ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

{Master-Spirits 1873}

                                                                                                                                                                 168

PROSE AND VERSE.

(A STRAY NOTE.)

THE ‘music of the future’ is at last slowly approaching its apotheosis; since ‘Lohengrin’ has signally triumphed in Italy, and the South is opening its ears to the subtle secrets of the Teutonic Muse. The outcome of Wagner’s consummate art is a war against mere melody and tintinabulation, such as have for many long years delighted the ears of both gods and groundlings. Is it too bold, then, to anticipate for future ‘Poetry’ some such similar triumph? Freed from the fetters of pedantry on the one hand, and escaping the contagion of mere jingle on the other, may not Poetry yet arise to an intellectual dignity parallel to the dignity of the highest music and philosophy? It may seem at a first glance over-sanguine to hope so much, at the very period when countless Peter Pipers of Verse have overrun literature so thoroughly, robbing poetry of all its cunning, and ‘picking their pecks of pepper’ to the delight of a literary Music Hall; but, in good truth, when disease has come to a crisis so enormous, we have good reason to hope for amendment.
     A surfeit of breakdowns and nigger-melodies, or of ¹⁶⁹ Offenbach and Hervé, or of ‘Lays’ and ‘Rondels,’ is certain to lead to a reaction all in good time. A vulgar taste, of course, will always cling to vulgarity, preferring in all honesty the melody of Gounod to the symphony of Beethoven, and the tricksy, shallow verse of a piece like Poe’s ‘Bells’ to the subtly interwoven harmony of a poem like Matthew Arnold’s ‘Strayed Reveller.’ True art, however, must triumph in the end. Sooner or later, when the Wagner of poetry arises, he will find the world ready to understand him; and we shall witness some such effect as Coleridge predicted—a crowd, previously familiar with Verse only, vibrating in wonder and delight to the charm of oratio soluta, or loosened speech.
     Already, in a few words, we have sketched out a subject for some future æsthetic philosopher or philosophic historian. A sketch of the past history of poetry, in England alone, would be sufficiently startling; and surely a most tremendous indictment might be drawn thence against Rhyme. Glance back over the works of British bards, from Chaucer downwards; study the delitiæ Poetarum Anglicorum. What delightful scraps of melody! what glorious bursts of song! Here is Chaucer, wearing indeed with perfect grace his metrical dress; for it sits well upon him, and becomes his hoar antiquity, and we would not for the world see him clad in the freedom of prose. Here is Spenser; and Verse becomes him well, fitly modulating the faëry tale he has to tell. Here are Gower, Lydgate, Dunbar, Surrey, Gascoigne, Daniel, Drayton, and many others: each full ¹⁷⁰ of dainty devices; none strong enough to stand without a rhyme-prop on each side of him. Of all sorts of poetry, except the very best, these gentlemen give us samples; and their works are delightful reading. As mere metrists, cunning masters of the trick of verse, Gascoigne and Dunbar are acknowledged masters. Take the following verses from the ‘Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins’:

Then Ire came in with sturt and strife,
His hand was aye upon his knife,
         He brandeist like a beir;
Boasters, braggarts, and bargainers,
After him passit in pairs,
         All boden in feir of weir . . .
Next in the dance followed Envy,
Fill’d full of feid and felony,
         Hid malice and despite.
For privy hatred that traitor trembled,
Him follow’d many freik dissembled,
         With fenyit wordis white;
And flatterers unto men’s faces,
And back-biters in secret places,
         To lie that had delight,
With rowmaris of false leasings;
Alas that courts of noble kings
         Of them can ne’er be quite!

This, allowing for the lapse of years, still reads like ‘Peter Piper’ at his best; easy, alliterative, pleasant, if neither deep nor cunning. For this sort of thing, and for many higher sorts of things, Rhyme was admirably adapted, and is still admirably adapted. When, ¹⁷¹ however, a larger music and a more loosened speech was wanted, Rhyme went overboard directly.
     On the stage even, Rhyme did very well, as long as the matter was in the Ralph Royster Doyster vein; but a larger soul begot a larger form, and the blank verse of Gorboduc was an experiment in the direction of loosened speech. How free this speech became, how by turns loose and noble, how subtle and flexible it grew, in the hands of Shakspeare and the Elizabethans, all men know; and rare must have been the delight of listeners whose ears had been satiated so long with mere alliteration and jingle. The language of Shakspeare, indeed, must be accepted as the nearest existing approach to the highest and freest poetical language. Here and there rhymed dialogue was used, when the theme was rhythmic and not too profound; as in the pretty love-scenes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the bantering, punning chat of Love’s Labour’s Lost. True song sparkled up in its place like a fountain. But the level dialogue for the most part was loosened speech. Observe the following speech of Prospero, usually printed in lines, each beginning with a capital:—

     This King of Naples, being an enemy to me inveterate, hearkens my brother’s suit; which was,—that he, in lieu of the premises, of homage and I know not how much tribute, should presently extirpate me and mine out of the dukedom, and confer fair Milan, with all the honours, on my brother. Whereon, a treacherous army levied, one midnight fated to the purpose did Antonio open the gates of Milan; and, in the dead of darkness, the ministers for the purpose hurried thence me and thy crying self !
                                                                                                       Tempest, act i., scene 2.

¹⁷² Any poet since Shakspeare would doubtless have modulated this speech more exquisitely, laying special stress on the five accented syllables of each line. Shakspeare, however, was too true a musicians He knew when to use careless dialogue like the above, and when to break in with subtle modulation; and he knew, moreover, how the loose prose of the one threw out the music of the other. He knew well how to inflate his lines with the measured oratory of an offended king:

The hope and expectation of thy time
Is ruin’d; and the soul of every man
Prophetically doth forethink thy fall.
Had I so lavish of my presence been,
So common-hackney’d in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company;
Opinion, that did help me to the crown,
Had still kept loyal to possession;
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark, nor likelihood.
By being seldom seen, I could not stir,
But, like a comet, I was wonder’d at;
That men would tell their children, This is he!
Others would say, Where? which is Bolingbroke?” &c.
                                                     Henry IV., Part I., act iii., scene 2.

In the hands of our great Master, indeed, blank verse becomes almost exhaustless in its powers of expression; but nevertheless, prose is held in reserve, not merely as the fitting colloquial form of the ‘humorous’ scenes, but as the appropriate loosened utterance of strong emotion. The very highest matter of all, indeed, is sometimes delivered in prose, as its most appropriate medium. Take ¹⁷³ the wonderful set of prose dialogues in the second act of ‘Hamlet,’ and notably that exquisitely musical speech of the Prince, beginning, ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.’  Turn, also, to Act V. of the same play, where the ‘mad matter’ between Hamlet and the Gravediggers, so full of solemn significance and sound, is prose once more. The noble tragedy of ‘Lear,’ again, owes much of its weird power to the frequent use of broken speech. And is the following any the less powerful or passionate because it goes to its own music, instead of following any prescribed form?—

     I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
                                                                                       Merchant of Venice, act iii., scene 1.

     It would be tedious to prolong illustrations from an author with whom everybody is supposed to be familiar. Enough to say that the careful student of Shakspeare will find his most common magic to lie in the frequent use, secret or open, of the oratio soluta. And what holds of him, holds in more or less measure of his contemporaries—of Jonson, Marston, Webster, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, Greene, Peele, and the rest; just as it holds of the immediate predecessor of Shakspeare, whose ‘mighty line’ led the way for the full Elizabethan choir ¹⁷⁴ of voices. Then, as now, society had been surfeited with tedious jingle; and only waited for genius to set it free. It is difficult to say in what respect the following scene differs from first-class prose; although we have occasionally an orthodox blank verse line, the bulk of the passage is free and unencumbered; yet its weird imaginative melody could scarcely be surpassed.

     Duch. Is he mad, too?
     Servant. Pray question him; I’ll leave you.
     Bos. I am come to make thy tomb.
     Duch. Ha! my tomb?
Thou speak’st as if I lay upon my death-bed
Gasping for breath. Dost thou perceive me such?
     Bos. Yes.
     Duch. Who am I? am not I thy duchess?
     Bos. That makes thy sleep so broken:
Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright,
But looked to near have neither heat nor light.
     Duch. Thou art very plain.
     Bos. My trade is to flatter the dead, not the living;
I am a tomb-maker.
     Duch. And thou hast come to make my tomb?
     Bos. Yes!
     Duch. Let me be a little merry:
Of what stuff wilt thou make it?
     Bos. Nay, resolve me first: of what fashion?
     Duch. Why do we grow phantastical on our death-bed?
Do we affect fashion in the grave?
     Bos. Most ambitiously. Princes’ images on the tombs
Do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray
Up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks,
As if they died of the toothache! They are not carved
With their eyes fixed upon the stars; but as
Their minds were wholly bent upon the world,                                                                     175
The self-same way they seem to turn their faces.
     Duch. Let me know fully, therefore, the effect
Of this thy dismal preparation!—
This talk fit for a charnel.
     Bos. Now I shall (a coffin, cords, and a bell).
Here is a present from your princely brothers;
And may it arrive welcome, for it brings
Last benefit, last sorrow. ¹

He who will carefully examine the works of our great dramatists, will find everywhere an equal freedom; rhythm depending on the emotion of the situation, and the quality of the speakers, rather than on any fixed laws of verse.
     If we turn, on the other hand, to dramatists and poets of less genius—if we open the works of Waller, Cowley, Marvell, Dryden, and even of Milton, we shall find much exquisite music, but little perhaps of that wondrous cunning familiar to us in Shakspeare and the greatest of his contemporaries. Shallow matter, as in Waller; ingenious learned matter, as in Cowley; dainty matter, as in Andrew Marvell; artificial matter, as in Dryden; and puritan matter, as in  Milton, were all admirably fitted for rhymed or some other formal sort of Verse. Rhyme, indeed, may be said, while hampering the strong, to strengthen and fortify the weak. But, of the men we have just named, the only genius approaching the first

—    ¹ ‘The Duchess of Malfy,’ act iv. scene 2. The above extract is much condensed. The reader who would fully feel the force of our allusion, cannot do better than study Webster’s great tragedy as a whole. It utterly discards all metrical rules, and abounds in wonderful music. —

¹⁷⁶ class was Milton; and so no language can be too great to celebrate the praises of his singing.
     Passage after passage, however, might be cited from his great work, where, like Molière’s ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme,’ he talks prose without knowing it; and, to our thinking, his sublimest feats of pure music are to be found in that drama ¹ where he permits himself, in the ancient manner, the free use of loosened cadence. Milton, however, great as he is, is a great formalist, sitting ‘stately at the harpsichord.’ A genius of equal earnestness, and of almost equal strength—we mean Jeremy Taylor—wrote entirely in prose; and it has been well observed by a good critic that ‘in any one of his prose folios there is more fine fancy and original imagery—more brilliant conceptions and glowing expressions—more new figures and new applications of old figures—more, in short, of the body and soul of poetry, than in all the odes and epics that have since been produced in Europe.’ Nor should we have omitted to mention, in glancing at the Elizabethan drama, that the prose of Bacon is as poetical, as lofty, and in a certain sense as musical, as the more formal ‘poetry’ of the best of his contemporaries.
     Very true, exclaims the reader, but what are we driving at? Would we condemn verse altogether as a form of speech, and abolish rhyme from literature for ever? Certainly not! We would merely suggest the dangers of Verse, and the limitations of Rhyme, and briefly show how the highest Poetry of all answers to no fixed

—    ¹ ‘Samson Agonistes.’ —

¹⁷⁷ scholastic rules, but embraces, or ought to embrace, all the resources both of Verse generally and of what is usually, for want of a better name, entitled Prose. On this, as on many points, tradition confuses us. The word ‘Poet’ means something more than a singer of songs or weaver of rhymes. What are we to say to a literary classification which calls ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ a poem, and denies the title to ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress;’ which includes ‘Cato’ and the ‘Rape of the Lock’ under the poetical head, and excludes Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and the ‘Vicar of Wakefield;’ which extends to Cowper, Chatterton, Gray, Keats, and Campbell the laurel it indignantly denies to Swedenborg, Addison (who created Sir Roger de Coverley!), Burke, Dickens, and Carlyle; and which has for so long delayed the placing of Walter Scott’s novels in their due niche just below the plays of Shakspeare?
     Instead of being the spontaneous speech of inspired men in musical moods, Verse has become a ‘form of literature,’ binding so-called ‘poets’ as strictly as bonds of brass and iron; and the effort of most of our strong men has been to free their limbs as much as possible, by working in the most flexible chain of all, that of blank verse. If the reader will take the trouble to compare the early verse of Tennyson with his later works, wherein he has found it necessary to shake his soul free of its over-modulated formalism, he will understand what we mean. If, just after a perusal of even ‘Guinevere’ and ‘Lucretius,’ he will read Whitman’s ‘Centenarian’s Story’ or Coleridge’s ‘Wanderings of Cain,’ his feeling of the ¹⁷⁸ ‘wonderfulness of prose’ will be much strengthened. That feeling may thereupon be deepened to conviction by taking up and reading any modern poet immediately before a perusal of the authorized English version of the ‘Book of Job,’ ‘Ecclesiastes,’ or the wonderful ‘Psalms of David.’
     It is really strange that Wordsworth just hit the truth, in the masterly preface to his ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ ‘It may be safely affirmed,’ he says, ‘that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. . . . Much confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre; nor is this in truth a strict antithesis, because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them even were it desirable.’ Theoretically in the right, this great poet was often practically in the wrong; using rhythmic speech habitually for non-rhythmic moods, and leaving us no example of glorious loosened speech, combining all the effects of pure diction and of metre. After generations of ‘Pope’-ridden poets, the Wordsworthian language was ‘loosened’ indeed; but it sounds now sufficiently formal and pedantic. His only contemporaries of equal greatness—we mean of course Scott and Byron—were sufficiently encumbered by verse. Scott soon threw off his fetters, and rose to the feet of Shakspeare. Byron never had the courage to abandon them altogether; but ¹⁷⁹ he played fine pranks with them in ‘Don Juan,’ and, had he lived, would have pitched them over entirely. On the other hand, the fine genius of Shelley and the wan genius of Keats worked with perfect freedom in the form of verse: first, because they neither of them possessed much humour or human unction; second, because their subjects were  vague, unsubstantial, and often (as in the ‘Cenci’) grossly morbid; and third, because they were both of them overshadowed by false models, involving a very retrograde criterion of poetic beauty. Writers of the third or perhaps of the fourth rank, they occupy their places, masters of metric beauty, often deep and subtle, never very light or strong. Once more, what shall we say to a literary classification which grants Shelley the name of ‘poet’ and denies it to Jean Paul? and which (since poetry is admittedly the highest literary form of all, and worthy of the highest honour) sets a spare falsetto singer like John Keats high over the head of a consummate artist like George Sand?
     We have had it retorted, by those who disagreed with Wordsworth’s theory, that its reductio ad absurdum was to be found in Wordsworth’s own ‘Excursion;’ that ‘poem’ being full of the most veritable prose that was ever penned by man. Very good. Take a passage:—

