Part 10
The halcyon days, which sometimes extend their southern influence even to our stern climate, and carry an interval of gloomy calm into the heart of this dreary month, have generally ere its close given place to the nipping frosts and chilling blasts of mid-winter. "Out of the South" hath come "the whirlwind, and cold out of the North." The days have dwindled to their smallest stature, and the long nights, with their atmosphere of mist, shut in and circumscribe the wanderings of man. Clouds and shadows surround us. The air has lost its rich echoes, and the earth its diversified aspects; and to the immediate threshold of the house of feasting and merriment we have travelled through those dreary days which are emphatically called "the dark days before Christmas." Of one of the gloomy mornings that usher in these melancholy days Ben Jonson gives the following dismal description:--
"It is, methinks, a morning full of fate! It riseth slowly, as her sullen car Had all the weights of sleep and death hung at it! She is not rosy-fingered, but swoln black! Her face is like a water turned to blood, And her sick head is bound about with clouds, As if she threatened night, ere noon of day! It does not look as it would have a hail Or health wished in it--as of other morns!"
And the general discomforts of the season are bemoaned by old Sackville, with words that have a wintry sound, in the following passage, which we extract from "England's Parnassus:"--
"The wrathfull winter, proching on a pace, With blustring blast had all ybard the treene; And old Saturnus, with his frosty face, With chilling cold had pearst the tender greene; The mantle rent wherein inwrapped beene The gladsome groves that now lay over-throwne, The tapers torne, and every tree downe blowne; The soyle, that erst so seemely was to seeme, Was all dispoiled of her beauties hewe, And stole fresh flowers (wherewith the Somer's queene Had clad the earth), now Boreas blast downe blew; And small fowles flocking, in their songs did rew The Winter's wrath, where with each thing defast, In wofull wise bewayl'd the Sommer past: Hawthorne had lost his motley liverie, The naked twigs were shivering all for cold, And, dropping down the teares aboundantlie, Each thing, methought, with weeping eye me told The cruell season, bidding me withhold Myselfe within."
The feelings excited by this dreary period of transition, and by the desolate aspect of external things to which it has at length brought us, would seem, at first view, to be little in harmony with a season of festival, and peculiarly unpropitious to the claims of merriment. And yet it is precisely this joyless condition of the natural world which drives us to take refuge in our moral resources, at the same time that it furnishes us with the leisure necessary for their successful development. The spirit of cheerfulness which, for the blessing of man, is implanted in his nature, deprived of the many issues by which, at other seasons, it walks abroad and breathes amid the sights and sounds of Nature, is driven to its own devices for modes of manifestation, and takes up its station by the blazing hearth. In rural districts, the varied occupations which call the sons of labor abroad into the fields are suspended by the austerities of the time; and to the cottage of the poor man has come a season of temporal repose, concurrently with the falling of that period which seals anew for him, as it were, the promises of an eternal rest. At no other portion of the year, could a feast of equal duration find so many classes of men at leisure for its reception.
"With his ice, and snow, and rime, Let bleak winter sternly come! There is not a sunnier clime Than the love-lit winter home."
Amid the comforts of the fireside, and all its sweet companionships and cheerful inspirations, there is something like the sense of a triumph obtained over the hostilities of the season. Nature, which at other times promotes the expansion of the feelings and contributes to the enjoyments of man, seems here to have promulgated her fiat against their indulgence; and there is a kind of consciousness of an inner world created, in evasion of her law,--a tract won by the genius of the affections from the domain of desolation, spots of sunshine planted by the heart in the very bosom of shadow, a pillar of fire lit up in the darkness. And thus the sensation of a respite from toil, the charms of renewed companionship, the consciousness of a general sympathy of enjoyment running along all the links of the social chain, and the contrasts established within to the discomforts without, are all components of that propitious feeling to which the religious spirit of the season, and all its quaint and characteristic observances, make their appeal.
There is, too (connected with these latter feelings, and almost unacknowledged by the heart of man), another moral element of that cheerful sentiment which has sprung up within it. It consists in the prospect, even at this distant and gloomy period, of a coming spring. This is peculiarly the season of looking forward. Already, as it were, the infant face of the new year is perceived beneath the folds of the old one's garment. The business of the present year has terminated, and along the night which has succeeded to its season of labor have been set up a series of illuminations, which, we know, will be extinguished only that the business of another seed-time may begin.
