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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 408, October 1849

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 408, October 1849

Author: Various


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOLUME 66, NO. 408, OCTOBER 1849 ***

                              BLACKWOOD'S

                          EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

           NO. CCCCVIII.      OCTOBER, 1849.      VOL. LXVI.




CONTENTS.


  THE CAXTONS.--PART THE LAST,                              391

  LYNMOUTH REVISITED,                                       412

  WHAT HAS REVOLUTIONISING GERMANY ATTAINED?                424

  THE GREEN HAND--A "SHORT" YARN. PART V.                   436

  PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY,                                       456

  CIVIL REVOLUTION IN THE CANADAS.--A REMEDY,               471

  THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH, OR THE GLORY OF MOTION,           485

  DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS,                                    501


                              EDINBURGH:

             WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
                   AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

   _To whom all communications (post paid) must be addressed._

          SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

           PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.


                             BLACKWOOD'S
                          EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

           NO. CCCCVIII.      OCTOBER, 1849.      VOL. LXVI.




THE CAXTONS.--PART THE LAST.


CHAPTER CI.

Adieu, thou beautiful land! Canaan of the exiles, and Ararat to many a
shattered ark! Fair cradle of a race for whom the unbounded heritage
of a future, that no sage can conjecture, no prophet divine, lies afar
in the golden promise-light of Time!--destined, perchance, from the
sins and sorrows of a civilisation struggling with its own elements of
decay, to renew the youth of the world, and transmit the great soul
of England through the cycles of Infinite Change. All climates that
can best ripen the products of earth, or form into various character
and temper the different families of man, "rain influences" from the
heaven, that smiles so benignly on those who had once shrunk, ragged,
from the wind, or scowled on the thankless sun. Here, the hardy air of
the chill Mother Isle, there the mild warmth of Italian autumns, or the
breathless glow of the tropics. And with the beams of every climate,
glides subtle HOPE. Of her there, it may be said as of Light itself, in
those exquisite lines of a neglected poet--

    "Through the soft ways of heaven, and air, and sea,
    Which open all their pores to thee
    Like a clear river thou dost glide--

       *       *       *       *       *

    All the world's bravery, that delights our eyes,
    Is but thy several liveries;
    Thou the rich dye on them bestowest;
    Thy nimble pencil paints the landscape as thou goest."[1]

Adieu, my kind nurse and sweet foster-mother!--a long and a last adieu!
Never had I left thee but for that louder voice of Nature which calls
the child to the parent, and woos us from the labours we love the best
by the chime in the Sabbath-bells of Home.

No one can tell how dear the memory of that wild Bush-life becomes to
him who has tried it with a _fitting spirit_. How often it haunts him
in the commonplace of more civilised scenes! Its dangers, its risks,
its sense of animal health, its bursts of adventure, its intervals of
careless repose--the fierce gallop through a very sea of wide rolling
plains--the still saunter, at night, through woods never changing
their leaves--with the moon, clear as sunshine, stealing slant through
their clusters of flowers. With what an effort we reconcile ourselves
to the trite cares and vexed pleasures, "the quotidian ague of frigid
impertinences," to which we return! How strong and black stands my
pencil-mark in this passage of the poet from which I have just quoted
before!--

"We are here among the vast and noble scenes of Nature--we are there
among the pitiful shifts of policy; we walk here, in the light and open
ways of the Divine Bounty--we grope there, in the dark and confused
labyrinth of human malice."[2]

But I weary you, reader. The New World vanishes--now a line--now a
speck: let us turn away, with the face to the Old.

Among my fellow-passengers, how many there are returning home
disgusted, disappointed, impoverished, ruined, throwing themselves
again on those unsuspecting poor friends, who thought they had done
with the luckless good-for-naughts for ever. For don't let me deceive
thee, reader, into supposing that every adventurer to Australia has the
luck of Pisistratus. Indeed, though the poor labourer, and especially
the poor operative from London and the great trading towns, (who
has generally more of the quick knack of learning--the _adaptable
faculty_--required in a new colony, than the simple agricultural
labourer,) are pretty sure to succeed, the class to which I belong is
one in which failures are numerous, and success the exception--I mean
young men with scholastic education and the habits of gentlemen--with
small capitals and sanguine hopes. But this, in ninety-nine times out
of a hundred, is not the fault of the colony, but of the emigrants. It
requires, not so much intellect as a peculiar turn of intellect, and
a fortunate combination of physical qualities, easy temper, and quick
mother-wit, to make a small capitalist a prosperous Bushman.[3] And if
you could see the sharks that swim round a man just dropped at Adelaide
or Sydney, with one or two thousand pounds in his pocket! Hurry out of
the towns as fast as you can, my young emigrant; turn a deaf ear, for
the present at least, to all jobbers and speculators; make friends with
some practised old Bushman; spend several months at his station before
you hazard your capital; take with you a temper to bear everything and
sigh for nothing; put your whole heart in what you are about; never
call upon Hercules when your cart sticks in the rut, and, whether you
feed sheep or breed cattle, your success is but a question of time.

But, whatever I owed to nature, I owed also something to fortune.
I bought my sheep at little more than 7s. each. When I left, none
were worth less than 15s., and the fat sheep were worth £1.[4] I had
an excellent shepherd, and my whole care, night and day, was the
improvement of the flock. I was fortunate, too, in entering Australia
before the system miscalled "The Wakefield"[5] had diminished the
supply of labour and raised the price of land. When the change came,
(like most of those with large allotments and surplus capital,) it
greatly increased the value of my own property, though at the cost
of a terrible blow on the general interests of the colony. I was
lucky, too, in the additional venture of a cattle station, and in the
breed of horses and herds, which, in the five years devoted to that
branch establishment, trebled the sum invested therein, exclusive
of the advantageous sale of the station.[6] I was lucky, also, as I
have stated, in the purchase and resale of lands, at Uncle Jack's
recommendation. And, lastly, I left in time, and escaped a very
disastrous crisis in colonial affairs, which I take the liberty of
attributing entirely to the mischievous crotchets of theorists at
home, who want to set all clocks by Greenwich time, forgetting that it
is morning in one part of the world at the time they are tolling the
curfew in the other.


CHAPTER CII.

London once more! How strange, lone, and savage I feel in the streets.
I am ashamed to have so much health and strength, when I look at those
slim forms, stooping backs, and pale faces. I pick my way through the
crowd with the merciful timidity of a good-natured giant. I am afraid
of jostling against a man for fear the collision should kill him. I get
out of the way of a thread-paper clerk, and 'tis a wonder I am not run
over by the omnibuses;--I feel as if I could run over them! I perceive,
too, that there is something outlandish, peregrinate, and lawless about
me. Beau Brummell would certainly have denied me all pretension to the
simple air of a gentleman, for every third passenger turns back to
look at me. I retreat to my hotel--send for bootmaker, hatter, tailor,
and haircutter. I humanise myself from head to foot. Even Ulysses
is obliged to have recourse to the arts of Minerva, and, to speak
unmetaphorically, "smarten himself up," before the faithful Penelope
condescends to acknowledge him. The artificers promise all despatch.
Meanwhile I hasten to re-make acquaintance with my mother country over
files of the _Times_, _Post_, _Chronicle_, and _Herald_. Nothing comes
amiss to me, but articles on Australia; from those I turn aside with
the true pshaw-supercilious of your practical man.

No more are leaders filled with praise and blame of Trevanion. "Percy's
spur is cold." Lord Ulverstone figures only in the _Court Circular_,
or "_Fashionable Movements_." Lord Ulverstone entertains a royal duke
at dinner, or dines in turn with a royal duke, or has come to town, or
gone out of it. At most, (faint Platonic reminiscence of the former
life,) Lord Ulverstone says in the House of Lords a few words on some
question, not a party one; and on which (though affecting perhaps the
interests of some few thousands, or millions, as the case may be)
men speak without "hears," and are inaudible in the gallery; or Lord
Ulverstone takes the chair at an agricultural meeting, or returns
thanks when his health is drank at a dinner at Guildhall. But the
daughter rises as the father sets, though over a very different kind of
world.

"First ball of the season at Castleton House!" Long descriptions of
the rooms and the company; above all, of the hostess. Lines on the
Marchioness of Castleton's picture in the "Book of Beauty," by the Hon.
Fitzroy Fiddledum, beginning with, "Art thou an angel from," &c--a
paragraph that pleased me more on "Lady Castleton's Infant School,
at Raby Park;" then again--"Lady Castleton, the new patroness at
Almacks;" a criticism more rapturous than ever gladdened living poet,
on Lady Castleton's superb diamond stomacher, just re-set by Storr and
Mortimer; Westmacott's bust of Lady Castleton; Landseer's picture of
Lady Castleton and her children, in the costume of the olden time. Not
a month in that long file of the _Morning Post_ but what Lady Castleton
shone forth from the rest of womankind--

        "----Velut inter ignes
    Luna minores."

The blood mounted to my cheek. Was it to this splendid constellation
in the patrician heaven that my obscure, portionless youth had
dared to lift its presumptuous eyes? But what is this? "Indian
intelligence--Skilful Retreat of the Sepoys, under Captain de Caxton!"
A captain already--what is the date of the newspaper? Three months
ago. The leading article quotes the name with high praise. Is there
no leaven of envy amidst the joy at my heart? How obscure has been
my career--how laurel-less my poor battle with adverse fortune! Fie,
Pisistratus! I am ashamed of thee. Has this accursed Old World, with
its feverish rivalries, diseased thee already? Get thee home, quick,
to the arms of thy mother, the embrace of thy father--hear Roland's
low blessing, that thou hast helped to minister to the very fame of
that son. If thou wilt have ambition, take it, not soiled and foul with
the mire of London. Let it spring fresh and hardy in the calm air of
wisdom; and fed, as with dews, by the loving charities of Home.


CHAPTER CIII.

It was at sunset that I stole through the ruined courtyard, having
left my chaise at the foot of the hill below. Though they whom I came
to seek knew that I had arrived in England, they did not, from my
letter, expect me till the next day. I had stolen a march upon them;
and now, in spite of all the impatience which had urged me thither, I
was afraid to enter--afraid to see the change more than ten years had
made in those forms, for which, in my memory, time had stood still.
And Roland had, even when we parted, grown old before his time. Then,
my father was in the meridian of life, now he had approached to the
decline. And my mother, whom I remembered so fair, as if the freshness
of her own heart had preserved the soft bloom to the cheek--I could
not bear to think that she was no longer young. Blanche, too, whom I
had left a child--Blanche, my constant correspondent during those long
years of exile, in letters crossed and re-crossed, with all the small
details that make the eloquence of letter writing, so that in those
epistles I had seen her mind gradually grow up in harmony with the very
characters--at first vague and infantine--then somewhat stiff with the
first graces of running hand, then dashing off, free and facile; and,
for the last year before I left, so formed, yet so airy--so regular,
yet so unconscious of effort--though, in truth, as the caligraphy had
become thus matured, I had been half vexed and half pleased to perceive
a certain reserve creeping over the style--wishes for my return less
expressed from herself than as messages from others; words of the old
childlike familiarity repressed; and "Dearest Sisty" abandoned for
the cold form of "Dear Cousin." Those letters, coming to me in a spot
where maiden and love had been as myths of the bygone, phantasms and
_eidola_, only vouchsafed to the visions of fancy, had, by little and
little, crept into secret corners of my heart; and out of the wrecks
of a former romance, solitude and reverie had gone far to build up the
fairy domes of a romance yet to come. My mother's letters had never
omitted to make mention of Blanche--of her forethought and tender
activity, of her warm heart and sweet temper--and, in many a little
home picture, presented her image where I would fain have placed it,
not "crystal-seeing," but joining my mother in charitable visits to the
village, instructing the young, and tending on the old, or teaching
herself to illuminate, from an old missal in my father's collection,
that she might surprise my uncle with a new genealogical table, with
all shields and quarterings, blazoned _or_, _sable_, and _argent_; or
flitting round my father where he sat, and watching when he looked
round for some book he was too lazy to rise for. Blanche had made a
new catalogue and got it by heart, and knew at once from what corner
of the Heraclea to summon the ghost. On all these little traits had my
mother been eulogistically minute; but somehow or other she had never
said, at least for the last two years, whether Blanche was pretty or
plain. That was a sad omission. I had longed just to ask that simple
question, or to imply it delicately and diplomatically; but, I know not
why, I never dared--for Blanche would have been sure to have read the
letter--and what business was it of mine? And, if she _was_ ugly, what
question more awkward both to put and to answer? Now, in childhood,
Blanche had just one of those faces that might become very lovely in
youth, and would yet quite justify the suspicion that it might become
gryphonesque, witch-like, and grim. Yes, Blanche, it is perfectly
true! If those large, serious black eyes took a fierce light, instead
of a tender--if that nose, which seemed then undecided whether to be
straight or to be aquiline, arched off in the latter direction, and
assumed the martial, Roman, and imperative character of Roland's manly
proboscis--if that face, in childhood too thin, left the blushes of
youth to take refuge on two salient peaks by the temples (Cumberland
air, too, is famous for the growth of the cheek-bone!)--if all that
should happen, and it very well might, then, O Blanche, I wish thou
hadst never written me those letters; and I might have done wiser
things than steel my heart so obdurately to pretty Ellen Bolding's
blue eyes and silk shoes. Now, combining together all these doubts and
apprehensions, wonder not, O reader, why I stole so stealthily through
the ruined courtyard, crept round to the other side of the tower, gazed
wistfully on the sun setting slant on the high casements of the hall,
(too high, alas, to look within,) and shrunk yet to enter;--doing
battle, as it were, with my heart.

Steps!--one's sense of hearing grows so quick in the Bushland!--steps,
though as light as ever brushed the dew from the harebell! I crept
under the shadow of the huge buttress mantled with ivy. A form comes
from the little door at an angle in the ruins--a woman's form. Is it
my mother?--it is too tall, and the step is more bounding. It winds
round the building, it turns to look back, and a sweet voice--a voice
strange, yet familiar--calls, tender, but chiding, to a truant that
lags behind. Poor Juba! he is trailing his long ears on the ground: he
is evidently much disturbed in his mind; now he stands still, his nose
in the air. Poor Juba! I left thee so slim and so nimble--

    "Thy form, that was fashioned as light as a fay's,
    Has assumed a proportion more round."

Years have sobered thee strangely, and made thee obese and
Primmins-like. They have taken too good care of thy creature comforts,
O sensual Mauritanian! still, in that mystic intelligence we call
instinct, thou art chasing something that years have not swept from thy
memory. Thou art deaf to thy lady's voice, however tender and chiding.
That's right,--come near--nearer--my cousin Blanche; let me have a
fair look at thee. Plague take the dog! he flies off from her: he has
found the scent--he is making up to the buttress! Now--pounce--he is
caught! whining ungallant discontent. Shall I not yet see the face? it
is buried in Juba's black curls. Kisses too! Wicked Blanche, to waste
on a dumb animal what, I heartily hope, many a good Christian would be
exceedingly glad of! Juba struggles in vain, and is borne off. I don't
think that those eyes can have taken the fierce turn, and Roland's
eagle nose can never go with that voice which has the coo of the dove.

I leave my hiding-place, and steal after the Voice, and its owner.
Where can she be going? Not far. She springs up the hill whereon the
lords of the castle once administered justice--that hill which commands
the land far and wide, and from which can be last caught the glimpse
of the westering sun. How gracefully still is that attitude of wistful
repose! Into what delicate curves do form and drapery harmoniously
flow! How softly distinct stands the lithe image against the purple
hues of the sky! Then again comes the sweet voice, gay and carolling as
a bird's--now in snatches of song, now in playful appeals to that dull
four-footed friend. She is telling him something that must make the
black ears stand on end, for I just catch the words, "He is coming,"
and "home!"

I cannot see the sun set where I lurk in my ambush, amidst the brake
and the ruins; but I _feel_ that the orb has passed from the landscape,
in the fresher air of the twilight, in the deeper silence of eve. Lo!
Hesper comes forth: at his signal, star after star, come the hosts--

    "Ch'eran con lui, quando l'amor divino,
    Mosse da primà quelle cose belle!"

and the sweet voice is hushed.

Then slowly the watcher descends the hill on the opposite side--the
form escapes from my view. What charm has gone from the twilight? See,
again, where the step steals through the ruins and along the desolate
court. Ah! deep and true heart, do I divine the remembrance that leads
thee? I pass through the wicket, down the dell, skirt the laurels, and
behold the face, looking up to the stars--the face which had nestled
to my breast in the sorrow of parting, years, long years ago: on the
grave where we had sat, I the boy, thou the infant--there, O Blanche!
is thy fair face--(fairer than the fondest dream that had gladdened my
exile)--vouchsafed to my gaze!

"Blanche, my cousin!--again, again--soul with soul, amidst the dead!
Look up, Blanche; it is I."


CHAPTER CIV.

"Go in first, and prepare them, dear Blanche: I will wait by the door.
Leave it ajar, that I may see them."

Roland is leaning against the wall--old armour suspended over the gray
head of the soldier. It is but a glance that I gave to the dark cheek
and high brow: no change there for the worse--no new sign of decay.
Rather, if anything, Roland seems younger than when I left. Calm is the
brow--no shame on it now, Roland; and the lips, once so compressed,
smile with ease--no struggle now, Roland, "not to complain." A glance
shows me all this.

"Papæ!" says my father, and I hear the fall of a book, "I can't read
a line. He is coming to-morrow!--to-morrow! If we lived to the age of
Methusalem, Kitty, we could never reconcile philosophy and man; that
is, if the poor man's to be plagued with a good affectionate son!"

And my father gets up and walks to and fro. One minute more,
father--one minute more--and I am on thy breast! Time, too, has dealt
gently with thee, as he doth with those for whom the wild passions and
keen cares of the world never sharpen his scythe. The broad front looks
more broad, for the locks are more scanty and thin; but still not a
furrow!

Whence comes that short sigh?

"What is really the time, Blanche? Did you look at the turret clock?
Well, just go and look again."

"Kitty," quoth my father, "you have not only asked what time it is
thrice within the last ten minutes, but you have got my watch, and
Roland's great chronometer, and the Dutch clock out of the kitchen,
all before you, and they all concur in the same tale--to-day is not
to-morrow."

"They are all wrong, I know," said my mother, with mild firmness; "and
they've never gone right since he left."

Now out comes a letter--for I hear the rustle--and then a step glides
towards the lamp; and the dear, gentle, womanly face--fair still, fair
ever for me--fair as when it bent over my pillow, in childhood's first
sickness, or when we threw flowers at each other on the lawn at sunny
noon! And now Blanche is whispering; and now the flutter, the start,
the cry--"It is true! it is true! Your arms, mother. Close, close round
my neck, as in the old time. Father! Roland, too! Oh joy! joy! joy!
home again--home till death!"


CHAPTER CV.

From a dream of the Bushland, howling dingoes,[7] and the war-whoop
of the wild men, I wake and see the sun shining in through the
jasmine that Blanche herself has had trained round the window--old
school-books, neatly ranged round the wall--fishing rods, cricket-bats,
foils, and the old-fashioned gun,--and my mother seated by the
bedside--and Juba whining and scratching to get up. Had I taken thy
murmured blessing, my mother, for the whoop of the blacks, and Juba's
low whine for the howl of the dingoes?

Then what days of calm exquisite delight!--the interchange of heart
with heart; what walks with Roland, and tales of him once our shame,
now our pride; and the art with which the old man would lead those
walks round by the village, that some favourite gossips might stop and
ask, "What news of his brave young honour?"

I strive to engage my uncle in my projects for the repair of the
ruins--for the culture of those wide bogs and moorlands: why is it that
he turns away, and looks down embarrassed? Ah, I guess!--his true heir
now is restored to him. He cannot consent that I should invest this
dross, for which (the Great Book once published) I have no other use,
in the house and the lands that will pass to his son. Neither would
he suffer me so to invest even his son's fortune, the bulk of which
I still hold in trust for that son. True, in his career, my cousin
may require to have his money always forthcoming. But I, who have no
career,--pooh! these scruples will rob me of half the pleasure my
years of toil were to purchase. I must contrive it somehow or other:
what if he would let me house and moorland on a long improving lease?
Then, for the rest, there is a pretty little property to be sold close
by, on which I can retire when my cousin, as heir of the family,
comes, perhaps with a wife, to reside at the Tower. I must consider
of all this, and talk it over with Bolt when my mind is at leisure
from happiness to turn to such matters; meanwhile I fall back on my
favourite proverb,--"_Where there's a will there's a way_."