     Ah, gentle sir! slight, if you will, the means, but spare to slight the end, of those who did, by system, rank as the prime object of a wise man’s aim—security from shock of accident, release from fear; and cherished peaceful days for their own sakes, as mutual life’s chief good and only reasonable felicity. What motive drew, what impulse, I would ask, through a long ¹⁸⁰ course of later ages, drove the hermit to his cell in forest wide; or what detained him, till his closing eyes took their last farewell of the sun and stars, fast anchored in the desert?—Excursion, Book III.

This is not only prose, but indifferent prose; poor, colloquial, ununctional; and no amount of modulation could make it poetry. Contrast with it another passage, of great and familiar beauty:—

     I have seen a curious child, who dwelt upon a tract of inland ground, applying to his ear the convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell, to which, in silence hushed, his very soul listened intently. His countenance soon brightened with joy; for from within were heard murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed mysterious union with its native sea. Even such a shell the universe itself is to the ear of Faith. And there are times, I doubt not, when to you it doth impart authentic tidings of invisible things, of ebb and flow, and ever-during power, and central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.—Excursion, Book IV.

     Prose again, but how magnificent! poetical imagery worthy of Jeremy Taylor; but losing nothing by being printed naturally. The conclusion of the whole matter, so far as it affects the ‘Excursion,’ is that the work, while essentially fine in substance, suffers from an unnatural form. Read as it stands, it is rather prosy poetry. Written properly, it would have been admitted universally as a surpassing poem in prose; although it contains a great deal which, whether printed as prose or verse, would be unanimously accepted as commonplace and unpoetic.
¹⁸¹ Our store of acknowledged poetry is very precious; but it might be easily doubled, were we suffered to select from our prose writers—from Plato, from Boccaccio, from Pascal, from Rousseau, from Jean Paul, from Novalis, from George Sand, from Charles Dickens, from Nathaniel Hawthorne—the magnificent nuggets of pure poetic ore in which these writers abound. Read Boccaccio’s story of Isabella and the Pot of Basil, or Dickens’ description of a sea-storm in ‘David Copperfield,’ or Hawthorne’s picture of Phœbe Pyncheon’s bedchamber, and confess that, if these things be not poetry, poetry was never written. If you still doubt that the rhythmic form is essential to the highest poetic matter, read that wondrous dream of the World without a Father at the end of Jean Paul’s ‘Siebenkäs,’ and then peruse Heine’s description of the fading away of the Hellenic gods before the thorn-crowned coming of Christ. What these prose fragments lose in neatness of form, they gain in mystery and glamour. After reading them, and many another similar effort, one almost feels that rhymed poetry is a poor, petty, and inferior form of language after all.
     Just at this present moment we want a great Poet, if we want anything; and we particularly want a great Poet with the courage to ‘loosen’ the conventional poetic speech. ‘Off, off, ye lendings!’ Away with lutes and fiddles; shut up Pope, Dryden, Gray, Keats, Shelley, and the other professors of music, and try something free and original—say, even a course of Whitman. Among living men, one poet at least is to ¹⁸² be applauded for having, inspired by Goethe, ‘kicked’ at the traces of rhyme, and written such poems as ‘The Strayed Reveller,’ ‘Rugby Chapel,’ and ‘Heine’s Grave.’ We select a passage from the first-named of these fine poems:—

THE YOUTH (loquitur).

The gods are happy;
They turn on all sides
Their shining eyes,
And see, below them,
The earth and men.
They see Teresias
Sitting, staff in hand,
On the warm grassy
Asopus’ bank,
His robe, drawn over
His old sightless head,
Revolving only
The doom of Thebes.

They see the centaurs
In the upper glens
Of Pelion, in the streams
Where red-berried ashes fringe
The clear brown shallow pools
With streaming flanks and heads
Rear’d proudly, snuffing
The mountain wind.

They see the Indian
Drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moor’d to
A floating isle, thick matted
With large-leaved, low-creeping melon plants                                 183
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them,
Drifting—drifting—round him,
Round his green harvest-plot,
Flow the cool lake-waves:
The mountains ring them.

They see the Scythian
On the wide steppe, unharnessing
His wheel’d house at noon,
He tethers his beast down, and makes his meal,
Mares’ milk and bread
Baked on the embers; all around
The boundless waving grass-plains stretch, thick starred
With saffron and the yellow hollyhock
And flag-leaved iris flowers.
Sitting in his cart
He makes his meal; before him, for long miles,
Alive with bright green lizards
And springing bustard-fowl,
The track, a straight black line,
Furrows the rich soil; here and there
Clusters of lonely mounds,
Topp’d with rough-hewn,
Grey, rain-bleared statues, overspread
The sunny waste.

They see the ferry
On the broad clay-laden
Lone Charasmian stream; thereupon
With snort and steam,
Two horses, strongly swimming, tow
The ferry-boat, with woven ropes
To either bow
Firm-harness’d by the wain; a chief,
With shout and shaken spear,                                                       184
Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern
The cowering merchants, in long robes,
Sit pale beside their wealth
Of silk bales and of balsam-drops,
Of gold and ivory,
Of turquoise, earth, and amethyst,
Jasper and chalcedony,
And milk-barr’d onyx stones.
The loaded boat swings groaning
In the yellow eddies.
The gods behold them.
                                         Matthew Arnold’s Poetical Works, vol. ii.

Equally fine are some of the choric passages in the ‘Philoctetes’ of the Hon. J. Leicester Warren, one of the first of our young poets. Passages such as we have quoted differ little from prose, and would seem equally beautiful if printed as prose. They move to their own music, and need no adventitious aid of the printer. The same may be said of Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’:—

Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus,
Mit Wolkendunst,
Und übe, dem Knaben gleich
Der Disteln köpft,
An Eichen dich an Bergeshöhn;
Musst mir meine Erde
Doch lassen stehn,
Und meine Hütte, die du nicht gebaut,
Und meinen Herd,
Um dessen Gluth
Du mich beneidest, &c.

¹⁸⁵ The strain rolls on in simple grandeur, too massive for rhyme or formal verse. It bears to the ‘Poe’ species of poetry about the same relation that the Venus of Milo does to Gibson’s tinted Venus.
     Illustrations so crowd upon us as we write, that they threaten to swell this little paper out of all moderate limits. We must conclude; and what shall be our conclusion? This. A truly good Poet is not he who wearies us with eternally jingling numbers; is not Pope, is not Poe, is not even Keats. It is he who is master of all speech, and uses all speech fitly; able, like Shakspeare, to chop the prosiest of prose with Polonius and the Clowns, as well as to sing the sweetest of songs with Ariel and the outlaws ‘under the greenwood tree.’ It is not Hawthorne, because his exquisite speech never once rose to pure song; it is Dickens, because (as could be easily shown, had we space) he was a great master of melody as well as a great workaday humorist. It is not Thackeray, because he never reached that subtle modulation which comes of imaginative creation; and it is not Shelley, because he was essentially a singer, and many of the profoundest and delightfullest things absolutely refuse to be sung. It is Shakspeare par excellence, and it is Goethe par hasard. Historically speaking, however, it may be observed that the greatest Poets have not been those men who have used Verse habitually and necessarily; and if we glance over the names of living men of genius, we shall perhaps not count those most poetic who call their productions openly ‘poems.’ ¹⁸⁶ Meanwhile, we wait on for the Miracle-worker who never comes,—the Poet. We fail as yet to catch the tones of his voice; but we have no hesitation in deciding that his first proof of ministry will be dissatisfaction with the limitations of Verse as at present written.

[Note:
Originally published under the pseudonym, ‘Walter Hutcheson’ in The Saint Pauls Magazine (September, 1872 - Vol. XI, pp. 337-347). The original version is available here, although there are only minor alterations:

pp. 168-169:
A surfeit of breakdowns and nigger-melodies, or of Offenbach and Hervé, or of ‘Lays’ and ‘Rondels,’ is certain to lead to a reaction all in good time.
St. Pauls version: A surfeit of breakdowns and nigger-melodies, or of Offenbach and Hervé, or of “Lays” and “Rondels,” and “Songs without Sense,” is certain to lead to a reaction all in good time.

[I’m assuming that ‘Songs without Sense’ was meant as a swipe at Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise, published in 1871.‘Walter Hutcheson’s’ article appeared during the height of the controversy surrounding ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’. Swinburne had published his attack on Buchanan, Under the Microscope in July, 1872, and Buchanan’s reply, ‘The Monkey and the Microscope’ appeared in the August edition of The Saint Pauls Magazine. A year later, when ‘Prose and Verse’ was reprinted in Master-Spirits, perhaps Buchanan wanted to distance himself from the feud with Swinburne and so dropped ‘Songs without Sense’.]

p. 181:
Read Boccaccio’s story of Isabella and the Pot of Basil, or Dickens’ description of a sea-storm in ‘David Copperfield,’ or Hawthorne’s picture of Phœbe Pyncheon’s bedchamber, and confess that, if these things be not poetry, poetry was never written.
St Pauls version: Read Boccaccio’s story of Isabella and the Pot of Basil, or Dickens’s description of a sea-storm in “David Copperfield,” or Hawthorne’s picture of Phœbe Pyncheon’s bedchamber (quoted recently by an admirable  writer, himself a fine prose poet,* in this magazine), and confess that, if these things be not poetry, poetry was never written.
*footnote: Matthew Browne.

p. 185
A truly good Poet is not he who wearies us with eternally jingling numbers; is not Pope, is not Poe, is not even Keats.
St Pauls version: A truly great Poet is not he who wearies us with eternally sweet numbers; is not Pope, is not Poe, is not even Keats.]

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                                                                                                                                                             187

BIRDS OF THE HEBRIDES.

(WRITTEN ON BOARD THE ‘ARIEL.’)

IT is mid-June, but the air bites sharply, and it is blowing half a gale from the south-west. Squadron by squadron, vast clouds, white as the smoke from a housewife’s boiling kettle, sail up from the Atlantic, and pause yonder on Mount Hecla, till they are shredded by a mountain whirlwind into fragments small and white as the breast of the wild swan. The ‘Ariel’ rolls at her anchorage, with a strain on forty fathoms of chain, and a kedge out to steady her to the wind, which whistles through the rigging like a Cyclops at his anvil. At intervals, down comes the rain, with a roar and a pour; washing the very wind still, till it springs up, renewed by the bath, with stronger and more persistent fury. All round rise the desolate hills, blotted and smeared, with their patches of fuel bog and moorland, and their dark stains of stunted heather. A dreary day! a dreary scene! There is nothing for it in such weather but to sit in one’s cabin and smoke, dividing one’s attention between gazing occasionally out at the prospect and reading a good book.
     Which of one’s favourite authors befits such a place and such a season? Björnson might do, if he were less ¹⁸⁸ exclusively Scandinavian; as for Oehlenschläger, he is far too æstheticised by air from Weimar. Catullus and Alfred de Musset, these charming twin brothers of song, would sound insufferable here; and so, for that matter, would Thoreau, full of sea-salt as is that Concord worthy. Whom shall we choose? There they wait to our hand: Goethe, Fichte, Whitman, Swedenborg, Lucretius, Shakspeare, or Victor Hugo? One by one, as the long day passes, the well-thumbed tomes are lifted and dropped; and now, at a critical moment of sheer ennui, we, thrusting our head out into the air, behold a Black Eagle, hovering against the lower shoulder of Hecla, and attended (at a distance) by innumerable Ravens and Hooded Crows, which have gathered from every fissure in the crags to croak their cowardly defiance. A minute he hovers; then, with one proud waft of the wing, he swims from sight into the white and silent mist. As at a given signal, there arises up before us the whole Bird-prospect by which we are surrounded: the two pairing Terns sitting on the stone of ‘the point,’ as still as stone themselves; the Merganser shooting by, with the white gleam in the patch of his powerful wing; the Black Guillemot fishing tranquilly amid the surf, a stone’s throw from the vessel; the Rock Doves wavering swiftly by against the hill-side; the Gulls innumerable hovering afar off at the mouth of the loch, while Puffins and Guillemots make a black patch in the water beneath them; and yonder, inland, the string of wild Geese beating in a wedge windward, to the green island promontories where they love to feed ¹⁸⁹ and rear their young. The picture thus perceived awakens its kindred mood, and (stranger still) produces its kindred book; for has not Mr. Robert Gray, a naturalist well-known in our north, produced this very year the biography of these very birds and all others which frequent the storm-beaten and dreary Hebridean shores? ¹ A portly volume it is, and a precious: full of matter of intense interest to the sportsman, the naturalist, and the student of nature; and being to a great extent the record of a long personal experience, it has all the lyric charm of a salient individual flavour. Its niche in the library is sure, for we know no work which supplies its place; and on this dreary day, amid the very scenes where Mr. Gray gathered many of his materials, it may be interesting to compare notes a little with a man so intelligent and so enthusiastic as the author.

