Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

It is this exquisite miracle of transparency which gives the last secret of beauty to water. All else that we look upon is opaque: the 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 undulation 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.

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 medusæ, 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. The mountain lands have that which no lowland has. But in that company we shall not 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 excelling 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 stillness deep-sinking into fathomless blue, can forget that the impassive beauty of the wilderness is more searching and compelling than the continual miracle of wind-swept Alp 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 promontories, 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 of Hecla in the Hebrides, that gives majesty and wonder to the village green, and delivers 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 conflagration 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, unswerving tides of the sea. Beauty, and Light, and Wind: they who are so common in our companionship and so continual in mystery, are as one in this--that none knows whence the one or the other is come, or where any has the last excellence or differs save in the vibration 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; that, there, the sun itself is not golden or amber or bronze, but violet-blue?

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 of a furrowed hill in this midsummer season. 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 incalculable host of invisible ice-needles, and become cirrus; to float like thistledown, or to be innumerably 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 undulatingly 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 meteorologist. It is not alone in this: memory and imagination are alike stirred by the names of 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 pinnacles 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 persuaded of the great winds which may drive 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 moonlight will turn into the most poignant loveliness, 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 upper world eternally shepherd, who have their mortal hour in beauty and strength and force, and, instead of the havens and graves and secret places of the creatures of earth, know a divine perpetual renewal.

THE CUCKOO’S 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 as the _sorg-gök_, uttering ‘sorrow,’ or floated out of the east as the _tröste-gök_, calling ‘consolation’? 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 Vallombrosa. 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’ amore_: 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 remnant in Mexico and the Californian wilds, who hear with terror that foreboding flute-like voice calling out 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, Aphroditê of sound. Long, long ago this voice, this dim-remembered myth, was transmuted into Orpheus in the south, into Lemminkainen by the singers of the Kalevala, into Sigurd across the Scandinavian fjords, 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 forgotten, all save its refrain, which was

“_Gù-Gù, Gù-Gù,
A cuisilin a-ghràidh,
Cuisilin mo-chrìdhe!_”

“_Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
O 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

“_Gù-Gù! Gù-Gù!
O cushleen a-ghrày
Cushleen mo-chree!_”

‘The returning one’ the cuckoo is called in an old saga. It is the ancient mystery, Love, the son 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 Wondersmith and the Air, goes north to woo the snow-bound princess ... what but another lovely metaphor of Spring calling to the North to cover herself 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 Ilmarinen, 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 Culain, as unmistakably a cuckoo-god as his 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 Cuchulain, 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 mythopœic 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 longing of the wind of the west. But that I have told, and am more fully telling, elsewhere. 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 fragrance comes into flowers, and birds break into song. The voice of Cuchulain is the music 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; Blathmaid 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 of tradition. Some say that the wandering clan has dispersed on the four winds. The sweet mysterious voice will be heard no more 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 woodlands 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.

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, something 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 everywhere 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 dreaming 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 mountain-shadow. In lonely places there is something ominous, menacing in the swift 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 extinguish 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 the beautiful old English west-country word. The further north one is the longer the suspense, 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 Mediterranean while the rose of the west yet flames against the Cornish headlands, and the Sicilian wave is dark while the long green billow washing 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 may hear the breathing of the miraculous presence. The birds, who still sing early in the month, and many even of those whose 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 if the nightingale ever sings in actual darkness, though the 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 another I believe is also found in the Austrian highlands, parts of Germany, and elsewhere, to the effect that if a nightingale come ‘with 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 nightingale, 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 meadowsweet, the white water-lily, and the ‘lusavone’ (? _Lus-Mhonaidh_...? 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 everywhere, ‘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 croaking 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-krex_ of the bull-frog from the large, air-swimming, harshly musical _crek-crāke_, with the singular suspense so often to be noted after the first syllable. For all its harshness there are few sounds of the summer-dusk so welcome. It speaks of heat: of long shadow-weaving afternoons: 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 wilderness of wild-roses has been crushed, and their fragrance diffused among the dove-grey and harebell-blue and pansy-purple veils of twilight: 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 lance-thrusting whiteness of the Evening 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’ unmistakably throw his voice a few score of yards away. Often a _crek-crāke_ has resounded, and at some distance away, just as I have seen the stooping body of the _dreaun_ (or _traon_ or _treun-ri-treun_) 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 distance 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 after a brief rapid run forward with out-thrust neck and lowered head, as though calling along the ground. In no instance was the call thrown as though from a distance, but unmistakably from where the bird moved or crouched. There had been no response to the first, a single echo-like _crek-crāke_ 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 meaning, unless it is ‘the lumpy’ or ‘awkward one’; while an English factor knew it as the grass-drake or meadow-drake, and again as the night-crow--the latter obviously a survival 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 widespread, as the Germans call the landrail the quail-king (_Wachtelkonig_), the French ‘_le roi 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 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 tremulous white rays. The night of summer is come.

