Chapter I: Front Matter (1)

Where the Forest Murmurs

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._

PHARAIS: A Romance of the Isles.
THE MOUNTAIN LOVERS: A Romance.
THE SIN-EATER, and other Tales.
THE WASHER OF THE FORD.
REISSUE SHORTER TALES, with others.
I. Spiritual Tales.
II. Barbaric Tales.
III. Tragic Romances.
(_Reissued by David Nutt._)

THE LAUGHTER OF PETERKIN: Old Celtic Tales Retold.
FROM THE HILLS OF DREAM: Poems.
THE DOMINION OF DREAMS.
THE DIVINE ADVENTURE.
THE WINGED DESTINY.

_To appear Shortly._

TORCHES OF LOVE AND DEATH: Poems Old and New.
THE IMMORTAL HOUR: Two Dramas and a Fragment.

WHERE THE FOREST
MURMURS. NATURE
ESSAYS. BY FIONA
MACLEOD

‘There through the branches go the ravens
of unresting thought.’--W. B. YEATS.

LONDON: PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICES
OF ‘COUNTRY LIFE,’ LTD. TAVISTOCK
STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C., & BY
GEORGE NEWNES, LTD. SOUTHAMPTON
STREET, STRAND, W.C. NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNERS’ SONS MCMVI

Fiona Macleod.]

But today I saw one, on these still garths of shadow and silence, who put a hollow reed to his lips and played a white spell of beauty. Then I knew Love and Sorrow to be one, as in the old myth of Oengus of the White Birds and The Grey Shadows.

(F. M.)]

Indian Saying]

TO

MR. P. ANDERSON GRAHAM

DEAR MR. GRAHAM--To whom so fittingly as to you could I inscribe this book? It was you who suggested it; you who in _Country Life_ published at intervals, longer or shorter as the errant spirit of composition moved me, the several papers which make it one book; you without whose encouragement and good counsel this volume would probably not have been written. Then, perchance, it might have gone to that Y-Brasil Press in the Country of the Young wherefrom are issued all the delightful books which, though possible and welcome in Tir-na-n’ Og, are unachieved in this more difficult world, except in dreams and hopes. It would be good to have readers among the kindly Shee ... do not the poets there know an easy time, having only to breathe their thought on to a leaf and to whisper their music to a reed, and lo the poem is public from the caverns of Tir-fo-tuinn to the hills of Flatheanas! ... but, till one gets behind the foam yonder, the desire of the heart is for comrades here. These hours of beauty have meant so much to me, somewhat in the writing, but much more in the long, incalculable hours and days out of which the writing has risen like the blue smoke out of woods, that I want to share them with others, who may care for the things written of as you and I care for them, and among whom may be a few who, likewise, will be moved to garner from each day of the eternal pageant one hour of unforgettable beauty.

FIONA MACLEOD.

“The Divine Adventure.”
F. M.]

CONTENTS

PAGE
WHERE THE FOREST MURMURS 1

THE MOUNTAIN CHARM 13

THE CLANS OF THE GRASS 26

THE TIDES 37

THE HILL-TARN 47

AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR 56

THE SONS OF THE NORTH WIND 66

ST. BRIDGET OF THE SHORES 76

THE HERALDS OF MARCH 87

THE TRIBE OF THE PLOVER 99

THE AWAKENER OF THE WOODS 112

THE WILD APPLE 124

RUNNING WATERS 136

THE SUMMER HERALDS 146

THE SEA-SPELL 158

SUMMER CLOUDS 168

THE CUCKOO’S SILENCE 178

THE COMING OF DUSK 188

AT THE RISING OF THE MOON 200

THE GARDENS OF THE SEA 211

THE MILKY WAY 221

SEPTEMBER 232

THE CHILDREN OF WIND AND THE CLAN OF PEACE 242

STILL WATERS 255

THE PLEIAD-MONTH 265

THE RAINY HYADES 277

WINTER STARS. I 290

WINTER STARS. II 301

BEYOND THE BLUE SEPTENTRIONS. TWO LEGENDS OF THE POLAR STARS 312

WHITE WEATHER: A MOUNTAIN REVERIE 327

ROSA MYSTICA (AND ROSES OF AUTUMN) 337

THE STAR OF REST: A FRAGMENT 349

Many runes the cold has taught me,
Many lays the rain has brought me,
Other songs the winds have sung me;
Many birds from many forests
Oft have sung me lays in concord;
Waves of sea, and ocean billows,
Music from the many waters,
Music from the whole creation,
Oft have been my guide and master.