What smiles and tears, and laughter and careless prattle with my
mother, and roundabout questions from her, to know if I had never lost
my heart in the Bush; and evasive answers from me, to punish her for
not letting out that Blanche was so charming. "I fancied Blanche had
grown the image of her father, who has a fine martial head certainly,
but not seen to advantage in petticoats! How could you be so silent
with a theme so attractive?"

"Blanche made me promise."

Why? I wonder. Therewith I fell musing.

What quiet delicious hours are spent with my father in his study, or
by the pond, where he still feeds the carps, that have grown into
Ceprinidian leviathans. The duck, alas! has departed this life--the
only victim that the Grim King has carried off; so I mourn, but am
resigned to that lenient composition of the great tribute to Nature. I
am sorry to say the Great Book has advanced but slowly--by no means yet
fit for publication, for it is resolved that it shall not come out as
first proposed, a part at a time, but _totus, teres, atque rotundus_.
The matter has spread beyond its original compass; no less than five
volumes--and those of the amplest--will contain the History of Human
Error. However, we are far in the fourth, and one must not hurry
Minerva.

My father is enchanted with Uncle Jack's "noble conduct," as he
calls it; but he scolds me for taking the money, and doubts as to
the propriety of returning it. In these matters my father is quite
as Quixotical as Roland. I am forced to call in my mother as umpire
between us, and she settles the matter at once by an appeal to feeling.
"Ah, Austin! do you not humble me, if you are too proud to accept what
is due to you from my brother."

"_Velit, nolit, quod amica_," answered my father, taking off and
rubbing his spectacles--"which means, Kitty, that when a man's married
he has no will of his own. To think," added Mr Caxton, musingly,
"that in this world one cannot be sure of the simplest mathematical
definition! You see, Pisistratus, that the angles of a triangle so
decidedly scalene as your Uncle Jack's, may be equal to the angles of a
right-angled triangle after all!"[8]

The long privation of books has quite restored all my appetite for
them. How much I have to pick up!--what a compendious scheme of reading
I and my father chalk out. I see enough to fill up all the leisure
of life. But, somehow or other, Greek and Latin stand still: nothing
charms me like Italian. Blanche and I are reading Metastasio, to the
great indignation of my father, who calls it "rubbish," and wants to
substitute Dante. I have no associations at present with the souls

              "Che son contenti
    Nel fuoco;"

I am already one of the "_beate gente_." Yet, in spite of Metastasio,
Blanche and I are not so intimate as cousins ought to be. If we are by
accident alone, I become as silent as a Turk, as formal as Sir Charles
Grandison. I caught myself calling her _Miss_ Blanche the other day.

I must not forget thee, honest Squills!--nor thy delight at my health
and success; nor thy exclamation of pride, (one hand on my pulse and
the other griping hard the "ball" of my arm,) "It all comes of my
citrate of iron; nothing like it for children; it has an effect on the
cerebral developments of hope and combativeness." Nor can I wholly omit
mention of poor Mrs Primmins, who still calls me "Master Sisty," and
is breaking her heart that I will not wear the new flannel waistcoats
she had such pleasure in making--"Young gentlemen just growing up are
so apt to go off in a galloping 'sumption!" "She knew just such another
as Master Sisty, when she lived at Torquay, who wasted away, and went
out like a _snuff_, all because he would not wear flannel waistcoats."
Therewith my mother looks grave, and says, "One can't take too much
precaution."

Suddenly the whole neighbourhood is thrown into commotion. Trevanion--I
beg his pardon, Lord Ulverstone--is coming to settle for good at
Compton. Fifty hands are employed, daily in putting the grounds into
hasty order. Fourgons, and waggons, and vans have disgorged all the
necessaries a great man requires, where he means to eat, drink, and
sleep--books, wines, pictures, furniture. I recognise my old patron
still. He is in earnest, whatever he does. I meet my friend, his
steward, who tells me that Lord Ulverstone finds his favourite seat,
near London, too exposed to interruption; and, moreover, that as he has
there completed all improvements that wealth and energy can effect, he
has less occupation for agricultural pursuits, to which he has grown
more and more partial, than on the wide and princely domain which
has hitherto wanted the master's eye. "He is a bra' farmer, I know,"
quoth the steward, "so far as the theory goes but I don't think we in
the north want great lords to teach us how to follow the pleugh." The
steward's sense of dignity is hurt; but he is an honest fellow, and
really glad to see the family come to settle in the old place.

They have arrived, and with them the Castletons, and a whole _posse
comitatus_ of guests. The County Paper is full of fine names.

"What on earth did Lord Ulverstone, mean by pretending to get out of
the way of troublesome visitors?"

"My dear Pisistratus," answered my father to that exclamation, "it is
not the visitors who come, but the visitors who stay away, that most
trouble the repose of a retired minister. In all the procession, he
sees but the images of Brutus and Cassius--that are _not_ there! And
depend on it, also, a retirement so near London did not make noise
enough. You see, a retiring statesman is like that fine carp--the
farther he leaps from the water, the greater splash he makes in falling
into the weeds! But," added Mr Caxton, in a repentant tone, "this
jesting does not become us; and, if I indulged it, it is only because
I am heartily glad that Trevanion is likely now to find out his true
vocation. And as soon as the fine people he brings with him have left
him alone in his library, I trust he will settle to that vocation, and
be happier than he has been yet."

"And that vocation, sir, is--"

"Metaphysics!" said my father. "He will be quite at home in puzzling
over Berkeley, and considering whether the Speaker's chair, and
the official red boxes, were really things whose ideas of figure,
extension, and hardness, were all in the mind. It will be a great
consolation to him to agree, with Berkeley, and to find that he has
only been baffled by immaterial phantasma!"

My father was quite right. The repining, subtle, truth-weighing
Trevanion, plagued by his conscience into seeing all sides of a
question, (for the least question has more than two sides, and is
hexagonal at least,) was much more fitted to discover the origin of
ideas than to convince Cabinets and Nations that two and two make
four--a proposition on which he himself would have agreed with Abraham
Tucker, where that most ingenious and suggestive of all English
metaphysicians observes, "Well persuaded as I am that two and two
make four, if I were to meet with a person of credit, candour, and
understanding, who should sincerely call it in question, I would
give him a hearing; for I am not more certain of that than of the
whole being greater than a part. And yet I could myself suggest _some
considerations that might seem to controvert this point_."[9] I can so
well imagine Trevanion listening to "some person of credit, candour,
and understanding," in disproof of that vulgar proposition that twice
two make four! But the news of this arrival, including that of Lady
Castleton, disturbed me greatly, and I took to long wanderings alone.
In one of these rambles, they all called at the Tower--Lord and Lady
Ulverstone, the Castletons, and their children. I escaped the visit;
and on my return home, there was a certain delicacy respecting old
associations, that restrained much talk before me on so momentous an
event. Roland, like me, had kept out of the way. Blanche, poor child,
ignorant of the antecedents, was the most communicative. And the
especial theme she selected--was the grace and beauty of Lady Castleton!

A pressing invitation to spend some days at the castle had been
cordially given to all. It was accepted only by myself: I wrote word
that I would come.

Yes; I longed to prove the strength of my own self-conquest, and
accurately test the nature of the feelings that had disturbed me. That
any sentiment which could be called love remained for Lady Castleton,
the wife of another, and that other a man with so many claims on my
affection as her lord, I held as a moral impossibility. But, with
all those lively impressions of early youth still engraved on my
heart--impressions of the image of Fanny Trevanion, as the fairest
and brightest of human beings--could I feel free to love again? Could
I seek to woo, and rivet to myself for ever, the entire and virgin
affections of another, while there was a possibility that I might
compare and regret? No; either I must feel that, if Fanny were again
single--could be mine without obstacle, human or divine--she had ceased
to be the one I would single out of the world; or, though regarding
love as the dead, I would be faithful to its memory and its ashes. My
mother sighed, and looked fluttered and uneasy all the morning of the
day on which I was to repair to Compton. She even seemed cross, for
about the third time in her life, and paid no compliment to Mr Stultz,
when my shooting-jacket was exchanged for a black frock, which that
artist had pronounced to be "splendid;" neither did she honour me with
any of those little attentions to the contents of my portmanteau, and
the perfect "getting up" of my white waistcoats and cravats, which
made her natural instincts on such memorable occasions. There was also
a sort of querulous pitying tenderness in her tone when she spoke to
Blanche, which was quite pathetic; though, fortunately, its cause
remained dark and impenetrable to the innocent comprehension of one
who could not see where the past filled the urns of the future, at the
fountain of life. My father understood me better--shook me by the hand,
as I got into the chaise, and muttered, out of Seneca--

    "Non tanquam transfuga, sed tanquam explorator!"

        'Not to desert, but examine.'

Quite right.


CHAPTER CVI.

Agreeably to the usual custom in great houses, as soon as I arrived
at Compton I was conducted to my room, to adjust my toilet, or
compose my spirits by solitude:--it wanted an hour to dinner. I had
not, however, been thus left ten minutes, before the door opened,
and Trevanion himself, (as I would fain still call him) stood before
me. Most cordial were his greeting and welcome; and, seating himself
by my side, he continued to converse, in his peculiar way--bluntly
eloquent, and carelessly learned--till the half hour bell rang. He
talked on Australia, the Wakefield system--cattle--books, his trouble
in arranging his library--his schemes for improving his property,
and embellishing his grounds--his delight to find my father look so
well--his determination to see a great deal of him, whether his old
college friend would or no. He talked, in short, of everything except
politics, and his own past career--showing only his soreness in that
silence. But (independently of the mere work of time,) he looked yet
more worn and jaded in his leisure than he had done in the full tide
of business; and his former abrupt quickness of manner now seemed to
partake of feverish excitement. I hoped that my father _would_ see much
of him, for I felt that the weary mind wanted soothing.

Just as the second bell rang, I entered the drawing-room. There were
at least twenty guests present--each guest, no doubt, some planet of
fashion or fame, with satellites of its own. But I saw only two forms
distinctly--first, Lord Castleton, conspicuous with star and garter,
somewhat ampler and portlier in proportions, and with a frank dash of
gray in the silky waves of his hair, but still as pre-eminent as ever
for that beauty--the charm of which depends less than any other upon
youth--arising, as it does, from a felicitous combination of bearing
and manner, and that exquisite suavity of expression which steals
into the heart, and pleases so much that it becomes a satisfaction to
admire! Of Lord Castleton, indeed, it might be said, as of Alcibiades,
'that he was beautiful at every age.' I felt my breath come thick, and
a mist passed before my eyes, as Lord Castleton led me through the
crowd, and the radiant vision of Fanny Trevanion, how altered--and how
dazzling!--burst upon me.

I felt the light touch of that hand of snow; but no guilty thrill shot
through my veins. I heard the voice, musical as ever--lower than it was
once, and more subdued in its key, but steadfast and untremulous--it
was no longer the voice that made "my soul plant itself in the
ears."[10] The event was over, and I knew that the dream had fled from
the waking world for ever.

"Another old friend!" as Lady Ulverstone came forth from a little group
of children, leading one fine boy of nine years old, while one, two or
three years younger, clung to her gown. "Another old friend!--and,"
added Lady Ulverstone, after the first kind greetings, "two new ones,
when the old are gone." The slight melancholy left the voice, as, after
presenting to me the little viscount, she drew forward the more bashful
Lord Albert, who indeed had something of his grandsire's and namesake's
look of refined intelligence in his brow and eyes.

The watchful tact of Lord Castleton was quick in terminating whatever
embarrassment might belong to these introductions, as, leaning
lightly on my arm, he drew me forward, and presented me to the guests
more immediately in our neighbourhood, who seemed by their earnest
cordiality to have been already prepared for the introduction.

Dinner was now announced, and I welcomed that sense of relief and
segregation with which one settles into one's own "particular" chair at
your large miscellaneous entertainments.

I stayed three days at that house. How truly had Trevanion said that
Fanny would make "an excellent great lady." What perfect harmony
between her manners and her position; just retaining enough of the
girl's seductive gaiety and bewitching desire to please, to soften the
new dignity of bearing she had unconsciously assumed--less, after all,
as great lady than as wife and mother: with a fine breeding, perhaps
a little languid and artificial, as compared with her lord's--which
sprang, fresh and healthful, wholly from nature--but still so void of
all the chill of condescension, or the subtle impertinence that belongs
to that order of the inferior _noblesse_, which boasts the name of
"exclusives;" with what grace, void of prudery, she took the adulation
of the flutterers, turning from them to her children, or escaping
lightly to Lord Castleton, with an ease that drew round her at once the
protection of hearth and home.

And certainly Lady Castleton was more incontestably beautiful than
Fanny Trevanion had been.

All this I acknowledged, not with a sigh and a pang, but with a
pure feeling of pride and delight. I might have loved madly and
presumptuously, as boys will do; but I had loved worthily;--the
love left no blush on my manhood; and Fanny's very happiness was my
perfect and total cure of every wound in my heart not quite scarred
over before. Had she been discontented, sorrowful, without joy in the
ties she had formed, there might have been more danger that I should
brood over the past, and regret the loss of its idol. Here there
was none. And the very improvement in her beauty had so altered its
character--_so_ altered--that Fanny Trevanion and Lady Castleton seemed
two persons. And, thus observing and listening to her, I could now
dispassionately perceive such differences in our nature as seemed to
justify Trevanion's assertion, which once struck me as so monstrous,
"that we should not have been happy had fate permitted our union."
Pure-hearted and simple though she remained in the artificial world,
still that world was her element; its interests occupied her; its talk,
though just chastened from scandal, flowed from her lips. To borrow the
words of a man who was himself a courtier, and one so distinguished
that he could afford to sneer at Chesterfield,[11] "_She_ had the
routine of that style of conversation which is a sort of gold leaf,
that is a great embellishment where it is joined to anything else." I
will not add, "but makes a very poor figure by itself,"--for _that_
Lady Castleton's conversation certainly did not do--perhaps, indeed,
because it was not "by itself"--and the gold leaf was all the better
for being thin, since it could not cover even the surface of the sweet
and amiable nature over which it was spread. Still, this was not the
mind in which now, in maturer experience, I would seek to find sympathy
with manly action, or companionship in the charms of intellectual
leisure.

There was about this beautiful favourite of nature, and fortune a
certain helplessness, which had even its grace in that high station,
and which perhaps tended to insure her domestic peace, for it served
to attach her to those who had won influence over her, and was happily
accompanied by a most affectionate disposition. But still, if less
favoured by circumstances, less sheltered from every wind that could
visit her too roughly--if, as the wife of a man of inferior rank, she
had failed of that high seat and silken canopy reserved for the spoiled
darlings of fortune--that helplessness might have become querulous. I
thought of poor Ellen Bolding and her silken shoes. Fanny Trevanion
seemed to have come into the world with silk shoes--not to walk where
there was a stone or a briar! I heard something, in the gossip of
those around, that confirmed this view of Lady Castleton's character,
while it deepened my admiration of her lord, and showed me how wise
had been her choice, and how resolutely he had prepared himself to
vindicate his own. One evening, as I was sitting a little apart from
the rest, with two men of the London world, to whose talk--for it ran
upon the _on-dits_ and anecdotes of a region long strange to me--I
was a silent but amused listener; one of the two said--"Well, I don't
know anywhere a more excellent creature than Lady Castleton; so fond
of her children--and her tone to Castleton so exactly what it ought
to be--so affectionate, and yet, as it were, respectful. And the more
credit to her, if, as they say, she was not in love with him when she
married, (to be sure, handsome as he is, he is twice her age!) And
no woman could have been more flattered and courted by Lotharios and
lady-killers than Lady Castleton has been. I confess, to my shame,
that Castleton's luck puzzles me, for it is rather an exception to my
general experience."

"My dear * * *," said the other, who was one of those wise men of
pleasure, who occasionally startle us into wondering, how they come
to be so clever, and yet rest contented with mere drawing-room
celebrity--men who seem always idle, yet appear to have read
everything; always indifferent to what passes before them, yet who know
the characters and divine the secrets of everybody--"my dear * * *,"
said the gentleman, "you would not be puzzled if you had studied Lord
Castleton, instead of her ladyship. Of all the conquests ever made by
Sedley Beaudesert, when the two fairest dames of the Faubourg are said
to have fought for his smiles in the _Bois de Boulogne_--no conquest
ever cost him such pains, or so tasked his knowledge of women, as that
of his wife after marriage! He was not satisfied with her hand, he was
resolved to have her whole heart, 'one entire and perfect chrysolite;'
and he has succeeded! Never was husband so watchful, and so little
jealous--never one who confided so generously in all that was best in
his wife, yet was so alert in protecting and guarding her wherever
she was weakest! When, in the second year of marriage, that dangerous
German Prince Von Leibenfels attached himself so perseveringly to Lady
Castleton, and the scandal-mongers pricked up their ears in hopes of
a victim, I watched Castleton with as much interest as if I had been
looking over Deschappelles playing at chess. You never saw anything
so masterly: he pitted himself against his highness with the cool
confidence, not of a blind spouse, but a fortunate rival. He surpassed
him in the delicacy of his attentions, he outshone him by his careless
magnificence. Leibenfels had the impertinence to send Lady Castleton
a bouquet of some rare flowers just in fashion. Castleton, an hour
before, had filled her whole balcony with the same costly exotics, as
if they were too common for nosegays, and only just worthy to bloom for
her a day. Young and really accomplished as Leibenfels is, Castleton
eclipsed him by his grace, and fooled him with his wit: he laid little
plots to turn his mustache and guitar into ridicule; he seduced him
into a hunt with the buckhounds, (though Castleton himself had not
hunted before, since he was thirty,) and drew him, spluttering German
oaths, out of the slough of a ditch; he made him the laughter of the
clubs; he put him fairly out of fashion--and all with such suavity and
politeness, and bland sense of superiority, that it was the finest
piece of high comedy you ever beheld. The poor prince, who had been
coxcomb enough to lay a bet with a Frenchman as to his success with
the English in general, and Lady Castleton in particular, went away
with a face as long as Don Quixote's. If you had but seen him at S----
House, the night before he took leave of the island, and his comical
grimace when Castleton offered him a pinch of the Beaudesert mixture!
No! the fact is, that Castleton made it the object of his existence,
the masterpiece of his art, to secure to himself a happy home, and the
entire possession of his wife's heart. The first two or three years, I
fear, cost him more trouble than any other man ever took, with his own
wife at least--but he may now rest in peace; Lady Castleton is won, and
for ever."

As my gentleman ceased, Lord Castleton's noble head rose above the
group standing round him; and I saw Lady Castleton turn with a look
of well-bred fatigue from a handsome young fop, who had affected to
lower his voice while he spoke to her, and, encountering the eyes of
her husband, the look changed at once into one of such sweet smiling
affection, such frank unmistakeable wife-like pride, that it seemed a
response to the assertion--"Lady Castleton is won, and for ever."

Yes, that story increased my admiration for Lord Castleton: it showed
me with what forethought and earnest sense of responsibility he had
undertaken the charge of a life, the guidance of a character yet
undeveloped; it lastingly acquitted him of the levity that had been
attributed to Sedley Beaudesert. But I felt more than ever contented
that the task had devolved on one whose temper and experience had so
fitted him to discharge it. That German prince made me tremble from
sympathy with the husband, and in a sort of relative shudder for
myself! Had that episode happened to me, I could never have drawn "high
comedy" from it!--I could never have so happily closed the fifth act
with a pinch of the Beaudesert mixture! No, no; to my homely sense of
man's life and employment, there was nothing alluring in the prospect
of watching over the golden tree in the garden, with a "woe to the
Argus, if Mercury once lull him to sleep!" Wife of mine shall need no
watching save in sickness and sorrow! Thank Heaven, that my way of life
does not lead through the roseate thoroughfares, beset with German
princes laying bets for my perdition, and fine gentlemen admiring the
skill with which I play at chess for so terrible a stake! To each rank
and each temper, its own laws. I acknowledge that Fanny is an excellent
marchioness, and Lord Castleton an incomparable marquis. But, Blanche!
if I can win thy true simple heart, I trust I shall begin at the fifth
act of high comedy, and say at the altar--

    "Once won, won for ever!"


CHAPTER CVII.

I rode home on a horse my host lent me; and Lord Castleton rode
part of the way with me, accompanied by his two boys, who bestrode
manfully their Shetland ponies, and cantered on before us. I paid
some compliment to the spirit and intelligence of these children--a
compliment they well deserved.

