Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

I recall a singular legend, where heard, where read, I do not remember, nor even am I sure of what race the offspring, of what land the denizen. It was to the effect that, in the ancient days of the world, flowers had voices, had song to them as the saying is: and that there were kingdoms among these populations of beauty, and that in the course of ages (would they be flower-æons, and so of a measure in time different from our longer or shorter periods?) satraps revolted against the dominion of the Rose, and tropical princes led new hosts, and scarlet forest-queens filled the jungle and the savannah with their chants of victory. And the end was a conflict so great that even the isles of the sea were shaken by it, and the pale green moss of polar rocks whispered of the great world-war of the peoples of Flowry. At last, after the shadow-flitting passage of an æon, the gods were roused from their calm, and, looking down into the shaken mirror of the world, beheld all their dreams and visions and desires no longer children of loveliness and breaths of song. In these æons while they had slept in peace the Empire of Flowry had come to a dissolution: race fought with race, tribe with tribe, clan with clan. Among all the nations there was a madness for supremacy, so that the weed in the grass and the flame-crowned spire of the aloe were at one in a fierce discontent and a blind lust of dominion. Thereupon the gods pondered among themselves. Kronos, who had been the last to wake and was already drowsy with old immemorial returning slumber, murmured: ‘A divine moment, O ye Brotherhood of Eternity, is a long time wherein to be disturbed by the mortal reflection of our dreams and the passions and emotions of our enchanted hearts.’

And as all the calm-eyed Immortals agreed, Kronos sighed out the mandate of silence, and turning his face to Eternity was again among the august dreams of the Everlasting Ones.

In that long moment--for there in the other world it was but a brief leaning on their elbows of the drowsy gods while the fans of Immortal Sleep for a second stayed the vast waves of Peace--the divine messengers, or were they the listening powers and dominions of the earth, fulfilled destiny. From every flower-nation, from every people by far waters, from every tribe in dim woods and the wilderness, from every clan habiting the most far hills beyond the ever-receding pale blue horizons, song was taken as stars are pluckt away from the Night by the grey fingers of the Dawn. The Rose breathed no more a flusht magic of sound; the Lily no more exhaled a foamwhite cadence. Silence was come upon the wild chant of orchids in old, forgotten woods; stillness upon the tinkling cymbals of the little hands of the dim, myriad, incalculable host of blossom; a hush upon the songs of meadow-flowers; a spell upon the singing of honeysuckles in the white dews at the rising of the moon. Everywhere, from all the green tribes, from all the glowing nations of Flowry, from each and every of the wandering folk of the Reed, the Moss, and the Lichen, from all the Clans of the Grass, the added loveliness of song was taken. Silence fell upon one and all: a strange and awful stillness came upon the woods and valleys. It was then that the God of Youth, wandering through the hushed world, took the last song of a single rose that in a secret place had not yet heard the common doom, and with his breath gave it a body, and a pulse to its heart, and fashioned for it a feather-covering made of down of the bog-cotton and the soft undersides of alder-leaf and olive. Then, from a single blade of grass that still whispered in a twilight hollow, he made a like marvel, to be a mate to the first, and sent out both into the green world, to carry song to the woods and the valleys, the hills and the wildernesses, the furthest shores, the furthest isles. Thus was the nightingale created, the first bird, the herald of all the small clans of the bushes that have kept wild-song in the world, and are our delight.

But in the hearts of certain of the green tribes a sullen anger endured. So the mysterious Hand which had taken song and cadence away punished these sullen ones. From some, fragrance also was taken. There were orchid-queens of forest-loveliness from whom all fragrance suddenly passed like smoke: there were white delicate phantoms among the grasses, from whom sweet odour was lifted as summer dew: there were nomads of the hillways and gypsies of the plain to whom were given the rankness of the waste, the smell of things evil, of corruption, of the grave. But to some, beautiful rebels of the peoples of the Reed, the Grass, and the Fern, the doom went out that henceforth their place should be in the waters ... the running waters of streams and rivers, the quiet waters of pools and lakes, the troubled waters of the seas along the coasts of the world, the ocean depths.

And that is how amid the salt bite of the homeless wave there grew the Gardens of the Sea. That is how it came about that the weed trailed in running waters, and the sea-moss swayed in brackish estuaries, and the wrack clung or swam in tangles of olive-brown and green and soft and dusky reds.

What a long preamble to the story of how the Seaweeds were once sweet-smelling blooms of the shores and valleys! Of how the flowers of meadow and woodland, of the sun-swept plain and the shadowy hill, had once song as well as sweet odours: how, of these, many lost not only fragrance but innocent beauty: and how out of a rose and a blade of grass and a breath of the wind the first birds were made, the souls of the green earth, winged, and voiced.

To-day I sit amongst deep, shelving rocks by the shore, in a desolate place where basaltic cliffs shut away the familiar world, and where, in front, the otherworld of the sea reaches beyond sight to follow the lifted wave against the grey skyline, or is it the grey lip of the fallen horizon? Looking down I can perceive the olive-brown and green seaweed swaying in the slow movement of the tide. Like drifted hair, the long thin filaments of the Mermaid’s Locks (_Chorda Filum_) sinuously twist, intertwine, involve, and unfold. It is as though a seawoman rose and fell, idly swam or idly swung this way and that, asleep on the tide: nothing visible of her wave-grey body but only her long fatal hair, that so many a swimmer has had cause to dread, from whose embrace so many a swimmer has never risen. In the rock-set pools the flesh-hued fans of the dulse indolently stir. Wave-undulated over them are fronds of a lovely green weed, delicate, transparent: above these, two phantom fish, rock-cod or saithe, float motionless.

