age lies hid in their now impene-
trable thickets. Through their branches we
may look at the tireless hunter of to-day on
the interminable pampas, at the bowed trailer
in the dim savannahs of the Amazon, at the
swarthy nomad on the wastes of Sahara guard-
ing his camels like ships becalmed in a vast
sea of sand, or may see the solitary mountain-
shepherd in the hill-wildernesses of Spain or
Italy, or the Northern herdsman toiling
against wind and snow on our Gaelic hills.
Here also is the romance of the stars, as
299

Winter well as that deeper and perturbing romance
Stars, which is disclosed to us in the revelations of
science. That sense of incalculable distances,
of immeasurable periods, of unknown destinies
and amazing arrivals, which haunts the
imagination of the astronomer when he looks
beyond the frontiers of ascertained knowledge,
half-doubting perhaps whether even that be
not a terrible illusory logic, is also here. One
goes back, as in thought one recedes into
the beautiful, impassioned wonderland of
childhood. One seems to see mankind itself
as a child, gone but a little way even yet,
looking up trustfully or fearfully to the
mysterious mother-eyes of a Face it cannot
rightly discern, in its breath being Immortality,
Eternity in its glance, and on its brows
Infinitude.

300

WINTER STARS

II

Of all winter stars surely the most familiar is
Polaris, the Pole Star or Lodestar : of all
winter Constellations, the Plough, the Little
Dipper (to give the common designations),
Orion, and the lovely cluster of the Pleiades,
are, with the Milky Way, the most commonly
observed stellar groups. One of our old
Scottish poets, Gawain Douglas, writing
towards the close of the fifteenth or early in
the sixteenth century, thus quaintly brought
them into conjunction —

" Arthurys hous, and Hyades betaikning rane,
Watling strete, the Home and the Charlewane,
The fiers Orion with his goldin glave."

Here possibly he has taken Arcturus for
Polaris. Of old, the Lodestar and Arcturus
(or, as often given in the North, * Arturus' or

301

Winter 'Arthur' ... a word itself signifying the
Stars. Great or Wondrous Bear) were often confused.
Sometimes, too, Arcturus stood for the whole
constellation of Ursa Major — or, as we
commonly call it, the Plough or the Wain, as,
for example, in Scott's lines :

" Arthur's slow wain his course doth roll,
In utter darkness, round the Pole."

But it is obvious Gawain Douglas did not
mean this to be understood, for in the second
line he speaks of ' Charlewane,' i.e., Charles's
Wain . . . the Wain or Waggon being then,
as it still is among country-folk, even more
familiar a term than the Great Bear or than
the Plough itself. Probably, then, he had in
mind the Pole Star, the ' House of Arthur ' of
the ancient British. His choice of the 'rain-
betokening Hyades ' may be taken here as
including the Pleiades, these * greater seven '
in whom centres so much poetry and
old legend. A previous paper has been
devoted to the Milky Way, so that there
is no need to explain why Watling Street
should be analogous with the Galaxy. The
' Home ' is the Little Dipper or Ursa
Minor. Than ' fierce Orion with his glistering
sword ' there is no constellation so universally
familiar. If, then, to this category of the old

Scottish poet, we add the star Aldebaran, Winter
and the constellation of Taurus or the Bull, Stars.
we have more than enough Winter Lights to
consider in one chapter.

Having already, however, dealt with * the
watery constellations' we can be the more
content now to ignore Alcyone, Maia, Taygeta,
Electra, and the other Pleiadic stars of Taurus.
This great constellation is one of the earliest in
extant astronomical records : the earliest, it is
believed. The stellar image of a Bull has
occurred to many nations since the designation
first arose among the ancient Cretans or
Akkadians — if, indeed, in its origin it was not
immeasurably more remote. East and West,
in the deserts of the South and among the grey
isles of the North, ' the Bull ' was recognised.
To-day the Scottish peasant still calls it ' the
Steer,' as his German kinsman does in der
Stier, his French kinsman in le Taureau, his
Spanish or Italian kinsman in Toro. When
certain of the Greeks and Latins used Kerdon
and Comus instead of Tauros and Taurus,
they said merely the same thing — the Horned
One. Virgil, as many will remember, utilises
the image in the first * Georgic ' :

" When with his golden horns bright Taurus opes
The year ..."

303

Winter just as a poet of our own time, in a beautiful
Stars. < Hymn to Taurus,' writes :

"... I mark, stern Taurus, through the twilight grey
The glinting of thy horn
And sullen front, uprising large and dim
Bent to the starry Hunter's sword at bay."

Among our own ancestors, the Druids made
Taurus an object of worship, the Tauric
Festival having been one of the great events
of the year, signalised when the sun first
entered the imagined frontiers of this constel-
lation. To-day, among the homesteads of our
Scottish lowlands, the farm -folk tell of the
Candlemas Bull who may be seen to rise in the
gloaming on New Year's Eve and move slowly
to the dark pastures which await his coming.

The particular stellar glory of this constel-
lation is Aldebaran. This beautiful star has
appealed to the imagination of all peoples. I
do not know what were its earliest Celtic or
Anglo-Saxon names. But as in Gaelic it is
sometimes called ' the Hound,' this term may
well be a survival from ancient days. If so,
there is an interesting relation with the primi-
tive Arabic name by which it is all but uni-
versally known. Aldebaran is Al Dabardn, the
Follower : and, figuratively, a follower could
hardly be better symbolised than by a hound.
I recall a Gaelic poem on a legendary basis

304

where the analogy is still further emphasised, Winter
for there Aldebaran is called 'the Hound Stars.
of the Pleiades,' which is exactly what the
Arabian astronomers implied in ' the Follower.'
Another interesting resemblance is between
' the red hound ' of the Gaelic poet and legend
and the Rohini of the Hindus, that word
signifying ' a red deer ' . . . in each case the
ruddy gleam of the star having suggested the
name. Probably it was this characteristic
which led Ptolemy to apply to the star the
name ' Lampadias ' or the Torch-Bearer. In
the narration of folk-tales I have more than
once or twice heard Aldebaran alluded to as
the star of good fortune, of 'the golden luck.'
With us it is pre-eminently a winter-star, and
may be seen at its finest from the latter part
of January till the approach of the vernal
equinox. Some idea of its luminosity may be
gained from the fact that this is thrice the
outglow of the Pole Star. How often I have
stood on a winters night, and watched awhile
this small red ' torch ' burning steadfastly in
the unchanging heavens, and thought of its
vast journeys, of that eternal, appalling pro-
cession through the infinite deeps : how often
I have felt the thrill of inexplicable mystery
when, watching its silent fire in what appears
an inexorable fixity, I recall what science tells

305 x

Winter us, that it is receding from our system at an
Stars. an Dut unparalleled velocity, a backward flight
into the unknown at the rate of thirty miles a
second.

It would be hopeless to attempt here even
the briefest account of the primitive and diverse
nomenclature, the mythology, the folklore of
Orion . . . the Winter-Bringer, as this con-
stellation is called in an old Scandinavian saga,
identical thus with the marginal reading in the
Geneva Bible relative to the reference to
Orion in Job — c which starre bringeth in
winter,' an allusion to its evening appearance
at the season of cold and storms. For these
things are writ in the records of a hundred
nations. They are alive in the poetry of all
peoples. Centuries before our era, when
Thebes was the greatest city of Greece, the
poetess Corinna sang of this great Warrior,
the Great Hunter, whose nightly course was
so glorious above the dusky lands and waters
of Hellas. Long after Pindar and the Greek
poets, Catullus and Horace gave it a like pre-
eminence in Latin literature. In our own
poetry, many surely will recall from Paradise
Lost :

" . . . when with fierce winds Orion arm'd
Hath vext the Red-sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry ..."
306

or Tennyson's beautiful line in Locksley Winter
Hall : Stars.