"Why, yes," said the marquis, with a father's becoming pride, "I hope
neither of them will shame his grandsire, Trevanion. Albert (though not
quite the wonder poor Lady Ulverstone declares him to be) is rather
too precocious; and it is all I can do to prevent his being spoilt
by flattery to his cleverness, which, I think, is much worse than
even flattery to rank--a danger to which, despite Albert's destined
inheritance, the elder brother is more exposed. Eton soon takes out the
conceit of the latter and more vulgar kind. I remember Lord----(you
know what an unpretending good-natured fellow he is now) strutting into
the play-ground, a raw boy with his chin up in the air, and burly Dick
Johnson (rather a tuft-hunter now, I'm afraid) coming up, and saying,
'Well, sir, and who the deuce are you?' 'Lord----,' says the poor
devil unconsciously, 'eldest son of the Marquis of----.' 'Oh, indeed!'
cries Johnson; 'then, there's one kick for my lord, and two for the
marquis!' I am not fond of kicking, but I doubt if anything ever did
---- more good than those those kicks! But" continued Lord Castleton,
"when one flatters a boy for his cleverness, even Eton itself cannot
kick the conceit out of him. Let him be last in the form, and the
greatest dunce ever flogged, there are always people to say that your
public schools don't do for your great geniuses. And it is ten to one
but what the father is plagued into taking the boy home, and giving
him a private tutor, who fixes him into a prig for ever. A coxcomb in
dress," said the marquis smiling, "is a trifler it would ill become
me to condemn, and I own that I would rather see a youth a fop than
a sloven; but a coxcomb in ideas--why, the younger he is, the more
unnatural and disagreeable. Now, Albert, over that hedge, sir."

"That hedge, papa? The pony will never do it."

"Then," said Lord Castleton, taking off his hat with politeness, "I
fear you will deprive us of the pleasure of your company."

The boy laughed, and made gallantly for the hedge, though I saw by his
change of colour that it a little alarmed him. The pony could not clear
the hedge; but it was a pony of tact and resources, and it scrambled
through like a cat, inflicting sundry rents and tears on a jacket of
Raphael blue.

Lord Castleton said, smiling, "You see I teach them to get through
a difficulty one way or the other. Between you and me," he added
seriously, "I perceive a very different world rising round the next
generation from that in which I first went forth and took my pleasure.
I shall rear my boys accordingly. Rich noblemen must now-a-days be
useful men; and if they can't leap over briars, they must scramble
through them. Don't you agree with me?"

"Yes, heartily."

"Marriage makes a man much wiser," said the marquis, after a pause. "I
smile now, to think how often I sighed at the thought of growing old.
Now I reconcile myself to the gray hairs without dreams of a wig, and
enjoy youth still--for" (pointing to his sons) "it is _there_!"

"He has very nearly found out the secret of the saffron bag now," said
my father, pleased, and rubbing his hands, when I repeated this talk
with Lord Castleton. "But I fear poor Trevanion," he added, with a
compassionate change of countenance, "is still far away from the sense
of Lord Bacon's receipt. And his wife, you say, out of very love for
him, keeps always drawing discord from the one jarring wire."

"You must talk to her, sir."

"I will," said my father angrily; "and scold her too--foolish woman! I
shall tell her Luther's advice to the Prince of Anhalt."

"What was that, sir?"

"Only to throw a baby into the river Maldon, because it had sucked dry
five wet-nurses besides the mother, and must therefore be a changeling.
Why, that ambition of hers would suck dry all the mothers' milk in the
genus mammalian! And such a withered, rickety, malign little changeling
too! She shall fling it into the river, by all that is holy!" cried my
father; and, suiting the action to the word, away went the spectacles
he had been rubbing indignantly for the last three minutes, into the
pond. "Papæ!" faltered my father aghast, while the Ceprinidæ, mistaking
the dip of the spectacles for an invitation to dinner, came scudding
up to the bank. "It is all your fault," said Mr Caxton, recovering
himself. "Get me the new tortoise-shell spectacles and a large slice
of bread. You see that when fish are reduced to a pond they recognise
a benefactor, which they never do when rising at flies, or groping for
worms, in the waste world of a river. Hem!--a hint for the Ulverstones.
Besides the bread and the spectacles, just look out and bring me the
old black-letter copy of St Anthony's _Sermon to Fishes_."


CHAPTER CVIII.

Some weeks now have passed since my return to the Tower: the Castletons
are gone, and all Trevanion's gay guests. And since these departures,
visits between the two houses have been interchanged often, and the
bonds of intimacy are growing close. Twice has my father held long
conversations apart with Lady Ulverstone, (my mother is not foolish
enough to feel a pang now at such confidences,) and the result has
become apparent. Lady Ulverstone has ceased all talk against the
world and the public--ceased to fret the galled pride of her husband
with irritating sympathy. She has made herself the true partner of
his present occupations, as she was of those in the past; she takes
interest in farming, and gardens, and flowers, and those philosophical
peaches which come from trees academical that Sir William Temple reared
in his graceful retirement. She does more--she sits by her husband's
side in the library, reads the books he reads, or, if in Latin, coaxes
him, into construing them. Insensibly she leads him into studies
farther and farther remote from Blue Books and Hansard; and, taking my
father's hint,

    "Allures to brighter worlds, and leads the way."

They are inseparable. Darby-and-Joan-like, you see them together in
the library, the garden, or the homely little pony-phaeton, for which
Lord Ulverstone has resigned the fast-trotting cob, once identified
with the eager looks of the busy Trevanion. It is most touching, most
beautiful! And to think what a victory over herself the proud woman
must have obtained!--never a thought that seems to murmur, never a word
to recall the ambitious man back from the philosophy into which his
active mind flies for refuge. And with the effort her brow has become
so serene! That careworn expression, which her fine features once wore,
is fast vanishing. And what affects me most, is to think that this
change (which is already settling into happiness) has been wrought by
Austin's counsels and appeals to her sense and affection. "It is to
you," he said, "that Trevanion must look for more than comfort--for
cheerfulness and satisfaction. Your child is gone from you--the world
ebbs away--you two should be all in all to each other. Be so." Thus,
after paths so devious, meet those who had parted in youth, now on the
verge of age. There, in the same scenes where Austin and Ellinor had
first formed acquaintance, he aiding her to soothe the wounds inflicted
by the ambition that had separated their lots, and both taking counsel
to insure the happiness of the rival she had preferred.

After all this vexed public life of toil, and care, and ambition,--to
see Trevanion and Ellinor drawing closer and closer to each other,
knowing private life and its charms for the first time,--verily it
would have been a theme for an elegiast like Tibullus.

But all this while a younger love, with no blurred leaves to erase
from the chronicle, has been keeping sweet account of the summer time.
"Very near are two hearts that have no guile between them," saith
a proverb, traced back to Confucius. O ye days of still sunshine,
reflected back from ourselves--O ye haunts, endeared evermore by a
look, tone, or smile, or rapt silence, when more and more with each
hour, unfolded before me that nature, so tenderly coy, so cheerful
though serious, so attuned by simple cares to affection, yet so filled,
from soft musings and solitude, with a poetry that gave grace to duties
the homeliest;--setting life's trite things to music. Here nature and
fortune concurred alike: equal in birth and pretensions--similar in
tastes and in objects,--loving the healthful activity of purpose, but
content to find it around us--neither envying the wealthy, nor vying
with the great; each framed by temper to look on the bright side of
life, and find founts of delight, and green spots fresh with verdure,
where eyes but accustomed to cities could see but the sands and the
mirage. While afar (as man's duty) I had gone through the travail
that, in wrestling with fortune, gives pause to the heart to recover
its losses, and know the value of love, in its graver sense of life's
earnest realities; heaven had reared, at the thresholds of home, the
young tree that should cover the roof with its blossoms, and embalm
with its fragrance the daily air of my being.

It had been the joint prayer of those kind ones I left, that such might
be my reward; and each had contributed, in his or her several way,
to fit that fair life for the ornament and joy of the one that now
asked to guard and to cherish it. From Roland came that deep, earnest
honour--a man's in its strength, and a woman's in its delicate sense
of refinement. From Roland, that quick taste for all things noble in
poetry, and lovely in nature--the eye that sparkled to read how Bayard
stood alone at the bridge, and saved an army--or wept over the page
that told how the dying Sidney put the bowl from his burning lips. Is
that too masculine a spirit for some? Let each please himself. Give me
the woman who can echo all thoughts that are noblest in man! And that
eye, too--like Roland's,--could pause to note each finer mesh in the
wonderful webwork of beauty. No landscape to her was the same yesterday
and to-day,--a deeper shade from the skies could change the face of the
moors--the springing up of fresh wild flowers, the very song of some
bird unheard before, lent variety to the broad rugged heath. Is that
too simple a source of pleasure for some to prize? Be it so to those
who need the keen stimulants that cities afford. But if we were to pass
all our hours in those scenes, it was something to have the tastes
which own no monotony in Nature.

All this came from Roland; and to this, with thoughtful wisdom, my
father had added enough knowledge from books to make those tastes more
attractive, and to lend to impulsive perception of beauty and goodness
the culture that draws finer essence from beauty, and expands the Good
into the Better by heightening the site of the survey: hers, knowledge
enough to sympathise with intellectual pursuits, not enough to dispute
on man's province--Opinion. Still, whether in nature or in lore, still

      "The fairest garden in her looks,
    And in her mind the choicest books!"

And yet, thou wise Austin--and thou Roland, poet that never wrote a
verse,--yet your work had been incomplete, but then Woman stept in,
and the mother gave to her she designed for a daughter the last finish
of meek everyday charities--the mild household virtues,--"the soft
word that turneth away wrath,"--the angelic pity for man's rougher
faults--the patience that bideth its time--and, exacting no "rights of
woman," subjugates us, delighted, to the invisible thrall.

Dost thou remember, my Blanche, that soft summer evening when the vows
our eyes had long interchanged stole at last from the lip? Wife mine!
come to my side,--look over me while I write; there, thy tears--(happy
tears, are they not, Blanche?)--have blotted the page! Shall we tell
the world more? Right, my Blanche, no words should profane the place
where those tears have fallen!

       *       *       *       *       *

And here I would fain conclude; but alas, and alas! that I cannot
associate with our hopes, on this side the grave, him who, we fondly
hoped, (even on the bridal-day, that gave his sister to my arms,) would
come to the hearth where his place now stood vacant, contented with
glory, and fitted at last for the tranquil happiness, which long years
of repentance and trial had deserved.

Within the first year of my marriage, and shortly after a gallant
share in a desperate action, which had covered his name with new
honours, just when we were most elated, in the blinded vanity of human
pride--came the fatal news! The brief career was run. He died, as I
knew he would have prayed to die, at the close of a day ever memorable
in the annals of that marvellous empire, which valour without parallel
has annexed to the Throne of the Isles. He died in the arms of Victory,
and his last smile met the eyes of the noble chief who, even in that
hour, could pause from the tide of triumph by the victim it had cast
on its bloody shore. "One favour," faltered the dying man; "I have a
father at home--he too is a soldier. In my tent is my will: it gives
all I have to him--he can take it without shame. That is not enough!
Write to him--you--with your own hand, and tell him how his son fell!"
And the hero fulfilled the prayer, and that letter is dearer to Roland
than all the long roll of the ancestral dead! Nature has reclaimed her
rights, and the forefathers recede before the son.

In a side chapel of the old Gothic church, amidst the mouldering tombs
of those who fought at Acre and Agincourt, a fresh tablet records the
death of HERBERT DE CAXTON, with the simple inscription--

HE FELL ON THE FIELD:

HIS COUNTRY MOURNED HIM,

AND HIS FATHER IS RESIGNED.

Years have rolled away since that tablet was placed there, and changes
have passed on that nook of earth which bounds our little world: fair
chambers have sprung up amidst the desolate ruins; far and near,
smiling corn-fields replace the bleak, dreary moors. The land supports
more retainers than ever thronged to the pennon of its barons of old;
and Roland can look from his tower over domains that are reclaimed,
year by year, from the waste, till the ploughshare shall win a lordship
more opulent than those feudal chiefs ever held by the tenure of the
sword. And the hospitable mirth that had fled from the ruin has been
renewed in the hall; and rich and poor, great and lowly, have welcomed
the rise of an ancient house from the dust of decay. All those dreams
of Roland's youth are fulfilled; but they do not gladden his heart as
does the thought that his son, at the last, was worthy of his line, and
the hope that no gulf shall yawn between the two when the Grand Circle
is rounded, and man's past and man's future meet where Time disappears.
Never was that lost one forgotten!--never was his name breathed but
tears rushed to the eyes; and, each morning, the peasant going to his
labour might see Roland steal down the dell to the deep-set door of
the chapel. None presume there to follow his steps, or intrude on his
solemn thoughts; for there, in sight of that tablet, are his orisons
made, and the remembrance of the dead forms a part of the commune
with heaven. But the old man's step is still firm, and his brow still
erect; and you may see in his face that it was no hollow boast which
proclaimed that the "father was resigned:" and ye, who doubt if too
Roman a hardness might not be found in that Christian resignation,
think what it is to have feared for a son the life of shame, and ask,
then, if the sharpest grief to a father is in a son's death of honour.

Years have passed, and two fair daughters play at the knees of Blanche
or creep round the footstool of Austin, waiting patiently for the
expected kiss when he looks up from the Great Book, now drawing fast
to its close; or, if Roland enter the room, forget all their sober
demureness, and, unawed by the terrible "Papæ!" run clamorous for the
promised swing in the orchard, or the fiftieth recital of "Chevy Chase."

For my part, I take the goods the gods provide me, and am contented
with girls that have the eyes of their mother; but Roland, ungrateful
man, begins to grumble that we are so neglectful of the rights of
heirs-male. He is in doubt whether to lay the fault on Mr Squills or
on us: I am not sure that he does not think it a conspiracy of all
three to settle the representation of the martial De Caxtons on "the
spindle side." Whosoever be the right person to blame, an omission so
fatal to the straight line in the pedigree is rectified at last; and
Mrs Primmins again rushes, or rather rolls--in the movement natural to
forms globular and spheral--into my father's room with--

"Sir, sir--it is a boy!"

Whether my father asked also this time that question so puzzling to
metaphysical inquirers, "What is a boy?" I know not; I rather suspect
he had not leisure for so abstract a question: for the whole household
burst on him, and my mother, in that storm peculiar to the elements
of the Mind Feminine--a sort of sunshiny storm between laughter and
crying--whirled him off to behold the _Neogilos_.

Now, some months after that date, on a winter's evening, we were all
assembled in the hall, which was still our usual apartment, since its
size permitted to each his own segregated and peculiar employment.
A large screen fenced off from interruption my father's erudite
settlement; and quite out of sight, behind that impermeable barrier, he
was now calmly winding up that eloquent peroration which will astonish
the world whenever, by Heaven's special mercy, the printer's devils
have done with "The History of Human Error." In another nook my uncle
had ensconced himself--stirring his coffee, (in the cup my mother had
presented to him so many years ago, and which had miraculously escaped
all the ills the race of crockery is heir to,) a volume of _Ivanhoe_
in the other hand: and, despite the charm of the Northern Wizard, his
eye _not_ on the page. On the wall behind him, hangs the picture of Sir
Herbert de Caxton, the soldier-comrade of Sidney and Drake; and, at the
foot of the picture, Roland has slung his son's sword beside the letter
that spoke of his death, which is framed and glazed: sword and letter
had become as the last, nor least honoured, Penates of the hall:--the
son was grown an ancestor.

Not far from my uncle sat Mr Squills, employed in mapping out
phrenological divisions on a cast he had made from the skull of one
of the Australian aborigines--a ghastly present which (in compliance
with a yearly letter to that effect) I had brought him over, together
with a stuffed "wombat" and a large bundle of sarsaparilla. (For the
satisfaction of his patients, I may observe, parenthetically, that the
skull and the "wombat"--that last is a creature between a miniature
pig and a very small badger--were not precisely packed up with the
sarsaparilla!) Farther on stood open, but idle, the new pianoforte, at
which, before my father had given his preparatory hem, and sat down to
the Great Book, Blanche and my mother had been trying hard to teach me
to bear the third in the glee of "The Chough and Crow to roost have
gone,"--vain task, in spite of all flattering assurances that I have a
very fine "bass," if I could but manage to humour it. Fortunately for
the ears of the audience, that attempt is now abandoned. My mother is
hard at work on her tapestry--the last pattern in fashion--to wit, a
rosy-cheeked young troubadour playing the lute under a salmon-coloured
balcony: the two little girls look gravely on, prematurely in love, I
suspect, with the troubadour; and Blanche and I have stolen away into
a corner, which, by some strange delusion, we consider out of sight,
and in that corner is the cradle of the _Neogilos_. Indeed it is not
our fault that it is there--Roland would have it so; and the baby is
so good, too, he never cries--at least so say Blanche and my mother:
at all events he does not cry to-night. And indeed, that child is a
wonder! He seems to know and respond to what was uppermost at our
hearts when he was born; and yet more, when Roland (contrary, I dare
say, to all custom) permitted neither mother, nor nurse, nor creature
of womankind, to hold him at the baptismal font, but bent over the new
Christian his own dark, high-featured face, reminding one of the eagle
that hid the infant in its nest, and watched over it with wings that
had battled with the storm: and from that moment the child, who took
the name of HERBERT, seemed to recognise Roland better than his nurse,
or even mother--seemed to know that, in giving him that name, we sought
to give Roland his son once more! Never did the old man come near the
infant but it smiled and crowed, and stretched out its little arms; and
then the mother and I would press each other's hands secretly, and were
not jealous. Well, then, Blanche and Pisistratus were seated near the
cradle, and talking in low whispers, when my father pushed aside the
screen and said--

"There--the work is done! and now it may go to press as soon as you
will."

Congratulations poured in--my father bore them with his usual
equanimity; and standing on the hearth, his hand in his waistcoat, he
said musingly, "Among the last delusions of Human Error, I have had
to notice Rousseau's phantasy of Perpetual Peace, and all the like
pastoral dreams, which preceded the bloodiest wars that have convulsed
the earth for more than a thousand years!"

"And to judge by the newspapers," said I, "the same delusions are
renewed again. Benevolent theorists go about, prophesying peace as a
positive certainty, deduced from that sibyl-book the ledger; and we are
never again to buy cannons, provided only we can exchange cotton for
corn."

MR SQUILLS, (_who, having almost wholly retired from general
business, has, from want of something better to do, attended sundry
"Demonstrations in the North," since which he has talked much about
the march of improvement, the spirit of the age, and_ "US _of the
nineteenth century."_)--I heartily hope that these benevolent theorists
_are_ true prophets. I have found, in the course of my professional
practice, that men go out of the world quite fast enough, without
hacking them into pieces, or blowing them up into the air. War is a
great evil.

BLANCHE, (_passing by Squills, and glancing towards Roland_.)--Hush!

Roland remains silent.

MR CAXTON.--War is a great evil; but evil is admitted by Providence
into the agency of creation, physical and moral. The existence of evil
has puzzled wiser heads than ours, Squills. But, no doubt, there is One
above who has His reasons for it. The combative bump seems as common to
the human skull as the philoprogenitive; if it is in our organisation,
be sure it is not there without cause. Neither is it just to man, nor
wisely submissive to the Disposer of all events, to suppose that war
is wholly and wantonly produced by human crimes and follies--that
it conduces _only_ to ill, and does not as often arise from the
necessities interwoven in the framework of society, and speed the great
ends of the human race, conformably with the designs of the Omniscient.
Not one great war has ever desolated the earth, but has left behind it
seeds that have ripened into blessings incalculable.

MR SQUILLS, (_with the groan of a dissentient at a
"Demonstration."_)--Oh! oh! OH!

Luckless Squills! Little could he have foreseen the shower-bath, or
rather _douche_, of erudition that fell splash on his head, as he
pulled the spring with that impertinent _Oh! oh!_ Down first came
the Persian War, with Median myriads disgorging all the rivers they
had drunk up in their march through the East--all the arts, all the
letters, all the sciences, all the notions of liberty that we inherit
from Greece--my father rushed on with them all, sousing Squills with
his proofs that, without the Persian War, Greece would never have risen
to be the teacher of the world. Before the gasping victim could take
breath, down came Hun, Goth, and Vandal, on Italy and Squills.

"What, sir!" cried my father, "don't you see that, from those eruptions
on demoralised Rome, came the regeneration of manhood; the re-baptism
of earth from the last soils of paganism; and the remote origin of
whatever of Christianity yet exists, free from the idolatries with
which Rome contaminated the faith?"

