The Isles of Loch Awe and Other Poems of my Youth With Sixteen Illustrations. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton |
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A DREAM OF NATURE. |
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 | The Isles of Loch Awe and Other Poems of my Youth |  |
A DREAM OF NATURE.
A gentle streame, whose murmuring wave did play
Emongst the pumy stones, and made a sowne
To lull him soft asleepe that by it lay.”
—The Faërie Queene.
Wherein I spent the springtime of my youth;
Where I first worshipped Nature and her truth,
And where in elder time one may have been
Than I dare hope for my maturer age;
Yet still in toils like his I would engage,
Although my sole reward be pleasure in pursuit.
Upon a rooted stone, with starry leaves
And there he would unfold a little store
Of plants he had collected by the stream.
'Twas in the early summer, when at noon,
Wearied with walking, in a secret place
Amongst the rocks he sought an hour of sleep.
The longings and the thoughts of boyish love
Found objects in his dreams, whereof the scene
Was ever in cool caves, or mossy banks,
Or deep, refreshing pools. Of rarest plants
And birds that seldom visit us, he dreamed;
And fossils in the stones and in the sky,
Such wondrous combinations as we see
Once in a lifetime. If humanity
Peopled the land, it was in noblest form
And most refined development. But though
His fancy was thus elegant, he found
An equal happiness in common things;
For in his dream the shady alder grew,
And ash with oval leaf, and hazel shrubs,
And glossy ivy. On the ragged sods
About the roots, the undeveloped ferns
Reared up their crozier heads of silvery white,
Or powdered with a bloom of frosted gold,
Amongst their delicate scroll-work. Round about,
The ground was thickly strewed with primroses.
Some dark rocks dripped with tributary springs,
And crowds of lilies choked the dampest nooks;
Hung o'er a thousand nebulæ of flowers.
Anemone, and hyacinth, and bells
That drew the bee into their silent mouths,
Were waving near a water-ousel's nest.
Before the entrance of a little cave
Long creepers hung, and every angled leaf
Cast a sharp shadow on the rocky front,
Polished by many floods. The water flew
In domes of crystal o'er the rounded stones,
Gilded with solar images, and bright
With azure of the sky. The young man's dream
Led him from stone to stone, until he turned
The corner of a rock; and in his ear
The heavy water sounded as it fell.
And thereupon he started in his sleep—
For, white against the snowy waterfall
There stood a lady mute and motionless.
On her fair shoulders fell a cloud of spray,
Above her glossy hair an iris hung.
Her eyes were dark and wild, and cornered with
Vermilion. Down her pure transparent skin
The bright drops chased each other, hanging long
About her breasts, that like two shapely knolls
Covered with wintry snow, shone white and cold;
Upon their tops the rosy sunset hue;
Their round sides bright with streams. Below her knees
The water did embrace her; but there gleamed
Beautiful tints ascending from her feet.
Two crimson-spotted trout were playing there,
Touching her shapely limbs as worshippers
Lean against marble pillars smooth and tall
Of some most sacred edifice. At this
The youth grew restless with enchanting thoughts,
And murmured passionate words; but afterwards
Dreamed on that by the self-same waterfall
He stood and sought her vainly. Still the moss
Was green beneath the spray that once had clothed
Her shining shoulders, and the loving trout
Were darting to and fro. The sun had set,
And white before the moon, its iris lost,
Plunged the distracted water. Every hue
Faded to pearly green or blackest voids;
And on the cold foam not an azure streak;
And on the crystal domes no golden light.
There was a tender greyness in the sky;
And past the moon, like revellers returning,
Cloud after cloud was hurrying towards the east,
Casting swift shadows on the rivulet.
Then through the pendulous boughs, and round about
The banks of fern and hyacinth, and in
The hollows of the rocks, there wandered loose
A voice that sometimes on the primrose beds,
And sometimes on the water, seemed to rest.
