PROFESSOR WILSON'S ESSAYS. * ExcErr in form, these essays " critical
and imaginative," con- tributed by Professor Wilson to Blackwood's Magazine, exhibit precisely the same qualities of intellect and character which culmi- nated in the " Nodes Ambrosiante." There is the same torrent- flow of eloquent words, flashing back the calm beauty of summer- cloud, blue sky, rainbow-tinted mountain, and pastoral vale, or darkening to the gathering storm and reflecting the war of ele- ments in blackness and thunder and dazzling foam-lightning. There is the same abruptness of transition from the profoundest pathos to the most reckless fun, from earnest passion to broad mirth, from serious sober sense to scurrilous invective and horse-laughter. Unity is as little regarded often in the essays as in the dialogues ; and, whatever the subject in hand, Wil- son can seldom resist the impulse to go off at a tangent, and perform a marvellous series of somersaults, indicative of an enormous superfluity of animal and intellectual activity, which if they lead him nowhere in particular are worthy of all admira- tion in themselves, and well compensate the audience for the price of admission to the show. To drop metaphor, there is not one of these essays, in our opinion, which deserves to be called a complete or satisfactory treatment of its subject, but scarcely one which will not give more pleasure to the majority of readers than if it were less desultory and capricious in its movements. So far, indeed, as our recollection serves us, the present volume, though it may be a fair specimen of Wilson's contributions to Blackwood, does him as a writer less justice than the specimens published during his lifetime under the title of " Recreations of Christopher North" ; and Professor Ferrier has not, to our thinking, exercised the requisite amount of discretion in limiting his selection. It must have been Wilson's fate—as it must be that of every person who gains his livelihood mainly by contributing to periodical literature—to be frequently called on' to furnish articles for the monthly supply of his magazine of an essentially temporary n interest ; and though his exuberant spirits, his power of lan- guage, his genial fancy, and rich imagination, seldom allowed him to be a dull writer, it is scarcely more worth while to republish all that even the cleverest man writes under such circumstances, than it would be to print in full whatever the same man might chance to say day after day at his dinner-table or in his social walks. There really should be some limit to the reproduction of literature written e re math ; and though it may be difficult to draw the line in the form of a general rule, there can be little difficulty in each particular case, and we do think that articles which are mere running commentaries on passages taken at random from books of no mark fall without the line, however smart, amusing, and piquant may be the style of treatment. Such articles serve their purpose, and sell the magazine ; but each generation is competent to produce as much of this sort of thing as is wanted at any given time, and we no more look to our literary grandsires to supply it than we expect our natural grand- fathers' cellars to furnish our tables with soda-water or ball champagne. At least half the present volume comes under this head ; and though we do not deny that it is amusing enough as smart writing, we do not see why the collected edition of Professor Wilson's works should be swelled out to an enormous bulk and proportionate expense by matter which hundreds of persons living at this moment could do equally well, if it were thought worth while to do it at all. For be it observed, though these essays are styled critical in the titlepage, not one of them except the last on Wordsworth's Poetry deserves the epithet. The books reviewed are taken as pegs to hang miscellaneous clever talk of Wilson's own upon : the author is sometimes made fun of, and mercilessly ridi- culed, sometimes extolled, but in both cases without any process that can by the largest allowance be termed critical. And even in the case of Wordsworth, it is rather a laudatory and eloquent exposition of his general character as a poet than criticism. In- deed, so far as this volume gives evidence, Wilson was deficient in critical judgment; was at once too vehement in his personal and political predilections, not to say prejudices, and too much given to identify his own enjoyment of works of literature with the excellences of the works themselves, to be a judicious or a judicial critic. As an instance, we should point to a review in this volume of a poem called " Banwell Hill," by the Reverend W. L. Bowles, both poem and poet utterly gone to Lethe long since, but which Wilson makes as much fuss with as if it had been a " Childe Harold" or an " Excursion " ; the charm being, that Wilson thoroughly sympathized with the English clergyman's ra- tional piety, contempt and dislike for fanatical hypocrites, and • Essays, Critical and Insaginatice. By Professor Wilson. Volume I. Pub- lished by Blackwood and Sons. admiration of rural scenery and peasant character,—all excellent qualifies and tastes, but not in any degree making a man a poet.