Squills held up his hands, and made a splutter. Down came
Charlemagne--paladins and all! There my father was grand! What a
picture he made of the broken, jarring, savage elements of barbaric
society. And the iron hand of the great Frank--settling the nations,
and founding existent Europe. Squills was now fast sinking into coma,
or stupefaction; but, catching at a straw, as he heard the word
"Crusades" he stuttered forth, "Ah! _there_ I defy you!"

"Defy me, there!" cries my father; and one would think the ocean was in
the shower-bath, it came down with such a rattle. My father scarcely
touched on the smaller points in excuse for the Crusades, though he
recited very volubly all the humane arts introduced into Europe by
that invasion of the East; and showed how it had served civilisation,
by the vent it afforded for the rude energies of chivalry--by the
element of destruction to feudal tyranny that it introduced--by its use
in the emancipation of burghs, and the disrupture of serfdom. But he
showed, in colours vivid as if caught from the skies of the East, the
great spread of Mahometanism, and the danger it menaced to Christian
Europe--and drew up the Godfreys, and Tancreds, and Richards, as a
league of the Age and Necessity, against the terrible progress of the
sword and the Koran. "You call them madmen," cried my father, "but the
frenzy of nations is the statesmanship of fate! How know you that--but
for the terror inspired by the hosts who marched to Jerusalem--how know
you that the Crescent had not waved over other realms than those which
Roderic lost to the Moor? If Christianity had been less a passion, and
the passion had less stirred up all Europe--how know you that the creed
of the Arab (which was then, too, a passion) might not have planted its
mosques in the forum of Rome, and on the site of Notre Dame? For in the
war between creeds--when the creeds are embraced by vast races--think
you that the reason of sages can cope with the passion of millions?
Enthusiasm must oppose enthusiasm. The crusader fought for the tomb of
Christ, but he saved the life of Christendom."

My father paused. Squills was quite passive; he struggled no more--he
was drowned.

"So," resumed Mr Caxton, more quietly--"so, if later wars yet perplex
us as to the good that the All-wise One draws from their evils,
our posterity may read their uses as clearly as we now read the
finger of Providence resting on the barrows of Marathon, or guiding
Peter the Hermit to the battle-fields of Palestine. Nor, while we
admit the evil to the passing generation, can we deny that many of
the virtues that make the ornament and vitality of peace sprang up
first in the convulsions of war!" Here Squills began to evince faint
signs of resuscitation, when my father let fly at him one of those
numberless waterworks which his prodigious memory kept in constant
supply. "Hence," said he, "hence not unjustly has it been remarked by
a philosopher, shrewd at least in worldly experience--(Squills again
closed his eyes, and became exanimate)--'It is strange to imagine
that war, which of all things appears the most savage, should be the
passion of the most heroic spirits. But 'tis in war that the knot
of fellowship is closest drawn; It is in war that mutual succour is
most given--mutual danger run, and common affection most exerted
and employed; for heroism and philanthropy are almost one and the
same!'"[12]

My father ceased, and mused a little. Squills, if still living, thought
it prudent to feign continued extinction.

"Not," said Mr Caxton, resuming--"not but what I hold it our duty never
to foster into a passion what we must rather submit to as an awful
necessity. You say truly, Mr Squills--war is an evil; and woe to those
who, on slight pretences, open the gates of Janus,

        ----'The dire abode,
    And the fierce issues of the furious god.'"

Mr Squills, after a long pause, (employed in some of the more handy
means for the reanimation of submerged bodies, supporting himself
close to the fire in a semi-erect posture, with gentle friction,
self-applied, to each several limb, and copious recourse to certain
steaming stimulants which my compassionate hands prepared for him,)
stretches himself, and says feebly, "In short, then, not to provoke
further discussion, you would go to war in defence of your country.
Stop, sir--stop, for God's sake! I agree with you--I agree with you!
But, fortunately, there is little chance now that any new Boney will
build boats at Boulogne to invade us."

MR CAXTON.--I am not so sure of that, Mr Squills. (_Squills falls
back with a glassy stare of deprecating horror._) I don't read the
newspapers very often, but the past helps me to judge of the present.

Therewith my father earnestly recommended to Mr Squills the careful
perusal of certain passages in Thucydides, just previous to the
outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, (_Squills hastily nodded the most
servile acquiescence_,) and drew an ingenious parallel between the
signs and symptoms foreboding that outbreak, and the very apprehension
of coming war which was evinced by the recent _Io pæans_ to peace.
And, after sundry notable and shrewd remarks, tending to show where
elements for war were already ripening, amidst clashing opinions and
disorganised states, he wound up with saying,--"So that, all things
considered, I think we had better just keep up enough of the bellicose
spirit, not to think it a sin if we are called upon to fight for
our pestles and mortars, our three per cents, goods, chattels, and
liberties. Such a time must come, sooner or later, even though the
whole world were spinning cotton, and printing sprigged calicoes. _We_
may not see it, Squills, but that young gentleman in the cradle, whom
you have lately brought into light, may."

"And if so," said my uncle abruptly, speaking for the first time--"if
indeed it is for altar and hearth!"

My father suddenly drew in and pished a little, for he saw that he was
caught in the web of his own eloquence.

Then Roland took down from the wall his son's sword. Stealing to the
cradle, he laid it in its sheath by the infant's side, and glanced from
my father to us with a beseeching eye. Instinctively Blanche bent over
the cradle, as if to protect the _Neogilos_; but the child, waking,
turned from her, and, attracted by the glitter of the hilt, laid one
hand lustily thereon, and pointed with the other, laughingly, to Roland.

"Only on my father's proviso," said I hesitatingly. "For hearth and
altar--nothing less!"

"And even in that case," said my father, "add the shield to the sword!"
and on the other side of the infant he placed Roland's well-worn Bible,
blistered in many a page with secret tears.

There we all stood, grouping round the young centre of so many hopes
and fears--in peace or in war, born alike for the Battle of Life. And
he, unconscious of all that made our lips silent, and our eyes dim,
had already left that bright bauble of the sword, and thrown both arms
round Roland's bended neck.

"_Herbert_," murmured Roland; and Blanche gently drew away the
sword,--and left the Bible.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cowley's _Ode to Light_.

[2] Cowley on _Town and Country_. (Discourse on Agriculture.)

[3] How true are the following remarks:--

"Action is the first great requisite of a colonist, (that is, a
pastoral or agricultural settler.) With a young man, the tone of his
mind is more important than his previous pursuits. I have known men
of an active, energetic, contented disposition, with a good flow of
animal spirits, who had been bred in luxury and refinement, succeed
better than men bred as farmers, who were always hankering after bread
and beer, and market ordinaries of Old England.... To be dreaming when
you should be looking after your cattle, is a terrible drawback....
There are certain persons who, too lazy and too extravagant to succeed
in Europe, sail for Australia under the idea that fortunes are to be
made there by a sort of legerdemain, spend or lose their capital in a
very short space of time, and return to England to abuse the place,
the people, and everything connected with colonisation."--_Sidney's
Australian Handbook_--admirable for its wisdom and compactness.

[4] Lest this seem an exaggeration, I venture to annex an extract from
a MS. letter to the author from Mr George Blakeston Wilkinson, author
of _South Australia_.

"I will instance the case of one person who had been a farmer in
England, and emigrated with about £2000 about seven years since. On
his arrival, he found that the prices of sheep had fallen from about
30s. to 5s. or 6s. per head, and he bought some well-bred flocks at
these prices. He was fortunate in obtaining a good and extensive _run_,
and he devoted the whole of his time to improving his flocks, and
encouraged his shepherds by rewards; so that, in about four years, his
original number of sheep had increased from 2500 (which cost him £700)
to 7000; and the breed and wool were also so much improved that he
could obtain £1 per head for 2000 fat sheep, and 15s. per head for the
other 5000, and this at a time when the general price of sheep was from
10s. to 16s. This alone increased his original capital, invested in
sheep, from £700 to £5700. The profits from the wool paid the whole of
his expenses and wages for his men."

[5] I felt sure, from the first, that the system called "The Wakefield"
could never fairly represent the ideas of Mr Wakefield himself, whose
singular breadth of understanding, and various knowledge of mankind,
belied the notion that fathered on him the clumsy execution of a theory
wholly inapplicable to a social state like Australia. I am glad to see
that he has vindicated himself from the discreditable paternity. But
I grieve to find that he still clings to one cardinal error of the
system, in the discouragement of small holdings, and that he evades,
more ingeniously than ingenuously, the important question--"What should
be the minimum price of land?"

[6] "The profits of cattle-farming are smaller than those of the
sheep-owner, (if the latter have good luck, for much depends upon
that,) but cattle-farming is much more safe as a speculation, and less
care, knowledge, and management are required. £2000, laid out on 700
head of cattle, if good runs be procured, might increase the capital in
five years, from £2000 to £6000, besides enabling the owner to maintain
himself, pay wages, &c."--_MS. letter from G. B. Wilkinson._

[7] _Dingoes_--the name given by Australian natives to the wild dogs.

[8] Not having again to advert to Uncle Jack, I may be pardoned for
informing the reader, by way of annotation, that he continues to
prosper surprisingly in Australia, though the Tibbets' Wheal stands
still for want of workmen. Despite of a few ups and downs, I have had
no fear of his success until this year, (1849,) when I tremble to think
what effect the discovery of the gold mines in California may have on
his lively imagination. If thou escapist that snare, Uncle Jack, _res
age, tutus eris_,--thou art safe for life!

[9] _Light of Nature--chapter on Judgment._--See the very ingenious
illustration of doubt, "whether the part is always greater than the
whole"--taken from time, or rather eternity.

[10] Sir Philip Sidney.

[11] Lord Hervey's _Memoirs of George II._

[12] Shaftesbury.




LYNMOUTH REVISITED.


                           BY THE SKETCHER.

Nearly sixteen years ago, there appeared in the pages of Maga,
descriptions of the scenery of Lynmouth, North Devon. As Sketcher, I
then proposed to myself to analyse the impressions which landscape
scenery makes upon the minds of artists and lovers of nature, and to
show that there must be in the artist a higher aim than imitation; and
that the pleasure of the unpractising admirer will be in proportion
to his power of extracting from the insensitive matter of nature,
the poetic life of thought; to rescue both art and nature from the
degradation they suffer when disconnected with the higher senses; to
show that nature, to be the worthy object of art, should be suggestive.
Its charm is to elicit, to draw out finely, and to embellish what
is already, in a ruder state, in the mind. If there be poverty
within, there is no room for the reception of the riches so profusely
surrounding us in the external world. Neither artists nor amateurs are
generally sufficiently aware, that a previous education is necessary
to make sketching effective and expressive. We find _ourselves_
everywhere. Whatever be the scenery, the sketcher brings little back
that he does not take with him. Hence the diversity in the character of
sketches--of different sketchers--and the one character that pervades
the portfolio of each. I have heard of an artist who visited our lakes,
and brought back with him only cottages! Morland would have added, or
rather made the principal, the stye and pigs; and even Gainsborough's
sketch-book may have shown little more than ragged pollards, and groups
of rustic children. To know what is in nature, you must know what is
in yourself. If you are ignorant of art, your sketches can only be
accidentally good. It is possible to be a very close observer, even of
minute beauties, and yet be a very bad sketcher. One of an original
genius will convert, and, by a bold dissimilitude in non-essentials,
incorporate into his own previous conceptions whatever is before him;
and thus, by preserving the great suggestive characteristics, represent
nature with a far greater truth, exhibiting her very life and feeling,
than they who aim at truth through exact and minute imitation.

Let this be exemplified in Salvator Rosa. Do his wild scenes of rock,
and rugged rock-engendered trees, exist to the general eye, exactly in
their form, and colour, and composition, as he has represented them?
The exact sketcher would have found a less correspondence in branches
and foliage--a less marked living feeling between the rocks and trees;
he would have found much in the colouring, especially in the green
leaves, where they are so few and scattered, of an inconsistent gaiety.
These would have been distracting; but his educated eye, toned by a one
bold feeling, rejected these, and seized the wilder characteristic,
to which he resolutely, under the impulse of his genius, made all the
rest subservient and suggestive. He embodied what he saw with what he
felt, and marred not the savage freedom by attractive littlenesses,
but gave it full play; and with an execution as bold and free, which
the minute critic would pronounce not natural, though most natural, as
most expressive of that spontaneous out-flung unconstrained-ness of
nature's growth, which really pervades all, he harmoniously brought all
the parts under the dominion of one poetic feeling. Take his foliage,
even in form--to say nothing of its actual unnaturalness of colour in
the exact sense--there is a raggedness, as torn and storm-beaten, in
the individual leafage, which the untutored sketcher will in vain look
for in his beat; but all this stamps one great truth, and that speaks
more of nature than many small ones. I do not mean here to give the
palm to Salvator Rosa, as if he were "Lord of Landscape;" I mention
him as a strong example, as the boldest deviator from that which the
unpoetic eye sees, and minds totally uncharmed by poetry can conceive.
I think it well here to lay some stress upon these preliminary remarks,
because much has been written, with a great fascination of language,
recommending, as I believe too strongly, a close observation in detail
of the phenomena of nature; overlooking the great phenomenon--the
accordance of external nature with the heart, feelings, and very life
and soul of man. One writer in particular, with great ability, and
audacious confidence, because in his blindness he, uneducated to it,
sees not in nature what such great men as Salvator Rosa and Gaspar
Poussin, have extracted from it, and yet made it nature's and their
own, flings upon their established fame the _brutum fulmen_ of his
contempt and abuse. _Damnat quod non intelligit._ He knows not the true
principles of art which exist to perfection in their works, nor knows
how strictly these principles belong to art and nature only through and
by their connexion with the mind of man. You may study meteorology in
the _Penny Magazine_, or geology and botany, most scientifically; but
it will further you a very little way, while your portfolio is under
your arm, and your eye in search of a picturesque which you have not
learned to find. Nay, it may happen, for it often does happen, that the
more you sketch the farther you are from art. It is possible, also, for
the most accomplished artist to sketch too much; and to stay the power
of his invention, by referring too constantly to the preciseness and
individuality of scenery. He dares not so much trust his palette as his
portfolio, as it were his register of nature, to which he has bound
himself beyond the usual apprenticeship.

It has been remarked by sketchers, amateurs, and artists by profession,
that, upon a sketching expedition, "their hands are not in" for some
days. I doubt if the fault be so much in the hand as in the eye; for
in most cases the hand had come from the immediate practice of the
studio: but the eye is distracted by the many beauties which now force
themselves into observation, and which in the home-practice, and in
following the mind's bent on the canvass, the memory did not vividly
present as not wanted. It is more difficult, therefore, at first to
generalise, to escape the fascinations of local form and colour, which
keep the eye from the instant acknowledgment of a whole. We are thus
at first apt to begin with the detail, instead of leaving it to the
last, by which means we have more than we want, or less accurately and
accommodatingly what is wanted. When we have learned again to reject,
and to see, we are surprised with a facility we at first despaired of.
We do, then, because we know what to do.

I would recommend therefore, before setting out on such expeditions,
where it be practicable, to visit daily, and all day, during a week or
fortnight, the best galleries of pictures, such as contain all schools,
that as much as possible there may be no bias, but such as every one
must find in himself before he reaches the gallery. I would do this to
confirm, and fasten upon the memory, the principles of art,--breadth,
greatness, truth, expression, colouring, sentiment, and how obtained.
Here will be a grammar without its drudgery; for every lesson will be
a delight, if we go to it with no conceited opinions of our own, and
no cavilling spirit bringing ourselves down to an admission that these
great men of former days had some foundation upon which they built
their fame, their acknowledged fame--so searching, we shall see the
reasons of their doings--why they, each for their own purpose, adopted
this or that style of colour, or of composition, or chiaroscuro. Going
then immediately to nature from art, we shall see how very true art
is--a secret that, without this immediate comparison, would be very apt
to be hidden from us. No man in his senses would begin a science from
his own observation alone. It was not the first shepherd who, studying
the stars, laid open the study of astronomy. We shall learn nothing by
despising all that has been learnt before we were born. So it is in
art; some principles have been established, which it is well to know
thoroughly; and, the more we know them, the more enthusiastic will be
our admiration, the love of art through nature, and of nature through
art.

During my former visits to the beautiful scenery of Lynmouth, I had
seldom taken any whole view, but chiefly studied parts for use in the
detail of compositions; and this I think to be a good practice for
the landscape painter, which term I use here in contradistinction
to the painter of views, there is so great a pleasure in as it were
creating--in being the ®poiêtês®, the maker--that, to one accustomed
to and at all skilled in composing, it becomes an irksome task to
make a "view." The continued habit of view-painting must necessarily
check invention, and limit unworthily the painter's aim. In revisiting
Lynmouth, I changed my purpose and this, not under the idea of making
pictures of any of the sketches, but for the practice of noting how
a picture, framed in from nature, as if it were a work of art, would
be brought to its completion; for sketching, with such an object, I
cannot but think of as great importance as the other method. We must
learn from nature to make a whole, as well as the use of the parts
separately. With this purpose the sketcher will look out for subjects,
not detail; he will be curious to see how nature composes now, and
when it is that scenes are most agreeable--made so by what combination
of lines, by what agreement of colours, by what proportions of light,
and gradations of shadow: for he will often find, when nature looks
her best, that light and shade are employed as substitutes for lines
which, in the actual and true drawing of them, would be unfortunate.
How often is it that a scene strikes the eye at once for its great
beauty, that, when we come to it again, seems entirely to have lost
its charm! Now these spots should be visited again and again, till the
causes be ascertained of the charm and of the deterioration: for here
must lie the principles of art, nature assuming and putting off that
which is most agreeable to us, that in which our human sympathies are
engaged. Sketchers often pass hastily these spots that are no longer
beautiful; but they are wrong, for they can learn best, by accurate
observation of the changes presented to them. And they will thus learn
to remedy deficiencies, and acquire a better power of selecting scenes,
by knowing where the deficiencies lie; the mind's eye will not dwell
upon them, or will fill them up, and the composition show itself to
them in a manner quite otherwise than it would have appeared, had no
such previous observations been made. There are sometimes good lines
marred by bad effects, and bad lines remedied by skilful management
of effects--of light and shadow. It must be a practised eye that can
properly abstract and separate lines from effects, and effects from
lines. We play with colour, but our serious business is with light and
shade; the real picture is more frequently in black and white, than
those who addict themselves to colour will credit. I will here but
refer to some passages in the early numbers of _The Sketcher_, on the
composition of lines, wherein I showed, and I believe truly explained,
the principle of composition upon which many of the old masters worked.
And I particularly exemplified the principle in the pictures of Gaspar
Poussin, whom Thompson calls learned Poussin, (unless he meant Nicolo,
who, though in other respects he may with equal justice be called
learned, is, in this art of the composition of lines, in no way to be
compared with his brother-in-law.) I showed that there was one simple
rule which he invariably adopted. We may likewise go to nature, and
find the rule there, when nature, as a composition, looks her best.

