Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

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 ‘Blackthorn-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, I need not let the subject delay me now, except to say that in the North-West Highlands I have heard the blackthorn called _Bròn 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 mediæval 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 commingling 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 blindness: a safe prognostication!

It is that other thorn which holds us now, that lovely torch of blossom which has taken to itself the name of the lovers’-month. Not that the hawthorn has unchallenged use of 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 honeysweet.’

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-fiadhaich_), is still common in woods and by stream-sides. The bitter juice of the fruit is 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 òg
An òr-fhuilt bhuidhe--
Do ghruaidh mar ròs
’S do phòg 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 unsurpassed 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, or on some lapwing-haunted pasture-edge, or in the heathy wilderness, on the wild-apple in 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 seedling 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 batwings 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 _Sìdhe_, ‘the young girl of the mouth of red berries, with voice 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 pathways 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.”

Something of that emotion as of ancestral memories, as of an awakened past, of an unloosening of the imagination, may well come to any imaginative nature encountering suddenly 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 sacrosanct. 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 Tregastèl, will cross himself as he smells the fragrance of apple-blossom coming from sunken isles across the long rolling billows, and remember, 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 tale of Bailê 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 the north and one in a grave to the south, grave-wood grew into grave-wood, and green 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 woman. And how at the end Fand became once more 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 _Caïn Adamnain_, where Adanman’s old mother cries _mo maccansa suut amail bis ubull fo’ 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.’

Is that too a dream, or is there no Ragnarök for the gods to fear? This at least we 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 incalculable 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 Ragnarök.

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 intensifying 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 that first communicated to the shaken mind of childhood the sense of mystery, the summons 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 in 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 brown flood beloved of the salmon, or the curve 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 few rivers or brooks or burns are blue. Their azure colour is a mirage wrought by distance and the angle of vision, affected by the play of wind, by the quality of light, by the blueness 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 doubtless each some happy choice, some hidden predilection. That will depend on memories and associations. I read somewhere 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 recollection 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 heart filled with a sweet trouble, perplext by a strange ache. It would be the Ouse at its 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 insignificant 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 defiling cities: its destiny, its ultimate blending with the devouring tide and the overrunning wave ... all this has become the commonplace of the poet and the romancist. Thames filled with every craft possible to be seen 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 the lowlands is a brook and in the highlands a burn, yet than the one is swifter and than 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.
From every side
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:
Yet not the less I love thee,
When, far away, and absent from thee long,
I yearn, my dark hill-water,
I yearn, I strain to hear thy song,
Brown, wandering water,
Dear, murmuring water!”

WILLIAM SHARP

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 corncrake 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 tireless 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 flycatcher hawks the happy hunting-grounds 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 gloaming when we hear

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

W. S.

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 lap throwing clouds of blossom on this hawthorn or on this apple-orchard, or where the 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-crāke! crek-crāke!_ 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 honeysuckle, 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 the west wind and the dancing sunlight, sleep put away like a nomad’s winter-tent and dreams become realities. Often I have wondered how it is that so little is commonly known of the bat-lore of our own and other races. Doubtless 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. I have heard it once or twice in the last few years, and once in a story where the teller, 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 _Bàdharan-dhu_, 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 choille_, ‘the little black wandering flame of the woods.’ But on the day of the Crucifixion the bat mocked at the agony of the Saviour, and while the redbreast was 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 evermore. 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 bais_, 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-bàs_ is one of the names of lightning.

The other name I heard as a child, and it long puzzled me. _Beuban-an-Athar-Uaibhreach:_ literally, the malformed one of the Haughty Father. Now why should the bat be called _beuban_, a thing spoiled, wilfully malformed? ‘An t’ Athair Uaibhreach’ (of which _an athar_ is the genitive) is one of the evasive names used by the Gael for Satan ... for that proud and glorious angel, the Father of Evil, who fell from his high estate through inconquerable 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 dhorchadas_, ‘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 la’ bais!_ (‘till the day of death’ ... _i.e._, the Last Day).

In some parts of Argyll the bat is said to live for three generations of an eagle, six generations of a stag, and nine generations of a man. With less poetic exactitude I have 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 fiadh_ (the stag) was twice the age of a _dialtag_, ‘and put ten to that and you’ll have the allotted age of man’ [_i.e._, an eel is supposed to live about seven years 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 wind, and is weaving roses for her coronal and will be with us while we are yet unaware.

What a quantity of old lore one might 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 heartë 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 dedicated 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 illness. In a word, the peasant-invalid might take the bird to be a death-messenger, the bird 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 _Kalevala_, or of that not less mysterious ancient Teutonic nature-god Wunsch, or of our Gaelic Angus Og, son of heaven and earth; each of 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.

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 resolve 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. Howsoever 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. Some tell of the terror of the sea, some of its mysteriousness, some of the evil and of the 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 _Brònavara_ (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 tossing its white crest, or of the green billow 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 happiness, 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 deathless clan of the sky loved the children of Lilith. On the day when Adam uttered the sacred name and became king of the world, a great 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 twilight 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, and the star within the darkness, in her womb. 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. For most of us, for those of us who do not dwell by lonely shores and seldom behold the 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 composure 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 tossing wilderness of blue and white. The blue sea frothed with wind has ever been a salutation of joy. Æschylos 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 songs 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 of waves? How good that old-world rejoicing in the great green wilderness of 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 _Evoë!_ 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._

“_O, champing horses of my soul, toss, toss on high your sunlit 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:--

“The grey sky gleams and the grey seas glimmer,
Pale and 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----”