Idly watching, idly dreaming thus, I recall part of a forgotten poem about the woods of the sea, and the finned silent creatures that are its birds: and how there are stags and wolves in these depths, long hounds of the sea, mermen and merwomen and seal-folk. Others, too, for whom we have no name, we being wave-blind and so unable to discern these comers and goers of the shadow. Also, how old sea-divinities lie there asleep, and perilous phantoms come out of sunken ships and ancient weed-grown towns; and how there roams abroad, alike in the flowing wave and along the sheer green-darkening bodiless walls, an incalculable Terror that may be manifold, the cold implacable demons of the deep, or may be One, that grey timeworn Death whom men have called Poseidon and Mananan and by many names.

What a mysterious world this Tir-fo-Tuinn, this Land-Under-Wave. How little we know of it, for all that wise men have told us concerning the travelling tides, of currents as mysteriously steadfast in their comings and goings as the comets that from age to age loom briefly upon the stellar roads: how little, though they have put learned designations to a thousand weeds, and given names to ten thousand creatures to whom the whole world of man and all his hopes and dreams are less than a phantom, less than foam. The Gaelic poet who said that the man who goes to Tir-fo-Tuinn goes into another world, where the human soul is sand, and God is but the unloosened salt, tells us as much as the scientist who probes the ocean-mud and reveals dim crustacean life where one had believed to be only a lifeless dark. Above the weed-held palaces of Atlantis, over the soundless bells of Ys, above where Lyonesse is gathered in a foamless oblivion, the plummet may sink and lift a few broken shells, the drag-net may bring to the surface an unknown sea-snail or such a microscopic green Alga as that _Halosphoera viridis_ which science has discovered in the great depths beyond the reach of sunlight: but who can tell, perchance how few who care to know, what Love was, long ago, when there were poets in Lyonesse: what worship was served by white-robed priests among the sunken fanes of Ys: what dreams withstayed and what passions beset the noble and the ignoble in drowned Atlantis, what empires rose and fell there, what gods were lauded and dethroned, and for how long Destiny was patient.

Even in the little pools that lie shoreward of the Gardens of the Sea what beauty there is, what obscure life, what fascinating ‘other-world’ association. This piece of kelp is at once _Fucus vesiculosus_ and the long fingers of the Cailliach-Mhara, the Sea-Witch. This great smooth frond is ... I do not know, or forget: but it is the kale of Manan, in sea-groves of which that Shepherd pastures his droves of uncouth sea-swine. This green tracery has a Greek or Latin name, but in legend it is called the Mermaid’s Lace. This little flame-like crest of undulating wrack has a designation longer than itself, but in tales of faerie we know it to be that of which the caps of the pool-elves are fashioned.

In the Isles seaweed has many local names, but is always mainly divided into Yellow Tails, Dark Tails, and Red Tails (_Feamainn bhuidhe_, _feamainn dubh_, and _feamainn dearg_). The first comprise all the yellowish, light-brown, and olive-brown seaware; the second all the dark-green, and also all green wrack; the third, the red. The common seaware or kelp or tang (_Fucus vesiculosus_) is generally called _propach_, or other variant signifying tangled: and the bladder-wrack, _feamainn bholgainn_ or _builgeach_, ‘baggy-tails.’ I have at times collected many local names of these weeds, and not a few superstitions and legends. Naturally, the most poetic of these are connected with the _Chorda filum_ or Dead Man’s Hair, which has a score of popular names, from ‘corpsy-ropes’ to the occasional Gaelic _gillemu lunn_, which may be rendered ‘the wave’s gillie’ or ‘servant of the wave’: with the drifted gulf-weed, whose sea-grapes are called _uibhean sìthein_, fairy eggs, and are eagerly sought for: and with the _duileasg_, or dulse. Even to this day, in remote parts, an ancient seaweed-rite survives in the propitiatory offerings (now but a pastime of island children) to the Hebridean sea-god Shony at Samhein (Hallowmass). This Shony, whose favours were won by a cup of ale thrown into the sea in the dark of the night, is none other than Poseidon, Neptune, Manan; for he is the Scandinavian sea-god _Sjoni_, viking-brought from Lochlin in the far-off days when the Summer-sailors raided and laid waste the Gaelic Isles.

It is singular how rarely seaweed has entered into the nomenclature and symbology of peoples, how seldom it is mentioned in ancient literature. Among our Gaelic clans there is only one (the M’Neil) which has seaware as a badge. Greek art has left us a few seaweed-filleted heads of Gorgons, and to sea-wrack the Latin poets have once or twice made but passing and contemptuous allusion. In the Bible (‘whaur ye’ll find everything frae a bat to a unicorn,’ as an old man said to me once) there is one mention of it only, in Jonah’s words: ‘The depths closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.’

THE MILKY WAY

With the first sustained breath of frost the beauty of the Galaxy becomes the chief glory of the nocturnal skies. But in midsummer even what amplitude of space, what infinite depths it reveals, and how mysterious that filmy stardrift blown like a streaming banner from behind the incalculable brows of an unresting Lord of Space, one of those Sons of the Invisible, as an oriental poet has it, whose ceaseless rush through eternity leaves but this thin and often scarce visible dust, ‘delicate as the tost veil of a dancing girl swaying against the wind.’ Perhaps no one of our poets, and poetry ancient and modern and of every country and race is full of allusions to the Galaxy, has more happily imaged it in a single line than Longfellow has done in

“Torrent of light and river of the air.”