I think it will be found that any scene is most pleasing when its
variety is in the smallest portion--that is, when the greatest part
of the picture is made up of the most simple and pervading lines, and
the intricacies, all variety, and alternations, and interchanges of
lines and parts, shall be confined to a very small portion; for thus
a greatness, a largeness, an importance, is preserved and heightened,
and at the same time, monotony is avoided--though there be much in it,
the piece is not crowded. There is a print from a picture by Smith
of Chichester, who, by the bye, obtained the prize, against Richard
Wilson, which attracted my attention the other day at a print-seller's
window. It was meant, I presume, as an imitation of Claude, Claude
reduced to the then English vulgarity. If multiplicity of parts would
make a picture, doubtless Richard Wilson, with his simple, sweeping,
free lines, could have no chance in competition with such a painter.
Every niche was crowded--and equally so--every niche might have made a
picture, such as it was, but all the niches made none, or a bad one.
Why, the variety was universal; it should have been confined to the
smaller space. The picture is objectionable in other points of view;
but this ignorance of the very nature of composition was fatal. Yet
this work was evidently an imitation of Claude, whose variety, however,
of distance, the modern imitator brought into his very foreground.
He could not see the simplicity of Claude. Not that Claude himself
was a learned composer; his lines are often incongruous, and there is
not unfrequently a poverty of design, scarcely concealed by the magic
of his colouring. Now, I find, in looking over my sketches, that I
had selected those scenes where the passages of variety lay in the
distance, and, it being a narrow valley, they occupied but a small
space; but, though small, it was mostly the place of interest--there
was the more vivid light or the deeper shade, the change, the life
of the picture, and the embellished way of escape out of a defile,
that from its closeness would have been otherwise painful. In saying
"painful," I seem to point to a defect in this Lynmouth valley. Indeed,
it will not suit those who do not love close scenery. That certainly
is its character. Yet is it not so close, but that there is room for
this kind of variety. I think what I have said upon this point, of
interest and variety lying in the smaller portion of the canvass--for
I here speak even of nature as a picture--may be applicable generally
to light. I imagine those scenes will be found most pleasing, where the
light is by far the smallest portion, the half-tone by far the larger,
and the dark but to show the power of both. Take, for instance, a
garden scene--a broad walk, trees on each side--all is in broad light,
but all is in painful glare, monotony, and sameness of endless detail.
Let a shadow pass over it, a broad shadow--or rather a half-tone of
light, that shall only show the local colour subdued--how, let a gleam
pass across it, and just touch here and there the leafage, and seem
to escape behind it--how small is the light, but it has given life to
the picture. I cannot but think it a fault of our day that half-tone
is neglected; light is made a glare, and therefore the very object of
light is lost. I believe it was the aim at a mere novelty that first
introduced this false principle. It was recommended to Guido, but
he failed in it: pictures so painted by him are far from being his
best. Rubens erred in it; but modern artists have carried the false
principle to the utmost limit; and, in doing so, are liable to a
palpable incongruity; an impossibility in nature, which they profess
to imitate. For it is the property of light to take away colour; yet
in this school, the whitest light, and the most vivid colours, are in
the same piece. The old painters, aware of this property of light, in
their out-of-door scenes, avoid, not to say a white, but even a light
sky--especially the Venetian--so that their great depth and power of
colour was rendered natural, by the depth of their skies. Their blues
were dark--intensely so--but they were sustained by the general colour.
If it be said the Italian skies are notoriously the bluest, Mr Ruskin
has, in contradiction, pronounced them to be white, but I believe the
fact is, that the great painters considered colour, as a beauty in
art, _sui generis_, and that there was no need of a slavish adherence,
in this respect, to nature herself. Indeed, they delighted, even when
aiming at the richest colouring, to subdue all glare, and to preserve
rather a deep half-tone.

I believe they studied nature through coloured glasses; and we learn
from Mrs Merrifield that Gaspar Poussin used a black mirror, which had
been bequeathed to him by Bamboccio. The works of some of the Flemish
painters evidently show that they used such a mirror.

Have I not, then, reached Lynmouth yet? I found it in full leafage,
and the little river as clear as amber, and like it in colour. It is
always beautiful, and variable too--after rain it assumes more variety
of colour, and of great richness. For most part of the time of my
visit, it was more shallow than I had ever seen it. I was pleased that
it was so, though I heard many complaints on that score. To those who
sketch close to the water, it is, in fact, an advantage; for where the
scenery is so confined, it is a great thing to be able to reach the
large stones in mid-stream, and thus many new views are obtained; and
when you are pretty close to water, whether it be a fall, or still,
there is really but very little difference whether the river be full or
not--the falls still retain sufficient body, and the still pools are
sufficiently wide.

There are but two parties who know anything of the painter-scenery of
Lynmouth--the sketchers and the anglers. The common road generally
taken by tourists shows not half the beauty of the place. Did Lynmouth
appear less beautiful?--certainly not. I easily recognised the chosen
spots, and was surprised to find what little change had taken place.
I knew individual trees perfectly, and, strange to say, they did not
seem to have acquired growth. There were apparently the same branches
stretching over the stream.

In one spot where large ledges of rock shoot out in mid-stream, down
whose grooves the river rushes precipitously, (I had, sixteen years
ago, sketched the scene,) there was growing out of the edge of the
rock a young ash-tree shoot--to my surprise, there it was still, or
the old had decayed, and a similar had sprang up. There is something
remarkable in this continued identity, year after year, as if the law
of mutability had been suspended. Yet there were changes. I remember
sketching by a little fall of the river, where further progress was
staid by a large mass of projecting rock. I felt sure there must be
fine subjects beyond, and in my attempt to reach it from the opposite
side by climbing, and holding by the boughs of a tree, one broke off,
and I fell into the cauldron. I found now that the whole mass of this
ledge of rock had given way, and opened a passage, and one of no great
difficulty. Here, as I suspected, were some very fine studies. The
place where I descended is about half a mile, or less, from Lynmouth,
where the road turns, near to a little bridge across a watercourse
intercepting the road. The view of this little fall from above is
singularly beautiful; and, being so much elevated, you see the bed of
the river continuous for a long distance, greatly varied. I know no
place where there are such fine studies of this kind, though they are
rarely taken, being only parts for composition--the whole not making a
view.

Was Lynmouth, then, to me as it was?--not quite. The interval of years
had not, I trust, been lost. If there was little change in the place,
there was a change in the mind's eye and head of the sketcher. Though
I recognised nearly all the spots where I had sketched, I found many
new--some that might have escaped me, because I had not taken the
feeling with me, at least not in the degree, in which I now possessed
it. During all the years that had intervened, I had scarcely painted
a single view. I could not but observe that the new scenes were those
more especially suggestive, leading to the ideal.

A friend who was part of the time with me observed that he had thought
some of my pictures, which he had seen, compositions without the
warranty of nature; but he now saw that nature supplied me with what
I wanted, and acknowledged that the sketches were correct. It was
then I observed that the sketcher may find almost everywhere what he
has learnt to look for. The fact is, that it is not whole and large
scenery, nor the most beautiful, that best suits the painter, but those
parts which he can combine. The real painter looks to nature for form
and colour, the elements of his art: upon these he must work; and they
seldom reach any great magnitude, or are diffused over large space.

Why is it, that generally what we term beautiful scenery was seldom the
ground of the old painters? They were not, generally speaking, painters
of views; and why not? There the pictures were made for them. They,
and all the world had the thing before them to love and to admire--it
was already done; there was no room for their genius, which is a
creative, not an imitative faculty. The scene for every eye was not
theirs. They found that, by their art, they could take nature's best
feeling, even from her fragments. It requires not an Alp to portray
grandeur. Fifty feet of rock, precipitous or superimpending, will
better represent the greatness of danger; for it is a more immediate
and solid mass to crush the intruder, and the form may frown with a
demon malice. The whole awe of darkness may be felt in a cavern of a
few feet space. Indeed, it may be almost said that largeness is not
to be obtained on the canvass, by the largeness of whole extensive
scenes in nature, but by the continuous lines of near masses: whatever
is actually largest in nature--the forest and the mountain--in art
may with advantage occupy the smallest space. For the best magnitude
here is in perspective, and in that aerial tone which, as a veil, half
conceals, and thereby makes mysterious, and converts into one azure
whole the parts which would, otherwise seen, but break up the great
character. The Arabian genii were greatest when dimly seen through
smoke and vapour.

Art, indeed, differs from nature in this, as regards the pleasure
derived through the eye, that nature allows you many unperspective
views at many instant glances, and therefore surprises you, if I may so
express it, with a perspective impossibility, of which the judgment at
the time is not cognisant; whereas art is bounded by a rule, looks not
all around, and comprehends by mind beyond the eye, but is constrained
to frame in the conception. It must, therefore, make to itself another
power--and this power it finds in form, in light and shade, and colour,
all which are in greater intensity and force in the fragmentary parts
than in the whole and large scenes. It is a step for the young artist
to believe that art and nature are not and should not be the same--that
they are essentially different, and use their materials differently,
have other rules of space and largeness. If art be more limited, its
power is greater by being more condensed,--and its impressions more
certain, because more direct, and not under the vague and changeable
process of making an idea from many perspectives.

If there be truth in these remarks, we may see why the old masters left
untouched those scenes which are the delight of tourists. To copy the
scene before them was to put their creative faculty in abeyance. It
was only to work after a given pattern--and that pattern imperfect--of
a whole which defied the laws of optics. I here speak almost entirely
of the Italian masters, both the historical, and more strictly the
landscape painters. The Flemish and Dutch schools had mostly another
aim, and were more imitative; hence they are more easily understood,
but felt with a far less passion. But even these, far from undervaluing
the conventional aids of art, applied as much of them as the nature of
their subjects would admit.

But the sketcher must not consider himself in his studies when he is
out with his portfolio. However he may select, he must be faithful.
And this fidelity I have seen painters of great skill often unwisely
contemn, become too conventional, both in their drawing and colouring.
It requires much practice of the eye, as well as that knowledge which
constitutes taste, to frame in as it were pictures, from the large
space that fills the eye. Nothing is more useful than to carry in the
portfolio a light frame of stiff paper or wood, and to hold it up, so
as actually to frame in pictures, and thus to experimentalise upon the
design, and see what shiftings of the frame make the best choice. It is
an assistance even to the most practised in composition.

Lynmouth is greatly improved of late years in accommodation; many new
lodging-houses are built, and there are some residents who have shown
great taste in laying out their grounds, and in their buildings. The
little pier has been rendered picturesque, by the erection of a small
look-out house after a model from Rhodes. There is not much here at
any time that would deserve the name of shipping; but a few fishing
boats, and such small craft compose well with the little pier. The
evenings are very fine, the sun setting over the Channel; and the
Welsh coast in the distance assumes, occasionally, a very beautiful
ultramarine blue, like a glaze over warm colouring. When the tide
comes in, and the little vessels are afloat, these are good subjects,
the water being of a gray green, softening the reflections. I began a
sketch when the boats were aground; but the tide, coming in rapidly,
soon so altered the position of the vessels that I did not proceed.
When the tide receded, leaving the vessels aground, they were not in
the same direction in which I had sketched them; and an artist who
was present remarked, that the beauty of the scene as a composition
was gone, and referred to the sketch. This led to some discussion, as
to the cause--Why should it be less good now, said he, than when you
drew it? I believe I saw the reason, and pointed it out. There was a
sloop, larger by much than all the rest, which were indeed, though
having masts, but boats. The larger vessel was the principal object,
even more so than the buildings on the pier, towards which it leaned;
and this leaning was important, for a union and certain connexion of
parts was everything here, for it made one of many things. Accordingly,
the smaller boats on each side the larger vessel inclined their masts
towards it; so that this manifest uniting, and the belonging of one to
the other, was the pleasing idea, and invested the whole with a kind of
life and sensitiveness; but in the alteration, after the receding of
the tide, this communication of the one with the other was gone, and,
on the contrary, there was left an uncomfortable feeling of disunion.

This reasoning was admitted, and we further discussed the principle
involved in the remarks, as applicable to all scenes and subjects. It
is this correspondence of part with part which animates the works of
nature, invests them with an ideal sensitiveness; and through this fond
belief of their life, our own sensitiveness is awakened to a sympathy
with them. Whatever inanimate objects we in our fancy invest with
life, through our own sympathy, we clothe with a kind of humanity;
and thus we look on trees and rocks, and water, as to a degree our
fellow creatures, in this great wild world. We love accordingly. _Nihil
humanum a me alienum puto._ The very winds speak to us as human voices,
as do the trees in their whisperings or complainings; and the waters
are ever repeating their histories and their romances to our willing
ears. As we walked we tested the principle, and were believers in its
truth. "Mark," said our friend, "that bank of fern--how graceful, how
charming, is their bending, their interchange, their masses and their
hollow shades, their little home-depths, wherein they grow, and retire
as their home-chambers: there is throughout the pleasing idea of a
family enjoying their quiet existence, and all in one small green world
of their own." He enjoys nature most worthily, and most intensely, who
carries with him this sense of nature's life, and of a mutuality, a
co-partnership with the blessings of existence with himself. There are
some fine rocks at the base of the precipitous cliffs--of fine form and
colour; I never went sufficiently near to sketch them, having no fancy
to be caught by the tide. I have seen sketches made amongst them that
prove them to afford very good subjects. Many years ago, while sitting
under these cliffs, I heard a groan; I thought at the time it must have
been a delusion, but on that evening a man had fallen over the cliffs.
His body was, I think, found the next day. It fell from Countesbury
Hill, the road on which is certainly not sufficiently protected. And
this reminds me to speak of an alarming occurrence on the road, about
half a mile from Lynmouth. We were a small party, and had taken shelter
from rain against the receding part of the rocks cut for the widening
the road. I and another were reading a newspaper. Looking up, we
suddenly saw a woman on horseback very near us. The animal started, and
was frightened at the newspaper. Our endeavour to conceal it made the
matter worse; the horse retreated from us, and I think his hind legs
could not have been many inches from the precipice. It was a trying
moment; one step more back would have been certain death to both the
woman and the horse. We were truly happy when, by a little management,
we contrived to get them past us. The road, too, is in these dangerous
places very narrow; yet the people venture to drive at a good pace, and
without reins, their uncouth and apparently unmanageable teams--neither
quite dray nor cart--fearlessly. It is surprising that accidents do
not often occur, especially as there is some danger from the falling
of masses of stone from above; and even such as the sheep remove
with their feet may frighten horses, and precipitate all to sure
destruction. There are great rents in huge masses of rock, close to
the road, and some apparently are kept firm with but little earth, and
seem to threaten a move. I have had some blows on the back occasionally
from small stones, cast down by passing sheep, while I have been
sketching down by the water; and once so large a one took the corner
of my portfolio, that with my best speed I quitted the place. That
was some years ago; but I have recently seen not very small fragments
fall very near me. I would, therefore, caution the sketcher to choose
as safe a position as he can, which he may generally find under some
projection of rock. Some of the masses in the bed of the river are of
enormous size; and let me here remark upon the fine, bold character
these masses in the river possess--they are very fine in form, and the
beauty and variety in their colouring are quite wondrous. Some are very
dark, entirely covered with brown, and some with, bright golden moss.
But most of them when dry are gray--but one name will not describe that
gray, varying as it does from the blue to the green and pink hues. They
are commonly in bold relief against the dark water--yet themselves show
dark, edged by the white foam, where the water, sloping insinuatingly,
falls and rushes by them. Here and there, in some deep-shaded, wild,
lonely places, they are of gigantic size, and look like huge Titans
turned to stone, amid the fragments that had hurled them down. The
sketcher may easily imagine himself in the territory of magic. Shall I
confess that, in such places, I do not like to sketch alone? And why
not? Why should there be a something like a superstitious awe of the
spot, the "_severi religio loci_?"

Doubtless it is because we do feel contradicting knowledge, in this
consciousness of all nature in its own life and power. Nor can we
divest ourselves of a kind of natural poetry--a feeling that the rocks,
the wild trees, and the somewhere though unseen "_genius loci_" all
look at us, and we fancy ourselves but under sufferance, and know not
how long our presence may be endured. It is surprising how a sense of
such presences possesses us when alone. I could often have fancied
voices, and mocking ones too, in the waters, and threats that thundered
in the ear, and went off as if to fetch and bring whole cataracts down
upon me. In such places I do not like to be caught by the dusk of the
evening, being quite alone.

The fact is, nature, to a real lover and sketcher, is at all times
powerful. Scenes affect him as they affect no other. I have often
surprised people by the assertion that I could not live in the midst of
fine scenery; it is too powerful, it unnerves one with an unrelaxing
watchfulness. The presence of the mountain will not be shaken off.
It becomes a nightmare upon the spirits, holds communion with the
wild winds and storms, and has fearful dealings I would not dream of
in the dark, howling, dismal nights. Nor, when the sombre light of a
melancholy day just obscures the clouds that have been gathering round
it, would I in imagination draw the curtain to behold the unearthly
drama.

There is something terrific in the sound of unseen rushing water.
When all else is still in the dark night, and you are uncertain of
the path, and feel the danger that a false footing may plunge you
into an abyss of waters, that seem to cry out and roar for a victim,
have you not felt both fear and shame? Recently I experienced this
in Lynmouth, having in the darkness lost my way. To the poet and the
painter, here is a source of the sublime. Plunge your pencil boldly
into this eclipse, and work into it a few dim lights formless and
undefined--the obscure will be of a grand mystery. The night-darkness
that settles over fine mountainous scenery does not remove the sense of
its presence; as its lakes blacken, they become fabulous, of unknown
depths, below which may be infernal "bolge." But I am wandering into
strange regions now, and far from Lynmouth, whose scenes, after all,
are not of a very severe beauty, unless we will to make it so. It will
then answer the demand imagination makes upon it. Many are the scenes
of a purely quiescent kind, still and calm, and of gentle repose, where
the shallow river shows its amber bed, wherein the gleams rest upon the
well-defined ledges beneath, whose gray shadows melt into golden tints;
and beyond, in the deeper pools, the green of the trees is reflected
greener still, across which here and there is a gray streak, showing
the river's silent onward movement; and further on, some dark stones
send their brown and purple hues, mirrored and softened down into the
green, just dotted here and there with white. Then the trees shoot out
lovingly from the bank overhead, and reach and communicate pleasantly
with those on the opposite side; and here a bough sends down and just
forbears to touch the stream, Narcissus-like, loving its own image.
The gray stones in the foreground, half beneath the water, are of a
delicate hue, blue intermingling with pale greenish and lakey tints;
for there is nothing violent in all this scene of peaceful repose.
Very many spots of this kind are there that court the sketcher. Let
him wind his way over masses of stone, and roots of trees, beyond
these--the scene how changed! The masses of stone are huge, blocking
up, in various positions, the free passage of the river, which chafes
and foams between them, throwing off its whiteness into the brown and
green water depths. One broad shadow is over the dark stones; and
beyond that rise the tops of other masses, gray illuminated; and beyond
them, a gleam or two of falling water. Wilder are the trees that shoot
out, from rocky fragments near, and lock their branches with those on
the other side; while in the hollow space beneath their arching boles,
distant and fantastic stems cross the stream. Opposite are huge masses,
ledges with precipitous and brown-mossed sides; above which the high
rocky bank sends forth large trees, their roots twisting about the
rocks and coming out again through the fissures, and met by green weed
leafage. The trees are darker than the dun-red ground, but edged with
greenish light; and above them the yellow sunlight gleams through, and
the dotted blue of sky is just seen; and, as avoiding the light, a
huge branch, or limb rather, shoots down, edged with the light on its
upper surface, and dark underneath, and throws a scanty defined leafage
across over the depth of the river. But this precipitous bank again
terminates towards the ledges in fine masses, rocks that project and
recede, partially luminous with reflected light, and then falling back
into extreme brown and purple darkness, down into which the ivy falls
clustering and perpendicular, with innumerable briar-like shoots and
tendrils. Here are severer studies. They are to be found by crossing
the Lyn by the wooden bridge, not far from Lynmouth, and following
the path through the wood some way, and seeking the bed of the river
by a scarcely-discernible sheep-path, till it be lost at the edge of
a downward way, not very difficult of descent. Within a very small
space, there are fine and very different subjects. One of scarcely less
grandeur than the last described, if it had not more beauty blended
with it; but it must be seen in the sun's eye--the best time will be
about 3 o'clock. Reach a large stone that juts out from the river's
side, climb it, and look down the stream. You must sketch rapidly, for
the charm will not last--it is most lovely in colour, and the forms are
very beautiful. The opposite side of the river may be termed a mountain
side, broken into hollows, in which rock and vegetation deepen into
shade. The top is covered with trees, very graceful, the sun edges
their tops, and rays flow through them, touching with a white and
silver light the ivied rock, which is here perpendicular. Beyond this
mountain-side, which juts out, is another clothed cliff, terminating at
the base in bold and bare rock; beyond this, and high above, shooting
into the sky, are piled rocks of a wild and broken character, gray,
but dark against the distant mountain range, of an ultramarine haze,
over warm and slightly marked downward passages; above is the illumined
and illuminating sky. On the side of the river from which this lovely
view is seen, are large masses, backed by trees, which shoot across,
but high overhead, so that in the sketch the leafage would drop as it
were from the sky into the middle of the picture. The river itself is
quite accordant in colour, and in the forms and light and shade of the
stones, that, though so large, are dwarfed by the large precipitous
rocks perpendicular above them. The course of the stream is away from
the eye of the spectator--is in parts darkly transparent and deep--here
and there showing the white foam, and in other parts its amber and
reddish bed.

