gaslights go out, and the chairs and tables | heim's friend, the doctor, give a curious turn over on their backs and go to sleep. sort of snort. Arnheim came up looking very tired, but he brightened directly at the sight of his friend. "I have been enjoying your lecture very much,' said the doctor. I saw the concerts advertised at the station at Basel, and so I came on to find you.' "The people scattered. Some went home; some turned into the établissement, which sits up later than the garden. Mamma, strange to say, had a fancy for a stroll. We walked along the avenue, and crossed the road, and the piazza, and the bridge, and got out into the open. 66 High, clear, chill, with strange, unresponding beauty, the moon shone upon the wide, black valley; the waters of the torrent were brawling and circling in cool eddies; some pines crowded dark, and whispered mysteriously fragrant. What was that flash? Some planet changing from rainbow to rainbow. We walked a little way by the rushing stream. It was all dim, noisy, bewildering, and sleepy at once. Weeds floated on the water; the moon floated in the sky. Across the plain rose a shadowy presence - the Jungfrau which seemed to face us in some indifferent mood of chilly life. The dew was falling heavily; and I heard Arnheim sigh. "Come back,' said the doctor - it was quite a relief to hear his comfortable voice. It is too dark to stay out any longer.' 66 Many of the windows of the hotel were lighted up still when we reached it. The porters and waiters were closing for the night. On our way we passed a ground-floor window through which we could see a peaceful interior scene: a little child asleep on a low couch, with all its hair falling upon the pillow; the nightlight was shaded; a woman bent over the little one, and then came to the window and carefully drew down the blind. "In the great salle the gas was still flaring. Everybody was gone, and the red velvet sofas were empty. One lady only remained in the great, empty room. She was old, painted, and wrinkled; she had a frizz of flaxen tow, cheeks of chalk, eyebrows of black lead. She was dressed in some grand satin dress, and, as we came in, was kneeling on one of the high red sofas looking at herself fixedly in the glass. I don't know what made Arn "To think,' he said, 'of some women, and not bad women either, deliberately choosing such a life as that, and giving up everything in the whole world for it!' and then he stalked away. "But, dear Miss Williamson, it is not true. Women don't deliberately choose; their lives come to them, and they can but take them as they come." VII. en I WENT to show this letter to Josephine, for I knew it would interest her; but she had gone away with her mother for a few weeks, on a visit to Mrs. Thomas at Cradlebury, and I did not send it after her. The colonel was to stay on with Miss Bessie in London. He had business to attend to before he went abroad. The colonel's business was always looked upon with great respect by his family. There was not much of it; but what there was always seemed more important than anybody else's. I believe he was grossed, among other things, in negotiations for the exchange of the old silver tea-urn for a dozen flat candlesticks, the want of which at Cradlebury he felt keenly. Mr. Ellis, the father, had been a collector of old plate, and the spoons and forks in Old Palace Square were certainly a pleasure to contemplate. Burroughes, in spite of his failings, used to rub up his silver to a bright perfection in those underground regions he affectioned. There were long, slim spoons and forks with the handles all curled the wrong way, to the delight of the knowing; also the spoons were an egg-shaped and rounded oval, not pointed as ours are, and heavy and massive to wield. Early Georgian plate had certainly much of the spirit of the powdered and deliberate company for whose mouths it was intended. It did not sprawl into vulgar ornamentations; it did not beat out one solid fork into several flimsy, four-pronged impossibilities; it contented itself with three handsome prongs, firmly and massively set, shining and sufficient. But whether it is better that one man should have a handsome fork all to himself, or that two men should enjoy theirs flimsy, is a difficult question. A comico-tragedy was enacted at Mrs. Ellis's concerning this very plate; for when it came to be counted over, a certain quantity was found to be missing. What there was left was in a beautiful, shining condition. But though the moth and rust had been kept at bay, not so the 3 This absurd piece of news was all I had to send to Sophy in exchange for her faithful, long letters. I think she was as glad to write as I to read. Her mother was to her an affection, a tender solicitude, but no companion to the girl. Her only sister was married and away, her father had little sympathy for the things she cared about. The girl was full of interest, emotion, kindness, sympathy, and talkativeness; she wanted a vent, some one to confide in; and her old gov erness on her second floor was only too glad to respond. thieves. It was not that which was used Mam "Alas! we all part to-morrow. ma and I go on to St. Pierre. I don't like saying good-bye. Oh, Miss Williamson, why must one always be saying goodbye? We have all been sitting out for the last time in front of the hotel, watching an odd mixture of elements upon the terrace. Russian human nature, smoking