Recreations of Christopher North
9781465588326
206 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
There is a fine and beautiful alliance between all pastimes pursued on flood, field, and fell. The principles in human nature on which they depend, are in all the same; but those principles are subject to infinite modifications and varieties, according to the difference of individual and national character. All such pastimes, whether followed merely as pastimes, or as professions, or as the immediate means of sustaining life, require sense, sagacity, and knowledge of nature and nature's laws; nor less, patience, perseverance, courage even, and bodily strength or activity, while the spirit which animates and supports them is a spirit of anxiety, doubt, fear, hope, joy, exultation, and triumphÑin the heart of the young a fierce passionÑin the heart of the old a passion still, but subdued and tamed down, without, however, being much dulled or deadened, by various experience of all the mysteries of the calling, and by the gradual subsiding of all impetuous impulses in the frames of all mortal men beyond perhaps three-score, when the blackest head will be becoming grey, the most nervous knee less firmly knit, the most steely-springed instep less elastic, the keenest eye less of a far-keeker, and, above all, the most boiling heart less like a caldron or a craterÑyea, the whole man subject to some dimness or decay, and, consequently, the whole duty of man like the new edition of a book, from which many passages that formed the chief glory of the editio princeps have been expungedÑthe whole character of the style corrected without being thereby improvedÑjust like the later editions of the Pleasures of Imagination, which were written by Akenside when he was about twenty-one, and altered by him at fortyÑto the exclusion or destruction of many most splendida vitia, by which process the poem, in our humble opinion, was shorn of its brightest beams, and suffered disastrous twilight and eclipseÑperplexing critics.