A little further back from this point of view is another of the same
scene; I am doubtful which would make the best picture. On the very
same stone from which I sketched the scene described, turning with my
back to the opposite side of the river, I was much struck with the
fine forms and solemn light and shade of a rock, that was cavernously
hollow at its base, and very near the stream. Above it, and declining
into the middle of the picture, the sunlit boles of coppice-trees,
rising among the light-green leafage, made the only positive sunlight
of the picture: whatever else of light there was, was shade luminous.
This rock was united with another across the picture, that thus made
a centre and opening for the coppice, dotted with the blue sky; but
all that side of the picture was in very dark shadow, being rock
perpendicular, through the depth of which light and boldly formed
trees rose to the top of the picture, and threw down leafage into the
deep shade. The colouring of the cavernous hollow was remarkable: it
was dark, yet blending gray, and pink, and green. The scene was of an
ideal character; and I doubt if the sketch, though taken with as much
truth as I could reach, would be thought to be from nature. The same
rocky mass, taken in another direction, supplies a very different but
perhaps equally good subject for the pencil. I say these sketches are
of an ideal kind. It may be asked--Are they not true?--are they not in
nature? They are; but still for a better use than the pleasure of the
imitation a mere sketch offers. These are the kinds of scenes for the
painter's invention, into which he is to throw his mind, and to dip his
pencil freely into the gloom of his palette, and concentrate depths,
and even change the forms, and even to omit much of the decorative
detail, and make severity severer. He would give the little trees a
wilder life, a more visible power, as if for lack of inhabitant they
only were sentient of the scene. If a figure be introduced, they would
be kept down, but shoot their branches towards him, for there would be
an agreement, a sentient sympathy. But what figure? It is not peaceful
enough for a hermit; too solemn for the bandit, such as Salvator would
love to introduce; an early saint, perhaps a St Jerome--no unapt place
for him and his lion: and somehow it must be contrived to have the
water perhaps entering even into the retreat, and reflecting the aged,
the hoary bearded saint. Is not then the subject ideal, and the sketch
only suggestive? And here let me remark, with regard to that favourite
word "finish,"--an elaborate finish of _all_ the detail, either
of objects or colouring, would ruin the sketch; it would lose its
suggestive character, which is its value. I have here described, I know
how inadequately, several very striking scenes; yet are they scarcely a
stone's throw apart. I mention them exclusively on that account, for,
where there is so much, it must be the more worth the while of the
sketcher to take some pains to find out the spot.

What do we mean by the "ideal" of landscape? The "naturalists" ask
the question in a tone of somewhat more than doubt. The sketcher is
apt to be caught in the snare of nature's many beauties, and, growing
enamoured of them in detail, to lose the higher sense in his practical
imitation. This is a danger he must avoid, by study, by reflection, by
poetry. If the "ideal" be in himself, he will find it in nature. If he
sees in mountains, woods, and fields but materials for the use of man,
and what the toil of man has made them, he may be a good workman in his
imitation, but he will be a poor designer. The "ideal" grows out of a
reverence, which he can scarcely feel. If the earth be nothing to him
but for the plough, and the rivers for the mill, and its only people
are the present people--doomed to toil, bearing about them parochial
cares, and tasteless necessity, ignorant and regardless of the history
of the earth they tread--he may boast of his love of nature; but his
love is, in fact, the love of his technical skill, of his imitation. He
thinks more of the how to represent, than what the scene may represent.
The ideal ranges beyond the present aspect, and he who has a belief in
it will reverence this ancient earth, the cradle wherein he and all
living things took form from their creation. He will see visions of
the past, and dream dreams of its future aspects and destiny; and will
learn, in his meditations, to recall the people of old, and imprint its
soil with imaginary footsteps. The painter is no true artist if he feel
not the greatness of nature's immortality--at least, that as it rose
from the creation so will it be, throwing forth its bounty, and beaming
with the same vigorous beauty, till it shall pass away as a scroll. The
painter-poet must be of a loving superstition, must acknowledge powers
above his own--beings greater between him and the heavens. They may be
invisible as angels, yet leave some understanding of their presence.
They will voice the woods and the winds, and tell everywhere that all
of nature is life. Are there not noble elements here for the landscape
painter, and can neither history nor fable supply him with better
figures than toil-worn labourers, drovers taking their cattle or sheep
to the butchers, and paupers walking the poorhouse? I like not the
"naturalist's" poverty of thought. If the art be not twin sister with
poetry, her charm is only for the eye. Nothing great ever came from
such hands.

    "And deeper faith--intenser fire--
      Fed sculptor's chisel--poet's pen;
    What nobler theme might art require
      Than gods on earth, and godlike men?
    Yea, gods then watched with loving care
      (Or such, at least, the fond belief)
    E'en lifeless things of earth and air--
      The cloud, the stream, the stem, the leaf:
    Iris, a goddess! tinged the flower
      With more than merely rainbow hues;
    Great Jove himself sent down the shower,
      Or freshen'd earth with healing dews!"

                                        KENYON'S _Poems_.

How do such thoughts enhance all nature's beauties! The sketcher's real
work is to see, to feel them all, and to fit them to the mind's poetic
thoughts.

I seem to be forgetting that the reader and myself are all this while
at the water's edge, and under deep-brow'd rocks; that sunshine
has left us, and it is time to climb to the path that leads toward
Lynmouth. For such an hour we are on the wrong side of the stream. Now
the woods are mapped, and edged only by the sun hastening downward. Yet
after awhile we shall not regret that we are in this path. Escaping
the closer and shaded wood, we shall reach a more open space, and see
the flood of evening's sunlight pouring in. Here it is; my sketch was
poor indeed, for there was neither time nor means to do anything like
justice to the scene. Here is a narrow, winding rocky path, a little
above the river, from whose superimpending bank, trees that now look
large shoot across the landscape, and a bold stem or two rises up
boldly to meet them; the river stretches to some distance, wooded on
this side to the edge, and wooded hills in front, and in perspective.
The distant hills are most lovely in colour, pearly and warm gray;
the river, the blazing sky reflected, yet showing how rich the tone,
by a few yellowish-gray lighter streaks that mark its movement. The
fragments of rock in the river are of a pinkish-gray, and, though not
dark, yet strongly marked against the golden stream,--the whole scene
great in its simplicity of effect and design. In broad day the scene
would be passed unnoticed; it would want that simplicity which is its
charm, and be a scene of detail; but now the lines are the simplest,
and, happily, where the river really turns, its view is lost in the
reflection of the shaded wood. And here, in this smallest portion of
the picture, the hills on each side seem to meet and fold, giving the
variety in the smallest space, upon which I have made remarks in this
paper. This beautiful picture of nature I visited several evenings, and
it little varied. But the charm lasts not long--the sun sets, or is
behind the wooded hill, before its actual setting, yet leaves its tinge
of lake blushing above the gold in the sky--the life of the scene
has faded, and it is still and solemn. I cannot better describe the
impression it left, than by a quotation from an old play, in which the
lover sees his mistress, who had swooned, or was in a deathlike sleep:--

      "ANTONIO.

    At the first sight I did believe her dead--
    Yet in that state so awful she appeared,
    That I approached her with as much respect
    As if the soul had animated still
    That body which, though dead, scarce mortal seemed.
    But as the sun from our horizon gone,
    His beams do leave a tincture on the skies,
    Which shows it was not long since he withdrew;
    So in her lovely face there still appeared
    Some scattered streaks of those vermilion beams
    Which used t'irradiate that bright firmament.
    Thus did I find that distressed miracle,
    Able to wound a heart, as if alive--
    Incapable to cure it, as if dead."

Thus is there sympathy between our hearts and nature--a sympathy, the
secret of taste, which, above all, the sketcher should cultivate as the
source of his pleasure, and (may it not be added?) of his improvement.

I will not proceed further with description of scenes; Lynmouth will
be long remembered. I scarcely know a better spot for the study of
close scenery. On reviewing my former impressions with the present, I
should not say that Lynmouth has lost, but I have certainly gained some
knowledge, and, I think, improved my sympathies with nature; and if
I have not enjoyed so enthusiastically as I did sixteen years ago, I
have enlarged my sight and extended my power. I am practically a better
sketcher. The hand and the eye, work together; the improvement of one
advances the other.

I know no better method of sketching than the mixture of transparent
and semi-opaque colouring. It best represents the variety and the power
of nature; and as it more nearly resembles in its working the practice
of oil-painting, so is it the more likely to improve the painter. I
have remarked that, even in depth of colour, the semi-opaque is very
much more powerful than the transparent, however rich; for the one has,
besides its more varied colour, the solidity of nature; whereas the
most transparent has ever an unsubstantial look--you see through to
the paper or the canvass. Semi-opaque, (or degrees of opacity, till it
borders on the transparent,) as it hides the material, and throws into
every part the charm of atmosphere, so it will ever bestow upon the
sketch the gift of truth.

I did not begin this paper on Lynmouth Revisited with any intention of
entering upon the technicalities of art; so I will refrain from any
further remarks tending that way, which leads to far too wide a field
for present discussion.




WHAT HAS REVOLUTIONISING GERMANY ATTAINED?


It is now rather more than a year since we asked, "What would
revolutionising Germany be at?" A full year has passed over the dreamy,
theorising, restless, and excited head of Germany, then confused and
staggering, like "a giant drunken with new wine," but loudly vaunting
that its strong dose of revolution had strengthened and not fuddled it,
and that it was about to work out of its troubled brains a wondrous
system of German Unity, which was to bring it infinite and permanent
happiness; and now we would once more ask, What is the result of the
attempted application of German revolutionising theory to practice? In
fact, what has revolutionising Germany attained? Our first question we
asked without being able to resolve an answer. The problem was stated:
an attempt was made to arrive at something like a solution out of the
distracting hurly-burly of supposed purposes and so-called intentions;
but, after every effort to make out our "sum" in any reasonable manner,
we were obliged to give it up, as a task impossible to any political
mathematician, not of German mould; to declare any definite solution
for the present hopeless,--and to end our amount of calculation by
arriving only in a _cercle vicieux_ at the statement of the problem
with which we started, and asking, as despairingly as a tired schoolboy
with a seemingly impracticable equation before him, "What, indeed,
_would_ revolutionising Germany be at?" Are we any further advanced
now? We will not attempt the difficult sum again, or we might find
ourselves obliged to avow ourselves as much deficient in the study
of German political mathematics as before. But we may at least try
to undertake a mere sum of addition, endeavour to cast up the amount
of figures the Germans themselves have laid before us, and make out,
as well as we can, what, after a year's hard--and how hard!--work,
revolutionising Germany has attained. The species of sum-total, as
far as the addition can yet go, to which we may arrive, may be still
a very confused and unsatisfactory one; but in asking, "What has
revolutionising Germany attained?" we will not take it entirely to our
own charge, if the answer attempted to be made is thus confused and
unsatisfactory. German political sums are all too puzzling for English
heads.

Last year Germany was, as yet, very young in its revolutionary career.
It galloped over the country like an unbroken colt, or rather like
a mad bull, "running a-muck" it scarcely knew, and seemingly little
cared, at what, provided that it trampled beneath its hoofs all that
stood, and, with proper culture, might have flourished and borne fruit.
It tried to imitate the frantic caperings of its fellow-revolutioniser
in the next paddock, just over the Rhine; but it imitated this model
in so clumsy a fashion, that it might have been very aptly compared to
the ass in the fable, had not the demonstrations it sought to make been
destructive kicks, and not mistaken caresses; and the model it sought
to copy resembled the bloodhound rather than the lap-dog. It kicked out
to the right and to the left, and, with its kicks, inflicted several
stunning blows, from which the other states, upon whose heads the kicks
fell, found some difficulty in recovering. Even the maddest of the
drivers who spurred it on, however, found it necessary to present some
goal, at which it was eventually to arrive in its mad career--that goal
was called "German Unity" in one great powerful united Germany. Where
this visionary goal existed, or how it was to be attained--by what
path, or in what direction, none seemed to know; but the cry was, "On,
on, on!" That it should miss this goal, thus visionary and indistinct,
and plunge on past it, through the darkness of anarchy, to another
winning-post, just as indistinct and visionary, called "a universal
republic," was a matter of little consideration, or was even one of
hope, to those of its principal drivers who whipped, and spurred, and
hooted it, with deafening and distracting cries, like the Roman drivers
of the unridden horses in the Corso races. A breaker-in was attempted,
however, to be placed, and not, at first, precisely by those who most
wished to check it, upon the back of the tearing beast, in order to
moderate its paces, and canter it as gently as might be, onwards
to the denied goal--which still, however, lay only in a most misty
distance, to which none seemed to know the road. In this rider, called
a central Frankfort parliament, men began to place their hopes, they
trusted confidently that it might ride the animal to its destination,
although they knew not where that lay. The revolution, then, was
decked out with colours of red, and black, and gold--the colours of an
old German empire, and of a new derived German unity--and the rider
mounted into the saddle. How the rider endeavoured to show the animal's
paces--how he strove to guide him forwards--how sometimes he seemed,
indeed, to be proceeding along a path, uncertain, it is true, but
apparently leading _somewhere_--how often he stumbled--how often, in
his inexperience, he slipped in his saddle--how, at last, he slipped
and fell from it altogether, in vain endeavouring, maimed, mutilated,
bruised, and half stunned, to spring into the saddle again, are matters
of newspaper history that need no detail here. It suffices to say,
that the rider was unhorsed--that the animal gave a last desperate
plunge, kicking and wounding the only one of the states around that
strove to the last to caress and soothe it with gentle treatment--that
it now stands perspiring, shaking, quivering in every limb--snorting
in vain struggle, and champing the bit of the bridle which Prussian
military force has thrown upon it. To what, then, has Germany attained
in its revolutionising career? It has, at all events, not reached that
imaginary goal to which men strove to ride it without direction-post.
The goal is as far off as ever, perhaps farther off than before, as may
be shown. It remains just as vague, and visionary, and misty. Not one
step seems to have been taken towards it. Has no farther step whatever
been taken, then, after all this mad rushing hither and thither? And
if any, how, and whither? We shall endeavour to see, as far as we
are able. Our readers must, then, judge whether it be forwards or
backwards, or whether, in fact, it be any step at all.

The Frankfort parliament has fallen from its seat. Last year, when
we gave a sketch of its sittings in that Lutheran church of St Paul
in Frankfort--now bearing a stamp which its sober-minded architect
probably never dreamt of, as a historical building--it was young,
still in hopes; and amidst its inexperience, its vapouring declamation
upon impracticable theories, its noise and confusion, its clamorous
radicalism, and its internal treachery, that sought every pretext for
exciting to anarchy and insurrection, it put forward men of note and
ability--who, however lacking in practical experience, gave evidence
of noble hearts, if not sound heads, and good intentions, if not
governmental power. It contained, amidst much bad, many elements of
good; and, if it has no other advantageous result, it has proved a
school of experience, tact, and reason--as far at least as Germans,
in the present condition of their political education, have been
able to profit by its lessons and its teaching. _De mortuis nil nisi
bonum_ as far as possible! It is defunct. What its own inability,
want of judgment, internal disorganisation, and "vaulting ambition,
that o'erleaps its sell," commenced, was completed by the refusal of
the principal northern German states to acknowledge its ill-digested
constitution. It sickened upon over-feeding of conceit, excess of
supposed authority, and a naturally weak constitution, combined with
organic defects, weakened still more by a perpetual and distracting
fever; it was killed outright by what the liberals, as well as the
democrats, of Germany choose to call the ill faith and treachery of
Prussia in declining to accept its offers, and ultimately refusing to
listen to its dictates. Its dying convulsions were frightful. It fled
to Stutgardt, in the hopes that change of air might save it in its
last extremity: and there it breathed its last. Its very home is a
wreck; its furniture has been sold to pay the expenses of its burial;
its lucubrations, and its mighty acts, in which it once fondly hoped
to have swayed all Germany, if not the world, have been dispersed,
in their recorded form, among cheesemongers and greengrocers as
waste-paper, at so much the pound. Its house--the silent, sad, and
denuded church of St Paul--looks now like its only mausoleum; and on
its walls remains alive the allegorical picture of that great German
empire, which it deemed it had but to will to found--the grim, dark,
shaded face of which grows grimmer and darker still, day by day;
whilst the sun that rises behind it, without illuminating its form,
daily receives its thicker and thicker cloud of dust to obscure its
painted rays. Of a sooth, the allegory is complete. It is dead, and
resolved to ashes. Its better and brighter elements have given up their
last breath, as, in their meeting at Gotha, they made a last effort
to discuss the acceptance of the constitution which Prussia offered
in lieu of their own, and strove, although only still wearing a most
ghostly semblance of life, to propose to themselves the best ultimate
means of securing that desideratum, which they still seem to consider
as the panacea for all evils--the great and powerful "United Germany"
of their theoretical dreams. This last breath was not without its noble
aspirations. Its less pure, more self-seeking, and darker elements
have striven, by wild and no longer (even in appearance) legal means,
to galvanise themselves into a false existence; their last struggles
were such hideous and distracted contortions as are usually produced
by such galvanic applications; and now the German papers daily record
the arrest of various members of the so-called "Rump Parliament," (so
nicknamed by the application or rather misapplication of an English
historical term,) which received its final extinguishing blow at
Stutgardt, mixed up, in these days of imprisonment, as the consequence
of mistaken liberty, along with insurgents and rebels engaged in the
late disastrous scenes acted in the duchy of Baden. Such was to be
_their_ fate. But, be it for good or for evil, the Frankfort parliament
has died, as was prophesied, and not without convulsions: its purposes
have proved null; its hopes have been dispersed to the winds; its very
traces have been swept away; its memory is all but a bitter mockery.
Thus far, then, we may indeed shake our heads despairingly as we
ask--"What has revolutionising Germany as yet attained?"

What has it attained? Let as go on. In the first place, what remains
of the gigantic cloud, which men attempted to catch, embody, and
model into a palpable form, although with hands inexperienced, and
with as little of the creative and vivifying health really within
its power, as Frankenstein, when he sought to remould the crumbling
elements he possessed into a human form, and produced a monster. What
remains of the great united German empire of men's dreams? Nothing
but a phantom of a central power, grasping the powerless sceptre of
a ghostly empire; surrounded by ministers whose dictates men despise
and disregard, in veritable exercise of their functions, as ghostly
as itself. The position of the Imperial administration has become a
byword and a scoff; and it is lamentable to see a prince, whose good
intentions never have been doubted, and whose popular sympathies have
been so often shown, standing thus, in a situation which borders upon
the ridiculous--an almost disregarded and now useless puppet--a _quasi_
emperor without even the shadow of an empire; and yet condemned to play
at empire-administrating--as children play at kings and queens--none
heeding their innocent and bootless game. How far the edicts of the
defunct Frankfort parliament, and the decrees of the government of
the Imperial Vicarage--paralysed in all real strength, if not utterly
defunct now--are held as a public mockery, is very pithily evidenced to
the least open eyes of any traveller to the baths of Germany, at most
of which the gambling tables--supposed to be suppressed, and declared
to be illegal by the shade of the "central power,"--openly pursue
their manoeuvres, and earn their gains as of yore; or, at most, fix
upon the doors of their hells a ticket, written "_salons reservés_,"
to give them the faint appearance of private establishments, and thus
adopt a very flimsy pretext, and effect a most barefaced evasion of a
hitherto useless law. _Croupiers_ and gamblers sit squatting, most
disrespectfully, at almost every bathing-place, upon the Imperial
edict--as the toads and frogs squatted upon King Log--treating him as a
jest, and covering him with their filthy slime. By what authority--of
the same Imperial Vicar also--the whole country around Frankfort is
overrun with Prussian soldiers, it would be difficult to show. That
the so-called free city itself should be occupied by a joint garrison
of Prussian and Austrian troops for its protection, may be looked upon
as a legal measure, adopted and authorised by a new parliament, and a
central power, such as it is, as by the old Diet. But when we see in
every village round about--in every house, in almost every hovel--those
hosts of Prussian spiked helmets gleaming in the sun--those Prussian
bayonets planted before every door--those Prussian uniforms, studding,
with variegated colour, every green rural scene; when we never cease to
hear upon the breeze--wherever we may wander in the country--the clang
of Prussian military bands, and the tramp of Prussian infantry; when
we find the faces of Prussian military at every window, and observe
Prussian soldiers mixing in every action of the common everyday life of
the country; and then turn to ask how it comes that Prussian soldiers
swarm throughout a part of the land in no way belonging to Prussia, we
are able to receive no more reasonable answer than that "they are there
because they are there"--an explanation which has a more significant
meaning in it than the apparently senseless words seem to express.
"They are there because they are there"--that is to say, without any
recognised authority from any central German power. "They are there
because they are there,"--because Prussia has sent them. Where, then,
is the central power?--what is its force? what its authority? what its
sense? If, then, all that still remains, in living form, of that great
united Germany of men's dreams, is but the "shadow of a shade," in
power--a power disregarded--even more, despised and ridiculed--what has
revolutionising Germany attained in its chase after the phantom of its
hopes?

