by Leigh Hunt.
Originally published in Leigh Hunt's London Journal (Sparrow and Co.) vol.1 #2 (09 Apr 1834).
Looking about us during a walk to see what subject we could write upon in this our second number, that should be familiar to every body, and afford as striking a specimen as we could give, of the entertainment to be found in the commonest objects, our eyes lighted upon a stone. It was a common pebble, a flint; such as a little boy kicks before him as he goes, by way of making haste with a message, and saving his new shoes.
"A stone!" cries a reader, "a flint! the very symbol of a miser! What can be got out of that?"
The question is well put; but a little reflection on the part of our interrogator would soon rescue the poor stone from the comparison. Strike him at any rate, and you will get something out of him:—warm his heart, and out come the genial sparks that shall gladden your hearth, and put hot dishes on your table. This is not miser's work. A French poet has described the process, well known to the maid-servant, when she stoops, with flashing face, over the tinder-box on a cold morning, and rejoices to see the first laugh of the fire. A sexton, in the poem we allude to, is striking a light in a church:—
—Boirude, qui voit que la peril approche,
Les arrete, et tirant un fusil de sa poche,
Des veines d' un caillou, qu' il frappe au meme instant,
Il fait jaillir un feu qui petille en sortant;
Et bientot an brasier d' une meche enflammee,
Montre, a l'aide du soufre, une cire allummee.
Boileau,
The prudent sexton, studious to reveal
Dark holes, here takes from out his pouch a steel;
Then strikes upon a flint. In many a spark
Forth leaps the sprightly fire against the dark;
The tinder feels the little lightning hit,
The match provokes it, and a candle's lit.
We shall not stop to pursue this fiery point into all its consequences, to shew what a world of beauty or of formidable power is contained in that single property of our friend flint, what fires, what lights, what conflagrations, what myriads of clicks of triggers—awful sounds before battle, when instead of letting his flint do its proper good-natured work of cooking his supper, and warming his wife and himself over their cottage-fire, the poor fellow is made to kill and be killed by other poor fellows, whose brains are strewed about the place for want of knowing better.
But to return to the natural, quiet condition of our friend, and what he can do for us in a peaceful way, and
#0 as to please meditation;—what think you of him as the musician of the brooks? as the unpretending player on those watery pipes and flageolets, during the hot noon, or the silence of the night? Without the pebble the brook would want its prettiest murmur. And then, in reminding you of these murmurs, he reminds you of the poets.
A noise as of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.—Coleridge.
Yes, the brook singeth; but it would not sing so well,—it would not have that tone and ring in its music, without the stone.
Then 'gan the shepherd gather into one
His straggling goats, and drove them to a ford,
Whose cœrule stream, rumbling in pebble-stone,[1]
Crept under moss as green as any gourd.
Spenser's Gnat.
Spenser's Gnat, observe; he wrote a whole poem upon a gnat, and a most beautiful one too, founded upon another poem on the same subject written by the great Roman poet Virgil, not because these great poets wanted or Were unequal to great subjects, such as all the world think great, but because they thought no care, and no etching out of beauty and wonder, ill bestowed upon the smallest marvellous object of God's workmanship. The gnat, in their poems, is the creature that he really is, full of elegance and vivacity, airy, trumpeted, and plumed, and dancing in the sunbeams,—not the contempt of some thoughtless understanding, which sees in it nothing but an insect coming to vex its skin. The eye of the poet, or other informed man, is at once telescope and microscope, able to traverse the great heavens, and to do justice to the least thing they have created.
But to our brook and pebbles. See how one pleasant thing reminds people of another. A pebble reminded us of the brooks, and the brooks of the poets, and the poets remind us of the beauty and comprehensiveness of their words, whether belonging to the subject in hand or not. No true poet makes use of a word for nothing. "Cœrule stream," says Spenser; but why cœrule, which comes from the Latin, and seems a pedantic word, especially as it signifies blue, which he might have had in English? The reason is, not only that it means sky-blue, and therefore shews us how blue the sky was at the time, and the cause why the brook was of such a colour (for if he had wanted a word to express nothing but that circumstance, he might have said sky-blue at once, however quaint it might have sounded to modern ears:—he would have cared nothing for that; it was his business to do justice to nature, and leave modern ears, as they grew poetical, to find it out); but the word cœrule was also a beautiful word, beautiful for the sound, and expressive of a certain liquid yet neat softness, somewhat resembling the mixture of soft hissing, rumbling, and inward music of the brook.—We beg the reader's indulgence for thus stopping him by the way, to dwell on the beauty of a word; but poets' words are miniature creations, as curious, after their degree, as the insects and the brooks themselves; and when companions find themselves in pleasant spots, it is natural to wander both in feet and talk.
So much for the agreeable sounds of which the sight of a common stone may remind us, (for we have not chosen to go so far back as the poetry of Orpheus, who is said to have made the materials of stone-walls answer to his lyre, and dance themselves into shape without troubling the mason.) We shall come to grander echoes by-and-bye. Let us see, meanwhile, how pleasant the sight itself may be rendered. Mr. Wordsworth shall do it for us in his exquisite little poem on the fair maiden who died by the river Dove. Our volume is not at hand, but we remember the passage we more particularly allude to. It is where he compares his modest, artless, and sequestered beauty with
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as the star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
Is not that beautiful? Can any thing express a lovelier loneliness than the violet half hidden by the mossy stone—the delicate blue-eyed flower against the country green? And then the loving imagination of this fine poet, exalting the object of his earthly worship to her divine birth-place and future abode, suddenly raises his eyes to the firmament, and sees her there, the solitary star of his heaven.