cigarettes, male and female; English human nature, simple and blousy, sitting on the benches, looking at the sky and the people underneath it; French human nature, exchanging good-natured, cheerful greetings, talkings, and laughter. Then the piano strikes up, and some of them go in and begin to dance. Dr. Adams sat with us for a while. He was saying he could imagine a passion for nature coming late in life to people for whom all other passion was over, especially to women, and that a need for absorbing interest is part of the machinery of life, and does not end with youth. He talks as if he were an old man, but he is really quite young. He hates sitting still, and soon went off straggling down the pathway. Arnheim looked after him and said, Hoopers, who was a youth of an excitable and romantic disposition, seems to have been very much engrossed by this event in the family; and, moreover, having been lately thrilled by various accounts of robberies in the paper and elsewhere, which, in Mrs. Ellis's absence, he had time to ponder on thoroughly, thought this a good opportunity for exercising his ingenuity and venting his feeling against a lady to whom he had taken a dislike. Miss Ellis, it seems, was peacefully asleep in her bed one night, when she was awakened by an alarming apparition of a short figure swathed in a tablecloth, with a crape across its face, which exclaimed in a crowing voice, "Ho, ho, I am the robber. Your money or your life." The poor lady sprang from her bed with a scream, and in so doing fell to the ground, upsetting the night-light which always burned at her side. The wretched boy, who had merely intended a wild practical joke, tried to rush from the room, but could not find the door. The maids came down, the colonel came up from his bedroom on the ground floor in an Indian dressing-gown. Hoopers was caught red-handed, the police were again sent for, and not only the police. The doctor was also necessary, for Miss Ellis was hurt. Her ankle was badly There is no fear of that. It has been sprained, and for many weeks she was a real happiness to me to know these confined to the sofa. For a person of good simple people, and I shall always her energetic temper this was no small feel as if Fina was a little niece of my infliction. "I envy him his energy; he will make a name for himself. He has a wonderful gift for discovering work for himself, and for helping others with theirs.' 666 "He ought to be a clergyman,' said I. Why should he be a clergyman?' said Arnheim. The religion of the strong helping the weak is the natural religion all the world over. There need be no paid clergy to teach such a simple doctrine as that. You must not forget us altogether,' he added, when he said goodnight. own.' 66 Good-bye from your ever affectionate | stay its tottering steps. To say that we 66 SOPHY." love the country is to make an indirect claim to a similar excellence. We assert Alas! the time came only too quickly, a taste for sweet and innocent pleasures, for Sophy to prove the reality of her good- and an indifference to the feverish exwill. It was the last day before the citements of artificial society. I, too, love summer holidays began. I had had a long the country—if such a statement can be day's work going from school to school, received after such an exordium; but I from pupil to pupil. I had been think-confess - to be duly modest — that I love ing of my own arrangements of Margate it best in books. In real life I have reor Southend as a convenient change, my marked that it is frequently damp and wildest ambition reached no farther than rheumatic and most hated by those who Calais or Boulogne. It was a lovely even- know it best. Not long ago I heard a ing, and on my way home I sat down to worthy orator at a country school-treat rest on one of the benches in Kensington declare to his small audience that honGardens and watched the sun setting in esty, sobriety, and industry, in their stafloods of red behind the old Dutch palace. tion in life, might possibly enable them There I sat feeling a little alone perhaps, to become cabdrivers in London. The as if the shadows were creeping from precise form of the reward was suggested, afar, and might engulf me. I fancy, by some edifying history of an ideal cabman; but the speaker clearly knew the road to his hearers' hearts. Perhaps the realization of this high destiny might dispel their illusions. Like My friends were all away, being amused in company; Miss Ellis had been conveyed to Cradlebury with many precautions; the colonel was abroad with a captain, a friend of his; even my three organ-poor Susan at the corner of Wood Street, grinders had trudged off to the seaside, they would see no doubt; and I went homewards dull and out of spirits, little thinking what trouble some of those I most cared for were in. A LOVE of the country is taken, I know not why, to indicate the presence of all the cardinal virtues. It is one of those outlying qualities which are not exactly meritorious, but which, for that very reason, are the more provocative of a pleasing self-complacency. People pride themselves upon it as upon habits of early rising, or of answering letters by return of post. We recognize the virtuous hero of a novel as soon as we are told that the cat instinctively creeps to his knee, and that the little child clutches his hand to Bright volumes of vapor through Lothbury glide, And a river flow