_The Kalevala._

F. M.]

WHERE THE FOREST MURMURS

It is when the trees are leafless, or when the last withered leaves rustle in the wintry air, creeping along the bare boughs like tremulous mice, or fluttering from the branches like the tired and starving swallows left behind in the ebbing tides of migration, that the secret of the forest is most likely to be surprised. Mystery is always there. Silence and whispers, still glooms, sudden radiances, the passage of wind and idle airs, all these inhabit the forest at every season. But it is not in their amplitude that great woodlands reveal their secret life. In the first vernal weeks the wave of green creates a mist or shimmering veil of delicate beauty, through which the missel-thrush calls, and the loud screech of the jay is heard like a savage trumpet-cry. The woods then are full of a virginal beauty. There is intoxication in the light air. The cold azure among the beech-spaces or where the tall elms sway in the east wind, is, like the sea, exquisitely desirable, exquisitely unfamiliar, inhuman, of another world. Then follow the days when the violets creep through the mosses at the base of great oaks, when the dust of snowbloom on the blackthorn gives way to the trailing dog-rose, when myriads of bees among the chestnut-blossoms fill the air with a continuous drowsy unrest, when the cushat calls from the heart of the fir, when beyond the green billowy roof of elm and hornbeam, of oak and beach, of sycamore and lime and tardy ash, the mysterious bells of the South fall through leagues of warm air, as the unseen cuckoo sails on the long tides of the wind. Then, in truth, is there magic in the woods. The forest is alive in its divine youth. Every bough is a vast plume of joy: on every branch a sunray falls, or a thrush sways in song, or the gauzy ephemeridæ dance in rising and falling aerial cones. The wind moves with the feet of a fawn, with the wings of a dove, with the passing breath of the white owl at dusk. There is not a spot where is neither fragrance nor beauty nor life. From the tiniest arch of grass and twig the shrewmouse will peep: above the shallowest rain-pool the dragon-fly will hang in miraculous suspense, like one of the faery javelins of Midir which in a moment could be withheld in mid-flight. The squirrel swings from branch to branch: the leveret shakes the dew from the shadowed grass: the rabbits flitter to and fro like brown beams of life: the robin, the chaffinch, the ousel, call through the warm green-glooms: on the bramble-spray and from the fern-garth the yellow-hammer reiterates his gladsome single song: in the cloudless blue fields of the sky the swifts weave a maze of shadow, the rooks rise and fall in giddy ascents and descents like black galleys surmounting measureless waves and sinking into incalculable gulfs.

Then the forest wearies of this interminable exuberance, this daily and nightly charm of exultant life. It desires another spell, the enchantment of silence, of dreams. One day the songs cease: the nests are cold. In the lush meadows the hare sleeps, the corncrake calls. By the brook the cattle stand, motionless, or with long tails rhythmically a-swing and ears a-twitch above the moist amber-violet dreamless eyes. The columnar trees are like phantom-smoke of secret invisible fires. In the green-glooms of the forest a sigh is heard. A troubled and furtive moan is audible in waste indiscoverable places. The thunder-time is come. Now in the woods may be seen and heard and felt that secret presence which in the spring months hid behind songs and blossom, and later clothed itself in dense veils of green and all the magic of June. Something is now evident, that was not evident: somewhat is entered into the forest. The leaves know it: the bracken knows it: the secret is in every copse, in every thicket, is palpable in every glade, is abroad in every shadow-thridden avenue, is common to the spreading bough and the leaning branch. It is not a rumour; for that might be the wind stealthily lifting his long wings from glade to glade. It is not a whisper; for that might be the secret passage of unquiet airs, furtive heralds of the unloosening thunder. It is not a sigh; for that might be the breath of branch and bough, of fern-frond and grass, obvious in the great suspense. It is an ineffable communication. It comes along the ways of silence; along the ways of sound: its light feet are on sunrays and on shadows. Like dew, one knows not whether it is mysteriously gathered from below or secretly come from on high: simply it is there, above, around, beneath.

But the hush is dispelled at last. The long lances of the rain come slanting through the branches; they break, as against invisible barriers, and fall in a myriad pattering rush. The hoarse mutterings and sudden crashing roar of the thunder possess the whole forest. There are no more privacies, the secrecies are violated. From that moment the woods are renewed, and with the renewal the secret spirit that dwells within them withdraws, is not to be surprised, is inaudible, indefinitely recedes, is become remote, obscure, ineffable, incommunicable. And so, through veils of silence, and hot noons and husht warm midnights, the long weeks of July and August go by.

In the woods of September surely the forest-soul may be surprised, will be the thought of many. In that month the sweet incessant business of bird and beast lessens or is at an end. The woodpecker may still tap at the boles of gnarled oaks and chestnuts; the squirrel is more than ever mischievously gay; on frosty mornings, when the gossamer webs are woven across every bramble, and from frond to frond of the bronze-stained bracken, the redbreast tries and retries the poignant new song he has somehow learned since first he flaunted his bright canticles of March and April from the meadow-hedge or the sunned greenness of the beech-covert. But there is a general silence, a present suspense, while the lime yellows, and the birch takes on her pale gold, and oak and sycamore and ash slowly transmute their green multitudes into a new throng clad in russet or dull red or sunset-orange. The forest is full of loveliness: in her dusky ways faint azure mists gather. When the fawn leaps through the fern it is no longer soundlessly: there is a thin dry rustle, as of a dove brushing swiftly from its fastness in an ancient yew. One may pass from covert to covert, from glade to glade, and find the Secret just about to be revealed ... somewhere beyond the group of birches, beside that oak it may be, just behind that isolated thorn. But it is never quite overtaken. It is as evasive as moonlight in the hollows of waves. When present, it is already gone. When approached, it has the unhasting but irretrievable withdrawal of the shadow. In October this bewildering evasion is still more obvious, because the continual disclosure is more near and intimate. When, after autumns of rain and wind, or the sudden stealthy advent of nocturnal frosts, a multitude of leaves becomes sere and wan, and then the leaves strew every billow of wind like clots of driven foam, or fall in still wavering flight like flakes of windless snow, then, it is surely then that the great surprise is imminent, that the secret and furtive whisper will become a voice. And yet there is something withheld. In November itself there are days, weeks even, when a rich autumn survives. The oaks and ashes will often keep their red and orange till after St. Luke’s Peace; in sheltered parts of the forest even the plane, the sycamore, and the chestnut will flaunt their thin leopard-spotted yellow bannerets. I remember coming upon a Spanish chestnut in the centre of a group of all but leafless hornbeams. There seemed to be not a leaf missing from that splendid congregation of scarlet and amber and luminous saffron. A few yards on and even the hardy beeches and oaks were denuded of all but a scattered and defeated company of brown or withered stragglers. Why should that single tree have kept its early October loveliness unchanged through those weeks of rain and wind and frosts of midnight and dawn? There was not one of its immediate company but was in desolate ruin, showing the bare nests high among the stark boughs. Through the whole forest the great unloosening had gone. Even the oaks in hollow places which had kept greenness like a continual wave suspended among dull masses of seaweed, had begun to yield to the vanishing call of the last voices of summer. Day by day their scattered tribes, then whole clans, broke up the tents of home and departed on the long mysterious exile. Yet this sentinel at the Gate of the North stood undaunted, splendid in warrior array. The same instinct that impels the soul from its outward home into the incalculable void moves the leaf with the imperious desire of the grey wind. But as, in human life, there are some who retain a splendid youth far into the failing regions of grey hair and broken years, so in the forest life there are trees which seem able to defy wind and rain and the consuming feet of frost.

