Page images
PDF
EPUB

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXVIII.-JANUARY, 1881.-VOL. LXII.

[merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by Harper and Brothers, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Vor LXII-No. 368.-11

[graphic]

EAGLE CRAG.

"When from behind that craggy steep, till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power extinct,
Upreared its head."-WORDSWORTH'S "PRELUDE."

ed the early missionaries in England to rededicate the pagan temples and observe their festivals, so as to invest the new faith

with the prestige of the old. Instead of the rushes which used to be strewn on the floor of the church, garlands of flowers are now borne by a procession of village girls on the last Sunday in July, and they are removed on Monday, when a sermon is preached. Entering Ambleside, I observed two "Druidic" stones set up before a shop for gate posts.

A moonlight row on Windermere, who can tell its charms? Far out on the soft, motionless water, watching the lights on shore, each making its comet tail in the still lake, gliding at our own sweet will, and across the reflex of many a star; pausing now and then to count the sounds faintly wafted through the slumberous air a dog's bark turned to music by aural perspective, a lonely night bird, or call of the water-fowl; looking up to the sky, radiant with stars double as large and clear as any visible in London-so passed we our first evening by Ambleside. Voyaging round a promontory dense with green foliage, which made a dark path in the water, we neared the mouth by which the Rothay and the Brathay bring their united waters into the lake. The Rothay comes from singing its gentle praises beside the hallowed graves of Grasmere; the Brathay comes with its sobbing dirge for the beauty and the joy that briefly lit up its banks, then withered amid pain, and made it a name of desolation.

For Brathay is associated with Charles Lloyd, a man much valued by the Lake poets, and who combined with Charles Lamb and Coleridge to give the world a volume of poems in 1797. The triad was lampooned in the Anti-Jacobin Review as "the anarchists," and Gilray caricatured Coleridge with ass's ears, Lamb as a frog, and Lloyd as a toad. Lloyd trans

lated "Alfieri," and Coleridge wrote that | Wordsworth. Lloyd said to De Quincey: in his babyhood Genius had plunged him "Ay, that landscape below, with its quiet "in the wizard fount hight Castaly." Yet cottage, looks lovely, I dare say, to you; Charles Lloyd would appear to have been as for me, I see it, but I feel it not at all." quite forgotten. He was not indeed a great Coleridge, in his "Ode to Dejection," lookpoet, but he was a fine scholar, a grace- ing during a serene eve on clouds, stars, ful writer, and his mansion, called Low and crescent, exclaims: Brathay, his brilliant hospitalities, the joy and tragedy of his life, form much of the romance of this region. Painful histories

"I see them all so excellently fair,

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are." Wordsworth, on the other hand, elevated

[graphic][merged small]

second book of of Blea Tarn

The Excursion," speaks

have strangely haunted this picturesque by the gorgeous vision described in the country, but few so sorrowful as that of Lloyd. The son of a wealthy banker, who allowed him plenty of money for himself "This little vale, a dwelling-place of man, and his literary friends, he came here to Lay low beneath my feet; 'twas visiblereside with his wife (whom he had marI saw not, but I felt that it was there." ried while at Cambridge University), and Again, Lloyd told De Quincey that he began to write poems expressive of his seemed to hear a "dull trampling sound happiness and his beautiful home on the.... the sound of some man, or party of Brathay. Insanity having been hereditary in the family, this young man appears to have surrendered to its first faint premonitions in his own case as the summons of fate. He then plucked up courage to struggle; he took exercise and anodynes. An ingenious writer, the author of Business, in an unpublished volume which I have seen, remarks that the processes of Charles Lloyd's disturbed mind correspond with descriptions written by Coleridge and

men, continually advancing slowly, con-
tinually threatening, or continually ac-
cusing him.... again and again....he
caught the sullen and accursed sound,
trampling and voices of men, or whatever
it were, still steadily advancing." Cole-
ridge says, in "The Pains of Sleep":
"But yesternight I prayed aloud

In anguish and in agony,
Upstarting from the fiendish crowd

Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me;

[blocks in formation]

And whom I scorned those only strong."