         The woods, the streams themselves,
The sweetly rural, and the savage scene,—
Haunts of the plumy tribes,—be these my theme!

sang Grahame; and let these be ours: a theme veritably uplifting the spirit as on wings, bearing it over wild crag and heath, past the lone ribbed sand, and the rock-bound sound, past the breeding-places of the Gray-lag and the Shell-drake, to the eyrie where the Eagle rears its solitary young.
     And first as to the King of Birds itself: the Golden Eagle, or Aquila Chrysaëtos of southern naturalists, but

—    ¹ ‘The Birds of the West of Scotland, including the Outer Hebrides.’ By Robert Gray, late Secretary to the Natural History Society of Glasgow, &c., &c. Glasgow: Murray and Son. —

¹⁹⁰ known in these Hebridean Isles by the better and fitter title of Black Eagle, or (in Gaelic) Iolair dhubh. Look at him, poised against the lone hill-side, or stretched dead at the keeper’s feet, and confess that he is indeed a black fellow, worthy of his Celtic name. Much has been said, and sung, of his nobility of nature:—

                                                 The last I saw
Was on the wing; stooping, he struck with awe
Man, bird, and beast; then, with a consort paired,
From a bold headland, their loved aery’s guard,
Flew high above Atlantic waves, to draw
Light from the fountain of the setting sun.

That is the poetical point of view: instinct with vital imaginative truth, as any man can aver who has seen Eagles hovering around and above the storm-vexed heads of Skye; but there lingers behind it the ugly prosaic truth, that the bird of Jove, like many other kings, is in reality lacking in true nobility of nature. The Golden Eagle breeds in all these Outer Hebrides, from the Butt of Lewis to Barra Head. There is one eyrie regularly every year yonder among the stony crags of Mount Hecla, and the old birds, instead of molesting the mutton of the surrounding district, fly regularly every day to Skye twenty-five miles across the Minch—and return with a young lamb each to their eaglets. The following interesting particulars of aquilar habits are from the pen of a good authority, Captain H. J. Elwes, late of the Scots Fusilier Guards:—

     The Golden Eagle usually commences to prepare its nest for eggs about the beginning of April, and selects for that purpose ¹⁹¹ a rock, which, though nearly always in a commanding situation, is nearer the bottom than the top of a mountain. I have been in or near at least a dozen eyries, and not one of them, to the best of my judgment, is more than 1,000 feet above the sea, though a beautiful and extended view is obtained from all of them. The rock is generally a good deal broken and clothed with grass, ferns, bushes, and tufts of a plant which I believe is Luzula sylvatica, and which is always found in the lining of the nest. The ledge on which the nest is placed is generally sheltered from above by the overhanging rock, the structure being sometimes composed of a large quantity of sticks, heather, &c., and in other cases very slight indeed. The eggs are laid about the 10th of April, being a little later in the Outer Hebrides than on the mainland. Their number is usually two, very often three, especially with old birds, and sometimes only one. When there are three, one is generally addled, and not so well coloured as the other two, and they vary extremely both in size and colour.
     Golden Eagles generally breed year after year in the same place, though they often have two or three eyries near together, especially when the nests are harried frequently. They sit for about twenty-one days, and are very reluctant to leave the nest when it is first discovered, though afterwards they do not sit so hard. I have seen an eagle sit on its nest for some minutes after a double shot was fired within one hundred yards in full view of the bird; but when once they know that the nest is discovered, they are much wilder. As for the stories about people being attacked by Eagles when taking their nests, I do not believe them, as I have never seen one come within gunshot of a person at the nest, and I never saw anyone who could vouch for a story of this sort on his own knowledge. In a deer-forest Eagles are of the greatest advantage, and it is a pity that foresters should be allowed to destroy them, as though they occasionally take a red deer calf, yet, in most cases, the forest is all the better for the loss of the weakest ones, and they ¹⁹² confer a great benefit on the deer-stalker by the destruction of the blue hares, which form their favourite food. One of the most interesting sights to a lover of nature is to see an Eagle soon after its young ones have left the nest, teaching them to kill their own prey by dashing amongst a covey of ptarmigan poults, which gives the awkward young Eagle a good opportunity of catching one when separated from the old birds. On a sheep farm, where game is scarce, it cannot be denied that Eagles do a great deal of harm in the lambing season; but in such cases it is best to take the eggs as soon as laid, which does not cause them to leave the district, though it relieves them of the necessity of providing food for the young ones. I do not think that the Golden Eagle often lays a second time after its nest has been robbed, and although an instance may happen occasionally, it is certainly not the rule.
     On a bright hot day, without much wind, Eagles are fond of soaring round and round at a great height above the top of a mountain; more, I think, for exercise than in search of prey, as the hill-top itself is sufficiently elevated to command a great extent of country. In this manner they can fly for some time without any perceptible motion of the wings, though the tail is often turned from side to side to guide the flight. The points of the primary quills are always rather turned up and separated, as is shown in one of Landseer’s beautiful pictures in which an Eagle is flying across a loch to a dead stag which has already been discovered by a fox.

The last few words are worth noting, as one of the many testimonies borne by observers of nature to the fidelity of a great painter’s brush. Landseer’s close observation of the peculiar action of the primary quills in flying, may be classed, for its fine imaginative realism, with Turner’s subtle perception of the secret of nether-vapour effects in Loch Coruisk—i.e., the steaming of the rain-soaked rocks and crags under the heat of the sun.
¹⁹³     Next in rank to the Golden Eagle stands the Erne,—a pluckier and altogether a fiercer bird, resembling in character one of those fierce Highland caterans, who were wont to flock in the neighbourhood of its haunts. In spite of the brutal butchery of keepers and collectors, this noble bird, unlike the other, still abounds, breeding in all the headlands of Skye, on the breast of one of Macleod’s Maidens, in the wild Scuir of Eigg, in Scalpa, North Uist, Shiant Isles, Benbecula, and in Lewis and Harris. He is an unclean feeder, seldom slaughtering his own food, but seeking everywhere for garbage—dead sheep, stranded fish, or a salmon out of the neck of which the otter has taken its own tasty bite. His eyrie is generally among the most inaccessible crags, but he has been known to rear the mighty fabric in a tree, in the midst of some lonely island. Macgillivray found a Sea Eagle’s nest in an island in a Hebridean lake, in a mound of rock ‘not higher than could have been reached with a fishing-rod.’ He varies greatly in size, ‘some specimens measuring only six feet from tip to tip of the wings, while others are at least one half more.’ He is pugnacious as a Cock-robin, and as vulgar as a Vulture, but he can be tamed, and in his tame state becomes an interesting pet. The finest extant specimen is in the Stornoway collection of Sir James Matheson; it was killed in the island of Lewis, and is of gigantic size, and very light in colour.
     Many other rapacious birds frequent the Hebrides, from the Osprey down to the Kestrel, or Wind-hover; but the most interesting of all, perhaps, is the Peregrine ¹⁹⁴ Falcon, so lovely in form and plumage, and so elegant of flight The Peregrine breeds in all the outer islands, on the outlying rocks of Haskair, and even in St. Kilda. He is a murderous fellow, killing far more than he can eat, for the sheer sake of killing, twisting off the head of a snipe or a ptarmigan as unconcernedly as a waiter draws a bottle of beer! When he resides near the sea, he makes sad havoc among the Puffins and Guillemots. Next to him, in point of beauty, is his swift little kinsman, the Merlin, pluckiest of all the hawks, and deftest in the hunt. Game to the bone is the Soog, as he is called by the Celts, and will tackle a quarry out of all proportion to his strength. Snipes and Golden Plovers are his favourite feeding, and he will beat the marshes and sea-sands as carefully as an old pointer beats the turnips in September.
     While the Eagle and Hawks hunt by day, the Owls prowl by night. These latter birds are not numerous in the Hebrides, the short-eared Owl being the most common; but we have here and there seen the tawny Owl hovering on the skirts of the plantations, oftentimes enough put up awkwardly by the dogs when beating cover, and likely to share a sudden fate at the hands of some bungler, unless protected by the sympathetic ‘It’s only an Old Wife—poor thing!’ of some friendly keeper. The last Owl we saw was last night, beating the margin of Loch Bee for mice, with that curious limp flap of its downy wing, and occasionally resting as still as stone on the overhanging cone of a damp boulder, in just the same attitude in which we had not long before seen one of ¹⁹⁵ his kinsmen resting on Robert Browning’s shoulder, in the very heart of London. As to the White Owl, the true Cailleach, or Old Woman, she seems to have taken some deathly offence at our islands, for though there is a ruin on every headland, sorry a one of them all will she inhabit. Her ghastly presence would indeed become the gloaming hour, when the moon is shining on the ruined belfry of Icolmkill; but not even there, where the Spirit of the sea-loving Saint still walks o’ nights, is her weird cry heard, or her ghostly flight beheld.

Not a whit of her tuwhoo!
Her to woo to her tuwhit!

We have sought her in vain in Iona, in Dunstaffnage, in Rodel, and in many kindred places, chiefly desolate graveyards; finding in her stead, among the tombs, only the little Clacharan, ¹ in his white necktie, cluck-clucking as monotonously as a death-watch, and conducting eternally, on his own account, a kind of lonely spirit-rapping, in the most appropriate place. Among the same desolate homes of the dead, we have also found (as Dr. Gray seems to have found) the Sea-gulls coming to rest for the night, stealing through the twilight with a slow flight, which might be mistaken, at the first glance, for that of the Cailleach herself. What the Stone-chat is to graveyards, the Dipper is to lonely burns. He has many names in the Isles,—Lon uisge, Gobha dubh nan Allt, &c.—but none so sweet as the name familiar to every Saxon ear, that of Water-Ouzel. Who has not

—    ¹ Celtic name of the Stone-chat (Saxicola Rubicola).—

¹⁹⁶ encountered the little fellow, with his light eye and white breast, dipping backwards and forwards as he sits on a stone amid the tiny pools and freshets, and rising swiftly to follow with swift but exact flight the windings and twistings of the stream? and who that has ever so met him, has failed to see in his company his faithful and inseparable little mate? He likes the waterfall and the brawling linn, as well as the dark pools amid the green and mossy heath; and he is to be found building from head to foot of every mountain that can boast a burn, however tiny and unpretending. The young are born with the cry of water in their ears; often the nest where they lie and cheep is within a few feet of a torrent, the voice of which is a roaring thunder; and close at hand, amid the spray, the little father-ouzels sit on a mossy stone, and sing aloud.

What pleasures have great princes? &c.,

they seem to be crying, in the very words of the old song. To search for water-shells and eat the toothsome larvæ of the water-beetle, and to have the whole of a mountain brook for kingdom,—what royal lot can compare with this?

