University of Virginia Library

AUSTEN LYELL

College-Musing

Crash! crash! there they go, Ralph, Darrel and Hugh,
And little Tom Guild, and that jovial crew.
First, cups in the tavern, and brawls in the street,
A springing of rattles, and scuffling of feet,
A laughter and screaming of girls, and a thud
As of some one that falls in the slush and the mud;
Then a rush up the stairs, and tramp, tramp overhead,
With a Babel of speech that might waken the dead,
A clinking of glasses, and ringing of bells,
And song after song till the daylight draws near—
Ralph sings like a bird, how his voice trills and swells!
And the rogues make a chorus that catches the ear:
Love song and drinking song, madrigal, glee,
Breaking in on the long-rolling boom of the sea.
What to do with their tramping and chorusing so
Through the still hours of thought, with the lamp burning low?
Let me read as I will, I read nothing but words;
And somehow they run into quavers and chords—
Metaphysics in music, crabbed Latin in tunes,
With no more clear meaning than so many Runes:
At the trick of the singer they trip in light measure,
But shake from their folds the fine thought which they treasure.
What to do?—Why not join in their jolly carouse?
Ralph's a splendid young scamp, and has plenty of nous,
Ay, and more Greek and Latin than half of the fellows
Who are cramming for honours, dull, bilious, and jealous.
Now, were Socrates here, and saw how they mope,
And travail in pain with a theme, or a trope,
And drag out a thought as with pulleys and cranks,
How his jests would go crack like a whip on their flanks!
But for Ralph—there the Greek eye would brighten to witness
His beauty and vigour, his swiftness and fitness
For wisdom or valour, for pleasure or power,
For speech to the Demos, or maid in her bower,
For bridling the wild horse, or quaffing the bowl,
Or holding discourse of the gods and the soul:
For dear to the sage was a beautiful youth,
And the wholeness of manhood was precious as truth.
And I too am young; and my blood too is hot
With the lust of all broad roads where pleasure is got.
They think me a bookworm, a winner of prizes,
Full of priggish decorums, and learned surmises;
Precise as a Puritan; feeding on Scholia,
And Elzevir classics, and black Melancholia:
Yet the craving of passion is gnawing within,
And the strong human hanker to dally with sin.
Ho! a flask of old wine, grey with cobwebs, whose scent
Made the grim spiders jolly in bloated content.
Rare topers! no fly buzzed their darkness, or brought
The grossness of appetite into their thought;
Nor bubble nor bead marred the rapture divine,
But they netted aroma, and breathed the bright wine,
And folding the cork in their mouse-coloured wraps,
They boozed on, and dreamt not of time and its lapse.
And oh for my Horace's Daphne or Phyllis,
Low-browed, and breathing of wreathed amaryllis;
How her eyes beam, and her golden curls break,
Like tangled laburnum drops, round her white neck!—
Shell-tipped her fingers are, taper and long,
Tripping she comes to me, lissom and strong,
Yet coy too, and hard to be caught, till I kiss
The blushes and dimples, and revel in bliss.
Why not? Why should phantoms of beauty and grace,
Pink and gold with the sunniest hues of delight,
Hang like clouds in their glory before the warm face
Of our youth, as it comes, in its morning and might,
Shining and singing and fresh with the dew;
Yet all be but shadows, and nothing be true?—
All but vanity, dream and inanity,
Nothing to shower down a blessing on you!
How was it that Goethe in full measure tasted
All that Life had to give him, nor missed aught, nor wasted!
Sat Shakespeare alone thus, and heard the dogs bark,
Like an owl in a barn staring into the dark,
And warming its five wits to find out the mystery
Of this wonderful world, and its wonderful history!
Did they shrink from love-tryste, song, or bright-beaded wine,
As if only the dulness of life were divine?
Nay, their nets swept the stream of our full-flowing gladness,
Its still pools of thought, and side-eddies of sadness;
Where life was the deepest, and passion was strong,
They fished in its waters, and lingered there long,
And so they were rich in the glorious sense
Of a wealth of world-wide experience.
And what is it all for—this heaping of ashes
On the hot fire of youth till you smother its flashes?—
This stating again of our hopeless imbroglios,
And dulling the brain with the dust of old folios?
There's my old school-companion, Dick Gow of the Glen,
With the brains of a half man, and labours of ten;
How he toils on, and mopes over volumes patristic,
And dogmas forensic, and rites eucharistic,
And fictions of law, that he calls gospel verity,
And tries to believe he believes in sincerity.