As a river, or as a winding serpent, or as a stellar road, it has imaginatively been conceived by almost every people, though many races have delighted in the bestowal of a specific name, as though it were not an aggregation of star-clusters and nebulæ, but a marvellous creature of the heavens, as, perhaps, we may conceive the Great Bear, or Orion, or moons-beset Jupiter, or Saturn among his mysterious rings. Thus in the Book of Job it is called the Crooked Serpent; the Hindûs of Northern India call it the Dove of Paradise (Swarga Duari), though they have or had a still finer name signifying the Court of God; and the Polynesians give it the strange but characteristic designation, ‘The Long, Blue, Cloud-Eating Shark.’

Last night I watched the immense tract for a long time. There was frost in the air, for I saw that singular pulsation which rightly or wrongly is commonly held to be an optical illusion, the aspect as of a pulse, or of an undulating motion of life such as one might dimly perceive in the still respiration of some sleeping saurian. There appeared to be countless small stars, and in the darker spaces the pale vaporous drift became like the trail of phosphorescence in the wake of a vessel: at times it seemed almost solid, a road paven with diamonds and the dust of precious stones, with flakes as of the fallen plumage of wings--truly _Arianrod_, the Silver Road, as the Celts of old called it. Of course it was no more than a fantasy of the dreaming imagination, but it seemed to me more than once that as a vast indefinite sigh came from the windless but nevertheless troubled sea there was a corresponding motion in that white mysterious Milky Way, so infinitely remote. It was as though the Great Snake--as so many bygone peoples called and as many submerged races still call the Galaxy--lay watching from its eternal lair that other Serpent of Ocean which girdles the rolling orb of our onward-rushing Earth: and breathed in slow mysterious response: and, mayhap, sighed also into the unscanned void a sigh infinitely more vast, a sigh that would reach remote planets and fade along the gulfs of incalculable shores.

As winter comes, the Milky Way takes on a new significance for pastoral and other lonely peoples, for shepherds and fisher-folk above all. Songs and poems and legends make it familiar to everyone. A hundred tales own it as a mysterious background, as Brocéliande is the background of a hundred Breton ballads, or as Avalon is the background of a hundred romances of the Cymric and Gaelic Celt. The Hebridean islanders seldom look at it on still frosty nights without in the long idle hours recalling some old name or allusion, some ancient _rann_ or _oran_, some _duan_ or _iorram_ of a later day, related to the mystery and startling appealing beauty of the Silver Road. It has many names on the lips of these simple men, who have little learning beyond the Bible and what life on the waters and life in the hearts of other simple men and women have taught them. Sometimes these names are beautiful, as ‘Dust of the World’ (or universe, _an domhain_) or the ‘Kyle of the Angels’ (the Strait or Sound): sometimes apt and natural, as ‘the Herring Way,’ and ‘the Wake’: sometimes legendary, as ‘the Road of the Kings’ (the old gods, from Fionn back to the Tuatha Dedannan) or as ‘the Pathway of the Secret People’: sometimes sombre or grotesque, as ‘The Shroud’ or as ‘the Bag of the Great Miller.’

There is especial interest for us, of course, in the legendary associations of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian and Celtic or Gaelic peoples. These, in common with the majority of western nations, image the Milky Way more as a ‘road’ or ‘street’ than as a serpent or than as a river--though the Norse have their _Midhgardhsormr_, connected in association with the _Weltum-Spanner_ (‘Stretcher-round-the-World’) or Ocean-Stream.

I do not know when the Milky Way as a designation first came into common English use. Possibly there is no prior mention to that in Chaucer’s _Hous of Fame_:

“_Se yonder, lo, the Galaxyë,
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey_”

--an allusion which certainly points to already familiar usage. It is now, I fancy, almost universal. Perhaps the old translator Eden was among the first to popularise it, with his rendering of the Latin _Via Lactis_ and _Via Lactea_ as ‘the Mylke way’ and ‘Mylke whyte way.’ There has been no need to derive the term from the Italian _Via lattea_ or the French _Voie lactée_, since Eden’s use and Chaucer’s preceded that of any French poet or romanticist. Certainly the phrase became part of our literature after it passed golden from the mint of Milton (paraphrasing Ovid)--

“Broad and ample road whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars, as stars to thee appear
Seen in the Galaxy, that milky way
Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest
Powdered with stars....”