"Great Orion sloping slowly to the west ..."

or, it may be, that epic of ' Orion ' upon which
is based Richard Hengist Home's claim to re-
membrance— or, once more, Matthew Arnold's
fine allusion to Sirius and Orion in Sohrab
and Rustum :

"... the Northern Bear,
Who from her frozen height with jealous eye
Confronts the Dog and Hunter in the South."

Before Catullus or Pindar the Egyptians had
identified Orion both with Horus and Osiris.
Among the peoples of Israel the poets ac-
claimed the constellation as Nimrod, 'the
mighty Hunter ' (or by another term signifying
the Giant), * bound to the sky for rebellion
against Jehovah.' Among the Celtic races it
has had kindred names, sometimes abstract,
sometimes personal, as the Gaelic Fionn. A
year or so ago I was told a sea -tale of the
Middle Isles, in which was an allusion to this
constellation as The Bed of Diarmid. This is
of especial interest, because of its connection
with Fionn or Finn, the Nimrod, the great
Hunter of the Gael. But in this story (a
modern, not an ancient tale, though with more
than one strange old survival) the major

307

Winter position is not held by Fionn, but by the
Stars. Alban-Gaelic hero Diarmid, who is represented
as succumbing under the spear thrust in his
left side by the enraged Fionn, at last in grips
with the daring chieftain who had robbed him
of Grania. When questioned, my informant
said he had heard a variant of this attribution,
and that the constellation was an image of
Diarmid with Grania hanging to his side in a
swoon, because she and her lover have been
overtaken by the wrath of Fionn . . . though
from the description I could not make out
whether the latter indicated the star Sirius, or
the rival constellation of the Great Bear. The
Gaels of old called Orion Caomai, sl name said
to signify the Armed King : while the Gall
(the Scandinavian races) applied the name
OrwandiU but with what signification I do not
know, though I have read somewhere that it
stood for Hero, or for an heroic personage.

Of the chief stars in Orion there is not
space here to speak. But of the splendid
Rigel — as affluent in the mysterious science
of the astrologer as in nocturnal light — pearly
Anilam, of the Belt or Sword — ominous
Bellatrix — ruddy-flamed Betelgeuze— of these
alone one might write much ... as one might
write much of the Girdle or Staff itself, what
Scott in The Lay of the Last Minstrel calls

308

' Orion's studded belt.' It has a score of Winter
popular names, from the Danish Frigge Rok Stars.
(Freya's Distaff) to the seamen's 'Yard-arm,'
as, collectively, its three great stars have all
manner of names in different countries, from
the Magi, or the Three Kings or the Three
Marys, to The Rake of the French Rhine-
landers or the Three Mowers of the Silesian
peasant.

Those who have studied the mythology and
folklore of the Pleiades will remember how
universally the numeral seven is associated
with their varying nomenclature. But there
was, and still is among primitive peoples, not
infrequent confusion in the use of ' The Seven
Stars' as a specific name. Although from
China to Arabia, from India and Persia to
the Latin countries of the South, the term
almost invariably designates the Pleiades, in
the folklore of many Western nations it is
used for the seven planets, and in many
Northern races it is often used for the seven
brilliant stars of the Great Bear. Even the
Biblical allusion to ' The Seven Stars,' as our
own Anglo-Saxon ancestral Sifunsterri, does
not necessarily indicate the Pleiades : many
consider the seven great planets to be meant.
There is a Shetland rune, common to all the
north isles and to be heard in Iceland and

309

Winter Norway, known as the rune of sevens, and of
Stars, which one of the invocatory lines is ' And by
da seven shiners.' All kinds of interpretation
have explained this, from the obvious ' seven
planets,' or else the Pleiades, to the Seven
Candlesticks of Revelation and I know not
what besides. I have again and again asked
fisher- folk or others from the Orkneys and
Shetlands, and in all but one or two instances
the answer has clearly indicated the Great
Bear, occasionally Polaris and the Ursine
Arcturus and their nearest brilliant ' shiners.'
Again, Crannarain, one of the Gaelic names
for the Pleiades, is, perhaps, as often applied
to the Great Bear : the curious legend of the
Baker's Shovel, implied in the Gaelic term,
fitting equally.

Of the Great Bear, of the North Star,
however, I have already spoken. Of Polaris
itself, indeed, there is more than enough
to draw upon. Years ago I began an MS.
book called 'The Book of the North Star,'
and from my recollection of it (for at the
moment of writing I am far from my books)
I should say there is enough folklore
and legend and various interest connected
with this star wherefrom to evolve a volume
solely devoted to it. It is strange that 'the
Lamp of the North ' should have so fascinated

310

all the poets from the time of Homer till to- Winter
day, and yet that all have dwelled in the same Stars,
illusion as to its absolute steadfastness. Never-
theless, Homer's

" Arctos, sole star that never bathes in the ocean wave "

has both poetic truth and the truth of
actuality.

It is a relief to put aside notes and pen and
paper, and to go out and look up into the
darkness and silence, to those 'slow-moving
palaces of wandering light ' of which one has
been writing. How overwhelmingly futile
seems not only the poor written word, but
even the mysterious pursuit of the far-fathom-
ing thought of man. By the sweat of the
brow, by the dauntless pride of the mind, we
mortal creatures have learned some of the
mysteries of the coming and going in infini-
tude of these incalculable worlds, of their vast
procession from the unknown to the unknown
Then, some night, one stands solitary in the
darkness, and feels less than the shadow of a
leaf that has passed upon the wind, before
these still, cold, inevitable, infinitely remote
yet overwhelmingly near Children of Immor-
tality.

3"

BEYOND THE BLUE
SEPTENTRIONS

TWO LEGENDS OF THE POLAR STARS

The star Septentrion is, for the peoples of the
North and above all for the shepherd, the
seaman and the wayfarer, the star of stars. A
hundred legends embody its mystery, its
steadfast incalculable service, its unswerving
isolation over the Pole. Polaris, the North
Star, the Pole- Star, the Lodestar, the Seaman's
Star, the Star of the Sea, the Gate of Heaven,
Phoenice, Cynosure, how many names, in all
languages, at all times. The Mongolian nomad
called it the Imperial Ruler of Heaven : the
Himalayan shepherd, Grahadara, the Pivot of
the Planets : the Arab knows it as the Torch
of Prayer, burning for ever at the portal of the
heavenly Mecca. It shines through all litera-
ture, since (and indeed long before) Euripides
wrote his superb verse of how the two great

Northern constellations which encircle Polaris, Beyond
Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the two 'swift- tne Blue
wandering' Bears, 'guard the Atlantean Pole,' Septen-
till a poet of our own time wrote the less
majestic but not less lovely line relating to
these constellations which gives the title to
this paper. In all ages, too, the dreaming
mind of man has imagined here the Throne of
the Gods, the Seat of the Mighty, the last
Portal of the Unknown. It is the Flatheansas
of our Gaelic ancestors, the ultimate goal of
the heroic spirit : the Himinbiorg, or Hill of
Heaven, of the Norsemen of old, and the abode
of Heimdallr, the guardian of the bridge
Bifrost (the Rainbow) which unites Asgard the
Everlasting with that brief whirling phantom,
the Earth. It is Albordy, 'the dazzling
mountain on which was held the Assembly of
the Gods ' of the ancient Teutonic peoples :
the mysterious Mount Meru, the seat of the
gods, of the Aryan dreamers of old, and the
Hindu sages of later time : ' the holy mountain
of God ' alluded to in Ezekiel — so, at least, it
has been surmised.

