A DREAM OF THE HIGHLANDS.
[It appears from some pencil-marks on the margins of his copy of Unimore, that the author intended to have made some very extensive alterations on this poem. None of the hints, however, which he had jotted down for his own guidance, have been worked out by him-so that the text of the poem, with the exception of two or three verbal alterations from the MS. referred to, is here printed as it originally stood in Blackwood's Magazine.]
MORVEN and Morn and Spring and Solitude!
As yet it is scarce sunrise, but the sun
Sends dawn before him, while his dazzling disc
Is soaring from the sea, a gentle light,
Tender and delicate exceedingly,
'Neath which, as if it were a glittering veil,
Lies the new-woke and undisturbed earth,
Conscious once more of the sweet hour of Prime.
No object in creation now looks dead.
Stones, rocks, knolls, heather, broom, and furze and fern,
Have all a life-like semblance in the hush,
So strong is the expression of their joy;
Alive appears each solitary tree,
Half-tree, half-shrub, birch with its silver stem,
And hazel azure-hued; with feeling smiles,
The feeling of its own fresh loveliness,
That budding brake; and these wild briers enwreathed
With honeysuckles wild, brimful of life,
Now trail along, and clamber up and fill
The air with odours, by short-sleeping bee
Already visited; though not a bird
Within the nested foliage more than stirs,
Or twitters o'er the blissful wilderness.
Life breathes intenser beauty o'er the flowers.
There within one small round of greensward set
Dew-diamonded daisies, happy all
In their own sweetness and simplicity;
With lustre burnishing yon mossy nook
An inexhaustible hoard of primroses,
Heaped up by spring for the delight of morn,
Miser at once and prodigal; here steeped,
And striped and starred in colours manifold,
Mosses that 'twould be sin to tread upon;
And lo! the white mist lying like a dream,
Motionless almost, yet the while ascending
With gradual revelation of the desert
Brightly and balmily swimming far and wide,
And yet the spirit of its character
Varying not altering, as the circle spreads
Serener and more spacious ;-Like the Land
Where old songs say the Silent People dwell,
And aye one creature with a Christian name
Attends the Fairy Queen, by her beloved
O'er all elves else, though spite of all that love,
Oft is her seven years' sojourn dimmed with tears
Shed for their sake who, since the fatal hour
That saw their daughter spirited away,
Have little done but wander up and down
Wondering and weeping, or upon the brae
Whence she evanished, with their faces plunged
In both their hopeless hands, sit side by side,
Far from all human ken, from morn till night,
And all on through the moonlight starriness,
Without once knowing that there is a sky.
Morven and Morn and Spring and Solitude! In front is not the scene magnificent? Through the mist partly broken into fragments Fleece-like, and partly rolled voluminous Higher and higher up what now is seen To be a range of mountains, blind-faced cliffs And hoary crags and blasted stumps look out Strangely, and all as if they were alive, From midst of that disparting glamoury: While from yon indistinct and dubious gloom, Even now as sable as a mass of night, Softening and brightening into woodiness A shadowy slope with loveliest lights bestrewn (For see! the sun is in ascension),
Emerges an old forest. Haunt, no doubt,
Of many a sylvan, shy, thick-spotted roe,
And red-deer vagrant from the stony heights
Below the eagle's eyrie; single trees,
Each in itself a grove, at intervals
Gigantic towering o'er a race of giants,
Illustrious in the yellow glow of morn.
And now the mists from earth are clouds in heaven;
Clouds slowly castellating in a calm
Sublimer than a storm; while brighter breathes
O'er the whole firmament the breadth of blue,
Because of that excessive purity
Of all those hanging snow-white palaces,
A gentle contrast, but with power divine.
Morven and Morn and Spring and Solitude!
A multitudinous sea of mountain-tops;
And lo! th' uneyeable sun flames up the heavens.
Broad daylight now through all the winding glens
Is flowing river-like, but with no sound;
And there are goings on of human life
In hut and shieling and in woodland bower,
On the green pastures and the yellow sands;
And from the high cliff the deer-stalker sees
And hears the coble of the fisherman
Glancing and clanking, as she scarcely seems
To move o'er the still water sleepily,
From her stern almost level with the light
Letting her long net drop into the sea.
