Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/177

Rh "I have a brilliant Scotch friend, who cannot walk on the sea-shore—within sight of its, the multitudinous laughter of its waves, or within hearing of its resounding uproar, because they bring up, by links of old associations, too insupportably to his mind, the agitations of his guttering, but too fervid youth." Be the allusion, as a "private interpretation," of this passage to whom it may, the scope of it is thoroughly applicable to Wilson's highly-wrought and profoundly sensitive nature. Illustrations of this abound in his prose poetry. "Oh! there are places on this earth that we shudder to revisit even in a waking dream, beneath the meridian sunshine. They are haunted by images too beautiful to be endured, and the pangs are dismal that clutch the heart when approaching their bewildering boundaries! for there it was we roamed in the glorious novelty of nature, when we were innocent and uncorrupted. There it was that we lived in a world without shadows—almost without tears; and after grief and guilt have made visitations to the soul, she looks back in agony to those blissful regions of time and space, when she lived in Paradise." Elsewhere he says, bat regarding the past from another stand-point—"Oh! blessed, thrice blessed years of youth! would we choose to live over again all your forgotten and unforgotten nights and days? Blessed, thrice blessed we call you, although, as we than felt, often darkened almost into insanity by self-sown sorrows springing into our very soul! No, we would not again face such troubles, not even for the glorious apparitions that familiarly haunted us in glens, and forests, on mountains, and on the great sea." Yet ever does his heart leap up when he remembers him of "fearless, beautiful boyhood! beloved of nature, who, like a kind schoolmistress, sits upon the hills and claps her hands in joy at his pastime, giving him the earth and all its landscapes at once, for his school and playground—and then in thoughtful silence wandering away, the quiet nooks enclose him with their greenness, making companions of everything animate and inanimate—endowed with beauty; searching with a worshipping curiosity into every leaf and flower about his path, while the boughs bend to him and touch him with their sunshine; picking up lessons of present delight and future wisdom, by rivers' sides, by brooks, in the glens, and in the fields; inhaling, in every breath he draws, intelligence and health." We here recognise the joyous, inspiriting, healthful spirit—strong, sound, sane—but for which that tendency to indulge in the luxury of emotion, that temptation to toy with cherished regrets and to "hug darkness as a bride," would have become morbid and blighting. But, with all his exquisitely refined sensitiveness—with a nature trembling like an aspen-leaf when moved by airs from heaven—John Wilson was as far as farthest can be from larmoyant sentimentalism. If there was in him the tenderness of gentlest womanhood, so was there the massive robustness, hale and hearty, of manhood, in its burliest types. If he could coo like a dove, anon he could fret and fume like a ramping and a roaring lion. If he could rival the poor sequestered stag in Arden, in sobbing and tears "wept in the needless stream," yet a little while and he would rush at a Cockney with the rage and momentum of a fat bull of Bashan, intent on tossing and goring all Hampstead man by man. If addicted to the melting mood, and a very master in depicting solitary pinings and pastoral melancholy,—how uproariously would he lead off the revellers at midnight