The most subtle charm of the woods in November is in those blue spaces which lie at so brief a distance in every avenue of meeting boughs, under every enclosing branch. This azure mist which gathers like still faint smoke has the spell of silent waters, of moonlight, of the pale rose of serene dawns. It has a light that is its own, as unique as that unnameable flame which burns in the core of the rainbow. The earth breathes it; it is the breath of the fallen leaves, the moss, the tangled fern, the undergrowth, the trees; it is the breath also of the windless grey-blue sky that leans so low. Surely, also, it is the breath of that otherworld of which our songs and legends are so full. It has that mysteriousness, that spell, with which in imagination we endow the noon silences, the eves and dawns of faery twilights.

Still, the silence and the witchery of the forest solitudes in November are of the spell of autumn. The last enchantment of mid-winter is not yet come.

It is in ‘the dead months’ that the forest permits the last disguises to fall away. The forest-soul is no longer an incommunicable mystery. It is abroad. It is a communicable dream. In that magnificent nakedness it knows its safety. For the first time it stands like a soul that has mastered all material things and is fearless in face of the immaterial things which are the only life of the spirit.

In these ‘dead months’ of December and January the forest lives its own life. It is not asleep as the poets feign. Sleep has entered into the forest, has made the deep silence its habitation: but the forest itself is awake, mysterious, omnipresent, a creature seen at last in its naked majesty.

One says lightly, there is no green thing left. That, of course, is a mere phrase of relativity. There is always green fern somewhere, even in the garths of tangled yellow-brown bracken. There is always moss somewhere, hidden among the great serpentine roots of the beeches. The ilex will keep its dusty green through the harvest winter: the yew, the cypress, the holly, have no need of the continual invasion of the winds and rains and snows. On the ash and elm the wood-ivy will hang her spiked leaves. On many of the oaks the lovely dull green of the mistletoe will droop in graceful clusters, the cream-white berries glistening like innumerable pleiads of pearls. But these are lost in the immense uniformity of desolation. They are accidents, interludes. The wilderness knows them, as the grey wastes of tempestuous seas know a wave here and there that lifts a huge rampart of jade crowned with snow, or the long resiliency of gigantic billows which reveal smooth falling precipices of azure. The waste itself is one vast desolation, the more grey and terrible because in the mass invariable.

To go through those winter-aisles of the forest is to know an elation foreign to the melancholy of November or to the first fall of the leaf. It is not the elation of certain days in February, when the storm-cock tosses his song among the wild reefs of naked bough and branch. It is not the elation of March, when a blueness haunts the myriad unburst buds, and the throstle builds her nest and calls to the South. It is not the elation of April, when the virginal green is like exquisite music of life in miraculous suspense, nor the elation of May, when the wild rose moves in soft flame upon the thickets and the returned magic of the cuckoo is an intoxication, nor the elation of June, when the merle above the honeysuckle and the cushat in the green-glooms fill the hot noons with joy, and when the long fragrant twilights are thrilled with the passion of the nightjar. It has not this rapture nor that delight; but its elation is an ecstasy that is its own. It is then that one understands as one has never understood. It is then that one loves the mystery one has but fugitively divined. Where the forest murmurs there is music: ancient, everlasting. Go to the winter woods: listen there, look, watch, and ‘the dead months’ will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest. Then there is always one possible superb fortune. You may see the woods in snow. There is nothing in the world more beautiful than the forest clothed to its very hollows in snow. That is a loveliness to which surely none can be insensitive. It is the still ecstasy of Nature, wherein every spray, every blade of grass, every spire of reed, every intricacy of twig, is clad with radiance, and myriad form is renewed in continual change as though in the passionate delight of the white Artificer. It is beauty so great and complex that the imagination is stilled into an aching hush. There is the same trouble in the soul as before the starry hosts of a winter night.