Lloyd was overmastered. The owner of Low Brathay-mansion of brilliant hospitality, amidst whose festivities De Quincey first saw Professor Wilson, dancing with his future wife, then the leading belle of the Lake country-was torn from all its joys and treasures of heart and intellect, and lodged in an asylum. De Quincey has told of Lloyd's escape after some years of confinement, and his sudden entry into Grasmere. The wanderer refused the shelter of De Quincey's home; he set out in the evening for his old home. When the two reached Rydal Mere, Lloyd stopped and poured out his sorrows for an hour by the side of the gloomy water; the friends then separated. Lloyd fled into the darkness. After being several times put in an asylum, after temporary liberation or escape, he was sent to a house in France for treatment, and there died.

"I am dearly fond of Charles Lloyd," wrote Charles Lamb; "he is all goodness, and I have too much of the world in my composition to feel myself thoroughly deserving of his friendship."

Charles Lloyd ought to be famous, if only because his memory inspired a passage concerning him by De Quincey hardly surpassed by any prose writing in the English language for solemn eloquence: "Charles Lloyd never returned to Brathay after he had once been removed from it, and the removal of his family soon followed. Mrs. Lloyd, indeed, returned at

intervals from France to England upon business connected with the interests of her family and during one of these visits she came to the Lakes, where she selected Grasmere for her residence, so that I had opportunities of seeing her every day for the space of several weeks. Otherwise I never saw any of the family except one son, an interesting young man, who sought most meritoriously, by bursting asunder the heavy yoke of constitutional inactivity, to extract a balm for his own besetting melancholy from a constant series of exertions in which he had forced himself to engage for promoting education or religious knowledge among his poorer neighbors. But often and often, in years after all was gone, I have passed old Brathay, or have gone over purposely after dark, about the time when for many a year I used to go over to spend the evening; and, seating myself on a stone by the side of the mountain river Brathay, have staid for hours listening to the same sound to which so often Charles and I used to hearken together with profound emotion and awe-the sound of pealing anthems, as if streaming from the open portals of some illimitable cathedral; for such a sound does actually arise, in many states of the weather, from the peculiar action of the river Brathay upon its rocky bed; and many times I have heard it of a quiet night, when no stranger could have been persuaded to believe it other than the sound of choral chanting-distant, solemn, saintly. Its meaning and expression were, in these earlier years, uncertain and general; not more pointed or determinate in the direction which it impressed upon one's feeling than the light of setting suns, and sweeping, in fact, the whole harp of pensive sensibilities rather than striking the chord of any one specific sentiment. But since the ruin or dispersion of that household, after the smoke had ceased to ascend from their hearth, or the garden walks to re-echo their voices, oftentimes, when lying by

[graphic]

the river-side, I have listened to the same aerial, saintly sound, whilst looking back to that night, long hidden in the forest of receding years, when Charles and Sophia Lloyd, now lying in foreign graves, first dawned upon me, coming suddenly out of rain and darkness; then young, rich, happy, full of hope, belted with young children (of whom also most are long dead), and standing apparently on the verge of a labyrinth of golden hours. Musing on the night in November, 1807, and then upon the wreck that had been wrought by a space of fifteen years, I would say to myself sometimes, and seem to hear it in the songs of this watery cathedral, Put not your trust in any fabric of happiness that has its root in man or the children of men.' Sometimes, even, I was tempted to discover in the same music a sound such as this: 'Love nothing, love nobody, for thereby comes a killing curse

ain river, a more solemn, if a less agitated, admonition-a requiem over departed happiness, and a protestation against the thought that so many excellent creatures, but a little lower than the angels, whom I have seen only to love in this life-so many of the good, the brave, the beautiful, the wise-can have appeared for no higher purpose or prospect than simply to point a moral, to cause a little joy and many tears, a few perishing moons of happiness and years of vain regret. No! that the destiny of man is more commensurate with the grandeur of his endowments, and that our own mysterious tendencies are written hieroglyphically in the vicissitudes of day and night, of winter and summer, and throughout the great alphabet of nature."

But the night has deepened on Windermere. The moon is low, and the lake has drawn over it a sheet of white mist;

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small]
« PreviousContinue »