He sought her in the caves and in the pools,
That voice fell from above; and looking up,
He saw a ladder made of tangled roots,
And fractures of the stone. Ascending this,
In the full moonlight gorgeously reclining
Did he behold the lady of the stream.
Her dark locks wandered in the tall young grass;
And, kissing all her body with sweet lips,
Beneath her lay faithful forget-me-nots.
And looked upon him with such kindliness,
That grasping her white hand with reverence
And wonder at her beauty, by her side
He knelt, till gazing in her tender eyes,
Trembling all over with delicious hope,
He would have kissed the bloom upon her lip.
His body grew benumbed and lost its use,
Oppressed by dreadful nightmare that confines
The soul—still conscious—in a stiffened corpse.
So that in safety, and beyond his reach
That fair, unguarded form, with careless grace,
Lay smiling in the flowers. With quiet eyes
The lady watched the boy's astonished air,
And with a touch of haughtiness in tone,
That quickly changed to kindness kindling hope,
Whose music ever entered human heart.
And fewer still discover my retreat;
Yet, though thine eyes are drinking deep of love,
I am not won thus easily. The toil
That leads thee onward to my hidden joys
Must be a life-long struggle; every pause
Of daily labour eloquent with prayer
Unto my Father that he may bestow
The wealth of all my glory upon thee.
I am immortal, and eternal youth
Clothes me with all that freshness which excites
Your hot desire. Let patience prove your love:
For if true faith outlast this boyish passion,
And all the wishes of increasing years
Still point to me alone, that constancy
Will meet its fit reward; and if you come
In future years with patient training strong,
I will dissolve the spell that frets you now.”
Beheld the shadows of the ivy leaves
Still on the sunwarmed rock. He saw new thoughts
Come full of light from slumber's airy realm,
Whose wings resisted well the solar glare,
Not waxen like the pens of Dædalus;
In this soliloquy:
Success, fair Nature, in pursuit of thee;
And to thy service thus I dedicate
All my bright future, sitting at thy feet.
I now can see, although I fail to grasp
Thy purity within the waterfall,
And on the rippling surface everywhere,
Those living tints ascending from thy feet.
The trout do love thee, and the iris arch
Is thy tiara. On the primrose beds,
And through the pendulous boughs, and round about
The banks of fern and hyacinth, and in
The hollows of the rocks, thy voice is heard
By those whose ears, undeafened by the roar
Of cities, can perceive thy melodies.”
NOTE.
A paragraph appeared in “The Times” of June 16, 1841, which perhaps assumed too confidently the success of Mr. F. Spenser of Halifax in identifying the family to which he belonged with that of the poet. It was re-produced in “Notes and Queries,” (March 26, 1853), and answered in the same periodical on the ninth of the month following. The author of the reply grounds his principal objection to the paragraph on the fact that Hurstwood Hall was built by Barnard Towneley, and was for some time the property of his descendants. The building, however, which is supposed to have been honoured by the temporary residence of the author of “The Faërie Queene” is not Hurstwood Hall, but another house in the same village, probably of equal antiquity. The vignette illustrating this note was painted on the spot, and the house on the left is that which belonged to the Spensers, whereas a portion of the hall closes the view. Dr. Whitaker's silence on the subject is, after all, merely negative testimony; and his researches, though laborious, by no means exhausted the districts he described. Mr. Craik, in his industrious work on “Spenser and his Poetry,” enumerates the probabilities of the case. To him, therefore, I refer the reader for the details of the argument.
If Spenser ever visited Hurstwood, he must have crossed the Brun, there a beautiful rivulet about four miles from its source. And since the scene of the poem is about a mile lower down in the same valley, and by the same stream—and that, too, in the most picturesque part of its course—there is, I think, sufficient evidence to justify the allusion.
The “Dream of Nature,” it will be scarcely necessary to observe, is an early, and therefore of course a metaphysical poem. As I grow into natural philosophy the tendency to personification passes off. The warmth of colouring and the erotic sentiment of the allegory are mere boyishness, and will do no harm.
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