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 tremulous 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 pinewoods, the dance of the moths round certain trees, the faint woven cadence of the wheeling gnat-columns, the sudden scream of 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 dayworn 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 summer night has a loveliness to which the least sensitive must in some degree yield, creates a spell which must trouble even a dulled imagination, as moonlight and the faintest rippling breath will trouble unquickened 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 solitudes, 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 of cattle: or in a cottage-garden, with mignonette and cabbage-roses and ghostly phlox, or dew-fragrant with musk and southernwood: 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; also jar-owl, heather-owl. I have heard it called the heather-bleat, though probably that name commonly indicates the snipe. How well I remember from childhood that puzzling riddle

“_The bat, the bee, the butterflee, 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 ‘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,’ the night-bogle; or (for the screech-owl) the onomatopœic ‘corra-sgriachaig,’ or several terms meaning ‘long-eared’ or ‘horned’; and three or four designations, either onomatopœic, 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 ‘Katyugle’ or ‘Katogle’: indeed ‘catyogle,’ ‘catogle,’ 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 ‘gheal’ (white), as many north-Celtic names survive in that region. Our commonest name in the Highlands is ‘comhachag’ (co-achak) probably as onomatopœic a term as ‘cuach’ or ‘cuthag’ (coo-ak) for the cuckoo, or ‘fitheach’ (_fee-ak_) for the raven. It is said that the longest poem on the Owl in any language is in Gaelic. The _Oran 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 ’us bard ainmeil Abrach, mu thiomchioll 1590_ (done by Donald Finlay of the Songs, the celebrated Lochaber huntsman 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 do’n daraig,
Bha na fhaillain ann sa choinnich,
’S ioma linn a chuir mi romham,
’S gur mi comhachag bhochd na sroine._”

(I am old as the oak ... lit. ‘the ancientness 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 mourning. It is also the bird of night pre-eminently (what a pity the old-English owl-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 undisturbed, 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’ weaving a thin invisible web in the dusk wherein to entangle and bring close the hearts of lovers. Old Donald Finlay of 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 derivative from the ancient connection of the small owl with the Maiden Maid goddess who presided 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 Nyctimenê is still ‘the woman’s bird’ among the Australian aborigines: Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Icelandic, Vendish, German, French, Hungarian, all afford the same sex-indication. The great white owl, however, is the bird of heroes, wanderers, the night-foray, war, lightning, desolation, solitude, and death. It is said, I know not how demonstrated or traced, that the name Ulysses is but the variant of the Etruscan _Ulixé_ or Sikulian _Oulixes_, 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 Ulixé or Oulixes be older than the Greek name, what of Odysseus? In like fashion some speculative philologists derive ‘Pallas’ from the Turanian owl-name _Pöllö_.

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, between the soft white fire of the Vesper Star, the star of 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 midsummer night, and, as Phosphoros, the Day-Star, Son of the Morning, flashes like a lance-point against the milky onflood of the dawn?

THE GARDENS OF THE SEA

(A MIDSUMMER NOON’S DREAM)