Now let us seek yon bosky dell And where its clear stream murmurs on, And o'er us, hark! Chirrup! chirrup! away soars he, and where she was buried we never knew-but it was somewhere, we had reason to believe, among the upland parishes of the Lowlands, where they melt away into the Western Highlands. Thoughts that had evanished from our hearts, like young birds that fly away from their nest and return never more, came fluttering about it in the hush that ensued on the pleasant perusal of these lively lines, and for a moment we saw a face, the face of a Phantom smiling upon us, with eyes lifelike as if they had never been shut but in sleep! 'Tis one of the functions of the Poet to awaken such reminiscences; but with some beautiful verses of a different mood, we bid Mr Motherwell and his delightful volume farewell. It is a many long-long ages ago since we were in love-but we remember, if not so distinctly, at least far more indistinctly than if it had been yesterday, our emotions, one May-morning, while walking through a hill-side wood, and sometimes sitting, with a maiden of the sweet name of Mary. Years afterwards she took a consumption-so we heard when at a great distance-and died THEY COME! THE MERRY SUMMER MONTHS. They come the merry summer months of Beauty, Song, and Flowers; They come! the gladsome months that bring thick leafiness to bowers. Up, up, my heart! and walk abroad, fling cark and care aside, Seek silent hills, or rest thyself where peaceful waters glide; Scan through its leaves the cloudless sky in rapt tranquillity. The grass is soft, its velvet touch is grateful to the hand, It stirs their blood, with kindest love, to bless and welcome thee; There is no cloud that sails along the ocean of yon sky, Thou see'st their glittering fans outspread all gleaming like red gold, But soft! mine ear upcaught a sound, from yonder wood it came ; Good Lord! it is a gracious boon for thought-crazed wight like me, I'm sadder now, I have had cause; but oh! I'm proud to think THE SKETCHER. No I. I "QUE regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?" What region is not witness to my toils? Sketching tourists, antiquarians, geologists, and travellers by profession, complacently smiling over their portfolios, their coins, and their cotton-bedded fragments of Ichthiosauri, or large-margined quartos, in their conceit of their labours often think, if they do not utter, these words, of the cold-hearted Phrygian, in Queen Dido's picture gallery. have been a Sketching Tourist; but it would be more becoming modesty, were I, as an ingenious friend thus commenced the catalogue of his library-a list of books I have not got -to put down where I have not been, that the motto in the end bring no shame. Imprimis, I have not even seen Scotland, and have therefore little reason, in the eyes of Maga and the world, to boast of my search after the picturesque. But after a few years more of improvement, and why not further improvement?-for an old man of my village has told me that his constitution is just beginning to get strong, having been of the weakest in his youth, and he is 83and Cato learned Greek at I know not what age. It is then no presumption to hope for improvement. Cato expected to talk with Homer, and Hesiod, and Pindar, in the other world, and therefore learned their language, and why may we not fondly hope, that every improvement we make will advance our position elsewhere, that taste is with us and immortal? Has heaven no music, no poetry? Perhaps we have here given us but the smallest atom of the great whole, of which our souls may be made capacious, and that the greatest gift of human genius is but the minutest particle from the infinite celestial storehouse. While he thinks of this, the enthusiast is more ardent in his pursuit. At least, it makes me thankful in my pleasures-and this gratitude to the Giver, heightened by prospective views, sanctifies amusement; I can walk the hills and the vallies with a step elastic with the dignity of duty-why should not I then seek improvement, till I can say with Corregio, "Anche io son Pit tore?" And then I shall visit Scotland, its lakes, mountains, neither as Piscator nor Geologist, to whip the one, or tomahawk the other, but as Sketcher; and besides, there is another point of ambition-When in the Queendom of Maga, I may be admit ted at court, and be one of the elected at a Noctes. There is a scope to aim at! "The most accomplished Christopher" is awful, and I am determi. ned not to open my portfolio before Tickler, though my performances have often been thought very pretty by ladies, even when looked at upside down. After this great defect in my title, it may be allowed me to say what are my pretensions to make any remarks upon nature and art, as I intend doing. I have visited the lakes of Cumberland, more than once pedestrianised Wales, been refused admittance to an inn "that did not take in trampers," been questioned as a pedlar by mountain lasses, eyeing my large portfolio, if I had laces to sell; have run through the wild Irish and escaped, penetrated Wicklow, stood on M'Gilly Cuddy's Reeks, and threaded the Lakes of Killarney, and dropped a pencil into the Devil's Punchbowl. These and sundry other places in our Island might entitle me to be a member of the Stainers' Company. But the pilgrim's staff has taken me further. My portfolio has been opened on the blue Leman; can with accuracy that requires no oath, illustrate poem, or ornament Annual, with minute views of Vevay, Castle of Chillon, and Rousseau's romantic Meillerie. I have crossed the Alps winter and summer, and, like Hannibal, besieged nature in her strongholds, though "opposuit natura Alpemque nivemque," descended into