Whiles thro’ a linn the burnie plays,
     Whiles thro’ a glen it wimples,
Whiles bickering thro’ the golden haze
     With flickering dauncing dazzle,
Whiles cookin’ underneath the braes
     Beneath the flowing hazel! ¹

—    ¹ The lover of Burns must forgive blunders, as I quote from memory. —

¹⁹⁷     To the eye of the little feathered king and queen, the bubbling waters are a world miraculously tinted and sweet with summer sound. The life of the twain is full of calm joy. So at least thinks the angler, as he crouches under the bank from the shower, and sees the cool drops splashing like countless pearls round the Ouzel’s mossy throne in the midst of the pool. We hear for the first time, on the authority of Doctor Gray, that the Ouzel has been proscribed and decimated in many Highland parishes, because, forsooth, he is supposed to interfere with the rights of human fishermen! In former times, whoever slew one of these lovely birds received as his reward the privilege of fishing in the close season; and a reward of sixpence a head is this day given for the ‘Water Craw’ in some parts of Sutherlandshire. To such a pass come mortal ignorance and greed!—ignorance, here quite unaware that the Ouzel never touches the spawn of fish at all; and greed, unwilling to grant to a bird so gentle and so beautiful even a share of the prodigal gifts of nature.
     Far more persecuted than the Bird of the Burn is that other frequenter of inland waters, the Kingfisher: so lovely, that every cruel hand is raised against his life; so rare through such slaughter, that one may now search long and far without ever perceiving the azure gleam of its wing. Its head is not unlike that of a Heron, on a diminutive scale; and its attitude, as it sits motionless for hours together, on some bough overhanging the stream, is heron-like in its steadfastness and patience. Unsocial and solitary, it deposits its pink-white eggs and ¹⁹⁸ rears its young in a hole in the green bank. Flashing past, it seems like a winged emerald; in repose, its colour is ruddy brown. Seen in any light, it is a thing of perfect beauty, not to be spared from the precious things of the student of nature. To these Outer Hebrides, it never comes; but it has been found in the island of Skye. The dark, shrubless banks of these streams do not attract it; and, moreover, for so sportsmanlike and indefatigable a bird, the fishing is bad. It loves a stream shaded with alders and dwarf willows, and affects, too, spots well-warmed by the sun. When the buds of the water-lilies blow, and the well-oiled leaves float around them, when the dragon-fly poises in the leaves and gleams brilliantly, when the sun shines golden overhead and, below in the pool, you see the shadows of the motionless trout on the bright stones—then, creeping near, warily, look for the Kingfisher. There he sits, on a green branch near the mouth of his dwelling, arrayed as Solomon never was in all his glory, and shadowed by the willow tree,

                           That grows aslant the brook,
And shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.

The sun creeps behind a cloud for a moment; a tiny trout splashes, leaving a circle that widens and fades. What was that, the flash of an emerald or the gleam of some passing insect? ’Twas the King of Fishers darting down to seize his tiny prey; but so swiftly is he back again to his point of vantage, that he scarcely seems to have stirred at all.
¹⁹⁹     We sit dreaming, while a panorama of past scenes floats by, each scene surrounded by its presiding Spirit of a Bird. In the dizzy air, on the ‘ribbed sea sands,’ through dark pine woods paved with azure flowers, amid lone isles blackening in the sea, over swamp, bog, and rainbow-kindled marsh, we seem to be winding our ever-changing way. The Curlew calls, the Snipe drums, the Blackbird whistles, the Kestrel hovers, the Tern wavers, and the Grey-lag twangs. A little while ago we were in the woods near Bonaw, hearkening by nightfall to the monotonous calls of the grasshopper warblers; a moment since, amid the fir plantations on the banks of Loch Feochan, we were hearkening to the deep-toned plaint of the Cushat, and the whistling of the Mavis, just as Tannahill heard them of old in the ‘bonnie woods of Craigielea’—

Far ben thy dark green planting’s shade
     The cushat croodles amorouslie;
The mavis, down thy bughted glade,
     Gars echo ring frae tree to tree!

and now, we are floating on the storm-vexed waters of the Minch, out of sight of land, with a hurricane of rain around us (though the month is July), while a number of tiny Storm-petrels, tempted out doubtless by the infernal weather, are hovering up and down, swift as insects, close to the yacht’s stern. The tiny Petrel (Thalassidroma Pelagica, the bungling pedants have christened him; and, good heavens! what a mountain of a name for such a mite of a bird!) breeds everywhere in the Hebrides, affecting chiefly the most exposed quarters, ²⁰⁰ such as Canna, Rum, Eigg, and the heads of Skye. They fly chiefly by night, but a good stiff breeze, especially if it promises to rise, often brings them out by daylight: whence their appearance is by many fishermen considered ominous of bad weather.
     Dr. Gray’s description of their flight is perfect. “There they were, pattering the top of each wave, the broken crest of each they barely touched as it rose and threatened our bulwarks. Several times they seemed as if they might have been touched by the hand. . . . They did not appear to pick up anything, but untiringly followed the rising and falling of the water—now going down into a hollow, and now rising with the wave until the edge broke and curled over, when the little feet were let down with a gentle tripping movement as if trying to get a footing on the treacherous deep. . . . Sometimes, as one of them remained in the trough of the sea, until the wave seemed ready to engulf the little creature, it mounted sideways to let it pass, and down it went on the other side with ‘contemptuous celerity.’” The tiny black moth of a bird, measuring not six inches in length, burrows in the earth like a Puffin, and lays one small white egg; and after incubation, it feeds its small fluff of white down with oil secreted in its crop. So greasy is its body, that one has only to run a wick through it to have a capital lamp ready made. Its appearance at sea is deemed ominous enough by sailors (whence its familiar name of ‘Mother Carey’s Chicken’), and in good truth with some reason, for it seldom ventures far abroad in respectable weather. Nothing can be more ²⁰¹ delicious, to our taste, than the following little sketch of the Storm-petrel’s habits, and the sympathetic reader will thank us for transcribing it entire:

     Twenty years ago my valued correspondent, Mr. Graham, of whom I now take leave in these pages, communicated some very interesting notes on the Stormy Petrel, the insertion of the substance of which may not inappropriately bring my labours to a close. Mr. Graham became acquainted with the bird through a mere accident. He had, while residing at Iona, made frequent excursions to the famous isle of Staffa in a small boat of his own named ‘The Ornithologist,’ and on one of these occasions had been compelled, through a sudden storm, to remain alone all night on this isolated roosting-place under shelter of his boat, which he drew up on the landing and turned bottom upwards for the purpose. Of course, in the circumstances, sleep was impossible; and during the night he heard the most curious buzzing sounds emanating from the rough stony ground he was lying upon. They were not continuous, but broken every ten seconds or so by a sharp click. Waiting until daylight, he found the strange music issuing from beneath his feet; guided by the sound he commenced removing the heavy stones, and being encouraged in his labours by hearing the sounds nearer and more distinct—sometimes ceasing, then recommencing—he worked away till the noise and rolling of the rocks seemed to provoke the subterranean musician to renewed efforts, until with a vigorous exertion the last great stone was rooted out and the mystery laid bare. He saw a little black object shuffling off, leaving its small white egg lying on a blade of dry grass which protected it from the hard rock. It made no attempt to escape, as if dazzled by the glare of daylight, or stunned by the depth of its misfortune, but lay passively in his hand when he took it up, uttering only a faint squeak of surprise at the outrage. From this romantic island Mr. Graham afterwards procured several young birds, which he kept in ²⁰² confinement until they became fledged. He reared them solely upon cod-liver oil, which they sucked from a feather dipped into it, clattering their beaks and shaking their heads with evident satisfaction. Towards nightfall they became exceedingly restless and active; and on being taken out of their box they sat on the table and set their wings in motion so rapidly that they ceased to be discernible. Their eyes being closed during this exercise, the whirring of their wings apparently fanned the little fellows into the notion that they were far out at sea, travelling at the rate of forty miles an hour; and as their bodies became buoyant by the action of the wings, their little feet could retain no hold of the slippery mahogany; so the exhibition generally ended by the poor Petrels falling backwards and disappearing over the edge of the table. Two of these pets died and were sent to me through the post accompanied by a note from my friend, informing me that they had both departed this life during the roaring of an equinoctial storm.

Requiescant in pace! Who shall say that stone walls do make a prison, or iron bars a cage, when even a captive Mother Carey’s Chicken, by ‘whirring its wings rapidly,’ can ‘fan itself into the notion that it is far away at sea?’ Think of that, ye chamber-followers of the Byronic! Even in your false romantic flights, when, molly-coddling in a study (or a stew), you make believe to be leading corsairs to death, and offering proud love to dark-eyed Eastern maids, ye are still far behind the little Petrel in his prison. He has seen veritable storm, and his mind travels back to delights well-known and well-loved; ye, on the other hand, shut your eyes like him, merely conjure up the vapours of an idle fancy, have no experience to record, no delight to remember that is not a delusion and a closet-sham.
²⁰³     So much for the Petrel, whose very name is breezy and smelling of sea-salt. What bird comes next? What picture next appears? In a lonely lochan, glossy black, and with never reed or flower to relieve its sadness, under a dark sky seamed with silvern streaks, there rises a rocky isle, and close to the isle swims the Learga, or Black-throated Diver, troubling the brooding silence with his weird cry—Deoch! deoch! tha’n loch a traogbadh! ¹ Sunset on Loch Scavaig, the ocean glassy-still, and the Coolins rising lurid in the red light streaming over the western ocean, while the Solan drops like a bullet to his prey, and

The cormorant flaps o’er a sleek ocean-floor
     Of tremulous mother-of-pearl.

Twilight on the slopes of the mountains of Mull, and the evening star glimmering over the dark edge of the fir-wood, while the ghost-moths begin to issue from their green hiding-places, and the Night gar, looming on the summit of a tree, utters his monotonous call. A spring morning, with broken clouds and a rainbow, gleaming on the isles of Loch Awe, and cuckoos multitudinous as leaves in Vallambrosa telling their name to all the hills. The prospects are endless, the cries confusing as the chorus of birds in Aristophanes:

Toro, toro, toro, toro, toro, toro, toro, toro, toro,
                       Kickabau, kickabau,
Toro, toro, toro, toro, tobrix!

—    ¹ ‘Drink! drink! the lake is nearly dried up.’ —

²⁰⁴ With these for guides, one may wander further and see stranger scenes than ever came under the eyes of the Nephelococcygians; but, indeed, modern culture scarcely knows even their names, and the spots where they dwell scarcely attract even the passing tourist. Wonderful indeed is modern ignorance, only to be paralleled by modern fatuity. Few men know the difference between the Birch and the Hornbeam, the Curlew and the Whimbrel. Modern authors, poets particularly, write as if they had been brought up in a dungeon or a hothouse, never breathing the fresh air or beholding plants and birds in a state of nature. ‘It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.’ The pursuit of false comforts, the desire of vain accomplishments, the sucking of social lollipops, these are modern vanities. We were speaking the other day with one of the best educated men in England, a party finished to the finger-tips, great in philosophy, and ‘in Pindar and poets unrivalled.’ He had never seen an eagle or a red deer; he could neither shoot, fish, nor swim; he was sea-sick whenever he left dry land; he believed the ‘sheets’ of a boat to be her ‘sails;’ he knew (as Browning expresses it) ‘the Latin word for Parsley,’ but he had never even heard of ‘white’ heather. For this being, his University had done all it could, and had turned him out in the world about as ignorant as a parrot, and as helpless, for all manly intents and purposes, as a new-born baby.

The world is too much with us. Late or soon,
Getting or spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours.

²⁰⁵ So far, at least, as the knowledge of birds is concerned, the ordinary extent of knowledge may be safely summed up in the memorable conversation attached to the cut in ‘Punch’—’What’s that, Bill? An ’Awk?’—‘No, stoopid; it’s a Howl!’ when in point of fact, if we remember rightly, the subject of conversation was an Erne!
     That ‘’Awk’ brings us, by a natural transition, to the Great Auk, or Garefowl, the very name of which alone makes ornithologists prick up their ears, and in which even vulgarity is now interested, because the species is supposed to be extinct. This extraordinary bird has from time immemorial been a theme for wonder-stricken travellers. Martin, in his ‘Voyage to St. Kilda,’ published in 1698, describes the Garefowl as ‘above the size of a Solan Goose, of a black colour, red about the eyes, a large white spot under each eye, a long broad bill, stands stately, his whole body erected, his wings short, he flyeth not at all, layes his egg upon the bare rock, which, if taken away, he layes no more for that year; his egg is twice as big as that of a Solan Goose, and is variously spotted black, green, and dark.’
     Sixty years later, the Rev. Kenneth Macaulay landed in St. Kilda, remained there a month, and afterwards wrote a history of the island. He writes thus of the Great Auk: ‘I had not an opportunity of knowing a very curious fowl, sometimes seen upon this coast, and an absolute stranger, I am apt to believe, in every other part of Scotland. The men of Herta call it the Garefowl, corruptly, perhaps, instead of Rarefowl, a name probably given it by some one of those foreigners, whom either ²⁰⁶ choice or necessity drew into this secure region. This bird is above four feet in length, from the bill to the extremities of its feet; its wings are, in proportion to its size, very short, so that they can hardly poise or support the weight of its very large body. Its legs, neck, and bill are extremely long. It lays the egg, which, according to the account given me, exceeds that of a goose no less than the latter exceeds the egg of a hen, close by the sea mark, being incapable, on account of its bulk, to soar up to the cliffs. It makes its appearance in the month of July. The St. Kildians do not receive an annual visit from this strange bird as from all the rest in the list, and from many more. It keeps at a distance from them, they know not where, for a course of years. From what land or ocean it makes its uncertain voyages to their isle is perhaps a mystery. A gentleman who had been in the West Indies informed me that, according to the description given of him, he must be the Penguin of that clime, a fowl that points out the proper soundings of seafaring people.’
     Again, 1793, that delightful romancist, the Rev. John Lane Buchanan, wrote an account of St. Kilda and its birds, and averred that the Garefowl’s egg ‘exceeds that of a goose as much as that of the latter exceeds that of a hen.’ Lastly, let us quote Dr. Gray’s summary of the most recent appearances of the now missing bird:—