'The blue Septentrions ' . . . Bootes with
Arcturus, the Great Bear, the Lesser Bear,
the Pointers or the Northern Hounds, the
North Star . . . what legend, what poetry,
what romance, what wonder belongs to these

3*3

Beyond stars and constellations which guard the
the Blue marches of the Arctic North. To the mass of
trions " wna^ *s already extant, what need to add
further matter ? And yet there is ever new
justification in that continual need of the soul
to hear over and over again and in ever- vary-
ing ways even the most fragmentary runes or
sagas of this unfathomably mysterious stellar
universe which encloses us with Silence and
Beauty and Wonder, the three Veils of God —
as the Hebridean islesman, the Irish Gael of
the dreaming west, and the Arab of the
Desert alike have it.

I have elsewhere spoken of the legendary
association of Arthur (the Celtic- British King
and the earlier mythical Arthur, semi-divine,
and at last remote and celestial) with Arcturus,
that lovely Lamp of the North, the glory of
Bootes. But now, I may add what there I
had to omit.

In all European lands, and above all in the
countries of the West, there is none without
its legend of King Arthur. The Bretons claim
him as theirs, and the places of his passage and
exploit are familiar, though only the echo, only
the phantom of a great fame ever reached
Arvor. In the Channel and Scilly Isles the
story runs that there is Lyonesse, and that
Arthur sleeps in a cavern of the seas. The

3i4

Cornish folk and their kindred of Somerset Beyond
and Devon believe there is not a rood of tne Blue
ground between Camelot and Tintagel where tr^Qten
the great King has not dwelt or passed.
Wales calls him her son, and his chivalry her
children, and the Cymric poets of a thousand
mabinogion have sung his heroic fame. Clydes-
dale, that more ancient home of the Cymri,
has dim memories older than what Taliesin
sang : Arthur's Seat hangs above Edinburgh,
a city so old that a thousand years ago its
earlier name was forgotten ; and from the
Sidlaw to the Ochil, from blue Demyat to grey
Schiehallion, old names and broken tradition
preserve the obscure trails of a memory fallen
into oblivion, but not so fallen that the names
of Arthur and Queen Guinevere and wild-eyed
Merlin of the Woods have ceased to stir the
minds of the few who still care for the things
that moved our fathers from generation to
generation. The snow of the Grampians have
not stayed the wandering tale : and there are
still a few old people who recall at times, in
the winter story-telling before farm-kitchen
fires, how the fierce Modred, King of the
North, made Queen Gwannole his own, and
how later, in a savage revenge, Arthur con-
demned her to be torn asunder by wild horses.
Lancelot passes from the tale before it crosses

315

Beyond the Border, and as it goes north (or is it not
the Blue that as it comes south ?) Merlin is no more a
trions courtier but a wild soothsayer of the woods,
Queen Wanders or Gwannole or Guinevere is
tameless as a hawk, and Arthur himself,
though a hero and great among his kind, is of
the lineage of fire and sword.

Where is Joyeuse Gard ? Some say it is
in the isle Avillion off the Breton shores :
some that it is in Avalon, under the sacred
hill of Glastonbury : some that it is wet with
the foam of Cornish Seas : others aver that it
lies in fathomless silence under the sundown
wandering wave and plunging tide. Another
legend tells that it leaned once upon the sea
from some lost haven under Berwick Law,
perhaps where North Berwick now is, or where
Dhieton looks across to Fidra, or where the
seamews on ruined Tantallon scream to the
Bass.

Arthur himself has a sleeping-place (for
nowhere is he dead, but sleeps, awaiting a
trumpet-call) in 'a lost land' in Provence, in
Spain, under the waters of the Rhine. To-day
one may hear from Calabrian shepherd or
Sicilian fisherman that the Great King sleeps
in a deep hollow underneath the Straits of
Messina. And strangest of all (if not a new
myth of the dreaming imagination, for I have

3i6

not been able to trace the legend beyond a Beyond
modern Slavonic ballad) among the Carpathian the Blue
Highlands is a nameless ancient tomb lost in a pPten"
pine-forest, where at mid-winter a bear has
been seen to rise, walking erect like a man,
crowned with a crown of iron and gold holding
a single shining stone magnificent as the Pole
Star, and crying in a deep voice, '/ am Arthur
of the West, who shall yet be king of the World.'

Strange indeed, for here among the debris
of the lost history of Arthur, that vast
shadowy kingly figure whose only kingdom
may have been the soul of primitive races, and
whose sword may have been none other than
the imagination that is for ever on its beautiful
and perilous quest, here among that debris of
legend scattered backward from the realms of
the north across Europe is one, remote as it is,
which brings us back to the early astro-
nomical myth which identifies the great Celtic
champion with the chief constellation of the
north.

But as I have heard this fragment of our
old lost mythology related in a way I have
not seen in any book, I will give it here altered
but slightly if at all from one of the countless
legends told to me in my childhood.

At sunset the young son of the great King
3*7

Beyond Pendragon came over the brow of a hill that
the Blue stepped forward from a dark company of
trions " mountains and leaned over the shoreless sea
which fills the west and drowns the north.
All day he had been wandering alone, his
mind heavy with wonder over many things.
He had heard strange tales of late, tales about
his heroic father and the royal clan, and how
they were not as other men, but half divine.
They were not gods, he knew, for they could
be slain in battle or could die with the crowd-
ing upon them of many years : but they were
more terrible in battle than were the greatest
of men, and they had vision and knowledge
beyond the vision and knowledge of the druids,
and were lordly beyond all men in mien and
the beauty of courtesy, and lived beyond the
common span of years, and had secret com-
munion with the noble and invisible company.
He had heard, too, of his destiny : that he,
too, was to be a great king, as much greater
than Pendragon, than Pendragon was above
all the kings of the world. What was
Destiny, he wondered. Then, again, he
turned over and over in his mind all the names
he could think of that he might choose for his
own : for the time was come for him to put
away the name of his childhood and to take on
that by which he should be known among men.

318

He came over the brow of the hill, and out Beyond
of the way of the mountain-wind, and, being tne Blue
tired, lay down among the heather and stared pPten"
across the grey wilderness of the sea. The
sun set, and the invisible throwers of the nets
trailed darkness across the waves and up the
wild shores and over the faces of the cliffs.
Stars climbed out of shadowy abysses, and the
great chariots of the constellations rode from
the west to the east and from the north to the
south. His eyes closed, but when he opened
them again to see if a star quivering on the
verge of the horizon had in that brief moment
sprung like a deer above the drowning wave
or had sunk like a white seabird passing out
of sight, he saw a great and kingly figure
standing beside him. So great in stature, so
splendid in kingly beauty was the mysterious
one who had so silently joined him, that he
thought this must be one of the gods.

"Do you not know me, my son?" said the
kingly stranger.

The boy looked at him in awe and wonder,
but unrecognisingly.

" Do you not know me, my son ? " he heard
again ..." for I am your father Pendragon.
But my home is yonder, and there I go before
long, and that is why I have come to you as a
vision in a dream ..." and, as he spoke, he

319

Beyond pointed to the constellation of the Arth, or
the Blue Bear, which nightly prowls through the vast
trions" aDvsses of the polar sky.

When the boy turned his gaze from the
great constellation which hung in the dark
wilderness overhead, he saw that he was alone
again. While he yet wondered in great awe
at what he had seen and heard, he felt himself
float like a mist and become like a cloud, and,
as a cloud, rise beyond the brows of the hills,
and ascend the invisible stairways of the sky.

When for minutes that were as hours he
had moved thus mysteriously into the pathless
and unvisited realms of the air, he saw that he
had left the highest clouds like dust on a
valley-road after one has climbed to the
summit of a mountain : nor could he see the
earth save as a blind and obscure thing that
moved between the twilights of night and
dawn.