But stone does not want even moss to render him interesting. Here is another stone, and another solitary evening star, as beautifully introduced as the others, but for a different purpose. It is in the opening words of Mr. Keats's poem of Hyperion, where he describes the dethroned monarch of the gods, sitting in his exile:—
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and Eve's one star,
Sate grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone.
Quiet as a stone! Nothing certainly can be more quiet than that. Not a syllable or a sigh will stone utter, though you watch and bear him company for a whole week on the most desolate moor in Cumberland. Thus silent, thus unmoved, thus insensible to whatever circumstances might be taking place, or spectators might think of him, was the soul-stunned old patriarch of the gods. We may picture to ourselves a large, or a small stone, as we please—Stone-henge, or a pebble. The simplicity and grandeur of truth do not care which. The silence is the thing,—its intensity, its unalterableness. Our friend pebble is here in grand company, and you may think him (though we hope not,) unduly bettered by it. But see what Shakspeare will do for him in his hardest shape and in no finer company than a peasant's:—
Weariness
Can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth
Finds the down pillow hard.
Sleeping on hard stone would have been words strong enough for a common poet; or perhaps he would have said, "resting," or "profoundly reposing;" or that he could have made his "bed of the bare floor;" and the last saying would not have been the worst; but Shakspeare must have the very strongest words and really profoundest expressions, and he finds them in the homeliest and most primitive. He does not mince the matter, but goes to the root of both sleep and stone—can snore upon the flint. We see the fellow hard at it—bent upon it—deeply drinking of the forgetful draught.
To conclude our quotations from the poets, we will give another line or two from Shakspeare, not inapplicable to our proposed speculations in general, and still less so to the one in hand.
Green, a minor poet, author of the "Spleen," an effusion full of wit and good sense, gives pleasant advice to the sick who want exercise, and who are frightened with hypochondria:
Fling but a stone, the giant dies.
And this reminds us of a pleasant story connected with the flinging of stones, in one of the Italian novels.
Two waggish painters persuade a simple brother of theirs, that there is a plant which renders the finder of it invisible, and they all set out to look for it. They pretend suddenly to miss him, as if he had gone away; and to his great joy, while throwing stones about in his absence, give him great knocks in the ribs, and horrible bruises, he hugging himself all the while at these manifest proofs of his success, and the little suspicion which they have of it. It is amusing to picture him to one's fancy, growing happier as the blows grow worse, rubbing his sore knuckles with delight, and hardly able to ejaculate a triumphant Hah! at some excessive thump in the back.
But setting aside the wonders of the poets and the novelists, Pebble, in his own person, and by his own family alliances, includes wonders far beyond the most wonderful things they have imagined. Wrongly is Flint compared with the miser. You cannot, to be sure, skin him, but you can melt him; aye, make him absolutely flow into a liquid;—flow too for use and beauty; and become light unto your eyes, goblets to your table, and a mirror to your beloved. Bring two friends of his about him, called Potash and Soda, and Flint runs into melting tenderness, and is no longer Flint; he is Glass You look through him; you drink out of him; he furnishes you beautiful and transparent shutters against the rain and cold; you shave by him; protect pictures with him, and watches, and books; are assisted by him in a thousand curious philosophies; are helped over the sea by him; and he makes your cathedral windows divine; and enables your mistress to wear your portrait in her bosom.
But we must hasten to close our article, and bring his most precious riches down in a shower surpassing the rainbow. Stone is the humble relation, nay, the stock and parent of Precious Stone! Ruby, Emerald, and Sapphire are of his family!—of the family of the Flints—and Flint is more in them than anything else! That the habitations and secret bosoms of the precious metals ate stone, is also true; but it is little compared with this. Precious stone, for the most part, is stone itself—is flint—with some wonderful circumstance of addition, nobody knows what; but without the flint, the preciousness would not be. Here is wealth and honour for the poor Pebble! Look at him, and think what splendours issue from his loins:
Fiery Opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price,
As one of them, indifferently rated,
Might serve in peril of calamity,
To ransom great kings from captivity.
Marlow.
"Sparkling diamonds" are not properly in our list of pebbles; for diamond, the most brilliant mystery of all, is a charcoal!
What now remains for stone, thus filling the coffers of wealth, glorifying the crowns of sultans, and adding beams to beauty itself? One thing greater than all. The oldest and stoniest of stone is granite, and granite (as far as we know,) is the chief material of the earth itself—the bones of the world—the substance of our Star.
Honoured therefore be thou, thou small pebble lying in the lane; and whenever any one looks at thee, may he think of the beautiful and noble world he lives in, and all of which it is capable.
1. "Rumbling in pebble-stone" is a pretty enlargement of Virgil's "susurrantis" (whispering). Green as any gourd is also an improvement as well as an addition. The expression is as fresh as the colour.