     No recent visitor to the island of St. Kilda appears to have received any satisfactory information regarding the existence of the Great Auk there. There is not even the bare mention of it in the ‘Journal of an Excursion to St. Kilda,’ published in ²⁰⁷ Glasgow in 1838 by P. Maclean, a writer who furnishes an interesting account of the birds on the authority of the then resident clergyman, the Rev. Neil Mackenzie, who had been there eight years; and Mr. John Macgillivray, who visited the island in 1840, was informed that though the bird was by no means of uncommon occurrence about St. Kilda, none had been known to breed there for many years past, and that the ‘oldest inhabitant’ only recollected the procuring of three or four examples. Mr. Elwes, who visited the island in H. M. S. ‘Harpy’ on May 22, 1868, has the following remarks in a valuable paper on the ‘Bird Stations of the Outer Hebrides,’ contributed to the ‘Ibis’ for 1869:—‘On landing we were met by the minister, Mr. Mackay, who appeared very glad to see anyone, as may well be imagined. Strange to say, he did not seem to take any interest in or to know much about the birds, though he has been two years among the people whose thoughts are more occupied by birds than anything else, and who depend principally upon them for their living. I showed a picture of the Great Auk, which Mr. J. H. Gurney, Junr., had kindly sent me, to the people, some of whom appeared to recognise it, and said that it had not been seen for many years; but they were so excited by the arrival of strangers, that it was impossible to get them to say more about it, and though Mr. Mackay promised to take down any stories or information about the bird that he could collect, when they had leisure to think about it, he has not as yet sent me any. I do not think, however, that more than two or three examples are at all likely to have been seen in the last forty years, as Mr. Atkinson of Newcastle, who went there in 1831, does not say a word about it in his paper ¹ beyond mentioning the name, and neither John Macgillivray, who visited the place in 1840, nor Sir W. Milner, says that any specimen had been recently procured. I believe that Bullock was also there about 1818; and as he had not long before met with the species in Orkney, there is little doubt he would have

—    ¹ ‘Trans. Nat. Hist. Soc.,’ Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1832. —

²⁰⁸ mentioned it to somebody if he had heard of any having been recently procured at St. Kilda. I made every inquiry about this bird on the north and west coast of Lewis, and showed pictures of it to the fishermen; but all agreed that nothing of the sort had been seen since they could remember.’ Writing in 1861, Professor Newton, in a paper contributed by him to the ‘Ibis’ for that year, on Mr. Wolley’s researches in Iceland respecting the Garefowl, states that Sir William Milner had informed him that within the last few years he had become possessed of a fine Great Auk, which he had reason to believe had been killed in the Hebrides. This specimen was found to have been stuffed with turf. The Great Auk is not mentioned by Dr. Patrick Neill in his ‘Tour through the Orkney and Shetland Islands,’ printed in 1806, a work which contains a full list of the birds known to inhabit that district; nor is it alluded to by Dr. John Barry in his ‘History of the Orkney Islands,’ which appeared in the following year. Negative evidence like this, however, may not carry much weight. Low, who died in 1795, but whose natural history manuscript was not published till 1813, remarks as follows:—‘I have often inquired about the Great Auk especially, but cannot find it is ever seen here;’ ¹ yet nearly twenty years later it was found by Mr. Bullock, who was but a casual visitor. The following remarks from an interesting little work entitled, ‘The Ornithologist’s Guide to the Islands of Orkney and Shetland,’ published in 1837, by Robert Dunn, now of Stromness, may not be out of place: ‘I have never seen a living specimen of this bird, nor do I believe it ever visits Shetland. I made inquiries at every place I visited, but no one knew it: had such a remarkable bird been seen there, I must have heard of it. During my stay at Orkney, and while on a visit at Papa Westra, I was informed by Mr. Trail, whom I had the pleasure of seeing two or three times, that a pair of these birds were constantly seen there for several years, and were christened by the people the King and

—    ¹ ‘Fauna Orcadiensis,’ p. 107.—

²⁰⁹ Queen of the Auks. Mr. Bullock, on his tour through these islands, made several attempts to obtain one, but was unsuccessful. About a fortnight after his departure one was shot and sent to him, and the other then forsook the place. Mr. Trail supposed they had a nest on the island, but on account of its exposed situation the surf must have washed the eggs from the rocks, and thus prevented any further increase.’ Ten years later another little work on the ‘Natural History of Orkney’ was issued by Dr. W. B. Baikie and Mr. Robert Heddle, who thus speak of the Great Auk:—‘This bird has not visited Orkney for many years. One was seen off Fair Isle in June 1798. A pair appeared in Papa Westra for several years.’

     The ornithologists still hope; the prospect every day grows more depressing. The cruel hand of man has done its work, and the probability is that the Garefowl is extinct, dead as the Dodos, to which, in its inability to fly and its voracious tastes, it bore a strong resemblance. This vanishing away lends to the species a strange interest. Were Garefowls numerous as Puffins, we should esteem them little, wonder at them still less; but the charm of mystery has been given, and even our well-crammed man who could not tell a Birch from a Hornbeam, would be interested here. O Garefowl!—

  . . . Thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where’er thy bones are hurled,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou, perhaps, under the whelming tide,
Visit’st the bottom of the wondrous world,—

if (as may well happen) there still exists some scattered survivor of thy race, woe to him, let him keep to his ²¹⁰ Icelandic solitude; for a price is set upon his head, and even the half savage Lapp and Finn know his value in the white man’s market. For our own part, our course even now lies St. Kilda-ward; and if, in some of these isolated waters, we should see the lost bird lingering, we shall be as wonder-stricken as one who should suddenly stumble upon the Dodo; but as to shooting or otherwise injuring a feather of the poor persecuted fellow, why, to parody the words of Canning’s knife-grinder,

‘We kill the Garefowl? We will see thee d—d first!’

We should rather endeavour to drive him out of danger, to take him on board, for example, and run with him northward, to some solitary ocean isle; and afterwards to keep our secret; for were Professor Newton, or any other pundit, to hear of our offence, why, as Bottom has it, ‘’twere pity of our life!’ Still, were our search crowned with success, to secure the bird, even for so friendly a purpose, would not be so easy. ‘First catch your Garefowl!’ It has been said that the bird was swift enough to elude even a six-oared boat, and if a survivor still swims, we pray with all our heart that Neptune or some other ocean-god may quadruple his speed!
     We have had enough of this day-dream. Closing the book that has conjured up so many pleasant pictures, and looking forth for a moment, we see that the gale is abating, for the ‘carry’ above in the clouds is running as fast as the wind below on the water; and we must fly across the Minch to get last-month’s letters.

[Notes:
Originally published in the August 1872 edition of The Saint Pauls Magazine (under his own name).

The Birds of the West of Scotland, including the Outer Hebrides by Robert Gray is available at the Internet Archive.

There are a number of unattributed quotations in the piece which I thought it might be helpful to identify:

“The woods, the streams themselves,...” from ‘The Birds of Scotland’ by James Grahame (1765-1811), the verse is used for the epigraph of Gray’s book:

“The woodland song, the various vocal quires
That harmonize fair Scotia’s streamy vales;
Their habitations, and their little joys;
The winged dwellers on the leas, and moors,
And Mountain cliffs; the woods, the streams themselves,
The sweetly rural, and the savage scene,—
Haunts of the plumy tribes,—be these my theme!”

The Birds of Scotland: with other poems 1807) is available at the Internet Archive.

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“The last I saw ...” from ‘Eagles - Composed at Dunollie Castle in the Bay of Oban’ by William Wordsworth.

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“Not a whit of her tuwhoo! ...” misquote of ‘Second Song [to the Owl] by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

‘Not a whit of thy tuwhoo,
Thee to woo to thy tuwhit,’

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“What pleasures have great princes?” song by William Byrd.

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“Whiles thro’ a linn the burnie plays, ...”  from ‘Halloween’ by Robert Burns. The correct verse is

‘Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,
     As thro’ the glen it wimpl’t;
Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays;
     Whyles in a wiel it dimpl’t;
Whyles glitter’d to the nightly rays,
     Wi’ bickerin, dancin dazzle;
Whyles cookit underneath the braes,
     Below the spreading hazel,
                         Unseen that night.’

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“That grows aslant the brook, ...”from Hamlet, Act IV, scene vii:

‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.’

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“Far ben thy dark green planting’s shade...” from the song, ‘Bonnie Wood of Craigielee’ by Robert Tannahill (1774-1810). The version given in Complete Songs and Poems of Robert Tannahill (1874) is:

‘Far ben thy dark green plantin’s shade,
     The cushat croodles am’rously,
The mavis down thy bughted glade,
     Gars echo ring frae ev’ry tree.’

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“The cormorant flaps o’er a sleek ocean-floor ...” from ‘A Bunch of Song-Flowers, I. Blaavin’ by Alexander Smith 1830?-1867).

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“It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.” from Walden by Henry David Thoreau:

“The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

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“The world is too much with us; late and soon, ...” from ‘The World Is Too Much With Us’ by William Wordsworth.

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“‘Punch’—’What’s that, Bill? An ’Awk?’—‘No, stoopid; it’s a Howl!’ when in point of fact, if we remember rightly, the subject of conversation was an Erne!” The original ends thus:
‘when in point of fact, if I remember rightly, the subject of conversation was neither one nor the other.’

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“Thee the shores and sounding seas ...” from Lycidas by John Milton. Buchanan changes the last line, which should read:
‘Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world,’

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‘Canning’s knife-grinder.’ ]

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                                                                                                                                                                 211

SCANDINAVIAN STUDIES

I.

A MORNING IN COPENHAGEN.

‘———They manage these things better in Denmark.’

THE air was full of a wet mist, familiar to the otherwise self-congratulatory people who dwell in the capital of Scotland. In the centre of the great square, surrounded by an admiring audience of street boys and street dogs, were certain military musicians, discoursing the martial strains of ‘King Christian stod ved höjen Mast;’ and in the far distance, innumerable dogs were answering in dismal discord. With no very lively feelings we hoisted our umbrella, sallied forth from our hotel, and made the best of our way through the narrow streets to the house of our friend the Professor. We found the old gentleman seated at his study window, with a coloured nightcap stuck on his white head, and the great black pipe between his teeth. For, like the old clergyman described by Andersen in his dismallest novel, ‘he had but one fault—he smoked much tobacco, and very bad tobacco, and every portion of his attire was so impregnated with the smoky odour, that if it were sent ²¹² over all the seas in Europe, ’twould still preserve the flavour of the tight, strong-smelling, beloved canister.’ We had arranged, the previous evening, to spend the morning together, in a stroll through the capital.
     ‘Good morning!’ said the Professor, with his feminine smile. ‘Take a cup of coffee? The sun is already elbowing the clouds towards England, and by the time that you have drunk your coffee and I have finished my pipe, the rain will have ceased. Hearken!’ he continued, as we sipped the black nectar. ‘The dogs down yonder made the whole night hideous, and even now they are not all silent. This canine pest you must have remarked is one of the characteristics of our capital. Copenhagen is as overrun with dogs as Constantinople. Here, however, they are not houseless, not vagabond hordes; no, they are at home; for every gentleman, every lady, every boy, has his or her dog; every house its Cerberus, in the shape of one or more dogs. But this, being so close to the harbour, is the worst part of the whole city. On board the merchant and fishing boats, they howl all night long, and Heaven help him who lies in the neighbourhood, and does not sleep heavily! In the daytime, there are puppies barking from windows, curs from doorsteps; tradesmen’s dogs, chained dogs, and loose dogs; dogs indoors, dogs in bed, dogs at table even—dogs of all kinds, of all sizes, and all degrees, yelping everywhere! They throng the street, they congregate in villainous groups in the squares, they howl from carriages, they sit moaning in the fish-market, wistfully eyeing the fish, they creep even into the churches, and mingle their ²¹³ whining with the drone of the preacher! In fact, here they swarm, to paraphrase the words of your great modern poet:

‘Great dogs, small dogs, lean dogs, brawny dogs,
Brown dogs, black dogs, grey dogs, tawny dogs,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
     Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails, and pricking whiskers,
     Families by tens and dozens!’