It seemed to him thereafter that a swoon
came over him, in which he passed beyond the
far-off blazing fires of strange stars. At last,
suddenly, he stood on the verge of Arth, or
Arth Uthyr, the Great Bear. There he saw,
with the vision of immortal not of mortal eyes,
a company of most noble and majestic figures
seated at what he thought a circular abyss but
which had the semblance of a vast table. Each

320

of these seven great knights or lordly kings had Beyond
a star upon his forehead, and these were the tne Blue
stars of the mighty constellation of the Hear p?Pten-
which the boy had seen night after night from
his home among the mountains by the sea.

It was with a burning throb at his heart
that he recognised in the King of all these
kings no other than himself.

While he looked, in amazement so great
that he could hear the pulse of his heart, as in
the silence of a wood one hears the tapping of
a woodpecker, he saw this mighty phantom-
self rise till he stood towering over all there,
and heard a voice as though an ocean rose and
fell through the eternal silences.

"Comrades in God," it said, "the time is
come when that which is great shall become
small."

And when the voice was ended, the mighty
figure faded into the blue darkness, and only
a great star shone where the uplifted dragon-
helm had brushed the roof of heaven. One
by one the white lords of the sky followed in
his mysterious way, till once more were to be
seen only the stars of the Bear.

The boy- king dreamed that he fell as a
falling meteor, and then that he floated over
land and sea as a cloud, and then that he sank
as mist upon the hills of his own land.

321 Y

Beyond A noise of wind stirred in his ears, and he

the Blue felt the chill dew creep over his hands like
Septen- the steaitiiy co\& ftp 0f the tide. He rose

stumblingly, and stood, staring around him.
He was on the same spot, under the brow of
the hill that looked over the dim shoreless
seas, now obscure with the dusk. He glanced
upward and saw the stars of the Great Bear
in their slow majestic march round the Pole.
Then he remembered.

He went slowly down the hillside, his
mind heavy with thought. When he was
come to the place of the King his father, lo,
Pendragon and all his fierce chivalry came out
to meet him, for the archdruid had foretold that
the great King to be had received his mystic
initiation among the holy silence of the hills.

"I am no more Snowbird the child," the
boy said, looking at them fearlessly, and as
though already King. "Henceforth I am
Arth-Uthyr,1 for my place is in the Great
Bear which we see yonder in the north."

So all there acclaimed him as Arthur, the
wondrous one of the stars, the Great Bear.

" I am old," said Pendragon, " and soon you
shall be King, Arthur my son. So ask now a
great boon of me and it shall be granted to you."

1 Pronounced Arth-Uir, or Arth-Ur. In ancient British Arth
means Bear, and Uthyr great, wondrous.

322

Then Arthur remembered his dream. Beyond

" Father and King," he said, " when I am the Blue
King after you I shall make a new order of ~epten-
knights, who shall be strong and pure as the
Immortal Ones, and be tender as women, and
simple as little children. But first I ask of
you seven flawless virgin knights to be of my
chosen company. To-morrow let the wood-
wrights make for me a round dais or table
such as that where we eat our roasted meats
and drink from the ale-horns, but round and of
a size whereat I and my chosen knights may
sit at ease."

The King listened, and all there.

"So be it," said the King.

Then Arthur chose the seven flawless virgin
knights, and called them to him.

"Ye are now Children of the Great Bear,"
he said, "and comrades and liegemen to me,
Arthur, who shall be King of the West.
And ye shall be known as the Knights of the
Round Table. But no man shall make a mock
of that name and live : and in the end that
name shall be so great in the mouths and
minds of men that they shall consider no glory
of the world to be so great as to be the
youngest and frailest of that knighthood."

And that is how Arthur, the son of Pen-
323

Beyond dragon, who three years later became King of
the Blue the West, read the Rune of the Stars that are
Septen- cane(j the Qreat Bear, and took their name
upon him, and from the strongest and purest
and noblest of the land made Knighthood,
such as the world had not seen, such as the
world since has not known.

Very different, a cruder legend of the Pole-
star, the drift of which I heard some months
ago from a fisherman of Ross, 'forgathered
with ' in the Sound of Morvern.

One day, Finn, before he was born the
King of the West, a thousand years earlier
than that and maybe thousands more on the
top of that thousand, went hunting a great
bear beyond the highest mountains in Ross
and Sutherland. It came to the Ord, and
then, seeing there was no more land, it went
into the sea with an awesome plunge, like Ice-
land in the story before it swam away from
Scotland, so that the fish were knocked out of
the nets and the fishing cobles were thrown on
the shores like buckies, and the tides ran like
hares till they leaped into the sea again at the
rocks of Wick and over Cromarty Cliffs.
Aye, it is said a green wave ran right through
the great Kirk at Inverness ; and that away
across the lands of Mackenzie and Chisholm,

324

trions.

of Fraser and Gordon, a storm of foam blew Beyond
like snow against the towers and steeples of tne Blue
Aberdeen. At least all this might well have ?J:pten~
been, if in those old ancient days there had been
any Aberdeen or Inverness to see it, or if there
were cobles and nets then, as, for all you or I or
the wind know, there may have been. Well,
the Bear swam away due north, and Finn after
it and his great hounds Luath and Dorch. It
took them a month to come up with it, and
then it was among mountains of solid ice with
the sea between hard as granite. Then it
came to the place where there's an everlasting
Rainbow. The Bear climbed this, to jump to
the other side of the Pole, but Luath ran up
one side and Dorch the other and Finn hurled
his great shining spears, one after the other:
so that down the bear came with a rush, and
so great was the noise and stramash that the
icebergs melted, and out flew thousands of
solanders and grey swans and scarts and God
knows what all, every kind of bird that is with
a web to its foot. The hounds fell into the
water, and the Bear lay on a floe like a
wounded seal, but Finn never moved an inch
but put spear after spear into the Bear. "Well,
you're dead now," he said ; " and if you're not,
you ought to be," he added, seeing that the
Bear was up again and ready to be off.

325

Beyond "This can't go on," said God Allfather, so

the Blue ]-[e swung a noose and sagged up the Bear

<.-?™n~ into the black Arctic sky. But the hounds
tnons. .-in

hung on to its tail, and so were carried up too.

And as for Finn, he took the hero-leap, and
with one jump was on the Pole, and with the
next was in the Northman's Torch {Arctarus),
and with the third was on the Hill of Heaven
itself. And that's where he went back to on
the day he died after his three hundred years
of mortal life. He's never moved since, and
he won't move again, till Judgment Day.
And by the same token, you can see the
Great Bear prowling round the Pole still, and
Finn the Watchman never letting him go by,
night or day, day or night, and far away down
are the two Hounds that herd the Great Bear
and his mate. And when these come too
near, Finn hurls his spears, and that's when
we see the Northern Lights. And behind
the streamers and the auroras and the rain-
bows and the walls of ice Finn looks into the
Garden of Eden — Paradise as they say, just
the Flatheanas of the old tales, the old songs.
And who would be doubting it ?