Italy and mapped Tivoli, and sought inspiration in Neptune's Grotto and the Sybil's Temple, conversed with Horace in his own Villa-have dared the thundering cataracts of Terni-taken castles and villages with and without fortifications—“ Urbes montibus impositas"-nearly lost my life by stepping over the top wall of the Colliseum, and leaving the saints within unworshipped-"Egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma," and thence brought away the tomb of the Horatii and Curiatii. In the service of the arts, have run the gauntlet among robbers, between Rome and Naples, extinguished the smoke of Vesuvius with my foot, and been stripped to the very skin by banditti in Calabria, yet even after that, replenished my box (Smith and Warner) with lake and vermilion for the double roses of Paestum, trampled on by herds of hideous reforming buffaloes; for all Hesperides have their monsters. But oh ! the infinity of Nature, how wide her domain, to be looked at with both ends of the telescope! here comes the humiliation, though in the portfolios there be stores laid up for many years; yet to suppose that from any of these places, the numerous, untranslatable riches and beauties have been brought away,would argue the conceit of a Political Reformer, Economist, and Utilitarian, who think they have surveyed the whole fabric of a constitution, when they have only discovered a mousehole in the edifice, or that they know the whole will of heaven by their superintendance of a parish register. Perhaps my next confession will be deemed a disqualification-a whole generation of artists will scorn my presumption-I have not visited that great mart of intellect, and depot of excellence, London, these ten years; and consequently cannot talk learnedly of any exhibitions, oil or water colours, nor of public nor private collections. I would have been Ignoramus, but that the name has been adopted by one who knows more than most of us. If within these dozen years or so, any great artist has started into existence, he will not want my praise, and will pardon my silence after this confession. I know little of modern actual performances of art, and only judge of a part, and such as I can see in Annuals, and engravings in the shop windows of a country town; and some of these things are astonishing enough, too astonishing, much too astonishing, and beyond the taste of common intellect, whose hobbling pace has not marched up to them. Are there any landscape painters yet living in the world? He of Nineveh and Babylon is great; but "Flumina amem sylvas inglorius." Thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, death and destruction; metamorphoses of elements, cloud into solid rock, and earth into air, and water into fire, confusion and chaos, powerful as the genius is that has there been dealing with them, satisfy not me but in certain imaginative moods that are not permanent, and like vapours pass away. I would be of Hamlet's advice to the players, "in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness." I like nature in her placid smiling or evenly dignified mood, not in convulsions, hysterics, and in her parturition of monsters. I had rather see the earth peopled with Pan and Sylvanus, with the accompaniment of wood nymphs, be they not spoiled of their fair proportions, than giants and dwarfs. Ovid himself keeps some measure, and brings, artfully enough, his beautiful extravagancies within the scope of human probabilities,-and therefore is delightful. Apollo was a better shepherd than Polyphemus, and more became the pastoral. Poetry, poetry, poetry, if it be not in the soul of a painter, let him advertise to paint signs; but even then, let him never attempt above a red lion, or, in his ecstatic moments, a jolly Bacchus astride a tun. But a picture of contortions, or of vulgarities, landscape or figures, is like moral vice, and would be punishable with death in the justice hall of Queen Maga. In sketching then from nature, your eyes must see what is before them, but the mind's eye must be in the middle of your forehead, to command the wanderings of the other two, and to select and reject; hence may taste be termed durigov oμμa, the new eye-new sense-new perception. Poetry of nature, what is it? All nature is poetry, is full of it, yet may you not have the power to extract an atom, any more than you can extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Question yourself well on this point, and if it be so, you are not of the art divine. When you sketch from nature, if you find, on examining your portfolio, you have brought back nothing but views, and that it is a remembrancer of localities, as your almanack is of dates, there is so little dignity in your employment, it will not be amiss if you quit it. So, if you paint, and do no more than manufacture views, you are only fit to ornament musical snuffboxes, and beautify albums. If you can see no poetry in nature beyond what is on the retina of your eye, you want the mind's eye to constitute the painter; you must be the poet, or discard the whole concern; you must have a convertible power, and have enjoyed visions of FairyLand; and you must people your pastoral, or your romantic, or your poetical, with beings that are not on the poor's books;-you must remove, as it were, the curse from the earth, and from man, for whose sake it was under it separate the free beauties from detestable toil and labour, and from all idea of the dire punishment and necessity of "eating our bread by the sweat of our brows." Give your scenes the charm of the dolce far niente,' let the verdure be fit for the gentle feet of Astræa, still blessing humanity with her intercourse. Nay, let your almost aerial mountain-perch'd