Neither, amid all its dreary features, is the _natural_ season without its own picturesque beauty, nor even entirely divested of all its summer indications of a living loveliness, or all suggestions of an eternal hope. Not only hath it the peculiar beauties of old age, but it hath besides lingering traces of that beauty which old age hath not been able wholly to extinguish, and which come finely in aid of the moral hints and religious hopes of the season.
The former--the graces which are peculiar to the season itself--exist in many a natural aspect and grotesque effect, which is striking both for the variety it offers and for its own intrinsic loveliness.
"We may find it in the wintry boughs, as they cross the cold blue sky, While soft on icy pool and stream the pencilled shadows lie, When we look upon their tracery, by the fairy frost-work bound, Whence the flitting red-breast shakes a shower of blossoms to the ground."
The white mantle which the earth occasionally puts on with the rapidity of a spell, covering, in the course of a night and while we have slept, the familiar forms with a sort of strangeness that makes us feel as if we had awakened in some new and enchanted land; the fantastic forms assumed by the drifting snow; the wild and fanciful sketching of old winter upon the "frosty pane;" the icicles that depend like stalactites from every projection, and sparkle in the sun like jewels of the most brilliant water; and, above all, the feathery investiture of the trees above alluded to, by which their minute tracery is brought out with a richness shaming the carving of the finest chisel,--are amongst the features which exhibit the inexhaustible fertility of Nature in the production of striking and beautiful effects. Hear how one of our best poetesses, Mary Howitt, sings of these graces:--
"One silent night hath passed, and lo, How beautiful the earth is now! All aspect of decay is gone, The hills have put their vesture on, And clothed is the forest bough.
"Say not 'tis an unlovely time! Turn to the wide, white waste thy view; Turn to the silent hills that rise In their cold beauty to the skies, And to those skies intensely blue.
. . . . . . .
"Walk now among the forest trees: Saidst thou that they were stripped and bare? Each heavy bough is bending down With snowy leaves and flowers,--the crown Which Winter regally doth wear.
"'Tis well; thy summer garden ne'er Was lovelier, with its birds and flowers, Than is this silent place of snow, With feathery branches drooping low, Wreathing around thee shadowy bowers!"
While on the subject of the natural beauties of this season, we must introduce our readers to some admirable verses which have been furnished to us by our friend Mr. Stoddart, the author of that fine poem the "Death-Wake," and in which its peculiar aspects are described with a very graphic pen:
A WINTER LANDSCAPE.
The dew-lark sitteth on the ice, beside the reedless rill; The leaf of the hawthorn flutters on the solitary hill; The wild lake weareth on its heart a cold and changed look, And meets, at the lip of its moon-lit marge, the spiritual brook.
Idly basks the silver swan, near to the isle of trees, And to its proud breast come and kiss the billow and the breeze; They wash the eider as they play about the bird of grace, And boom, in the same slow mood, away, to the moveless mountain-base.
The chieftain-deer, amid the pines, his antlered forehead shows, And scarcely are the mosses bent where that stately one arose; His step is as the pressure of a light beloved hand, And he looketh like a poet's dream in some enchanted land!
A voice of Winter, on the last wild gust of Autumn borne, Is hurried from the hills afar, like the windings of a horn; And solemnly and heavily the silver birches groan, And the old ash waves his wizard hand to the dim, mysterious tone.
And noiselessly, across the heaven, a gray and vapory shred Is wandering, fed by phantom clouds that one by one are led Out of the wide North, where they grow within the aged sea, And in their coils the yellow moon is laboring lazily!
She throws them from her mystic urn, as they were beckoned back By some enchantress, working out her spells upon their track; Or gathers up their fleecy folds, and shapes them, as they go, To hang around her beautiful form a tracery of snow.
Lo, Winter cometh!--and his hoar is heavy on the hill, And curiously the frostwork forms below the rimy rill; The birth of morn is a gift of pearl to the heath and willow-tree, And the green rush hangs o'er its water-bed, shining and silvery.
From the calm of the lake a vapor steals its restless wreath away, And leaves not a crisp on the quiet tarn but the wake of the swan at play; The deer holds up the glistening heath, where his hoof is lightly heard, And the dew-lark circleth to his song,--sun-lost and lonely bird!