Meanwhile in the glen where his childhood had been
Stands the lowly turf hut, where the house-leek is green;
Near by it, the burn rushes hurrying down
Through the rocky gorge headlong, and turbid, and brown,
Or glistens o'er slippery shelves, green with long moss,
Where the maiden-hair tresses stretch half-way across,
Or sleeps in the pools where the speckled trout play,
And leap to the fly when the evening is grey,
Or sings through the woodland its few plaintive bars
To the slender oak-fern, and the pale sorrel-stars.
There, cramped with rheumatics, and bending with age,
His grave father sweats at the ditch and the hedge,
And sisters and brothers are patiently drudging
From day-break till dark, unrepining, ungrudging;
And all, as they stint food and raiment and fire,
Have but one hope that cheers them—to see the Kirk spire
In the glory long prayed for, when crossing the hill.
Lo! the folk are fast gathering from farmstead and mill,
From the shepherd's lone hut in the deep mountain shade,
And the wood-ranger's hid in the dim forest glade,
All to hear their boy preach the great Gospel, and sever
Himself from the old home and old life for ever.—
That's the end of his struggle, when Priesthood has riven
The fondest of earth's ties, that bind us to heaven;
Has sundered those hearts that were loving and true,
And linked him now fast to the Laird, and the few
Respectable folk who have nothing to do!
Or there is young Barbour; his factoring father
Heeds of nothing but charters, and wadsets, and leases,
Rotations of cropping, and how he shall gather
Biggest rents for my Lord whose waste daily increases.
But his boy, he must ponder high questions of Law,
And store up old precedent, rubric, and saw,
Load his memory daily with cases in point,
Learn the sharp fence of Logic to pierce through a joint
In his learned friend's argument, parry his hits,
Or to pester a witness half out of his wits.
Great the thoughts of his youth, to determine all right
By the law which the landlords have voted is light,
For ever immutable, sacred, divine,
To the serf of the glebe, and the thrall of the mine.
So his days and his nights shall be spent, and his youth
Dried up into parchment, amassing the truth
Which entails the broad acres of meadow and corn,
And the heath-purpled hills where the wild deer are born,
And the fish of the river, and bird of the air
To the high chosen people for whom the gods care—
Whose the anointing is, whose is the money,
And whose is the land, with its milk and honey,
So he squanders bright youth with its wonder and awe
For a wig and a gown, and this vision of Law!
Oh, but Culture? and what all the culture we get?
Old furniture crammed into “Lodgings to let,”—
Nothing blending in harmony, graceful in beauty,
Or meet for a high life of courage and duty;
Only that which will pay: for our culture is meant
Not to make noble men, but a handsome per cent.
We touch on all topics, but nothing we know;
We open all questions, and still leave them so;
Never look to the end of them, dare not abide
By the issues we raise, but glance ever aside;
For there is not a lie, spite of God's high decree,
But has made its nest sure, on some branch of our tree,
And has some vested right to exist in the land,
And some who will have it the tree could not stand
If the sticks, straws, and feathers, that sheltered the wrong,
Were swept from the boughs they have cumbered so long.
Let me toss to the wind every dream; let me know
All that Nature full-blooded, full-handed, can show;
Let me touch at all points the whole life that man lives,
And taste with a relish all pleasure it gives,
Link the sweet notes of music with sweet words of song,
Wreathe the arms in the dance, and go tripping along,
Kiss the peach-blossom cheek, rich with life's glowing dyes,
And know the wild rapture of love-gleaming eyes,
Crown the cup with its flowers, purple lip with old wine,
And let young vigour rage—in its passion divine.
Ah! we grow hydrocephalous, swelling the brain
At the cost of our manhood, till thinking is pain,
And the surfeited mind labours wearily through
A task which the healthful Greek lightly would do—
Lightly and laughing, for subtle and strong,
He lived at full pitch, and his life was a song.
Why, what demon is this, with the logic of Hell,
That pleads for the wild Beast within me so well—
The Beast that was doomed to a Cross by the Three
Awful names, that are named in the great Mystery?
Down, down, thou foul fiend! Hence to leprous romance
Of the demi-monde poisonous mushrooms of France.
Better sin like a man, doing after his kind,
Than sit here cold-blooded, debauching the mind.—
Hark! Ralph sings again, but he sings all alone,
And he wails now, poor fellow, the days that are gone.