     ‘What! you read Browning!’ we exclaimed, with some astonishment.
     ‘I do indeed,’ replied the Professor, ‘and so do many of my friends. Let me tell you, sir, that we in Denmark do know something of English literature, while you in England know next to nothing of the literature of the North. The only man of whom you really do know anything is Hans Christian Andersen; he represents northern poesy in your eyes, while many of us will not allow that he is a poet at all. Holberg, Evald, Baggesen, Oehlenschläger, Grundtvig, Rahbek, Ingemann, Holberg, Molbech! what do you know of these; to say nothing of a host of smaller names, to say nothing of any of the great names of Sweden? But come! it rains no longer. We will promenade!’
     Forth we fared. The Professor had exchanged his nightcap for an old wideawake, but the inevitable black pipe was still fixed between his teeth. As we jogged along the unclean and narrow streets, he discoursed eloquently on the beauties of his native city; but as a stranger could not quite see the force of his expressions, ²¹⁴ it is useless to quote them. We soon reached the fish-market, a large square bounded at one end by a canal communicating with the sea. Close to the canal, with a background of black masts and sails, sat the fisher-women, presiding over tanks of water wherein the fish they were offering for sale swam living. Whenever a customer came, the great strong arms were plunged into the water, and a struggling fish was selected for inspection. Leaning over the sides of the barges behind, smoking their black cutty pipes, and watching their brawny better halves humbly, were the fishermen. But heedless of the cries of the women inviting us to purchase, we passed the canal by a drawbridge.
     ‘That is the King’s Palace,’ said the Professor, pointing to a large building which stood straight before us. ‘It contains much to interest the antiquary, besides a very fair picture gallery, and is open to the public two or three days a week. But we will not go there this morning. Hard by is something which will interest you more. You observe that square building, with the queer paintings on its walls. Well, that is Thorwaldsen’s Museum. It was erected, as you have perhaps heard, by public subscription, to contain the works of art which our great sculptor bequeathed to his country. It is his Museum, and it is his Mausoleum also—for it contains his grave.’
     We approached the Museum, on the exterior of which, in vari-coloured cement, is represented the sculptor’s return to Fatherland, after an absence of eighteen years, in 1838. On one side he is pictured landing before the ²¹⁵ enthusiastic crowd; on the other, are paintings representing the transport of the works to the Museum. The façade of the building represents Victory in her fiery car. Passing in by a side door, the Professor led the way to the centre of the Museum,—a wide open space roofed only by the heavens, and paven with stone. ‘This is the grave,’ said the Professor, standing with uncovered head before a tomb—a simple square, with the name and death-day of Thorwaldsen graven on the side, roses growing above, and a bouquet of field-flowers laid reverently by some gentle hand in the midst of all!
     ‘In Denmark,’ observed the old gentleman, ‘we honour our great men thus; but we do more—we help them to that eminence which is to be our glory. If a poor lad of Copenhagen show a genius for painting, we educate him with public money; and when he has learned the rudiments of his art, we give him, still with public money, a stipend which enables him to travel abroad for years. Poets, painters, scholars, historians,—all have the same chance; all get help at the outset, and the glorious education of travel. I have heard’ he added, with emphasis, ‘that in England you manage such things rather differently. I am not aware that your Court encourages genius, though your Prince, if the newspapers speak truly, deigns to patronise it occasionally—when it burns in the bosom of a fireman or a comic actor!’
     ‘In England,’ we replied, ‘it is believed every man, be he genius or fool, should fight his own way upward by the might of his own brain and hands.’
²¹⁶ ‘Very pretty. You starve a man of genius, or suffer him to waste his best years in menial labour, or brutalise his brain by the work of a flippant and worthless press; and then, if he does happen to sing you an immortal song or write you an immortal chronicle, you take all the credit to yourselves, just as if you had not been putting obstacle on obstacle, year after year, in the way of God Almighty’s purpose! A genius, say I, is not a beast of burden! Nine true poets out of ten, I aver, are like immortelles—they require the most delicate attention to bring out their beauties! Suffering should purify; but such suffering as ye entail brutalises. Hunger will turn a lyric poet into a wild animal! Debt will convert the cry which should be music for ages into an oath which dies in the undermost caverns of Hell!’
     ‘Paupertas impulet audax!’ we said, smiling at the Professor’s warmth.
     ‘Stuff! Poverty, in such a society as yours, does no genius good. The beasts of Germans are nearly as bad. Do you mean to tell me that these would not have got still grander things out of Schiller if they had treated him more liberally? Because he was fond of luxury and good living, should he have been compelled to work like a jacketless slave, turning off to order the ‘History of the Thirty Years’ War,’ when he might have soared still higher in the region of eternal song. You quite ignore the infinite possibilities of genius. You are satisfied if a poet gives you a diamond, when he might be rearing ye a palace of diamonds. We in Denmark act differently, and never lose sight of what a man may ²¹⁷ do. We make a grand speculation of a promising life, and are not at all angry at losing a few miserable pounds if the speculation fails.’
     So saying, he led the way into the building, where, for upwards of two hours, we regaled our eyes and minds with the contemplation of Thorwaldsen’s works. It is not our intention to describe these works here; to attempt to do so at all would be far to transcend the limits of a short paper. Enough to say, that the Museum contains much splendid workmanship, interspersed with a great deal of trash. The ‘Jason,’ for example, is striking, while some of the bas-reliefs are beneath contempt. What struck us most of all, on cool reflection, was the enormous amount of work Thorwaldsen had been able to get through—almost single-handed, so to speak. We expressed as much to the Professor, as we walked away.
     ‘Why, yes!’ he said, ‘Thorwaldsen did manage to leave a good many monuments behind him. We Danes, I will confess, are a queer compound of laziness and energy. Thorwaldsen was by nature inclined to be lazy; so are we all—’tis the national characteristic. But when we do work, my friend, we work like those Trolls in the story, who were able to build a city in a single night. All our great writers have been very prolific, yet most of them have taken plenty of pleasuring. Oehlenschlager enjoyed life hugely, yet what heaps of printed matter has he left behind him! I think myself we should write better if we did not write quite so much. The bulk of our literature lacks that artistic ²¹⁸ finish which slow and conscientious workmanship alone can give. We lounge as long as we can with our hands in our pockets and our pipes in our mouths; and the cacoethes scribendi seizes on us so suddenly and violently, that what we gain oftentimes in heat we lose in harmony. Thorwaldsen has left no statue, Oehlenschlager has left no tragedy, Holberg has left no comedy, which can be denominated absolutely complete of its kind—excellent and perfect as a work of art.’
     Here a handsome elderly gentleman, dressed in simple black, passed by, taking off his hat to the Professor, with a polite smile. The Professor responded, somewhat deferentially.
     ‘Rather a distinguished-looking person?’ said the Professor, quietly.
     ‘Undoubtedly. A brother author?’
     ‘Not exactly. That gentleman is the King of Denmark.’ And noticing our look of surprise, the Professor continued, ‘These things also we manage better in the North. His Majesty moves among us where he pleases like a simple gentleman, and he has never any reason to regret admitting his people to a certain amount of familiarity. Let the veriest tradesman recognise him in the street, and salute him, he will gracefully respond. He is not Christian the First, but he is the first of Christians, this King of ours. You noticed how he saluted me? All, I assure you, on account of that little work of mine on the Gnostic Philosophy. More than once, when I have been wandering in the park, we have encountered; he has addressed me, and we have fired away on the ²¹⁹ subjects dearest to my heart. Our King, in brief, is what he ought to be—a father among his children. We do not, like some other countries, illustrate the fable of the Donkey reigning as king over the other animals among whom, if I recollect rightly, the LION himself was included.’
     By this time we had reached the more populous part of the city. As we passed through a narrow street, the Professor pointed to a window on the second floor.
     ‘In that room,’ he said, ‘Jens Baggesen passed a certain portion of his youth.’
     ‘Baggesen?’ we repeated. ‘I have heard the name, but really know nothing of the owner.’
     ‘Baggesen,’ said the Professor, ‘was the greatest humorist, the brightest satirist, that Denmark ever produced. I will tell you about him as we walk along. His father was a clerk—a poor simple fellow, and his early days were passed in the country town of Korsöer, where he was born in 1764. After a series of misfortunes, he was sent to the University, where he supported himself by occupying his spare hours in private teaching. Despite privations of the most intense description, he made great progress in classical and philosophical studies, and passed his examination with honour. In his spare time he amused himself by writing comic verses; these verses were speedily popular among his classmates, and were circulated by them among the outside public. Finally, when only twenty years of age, he was induced to publish his “Comic Stories in Verse.” In an instant, as it were, he found himself famous. The success of his book ²²⁰ was enormous, and the boy of twenty was at once recognised by one and all as the greatest comic poet of Denmark. He went to bed a poor student, and awoke famous—with a rich market for every line he chose to write. Honours showered fast upon him. He was patronised and petted by the noblest in the land; and soon, in their society, he derived the one completion his genius needed—elegance of polish and refinement of taste. He now lounged about in Danish style for a considerable period, passing the most of his time in the country houses of the nobility. In a fit of activity he translated “Niel Klim’s Underground Journey,” which Holberg had written in Latin. This story, which bears a strong resemblance to “Gulliver’s Travels,” became highly popular. Not so “Holger Danske,” a comedy founded on Wieland’s “Oberon.” This last was dreadfully abused and satirised, and poor Jens Baggesen showed all the biliousness of his brethren. For Jens, you must know, was an irritable fellow—savage in attack, jealous of rivalry, feverishly ambitious, and impatient of censure. He speedily succeeded in making a great number of enemies; and there is no saying what might have happened to him, had not Government granted him a liberal stipend to travel whithersoever he pleased for three years.
     ‘He describes his travels in one of his pleasantest books—the “Labyrinth”—a kind of autobiographical gossip on Baggesen and men and things. A romantic meeting in Switzerland with a beautiful and accomplished girl, Sophia Haller, decided his fate matrimonially. He ²²¹ married, and after travelling through Germany returned to Copenhagen. He did not linger long. Domestic troubles came upon him; his wife fell sick, and was ordered to a warmer climate. He hastened her removal; but they had only reached Kiel when she died in childbed, bearing him twin sons. He was inconsolable, of course; but in about a year after his wife’s death he returned to Denmark with another wife. Again he rambled forth, dwelling in Germany and France, and acquiring a good deal of vicious taste in both. He returned again, solicited and received a fresh stipend, and again departed. Thus, for many a year, did Baggesen range Europe at his country’s expense, writing by fits and starts, still petted by the Danish public, still indulged in a thousand eccentricities by the liberal Government. Better had he stayed at home. Not content with wasting much valuable time in idleness, he conceived the idea of becoming a German instead of a Danish writer, and thence we may date his fall. His wild satiric mood at last pushed him to such an extreme that he forgot his country, ignored the innumerable benefits that fatherland had heaped upon him, and mocked Denmark in her bitterest hour of sorrow—the time of Nelson’s bombardment of Copenhagen. This was a wrong never to be forgiven; but meantime, while he had neglected his opportunities, the crown of song was snatched from his brow by a new aspirant, the man you see here represented in stone.’
     We had come into a wide street, and were standing before the large statue of a sitting figure—a strong, bold, ²²² Danish face, darkened by the mist and smoke of the capital.
     ‘This is our high priest of song,’ said the Professor, ‘Adam Oehlenschläger.’
     ‘I know a little of him.’
     ‘Poor Baggesen, on his last return to Denmark, found that the tide had turned against him in favour of the young tragedian. Picture his mortification and rage! No writer can equal your comic one for savage irritability. He abused the plays of Oehlenschläger both in print and by word of mouth, ridiculed them in a style which would have been vastly ludicrous had it not been so strongly coloured with jealousy and spleen. But the new star stood firm. Thenceforward the career of Baggesen was a sad journey downward. He hied to Paris with his wife. There, in 1821, he fell terribly ill, and was only saved by the tender attention of Prince Christian of Denmark, who had him nursed in his own house. Shortly afterwards his wife died, and was followed speedily by his dearest child. Under these sorrows he gradually sank. As his end drew nigh, a mad yearning came upon him to die in his native land, which had used him so gently and been repaid so ungenerously. He died on the way home, at Hamburg; and the poet whom he had abused revenged himself by writing a glowingly eulogistic poem on his death.’
     ‘Your system of stipends rather failed with Baggesen,’ we cried; ‘the gentleman was too flighty. If he had been an English author, hard knocks at the outset would have ²²³ taught him better manners. Was Oehlenschläger as lucky—pecuniarily, I mean?’
     ‘Denmark has nothing to reproach herself with in either case. The men had equal advantages, but Oehlenschläger was a finer, sterner genius than Baggesen, though even he had the national characteristics I have hinted at. He was the contemporary of Wieland, of Goethe, of Herder, and Jean Paul, and all that wondrous generation of intelligences who have founded German literature. He, too, belonged to the lower classes, though he never had to encounter the harsh lot that befell Baggesen in youth. He began to write little comedies and poems when very young, and his mind was soon attracted by the drama. He neglected his studies, and haunted the theatre. At last, having determined to become an actor, he solicited and obtained an engagement at the Grand Theatre. The result, as you may imagine, was unfavourable in the extreme. But I am not going to linger over the life of Oehlenschläger. Read his “Autobiography.” What I want to point out in his life is the matter which reflects on our treatment of our great authors. Oehlenschlääger was still but a boy, and had but recently failed as an actor, when he received his travelling stipend, and was free to make or mar himself. Here our liberality was amply repaid by a succession of works which will live as long as our country endures,—and it, I assure you, in spite of the attitude of England in the Schleswig-Holstein business, is in no immediate danger of extinction. But here we are at the ²²⁴ harbour, with the sea air in our nostrils. Ah!’ cried the old gentleman, pointing out seaward, ‘so long as we Danes have the water round us, and the sea spray dashing in on our faces in this fashion, we may, like our authors, be a little lazy at times, but our blood will have the ocean tumult in it, and we shall be too seaman-like to regard ungenerously those beacon-lights of genius who point out our path, and shine over us on the way.’

                                                                                                                                                             225

II.

THE OLD BALLADS OF DENMARK.