So much for the volume as a whole. It contains, as we said at first, passages in abundance that display Wilson's characteristic powers, and will be a very pleasant railroad companion during the travelling season, now that newspapers are as dull as blue-books and not half as instructive. The first paper in the volume is far away the best. It is entitled " Streams," and consists of a series of vivid pictures of Scotch rivers, lochs, and waterfalls, inter- spersed with sketches of rural life and roadside scenery and angling adventure. Here is a noble painting of " The Fall of Foyers by Night."
"Up, up to you floating fleecy cloud, and away to the Fall of Foyers. Here is solitude with a vengeance—stern, grim, dung-eon solitude ! How ghostlike those white skeleton pines, stripped of their rind by tempest and lightning, and dead to the din of the raging cauldron ! That cataract, if descending on a cathedral, would shatter down the pile into a million of fragments. But it meets the black foundations of the cliff, and flies up to the starless heaven in a storm of spray. We are drenched, as if leaning in a hurricane over the gunwale of a ship, rolling under bare poles through a heavy sea. The very solid globe of earth quakes through her entrails. The eye, reconciled to the darkness, now sees a glimmering and gloomy light— and lo, a bridge of a single arch hung across the chasm, just high enough to let through the triumphant torrent. Has some hill-loch burst its barriers ? For what a world of waters come now tumbling into the abyss ! Niagara ! hest thou a fiercer roar ? Listen—and you think there are momentary pauses of the thunder, filled up with goblin groans ! All the military music-bands of the army of Britain would here be dumb as mutes—trumpet, cymbal, and the great drum ! There is a desperate temptation in the hubbub to leap into destruction. Waterhorses and kelpies, keep stabled in your rock- stalls—for if you issue forth the river will sweep you down before you have finished one neigh, to Castle Urquhart, and dash you, in a sheet of foam, to the top of her rocking battlements. A pretty place indeed for a lunar rainbow ! But the moon has been swept from heaven, and no bright- ness may tinge the black firmament that midnight builds over the liquid thunder. What a glorious grave for the Last Man !—a grave without a resurrection ! Oh, Nature ! Nature ! art thou all in all ?—and is there no God ! The astounded spirit shrinks from superstition into Atheism, and all creeds are dashed into oblivion by the appalling roar. But a still small voice is heard within my heart—the voice of conscience—and its whispers shall be heard when all the waters of the earth are frozen into nothing, and earth itself shrivelled up like a scroll !"
Wilson is a master of the horrible grotesque ; though he generally disarms his horrors by the broad grin with which he tells his fancies. Here is a vision of retribution for an angler.
"Man is by nature a beast of prey. So said old Hobbes—and what angler Can deny it ? Isaac -Walton himself was a murderer. If the ghosts of all the pikes he had ever trolled had taken upon them to send constant deputa- tions to draw his curtsies at the dead of night,' not one of them all had ever been called upon a second time upon that service. By the way, a pike would make a horrid ghost. What cadaverous jaw and jowl ! What a bony spectre, wheremt one single bone of all those thinner than a hair up to the horse-like spine was deficient in the threatening skeleton ! To frighten
you more deadly, perhaps an artificial mouse in his mouth ra , with agglome-
rated hooks, and the twisted brass-chain that in his tortured hour he strove in vain to snap asunder. What think you of a yard-long eel, not only haunting your -bed but evolving his lean length from below your bolster, and worm-like crawling down your back, cold as ice, and hard as iron, jagged too as the wheel of a watch, and emitting a faint hiss like that of a serpent ? The very spinning minnows would thus have their revenge, for they would come in shoals among your sheets, and bury you alive under bushels of small anatomies. And then, oh ! the bait you so purged in moss- bags, and impaled through all their wnthing 'mots from head to tail, (never, never, were we guilty of such enormity,) with all the careless cruelty of a practised executioner ! But they have no need to become ghosts before they can enjoy their retaliation ; for, whatever geologists aver to the contrary, down they glide with ease through the pory earth, or mine their way with- out much difficulty, labor ipse volupins,' through the stiff clay, till they reach your coffin at last—and, free from all sumptuary laws, is then their coiling revelry in the very core of your heart." Much of the charm of Wilson's magazine papers lay in the audacious freedom of his language and description, frequently bordering