Harmonious all as music! For the soul,
Creative in the power of her delight,
Painter and Poet, though she knows it not,-
Believing all that crowd of images
That o'er the mountains swarm or on the main
To appertain by their appropriate right
To dead insensate Nature, while in truth
From the divinity within us born,
From life to death they fluctuate evermore,
Mistakes her inward thoughts for outward things,
And erring in her blest simplicity,
By dreams thus glorifies the universe!
Morven ! this magic lies upon thee now, Imagination, she it is who bathes
With blue celestial as an angel's eyes
Thy cloud-sustaining depths which she calls Heaven! By many an intermediate link of thought
She joins that frowning family of rocks
In strange relationship, till on the edge
Of the flat moor, that moss-enshrouded cairn,
Where heroes that once fought with Fingal sleep,
Is felt one with the skyey pinnacle
Round which that speck-it is an eagle-soars.
Silent in nature all thy waterfalls,
For distance makes them dumb as wreaths of snow;
But in Imagination's ear they sound
Thundrous for ever in the wilderness.
Where now are all thy rivers? In black woods
Night-hidden flow they through the blazing morn,
Or their imprisoned foam is only seen
By the fleet merlin shrieking 'twixt the crags
That topple o'er the turmoil far below.
But she beholdeth and she heareth all
The dazzling and the din, the flowing peace,
The leaping fury; hers the glory, when
Sunshiny rivers set the straths on fire;
And hers the gloom, when sullen as the grave
Their blackness bears upon its serpent bulk
No image, but of the huge thunder-cloud
That makes the earth as grim as its own heaven.
Morven belongs now wholly to the morn;
And morn's sole sovereign, the almighty Sun,
Surveys his kingdom with a regal eye,
On the blue, broad, and braided firmament
Throned, while his cloud-retinue hovering hangs
In idol-worship round the fount of light-
King call him not, he is indeed a god!
Look o'er the edge of the bare precipice! Forgotten are the mountains; and your heart Quakes and recoils, as dizzying down and down Ventures your eyesight, often shut in fear,
Nor daring to become familiar
With that strange world withdrawing from your gaze,
Most awful in its still profundity,
Nor of this steadfast earth! Why tremble so ?
Hold by the rock, lest wild imaginings
Do tempt you headlong o'er the battlements
Plumb down to undiscoverable death.
Unto the bottom of that blind abyss,
What a terrific distance from the sky!
There might the floating eagle's self feel fear!
But, look again, and with a steadied gaze ;
And lo! the dangerous is the beautiful,
The beautiful indeed the true sublime.
What an abyss of glorious poetry!
All that seemed mist and vapour like a shroud
In the dim dawning and the clearing morn,
In daylight is pure air. No-'tis not air,
Transparent though it be, and glimmering too
As gossamer by heat spun out of light,
A fine web yielding to the insect's wing;
The solid earth was ne'er so shadowy-
It is it is the liquid element,
An arm of the great Sea!
A Highland Loch!
Loch-Sunart! who, when tides and tempests roar,
Comes in among these mountains from the main,
"Twixt wooded Ardnamurchan's rocky cape
And Ardmore's shingly beach of hissing spray;
And while his thunders bid the Sound of Mull
Be dumb, sweeps onwards past a hundred bays
Hill-sheltered from the wrath that foams along
The mad mid-channel,-all as quiet they
As little separate worlds of summer dreams,—
And by storm-loving birds attended up
The mountain-hollow, white in their career
As are the breaking billows, spurns the Isles
Of craggy Carnich, and green Oronsay
Drenched in that sea-born shower o'er tree-tops driven, And ivied stones of what was once a tower
Now hardly known from rocks-and gathering might In the long reach between Dungallan caves
And Point of Arderinis ever fair
With her Elysian groves, bursts through that strait
Into another ampler inland sea;
Till, lo! subdued by some sweet influence,—
And potent is she though so meek the Eve,-
Down sinketh wearied the old Ocean
Insensibly into a solemn calm,
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