It is rarely now alluded to as the Galaxy, and probably never by unlettered people. In most parts of England for centuries, and it is said in many parts still, the common designation is ‘The Way of Saint James.’ This has a singular correspondence in the name popular among the French peasants, ‘the Road of Saint Jacques of Compostella.’ Originally a like designation was common in Spain, though for a thousand years the popular epithet runs _El Camino de Santiago_, after the Warrior-Saint of the Iberian peoples. I am told that ‘the Way of Saint James’ is common in certain counties of England, but I have never heard it, nor do I wholly recall the reason of this particular nomenclature. In some form the road-idea continually recurs. How many readers of these notes will know that the familiar ‘Watling Street’--that ancient thoroughfare from Chester through the heart of London to Dover--was also applied to this Galaxy that perchance they may look at to-night from quiet country-side, or village, or distant towns, or by the turbulent seas of our unquiet coasts, or by still waters wherein the reflection lies and scintillates like a phantom phosphorescence. Watling Street does not sound a poetic equivalent for the Milky Way, but it has a finer and more ancient derivation than ‘the Way of Saint James.’ The word goes back to Hoveden’s ‘Watlinga-Strete,’ itself but slightly anglicised from the Anglo-Saxon _Waetlinga Straet_, where the words mean the Path of the Waetlings, the giant sons of King Waetla, possibly identical with the giant Sons of Turenn of ancient Gaelic legend, heroes who went out to achieve deeds impossible to men, and traversed earth and sea and heaven itself in their vast epical wanderings. Another curious old English name of the Galaxy, of great beauty in its significance, is ‘Walsyngham Way.’ Why the Galaxy should be so called might well puzzle us, were it not explained by the fact that up till near the middle of the sixteenth century one of the most common English names of the Virgin Mary was ‘Our Lady of Walsyngham,’ from the fact that the Blessed Mother’s chief shrine in the country was at Walsyngham Abbey in Norfolk. Further, as ‘the Way to Walsyngham’ in common parlance signified the road to the earthly tabernacle of Mary, so ‘Walsyngham Way,’ as applied to the Galaxy, signified the celestial road to the virgin Mother in heaven. Much more barbaric is a name for the Milky Way still to be heard in Celtic Wales, _Caer Gwydyon_, the Castle or Fortress of Gwython. This Gwython or Gwydyon was a kind of Merlin Sylvestris. He was known as the Enchanter, the Wizard as we would say now, and was feared on this account, and because he was the son of Don, King of the Otherworld, Lord of the Secret People, the ‘fairies’ of later tradition. Like Grania, the beautiful wife of Fionn, whose elopement with Dermid and their subsequent epical odyssey is the subject of one of the greatest and to this day most popular of Gaelic legendary romances, the wife of Gwython fled from his following vengeance from land to land, across seas, over mountains, ‘to the ends of the earth,’ and at last with her faery lover dared the vast untrodden ways of the remote skies. But long before they could reach Arcturus, or whatever the star or planet to which they fled, Gwython overtook them, led by the dust which these mortal if semi-divine fugitives made along the soundless dark blue roads of heaven. He slew them and their winged horses and their aerial hounds, and standing on the verge of space flung the heads and limbs and bodies into infinitude. Hence the meteors and falling stars which at the season of the autumnal equinox and at the approach of winter may still be seen whirling adown the bastions of high heaven. So terrible in tragedy, so titanic the deed, that to all eternity, or as long as our world endures, the phantom iteration of that mighty vengeance shall commemorate the inappeasable anger of Gwython the Enchanter. Is there not convincing evidence in the unpassing dust of that silent highway of the doomed lovers ... the dust of the trampled star-way that no wind of space has blown to this side or to that, that no alchemy of sun or moon has burned up or like dew dissolved?

Besides ‘Watling Street,’ our Anglo-Saxon forbears had _Iringes Weg_ or _Wec_ and _Bil-Idun’s Weg_; Iringe and Bil-Idun having been famous descendants of the Waetla already alluded to. They were warders of the Bridge of Asgard, the Scandinavian Heaven. In time this Asgard-Bridge came to be given as a name to the Milky Way ... though the later poets applied the epithet also to the Rainbow. Readers of Grimm’s _Teutonic Mythology_ will remember that he cites many collateral instances. Thus the Vikings knew the Galaxy as _Wuotanes Straza_, or ‘Woden’s Street’; the Dutch have in common use _Vronelden Street_, ‘the women’s Street’; and the German peasants commonly call it _Jakob’s Weg_. The Westphalian term is singular and suggestive, ‘Weather Street.’ One wonders if there is any common idea that weather is in any way as closely associated with the Milky Way as are the vernal floods and the autumnal rains with the Pleiades. Probably the bestowal of the name is due to the fact that when the Galaxy is clear and bright and scintillant the weather is serene and dry. A more poetic designation is that of the Finns, who delight in the term _Linnunrata_, the Birds’ Way, either from an old Finnish and Esthonian legend that once by a miracle all the songs of all the birds of the world were turned into a cloud of snow-white tiny wings, or from the more likely belief that it is the road of winged spirits on their passage from earth to heaven. This is, of course, a very ancient conception. The ancient Hindûs revealed it in the phrase ‘the Path of Ahriman’: the ancient Norse as ‘the Path of the Ghosts’ going to Valhalla: the ancient Gaels as the Hero-Way, leading from Earth to Flatheanas, the Abode of Eternal Youth. It is strange and suggestive that not only the North American aborigines called it ‘the Trail to Ponemah’ (the Hereafter), but that people so rude as the Eskimo and the Bushmen of South Africa call it ‘the Ashen Path,’ the road of fire-ember signals, for the ghosts of the dead. Even the Patagonians speak of the Milky Way as the white pampas where their dead are immortal huntsmen rejoicing in the pursuit of countless ostriches.

But of all popular names I do not think any is more apt and pleasant than that common to the Swedish peasantry, who call the Galaxy _Winter Gatan_--_i.e._, ‘Winter Street.’ It is the Winter Street we must all travel some day, if the old poets say true, when the green grass grows on our quiet beds, when the loudest wind will not fret the silence in our tired minds, and when day and night are become old forgotten dreams. May we too find it the Pathway of Peace ... not the least beautiful of the names of the Milky Way, not the least beautiful of the legends connected with that lovely wonder of our nocturnal skies.