326

WHITE WEATHER

A MOUNTAIN REVERIE

To be far north of the Highland Line and
among the mountains, when winter has not
only whitened the hill-moors but dusted the
green roofs of every strath and corrie, may
not have for many people the charm of the
southward flight. But to the hill-born it is a
call as potent as any that can put the bitter-
sweet ache into longing hearts. There is
peace there : and silence is there : and, withal,
a beauty that is not like any other beauty.
The air and wind are auxiliary ; every cloud
or mist -drift lends itself to the ineffable
conspiracy ; the polar breath itself is a weaver
of continual loveliness often more exquisitely
delicate than the harebell, often incalculable
or immeasurable, or beautiful with strangeness,
as moonlight on great waters, or the solitary
torch of Jupiter burning his cold flame in the

327

White heart of a mountain - tarn. There is no
Weather, soundlessness like it. And yet the silence is
relative ; is, in a word, but an imagination laid
upon an illusion. If there is no wind on the
moor, there may be a wandering air among
the lower heights. If so, many hollows of
rocks, caverns lost in bracken, caves of hill-
fox and badger, sudden ledges haunted by the
daw and the hoodie and filled with holes as
though the broken flutes of the dead forgotten
giants of old tales, will make a low but audible
music : a lifting and falling sighing, with
singular turnings upon itself of an obscure
chant or refrain, that just as one thinks is
slipping into this side knowledge and is almost
on the edge of memory, slides like rain along
that edge and vanishes, vague as an unre-
membered fragrance. Or if the suspense be
so wide that not a breath moves lower than
where the corries climb towards the very
brows of the mountains, one will surely hear,
far up among the time-hollowed scarps and
weather-sculptured scaurs, that singular sound
which can sink to a whimpering, as of
unknown creatures or lost inhuman clans
strayed and bewildered, or can be as though
unseen nomads were travelling the mountain-
way with songs and strange flutes and thin
wailing fifes, or can rise to a confused tumult

32S

as of embattled hosts, or to a crying and a White
lamentation more desperate than the cries of Weather.
men and a lamenting as of that mysterious
and dreaded clan, the Grey Children of the
Wind. The wind, in truth, is almost always
to be heard, near or far. Sometimes the eye
may learn, where the ear fails : as when one is
in a glen or strath or on a shore or moor, and,
looking up, may see smoke rising from the
serrated crests or the curving sky-lines, like
the surf of vast billows — to realise soon, that
this volcanic apparition means no more than
that vast volumes of driven snow are being
lifted by the north wind and whirled against
and over the extreme mountain - bastions.
Troth chaidleas *s a ghleann an t-aile, ' when
the air sleeps in the glens,' goes a Gaelic
saying, * you may hear the wind blowing in the
high corries ma?~ chaithream chlar,' like the
symphony of harps.

Then, too, it is rare that the snowy
wilderness is without voice of mountain
torrent, for even when frost holds the hill-
world in a grip so terrible that the smaller
birds cannot fly in the freezing air, there are
rushing burns of so fierce a spate that the
hands-of-ice are whirled aside like foam, and
the brown wave leaps and dashes from rock to
rock, from granite ledge to peaty hollow,

329

White from brief turbulent channels to chasms and
Weather, crevasses whence ceaselessly ascends the damp
smell of churned surge, above which as cease-
lessly rises a phantom spray. Again, there
is that strange, continual earth -movement,
the alarm of all unfamiliar wayfarers. Who
suddenly unloosened that rush of rock and
earth yonder? What enemy moved that
boulder that leapt and hurtled and crashed
downward and beyond, but a score yards
away ? Of what elfin - artillery are those
rattling stones the witness ? What hand, in
the silence, thrust itself through the snow and
crumbled that old serrated ledge, where, a
week ago, the red deer stood sniffing the
wind, where, yesterday perhaps, the white
ptarmigan searched the heather ?

Moreover we are in the domain of the eagle,
the raven, and the corbie. They are seldom
long silent there. And that sudden call on
the wind ? . . . what but the Merry Folk,
Clann Aighean Siubhlach, the Wandering
Deer- Clan, passing like drifting shadows over
white heather-pastures lost to view ? It is
long since the love-belling of the stags made
musical the mountain - side : was not 'the
Silence of the Deer' the first sign of winter
come again ? But that cry was the cry of
hunger — a guth acaimeach, a sobbing voice,

330

as once I heard a prosaic roadmender unpro- White
saically and with kindly sympathy allude to Weather.
the winter-bleat of the snow-famished deer.
And that other bleating : of sheep left upon
the hills, and overtaken by the White Weather.
How goes the sound, the translated echo of
their mournful iteration, that is now a long
ul ulation of lament and now a rising and falling
bleating as of confused words ? The same
roadmender I speak of said — after himself
lamenting in sympathy tha 'mfuachd a muigh \s
a staigh an diugh . . . ' the cold is outside and
inside to-day ' — that it went like this : Tha sinn
cearr, tha sinn cearr, tha sinn cearr \s gun fhios
againn ! . . . ' We are astray, we are astray, we
are astray and have lost our bearings ! '

Up here everything may have a snow-change
' into something rich and rare.' It was in a
hill-solitude, in white weather such as this,
that, for example, I heard from an old shepherd
names for the eagle, the corbie, and the
ptarmigan that I had not elsewhere heard, nor
have seen in print, though for long now I have
been collecting all whenever and wherever
chance permits the Gaelic and Lowland names
of birds and animals. The corbie he called
An t-Eun Acarachd, the Merciless, literally,
4 the bird without compassion/ no doubt with
thought of its love for young lambs or its

33*

White savage lust for the eyes of stricken or dying
Weather, sheep. The ptarmigan he called An t-Eun
(Adhar or Aidkre), the bird of the snow or
frost — though this is but a variant, of course,
of the more familiar Sneacag or Eun-an-
Sneachel. When he spoke of the eagle simply
as An t~Eun M6r9 the great bird, that seemed
less noteworthy, but when he added, Abu ! An
t-Eun Mbr Abu, I was puzzled. I thought he
meant aboo to simulate the Iohir's cry, though
it sounded much more like the muffled hoot of
the great owl than the eagle's screech. He said
he remembered that was the eagle's name in
an old tale he had often heard his mother tell
when he was a child. I never thought of it as
Abu, however, till one day I came upon this
word in a Gaelic dictionary and found it entered
as being an ancient war-cry of the Gael.
Truly, a fit survival, for a wild slogan that has
ages ago died away from the Gaelic hills : to
live still among these desolate mountains,
around those wind-tortured scarps and scaurs,
in the scream of the golden eagle. The old
man had a special bird-name for most of the
birds he spoke of or about which I asked him.
Doubtless he was as good a naturalist and
with as good a right to make names as any
ornithologist who would know what the old
man could not know, and would be familiar

332

with common and other names that would be White
unfamiliar there among the far hills, or, at least, Weather.
to the old mountaineer, for whom the hill-
birds were the best of company. For the
curlew, for instance, though he knew the
common Scots name, Whaup, he had the good
name An t-Eun Chaismeachd, 'the bird of alarm'
— how good a name (though perhaps equally
applicable to the grey plover, the green
whistler, or the lapwing) must be obvious to
all who have walked the moorland or travelled
the hillside. And where an islesman or a man
of the mainland coasts would, for swiftness, use
a comparison such as cho luath ri sgadan, ' as
swift as a herring,' he would say, cho luath vis
nafeadag, ' as swift as the plover.'

