Читать книгу Shakespeare's England - Winter William West - Страница 11

The coast-line recedes and disappears, and night comes down upon the ocean. Into what dangers will the great ship plunge? Through what mysterious waste of waters will she make her viewless path? The black waves roll up around her. The strong blast fills her sails and whistles through her creaking cordage. Overhead the stars shine dimly amid the driving clouds. Mist and gloom close in the dubious prospect, and a strange sadness settles upon the heart of the voyager—who has left his home behind, and who now seeks, for the first time, the land, the homes, and the manners of the stranger. Thoughts and images of the past crowd thick upon his remembrance. The faces of absent friends rise before him, whom, perhaps, he is destined nevermore to behold. He sees their smiles; he hears their voices; he fancies them by familiar hearth-stones, in the light of the evening lamps. They are very far away now; and already it seems months instead of hours since the parting moment. Vain now the pang of regret for misunderstandings, unkindness, neglect; for golden moments slighted and gentle courtesies left undone. He is alone upon the wild sea—all the more alone because surrounded with new faces of unknown companions—and the best he can do is to seek his lonely pillow and lie down with a prayer in his heart and on his lips. Never before did he so clearly know—never again will he so deeply feel—the uncertainty of human life and the weakness of human nature. Yet, as he notes the rush and throb of the vast ship and the noise of the breaking waves around her, and thinks of the mighty deep beneath, and the broad and melancholy expanse that stretches away on every side, he cannot miss the impression—grand, noble, and thrilling—of human courage, skill, and power. For this ship is the centre of a splendid conflict. Man and the elements are here at war; and man makes conquest of the elements by using them as weapons against themselves. Strong and brilliant, the head-light streams over the boiling surges. Lanterns gleam in the tops. Dark figures keep watch upon the prow. The officer of the night is at his post upon the bridge. Let danger threaten howsoever it may, it cannot come unawares; it cannot subdue, without a tremendous struggle, the brave minds and hardy bodies that are here arrayed to meet it. With this thought, perhaps, the weary voyager sinks to sleep; and this is his first night at sea.

There is no tediousness of solitude to him who has within himself resources of thought and dream, the pleasures and pains of memory, the bliss and the torture of imagination. It is best to have few acquaintances—or none—on shipboard. Human companionship, at some times, and this is one of them, distracts by its pettiness. The voyager should yield himself to nature now, and meet his own soul face to face. The routine of everyday life is commonplace enough, equally upon sea and land. But the ocean is a continual pageant, filling and soothing the mind with unspeakable peace. Never, in even the grandest words of poetry, was the grandeur of the sea expressed. Its vastness, its freedom, its joy, and its beauty overwhelm the mind. All things else seem puny and momentary beside the life that this immense creation unfolds and inspires. Sometimes it shines in the sun, a wilderness of shimmering silver. Sometimes its long waves are black, smooth, glittering, and dangerous. Sometimes it seems instinct with a superb wrath, and its huge masses rise, and clash together, and break into crests of foam. Sometimes it is gray and quiet, as if in a sullen sleep. Sometimes the white mist broods upon it and deepens the sense of awful mystery by which it is forever enwrapped. At night its surging billows are furrowed with long streaks of phosphorescent fire; or, it may be, the waves roll gently, under the soft light of stars; or all the waste is dim, save where, beneath the moon, a glorious pathway, broadening out to the far horizon, allures and points to heaven. One of the most exquisite delights of the voyage, whether by day or night, is to lie upon the deck in some secluded spot, and look up at the tall, tapering spars as they sway with the motion of the ship, while over them the white clouds float, in ever-changing shapes, or the starry constellations drift, in their eternal march. No need now of books, or newspapers, or talk! The eyes are fed by every object they behold. The great ship, with all her white wings spread, careening like a tiny sail-boat, dips and rises, with sinuous, stately grace. The clank of her engines—fit type of steadfast industry and purpose—goes steadily on. The song of the sailors—"Give me some time to blow the man down"—rises in cheery melody, full of audacious, light-hearted thoughtlessness, and strangely tinged with the romance of the sea. Far out toward the horizon many whales come sporting and spouting along. At once, out of the distant bank of cloud and mist, a little vessel springs into view, and with convulsive movement—tilting up and down like the miniature barque upon an old Dutch clock—dances across the vista and vanishes into space. Soon a tempest bursts upon the calm; and then, safe-housed from the fierce blast and blinding rain, the voyager exults over the stern battle of winds and waters and the stalwart, undaunted strength with which his ship bears down the furious floods and stems the gale. By and by a quiet hour is given, when, met together with the companions of his journey, he stands in the hushed cabin and hears the voice of prayer and the hymn of praise, and, in the pauses, a gentle ripple of waves against the ship, which now rocks lazily upon the sunny deep; and, ever and anon, as she dips, he can discern through her open ports the shining sea and the wheeling and circling gulls that have come out to welcome her to the shores of the old world.