But the season hath other striking aspects of its own. Pleasant, says Southey,--
"To the sobered soul, The silence of the wintry scene; When Nature shrouds her in her trance, In deep tranquillity.
"Not undelightful now to roam The wild heath sparkling on the sight; Not undelightful now to pace The forest's ample rounds,
"And see the spangled branches shine, And snatch the moss of many a hue, That varies the old tree's brown bark, Or o'er the gray-stone spreads."
Mr. Southey might have mentioned, too,--as belonging to the same class of effects with those produced by the mosses "of many a hue" that "vary the old tree's brown bark,"--those members of the forest which retain their dead and many tinted leaves till the ensuing spring, hanging occasional wreaths of strange and fantastic beauty in the white tresses of winter, together with the rich contrast presented by the red twigs of the dog-wood amid the dark colors of the surrounding boughs. The starry heavens, too, at this period of the year, present an occasional aspect of extraordinary brilliancy; and the long winter nights are illustrated by a pomp of illumination, presenting magnificent contrasts to the cold and cheerless earth, and offering unutterable revelations at once to the physical and mental eye.
Amongst the traces of a _former_ beauty not utterly extinguished, and the suggestions of a summer feeling not wholly passed away, we have those both of sight and scent and sound. The lark, "all independent of the leafy spring," as Wordsworth says, has not long ceased to pour his anthem through the sky. In propitious seasons, such as we have enjoyed for some years past, he is almost a Christmas-carol singer. The China-roses are with us still, and under proper management will stay with us till the snowdrops come. So will the anemones and the wallflowers; and the aconite may be won to come, long "before the swallow dares, and take the winds of _January_ with beauty." The cold air may be kept fragrant with the breath of the scented coltsfoot, and the lingering perfume of the mignonette. Then we have rosemary, too, "mocking the winter of the year with perfume,"--
"Rosemary and rue, which keep Seeming and savor all the winter long."
"It looks," says Leigh Hunt, pleasantly, "as if we need have no winter, if we choose, as far as flowers are concerned." "There is a story," he adds, "in Boccaccio, of a magician who conjured up a garden in winter-time. His magic consisted in his having a knowledge beyond his time; and magic pleasures, so to speak, await on all who choose to exercise knowledge after his fashion."
But what we would allude to more particularly here are the evergreens, which, with their rich and clustering berries, adorn the winter season, offering a provision for the few birds that still remain, and hanging a faint memory of summer about the hedges and the groves. The misletoe with its white berries, the holly (Virgil's acanthus) with its scarlet berries and pointed leaves, the ivy whose berries are green, the pyracanthus with its berries of deep orange, the arbutus exhibiting its flowers and fruit upon adjacent boughs, the glossy laurel and the pink-eyed laurestine (not to speak of the red berries of the May-bush, the purple sloes of the blackthorn, or others which show their clusters upon leafless boughs, nor of the evergreen trees,--the pine, the fur, the cedar, or the cypress), are all so many pleasant remembrancers of the past, and so many types to man of that which is imperishable in his own nature. And it is probably both _because_ they are such remembrancers of what the heart so much loves, and such types of what it so much desires, that they are gathered about our doors and within our homes at this period of natural decay and religious regeneration, and mingle their picturesque forms and hopeful morals with all the mysteries and ceremonies of the season.
[Illustration: COUNTRY CAROL SINGERS.--_Page 157._]
SIGNS OF THE SEASON.
WE have said that the coming festivities of the season "fling their shadows" long before: the _avant-couriers_ of the old man are to be seen advancing in all directions. At home and abroad, in town and in country, in the remote farmstead and on the king's highway, we are met by the symptoms of his approach, and the arrangements making for his reception.
We will not dwell here on the domestic operations which are so familiar to all,--the ample provision for good cheer, which has long been making in every man's home who can at any time afford to make good cheer at all. We need not remind our town readers of the increased activity visible in all the interior departments of each establishment, and the apparent extent and complication of its foreign relations; the councils held with the housekeeper and cook; the despatches to the butcher, baker, poulterer, and confectioner, which are their consequence; and the efficient state of preparation which is arising out of all these energetic movements. To our country readers we need not dwell upon the slaughter of fowls in the poultry-yard, and game in the field, or the wholesale doings within doors for the manufacture of pastry of all conceivable kinds and in all its conceivable forms. And to neither the one nor the other is it necessary that we should speak of the packages, in every shape and size, which both are getting ready, for the interchange between friends of the commodities of their respective positions. Here, however, the town has clearly the advantage in point of gain, and the country in point of character,--the former having little besides barrels of oysters and baskets of Billingsgate fish to furnish to the country larders in return for the entire range of the products of the dairy, farmyard, and game-field.