towns and villages, be in a sweet repose as under her divine government, and your figures shall be of them, and you shall see that they have homes and all social affections, and lead lives of delightful leisure, unconscious of the fatal curse, that some see alone dominant on the earth. Take not your Chancery suit into your silvan nooks, mar them not with bailiff, beadle, culprit, insensible clown, or workers of spinning jennies,-all are of the curse. Disturb not your latitat with a power of attorney. Yet I would not limit your genius; it is impossible to say what new paths genius may wander into, and what delightful wonders yet bring home from its own unexplored lands. Yet, pause awhile to ask what you are about ;-how many landscape painters have there been in the world as yet, not counting what this Annus Mirabilis may produce ? A painter of docks and thistles is not one; far less of barns and pigsties; such artificers should all be put in the stocks, and have their kindred grunting swine rub their fellowship against them. And always remember that repose is the beauty of landscape. The scene should be a poetical shelter from the world, and if in any thing partaking of it, it should be only so much so as would shew it to be a part and parcel of the "debateable land" that lies between Fairy Land and the cold Utilitarian world. As it is to be a shelter, remember repose, and let not the glorious sun himself act the impertinent intruder, and stare you ever in the face like a Polyphemus, stationed in mid heaven, hid with a cerulean curtain, all but his eye. There are modern pictures that would make you long for a parasol, and put you in fear of the yellow fever, and into a suspicion of the jaundice; scenes pretending too to be Fairy Land that are hot as capsicum, terribly tropical, "sub curru nimium propinqui solis,"-where an Undine would be dried and withered, -and you would long more for an icicle than Lalage, and would cry out for the shades of Erebus to hide you in. Horace says, "place me under the chariot of the too near sun, in a land unblest of houses." Yet do artists in defiance build their structures under the blaze of the sweltering orb, and then perhaps give you a river, where even a Niobe could not squeeze out the moisture of a tear. Then are you astonished at the skill of the artist, and detest his work, and require a green shade over your eyes for a week, and dread an ophthalmia. The true worship of nature is a greater mystery; the idol demands not the cauldron and the fiery furnace; would she were the Mater Cybele to unyoke the lion from her car, and drive the mad recusant back into the woods. You cannot open an Annual without the flaring sun in the middle of the page; all imitate the wonder. We are tired of quietness of repose, we must be revolutionizing every thing, this green earth must be new peppered and deviled, and Phoebus re-dosed with brimstone and cayenne. We must be astonished, not pleased. Paganini has kicked simple Pan out of the woods, as if extravagances, that with Johnson one would wish impossible, were the only "didicisse fideliter artes ingenuas.' We have no blessed medium of repose, soft light, and refreshing shade. We must plunge in the thrice sooty Acheron, or dance in the furnace; and where is the divine Poesy of Painting all this while? She has withdrawn, and refused to be dragged on the excursion into Chaos, and hides her The Sketcher, No. I. 1833.1 self in abhorrence of conflagration. It may be said in reply, that Claude 685 is all the unrestrained beauty of nature. His foliage lies, or waves, as Anacreon would have his mistress's locks, as λ-And who ever better understood the placid stream, the deep tarn or mountain river in its life and motion, from the first gushing, through all its course and rests? So his figures are all disengaged and free, are beings of leisure, they are of robust growth, natural vigour of limb and understanding, of a race sprung from the very woods and rocks, untamed and untameable to the treddle and spinning jenny-of no artificial elegance, the very reverse of the smirking, piping, cocked hat, and flowered shepherds of French crockery, (how the artist must have detested them!) but all of the simple elegance of pastoral freedom and leisure, a part with and influenced by the whole scenerynot as if they commanded it, or could command it, or would twist aside the streams, or cut a twig in all their land. Even the peculiarity of undress is entirely appropriate. It makes them of the pastoral age, and such as never can belong to any other. Like their fraternal trees, they are not ashamed to shew their rind. They live in no dressed paradise; all that is of the formal cast, as belonging to another beauty, the poetical painter rejects. All his pictures are, therefore, a just whole. Though he saw the beauty, as one who could be insensible to it, of the solemn cypress and pine, he would not overawe the simple youth and freedom of his foliage by their forbidding dictatorial cast. And it is remarkable that all his trees are in, or rather under than past, their vigorous growth. They are of youth and freshness like the fabled woodNymph and Faun that never grow old. Scarce any have attained the girt of timber to invite the axe, that the most avaricious eye shall never calculate their top and lop. They have the life of pastoral poetry in themselves, and are therefore eternal in undying youth and vigour. And to make this his natural ideal perfect, nothing is introduced to disturb this serene life, unless, indeed, he paints a storm, and then who ever tossed his foliage about like him, as if he were familiar with the winds, and knew all their ways, and played with and limited their power? |