THE MOUNTAIN CHARM

A famous writer of the eighteenth century declared that to a civilised mind the mountain solitude was naturally abhorrent. To be impressed was unavoidable, he allowed; to love barrenness and the wilderness, to take delight in shadow and silence, to find peace in loneliness, was unnatural. It is humanity that redeems nature, he added in effect. The opinion is not one commonly held now, or not admitted. But many hold it who would not admit that they so felt or thought. I have often asked summer wanderers if they have no wish to see the solitudes in early spring, when the ptarmigan’s wing begins to brown; in November, when the rust of the bracken can loom through the hill-mist like the bronze shields of the sleeping Fianna; in December, when the polar wind frays the peaks into columns of smoke, the loose, dry snow on the northward foreheads of ancient summits; in January, when there is white silence, and the blue flitting shadow of the merlin’s wing; in March, when in the south glens the cries of lambs are a lamenting music, and the scream of the eagle is like a faint bugle-call through two thousand feet of flowing wind. Few, however, would really care ‘to be away from home’ in those months when snow and wind and cloud and rain are the continually recurrent notes in the majestic Mountain Symphony. ‘To see in a picture, to read of in a story or poem, that is delightful; but ... well, one needs fine weather to enjoy the hills and the moorlands.’ That, in effect, is what I have commonly heard, or discerned in the evasive commonplace. It is not so with those who love the mountain-lands as the cushat loves the green twilight of beech or cedar, as the mew loves troubled waters and the weaving of foam. I remember, a year or so ago, being impressed by the sincerity of a lowlander whom I met on the road among the Perthshire mountains, in a region where the hills frowned and there was silence save for the hoarse sea-murmur of pines and the surge of a river hidden under boughs of hornbeam and leaning birch. I forget whence he had come, but it was from a place where the low lineaments of the fields were hardly more than long wave-lines on a calm sea; the only heights were heaps of ‘shag’ by old mines, scattered columnar chimney-stacks. The man had trod far afoot, and was eager for work. I told him to go on toward the pass for about a mile, and then to a big farm he would see to his right, and ask there, and probably he would get work and good pay. Some three hours later I was returning by the same road, and again met the wayfarer, but southward set. I asked him why he had turned, for I knew labour was wanted at the farm, and the man was strong, and seemed willing, and was of decent mien. “No,” he said, “he had not got work up yonder.” I knew he prevaricated, and he saw it. With sudden candour he added, “It’s no the good man at the farm--nor the work--nor the pay. It’s just this: I’m fair clemmed at the sight o’ yon hills ... eh, but they’re just dreidful. I couldna’ abide them. They’re na _human_. I’ve felt it all along since I cam up beyont the Ochils, but it’s only the now I’ve kent weel I couldna’ live here amang them.” “Weel, first and foremost,” he added, when I pressed him further, “it’s the silence. It fair kills me. An’ what’s more, it _would_ kill me if I stayed. The wife up yonder gave me a sup o’ milk an’ a bannock, an’ when I was at them I sat on a bench an’ looked about me. Naething but hills, hills, hills: hills an’ black gloom an’ that awfu’ silence. An’ there was a burd--a whaup we ca’ it in the southlands--which fair shook my mind. It went lamentin’ like a grave-bell, an’ I heard it long after it was out o’ sicht. Then there wasn’t another sound. Na, na, wark or no wark, I’m awa’ south.”

And so the wayfarer set foot to the white road again, the south spelling home and human solace to him. Those dreary coal-lands, where the green grass is wan and the thorn hedge sombre, and any wandering water illucid and defiled, those hideous heaps of ‘shag,’ those gaunt mine-chimneys, those squalid hamlets in a populous desolation--these meant ‘human comfort’ to him. Or, if they did not, at least they gave him somewhat which the mountain silence denied, which the gathered hills withheld, which the moorland solitudes overbore and refuted.

An extreme case, no doubt. But the deep disquietude of hill silence, of the mountain solitude, is felt by most habitual dwellers in towns and thronged communities. There is no mountain charm for these except the charm of release, of holiday, of novelty, of an imagined delight, of contrast, of unwonted air, of unfamiliar aspect. One of the popular excursion resorts in the near highlands of Argyll and Dumbarton is Loch Goil Head. A dweller there told me last autumn that of the hundreds who land every week, and especially on Saturdays and Fair holidays, and generally with an impatient eagerness, by far the greater number soon tire of the loneliness of the hills a brief way inland, and become depressed, and with a new and perhaps perturbing eagerness seek again the house-clad ways and the busy shore; and seem content, an hour or two before their steamer sails, to sit where they can see the movement of familiar life, and turn their back upon the strangely oppressive loneliness, so perturbingly remote, so paralyzingly silent.

But for those who love the hills as comrades, what a spell, what enchantment! To wander by old grassy ways, old ‘pack-road’ or timeless mountain path; to go through the bracken, by grey boulders tufted with green moss and yellow lichen, and see nothing but great rounded shoulders or sudden peaks overhead or beyond, nothing near but the yellow-hammer or wandering hawk or raven: to feel the pliant heather underfoot, and smell the wild thyme, and watch a cloud trail a purple shadow across the grey-blue slope rising like a gigantic wave from a sea of moors, rising and falling against the azure walls, but miraculously suspended there, a changeless vision, an eternal phantom: to go up into solitary passes, where even the June sunshine is hardly come ere it is gone, where the corbie screams, and the stag tramples the cranberry scrub and sniffs the wind blowing from beyond the scarlet-fruited rowan leaning from an ancient fallen crag: to see slope sinking into enveloping slope, and height uplifted to uplifting heights, and crags gathered confusedly to serene and immutable summits: to come at last upon these vast foreheads, and look down upon the lost world of green glens and dusky forests and many waters, to look down, as it were, from eternity into time ... this indeed is to know the mountain charm, this is enchantment.