SEPTEMBER

September: the very name has magic. In an old book, half in Latin half in English, about the months, which I came upon in a forgotten moth-eaten library years ago, and in part copied, and to my regret have not seen or heard of since, or anywhere been able to trace, I remember a singular passage about this month. Much had been said about the flowers of ‘these golden weekes that doe lye between the thunderous heates of summer and the windy gloomes of winter’; of those flowers and plants which bloom in gardens, and those, as the harebell and poppy and late-flowering gorse, which light the green garths of meadow and woodland; as the bryony, which trails among the broken copses and interweaves the ruddy masses of bramble; as the traveller’s-joy, which hangs its frail wreaths of phantom-snow along the crests of every hedgerow of beech and hornbeam. Of the changing colours of the trees, too, the old writer had much to say: of the limes ‘that become wan and spotted as a doe,’ of the mountain-ash ‘that has its long fingers dyed redd and browne,’ of ‘the wyche-elme whose gold is let loose on the wind after nighte-frosts and cold dawnes.’ Nor did he forget that ‘greate beautie of mistes’ which we all know; and he reached eloquence when he spoke of the apple-orchards and of the wall-fruits of ‘olde manor-gardenns’--‘the peache that women and poetes doe make the queene of fruites,’ ‘the rich glowe and savour of the apricock,’ ‘the delicate jargonell that keepes the sweetes of France in olde warme English gardenns.’ Of wild-fruit, also, he had dainty words and phrases. Blackberries, ‘the darke-blue bilberry,’ the sloe ‘whose excellent purple bloode maketh so fine a comfort,’ ‘the dusky clustres of the hasel,’ ‘the green-smockt filberte,’ and so forth. Even upon mushrooms he had words of sun and wind and dew, so lightsome were they, ardent and joyous, with a swift movement--as though writ by one who remembered gathering ‘musherooms’ in a sun-sweet dawn after a night of heavy dews, in company with another who laughed often in gladness and was dearest and fairest of all dear and fair things. ‘Howbeit,’ he added, after sorrowing that ‘many doe feare these goodly musherooms as poysonis dampe weedes,’ ‘this dothe in nowise abate the exceedynge excellence of Goddes providence that out of the grasse and dewe where nothing was, and where onlie the lytell worme turned in his sporte, come as at the shakynge of bells these delicate meates.’

Then, after some old-world lore about ‘the wayes of nature with beastes and byrdes’ in this month, he goes further afield. ‘And this monthe,’ he says, ‘is the monthe of dreames, and when there is a darke (or secret) fyre in the heartes of poetes, and when the god of Love is fierce and tyrannick in imaginings and dreames, and they doe saye in deedes also, yett not after the midwaye of the monthe; butt whye I know not.’

We hear so much of the poet-loved and poet-sung month of May, and the very name of June is sweet as its roses and white lilies and lavender, that it is become a romantic convention to associate them with ‘dreames’ and the ‘tyrannick’ season of ‘the god of Love.’ But I am convinced that the old Elizabethan or Jacobean naturalist was right. May and June are months of joy, but September is the month of ‘dreames’ and ‘darke fyre.’ Ask those who love nature as the poet is supposed to love her, with something of ecstasy perhaps, certainly with underglow of passion: ask those in whom the imagination is as a quickening and waning but never absent flame: ask this man who travels from month to month seeking what he shall never find, or this woman whose memories and dreams are many, howsoever few her hopes ... and the chance will be that if asked to name the month of the heart’s love, it will be September. I do not altogether know why this should be so, if so it is. There is that in June which has a time-defying magic: May has her sweet affinities with Spring in the human heart: in April are the flutes of Pan: March is stormy with the clarions of the winds: October can be wild with all wildness or be the calm mirror of the passing of the loveliness of the green-world. There is not a month that has not its own signal beauty, so that many love best February, because through her surge of rains appear days of blue wonder, with the song of the missel-thrush tost like spray from bare boughs--or November, because in the grey silence one may hear the fall of the sere leaves, and see mist and wan blueness make a new magic among deserted woods--or January, when all the visible world lies in a white trance, strange and still and miraculous as death transfigured to a brief and terrible loveliness on the face of one suddenly quiet from the fever of youth and proud beauty. There is not a month when the gold of the sun and the silver of the moon are not woven, when the rose of sunset does not lie upon hills which reddened to the rose of dawn, when the rainbow is not let loose from the tangled nets of rain and wind, when the morning-star and the evening-star do not rise and set.

And yet, for some, there is no month that has the veiled magic of September.

‘The month of peace,’ ‘the month of beauty,’ it is called in many Gaelic songs and tales; and often, ‘Summer-end.’ I remember an old _rann_, perhaps still said or sung before the peat-fires, that it was in this month God created Peace; again, an island-tale of Christ as a shepherd and the months as sheep strayed upon the hills of time. The Shepherd went out upon the hills, and gathered them one by one, and led them to the fold: but, before the fold was reached, a great wind of snow came down out of the corries, and on the left a wild flood arose, and on the narrow path there was room only, and that hardly, for the Shepherd. So He looked to see which one of the twelve He might perchance save, by lifting it in His strong arms and going with it alone to the fold. He looked long, for all were the children of His Father. Then He lifted September, saying, ‘Even so, because thou art the month of fulfilment, and because thy secret name is Peace.’ But when He came out of the darkness to the fold, the Shepherd went back between the wild lips of flood and tempest, and brought to the fold June, saying, ‘Because thy secret name is Joy’: and, in turn, one by one, He brought each to the fold, saying unto each, in this order, ‘May, because thy secret name is Love’; ‘April, because thou art made of tears and laughter’; ‘July, because thou art Beauty’; ‘August, thou quiet Mother’; ‘October, because thy name is Content’; ‘March, because thy name is Strife’; ‘February, because thy name is Hope’; ‘November, because thy name is Silence’; ‘January, because thou art Death’; and at the last, ‘December, whom I have left to the end, for neither tempest could whelm nor flood drown thee, for thy name is the Resurrection and the Life.’