If in this respect it has _attained_ nothing which it can show, after
more than a year's revolution, for the avowed or pretended purpose of
obtaining some result to this very end, it cannot be said, however,
that nothing remains to Germany of its dream of unity. Spite of
sad experience--spite of the uselessness of every effort--spite of
sacrifices made and sorrows suffered--Germany still pursues its phantom
with as much ardour as before. Like the prince in the fairy-tale, who,
panting, breathless, half-dead with exhaustion and fatigue, still
hunted without rest for the imaginary original of the fair portrait
placed in his hands--untired and unyielding, after the repeated
disappointments of lifting veil after veil from forms which he thought
might be that of the beloved one--still driven on by an incurable
longing--still yearning despairingly, and with false hope,--so does
Germany, after lifting veil after veil only to find delusive spectres
beneath, still yearn and long for the object of its adoration. It is
impossible to travel, even partially, through the country, without
discovering, from every conversation with all classes, that the intense
craving for this object--this great blessing of a grand and powerful
United Germany--is as strong as ever--far stronger than ever! For
what was not very long ago only the watchword of the fancied liberal
student, in his play of would-be conspirator--what was but the pretext
of really conspiring and subversive democrats--what grew only by
degrees into the cry of the people, who clamoured, not knowing what
they clamoured for--has taken evidently the strongest root throughout
the whole mass of German nationality, and _grows_--grows in despite
of the rottenness of the branches it has as yet sent forth--grows
in despite of the lopping, breaking, and burning of its first
offshoots--grows in despite of the atmosphere of contention, rather
than of union, that becomes thicker and more deleterious to its growth,
around it, and of the blight it daily receives from the seemingly
undispersable mildew of hatred, suspicion, and total want of sympathy
between Southern and Northern Germany, which formerly arose only from
uncongeniality of temperament, mixed up more or less with difference
of religious creed, but now is generated by a thousand causes. This
intense craving for the possession of the phantom--increasing, it
would seem, in proportion as the phantom flies farther and farther
from the grasp--is no longer expressed by the student, the democrat,
and the man of the people: it pervades all classes from below to
above; it is in the mouth of the man of caution and of sense, as in
that of the wild and poetico-political enthusiast; it becomes more
and more universal, and it amounts to a mania. Ask of whom you will,
"Whither tends German hope?" and the answer will still and ever be the
same--"German unity." But ask no more; for if you inquire, as last
year, into the "how," the "when," the "where," the answer will in most
cases be given in the same strain of incomprehensible and still more
impracticable rhapsody--visionary, poetical, noble sometimes, but
purposeless as before; or men will shrug their shoulders, shake their
heads, and sigh, but still dream on the dream of German unity--still
clamour for it loudly. And well may they shake their heads and groan,
if such be the end and aim of all German aspirations! for where,
indeed, is the pith that leads to it? That which Germany is itself
following up, leads (for the present at least) visibly from it, and
not towards it. Prussia has promulgated its constitution,--and we may
ask, _par parenthèse_, whether _that_ is to be put forward as the
great end which revolutionising Germany has attained, after more than
a year's revolution? Prussia has called upon all Germany to join with
it, hand in hand, in this constitution, granted and given, but not
accepted, at the hands of a Frankfort parliament. In answer to its
call, it has found the cleft between Northern and Southern Germany--the
cleft, of envy and jealousy, suspicion and mistrust--growing wider
and wider to oppose it. It has attempted to form a partial union of
Northern Germany--between the more northern states of Prussia, Hanover,
and Saxony; but even in this union has been disunion--reticence,
and suspicion, and doubt, and indecision, among the proposed allies
themselves; while Austria, Bavaria, and even Wurtemberg, have held
aloof to sulk and scoff, and have seemed to bide that time when Austria
should be less shackled, and could better oppose the supremacy of
Northern German influence. Coalitions even now are talked of, to which,
if Prussia be not a stranger, it is to be admitted only as a humbled
ally. With these feelings, which exist not only between powers, but
in the people, the cry of United Germany is but a jest--the longing
a green-sickness. Certainly revolutionising Germany has not thus far
attained any step in its progress towards the great desideratum of its
nationality. The only semblance of progress has been, in the advances
of Prussia towards supremacy, in the cession of the principality of
Hohenzollern Sigmaringen to its territory, (an example which other
small German principalities may follow,) in its present occupation of
the free town of Hamburg, in its military occupation of the duchy of
Baden, of which more further on. But if these be steps towards a united
Germany, tell it to Southern Germany, and hear what it will say!

If so little, then, has been attained by revolutionising Germany, in
its progress towards its most loudly clamoured desire, let us see what
else it has attained. After a year's labour, which was not without
its throes, revolutionising Germany, as represented by its central
parliament, brought forth its constitution--a rickety child, but fully
expected by its fond, and in many respects infatuated parents, to grow
into a giant, and flourish under the edifice of a United German Empire.
The implicit adoption of this bantling by the several German states,
as their heir and future master, was declared by revolutionisers to be
the _sine quâ non_ of their sufferance still to exist at all, under
the will of the people. Unhappy bantling, decked out with all sorts of
promised gifts for the future weal of mankind by its would-be fairy
godmothers! it proved but a changeling--or rather an imp, provided
with every curse, instead of every blessing; as if the gifts it was
intended to bestow had been reversed by a wicked fairy among the
godmothers, who had more power than the rest. And, of a truth, there
was such a one among them: and her name was Anarchy or Subversion,
although the title she gave herself was Red Republic, and the beast
on which she rode was Self-interest. The consequence was, that the
very contrary occurred to that which revolutionisers had prophesied or
rather menaced. Prussia, and the other states, which refused to adopt
the bantling, thus menacingly thrown into their arms, have gone on,
we cannot say the "even," but uneven "tenor of their way"--no matter
now by what means, for we speak only of the strange destinies of the
much-laboured, long-expected, loudly-vaunted Frankfort constitution.
Almost the only one--at least of the larger states the only one--that
seemingly accepted the adoption forced upon it, with frankness,
willingness, and openness, has been convulsed by the most terrible of
civil wars. In Baden, the acceptance of the Frankfort constitution,
and _not its rejection_, by a well-meaning, mild, but perhaps weak
ruler, was eagerly seized upon as a pretext for disaffection, armed
insurrection, civil war; while Wurtemberg, where it was received by the
king, although with evident unwillingness, or, as he himself expressed
it, in a somewhat overstrained tone of pathos, "with bleeding and
broken heart," narrowly escaped being involved in the same fearful
issue. The process by which this result was attained in Baden was
curious enough, although fully in accordance with the usual manoeuvres
of the anarchical leaders of the day, who, while denouncing Jesuitism,
in many parts of the world, as the great evil and anti-popular
influence against which they have most to contend, evidently adopt the
supposed and most denounced principle of Jesuitism--that "the ends
justify the means"--as their own peculiar line of conduct; and use
every species of treachery, deceit, falsehood, and delusion, as holy
and righteous weapons in the sacred cause of liberty, or of that idol
of their worship which they choose to nickname liberty. In showing
what revolutionising Germany has, or rather perhaps has not, as yet,
attained, we must briefly, then, revert once more to that insurrection
and its suppression, that has so fearfully devastated the duchy of
Baden, and its neighbouring province of the Palatinate, which, although
belonging to Bavaria, is so distant and divided from that kingdom as to
be included, without further distinction, in the same designation.

It was with almost prophetic spirit that we, last year, spoke of the
unhappy duchy of Baden, which had then, as since, the least cause of
complaint of any of the several subdivisions of Germany. "Nothing,"
it was then said, "can be more uneasy and disquieting than its
appearance. In this part of Germany, the revolutionary fermentation
appears far more active, and is more visible in the manner, attitude,
and language of the lower classes, than even in those (at that time)
hotbeds of revolutionary movement, Austria and Prussia. To this
state of things the confinity with agitated France, and consequently
a more active affinity with its ideas, caught like a fever from a
next-door neighbour's house, the agency of the emissaries from the
ultra-republican Parisian clubs, who find an easier access across the
frontiers, and the fact also that the unhappy duchy has been, if not
the native country, at least the scene of action of the republican
insurgents, Hecker and Struve, have all combined to contribute."
"It is impossible to enter the duchy, and converse with the peasant
population, formerly and proverbially so peacefully disposed in
patriarchal Germany--formerly so smiling, so ready, so civil, perhaps
only too obsequious in their signs of respect, now so insolent and
rude--without finding the poison of those various influences gathering
and festering in all their ideas, words, and actions."

Such were the views written last year; and this state of things has
since continued to increase, as regards popular fermentation, and
disposition to insurrection. Demagogic agitators swarmed in the land,
instilling poison wherever they went, and rejoicing as they saw the
_virus_ do its work in the breaking out of festering sores. The tactics
of this party, in all lands, has been to try their experiments upon
the military; but it has only been in Baden, thus demoralised, and
disorganised by weakness of sufferance, and a vain spirit of concession
and looked-for conciliation, that these subjects were found fitting
for the efforts of the experimentalisers. The _virus_ had already done
its work among them, to the utmost hopes of the poisoning crew, when
the New Frankfort Constitution--the rejection of which was to be the
signal for a _quasi_ legal insurrection--was accepted by the Grand-duke
of Baden. But the agitators were not to be thus baffled. A pretence,
however shallow and false, was easily found in the well-prepared
fermentation of men's minds; and the military, summoned by demagogic
leaders to tumultuous meetings, were easily persuaded that a false,
or at least a defective draught of the new boasted constitution had
been read to them and proclaimed--that, in the _real_ constitution, an
enactment provided that the soldiers were to choose and elect their own
officers--that this paragraph had been carefully suppressed; and that
the military had been thus deprived and cheated of their rights. Easily
detected as might have been the falsehood, it nevertheless succeeded
in its purposes. The military insurrection, in which the tumultuous
and evil-disposed of the lower classes, and a great portion of the
disaffected peasantry joined, broke out on the very evening of one of
these great meetings; and, by means of a well-prepared and actively
organised concentration of measures, in various parts of the duchy
at the same time. Thus was the very acceptance of the revolutionary
constitution made in Baden a pretext to stir the land to insurrection.

After the full account already published in these pages, it is needless
to enter into detail, with regard to the events which marked the
progress and suppression of this great insurrection. It is only to show
the insensate state of mind to which revolutionary agents, left to
do their will, were able to work up the military; the confused ideas
and purposes, with which these would-be revolutionising German heads
were filled; the ignorance that was displayed among these men, said to
be _enlightened_ by "patriots," and their want of all comprehension
of the very rights for which they pretended to clamour--in fact, the
utter absence of any experience gained by the lower classes, and
especially the military portion of them, after more than a year's
revolutionising, that we briefly recapitulate some of the leading
events of the outbreak. It was with a perfect headlong frenzy that the
garrison of the fortress of Rastadt first revolted; it was with just
as much appearance of madness that the mutiny broke out simultaneously
in the other garrison towns. There was every evidence of rabid mania
in the deplorable scenes which followed, when superior officers in
vain attempted with zeal and courage to stem the torrent, and, in many
instances, lost their lives at the hands of the infuriated soldiery;
when others were cruelly and disgracefully mis-handled, and two or
three, unable to contend with the sense of dishonour and degradation
which overwhelmed them as military men, rushed, maddened also, into
suicide, to have their very corpses mutilated by the men whom they had
treated, as it happened, with kindness and concession; when others
again, who had escaped over the frontiers, were, by a violation of the
Wurtemberg territory, captured, led back prisoners, and immured, under
every circumstances of cruelty and ignominy, in the fortress they had
in vain attempted loyally to guard. There was madness in all this; and
then we learn, to complete the deplorable picture, from a very accurate
account of all the circumstances, lately published by a Baden officer,
as well as from another pamphlet, more circumscribed in detail, but
fully as conclusive as regards narration of feeling, in almost every
page, that when the insurgent soldiers were asked by their officers
what they wanted, they could only answer, "Our rights and those of the
people;" and, when questioned further, "What are those rights?" either
held their tongues and shook their heads in ignorance, or replied with
the strangest _naïveté_, "That you ought to know better than we."
Still more strikingly characteristic of the insensate nature of the
struggle are the examples where the infatuated soldiers parted from
their officers with tears in their eyes, then, driven on by their
agitators, hunted them to the death; and then, again, with eyes opened
at last to their delusion, sobbed forth the bitterest repentance for
their blindness.

It has been already seen how the Grand-duke fled the land, how Baden
was given up, in a state of utter anarchy, to a Provisional government,
that existed but long enough to be utterly rent and torn by the very
instruments which its members had contributed to set in movement;
and to a disorganised, tumultuous army, prepared to domineer and
tyrannise in its newly-acquired self-power; how the insurrection was
suppressed, after an unwilling appeal to Prussia by the Grand-duke--how
the insurgent troops were dispersed by means of a Prussian army--and
how Rastadt was finally surrendered by the revolutionary leaders. As
these events have already been detailed, and as it is our purpose to
ask in general, "What has revolutionising Germany attained?" we need
do no more on this head, than ask, "What, by its late movement, has
revolutionising Baden attained?" "What then is the present position,
and the present aspect of the country, after the armed suppression?"

What, indeed! Poor old Father Rhine, although still, in these
revolutionary days, somewhat depressed in spirits, does not now,
however, exhibit that aspect of utter melancholy and despair which we
last year pictured; he has even contrived to reassume something of
that conceited air which we have so often witnessed in his old face.
Foreign tourists, if not in the pleasure-seeking shoals of aforetime,
at least in very decent sprinklings, return again to pay him visits;
and the hotels upon his banks give evidence that his courts are not
wholly deserted. Ems, from various causes independent of its natural
beauties--the principal one of which has been the pilgrimage of French
Legitimists to the heir of the fallen Bourbons, during his short
residence in that sweet bathing-place--has overflowed with "guests."
Homburg has had scarcely a bed to offer to the wanderer on his arrival.
Rhenish Prussia, then, has profited, by its comparative state of quiet,
somewhat to redeem its losses of last year. But the poor duchy of
Baden still hangs its head mournfully; and Baden-Baden, the fairest
queen of German watering-places, finds itself utterly deprived of its
well-deserved crown of supremacy, and seems to have covered itself,
in shame, with a veil of sadness. Although all now wears again a
smiling face of peaceful quiet, and Prussian uniforms, which at least
have the merit of studding with colour the gay scene, give warrant
for peace by the force of the bayonet, yet tourists seem to avoid the
scene of the late fearful convulsions, as they would a house in which
the plague has raged, although now declared wholly disinfected. A few
wandering "guests" only come and go, and tell the world of foreign
wanderers with dismal faces, "Baden-Baden is empty!" Travellers seem
to hurry through the country, as swiftly as the railroad can whirl
them across it, towards Strasburg and Bâle--ay! rather to republican
France, or fermenting Switzerland: they appear unwilling to turn aside
and seek rest among the beautiful hills of a country where the reek
of blood, or the vapour of the cannon-smoke, may be still upon the
air. In Baden-Baden bankrupt hotels are closed; and the lower classes,
who have been accustomed to amass comparative wealth by the annual
influx of foreigners, either by their produce, or in the various
different occupations of attending upon visitors, wear the most evident
expression of disappointment, listlessness, and want. Baden pays the
bitter penalty of insurrection, by being utterly crippled in one of the
branches of its most material interests. It bears as quiet an aspect
outwardly, however, as if it were sitting, in humiliation and shame,
upon the stool of repentance. There is nothing (if they go not beyond
the surface) to prevent foreign pleasure or health seekers from finding
their pleasure or repose in this sweet country; and in what has been
simply, but correctly, termed "one of the loveliest spots upon God's
earth," as of yore; but they are evidently shy, and look askance upon
it. Baden pays its penalty.

Although nature smiles, however, upon mountain and valley, and romantic
village, as cheerily as before, and there is gaiety still in every
sunbeam, yet traces of the horrors lately enacted in the land are
still left, which cannot fail to strike the eye of the most listless,
mere outward observer, as he whisks along, the country--sometimes
in the trampled plain, on which nature has not been as yet able to
throw her all-covering veil again, and which shows where has been
the battle-field, which should have been the harvest-field, and was
not--sometimes in the shattered wall or ruined house--sometimes in the
wood cut down or burned. At every step the traveller may be shown, by
his guide, the spots on which battles or skirmishes have taken place,
where the cannon has lately roared, where blood has been shed, where
men have fallen in civil contest. Here he may be conveyed over the
noble railway-bridge of the Neckar, and see the broken parapet, and
hear how the insurgents had commenced their work of destruction upon
the edifice, but were arrested in its accomplishment by the rapid
advance of the Prussian troops. Here again he may mark the late repairs
of the railroad, where it has been cut up into trenches, to prevent the
speedy conveyance of the war-material of the enemy. If he lingers on
his way, he may seek in vain in the capital, or other "residence towns"
of Baden, where ducal palaces stand, for the treasures of antiquity
which were their boast. Pillage has done its work: insurgents have
appropriated these objects of value to themselves, in the name of the
people; and the costly and bejewelled trappings of the East, the rich
gold inlaid armour, and the valuable arms, brought in triumph home
by the Margrave Louis of Baden, after his Turkish campaigns, are now
dispersed, none knows where, after having fed the greed of some French
red-republican or Polish democrat. But it is more particularly in the
neighbourhood of the fortress town of Rastadt, where the insurgents
last held out, that the strongest traces of the late convulsions may
be found. Marks of devastation are everywhere perceptible in the
country around; the remains of the temporary defences of the besiegers
still lie scattered in newly dug trenches; and the blackened walls
of a railway station-house, by the road-side, tell him how it was
bombarded from the town by the besieged insurgents, and then burned to
the ground, lest it should afford shelter to the besiegers. These are,
however, after all, but slight evidences of what the duchy of Baden has
attained by its late revolution. If we go below the surface, the dark
spots are darker and far more frequent still.

It is impossible to enter into conversation with persons of any class,
without discovering, either directly or indirectly, how deeply rooted
still remains the demoralisation of the country. The bitterness of
feeling, and the revolutionary mania of revolutionising, to obtain
no one can tell what, may have been crushed down and overawed; but
they evidently still smoulder below the surface and ferment. The
volcano-mouth has been filled with a mass of Prussian bayonets; but it
still burns below: it is clogged, not extinct. The democratic spirit
has been too deeply infused to be drugged out of the mass of the people
by the dose of military force. Fearful experience seems to have taught
the sufferers little or nothing; and although, here and there, may be
found evidences of bitter repentance, consequent upon personal loss of
property, or family suffering, yet even below that may be constantly
found a profound bitterness, and an eager rancour, against unknown and
visionary enemies. Talk to that poor old woman, who sits with pale face
upon a stile on the mountain-side. She will weep for the son she has
lost among the insurgents, and deplore, with bitter tears, his error
and his delusion; and yet, if you gain her confidence, she will raise
her head, and, with some fire in her sunken eye, tell you that she has
still a son at home, a boy, her last-born, who bides but his time to
take up the musket against "those, accursed enemies of the people and
the people's rights!" Enter into conversation with that shopkeeper
behind his counter, or that hotel-keeper in his palace hotel--both
are "well to do" in the world, or have been so, until revolutions
shattered the commerce of the one, or deprived the other of wealthy
visitors--you may expect to find in them a feeling, taught them at
least by experience, against any further convulsion. No such thing;
they are as ripe for further revolution as the lower classes, and as
eager to avenge their losses--not upon those who have occasioned them,
but upon those who would have averted them. Even in the upper classes
you will find that craving for the idol, "United Germany," to which
we have before alluded, and which seems to invite revolutions, rather
than to fear them. Of course exceptions may be found, and many, to the
examples here given; but in putting these figures into the foreground
of the picture to be painted of the state of Baden, (if not of Germany
in general,) we firmly believe we have given characteristic types of
the prevailing feelings of the country. German heads, once let loose
into the regions of ideal fantasy, be it political or philosophical,
or the strange and unpractical mixture of both, seem as if they were
not to be recalled to the earth and the realms of palpable truth by the
lessons of experience, however strongly, and even terribly, inculcated.