White Weather, he said, was always first
' called ' by the linnet, the ' heather Untie ' so
loved of Scots song-writers, to which he gave
several names (' out of a good ten that will be
known to any one whatever '), one a curious
blend of Scots-Gaelic, Shilfe-monaidh (i.e., the
moor - chaffinch), another a pretty name,
Breacan-Beithe, 'little speckled one of the
birch.' But even he, for all his hill-wisdom,
could not tell me why it is that when the
lapwing come again after the great winter-end
storm about mid-March, welcome pioneers of
the Spring that is stealing slowly up through

333

White the glens and straths of the south, they always,
Weather, jf they nest on the slope of a hillside, choose
the east side for their unsheltered homes and
where to lay their eggs. Do they so love
the bleak wind of the east ? Hardly any bird
takes so little trouble with the nest : often it is
but the frost-hardened delve of a cow's hoof, a
tangle of bent, or the hollow of a misplaced
stone. I have heard that this is truer of the
mainland than of the isles, but I have not
found it so. Last March or April I remember
that on the long, low-hilled and mainly 'upland'
island where I then was, not a single lapwing's
nest but was on the east slope of grassy brae or
sloping moor or pasture. But though he could
not say a wrord on so strange, almost so inex-
plicable a habit, he could be positive as to the
age of the eagle, and especially as to one aged
iolair that he often saw on Maol-Aitionnach,
the great hill that was half the world and more
to him : namely, that the king-bird lived to be
three hundred years. And he computed it
thus : that an eagle lives three times less than
an oak, and three times more than a deer.
There is a familiar proverb that ' Tri aoisfeidh
aois fir ein ; tri aois fir ein aois crsoibh dharaich?
6 Thrice the age of a deer, the age of an eagle '
('ferain,' 'fireun,' and 'fiolair' are variants of
'iolair,' whose more ancient name is 'antar'

334

(an t-ar)9 one of the oldest names in the Gaelic White
language) ; ' thrice the age of an eagle, the age Weather.
of an oak.' The stag lives a hundred years, or
so it is universally believed : therefore the eagle
lives three hundred, and the oak's age is at least
nine hundred years. I recall, in connection
with the eagle, a singular saying which I heard
many years ago and have not since heard or
anywhere encountered, to the effect that be-
tween dusk and dawn a bat's flight will be the
equivalent of a thousand miles, that between
dawn and dusk a swallow will cover a
thousand miles, and that a thousand miles is
the measure of an eagle's flight between sun-
rise and sunset.

Well, I must leave Maol-Aitionnach, and
the snow -held hills. Everywhere, now, the
White Weather may have spread. Far south,
listeners may hear the honk-honk of the travel-
ling solander, that most musical and thrilling
of all nocturnal sounds or of winter-dawns :
or, like phantom - voices from the world of
dreams, the kuilliyak-ee, kuilliyak-o of the
wild swans, the Clann righ fo gheasan, the
Enchanted sons of Kings, who, as they wheel
through the snowy twilight under the dawn-
star may remember the dim lands of the north,
and a great mountain that rises among white
and silent hills and looks down upon a black

335

White tarn I know of, so dark in the grip of black-
Weather. frost, and so strangely spared of the snow,
that not a white wing rests there, or floats
overhead, but is mirrored as an enchanted sail
in an enchanted sea.

336

ROSA MYSTICA

(and roses of autumn]

. . . Rosa Sem})it> ma

Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridolt

Odor di lode al Sol. . . .

Sitting here, in an old garden by the sea, it
is difficult for me to realise that the swallow
has gone on her long flight to the South, that
last night I heard countless teal flying over-
head, and before dawn this morning the
mysterious honk-honk of the wild-geese. A
white calm prevails. A sea of faint blue and
beaten silver, still molten, still luminous as
with yet unsubdued flame, lies motionless
beneath an immeasurable dome of a blue as
faint, drowned in a universal delicate haze of
silver-grey and pearl. But already a change
to pale apple-green and mauve is imminent.
A single tern flashes a lonely wing along a
grey-green line that may be where sky and

337 7

Rosa sea meet, or may be the illusion of the tide
Mystica. refluent from green depths. On the weedy
rocks I cannot see even a sleeping seamew :
on the havened stretch of yellow-white sand
a dotterel runs to and fro in sudden aimless
starts, but as suddenly is still, is all but unseen
with her breast against a rock covered with
the blue-bloom of mussels, and now is like a
shadow licked up by twilight.

Along the husht garden-ways beside me
and behind me are roses, crimson and yellow,
sulphur-white and pale carnation, the blood-
red damask, and a trailing-rose, brought from
France, that looks as though it were live flame
miraculously stilled. It is the hour of the
rose. Summer has gone, but the phantom-
summer is here still. A yellow butterfly
hangs upon a great drooping Marechal Niel :
two white butterflies faintly flutter above a
corner-group of honey-sweet roses of Provence.
A late hermit-bee, a few lingering wasps, and
the sweet, reiterated, insistent, late-autumn
song of the redbreast. That is all. It is the
hour of the rose.

" Cest Vheure de la rose

L'heure d'ambre etflamme,
Quand dans mon ame
Je sens une Blanche Rose
Eclose."

338

To-night the sea-wind will go moaning from Rosa
the west into the dark north : before dawn a Mystica.
steely frost will come over the far crests
of the hills. To-morrow the garden will
be desolate : a garden of phantom dreams.
They have waited long, spell-bound ! but the
enchantment is fallen ; in a few hours all shall
be a remembrance. What has so marvellously
bloomed thus late, so long escaped devastating
wind and far-drifting rains and the blight of
the sea, will pass in a night. Already, a long
way off, I hear a singular, faint, humming
sound, like stifled bees. So . . . the foam
of storm is on the skerries of the seaward
isles. Already from the north, a faint but
gathering chill comes on the slanting wings
of twilight. I rise with a sigh, thinking of
an old forgotten refrain in an old forgotten
poem :

" Ged tha thu 'n diugh 'a d'aibheis fhuar,
Bha thu nair '« d'aros righ — "

"(Though thou art to-day a cold ruin
Thou wert once the dwelling of a king.) "

In the long history of the Rose, from the
time when the Babylonians carried sceptres
ornamented now with this flower now with
the apple or lotus, to the coming of the
Damask Rose into England in the time of
Henry VII. : from the straying into English

339

Rosa gardens, out of the Orient, of that lovely
Mystica. yellow cabbage-rose which first came into
notice shortly after Shakespeare's death, or
from Shakespeare's own 'Provencal rose,'
which is no other than the loved and common
cabbage-rose of our gardens : from the combes
of Devon to the straths of Sutherland, to that
little clustering rose which flowered in Surrey
meads in the days of Chaucer and has now
wandered so far north that the Icelander can
gather it in his brief hyperborean summer :
from Keat's musk-rose —

" The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves — "

to that Green Rose which for more than half
a century has puzzled the rose-lover and been
a theme of many speculations ... a thousand
wise and beautiful things have been said of
this most loved of flowers and not a few errors
been perpetuated.

What has become of the Blue Roses to
which in 1800 a French writer, Guillemeau,
alludes as growing wild near Turin ? They
are no less phantoms than some of the rose-
allusions which the poet has made sacrosanct,
that to the Rhetorician have become an
accepted convention. Again, we are told and
retold that the cult of the rose is a modern

340

and not an ancient sentiment. Even, it is Rosa
said, the allusions of the Latin poets are not Mystica.
those of lovers and enthusiasts. It is the
Rose of Catullus, we are reminded, that
blooms in the old Italic literature, the flower
of festival, of Venus and Bacchus, alluded to
more for its associations and its decorative
value than for love borne to it or enthusiasm
lit by it as by a fragrant flame.