THE old ballads of Denmark, regarded from a merely antiquarian point of view, strike one as being somewhat fantastical mosaic. The region to which they introduce us is that of Tradition, not of History—albeit historical personages occasionally appear in mythical garb, passing along, like the shadowy generations of Banquo, to weird and monotonous music. Not until we have made up our minds to discard history altogether, not until we have assumed something of the credulous spirit of the men who made the melodies long ago, shall we be able to pass through the process of true enjoyment, and reach the point of criticism pure and proper. We shall get no good by being sceptical. We must believe in heroes of gigantic build, in dragons, in serpents, in weird spirits of the water and the air. We must not fall to picking and grumbling because the music to which we listen is imperfect: here a modern touch, closely following a tone of undoubted antiquity; there a style undoubtedly bred far north; and, close by, another clearly germane to the lands of the orange and cicala. We are in an enchanted region, listening to extraordinary ²²⁶ sounds. Heroes and spirits of all places and countries meet together in alternate discord and harmony. Directly we grow too curious, we are pelted with such a confusion of dates, contradictions, and flotsam and jetsam, that we begin to think ballad-reading a labour.
     But when we proceed in the right way, when we are in the humour to enjoy fine human truths without caring much about specially authenticated illustrations of such truths, we speedily find ourselves transported to an atmosphere swarming with creatures of delight and wonder. Everything we see is colossal, things as well as men being fashioned on a mighty scale; the adventurous nature burns fiercely as fire, lives fall thickly as the autumn leaves, and nearly every man is a big warrior. Werner the Raven sweeps across the seas, watched by Rosmer the Merman on his solitary rocks, and sending down a storm to catch the ship of a Danish king and queen. The mermaid combs her silken locks upon the shore. The Trold, or Goblin, holds his wild revels in the mountain. Two powers exist—physical strength and the command of the supernatural. We are by no means confined to Denmark, but flit all over Europe;—fighting with King Diderik of Berne, dreaming in a non-real Constantinople, as well as standing among giants on the Dovre Fjeld. But in our wanderings we again and again leave the battle-field, and come upon ‘places of nestling green,’ where abide love, and sorrow, and pity, and those gentler emotions which move the souls of all men in all times. We have love-making, ploughing and tilling, drinking and song-singing. At ²²⁷ every step we meet a beautiful maiden, frequently unfortunate, generally in love, and invariably with golden hair.
     This treasury of poetic lore might have been quite lost to us but for a timely accident. It was in the year 1586 that Queen Sophia of Denmark, being storm-bound for some days at Knutstrup, passed the time very pleasantly in discussing literary subjects with the learned and able pastor, Andrew Söffrensön (to whom, by the way, she had been introduced by Tycho Brahe), and touched among other topics upon the unpublished ballad-literature of the country. The result was that the pastor, about five years afterwards, published and edited the first hundred of Danish ‘Kjœmpe Viser.’ A hundred years afterwards, Peter Say, another ecclesiastic, and a gossip after Isaak Walton’s own heart, republished the work of Söffrensön, with the addition of one hundred pieces of his own collecting, and dedicated the whole—ballads, fantastical preface, and industrious notes—to Queen Amelia. From that time forth the stock has gone on increasing, and much useful information concerning its growth has been added from time to time by various editors. The ballads themselves may be divided into four classes: the ‘Kjœmpe Viser,’ or battle pieces; the historical pieces; the poems founded on popular superstition; and the poems dealing with the domestic affections. Much as these effusions have been altered, mutilated, or improved upon, in the course of transmission from generation to generation, they contain many a soft strain, many a ²²⁸ rough tone, many an antique meaning, which long ago mingled with the harps of the wandering minstrels—nay, which may have been familiar, for anything we know to the contrary, to the very Scalds themselves.
     At the time when Andrew Söffrensön published his centenary, the ballads had been floating about the land for centuries, and the rude melodies to which some of them may still be sung stirred the blood and moistened the eyes in many a peasant household. Transmitted in the same manner as the Scottish and Breton ballads, as a precious heritage from father to son, they were preserved by popular recitation. With all their contradictions and inconsistencies, they are national—distinguishable from the Scottish writings of the same class, although possessing many delicate points of similarity. As for the themes, some are of German and others of southern origin, while many are clearly Scandinavian. The adventurers who swept southward, to range themselves under the banners of strange chiefs, not seldom returned home brimful of wild exaggerated stories, to beguile many a winter night; and these stories in process of time became so imbedded in popular tradition, that it was difficult to guess whence they primarily came, and gathered so much moss of the soil in the process of rolling down the years, that their foreign colour soon faded into the sombre greys of northern poesy. Travellers, flocking northward in the middle ages, added to the stock, bringing subtle delicacies from Germany, and fervid tenderness from Italy. But much emanated from the north itself—from the storm-tost shores of Denmark, ²²⁹ and from the wild realm of the eternal snow and midnight sun. There were heroes and giants breasting the Dovre Fjord, as well as striding over the Adriatic. Certain shapes there were which loved the sea-surrounded little nation only. The Lindorm, hugest of serpents, crawled near Verona; but the Valrafn, or Raven of Battle, loved the swell and roar of the fierce north sea. The Dragon ranged as far south as Syria: but the Ocean-sprite liked cold waters, and flashed, icy-bearded, through the rack and cloud of storm. In the Scottish ballad we find the kelpie, but search in vain for the mermaid. In the Breton ballad we see the ‘Korrigaun,’ seated with wild eyes by the side of the wayside well; but hear little of the mountain-loving Trolds and Elves. It is in supernatural conceptions, indeed, in the creation of typical spirits to represent certain ever-present operations of nature, that the Danish ballads excel being equalled in that respect only by the German Lieder, with which, they have so very much in common. They seldom or never quite reach the rugged force of language,—shown in such Breton pieces as ‘Jannedik Flamm’ and the wild early battle-song. They are never so refinedly tender as the best Scottish pieces. We have to search in them in vain for the exquisite melody of the last portion of ‘Fair Annie of Lochryan,’ or for the pathetic and picturesque loveliness of ‘Clerk Saunders,’ in those exquisite lines after the murder:

Clerk Saunders he started, and Margaret she turn’d
     Into his arms, as asleep she lay;
And sad and silent was the night
     That was between thir twae.

And they lay still, and sleepéd sound,                                             230
     Until the day began to daw,
As kindly to him she did say,
     ‘It’s time, true love, ye were awa’!’

But he lay still and sleepéd sound,
     Albeit the sun began to sheen;
She looked atween her and the wa’,
     And dull and drowsy were his een.

But they have a truth and force of their own which stamp them as genuine poetry. In the mass, they might be described as a rough compromise of language with painfully vivid imagination. Nothing can be finer than the stories they contain, or more dramatic than the situations these stories entail; but no attempt is made to polish the expression or refine the imagery. They give one an impression of intense earnestness, of a habit of mind at once reticent and shadowed with the strangest mysteries. That the teller believes heart and soul in the story he is going to relate, is again and again proved by his dashing, at the very beginning of his narrative, into the catastrophe:

It was the young Herr Haagen,
     He lost his sweet young life!

And all because he would not listen to the warnings of a mermaid, but deliberately cut her head off. There is no pausing, no description, such as would infer a doubt of the reality of any person in the story. The point is, not to convey the fact that sea-maidens exist—a truth of which every listener is aware—but to prove the folly ²³¹ of disregarding their advice, when they warn us not to go to sea in bad weather.
     The ‘Kjœmpe Viser,’ ‘Stridssanger,’ or Ballads of Battle, are a series of pieces describing the exploits of kings, heroes, and giants. It is impossible to fix the time at which the events are supposed to occur; but it seems to have been a period when the new faith was gathering strength in the north, but when Thor, the mighty of muscle, was still a power divinely noisy, and when echoes from the battle-grounds of Valhalla still reverberated through the lands of mountain, snow, and cloud. Whom the heroes represented, or whether they represented any real personages at all, is of less consequence than the assurance, which may be boldly given, that the traditions concerning them are as antique as the fragments preserved by Sœmund, or to be found in the Sagas. They may be divided into two groups, both mightier, stronger, wilder, than the men now living—the genuine giants and the mere warriors, men of ordinary dimensions. It may be noted that the warriors, when they come to blows with the giants, nearly always have the best of it; and the ballad of ‘Berner Rise og Orm Ungersvend,’ is both a case in point and an excellent sample of the style of the ‘Kjœmpe Viser’ generally. As this ballad is very long, we shall not quote it, but briefly tell its story.
     The giant Berner was so big that he could with ease look over the battlements of any castle; but he was little-witted, irritable, never to be relied upon. ‘It would have been unfortunate had he been suffered to remain ²³² long in Denmark.’ One day he buckled his sword to his side, and strode to the palace of the king. ‘Hail, King of Denmark!’ he cried. ‘Either you shall give me your daughter, and share your land with me thereto, or we shall see which of your champions can meet me in the prize ring—i Kredsen.’ The king refused point-blank the first propositions, and swore that one of his warriors should encounter the giant. ‘Which of you brave Danish warriors,’ exclaimed the king, passing into the hall where they were assembled, ‘will fight this Berner, and receive my fair daughter and a share of my land as the reward of his bravery?’ The knights sat still, and did not answer a word;—all but one. For Orm, called Ungersvend, who sat ‘at the bottom of the board,’ sprang over the table and manfully accepted the offer. Berner, peeping over the castle, heard Orm’s mighty words. ‘What little mouse is this that squeaks so boldly?’ ‘I am no mouse,’ retaliated Orm; ‘I am King Sigfrid’s—son he who sleeps in the mountain.’ Whereupon the giant observed, doubtingly, that if King Sigfrid was his father, Orm could be only fifteen years old; a fine fellow to fight with so doughty a giant, surely. But the brave youth was undaunted. ‘Late in the evening, when the sun goes to rest,’ he mounted horse to ride to his father’s grave, his object being to procure the sword Birting, which lay by his father’s side. He knocked on the mountain ‘so hard, that it was a great wonder it did not fall with the blow.’ The stones and earth rattled, and there was much noise. Sigfrid stirred and heard. ‘May I not sleep in peace?’ ²³³ he cried. ‘Who wakes me so early? Let him beware lest he die by Birting!’ ‘I am Orm, thy youngest son, come to crave a boon.’ ‘Did I not give thee as much gold and silver as thou didst wish?’ ‘Yea!’ replied Orm; ‘but I value them not a penny. I want Birting; it is such a good sword.’ ‘Thou shalt not have Birting before thou hast been to Ireland, and avenged thy father’s death.’ ‘Hand up Birting!’ cried Orm, very angry! ‘or I will knock the mountain into a thousand pieces!’ This prevailed. ‘Reach down thy hand, and take Birting from my side; but break not my grave, or woe will be thy portion.’ That done, off went Orm, with ‘Birting on his back.’ On seeing him again, Berner began to hesitate, saying, ‘It does not become a warrior to fight with a child.’ But Orm attacked him, and they fought for three days, at the end of which Orm sliced off his opponent’s lower limbs at the knees. ‘Ugh!’ cried Berner, yielding; ‘it was unchampion-like to strike so low!’ ‘I was little and thou wert big, returned Orm; ‘I could not reach higher up!’ Leaving Berner to his reflections, the victor took Birting on his back and walked to the sea-shore, and there beheld one Tord of Valland, also a giant, coming on land. ‘Who is this little man?’ demanded Tord. ‘I am Orm Ungersvend, a champion bold and fine, and I have slain Berner, thine uncle.’ ‘If thou hast slain my dearest uncle, I slew the King of Ireland, thy father; and for that deed thou shalt not have a penny, or a penny’s worth.’ Then Orm raised Birting and struck off the head of Tord. First he slew Tord, and then all Tord’s men. Lastly, hastening back ²³⁴ to the palace, he took the king’s daughter by the hand. ‘Beautiful maiden!’ he exclaimed; ‘thou art now mine, and I have gone through all the danger for thy sake.’
     The above is not unlike our nursery legend of ‘Jack the Giant Killer;’ but it is told in good terse language, and the part where Orm visits his father’s grave is really powerful. It is noticeable that what was once serious literal description, the expression of sincere belief, sounds to a modern ear very like dry humour—the portion, for example, where Orm lops off the champion by the knees. The name ‘Mysseling’ (little mouse), and the adjective ‘böse’ (angry), from their resemblance to the German words ‘Mäuslein’ and ‘böse,’ would seem to suggest a German original. But ‘bös’ is said still to be in use in Norway.
     Perhaps the oldest of the battle ballads is the ‘Tournament,’ beginning

         It was a troop of gallant knights,
               They would a roving go,
         They have halted under Brattinborg,
               And pitched their tents below.
’Tis clatter, clatter, under hoof, when forth the heroes ride;

the last line being a kind of refrain to each stanza, to be found in all the Danish ballads, and generally having little or no connection with the theme. ¹ This ballad

—    ¹ These refrains doubtless belonged originally to pieces which they suited in significance and consistency, but in the course of transmission they have changed places. The refrain to ‘Berner Rise’ is

‘But the groves stand all in blossom!’