The prevailing feeling, however, at the present time in Baden, among
the lower classes, seems the hatred of the occupation of the Prussian
army, which has saved the land from utter anarchy. The very men who
have been taught by their demagogues to clamour for "German Unity" as
a pretext for insurrection, look on the Prussian military as usurping
aliens and foreign oppressors. Military occupation is certainly the
prevailing feature of the country. Prussian troops are everywhere--in
every town, in every village, in every house, in every hovel. Whichever
way you turn your eyes, there are soldiers--soldiers--soldiers--horse
and foot. The military seem to form by far the greater half of the
population; and, much disposed as many may have been to greet the
return of the Grand-duke to his states, as the symbol of the cause of
order, yet, in spite of birthday _fêtes_, and banners, and garlands,
and loyal devices in flowers, which have bedecked the road of the
traveller in the land not long since, these same men will grumble to
you of those "accursed Prussian soldiers," who alone were able to
restore him to his country, when the Baden army, as troops to support
their sovereign, existed no longer--when those who composed it fought
at the head of the insurgents. The very shadow of a Baden army, even,
is not now to be found. And it is this fact, and the evidences that an
insurrectionary spirit is still widely spread abroad, which are given
as the excuse of a continued Prussian occupation. It is difficult,
certainly, for a traveller in a land so lately convulsed, and still
placed in circumstances so peculiar, to arrive at truth. Prussian
officers will tell him how, on the arrival of the Prussian army in the
country, and the dispersion of the insurgents, flowers were strewn
along its path by the populations, who thus seemingly hailed the
Prussian soldiers as their deliverers; and in the next breath they will
inform him that this was only done from _fear_, and that, were it not
for this salutary _fear_, the insurrection would break forth again. He
may suspect that this account is given as the pretext for a continued
occupation of the land. But Baden officials will tell him that such
is the case--that Prussian troops alone keep, down a further rising;
and if he still suspects his source, he will certainly find among the
people, at all events, both the hatred and the fear. Meanwhile the
Prussian officers seem to think that both these feelings are necessary
for the pacification of the land; and, upon their own showing, or
rather boasting, they inculcate them by flogging insolent peasants
across the cannon, by shooting down insurgent prisoners, who spit upon
them from prison windows, without any other form of trial, and by other
autocratic repressive measures of a similar stamp. Meanwhile, also,
they seem, by all their words as well as actions, to look upon Baden as
a conquered province, acquired to Prussia, and openly and loudly vaunt
their _conquest_. Let it not be supposed that this is exaggeration. It
is the general tone of Prussian officers--ay, and even of the common
Prussian soldiers occupying the duchy of Baden--with a super-addition
of true Prussian conceit in manner, indescribable by words. In spite
of what we may read in late newspaper reports, then, of conciliation
between the two great powers of Northern and Southern Germany, we may
well ask, What will rival Austria say to this? Where is the prospect
here of a great United Germany? And, after this _resumé_ of the
present position of Baden as a part, we may well ask, also, What has
revolutionising Germany attained as a whole?

We have seen that the main object, and at all events the chief pretext
of the revolution, the establishment of a great United Germany, is
still further from the grasp of the revolutionising country than
ever--although it remains still the clamour and the cry. Prussia may
point in irony to its advances, by the occupation of the duchy of
Baden and of Hamburg, and by its acquisition of the principality of
Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, and smile while it says that it has effected
thus much towards a union of Germany under one head. Or, in more
serious mood, it may put forward its projected alliance of the three
northern German potentates. But, with regard to the former, what, in
spite of the reports we hear of conciliation, will be the conduct of
jealous Austria, now at last unshackled in its dealings? The latter
only shows still more the cleft that divides the northern portion of
the would-be united country from the southern. "United Germany" only
remains, then, a plaything in the hands of dreamers and democrats--a
pretty toy, about which they may build up airy castles to the one--an
instrument blunted and notched, for the present, to the other. What has
revolutionising Germany attained here?

What declared last year the manifesto of Prince Leiningen, then
Minister for Foreign Affairs, and leading member of the cabinet
of the newly established central power--put forward, as it was,
as the _programme_ of the new government for all Germany? It
denounced "jealousies between the individual states, and revilings
of the northern by the southern parts of the empire," as "criminal
absurdities;" and yet went on to say that "if the old spirit of discord
and separation were still too powerfully at work--if the jealousy
between race and race, between north and south, were still too strongly
felt--the nation must convince itself of the fact, and return to the
old feudal system." It declared, however, in the same breath as it
were, that "to retrograde to a confederation of states would only
be to create a mournful period of transition to fresh catastrophes,
and new revolutions." Failing of the realisation of the great union,
to which the revolution was supposed to tend, the manifesto then
placed revolutionising Germany between the alternative of returning
to a part, which it declared impossible, or further convulsions and
civil wars. It put Germany, in fact, into a cleft stick. Has a year's
revolution tended to extricate it from this position? The alternative,
remains the same--Germany sticks in the cleft stick as much as ever.
Revolutionising Germany, with all its throes and all its efforts, has
attained nothing to relieve it from this position. Without accepting
the manifesto of Prince Leiningen, either as necessarily prophetic,
or as a political dictum, from which there is no evasion or escape,
it is yet impossible to look back upon it, while trying to discover
what revolutionising Germany has attained, without sad presentiments,
without looking with much mournful apprehension upon the future fate of
the country. To return, however to the present state of Germany--for
the investigation of that is our purpose, and not speculation upon the
future, although none may look upon the present without asking with a
sigh, "What is to become of Germany?"

We find the revolutionary spirit crushed by the events of the last
year, but not subdued; writhing, but not avowing itself vanquished.
The fermentation is as great as heretofore: experience seems to have
taught the German children in politics no useful lesson. Now that the
great object, for which the revolution appeared to struggle, has
received so notable a check, the confusion of purposes, (if German
political rhapsodies may be called such;) of projects, (if, indeed,
in such visionary schemes there be any,) and pretexts, (of a nature
so evidently false,) is greater than ever--the confusion not only
exists, but ferments, and generates foul air, which must find vent
somewhere, be it even in imagination. Of the revolutionary spirits whom
we sketched last year in Germany, the students alone seem somewhat to
have learned a lesson of experience and tactics. Although many may
have been found in the ranks of insurgents, yet the general mass has
sadly sobered down, and, it may be hoped, acquired more reason and
method. The Jews--we cannot again now inquire into the strange whys and
wherefores--still remain the restless, gnawing, cankering, agitating
agents of revolutionary movement. The insolence and coarseness of the
lower classes increases into bitter rancour, and has been in no way
amended by concession and a show of good-will. Among the middle-lower
classes, the most restless and reckless spirits, it appears from
well-drawn statistical accounts, are the village schoolmasters, (as
in France)--to exemplify that "a little learning is a dangerous
thing"--the barbers, and the tailors. Had we time, it might form the
subject of curious speculation to attempt to discover why these two
latter occupations, (and especially the last one) induce, more than
all others, heated brains and revolutionary habits; but we cannot stop
on our way to play with such curious questions. Over all the relations
of social, as well as public life, hover politics like a deleterious
atmosphere, blighting all that is bright and fair, withering art in
all its branches, science, and social intercourse. And, good heavens,
what politics!--the politics of a bedlamite philosopher in his ravings.
In the late festivities, given in honour of Goethe at Frankfort, the
city of his birth, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of that
event, when it might have been supposed that all men might have, for
once, united to do homage to the memory of one whom Germans considered
their greatest spirit, politics again interfered to thwart, and
oppose, and spoil. The democratic party endeavoured to prevent the
supplies offered to be given by the town for the festivities, because
they saw the names of those they called the "aristocrats," among
the list of the committee, even although men of all classes were
invited to join it; and, when a serenade was given before the house
in which the poet was born, the musicians were driven away, and their
torches extinguished, by a band of so-called "patriots," who insisted
upon singing, in the place of the appointed _cantato_ composed for
the occasion, the revolutionary chorus in honour of the republican
Hecker--the now famous song of the revolutionary battle-field, the
_Hecker-Lied_. And such an example of this fermentation of politics
in all the circumstances of life, however far from political intents,
is not singular: it is only characteristic of the everyday doings
of the times. Among the upper classes, those feelings which we last
year summed up in the characteristic words, "the dulness of doubt and
the stupor of apprehension," have only increased in intensity. None
see an issue out of the troubled passage of the revolution. Their
eyes are blinded by a mist, and they stumble on their way, dreading
a precipice at every step. This impression depicts more especially
the feelings of the so-called moderates and liberal conservatives who
had their representatives among the best elements of the Frankfort
parliament, and who, with the vision of a united Germany before their
eyes, laboured to reach that visionary goal, at the same time that
they endeavoured to stem the ever-invading torrent of ultra-revolution
and red-republicanism. "The dulness of doubt, and the stupor of
apprehension," seem indeed to have fallen upon them since the last vain
meeting of the heads of their party in Gotha. They let their hands
fall upon their laps, and sit shaking their heads. Gagern, the boldest
spirit, and one of the best hearts that represents their cause and
has struggled for its maintenance, is represented as wholly prostrate
in spirit, unstrung--_missgestimmt_, as the Germans have it. He has
retired entirely into private life, to await events with aching heart.
If any feeling is still expressed by the moderate liberals, it has
been, of late, sympathy in the fate of Hungary, which the Prussians put
forward visibly only out of opposition to Austria, at the same time
that, with but little consistency, they condemn all the agents of the
Hungarian struggle.

We have endeavoured to give a faint and fleeting sketch of what
revolutionising Germany has attained, after a year's revolution. The
picture is a dark one, of a truth, but we believe in no ways overdone.
In actual progress the sum-total appears to be a zero. The position
of Germany, although calmer on the surface, is as difficult, as
embarrassing, as much in the "cleft stick," as when we speculated upon
it last year. All the well-wishers of the country and of mankind may
give it their hopes; but when they look for realisation of their hopes,
they can only shake their heads, with the Germans themselves, as they
ask, "What will become of Germany?"




THE GREEN HAND--A "SHORT" YARN.


PART V.

The next evening our friend the Captain found his fair audience by the
taffrail increased to a round dozen, while several of the gentlemen
passengers lounged near, and the chief officer divided his attention
between the gay group of ladies below and the "fanning" main-topsail
high up, with its corresponding studding-sail hung far out aloft to
the breeze; the narrative having by this time contracted a sort of
professional interest, even to his matter-of-fact taste, which enabled
him to enjoy greatly the occasional glances of sly humour directed
to him by his superior, for whom he evidently entertained a kind of
admiring respect, that seemed to be enhanced as he listened. As for
the commander himself, he related the adventures in question with a
spirit and vividness of manner that contributed to them no small charm;
amusingly contrasted with the cool, dry, indifferent sort of gravity
of countenance, amidst which the keen gray seawardly eye, under the
peak of the naval cap, kept changing and twinkling as it seemed to run
through the experience of youth again--sometimes almost approaching to
an undeniable wink. The expression of it at this time, however, was
more serious, while it appeared to run along the dotted reef-band of
the mizen-topsail above, as across the entry in a log-book, and as if
there were something interesting to come.

"_Well_, my dear captain," asked his matronly relative, "what comes
next? You and your friend had picked up a--a-what was it _now_!"

"Ah! I remember, ma'am," said the naval man, laughing; "the
bottle--that was where I was. Well, as you may conceive, this said
scrap of penmanship in the bottle _did_ take both of us rather on end;
and for two or three minutes Westwood and I sat staring at each other
and the uncouth-looking fist, in an inquiring sort of way, like two
cocks over a beetle. Westwood, for his part, was doubtful of its being
the Planter at all; but the whole thing, when I thought of it, made
itself as clear to me, so far, as two half-hitches, and the angrier
I was at myself for being _done_ by a frog-eating, bloody-politeful
set of Frenchmen like these. Could we only have clapped eyes on the
villanous thieving craft at the time, by Jove! if I wouldn't have
manned a boat from the Indiaman, leave or no leave, and boarded her in
another fashion! But where they were now, what they meant, and whether
we should ever see them again, heaven only knew. For all we could say,
indeed, something strange might have turned up at home in Europe--a new
war, old Boney got loose once more, or what not--and I could scarce
fall asleep for guessing and bothering over the matter, as restless as
the first night we cruised down Channel in the old Pandora."

Early in the morning-watch a sudden stir of the men on deck woke me,
and I bundled up in five minutes' time. But it was only the second
mate setting them to wash decks, and out they came from all quarters,
yawning, stretching themselves, and tucking up their trousers, as
they passed the full buckets lazily along; while a couple of boys
could be seen hard at work to keep the head-pump going, up against the
gray sky over the bow. However, I was so anxious to have the first
look-out ahead, that I made a bold push through the thick of it for
the bowsprit, where I went out till I could see nothing astern of me
but the Indiaman's big black bows and figurehead, swinging as it were
round the spar I sat upon, with the spread of her canvass coming dim
after me out of the fog, and a lazy snatch of foam lifting to her
cut-water, as the breeze died away. The sun was just beginning to rise;
ten minutes before, it had been almost quite dark; there was a mist on
the water, and the sails were heavy with dew; when a circle began to
open round us, where the surface looked as smooth and dirty as in a
dock, the haze seeming to shine through, as the sunlight came sifting
through it, like silver gauze. You saw the big red top of the sun glare
against the water-line, and a wet gleam of crimson came sliding from
one smooth blue swell to another; while the back of the haze astern
turned from blue to purple, and went lifting away into vapoury streaks
and patches. All of a sudden the ship came clear out aloft and on the
water, with her white streak as bright as snow, her fore-royal and
truck gilded, her broad foresail as red as blood, and every face on
deck shining as they looked ahead, where I felt like a fellow held up
on a toasting-fork, against the fiery wheel the sun made ere clearing
the horizon. Two or three strips of cloud melted in it like lumps of
sugar in hot wine; and, after overhauling the whole seaboard round and
round, I kept straining my eyes into the light, with the notion there
was something to be seen in that quarter, but to no purpose; there
wasn't the slightest sign of the brig or any other blessed thing. What
struck me a little, however, was the look of the water just as the fog
was clearing away: the swell was sinking down, the wind fallen for the
time to a dead calm; and when the smooth face of it caught the light
full from aloft, it seemed to come out all over long-winding wrinkles
and eddies, running in a broad path, as it were, twisted and woven
together, right into the wake of the sunrise. When I came inboard from
the bowsprit, big Harry and another grumpy old salt were standing by
the bitts, taking a forecastle observation, and gave me a squint, as
much as to ask if I had come out of the east, or had been trying to
pocket the flying-jib-boom. "D'you notice anything strange about the
_water_ at all?" I asked in an offhand sort of way, wishing to see if
the men had remarked aught of what I suspected. The old fellow gave me
a queer look out of the tail of his eye, and the ugly man seemed to be
measuring me from head to foot. "No, sir," said the first, carelessly;
"can't say as how I does,"--while Harry coolly commenced sharpening his
sheath-knife on his shoe. "Did you ever hear of currents hereabouts?"
said I to the other man. "Hereaway!" said he; "why, bless ye, sir, it's
unpossible as I _could_ ha' heer'd tell on sich a thing, 'cause, ye
see, sir, there an't none so far out at sea, sir--al'ays axin' _your_
parding, ye know, sir!" while he hitched up his trousers and looked
aloft, as if there were somewhat wrong about the jib-halliards.

The Indiaman by this time had quite lost steerage-way, and came
sheering slowly round, broadside to the sun, while the water began to
glitter like a single sheet of quicksilver, trembling and swelling to
the firm edge of it far off; the pale blue sky filling deep aloft with
light, and a long white haze growing out of the horizon to eastward.
I kept still looking over from the fore-chains with my arms folded,
and an eye to the water on the starboard side, next the sun, where,
just a fathom or two from the bright copper of her sheathing along the
water-line, you could see into it. Every now and then little bells
and bubbles, as I thought, would come up in it and break short of the
surface; and sometimes I fancied the line of a slight ripple, as fine
as a rope-yarn, went turning and glistening, round one of the ship's
quarters, across her shadow. Just then the old sailor behind me shoved
his face over the bulwark, too, all warts and wrinkles, like a ripe
walnut-shell, with a round knob of a nose in the middle of it, and
seemed to be watching to see it below, when he suddenly squirted his
tobacco-juice as far out as possible alongside, and gave his mouth
a wipe with the back of his tarry yellow hand; catching my eye in a
shame-faced sort of way, as I glanced first at him and then at his
floating property. I leant listlessly over the rail, watching the patch
of oily yellow froth, as it floated quietly on the smooth face of the
water; till all at once I started to observe that beyond all question
it had crept slowly away past our starboard bow, clear of the ship, and
at last melted into the glittering blue brine. The two men noticed my
attention, and stared along with me; while the owner of the precious
cargo himself kept looking after it wistfully into the wake of the
sunlight, as if he were a little hurt; then aloft and round about, in a
puzzled sort of way, to see if the ship hadn't perhaps taken a sudden
sheer to port. "Why, my man," I said, meeting his oyster-like old
sea-eye, "what's the reason of _that_?--perhaps there is some current
or other here, after all, eh?" Just as he meant to answer, however, I
noticed his watch-mate give him a hard shove in the ribs with his huge
elbow, and a quick screw of his weather top-light, while he kept the
lee one doggedly fixed on myself. I accordingly walked slowly aft as if
to the quarterdeck, and came round the long-boat again, right abreast
of them.

Harry was pacing fore and aft with his arms folded, when his companion
made some remark on the heat, peering all about him, and then right
up into the air aloft. "Well then, shipmate," said Harry, dabbing
his handkerchief back into his tarpaulin again, "I've seen worse,
myself,--ownly, 'twas in the Bight o' Benin, look ye,--an' afore the
end on it, d'ye see, we hove o'board nine of a crew, let alone six
dozen odds of a cargo!" "Cargo!" exclaimed his companion in surprise.
"Ay, black _passengers_ they was, ye know, old ship!" answered the ugly
rascal, coolly; "an' I tell ye what it is, Jack, I never sails yet
with passengers aboard, but some'at bad turned up in the end,--al'ays
one or another on 'em's got a foul turn in his conscience, ye see! I
say, 'mate," continued he, looking round, "didn't ye note that 'ere
'long-shore looking customer as walked aft just now, with them bloody
soft quest'ns o' his about--" "Why," said Jack, "it's him Jacobs and
the larboard watch calls the Green Hand, an' a blessed good joke they
has about him, to all appearance,--but they keeps it pretty close."
"Close, be d----d!" growled Harry, "I doesn't like the cut of his jib,
I tell ye, shipmate! Jist you take my word for it, that 'ere fellow's
done some'at bad at home, or he's bent on some'at bad afloat--it's
all one! Don't ye mark how he keeps boxhaulin' and skulking fore
an' aft, not to say looking out to wind'ard every now an' again, as
much as he expected a sail to heave in sight!" "Well, I'm blowed but
you're right, Harry!" said the other, taking off his hat to scratch
his head, thoughtfully. "Ay, and what's more," went on Harry, "it's
just comed ath'art me as how I've clapped eyes on the chap somewheres
or other afore this--d----n me if I don't think it was amongst a
gang o' Spanish pirates I saw tried for their lives and let off, in
the Havanney!" "Thank you, my man!" thought I, as I leant against
the booms on the other side, "the devil you did!--a wonder it wasn't
in the Old Bailey, which would have been more possible, though less
romantic,--seeing in the Havannah I never was!" The curious thing was
that I began to have a faint recollection, myself, of having seen
this same cross-grained beauty, or heard his voice, before; though
where and how it was, I couldn't for the life of me say at the moment.
"Lord bless us, Harry!" faltered out the old sailor, "ye don't mean
it!--sich a young, soft-looked shaver, too!" "Them smooth-skinned
sort o' coves is kimmonly the worst, 'mate," replied Harry; "for that
matter ye may be d----d sure he's got his chums aboard,--an' how does
_we_ know but the ship's _sold_, from stem to starn? There's that 'ere
black-avizzed parson, now, and one or two more aft--cuss me if that
'ere feller smells brine for the first time! An' as for this here Bob
Jacobs o' yours, blow me if there an't over many of his kind in the
whole larboard watch, Jack! A man-o'-war's-man's al'ays a blackguard
out on a man-o'-war, look ye!" "Why, bless me, shipmate," said Jack,
lowering his voice, "by that recknin', a man don't know his friends in
this here craft! The sooner we gives the mate a hint, the better, to
my thinking?" "No, blow me, no, Jack," said Harry, "keep all fast, or
ye'll kick up a worse nitty, old boy! Jist you hould on till ye see
what's to turn up,--ownly stand by and look out for squalls, that's
all! There's the skipper laid up below in his berth, I hears,--and to
my notions, that 'ere mate of ours is no more but

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