For the mountain-lover it would be hard to choose any pre-eminent season. The highland beauty appeals through each of the months, and from day to day. But, for all the glory of purple heather and dim amethystine slopes, it is perhaps not the early autumnal mountain charm, so loved of every one, that ranks first in one’s heart. For myself I think midwinter, June, and the St. Martin’s Summer of late October, or early November, more intimately compel in charm. And of these, I think June is not least. In midwinter the mountains have their most ideal beauty. It is an austere charm, the charm of whiteness and stillness. It is akin to the ineffable charm of a white flood of moonshine on a stilled ocean; but it has that which the waters do not have, the immobility of trance. There is nothing more wonderful in dream-beauty than vast and snow-bound mountain-solitudes in the dead of winter. That beauty becomes poignant when sea-fjords or inland waters lie at the sheer bases of the white hills, and in the luminous green or shadowy blue the heights are mirrored, so that one indeed stands between two worlds, unknowing the phantom from the real. There is a dream-beauty also in that lovely suspense between the last wild winds of the equinox and ‘the snow-bringer,’ that period of hushed farewell which we call St. Martin’s Summer. The glory of the heather is gone, but the gold and bronze of the bracken take on an equal beauty. The birch hangs her still tresses of pale gold, ‘that beautiful wild woman of the hills,’ as a Gaelic poet says. The red and russet of rowan and bramble, the rich hues of the haw, the sloe, the briony, all the golds and browns and delicate ambers of entranced autumn are woven in a magic web. In the mornings, the gossamer hangs on every bush of gorse and juniper. Through the serene air, exquisitely fresh with the light frosts which from dayset to dawn have fallen idly, rings the sweet and thrilling song of the robin, that music of autumn so poignant, so infinitely winsome. In what lovely words our Elizabethan Chapman wrote of the robin, of which we also of the North speak lovingly as ‘St. Colum’s Friend,’ ‘St. Bride’s Sweetheart,’ and the ‘little brother of Christ’:

“... the bird that loves humans best,
That hath the bugle eyes and ruddy breast,
And is the yellow autumn’s nightingale.”

But it is in June, I think, that the mountain charm is most intoxicating. The airs are lightsome. The hill-mists are seldom heavy, and only on south-wind mornings do the lovely grey-white vapours linger among the climbing corries and overhanging scarps. Many of the slopes are blue as a winter sky, palely blue, aerially delicate, from the incalculable myriad host of the bluebells. The green of the bracken is more wonderful than at any other time. When the wind plays upon it the rise and fall is as the breathing of the green seas among the caverns of Mingulay or among the savage rock-pools of the Seven Hunters or where the Summer Isles lie in the churn of the Atlantic tides. Everything is alive in joy. The young broods exult. The air is vibrant with the eddies of many wings, great and small. The shadow-grass sways with the passage of the shrewmouse or the wing’s-breath of the darting swallow. The stillest pool quivers, for among the shadows of breathless reeds the phantom javelin of the dragon-fly whirls for a second from silence to silence. In the morning the far lamentation of the flocks on the summer shielings falls like the sound of bells across water. The curlew and the plover are not spirits of desolation, but blithe children of the wilderness. As the afternoon swims in blue haze and floating gold the drowsy call of the moorcock stirs the heather-sea. The snorting of trampling deer may be heard. The landrail sweeps the dew from the tall grass and sends her harsh but summer-sweet cry in long monotonous echoes, till the air rings with the resonant _krek-crake_. And that sudden break in the silences of the dusk, when ... beyond the blossoming elder, or the tangle of wild roses where the white moths rise and fall in fluttering ecstacy, or, yonder, by the black-green juniper on the moorland ... the low whirring note of the nightjar vibrates in a continual passionate iterance! There, in truth, we have the passionate whisper of the heart of June, that most wonderful, that most thrilling of the voices of summer.

It is in June, too, that one mountain charm in particular may be known with rapt delight. It is when one can approach mountains whose outlying flanks and bases are green hills. The bright green of these under-slopes, these swelling heights and rolling uplands, is never more vivid. Near, one wonders why grasses so thick with white daisy and red sorrel and purple orchis and blue harebell can be green at all! But that wonderful sea-green of the hills near at hand gives way soon to the still more wonderful blue as the heights recede. The glens and wooded valleys grow paler. Rock and tree and heather blend. “What colour is that?” I asked a shepherd once. “The blueness of blueness,” he answered, in Gaelic. It is so. It is not blue one sees, but the bloom of blue; as on a wild plum, it is not the purple skin we note, but the amethyst bloom of purple which lies upon it. It is beauty, with its own loveliness upon it like a breath. Then the blue deepens, or greys, as the hour and the light compel. The most rare and subtle loveliness is when the grey silhouette of the mountain-ridge, serrated line, or freaked and tormented peaks, or vast unbroken amplitude, _sinks_ into the sudden deep clearness of the enveloping sky.

Even in June, however, the mountain charm is not to be sought, as in a last sanctuary, on the summits of the hills. I believe that to be a delusion, a confusion, which asserts the supreme beauty of the views from mountain summits. I have climbed many hills and not a few mountains, and, except in one or two instances (as Hecla in the Hebrides), never without recognition that, in beauty, one does not gain, but loses. There are no heights in Scotland more often climbed by the holiday mountaineer than Ben Nevis in Argyll and Goat Fell in the Isle of Arran. Neither, in beauty or grandeur of view, repays the ascent. Goat Fell is a hundred times lovelier seen from the shores or glens of its own lower slopes, or from a spur of the Eastern Caisteall Abhaill: the boatmen on the waters of Lorne, the shepherd on the hills of Morven, the wayfarer in the wilds of Appin, they know the beauty of ‘the Sacred Hill’ as none knows it who thinks he has surprised the secret on the vast brows overhanging the inchoate wilderness. At its best, we look through a phantasmal appearance upon a phantasmal world, and any artist will tell us that the disappointment is because every object is seen in its high light, none in its shadowed portion; that the direct sunlight being over all is reflected back to us from every surface; that the downward vision means a monotony of light and a monotony of colour.

