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A languor and a lethargy of soul,

Death-like, and gathering more and more, till Death

Comes to release thee. Ah! what now to thee,
What now to thee the treasure of thy youth?

As nothing!

But thou canst not yet reflect
Calmly; so many things, strange and perverse,
That meet, recoil, and go but to return,
The monstrous birth of one eventful day,
Troubling thy spirit—from the first at dawn,
The rich arraying for the nuptial feast,

To the black pall, the requiem.25 All in turn
Revisit thee, and round thy lowly bed

Hover, uncalled. Thy young and innocent heart,
How is it beating? Has it no regrets?
Discoverest thou no weakness lurking there?
But thine exhausted frame has sunk to rest.
Peace to thy slumbers!

THE FIRE-FLY.

THERE is an insect, that, when evening comes,
Small though he be and scarce distinguishable,

Like Evening clad in soberest livery,

Unsheathes his wings 266 and through the woods and glades
Scatters a marvellous splendor. On he wheels,

Blazing by fits as from excess of joy,267
Each gush of light a gush of ecstasy;
Nor unaccompanied; thousands that fling
A radiance all their own, not of the day,

Thousands as bright as he, from dusk till dawn,

Soaring, descending.

In the mother's lap

268

Well may the child put forth his little hands,
Singing the nursefy-song he learnt so soon;
And the young nymph, preparing for the dance 269
By brook or fountain-side, in many a braid
Wreathing her golden hair, well may she cry,
"Come hither; and the shepherds, gathering round,
Shall say, Floretta emulates the Night,

Spangling her head with stars."

Oft have I met

270

This shining race, when in the TUSCULAN groves
My path no longer glimmered; oft among
Those trees, religious once and always green,
That still dream out their stories of old ROME
Over the ALBAN lake; oft met and hailed,
Where the precipitate ANIO thunders down,
And through the surging mist a poet's house
(So some aver, and who would not believe?) 271
Reveals itself. Yet cannot I forget
Him, who rejoiced me in those walks at eve,
My earliest, pleasantest; who dwells unseen,
And in our northern clime, when all is still,
Nightly keeps watch, nightly in bush or brake
His lonely lamp rekindling. Unlike theirs,
His, if less dazzling, through the darkness knows
No intermission; sending forth its ray

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Through the green leaves, a ray serene and clear As Virtue's own.

32*

FOREIGN TRAVEL.

Ir was in a splenetic humor that I sat me down to my scanty fare at TERRACINA; and how long I should have contemplated the lean thrushes in array before me I cannot say, if a cloud of smoke, that drew the tears into my eyes, had not burst from the green and leafy boughs on the hearth-stone. "Why," I exclaimed, starting up from the table, "why did I leave my own chimney-corner? - But am I not on the road to BRUNDUSIUM? And are not these the very calamities that befell HORACE and VIRGIL, and MACENAS, and PLOTIUS, and VARIUS? HORACE laughed at them.—Then why should not I? HORACE resolved to turn them to account; and VIRGIL cannot we hear him observing that to remember them will, by and by, be a pleasure?" My soliloquy reconciled me at once to my fate; and when for the twentieth time I had looked through the window on a sea sparkling with innumerable brilliants, a sea on which the heroes of the Odyssey and the Æneid had sailed, I sat down as to a splendid banquet. My thrushes had the flavor of ortolans; and I ate with an appetite I had not known before. "Who," I cried, as I poured out my last glass of Falernian (for Falernian it was said to be, and in my eyes it ran bright and clear as a topaz-stone), "who would remain at home, could he do otherwise? Who would submit to tread that dull but daily round, his hours forgotten as soon as spent?" and, opening my journal-book and dipping my pen in my ink-horn, I determined, as far as I could, to justify myself and my countrymen in wandering over the face of the earth. may serve me,” said I, "as a remedy in some future fit of the spleen."

273

"It

Ours is a nation of travellers; 274 and no wonder, when the elements, air, water and fire, attend at our bidding, to transport us from shore to shore; when the ship rushes into the deep, her track the foam as of some mighty torrent; and, in three hours, or less, we stand gazing and gazed at among a foreign people. None want an excuse. If rich, they go to enjoy; if poor, to retrench; if sick, to recover; if studious, to learn; if learned, to relax from their studies. But, whatever they may say and whatever they may believe, they go for the most part on the same errand; nor will those who reflect think that errand an idle one.

Almost all men are over-anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures, so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor; and on they go as their fathers went before them, till, weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood.

Now travel, and foreign travel more particularly, restores to us in a great degree what we have lost. When the anchor is heaved, we double down the leaf; and for a while at least all is over. The old cares are left clustering round the old objects; and, at every step, as we proceed, the slightest circumstance amuses and interests. All is new and strange.275 We surrender ourselves, and feel once again as children. Like them, we enjoy eagerly; like them, when we fret we fret only for the moment; and here, indeed, the resemblance is very remarkable; for, if a journey has its pains as well as its pleasures (and there is nothing unmixed

in this world) the pains are no sooner over than they are forgotten, while the pleasures live long in the memory.

Nor is it surely without another advantage. If life be short, not so to many of us are its days and its hours. When the blood slumbers in the veins, how often do we wish that the earth would turn faster on its axis, that the sun would rise and set before it does! and, to escape from the weight of time, how many follies, how many crimes, are committed! Men rush on danger, and even on death. Intrigue, play, foreign and domestic broil, such are their resources; and, when these things fail, they destroy them

selves.

Now, in travelling we multiply events, and innocently. We set out, as it were, on our adventures; and many are those that occur to us, morning, noon and night. The day we come to a place which we have long heard and read of, and in ITALY we do so continually, it is an era in our lives; and from that moment the very name calls up a picture. How delightfully, too, does the knowledge flow in upon us, and how fast! 276 Would he who sat in a corner of his library, poring over books and maps, learn more or so much in the time as he who, with his eyes and his heart open, is receiving impressions all day long from the things themselves?277 How accurately do they arrange themselves in our memory, towns, rivers, mountains; and in what living colors do we recall the dresses, manners and customs, of the people! Our sight is the noblest of all our senses. fills the mind with the most ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues longest in action without being tired." Our sight is on the alert when we travel; and its exercise is then so delightful that we forget the profit in the pleasure.

"It

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