—appropriate for some pæan or love poem.     —

²³⁵ has been known time out of mind in Denmark, and is interesting as giving a description of the shields and devices, as well as of the peculiar idiosyncrasies, of a long list of fighters. It ends with a single combat between Herr Humble and Sivard Snarensvend, which latter performs great feats with an oak tree, torn out of the ground to serve as a cudgel. There is a considerable resemblance between the ‘Tournament’ and some portions of the ‘Vilkinasaga.’
     ‘Berner Rise’ and the ‘Tournament’ introduce us to many northern heroes. But the personages in many of the ‘Kjœmpe Viser’ are exclusively foreigners, belonging to the court of the Gothic King Diderik, or in some respect bound to him. King Diderik and his knights appear faintly and mistily in tradition; but surrounded by the silver haze of poetry, their figures stand out colossal, clear, and defined. ‘How the Warriors of King Diderik fought in the Land of Birting’ is a good ballad; but the best of all is the poem describing how Diderik and the Lion fought with the Serpent (Lindorm). Riding forth from Berne, one fine day, the king saw a lion and a serpent fighting, and after a battle of three days (the usual limit for combats in the ‘Kjœmpe Viser’), the former was getting the worst of it. ‘Help me, Herr King Diderik,’ cried the quadruped. ‘Help me, even for the sake of the golden lion which thou bearest on thy shield.’ ‘Long stood King Diderik, and thought thereupon’—though every minute was of consequence; but at last he drew his sword and attacked the serpent. He would have been victorious, ²³⁶ but unfortunately his sword broke off at the hilt. So the serpent ‘took him upon her back and his horse under her tongue,’ and crawled into her den in the mountain, where eleven young serpents were hungrily awaiting. She threw the horse to the babies, and tossed the man into a corner. ‘Keep an eye on this little mouthful, this toothsome bit; I am going to sleep, and shall eat him when I awake.’ So the wily lady went to sleep. Groping about the cave, Diderik found a sword, which he immediately recognised as Adelring, the property of King Sigfrid. ‘God help thy soul, Sigfrid! I never guessed that thou hadst died thus.’ Brandishing Adelring, he smote at the rocks, so that the mountain stood in flame. ‘If thou wakest our mother,’ screamed the little serpents, ‘it will go ill with thee.’ ‘I will awaken your mother,’ was the retort, ‘and with a very cold dream; for Sigfrid’s death shall be avenged upon you all.’ The serpent awakened in alarm. ‘What means all this noise?’ she cried; whereupon Diderik explained his intent. In spite of her cowardice and imploring, she and all her young were slain. But serpent stings and tongues, scattered everywhere, prevented the hero from passing out. ‘Curst be the lion!’ he cried in his agony. ‘The sneaking lion! had he not been graven on my shield, my horse would have borne me home.’ The lion heard from without. ‘Softly,’ he cried; ‘I am digging with my strong claw.’ And he did so, while Diderik used his sword; till at last they made a clear channel out of the mountain. On passing forth, Diderik began to bemoan the loss of his horse; ²³⁷ but the lion interrupted him, crying, ‘Mount my back, Master King Diderik, and I will bear thee home.’ The ballad fitly ends:—

O’er the deep dale King Diderik rode,
     And thro’ green field and wood;
And lightly, merrily along
     Went leaping the lion good.

King Diderik and the lion dwelt
     Together evermoe,
Right well had one the other freed
     From danger and much woe.

When Diderik in the greenwood rode,
     By his side the lion sped,
And in his lap when still he sat,
     The lion laid its head.

Wherefore was Diderik ever afterwards called the ‘Knight of the Lion’—a title he had won with exceeding honour.
     Thus are depicted, in somewhat startling colours, the manners and customs of a mythical period, familiar to us through the Sagas. The heroes sweep about, strong as the sword-blow, bright as the sword-flash. Echo babbles of wondrous things; every hill is haunted. But the tale-tellers talk like men dealing with facts, and are full of charming credulity. Not very different are the ‘Historical Ballads,’ so called, not because they are authentically historical, but because their heroes are historical personages. Beyond that, and the occasional mention of ‘fatherland,’ they have little to distinguish them from the other sets of ‘Viser.’ The northern ²³⁸ kings, from Oluf the Holy to Christian II., are the chief figures. We still find the supernatural element, besides plenty of fighting. King Waldemar flourishes a great sword, and a mermaid prophesies, soothsayer-like, to Queen Dagmar.
     Among the pieces founded on popular superstition, appear many of the gems of Danish ballad literature. In nearly every one of them we hear of enchantment, of men and maidens transformed into strange shapes; and it is remarkable that the worker of the foul witchcraft is invariably a cruel stepmother. The best of them are terse and strong, and impress us more solemnly than do the ‘Battle Ballads.’ We are in a strange region, as we read; and everywhere around us rises the wail of people who are doomed to visit the scenes of their humanity in unnatural forms.

In nova fert Animus mutatas dicere formas Corpora,

might be the motto of any future translator of these pieces. How the Bear of Dalby turned out to be a king’s son; how Werner the Raven, through drinking the blood of a little child, changed into the fairest knight eye of man could see; how an ugly serpent changed in the same way, and all by means of a pretty kiss from fair little Signe. But there are other kinds of supernatural manifestation, The Elves flit on ‘Elfer-hill,’and slay the young men; they dance in the grove by moonlight, and the daughter of the Elf-king sends Herr Oluf home, a dying man, to his bride. The ballad in ²³⁹ which the latter event occurs, bears, by the way, a striking resemblance to the Breton ballad of the ‘Korrigaun.’ The dead rise. A corpse accosts a horseman who is resting by a well, and makes him swear to avenge his death; and late at night, tormented by the sin of having robbed two fatherless bairns, rides a weary ghost, the refrain concerning whom has been adopted verbatim by Longfellow in his ‘Saga of King Oluf’:—

Dead rides Sir Morten of Foglesang!

The Trolds of the mountain besiege a peasant’s house, and the least of them all insists on having the peasant’s wife; but the catastrophe is a transformation—a prince’s son. ‘The Deceitful Merman’ beguiles Marstig’s daughter to her death, and the piece in which he does so is interesting as being the original of Goethe’s ‘Fisher.’ Goethe found the poem translated in Herder’s ‘Volkslieder.’ Another ballad, ‘Agnete and the Merman,’ begins—

On the high tower Agnete is pacing slow, ~
Sudden a Merman upsprings from below,
                   Ho! ho! ho! ~
A Merman upsprings from the water below.

‘Agnete! Agnete!’ he cries, ‘wilt thou be my true-love—my all-dearest?’ ‘Yea, if thou takest me with thee to the bottom of the sea.’ They dwell together eight years, and have seven sons. One day, Agnete, as she sits singing under the blue water, ‘hears the clocks of England clang,’ and straightway asks and receives permission to go on shore to church. She meets her mother ²⁴⁰ at the church-door. ‘Where hast thou been these eight years, my daughter?’ ‘I have been at the bottom of the sea,’ replies Agnete, ‘and have seven sons by the Merman.’ The Merman follows her into the church, and all the small images turn away their eyes from him. ‘Hearken, Agnete! thy small bairns are crying for thee.’ ‘Let them cry as long as they will; I shall not return to them.’ And the cruel one cannot be persuaded to go back. This pathetic outline, so capable of poetic treatment, forms the groundwork of one of the most musical and tender pieces in our language Mr. Matthew Arnold’s ‘Forsaken Merman.’ Indeed, the Danish mermen seem, with one or two exceptions, to have been good fellows, and badly used. One Rosmer Harmand does many kindly acts, but is rewarded with base ingratitude by everybody. The tale of Rosmer bears a close resemblance to the romance of Childe Rowland, quoted by Edgar in ‘Lear.’
     One of the best of the supernatural ballads is ‘Aage and Elsie,’ paraphrased by Oehlenschlager in ‘Axel and Valborg,’ and similar in subject to Bürger’s ‘Leonora.’ We shall translate it entire, as an excellent specimen of its class:—

It was the young Herr Aage
     He rode in summer shade,
To pay his troth to Elsie lyle,
     The rosy little maid.

He paid his troth to Elsie,
     And sealed it with red, red gold,
But ere a month had come and gone
     He lay in kirkyard mould.

It was the little Elsie,                                                                     241
     Her heart was clayey cold,
And young Herr Aage heard her moan
     Where he lay in kirkyard mould.

Uprose the young Herr Aage,
     Took coffin on his back,
And walked by night to Elsie’s bower,
     All thro’ the forest black.

Then knock’d he with his coffin,
     He knock’d and tirled the pin—
‘Rise up, my bonnie Elsie lyle,
     And let thy lover in!’

Then answered little Elsie,
     ‘I open not the door,
Unless thou namest Mary’s Son,
     As thou could’st do before!’

‘Stand up, my little Elsie,
     And open thy chamber door,
For I have named sweet Mary’s Son,
     As I could do before!’

It is the little Elsie,
     So worn, and pale, and thin,
She openeth the chamber-door
     And lets the dead man in.

His dew-damp dripping ringlets
     She kaims with kaim of gold,
And aye for every lock she curls
     Lets fall a tear-drop cold.

‘O listen, dear young Aage!
     Listen, all-dearest mine!
How fares it with thee underground
     In that dark grave of thine?’

‘Whenever thou art smiling,                                                        242
     When thy bosom gladly glows,
My grave in yonder dark kirkyard
   Is hung with leaves of rose.

‘Whenever thou art weeping,
     And thy bosom aches full sore,
My grave in yonder dark kirkyard
     Is filled with living gore.

‘Hark, the red cock is crowing,
     And the dawn gleams chill and grey,
The dead are summoned back to the grave,
     And I must haste away.

‘Hark, the black cock is crowing,
     ’Twill soon be break of day—
The gate of heaven is opening,
     And I must haste away!’

Upstood the pale Herr Aage,
     His coffin on his back,
Wearily to the cold kirkyard
     He walked thro’ the forest black.

It was the little Elsie,
     Her beads she sadly told—
She followed him thro the forest black
     Unto the kirkyard cold.

When they had passed the forest,
     And gained the kirkyard cold,
The dead Herr Aage’s golden locks
     Were grey and damp with mould.

When they had passed the kirkyard,
     And the kirk had enter’d in,
The young Herr Aage’s rosy cheeks
     Were ghastly pale and thin.

‘O listen, little Elsie,                                                                       243
     All-dearest, list to me!
O weep not for me any more,
     For I slumber tranquillie.

‘Look up, my little Elsie,
     Unto the lift so grey—
Look up unto the little stars,
     The night is winging away.’

She raised her eyes to heaven
     And the stars that glimmer’d o’er,—
Down sank the dead man to his grave—
     She saw him nevermore.

Home went little Elsie,
     Her heart was chilly cold,
And ere a month had come and gone
     She lay in kirkyard mould. ¹

The lines we have italicised seem to us at once tender and powerful, and the whole ballad is beautiful.
     The resemblance of ‘Aage and Elsie’ to the Scottish ballad of ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’ is apparent at a glance; and it also possesses some points in common with the old English ballad of the Suffolk Miracle.’ One portion contains a form of expression common in the old Scottish ballads, as in ‘Clerk Saunders,’—

Then up and crew the red, red cock,
     And up and crew the grey.

Indeed, only a few illustrations out of hundreds, showing the resemblance between the Danish and our own

—    ¹ See the author's ‘Ballads of the Affections’ (from the Scandinavian). Sampson, Low, and Co.     —

²⁴⁴ ballads, need be given here—since our purpose is not to build up any antiquarian theory, but to give a general and true impression of a somewhat neglected field of literature. ‘Skjön Anna’ (Beautiful Anna) is nearly the same as ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annie’ in the ‘Border Minstrelsy;’ ‘Stolt Ingeborg’ as the ‘Lady turned Sewing Man,’ in Percy’s ‘Reliques;’ and so on. The resemblance extends to the nicest points of language.

King Frederick sidder paa Koldinghus,
Med Ridder’ og Svende drikker han godt Rus,

is nearly word for word with the opening of ‘Sir Patrick Spens;’

Han satte Hjaltet mod en Sten,
Og Odden gjorde hans Hjerte Men,

is nothing more than the

He set the sword’s poynt to his brest,
     The pummill until a stone,

of Percy’s ‘Reliques.’ Compare also with the conclusion of ‘William and Margaret,’ in the ‘Reliques,’ this conclusion of ‘Herr Sallemand:’

In the southern chancel they laid him down,
     In the northern laid his love,
And out of each breast grew roses two,
     Their constancy to prove.

Out of each breast, grew roses two,
     And the blossoms they were red, &c.

But comparisons may stop here.
     We have left ourselves little room to write of the ²⁴⁵ large mass of romances and ballads, dealing with ordinary joys and sorrows consequent on the domestic affections. But to describe them in detail would far transcend our limits. Is it not enough that many of them are exquisite, and few of them disagreeable?— unless, indeed, the reader be a too fastidious person. In perusing them, indeed, we find ourselves again and again surprised at the recurrence of themes turning on seduction and illegitimacy—misfortunes and vices into which even kings and queens fall with dreadful frequency. It is not a nice subject to dwell upon, but he who is afraid of it must shut up old ballads for ever. We cannot get anything worse than the genuine version of the old Scottish ballad of ‘Lamkin.’ It must be confessed, moreover, that the themes are treated without pruriency, and that the frail ones are more unfortunate than sinful; for the seductions are nearly always caused by a lying troth on the part of the man, and the bastards grow up, and, sword in fist, compel their parents to make them honest children—as it seems they were able to do in those days and in those parts. The point of what might be styled immorality, we have said, is the one which first impresses us in reading the domestic pieces. But when we think of the changes which have taken place in manners and customs, and above all, when we contemplate the tender scenes of love, and joy, and sorrow which flower everywhere on our poetic vision—why, the immoral point seems so fine as to be hardly perceptible without green spectacles.
     We think we have written enough to send the reader ²⁴⁶ to the old Danish ballads. Many of them have been rendered into German by Grimm, in his ‘Altdänische Heldenlieder und Balladen;’ and Jamieson has translated five in his ‘National Ballads.’ But we need a good collection of them in English, and get it we must sooner or later. The sooner the better.

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Master-Spirits (‘Scandinavian Studies: III Björnson’s Masterpiece’) continued

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