The supreme charm of the mountain-lands in June is their investiture with the loveliest blue air that the year knows, and the entrancement of summer cloud. Small feathery cirrus or salmon-pink and snow-white cumulus emerging behind the shoulder of a mountain or drifting above the vast silent brows have an infinite beauty. We should be cloud-climbers rather than mere mountain-climbers; we should climb to see the heights recede in continual fold of loveliness, and the clouds lift their trailing purple shadows and sail slowly or hang motionless beyond the eternal buttresses. And it is but an added poignancy to the sense of infinite beauty to know that this word ‘eternal’ is, even for those ancient ‘changeless’ hills, but the idlest hyperbole--as though one were to call the breaking wave everlasting, or the blowing seed of the meadows as timeless as the wind. There is not a vast and lonely mountain that has not a fallen comrade among the low undulating ridges of the continual lowland; not one of these that has not in turn to feed the white dust of the plain or the sea-gathered sand of ancient or as yet unformed shores. For the hills pass, even as we, or the green leaf become sere, or the fruit that ripens to its fall; though we speak of them as everlasting, and find the subtlest spell of their incalculable charm in the overwhelming sense of their imagined eternity.

THE CLANS OF THE GRASS

Of all the miracles of the green world none surpasses that of the grass. It has many names, many raiments even, but it is always that wonderful thing which the poets of all time have delighted in calling the green hair of earth. ‘Soft green hair of the rocks,’ says a Breton poet. Another Celtic poet has used the word alike for the mosses which clothe the talons of old trees and for the forests themselves. No fantastic hyperbole this: from a great height forests of pine and oak seem like reaches of sombre grass. To the shrewmouse the tall grasses of June are green woods, and the slim stems of the reddening sorrels are groves of pinetrees. I remember having read somewhere of a lovely name given to the grass by the Arabs of the desert ... ‘the Bride of Mahomet.’ What lovelier and more gracious thing in the world, in their eyes, than this soft cool greenness of the oasis, this emerald carpet below the green shadowy roof of waving palms; and as of all women in the world there could be but one, according to the old legend, worthy to be the supreme bride of the Prophet, what poetic name for her so fitting as this exquisite apparition of the desert, so beautiful, so evernew in itself, so welcome for its association with sweet waters and shade and coolness. A Gaelic poet calls the grass the Gift of Christ, literally slender-greenness of Christ (_uaineachd-caol Chriosde_), and another has written of how it came to be called Green-Peace--both from an old tale (one of the many ebbed, forgotten tales of the isles) that, when God had created the world, Christ said “Surely one thing yet lacks, My Father: soft greenness for the barren mountain, soft greenness for rocks and cliffs, soft greenness for stony places and the wilderness, soft greenness for the airidhs of the poor.” Whereupon God said “Let thy tenderness be upon these things, O my Son, and thy peace be upon them, and let the green grass be the colour of peace and of home”--and thereafter, says the taleteller, the Eternal Father turned to the Holy Spirit and said of the Son that from that hour He should be named the Prince of Peace, _Prionnsa na Sioth-cainnt canar ris_.

Grass is as universal as dew, as commonplace as light. That which feels the seawind in the loneliest Hebrides is brother to that which lies on Himalaya or is fanned by the hot airs of Asian valleys. That which covers a grey scarp in Iceland is the same as that on Adam’s Peak in Ceylon, and that which in myriad is the prairie of the north is in myriad the pampas of the south; that whose multitude covers the Gaelic hills is that whose multitude covers the Russian steppes. It is of all the signature of Nature that which to us is nearest and homeliest. The green grass after long voyaging, the grass of home-valley or hillside after long wayfaring, the green grass of the Psalmist to souls athirst and weary, the grass of El Dorado to the visionary seeking the gold of the spirit, the grass of the Fortunate Isles, of the Hills of Youth, to the poets and dreamers of all lands and times ... everywhere and ever has this omnipresent herb that withereth and yet is continually reborn, been the eternal symbol of that which passes like a dream, the symbol of everlasting illusion, and yet, too, is the symbol of resurrection, of all the old divine illusion essayed anew, of the inexplicable mystery of life recovered and everlastingly perpetrated.