Song— The Hours

Here suddenly he rose, and stood
Close by the window in dreamy mood.
The snow had ceased to fall, and lay
White o'er all the level reach,
White to the sand-dunes and the beach
Where the tumbling breakers fell,
And what was snow, and what was spray,
It was hard for the eye to tell.
The broad white moon was hurrying swift,
Trailing her pale skirts over the drift
Of the flying clouds; and through a rift,
Here and there, in the distance far,
He caught the gleam of a throbbing star;
And away to the north was a band of light,
That wavered like the sheen of spears
Swaying about in some ghostly fight—
For all was ghostly in that wan night,
And the shadows passed like fears—
Wan the moon looked, and wan the cloud,
And wan the earth in its snowy shroud.
So, as he gazed, his eyes grew dim,
And moon and stars were hid from him
By some strange mist, and then the mist
Shaped itself into forms, I wist:
And he saw his old home, 'neath the wooded hill,
Between the bridge and the red-roofed mill,
And the village near it, sleepy and still.
O'er the high pine-tops the clouds were creeping,
And all the heavens were grey and cold;
And he was aware that Death was there,
For amid the hush was a sound of weeping,
And as it were muffled, the kirk bell tolled.
Was it the bell?—or only the boom
Of the waves that mixed with his dreamy thought?
Whose face was that in the darkened room?
The features changed in the shadowy gloom,
But the passionless calm, it changèd not.
Sometimes, he thought it was his own;
Sometimes, it had his mother's look;
And his quivering lip gave a low, faint moan
At the pathos of its still rebuke.—
Had he broken her heart by the way he took?
Then Austen; Can this be a dream I am dreaming;
Yet I see the clouds drifting o'erhead, the moon gleaming
On the cold hard blue of the sea, and the stars—
Lo! yonder the Pleïades, yonder red Mars;
But they seem to shine in through an oak-panelled ceiling
Which is solid and real, with a weird, alien feeling,
As if they were the shadows, and it alone true.
Or was it the shadow of Fate that I saw
On my old mother's home, with a chill sense of awe?
She is not what she was, and her letters have strange
Longings of late in them, hinting of change.
She used to be hard, though as true as the steel,
And is not one to utter the half she may feel;
Now she'd fain have me with her, is weary alone
In the wild winter evenings; and ere she is gone
There is so much to say; yet I must not let that,
Or the thought of her, hinder the work I am at.
That's not like her, somehow; its mild, mellow light
Is soft as the gloaming that fades into night;
Yet here have I been adding shadows of sin
To the shadow of death she is walking in;
Help me, O God, that my life may yet prove
True to Thy thought, and the hope of her love.
From the old University town
Looking out on the cold north sea
He carried high honours down
To his home in the hill country:
And proud was the mother that bore him then,
Though little she said, for that was her way;
But all the village, and all the glen,
When they saw her, dressed in her goodliest grey,
Walk to the kirk on Sunday, knew
That whether the sermon was old or new,
Whether the prayers were brief or long,
Or the psalms were all sung out of tune,
Or the doctrine all unsound and wrong,
Or the service stayed till afternoon,
This once at least, she would not hear
For the voices of triumph that filled her ear:
And bonnets, too, might be gay and bright,
And ribbons flash in the gleams of light,
And eyes might turn from the pulpit, too,
To gaze at the young laird's stately pew;
For once the sin would be forgot
Of garment gay and wandering thought;
And sooth to say, they blamed her not.
They liked the youth; and learning still
Is more esteemed among the folk
Who till the glebe, or watch the flock,
In lonely glen, or silent hill,
Than wealth of gold; and also he
Was wont to mix with them pleasantly:
And it was as if honour had come on them all
When he stood up among them grave and tall,
At the smithy door, or the bowling green,
Hurling the quoit, or rolling the ball,
Foremost scholar the year had seen.