And when the tale was told, some one would say, ‘But how, then, was September chosen first?’

And the teller would say, ‘Because its secret name is Peace, and Peace is the secret name of Christ.’

It is no wonder the poets have loved so well this month whose name has in it all the witchery of the North. There is the majesty of the hill-solitudes in it, when the moorlands are like a purple sea. It has the freshness of the dew-white bramble-copses, of the bracken become russet and pale gold, of the wandering frostfire along the highways of the leaf, that mysterious breath whose touch is silent flame. It is the month when the sweet, poignant second-song of the robin stirs the heart as a child’s gladness among tears. ‘The singer of September,’ a Gaelic poet calls it, and many will recall the lovely lines of the old half-forgotten Elizabethan poet on the bird

“That hath the bugle eyes and ruddy breast
And is the yellow autumn’s nightingale.”

It is strange how much bird-lore and beast-lore lie with September. The moorcock, the stag, the otter, the sea-wandering salmon, the corncrake, and the cuckoo and the swift, I know not how many others, have their tale told or their farewell sung to the sound and colour of September. The poets have loved it for the unreturning feet of Summer whose vanishing echoes are in its haunted aisles, and for the mysterious silences of the veiled arrivals of Winter. It is the month of the year’s fulfillings--

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close-bosom’d friend of the maturing sun.”

And yet there are other Septembers than the Septembers of memory, than the Septembers of the imagination. For three years past the month has come with rains from the sea and cold winds out of the east and north. The robin’s song has been poignantly sweet as of yore, but the dream-glow has been rare upon the hill and valley, and in the woods and on the moor-slopes the leaf has hung bannerets of dusky yellow, and the bracken burned dully without amber and flamelit bronze. This year, though, there has been some return of those September days which we believe in while yet a long way off, as we believe in May, as we feel assured of June. This last June was truly a month of roses, and in May the east wind slept: but last year the roses trailed along flooded byways, and the east wind nipped bud and blossom through the bleak days of ‘the merry month,’ and a colourless and forlorn September must have chilled even that ‘darke fyre in the heartes of poetes’ of which the old naturalist wrote. There have been days of peace this year, and of the whole beauty of Summer-end. In the isles, among the hills, on forest lands and uplands, and by the long plains and valleys of the south, the September blue--which is part a flame of azure and part a haze of the dust of pearls--has lain over land and sea like a benediction. How purple the western moors, what depths of floating violet and pale translucencies of amethyst on the transfigured mountains. What loveliness of pale blue mist in the hollows of quiet valleys; what richness of reds and ambers where the scarlet-fruited ash hangs over the unruffled brown pool; what profuse gold and ungathered amber where the yellow gorse climbs the hillside and the armies of the bracken invade every windy solitude. How lovely those mornings when the dew is frost-white and the gossamer is myriad in intricate interlacings that seem woven of aerial diamond-dust. What peace in that vast serenity of blue where not the smallest cloud is seen, where only seaward the gannet may hang immeasurably high like a winged star, or, above inland pastures, the windhover poise in his miraculous suspense.

But, alas, only ‘days.’ It has not been the September of the heart’s desire, of the poet’s dream. The advance-guard of the equinox has again and again come in force: the grey wind has wailed from height to height, and moaned among the woods. Even in the gardens the wall-fruits have hardly given the wonted rich warmth, though the apples have made a brave show. Yesterday there was a hush in the wind; a delicate frost lingered after a roseflusht dawn; and the inward light came out of the heather, the bracken and the gorse, out of the yellow limes and the amber planes and the changing oaks, and upon the hillside turned the great pine on the further crag into a column of pale gold and made the lichened boulders like the half-sunken gates of buried cities of topaz and jasper and chalcedony. But to-day vast masses of sombre cloud have been swung inland from the Atlantic, and the gale has the wild mournful sough that we look for in the dark months. It is in the firelight that one must recapture September. It lies hidden in that warm heart, amid the red and yellow flowers of flame: and in that other heart, which, also, has its ‘darke fyre,’ that heart in whose lands lit by neither sun nor moon are the secret glens where old dreams live again, and where the dreams of the hour are radiant in their new wonder and their new beauty.

THE CHILDREN OF WIND AND THE CLAN OF PEACE

I was abroad on the moors one day in the company of a shepherd, and we were talking of the lapwing that were plentiful there, and were that day wailing continuously in an uneasy wavering flight. I had seen them act thus, in this excess of alarm, in this prolonged restless excitement, when the hill-falcons were hovering overhead in the nesting season: and, again, just before the unloosening of wind and rain and the sudden fires of the thundercloud. But John Logan the shepherd told me that now it was neither coming lightnings nor drifting hawk nor eagle that made all this trouble among the ‘peewits.’ “The wind’s goin’ to mak’ a sudden veer,” he said--adding abruptly a little later, “an’ by the same token we’ll have rain upon us soon.”