But however lightly we may allude to the other articles which enter into the charge of the commissariat department, and have no distinctive character, at this particular season, beyond their unimaginable abundance, we are by no means at liberty, without a more special notice, to pass over the mystery of MINCE-PIE! We speak not here of the _merits_ of that marvellous compound; because a dish which has maintained without impeachment, since long before the days of honest old Tusser (who calls these marvels shred-pies), the same supreme character which it holds amongst the men of these latter days, may very well dispense with our commendation; and every school-boy knows, from his own repeated experience, the utter inadequacy of language to convey any notion of the ineffable flavor of this unapproachable viand. The poverty of speech is never so conspicuous as when even its richest forms are used for the purpose of describing that which is utterly beyond its resources; and we have witnessed most lamentable, although ludicrous, failures, on the part of eloquent but imprudent men, in their ambitious attempts to give expression to their sensations under the immediate influence of this unutterable combination. It is therefore to other properties than those which make their appeal to the palate that we must confine ourselves in our mention of mince-pie.
The origin of this famous dish, like that of the heroic in all kinds and classes, is involved in fable. By some it has been supposed, from the Oriental ingredients which enter into its composition, to have a reference (as probably had also the plum-porridge of those days) to the offerings made by the wise men of the East; and it was anciently the custom to make these pies of an oblong form, thereby representing the manger in which, on that occasion, those sages found the infant Jesus. Against this practice--which was of the same character with that of the little image called the Yule Dough, or Yule Cake, formerly presented by bakers to their customers at the anniversary of the Nativity--the Puritans made a vehement outcry, as idolatrous; and certainly it appears to us somewhat more objectionable than many of those which they denounced, in the same category. Of course it was supported by the Catholics with a zeal the larger part of which (as in most cases of controversy where the passions are engaged) was derived from the opposition of their adversaries; and the latter having pronounced the mince-pie to be an abomination, the eating thereof was immediately established as a test of orthodoxy by the former. Sandys mentions that even when distressed for a comfortable meal they would refuse to partake of this very tempting dish, when set before them, and mentions John Bunyan when in confinement as an example. He recommends that under such extreme circumstances they should be eaten with a protest, as might be done by a lawyer in a similar case.
In a struggle like this, however, it is clear that the advocates of mince-pie were likely to have the best of it, through the powerful auxiliary derived to their cause from the savoriness of the dish itself. The legend of the origin of eating roast-pig, which we have on the authority of Charles Lamb, exhibits the rapid spread of that practice, against the sense of its abomination, on the strength of the irresistible appeals made to the palate by the _crackling_. And accordingly, in the case of mince-pie we find that the delicious compound has come down to our days, stripped of its objectionable forms and more mystic meanings, from the moment when they ceased to be topics of disputation, and is freely partaken of by the most rigid Presbyterian, who raises "no question" thereon "for conscience' sake."
It may be observed, however, that relics of the more recondite virtues ascribed to this dish by the Catholics, in the days of its sectarian persecution, still exist in the superstitions which attach certain privileges and promises to its consumption. In some places the form of this superstition, we believe, is, that for every house in which a mince-pie shall be eaten at the Christmas season, the eater shall enjoy a happy month in the coming year. As, however, this version would limit the consumption, as far as any _future_ benefit is attached to it, to the insufficient number of twelve, we greatly prefer an edition of the same belief which we have met with elsewhere, and which promises a happy _day_ for every individual pie eaten during the same period,--thereby giving a man a direct and prospective interest in the consumption of as large a number out of three hundred and sixty-five as may happen to agree with his inclination.
Leaving, however, those proceedings which are going on within our homes, and of which the manufacture of mince-pies forms so important an article, we must turn to the symptoms of the approaching holiday that meet the eye at every turn which we make out of doors. He who will take the king's highway in his search after these, planting himself on the outside of a stage-coach, will have the greater number of such signs brought under his observation in the progress of a journey which whirls him through town and village, and by park and farmhouse.