When we speak of grass we generally mean one thing, the small slim green herb which carpets the familiar earth. But there are many grasses, from the smooth close-set herb of our lawns or the sheep-nibbled downy greenness of mountain-pastures, to the forest-like groves which sway in the torrid winds of the south. Of these alone much might be written. I prefer, however, that name I have placed at the head of this article--taken, if I remember rightly, from a poem by the Gaelic mountain-poet, Duncan Ban Macintyre--and used in the sense of the original. In this sense, the Clans of the Grass are not only the grasses of the pasture, the sand-dune, the windy down, not only the sorrel-red meadow-grass or the delicate quaking-grass, but all the humbler greengrowth which covers the face of the earth. In this company are the bee-loved clover, the trailing vetch, the yellow-sea clover and the sea-pink; the vast tribe of the charlock or wild mustard which on showery days sometimes lights up field or hillmeadow with yellow flame so translucent that one thinks a sudden radiant sunflood burns and abides there. In it too are all the slim peoples of the reed and rush, by streams and pools and lochans: of the yellow iris by the sea-loch and the tall flag by the mountain-tarn: the grey thistle, the sweet-gale, and all the tribe of the bog-cotton or canna (_ceann-bàn-a-mhonaidh_, the white head of the hillside, as we call it in Gaelic), those lovers of the wilderness and boggy places. With these is the bindweed that with the salt bent holds the loose shores. With these are all the shadow-loving clans of the fern, from the bracken, whose April-green lightens the glens and whose autumnal bronze and dull gold make the hillsides so resplendent, to the stonewort on the dykes, the lady-fern in the birch-woods, the maidenhair by springs and falls, the hart’s-tongue in caverns, the Royal fern whose broad fronds are the pride of heather-waste and morass. The mosses, too, are from this vast clan of the earth-set, from the velvet-soft edging of the oak-roots or the wandering greenness of the swamp to the ashy tresses which hang on spruce or hemlock or the grey fringes of the rocks by northern seas. And with them are the lichens, that beautiful secret company who love the shadow-side of trees, and make stones like flowers, and transmute the barrenness of rock and boulder with dyes of pale gold and blazing orange, and umber rich as the brown hearts of tarns, and pearl-grey delicate as a cushat’s breast, and saffron as yellow-green as the sunset-light after the clearing of rains. To all these, indeed, should be added the greater grasses which we know as wheat and oats, as rye and maize. Thus do we come to ‘the waving hair of the ever-wheeling earth,’ and behold the unresting Mother as in a vision, but with the winds of space for ever blowing her waving tresses in a green gladness, or in a shimmer of summer-gold, or in the bronze splendour of the autumnal passage.

But the grasses proper, alone: the green grass itself--what a delight to think of these, even if the meaning of the title of this paper be inclusive of them and them only. What variety, here, moreover. The first spring-grass, how welcome it is. What lovely delicacy of green. It is difficult anywhere to match it. Perhaps the first greening of the sallow, that lovely hair hung over ponds and streams or where sloping lawns catch the wandering airs of the south: or the pale green-flame of the awakening larch: or the tips of bursting hawthorn in the hedgerows--perhaps, these are nearest to it in hue. But with noonlight it may become almost the pale-yellow of sheltered primroses, or yellow-green as the cowslip before its faint gold is minted, and in the mellowing afternoon it may often be seen as illuminated (as with hidden delicate flame) as the pale-emerald candelabra of the hellebore. How different is the luxuriant grass in hollows and combes and along watered meadows in June, often dark as pine-green or as sunlit jade, and in shadowy places or in twilight sometimes as lustrously sombre-green as the obsidian, that precious stone of the Caucasus now no longer a rarity among us. How swiftly, too, that changes after the heats of midsummer, often being threaded with grey light before the dog-days are spent. Moreover, at any season there is a difference between down-grass and mountain-grass, between sea-grass and valley-grass, between moor-grass and wood-grass. It may be slight, and not in kind but only in shadowy dissemblances of texture and hue; still one may note the difference. More obvious, of course, is the difference between, say, April-grass and the same grass when May or June suffuses it with the red glow of the seeding sorrel, or between the sea-grass that has had the salt wind upon it since its birth, the bent as it is commonly called, and its brother among the scarps and cliff-edges of the hills, so marvellously soft and hairlike for all that it is not long since the snows have lifted or since sleet and hail have harried the worn faces of boulder and crag. Or, again, between even the most delicate wantonness of the seeding hay, fragrant with white clover and purple vetch, and the light aerial breathfulness, frail as thistledown, of the quaking-grass. How it loves the wood’s-edge, this last, or sheltered places by the hedgerows, the dream-hollows of sloping pastures, meadow-edges where the cow-parsley whitens like foam and the meadowsweet floats creamwhite and the white campions hang in clotted froth over the long surge of daisies: or, where, like sloops of the nautilus on tropic seas, curved blossoms of the white wild-rose motionlessly suspend or idly drift, hardly less frail less wantonly errant than the white bloomy dust of the dandelion.

_Caran-cheann-air-chrith_, ‘little friend of the quaking-grass,’ is one of the Gaelic names of the wagtail, perhaps given to it because of a like tremulous movement, as though invisible wings of gossamer shook ever in a secret wind. Or given to it, perhaps, because of a legend which puts the common grass, the quaking-grass, the wagtail, the cuckoo, the aspen, and the lichen in one traditional company. In the Garden of Gethsemane, so runs the Gaelic folk-tale as I heard it as a child, all Nature suddenly knew the Sorrow of Christ. The dew whispered it: it was communicated in the dusk: in pale gold and shaken silver it stole from moon and star into the green darkness of cypress and cedar. The grass-blades put all their green lips into one breath, and sighed _Peace, Brother!_ Christ smiled in His sorrow, and said, _Peace to you for ever._ But here and there among the grasses, as here and there among the trees, and as here and there among the husht birds, were those who doubted, saying, ‘It is but a man who lies here. His sorrow is not our sorrow.’ Christ looked at them, and they were shaken with the grief of all grief and the sorrow of all sorrow. And that is why to this day the quaking-grass and the aspen are forever a-tremble, and why the wagtail has no rest but quivers along the earth like a dancing shadow. But to those mosses of Gethsemane which did not give out the sympathy of their kin among the roots of cedar and oak, and to the cuckoo who rang from her nest a low chime of _All’s well! All’s well!_ Christ’s sorrowful eyes when He rose at dawn could not be endured. So the cuckoo rose and flew away across the Hill of Calvary, ringing through the morning twilight the bells of sorrow, and from that day was homeless and without power anywhere to make a home of her own. As for the mosses that had refused love, they wandered away to desolate places and hung out forlorn flags of orange-red and pale-yellow and faded-silver along the grey encampments of the rocks.