I looked at the cold blue of the sky, and at the drift of the few clouds trailing out of the east or south-east, and could see no sign of any change of wind or likelihood of rain.

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“Weel,” he answered literally, “I don’t think it. It’s the peewits an’ the craws that ken swifter than oursels; it’s they that tell, an’ I think they’re better at the business than thae folk wha haver awa’ in the papers, an’ are sometimes richt because they canna help it an’ oftener wrang because it’s maistly guesswork.”

“Well, what do the peewits and the crows say?--though I haven’t seen crow or rook or corbie for the last hour.”

“Thae peewits an’ a’ the plovers are a’ the same. If the win’s gaun to leap out of the east intae the sooth-wast, or slide quickly from the north intae the wast, they’ll gang on wheelin’ an’ wailin’ like yon for an hour or mair, an’ that afore there’s the least sign o’ a change. An’ as for the craws ... weel, if ye had been lookin’ up a wee whilie ago ye’d ’a seen a baker’s dozen go by, slantin’ on the edge o’ the win’, like boats before a stiff breeze. Aye, an’ see there! ... there’s a wheen mair comin’ up overhead.”

I glanced skyward, and saw some eight or ten rooks flying high and evidently making for the mountain-range about two miles away to our left.

“D’ye see that ... thae falling birds?”

“Yes,” I answered, noticing a singular occasional fall in the general steady flight, as though the suddenly wheeling bird had been shot: “and what o’ that, John?”

“It’s just this: when ye see craws flyin’ steady like that an’ then yince in a while drapping oot like yon, ye may tak’ it as meanin’ there’s heavy rain no that great way aff: onyways, when ye see the like when thae black deils are fleein’ straight for the hills, ye maun feel sure frae the double sign that ye’ll hae a good chance o’ being drookit afore twa-three hours.”

One question led to another, and I heard much crow and corbie lore from John Logan, some of it already familiar to me and some new to me or vaguely half-known--as the legend that the corbies or ravens, and with them all the crow-kind, were originally white, but at the time of the Deluge were turned sooty-black because the head of the clan, when sent out by Noah from the Ark, did not return, but stayed to feed on the bodies of the drowned. “So the blackness of death was put on them, as my old mother has it in her own Gaelic.”

“Your old mother, John?” I queried surprisedly: “I did not know you had any one at your croft.”

“Aye, but I have that, though she’s a poor frail auld body an’ never gangs further frae the hoose than the byre an’ the hen-yaird. If ye want to hear more aboot thae birds an’ the auld stories forenenst them, she’d mak’ you welcome, an’ we’d be glad an’ prood to offer ye tea: an’ I’ll just tell ye this, that ye’ll gie her muckle pleasure if ye’ll hae a crack wi’ her in the Gaelic, an’ let her tell her auld tales in’t. She’s Hielan’, ye ken: tho’ my faither was oot o’ Forfar, Glen Isla way. She’s never got hold o’ the English yet varra weel, an’ to my sorrow I’ve never learnt the auld tongue, takin’ after my faither in that, dour lowland body as he was. I ken enough to follow her sangs, an’ a few words forbye, just enough to gie us a change as ye micht say.”

I gladly accepted the shepherd’s courteous offer; and so it was that an hour later we found ourselves at Scaur-vàn, as his croft was called, from its nearness to a great bleached crag that rose out of the heather like a light-ship in a lonely sea. By this time, his prognostications--or those rather of the wheeling and wailing lapwings, and the mountain-flying rooks--had come true. Across the wide desolate moors a grey wind soughed mournfully from the south-west, driving before it long slanting rains and sheets of drifting mist. I was glad to be out of the cold wet, and in the warm comfort of a room lit with a glowing peat-fire on which lay one or two spurtling logs of pine.

A dear old woman rose at my entrance. I could see she was of great age, because her face was like a white parchment seamed with a myriad wrinkles, and her hands were so sere and thin that they were like wan leaves of October. But she was fairly active, and her eyes were clear--and even, if the expression may be used, with a certain quiet fire in their core--and her features were comely, with a light on them as of serene peace. The old-fashioned white mutch she wore enhanced this general impression, and I remember smiling to myself at the quaint conceit that old Mrs. Logan was like a bed-spirit of ancient slumber looking out from an opening of frilled white curtains.

It was pleasant to sit and watch her, as with deft hands she prepared the tea and laid on the table scones and butter and grey farrels of oatcake, while, outside, the wet wind moaned and every now and then a swirl of rain splashed against the narrow panes of the window, in whose inset stood three pots of geranium whose scarlet flowers caught the red flicker of the fire-flaucht and warmed the grey dusk gathering without.

Later, we began to speak of the things of which her son John and I had talked on the moor: and then of much else in connection with the legendary lore of the birds and beasts of the hills and high moorlands.

As it was so much easier for her (and so far more vivid and idiomatic) she spoke in Gaelic, delighted to find one who could understand the ancient speech: for in that part of the country, though in the Highlands, no Gaelic is spoken, or only a few words or phrases connected with sport, sheep-driving, and the like. I had won her heart by saying to her soon after the tea--up to which time she had spoken in the slow and calculated but refined Highland-English of the north-west--_Tha mi cinnteach gu bheil sibh aois mhòr_ ... ‘I am sure that you have the great age on you.’ She had feared that because I had ‘the English way’ I would not know, or remember, or care to remember, the old tongue: and she took my hand and stroked it while she said with a quiet dignity of pleasure, _Is taitneach leam nach ’eil ’ur Gàidhlig air meirgeadh_ ... (in effect) ‘It is well pleased I am that your Gaelic has not become rusty.’