The present writer, when first he saw the distant and dim coast of Britain, felt, with a sense of forlorn loneliness that he was a stranger; but when last he saw that coast he beheld it through a mist of tears and knew that he had parted from many cherished friends, from many of the gentlest men and women upon the earth, and from a land henceforth as dear to him as his own. England is a country which to see is to love. As you draw near to her shores you are pleased at once with the air of careless finish and negligent grace that everywhere overhangs the prospect. The grim, wind-beaten hills of Ireland have first been passed—hills crowned, here and there, with dark, fierce towers that look like strongholds of ancient bandit chiefs, and cleft by dim valleys that seem to promise endless mystery and romance, hid in their sombre depths. Passed also is white Queenstown, with its lovely little bay, its circle of green hillsides, and its valiant fort; and picturesque Fastnet, with its gaily painted tower, has long been left behind. It is off the noble crags of Holyhead that the voyager first observes with what a deft skill the hand of art has here moulded nature's luxuriance into forms of seeming chance-born beauty; and from that hour, wherever in rural England the footsteps of the pilgrim may roam, he will behold nothing but gentle rustic adornment, that has grown with the grass and the roses—greener grass and redder roses than ever we see in our western world! In the English nature a love of the beautiful is spontaneous, and the operation of it is as fluent as the blowing of the summer wind. Portions of English cities, indeed, are hard and harsh and coarse enough to suit the most utilitarian taste; yet even in those regions of dreary monotony the national love of flowers will find expression, and the people, without being aware of it, will, in many odd little ways, beautify their homes and make their surroundings pictorial, at least to stranger eyes. There is a tone of rest and homelike comfort even in murky Liverpool; and great magnificence is there—as well of architecture and opulent living as of enterprise and action. "Towered cities" and "the busy hum of men," however, are soon left behind by the wise traveller in England. A time will come for those; but in his first sojourn there he soon discovers the two things that are utterly to absorb him—which cannot disappoint—and which are the fulfilment of all his dreams. These things are—the rustic loveliness of the land and the charm of its always vital and splendid antiquity. The green lanes, the thatched cottages, the meadows glorious with wildflowers, the little churches covered with dark-green ivy, the Tudor gables festooned with roses, the devious footpaths that wind across wild heaths and long and lonesome fields, the narrow, shining rivers, brimful to their banks and crossed here and there with gray, moss-grown bridges, the stately elms whose low-hanging branches droop over a turf of emerald velvet, the gnarled beech-trees "that wreathe their old, fantastic roots so high," the rooks that caw and circle in the air, the sweet winds that blow from fragrant woods, the sheep and the deer that rest in shady places, the pretty children who cluster round the porches of their cleanly, cosy homes, and peep at the wayfarer as he passes, the numerous and often brilliant birds that at times fill the air with music, the brief, light, pleasant rains that ever and anon refresh the landscape—these are some of the everyday joys of rural England; and these are wrapped in a climate that makes life one serene ecstasy. Meantime, in rich valleys or on verdant slopes, a thousand old castles and monasteries, ruined or half in ruins, allure the pilgrim's gaze, inspire his imagination, arouse his memory, and fill his mind. The best romance of the past and the best reality of the present are his banquet now; and nothing is wanting to the perfection of the feast. I thought that life could have but few moments of content in store for me like the moment—never to be forgotten!—when, in the heart of London, on a perfect June day, I lay upon the grass in the old Green Park, and, for the first time, looked up to the towers of Westminster Abbey.