on what some not very straitlaced people would thin improper. For instance, take this picture of rural life in one of the lateral valleys of the Tweed. " Bless us, what sounds are these mixing with the murmurs of the Silver Pool ? Voices and laughter, and the splashing of water ! Diana and her nymphs bathing, by all that is beautiful! it is fortunate for us that no pack of hounds is kept in this neighbourhood, otherwise we might fear the fate of Admen. Here let us take up a position behind this large stone—the screen- scene in a new School for Scandal.' Sweet creatures ! not one of them more than eighteen ! The Scotch are a fair-skinned people, that is obvious; and it is quite a mistake to imagine that rural labour necessarily spoil! the female form. It is devoutly to be hoped that these merry mermaids will not drown themselves, pulling and hauling each other about so deliriously ; and now and then all invisible together below the water, except by the yellow gleam that changes the Silver Pool into the Pool of Gold. Ye five cruel wretches, are you absolutely going to hold that dark-tressed shrieker under the too high and too heavy shower-bath of the waterfall ? Let go your hold, or I will dart down upon you, and rescue the fair child from. jeopardy !' " The yell is in our ears yet that replied to our extorted ejaculation. You may have seen the effect produced upon half-a-dozen wild-ducks sportively dallying on their own small moorland tarn, by a sudden discharge of slugs or swan-shot. One of them plumps out of sight in a moment, and makes no sign. Another gives an awkward dive,preceded by a flourish of her tail, but cannot keep her poor wounded self from coming up to the surface. Here one lies floating quite dead among the water-lilies, and there another goes whizzing and whirring and whirling in the strangest antics, while the feathers are floating about m all directions. The other couple fly off quack- ing with outstretched necks and drooping sterns, and effect their escape to a distant fen.
" Even so was it now in the Silver Pool. The image occurred to us at the time ; but it has since brightened into amore perfect similitude. Unluckily for us, the two who made their instantaneous escape from the Pool, not
knowing in their alarm whence had come the voice, came in their scrambling flight up the rocks, due North. We involuntarily cried out—' Yo ho ! Ye ho !' wishing, half in love, half in fear, to arrest the fair pilgrims' pro- gress; when, flinging somersets backwards, they went with a plump and a plunge into the water, and on re-rising to the surface, lay by a beautiful in- stinct, with just the tips of their noses out, from which we could not but observe the little air-bells bubbling all over the subsiding pool. The whole basin was still as death. We began seriously to apprehend that six young women were about to lose their lives ; yet there was great difficulty, deli- cacy, and danger, in any scheme for their deliverance. By and by, a sweet Doric tongue was heard breathing from the waters—' What for are ye sittin glowerin there, ye auld chiel ? Siccan behaviour's a great shame for me o' your years ; and I wadna has expeckit it o' you, when you was playing thae bonny tunes last nicht wi' tears in your een. For gudesake, sir, take aff your specks—gang awa wi' you—and let a set o' puir naked lassies get to their ekes !' The appeal to our humanity was irresistible, as indeed at all times it is from a female in distress. Pardon us, our dearest Girzie,' we tenderly exclaimed ; and then, for the first time, looking modestly to the ground, we saw ourselves encircled with all the possible varieties of female apparel, which to name profanely would incense against us the Eumenides. Truth and simplicity spoke in every tone of our voice ; and Girzie, raising her weel-faured face from the foam, with a neck shown just down to the snow that covered her beating heart, conscious, as we thought, of her charms, nor even, in her bashful disquietude, unproud of their manifest ef- fect on a man well stricken in years, said, in still sweeter accents, and with imploring eyes—' That's a bonny man—gang your wa's—and dinna tell ony stories, na, about our ploutering, to the lads.' Will you promise to give me a few kisses, then Girzie, ony tune we chance to forgather, and I'll gang my wa's ? " Ou ay, Mr. North—ou ay, sir—but oh ! gang your wa's ; for Libbie's just chockin ower-by yonner aneath the water-pyet's nest ; and Kiraty's drank a gallon at the least, and mann be sair swalled. Oh! gang your wa's, my bonny Mr. North—gang your wa's.' We felt it was indeed time to ' gang our wa's '• for Girzie, as she was growing more and more im- passioned in her beseeching, rose higher and higher from the water, and stood nearly to the waist unveiled, the long-sought Naiad of the Silver Pool of Tails."
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