on through the vale of Cheapside. The Swiss, who at home regards a mountain as an unmitigated nuisance, is (or once was) capable of developing sentimental yearnings for the Alps at the sound of a ranz des vaches. We all agree with Horace that Rome is most attractive at Tibur, and vice versa. It is the man who has been "long in populous cities pent," who, according to Milton, enjoys The smell of grain or tedded grass or kine, and the phrase is employed to illustrate I do not wish to pursue the good old moral saws expounded by so many preachers and poets. I am only suggesting a possible ground of apology for one who prefers the ideal mode of rustication; who can share the worthy Johnson's love of Charing Cross, and sympathize with his pathetic remark when enticed into the Highlands by his bear-leader that it is easy "to sit at home and conceive rocks, heaths, and waterfalls." Some slight basis of experience must doubtless be provided on which to rear any imaginary 1 fabric; and the mental opiate, which stim- | emotions which it excites in our abnor ulates the sweetest reverie, is found in mally sensitive natures. I can never read chewing the cud of past recollections. without fresh admiration Mr. Arnold's But with a good guide, one requires small" Gipsy Scholar," but in this sense that external aid. Though a cockney in grain, delightful person is a typical offender. I I love to lean upon the farmyard gate; to put myself, at Mr. Arnold's request, in hear Mrs. Poyser give a bit of her mind the corner of the high, half-reaped field; I to the squire; to be lulled into a placid see the poppies peeping through the green doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill; roots and yellowing stems of the corn; I to sit down in Dandie Dinmont's parlor, lazily watch the scholar with "his hat of and bestow crumbs from his groaning antique shape," roaming the country-side, table upon three generations of Peppers and becoming the living centre of one bit and Mustards; or to drop into the kitchen of true, old-fashioned rustic scenery after of a good old country inn and to smoke a another; and I feel myself half persuaded pipe with Tom Jones or listen to the sim- to be a gipsy. But then, before I know ple-minded philosophy of Parson Adams. how or why, I find that I am to be worryWhen I lift my eyes to realities, I can ing myself about the strange disease of dimly descry across the street a vision of modern life; about "our brains o'ertaxed my neighbor behind his looking-glass ad- and palsied hearts," and so forth; and justing the parting of his back hair, and instead of being lulled into a delicious achieving triumphs with his white tie cal- dream, I have somehow been entrapped culated to excite the envy of a Brummell. into a meditation upon my incapacity for It is pleasant to take down one of the dreaming. And more or less, this is the magicians of the shelf, to annihilate my fashion of all poets. You can never be neighbor and his evening parties, and to sure that they will let you have your dream wander off through quiet country lanes out quietly. They must always be bothinto some sleepy hollow of the past. ering you about the state of their souls; and, to say the truth, when they try to be simply descriptive, they are for the most part intolerably dull. Who are the most potent weavers of that delightful magic? Clearly, in the first place, those who have been themselves in contact with rural sights and sounds. The echo of an echo loses all sharpness of definition; our guide may save us the trouble of stumbling through farmyards and across ploughed fields, but he must have gone through it himself till his very voice has a twang of the true country accent. Milton, as Mr. Pattison has lately told us, "saw nature through books," and is therefore no trustworthy guide. We feel that he has got a Theocritus in his pocket; that he is using the country to refresh his memories of Spenser, or Chaucer, or Virgil; and, instead of forgetting the existence of books in his company, we shall be painfully abashed if we miss some obvious allusion or fail to identify the passages upon which he has moulded his own descriptions. And, indeed, to put it broadly, the poets are hardly to be trusted in this matter, however fresh and spontaneous may be their song. They don't want to offer us a formal sermon, unless "they" means Wordsworth; but they have not the less got their little moral to insinuate. Shelley's skylark and Keats's nightingale are equally determined that we shall indulge in meditations about life and death and the mysterious meaning of the universe. That is just what, on these occasions, we want to forget; we want the bird's song, not the Your poet, of course, is bound to be an interpreter of nature; and nature, for the present purpose, must be regarded as simply a nuisance. The poet, by his own account, is condescending to find words for the inarticulate voices of sea and sky and mountain. In reality, nature is nothing but the sounding-board which is to give effect to his own valuable observations. It is a general, but safe rule that whenever you come across the phrase "laws of nature " in an article - especially if it is by a profound philosopher-you may expect a sophistry; and it is still more certain that when you come across nature in a poem you should prepare to receive a sermon. It does not in the least follow that it will be a bad one. It may be