All this may be so, and yet I am not
persuaded that the people of ancient days did
not love this flower of flowers as truly as, if
perhaps differently than, we do. It is true
that the ancients do not appear to have
regarded nature, either in the abstract or in
the particular, in the way characteristic of
peoples of modern times and above all of our
own time. But literary allusiveness does not
reveal the extent or the measure of the love of
objects and places. It is almost inconceivable,
for example, that so beauty-loving a people as
the Greeks did not delight in the rose. The
fact that only a mere handful of roses may be
culled from all the poetry of Hellas, here a
spray from Sappho, a wine-flusht cluster from
Anacreon, a dew-wet bloom from Theocritus,
a few wild - roses from the Anthology, an
epithet from Homer, an image from Simonides
or Pindar, a metaphor in some golden mouth,

34i

Rosa this paucity — so singular compared with the
Mystica. Rose of Poetry in our English speech, from
Chaucer's 'Rose of Rhone' to Mr. Yeats's
6 Rose on the Rood of Time,' loved and sung
through a thousand years. Such paucity does
not necessarily mean that only a few poets
casually alluded to this supreme flower, and
that it was unnoticed or unloved of the many.
Doubtless rose-chaplets were woven for lovers,
and children made coronals, and at mourning
ceremonies and marriage festivals these flowers
were strewn. The very fact that Sappho
called the rose the queen of flowers showed
that it was distinguished from and admired
among even the violets, pre-eminently the
flowers of Athens. That she likened a young
maiden to a rose is as indicative as when an
Arab poet likens his love to a delicate green
palm, or as when a northern poet speaks of
her as a pine-tree swaying in the wind or a
wave dancing on the sea.

Then, again, the Rose would not have been
consecrated to Venus, as an emblem of
beauty : to Eros, as an emblem of love : to
Aurora, as an emblem of Youth : and to
Harpocrates, as an emblem of silence : if this
symbolic usage were not such as would seem
fit and natural. That roses, too, were in
general demand is evident alone from their far-

342 -

famed culture and the great trade in them at Rosa
Paestum, the Lucanian town colonised by the Mystica.
Greek Sybarites five hundred years b.c. All
mediaeval and later literature is full of the
beauty and fragrance of the rose, but were it
not so, one could infer that the flower was
held in high esteem from the fact that it has
for ages been the wont of the Popes to have
a golden rose exquisitely finished, and, when
consecrated, to present it to some Catholic
monarch as a token of special regard. Thus
it seems to me that were there not a single
allusion to the rose by any great poet from
Homer to Sappho, from Anacreon to Theo-
critus, we might yet discern the love of the
ancient Greeks for this flower from, let us
say, a single surviving phrase such as the
anonymous lovely epitaph ial prayer-poem in
the Anthology : — ' May many flowers grow on
this newly-built tomb; not the dried- up
Bramble, or the red flower loved by goats ;
but Violets and Marjoram, and the Narcissus
growing in water ; and around thee may all
Roses grow.'

In Persia and the East, from Hindustan to
Palestine, from remotest Asia to Abyssinia
and Barbary, the Rose has ever been loved
and honoured. Sadi of the Rose-garden and
many another has sung of it with ecstasy.

343

Rosa The Hindu god Indra, even Buddha himself,
Mystica. suffered for robbing a paradisaical garden of a
rose. How suggestive it is, that the Eve of
the Aztec garden of Eden sinned, not for
plucking an apple but a rose : it was a fatal
rose, too, that the Eve of primitive Mexican
legend gathered to her undoing and that of all
her descendants.

What innumerable legends centre round
this flower. In every country and in either
hemisphere, north of the Equator, the poet
and the myth -maker and the legend- weaver
have occupied their imaginations to enhance
its beauty, to deepen its significance.

Long ago Bion told how the rose sprang
from the blood of the wounded Adonis, the
supreme type of beauty, and of the tears of
Venus. An older Hellenic legend declares
that the rose was originally white, till Eros,
dancing among the gods, upset a goblet of
nectar upon Venus's flower, which thereupon
became red. Christian legend, on the other
hand, would have it that the red rose sprang
from the brands which had been lighted at
Bethlehem to burn to death a Christian virgin-
martyr. Remote from Syria as from Greece,
the Scandinavian legend arose that this flower
was white till Baldur, the god of Youth and
Love, bled at the coming of Christ — akin to

344

which is a Gaelic legend, that the flower was Rosa
white till a drop of Christ's blood fell from the Mystica.
Cross ... a variant of which is that the
robin, who plucked at the thorns in Christ's
forehead till they stained its breast red, leaned
exhausted against a wild white-rose on Calvary,
which ever after was red as blood. I do not
know the origin of the legend save that it is
Teutonic in its present colour and shape, of
how the Crown of Thorns was woven of
the Briar-Rose, and how the drops that fell
from the thorns became blood-hued blooms.
Teutonic also, I think, is the legend that
Judas made a ladder of the rose-briar with
which to reach the closed doors of heaven :
hence why it is that the name Judas- Stairs is
given to the Briar in some parts of Germany
to this day, and why the scarlet hips are called
Judasbeeren.

Most beautiful of surviving rose- customs is
that akin to what is still done in some remote
parts of Europe, the placing of an apple into
the hand of a dead child, so that the little one
may have something to play with in Paradise.
I know of a dead Irish girl into whose right
hand was placed a white rose, and of a drowned
fisherman in whose hand was placed a red rose,
symbols of spiritual rebirth and of deathless
youth. Against this must be set the strange

345

Rosa and widespread aversion to throwing a rose
Mystica. jnt0 a grave, or even letting one fall or be
lowered there. ('It is throwing red life away '
it was explained to me once, — with the grim
addition, 'and Death will at once be hungry
for more of the rose-thrower.')

Again, I recall an old legend of the last rose
of summer, long anterior to the familiar song
so named : a legend of how at Samhain (Hallow-
mass) when of old was held the festival of
summer ended and of winter begun, a young-
Druid brought a rose to the sunward Stones
and, after consecration and invocation, threw
it into the sea.

To-day, sitting in my old garden amid many
roses, and looking westward across a waveless,
a moveless sea, now of faint apple-green and
fainter mauve lost in a vast luminous space of
milky, violet-shadowed translucency, I dream
again that old dream, and wonder what its
portent then, what its ancient significance, of
what the symbol now, the eternal and un-
changing symbol. For nothing is more strange
than the life of natural symbols. We may
discern in them a new illusion, a new meaning :
the thought we slip into them may be shaped
to a new desire and coloured with some new
fantasy of dreams or of the unspoken and
nameless longing in the heart : but the symbol

346

has seen a multitude of desires come and go Rosa
like shadows, has been troubled with many Cystica.
longings and baffled wings of the veiled pas-
sions of the soul, and has known dreams, many
dreams, dreams as the uncounted sand, the
myriad wave, the illimitable host of cloud, rain
that none hath numbered. The Symbol of
the Lily has been the chalice of the world's
tears ; the symbol of the Rose, the passion of
uplifted hearts and of hearts on fire ; in the
symbol of the Cross has dwelled, like fragrance
in a flower, the human Soul. The salt, mutable,
and yet unchanging sea has been the phantom
in which empires have seen Time like a shadow,
the mirage by which kings have wept and
nations been amorous in a great pride. The
Wind, that no man has seen, on whose rushing
mane no hand has been laid, and in whose
mouth has been set no bridle since the world
swung out of chaos on chariots of flame, . . .
has not that solitary and dread creature of the
deeps been fashioned in our minds to an image
of the Everlasting, and in our hearts been
shaped to the semblance of a Spirit ?

A rose, laid on a stone-altar in the sunrire,
and thrown into the sea, with strange hymns,
with supplication . . . what a symbol this of
the desires that do not die with nations, the
longings that outlive peoples, the grass of

347

Rosa prayer that Time has trampled upon and left
Mystica. an(j forever leaves green and virginal ?

