Not who first sees the rising sun commands, But who could first discern the rising lands.
We have lost something more than the delighted laughter of Marvell, more than his practical joke, and more than the heart that was light in so burly a frame--we have lost with these the wild humour that wore so well the bonds of two equal lines, and was wild with so much order, invention, malice, gaiety, polish, equilibrium, and vitality--in a word, the Couplet, the couplet of the past. We who cannot stand firm within two lines, but must slip beyond and between the boundaries, who tolerate the couplets of Keats and imitate them, should praise the day of Charles II because of Marvell's art, and not for love of the sorry reign. We had plague, fire, and the Dutch in the Medway, but we had the couplet; and there were also the measures of those more poetic poets, hitherto called somewhat slightingly the Cavalier poets, who matched the wit of the Puritan with a spirit simpler and less mocking.
It was against an English fortress, profoundly walled, that some remembered winter storms lately turned their great artillery. It was a time of resounding nights; the sky was so clamorous and so close, up in the towers of the seaside stronghold, that one seemed to be indeed admitted to the perturbed counsels of the winds. The gale came with an indescribable haste, hooting as it flew; it seemed to break itself upon the heights, yet passed unbroken out to sea; in the voice of the sea there were pauses, but none in that of the urgent gale with its hoo-hoo- hoo all night, that clamoured down the calling of the waves. That lack of pauses was the strangest thing in the tempest, because the increase of sound seemed to imply a lull before. The lull was never perceptible, but the lift was always an alarm. The onslaught was instant, where would it stop? What was the secret extreme to which this hurry and force were tending? You asked less what thing was driving the flocks of the storm than what was drawing them. The attraction seemed the greater violence, the more irresistible, and the more unknown. And there were moments when the end seemed about to be attained.
The wind struck us hasty blows, and unawares we borrowed, to describe it, words fit for the sharp strokes of material things; but the fierce gale is soft. Along the short grass, trembling and cowering flat on the scarped hill-side, against the staggering horse, against the flint walls, one with the rock they grasp, the battery of the tempest is a quick and enormous softness. What down, what sand, what deep moss, what elastic wave could match the bed and cushion of the gale?
This storm tossed the wave and the stones of the sea-wall up together. The next day it left the waters white with the thrilling whiteness of foam in sunshine. It was only the Channel; and in such narrow waters you do not see the distances, the wide levels of fleeting and floating foam, that lie light between long wave and long wave on a Mediterranean coast, regions of delicate and transitory brightness so far out that all the waves, near and far, seem to be breaking at the same moment, one beyond the other, and league beyond league, into foam. But the Channel has its own strong, short curl that catches the rushing shingle up with the freshest of all noises and runs up with sudden curves, white upon the white sea-wall, under the random shadow of sea-gulls and the light of a shining cloud.
THE DAFFODIL
To travel eastwards and breast the sun, to sail towards the watershed and breast the floods, to go north and breast the winter--fresh and warm are the energies of such bracing action; but more animating still is it to live so as to breast the stress of time.
Man and woman may, like the child, or almost like him, fill the time and enlarge the capacity of the day--our poor day that so easily shrinks and dwindles in the careless possession of idle minds. The date, every first of March, for example, may sweep upon a large curve and come home annually after a swinging flight. To the infinite variety of natural days may be entrusted half the work of strengthening the flight against time, but the other half must be the task of the vehement heart. Nature assuredly does not fail. Days, seasons, and years are as wide asunder as the unforeseen can set them, and a crowd of children is not more various. But the resisting heart seems of late to be somewhat lacking. We are inclined to turn our heel upon the East, upon the watershed, upon the gates of the wind, and to go the smooth road.
We are even precipitate, and whip our way faster on the time-killing course than the natural event would take us. It is not enough that we should run helplessly, we outstrip the breeze and outsail the current with the ease of our untimely luxuries. Our daffodils are no longer to have the praise of their daring, for we no longer relate them to the lagging swallow. By the time the barely budding woods give a poor man's lodging to the cold daffodil--a scanty kind taking the wind with a short stalk and giving it but small petals to buffet--we have already said farewell to the tall and splendid green-house daffodil that never braved the cold. We gave to this our untimely welcome long before the snowdrop came, and the golden name of daffodil has lost its vernal sound. And when we part with the improved creature, lofty and enlarged, we hardly know or care whether the starveling is yet mustering in hollows of woodlands, or whether it is over or to come. We are attending to a yellower tulip, no doubt, when the only daffodil that Shakespeare knew is opening in the chilly wood.
The reproach is a commonplace, but perhaps we have generally accused ourselves of the impatience rather than of the listlessness, and have not noted how we shorten the disarranged seasons and lay up for ourselves memories confused and undefined. Late springs and early, gentle and hard, are compelled to yield the same colours; haste has its way and its revenges. If we are resolved to live quickly, why, nothing is easier. There are no such brief days as those that are indistinct; and the sliding on the way of time is, of all habits, the most tyrannously careless. It is first a laxity, then a habit, and next a folly; and when we keep neither Ash Wednesday nor the birthday of daffodils, and have hardly felt the cold, and do not know where the sun rises, we are already on the way of least resistance, the friction of life is gone; and in our last old age the past will seem to dwindle even like the dwindled present of our decline.
There has been one unconscious operation of the love of life, one single grasp after variety, intended to save the year, to face it, to meet it, to compel it to show a unique face and bear a name of its own; and this is travel. It is the finest and most effectual flight against time of all. What elastic days are those wherein I make head against a travelling landscape, meet histories and boundaries, hail frontiers, face a new manner of building, cross the regions of silver roofs and of heavy Alpine stone, and bring with me the late light upon billowy gables and red eaves! And how buoyant the week in which I anticipate the sun upon the roofless east! How serried are the days with forests, how enlarged by plains, how thronged by cities, how singled by the pine, how newly audible by a new sea! Far was the sunrise from the sunset, and noon is one memorable midday with shortened shadows upon some solitary road.
Our fathers had friction of another kind: hardship at home, winters and nights that were dark with a darkness we have abolished; springs that brought an infinite releasing, illumination, and recolouring. None of us has seen the sight, or breathed the air, or heard those emancipated voices. The bloom, the birds, the ifted sky! Bright nights and glowing houses have surely robbed us of that variety, and all these untimely fruits and flowers have suppressed even the small privations of a winter in disguise.
In those days Englishmen had to breast the times as they were. They had the privilege of their latitude--vigorous and rigorous seasons. They had a year full of change--their time was stretched whether with impatience or with patience, with conflict or with felicity. Their salt meats were not the worst of it; there was the siege of darkness, the captivity of cold, the threat of storm, and the labour to close with the closing enemy, to break ways and save animals alive, and keep the laws in force in the street in the long and secret nights. From such a season of winter at home, winter well known, men broke free to hail their daffodils. They found them, short,