exquisite, graceful, edifying, and sublime; but, as a sermon, the more effective the less favorable to the reverie which one desires to cultivate. Nor, be it observed, does it matter whether the prophet be more or less openly and unblushingly didactic. A good many hard things have been said about poor Wordsworth for his delight in sermonizing; and though I love Wordsworth with all my heart, I certainly cannot deny that he is capable of becoming a portentous weariness to the flesh. But, for this purpose, Wordsworth is no better and no worse Some kind philosopher professes to put my thoughts into correct phraseology by saying that for such a purpose I require thoroughly objective treatment. I must, however, reject his suggestions, not only because "objective and "subjective" are vile phrases, used for the most part to cover indolence and ambiguity of thought, but also because, if I understand the word rightly, it describes what I do not desire. The only thoroughly objec tive works with which I am acquainted are those of which Bradshaw's Railway Guide is an accepted type. There are occasions, I will admit, in which such literature is the best help to the imagination. When I read in prosaic black and white that by leaving Euston Square at 10 A.M. I shall reach Windermere at 5.40 P.M., it sometimes helps me to perform an imaginary journey to the lakes even better than a study of Wordsworth's poems. It seems to give a fixed point round which old fancies and memories can crystallize; to supply a useful guarantee that Grasmere and Rydal do in sober earnest belong to the world of realities, and are not mere parts of the decaying phantasmagoria of memory. And I was much pleased the other day to find a complimentary reference in a contemporary essayist to a lively work called, I believe, the "Shepherd's Guide," which once beguiled a leisure hour in a lonely inn, and which simply records the distinctive marks put upon the sheep of the district. The sheep, as it proved, was not a mere poetical figment in an idyll, but a real, tangible animal, with wool capable of being tarred and ruddled, and eating real grass in real fells and accessible mountain dales. In our childhood, when any old broomstick will serve as well as the wondrous horse of brass On which the Tartar king did ride, than Byron or Shelley, or Keats or Rous- | reflection as some wild animal in a con seau, or any of the dealers in praises of genial country. Weltschmerz, or mental dyspepsia. Mr. Ruskin has lately told us that in his opinion ninety-nine things out of a hundred are not what they should be, but the very opposite of what they should be. And therefore he sympathizes less with Wordsworth than with Byron and Rousseau, and other distinguished representatives of the same agreeable creed. From the present point of view the question is irrelevant. I wish to be for the nonce a poet of nature, not a philosopher, either with a healthy or a disturbed liver, delivering a judicial opinion about nature as a whole, or declaring whether I regard it as representing a satisfactory or a thoroughly uncomfortable system. I condemn neither opinion; I will not pronounce Wordsworth's complacency to be simply the glow thrown from his comfortable domestic hearth upon the outside darkness; or Byron's wrath against mankind to be simply the crying of a spoilt child with a digestion ruined by sweetmeats. I do not want to think about it. Preaching, good or bad, from the angelic or diabolical point of view, cunningly hidden away in delicate artistic forms, or dashed ostentatiously in one's face in a shower of moral platitudes, is equally out of place. And, therefore, for the time, I would choose for my guide to the Alps some gentle enthusiast in "Peaks and Passes," who tells me in his admirably matter-offact spirit, what he had for lunch and how many steps he had to cut in the mur de la côte, and catalogues the mountains which he could see as calmly as if he were repeating a schoolboy lesson in geography. I eschew the meditations of Obermann, and do not care in the least whether he got into a more or less maudlin frame of mind about things in general as contemplated from the Col de Janan. I shrink even from the admirable descriptions of Alpine scenery in the "Modern in the days when a cylinder with four pegs Painters," lest I should be launched un- is as good a steed as the finest animal in awares into ethical or æsthetical specula- the Elgin marbles, and when a puddle tion. "A plague of both your houses!" swarming with tadpoles or a streamlet I wish to court entire absence of thought haunted by water rats is as full of romance not even to talk to a graceful gipsy as a jungle full of tigers, the barest catascholar, troubled with aspirations for mys-logue of facts is the most effective. A terious knowledge; but rather to the child is deliciously excited by Robinson genuine article, such as the excellent Bamfield Moore Carew, who took to be a gipsy in earnest, and was content to be a thorough loafer, not even a Bohemian in conscious revolt against society, but simply outside of the whole social framework, and accepting his position with as little Crusoe because De Foe is content to give the naked scaffolding of direct narrative, and leaves his reader to supply the sentiment and romance at pleasure. Who does not fear, on returning to the books which delighted his childhood, that all the fairy gold should have turned to dead leaves? |