Often I have thought of this when lying in the mountain-grass beside one of those ancient lichened boulders which strew our hillsides. The lichen is the least of the grasses--and let us use the term in its poetic sense--but how lovely a thing it is; almost as lovely in endless variety of form as the frost-flower. In a sense they are strangely akin, these two; the frost-flower, which is the breath of Beauty itself, lasting a briefer hour than the noontide dew, and the moss-flower which the barren rock sustains through all the changing seasons.

Who is that Artificer who has subtly and diversely hidden the secret of rhythm in the lichen of the rock and in the rock’s heart itself; in the frost-flower, so perfect in beauty that a sunbeam breathes it away; in the falling star, a snowflake in the abyss, yet with the miraculous curve in flight which the wave has had, which the bent poplar has had, which the rainbow has had, since the world began? The grey immemorial stone and the vanishing meteor are one. Both are the offspring of the Eternal Passion, and it may be that between the æon of the one and the less than a minute of the other there shall not, in the divine reckoning, be more than the throb of a pulse. For who of us can measure even Time, that the gnat measures as well as we, or the eagle, or the ancient yew, or the mountain whose granite brows are white with ages--much less Eternity, wherein Time is but a vanishing pulse?

THE TIDES

I remember that one of the most strange and perturbing pleasures of my childhood was in watching, from a grassy height, the stealthy motions of the tides. The fascination never waned, nor has it yet waned: to-day, as then, I know at times the old thrill, almost the old fear, when through a white calm or up some sea-loch I watch those dark involutions, in sudden twists and long serpentine curves, as the eddies of the tide force their mysterious way. For one thing my childish imagination was profoundly impressed by the words of an old islander whom I had asked where the tides came from and what they were and had they names. We were on the steep slope of a small grassy hill, and overlooked the eastern end of an island where the troubled waters of a _caoileas_ or strait to the south met the vast placid reach of ocean on the north. Through the lustrous green of the Sound, fleckt with long mauve shadows or clouded here and there with great splatches of purple-brown; and, again, to the left through the near calm heave of deep water so blue that as a child I could not understand why the shells which were washed up from it were not blue also: to right and to left I saw the sudden furtive motions of the flowing tide. I had often watched the blind-worm move thus through the coarse sea-grasses, and again and again had seen the adder dart through the bracken like one of those terrible living arrows of Faerie of which I had heard: often, too, I had followed the shadow-swift underwave glide of the hunting seal: and once, in a deep brown pool in Morven, when I was looking with trembling hope for the floating hair or dim white face of a kelpie, I had seen an otter rise from the depths ... rise like a fantastic elfin face and half-human figure in a dream ... make a soundless sinuous plunge and in less than a moment vanish utterly, still without sound or the least ruffling of the brown depths. So, it was natural that I should associate those mysterious gliding things of the sea with these sinuous things of the grass and heather and the shadowy pool. They, too, I thought, were furtive and sinister. There was something as of the same evil enchantment in their abrupt and inexplicable appearing and in their soundless departures. Thus it was I felt no surprise when my old island-friend Sheumais remarked to me:

“They are creatures of the sea.”

“What are they, Sheumais?” I urged; “are they great eels, or adders, or what? Can they put death on a swimmer? Have you ever caught one? Have----”

“Ay, for sure they might put death on a swimmer: and by the same token I will be remembering that Rùaridh Stewart, the Appin poet, has a _rann_ about them as the Hounds of the Sea.”

“And have they names?”

“For sure, that: _Luath_ (Swift) and _Gorm-Dhu_ (Blue-Black), _Luath-Donn_ (Fleet-brown-one) and _Braco_ (Speckled), _Rùn-fo-tuinne_ (Underwave Secret) and _Cu-Bhais_ (Hound of Death), and others that I will be forgetting.”

“But, Sheumais,” I persisted, “are they male-seafolk and women-seafolk like the seals, and have they little ones, and where do they go, and where do the big tides come from?”

“Well, well, I will not be knowing that, though, for sure, it is likely. But as to where they come from, and where they go, there will be none in all the world who can tell that; no, not one. They will be just like the wind, that no one knows the road of, behind or before. Ay, the sea’s just like the grey road: the green road an’ the grey road, they show no tracks. The wind an’ the tides, they just come an’ they just go. ‘Blind as the wind,’ ‘blind as the tide’ ... ay, it may be; but not so blind as we are, for they know their way, an’ brightest noon an’ darkest night, an’ summer an’ winter, an’ calm an’ storm, are one an’ the same to them.”

It is long ago now since I heard these words from old Sheumais Macleod, but I am certain (so deeply did they impress my childish imagination, and sink into a child’s mind) that I repeat them almost exactly. I had no hesitation in believing in _Gorm-Dhu_ and _Luath-Donn_, and the rest, and took these names to be real names of actual creatures, as _Daoine-Vhara_ (folk of the sea) for seals, or as _piocach_ for the brown saithe I was wont to watch swimming amid the fronds of the seaweed, or as _sgàdan_ for the flashing herring whose shoals so often made a dazzle in the offing beyond the strait, and whose radiant scales glorified as with gems the nets hauled up in the moonshine or in the pale rose and cowslip-yellow of August dawns.