To give that, that lovely fragrant flame of
the old material earth, to the altars of the
bowed spirit : to clothe it in the fire of heaven :
to commit it to the unassuaged thirst of the
everlasting graves of the sea. — Surely, here, an
image of that Rosa Mundi which has been set
upon the forehead of the world since time was,
that Rose of Beauty, that Rose of Time, that
Rose of the world which the passion of the
soul has created as a prayer to the Inscrutable :
the Rose of the Soul, of you, of me, of all
that have been, of all that are, of all unborn,
that we lay upon our places of prayer, and
offer to the Secret Fires, and commit to
desolation, and sorrow, and the salt and avid
hunger of Death ? What came of that
mystical wedding, of the world we know and
the world we do not know, by that rose of the
spirit, committed thus in so great a hope, so
great a faith ? The Druid is not here to tell.
Faith after Faith has withered like a leaf.
But still we stand by ancestral altars, still offer
the Rose of our Desire to the veiled Mystery,
still commit this our symbol to the fathomless,
the everlasting, the unanswering Deep.

348

THE STAR OF REST

A FRAGMENT

Rest — what an oceanic word ! I have been
thinking of this unfathomable, unpenetrable
word with mingled longing, and wonder, and
even awe.

What depths are in it, what infinite spaces,
what vast compassionate sky, what tenderness
of oblivion, what husht awakenings, what
quiet sinkings and fadings into peace.

Waking early, I took the word as one
might take a carrier-dove and loosed it into
the cloudy suspense of the stilled mind — and
it rose again and again in symbolic cloud-
thought, now as an infinite green forest
murmurous with a hidden wind, now in
some other guise and once as Ecstasy herself,
listening.

349

Dear soft, sweet breath of the hills,
Good-night !

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

SOME PRESS NOTICES

" Not beauty alone, but that element of strangeness in beauty
which Mr. Pater rightly discerned as the inmost spirit of romantic
art — it is this which gives to Miss Macleod's work its peculiar
aesthetic charm." — Mr. Ashcroft Nohle.

" Miss Macleod is a poet. Her prose w prose— it is a poet-
prose. . . . She excels in the very quality most Celtic literature
so signally wants —namely, form. . . . But more than a sense
of form is evident in her stories. She has the seeing eye, the
hearing ear, the attentive spirit, the brooding mind. She has
caught and construed into sweet words all the magical beauty of
the themes, nor has she shrunk from their horror ; and in
almost all one is conscious of that unknown something that
' moves in the shadow of life.' l It is Destiny,' she tells us,
' that is the Protagonist in the Celtic drama.' "—To-day.

" Miss Macleod's genius has long been recognised as repre-
senting most completely the revival of the Celtic spirit in
modern English literature."— The Manchester Guardian.

"Miss Macleod is a Celt of the Celts; her theme is the
ancient trouble of her race. . . . She appeals to a little clan of
her own, to whom the wild bees of the spirit come, as secret
wings in the dark, with the sound and breath of forgotten things.
To that clan The Winged Destiny will be more than welcome.
It shows in abundance all the writer's usual qualities of charm

Some Press and manner. . . . Criticism bends before the magic glamour

Notices* of the north, where the sea foam is white and the skies are dark

with cloud and wind. The land of the Gael is something rare

and -"apart ; and rare and apart, judge it as you will, is the art of

Fiona Macleod." — The Glasgow Herald.

" What I admire in the work of Miss Fiona Macleod is her
infinite sympathy for all that is beautiful, either in what we
usually call inanimate nature, or in the deeds and words of men.
She too— and this is no mean compliment— respects her own
gift, and bestows it royally."— Country Life.

"e There is no mystery in them, or anywhere, except the
eternal mystery of beauty '—and Miss Macleod certainly possesses
the master key to the heart of that mystery."— The Daily
Chronicle.

" Miss Macleod persuades one more than ever that she is the
possessor of that rare and precious thing, genius. . . . Her
work has energy, passion, beauty, and sweetness."— The National
Observer.

" ' J'avais le sentiment de l'iufini et de l'e'ternel et de la mes
sourires pour les choses qui passent. Mais l'Esprit ne passe
point.' Cette belle phrase de Renan s' applique assez exactment a
l'auteur de The Winged Destiny, Miss Fiona Macleod. Ce livre
qui s'est ' dresse comme un fantome hors des bois hautes ' a le
charme indicible des precedents ceuvres de cet auteur. Miss
Macleod a quelque chose de visionnaire et d'indefini, d'etrange-
ment melancolique, de profondement emouvant. . . . Tout cela,
c'est bien ' le reve de la vie vue en beaute', et voir les choses
dans leur beaute c'est les voir dans leur verite, comme l'a dit
Matthew Arnold." — Le Mercure de France.

SOME PRESS NOTICES

of
44 Where the Forest Murmurs"

" Fiona Macleod's prose baffles description. It is perhaps
hardly prose at all. It is melody in words suggesting scene- as
much by sound as by the passage of ideas. . . . But it is, when
all analysis is ended , something quite alone : pure music of a
strange and curious quality, that is neither prose nor poetry,
but thrilling with the pain and passion of a Gaelic chant." — The
Contemporary Review.

" Beyond any other writer whom one may allege for the
comparison, this writer has chosen to saturate her work in
beauty. The sense of it is, for her, a perpetual touchstone— a
touchstone for the apperception of sheer natural presences, of
dream and vision and intimation, of that miraculous and super-
sensuous world in which the spirit of the essential mystic has its
intensest life. . . . She has played, from the first, ' upon the
silent flutes, upon the nerves wherein the soul sits enmeshed.'
Always she has made her command over beauty serve the needs
of an exquisite spiritual consciousness."— Mr. Lawrence Oilman
in The North American Review.

"Fiona Macleod had imagination and sympathy of a rare
kind, and will rank high among the writers of sonorous and
beautiful English."— The Speaker.

"In a slipshod, slapdash age, there is a great relief to be
found in books like this, with its exquisite sense of style, its
almost supersensitive feeling for the beauty of words. . . .
Where the Forest Murmurs is haunting and unforgettable. It

Some Press is one of those pieces of nature-study in which, in Matthew
Notices* Arnold's phrase, we have that rarest of all modern qualities,
' healing power.'" — Mr. Alfred Noyes in The Bookman.

" The genius of ' Fiona Macleod ' is a thing subtle, elusive,
apart, defying classification and analysis alike. . . . The appeal
of this book is to such as love the earth in her varied moods —
such as delight in the delicate shades of colour and form, the
subtle changes of light and sound which make up the magnificent
pageant of the year. ... Is it this subtle sense of the imagina-
tive values of words which is the secret of these haunting
pictures ? " — The Academy.

" In the present volume the late William Sharp bequeaths to
us a delightful legacy, embodying the chief teachings of his
prose and verse." — The Manchester Courier.

" Here, again, we have the old, beautiful web made of dreams
and fantasies, shot through with the colour of folklore, of
legends and traditions — exquisitely chosen, if they were not,
indeed, made by Fiona Macleod — above all, a passionate delight
in the beauty of the world. And all set forth in an ordered
procession of words which are as beautiful as the things they
represent. Fiona Macleod had the Celtic gift of eloquence in
a superlative degree. ... To open this book anywhere is to be
pelted with words like jewels with fire at the heart of them.
And in our drab days we shall miss the Wonder-Worker
sadly."— The Pall Mall Gazette.

<e Where the Forest Murmurs seems to contain sure and certain
signs that it is not the work of a woman. It is full of a love of
abstract beauty, of a nearness to Nature herself, Nature Pagan
and primaeval. . . . Women have done many things in the
world of letters, but they have not yet written with the purely
impersonal passion that burns in these pages, touching us with
an art at once profoundly melancholy and profoundly moving."
— The Irish Times.

" Fiona Macleod is here revealed as the interpreter of Nature,
who has an intimacy with her in many moods. ... In every
page there is a call to see and hear and love Nature, to share
the writer's joy and passionate delight — a call framed in words
so fitting and so strangely beautiful that there is no resisting
it." — The Dundee Advertiser.

LlB%A%Y.

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1111

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