It was after the tea-things had been set aside, and old Mrs. Logan had said reverently, _Iarramaid beannachadh_ (‘Let us ask a blessing’), that she told me, among other legendary things and fragments of old natural-history folklore, the following legend (or holy Christmas tale, as she called it) as to how the first crows were black and the first doves white.

I will tell it as simply but also with what beauty I can, because her own words, which I recall only as the fluctuating remembrance from a dream and so must translate from the terms of dream into the terms of prose, though simple were beautiful with ancient idiom.

Thus she began:--_Feumaidh sinn dol air ar n’-ais dlùth fichead ceud bliadhna_, which is to say, ‘We must go back near two thousand (_lit_: _twenty hundred_) years.’

* * * * *

Yes, it is nigh upon twenty hundred years that we must go back. It was in the last month of the last year of the seven years’ silence and peace. When would that be, you ask? Surely what other would it be than the seven holy years when Jesus the Christ was a little lad. Do you not remember the lore of the elders? ... that in the first seven years of the life of the young Christ there was peace in the world, and that the souls of men were like souls in a dream, and that the hearts of women were at rest. In the second seven years it is said that the world was like an adder that sloughs its skin: for there was everywhere a troubled sense of new things to come. So wide and far and deep was this, that men in remote lands began moving across swamps and hills and deserts; that the wild beasts shifted their lairs and moaned and cried in new forests and upon untrodden plains; that the storks and swallows in their migration wearied their wings in high, cold, untravelled ways; that the narwhals and great creatures of the deep foamed through unknown seas; that the grasses of the world wandered and inhabited hills; that many waters murmured in the wilderness and that many waters mysteriously sank from pools and wellsprings. In the third seven years, men even on the last ocean-girdled shores were filled with further longing, and it is said that new stars were flung into the skies and ancient stars were whirled away, like dust and small stones beneath the wheels of a chariot. It was at the end of the third seven years that a Face looked out of Heaven, and that from the edges of the world men heard a confused and dreadful sound rising from the Abyss. Though the great and the small are the same, it is the great that withdraws from remembrance and the small that remains, and that may be why men have grown old with time, and have forgotten, and remember only the little things of the common life: as that in these years the Herring became the king of all fishes, because his swift gleaming clan carried the rumour of great tidings to the uttermost places of ocean; as that in these years the little fly became king over lions and panthers and eagles and over all birds and beasts, because it alone of all created things had remained tameless and fearless; as that in these years the wild-bees were called the clan of wisdom, because they carried the Word to every flower that grows and spread the rumour on all the winds of the world; as that in these years the Cuckoo was called the Herald of God, because in his voice are heard the bells of Resurrection.

But, as I was saying, it was in the last month of the last year of the seven years’ silence and peace: the seventh year in the mortal life of Jesus the Christ. It was on the twenty-fifth day of that month, the day of His holy birth.

It was a still day. The little white flowers that were called Breaths of Hope and that we now call Stars of Bethlehem were so hushed in quiet that the shadows of moths lay on them like the dark motionless violet in the hearts of pansies. In the long swards of tender grass the multitude of the daisies were white as milk faintly stained with flusht dews fallen from roses. On the meadows of white poppies were long shadows blue as the blue lagoons of the sky among drifting snow-white moors of cloud. Three white aspens on the pastures were in a still sleep: their tremulous leaves made no rustle, though there was a soundless wavering fall of little dusky shadows, as in the dark water of a pool where birches lean in the yellow hour of the frostfire. Upon the pastures were ewes and lambs sleeping, and yearling kids opened and closed their onyx eyes among the garths of white clover.

It was the Sabbath, and Jesus walked alone. When He came to a little rise in the grass He turned and looked back at the house where His parents dwelled. Joseph sat on a bench, with bent shoulders, and was dreaming with fixt gaze into the west, as seamen stare across the interminable wave at the pale green horizons that are like the grassy shores of home. Mary was standing, dressed in long white raiment, white as a lily, with her right hand shading her eyes as she looked to the east, dreaming her dream.

The young Christ sighed, but with the love of all love in His heart. “So shall it be till the day of days,” He said aloud; “even so shall the hearts of men dwell among shadows and glories, in the West of passing things: even so shall that which is immortal turn to the East and watch for the coming of Joy through the Gates of Life.”

At the sound of His voice He heard a sudden noise as of many birds, and turned and looked beyond the low upland where He stood. A pool of pure water lay in the hollow, fed by a ceaseless wellspring, and round it and over it circled birds whose breasts were grey as pearl and whose necks shone purple and grass-green and rose. The noise was of their wings, for though the birds were beautiful they were voiceless and dumb as flowers.

At the edge of the pool stood two figures, whom He knew to be of the angelic world because of their beauty, but who had on them the illusion of mortality so that the child did not know them. But He saw that one was beautiful as Night, and one beautiful as Morning.

He drew near.

“I have lived seven years,” He said, “and I wish to send peace to the far ends of the world.”

“Tell your secret to the birds,” said one.

“Tell your secret to the birds,” said the other.

So Jesus called to the birds.

“Come,” He cried; and they came.

Seven came flying from the left, from the side of the angel beautiful as Night. Seven came flying from the right, from the side of the angel beautiful as Morning.

To the first He said: “Look into my heart.”