Beyond Lyons, we met on the road the statue of Louis XIV. going to that city to overawe it with Bourbon memories. It was an equestrian statue, covered up, guarded with soldiers, and looking on that road like some mysterious heap. Don Quixote would have attacked it, and not been thought mad: so much has romance done for us. The natives would infallibly have looked quietly on. There was a riot about it at Lyons, soon after its arrival. I had bought in that city a volume of the songs of Béranger, and I thought to myself, as I met the statue, "I have a little book in my pocket, which will not suffer you to last long." And, surely enough, down it went; for down went King Charles. Statues rise and fall; but, a little on the other side of Lyons, our postilion exclaimed, "Monte Bianco!" and turning round, I beheld, for the first time, Mont Blanc, which had been hidden from us, when near it, by a fog. It looked like a turret in the sky, amber-coloured, golden, belonging to the wall of some ethereal world. This, too, is in our memories for ever,—an addition to our stock,—a light for memory to turn to, when it wishes a beam upon its face. At Paris we could stop but two days, and I had but two thoughts in my head; one of the Revolution, the other of the times of Molière and Boileau. Accordingly I looked about for the Sorbonne, and went to see the place where the guillotine stood; the place where thousands of spirits underwent the last pang of mortality; many guilty, many innocent, but all the victims of a re-action against tyranny, such as will never let tyranny be what it was, unless a convulsion of nature should swallow up knowledge, and make the world begin over again. These are the thoughts that enable us to bear such sights, and that serve to secure what we hope for. Paris, besides being a beautiful city in the quarter that strangers most look to, the Tuileries, Quai de Voltaire, &c., delights the eye of a man of letters by the multitude of its book-stalls. There seemed to be a want of old books; but the new were better than the shoal of Missals and Lives of the Saints that disappoint the lover of duodecimos on the stalls of Italy; and the Rousseaus and Voltaires were endless. I thought, if I were a bachelor, not an Englishman, and had no love for old friends and fields, and no decided religious opinions, I could live very well, for the rest of my life, in a lodging above one of the bookseller's shops on the Quai de Voltaire, where I should look over the water to the Tuileries, and have the Elysian fields in my eye for my evening walk. I liked much what little I saw of the French people. They are accused of vanity; and doubtless they have it, and after a more obvious fashion than other nations; but their vanity, at least, includes the wish to please; other people are necessary to them; they are not wrapped up in themselves; not sulky; not too vain even to tolerate vanity. Their vanity is too much confounded with self-satisfaction. There is a good deal of touchiness, I suspect, among them-a good deal of readymade heat, prepared to fire up in case the little commerce of flattery and sweetness is not properly carried on. But this is better than ill-temper, or than such egotism as is not to be appeased by anything short of subjection. On the other hand, there is more melancholy than one could expect, especially in old faces. Consciences in the south are frightened in their old age, perhaps for nothing. In the north, I suspect, they are frightened earlier, perhaps from equal want of knowledge. The worst in France is (at least, from all that I saw), that fine old faces are rare. There are multitudes of pretty girls; but the faces of both sexes fall off deplorably as they advance in life; which is not a good symptom. Nor do the pretty faces, while they last, appear to contain much depth, or sentiment, or firmness of purpose. They seem made like their toys, not to last, but to break up. Fine faces in Italy are as abundant as cypresses. However, in both countries, the inhabitants appeared to us amiable, as well as intelligent; and without disparagement to the angel faces which you meet with in England, and some of which are perhaps finer than any you see anywhere else, I could not help thinking, that, as a race of females, the countenances both of the French and Italian women announced more pleasantness and reasonableness of intercourse, than those of my fair and serious countrywomen. The Frenchwoman looked as if she wished to please you at any rate, and to be pleased herself. She is too conscious; and her coquetry is said, and 401 I believe with truth, to promise more than an Englishman would easily find her to perform: but at any rate she thinks of you somehow, and is smiling and good-humoured. An Italian woman appears to think of nothing, not even of herself. Existence seems enough for her. But she also is easy of intercourse, smiling when you speak to her, and very unaffected. Now, in simplicity of character the Italian appears to me to have the advantage of the English women, and in pleasantness of intercourse both Italian and French. When I came to England, after a residence of four years abroad, I was grieved at the succession of fair sulky faces which I met in the streets of London. They all appeared to come out of unhappy homes. In truth, our virtues, or our climate, or whatever it is, sit so uneasily upon us, that it is surely worth while for our philosophy to inquire whether, in some points. of moral and political economy, we are not a little mistaken. Gipsies will hardly allow us to lay it to the climate. It was a blessed moment, nevertheless, when we found ourselves among those dear sulky faces, the country women of dearer ones, not sulky. We set out from Calais in the steamboat, which carried us to London, energetically trembling all the way under us, as if its burning body partook of the fervour of our desire; [arriving on the 14th of October.] Here (thought we), in the neighbourhood of London, we are; and may we never be without our old fields again in this world, or the old "familiar faces" in this world or in the next.. CHAPTER XXIII. AT HOME IN ENGLAND. Ox returning to England, we lived a while at Highgate, whereI took possession of my old English scenery and my favourite haunts, with a delight proportionate to the difference of their beauty from that of beautiful Italy. For a true lover of nature does not require the contrast of good and bad in order to be delighted; he is better pleased with harmonious variety. He is content to wander from beauty to beauty, not losing his 26 love for the one because he loves the other. A variation on a fine theme of music is better still than a good song after a bad one. It retains none of the bitterness of fault-finding. I used to think in Italy that I was tired of vines and olives, and the sharp outlines of things against indigo skies; and so I was; but it was from old love, and not from new hatred. I humoured my dislike because I knew it was ill-founded. I always loved the scenery at heart, as the cousin-german of all other lovely scenery, especially of that which delighted me in books. But in England I was at home; and in English scenery I found my old friend "pastoral" still more pastoral. It was like a breakfast of milk and cream after yesterday's wine. The word itself was more verified: for pastoral comes from pasture; it implies cattle feeding, rather than vines growing, or even goats browsing on their tops; and here they were in plenty, very different from the stall-fed and rarely seen cattle of Tuscany. The country around was almost all pasture; and beloved Hampstead was near, with home in its churchyard as well as in its meadows. Again I wandered with transport through "Each alley green, And every bosky bourn from side to side,— Only for "bosky bourn" you must read the ponds in which Shelley used to sail his boats, and very little brooks unknown to all but the eyes of their lovers. The walk across the fields from Highgate to Hampstead, with ponds on one side, and Caen Wood on the other, used to be (and I hope is still, for I have not seen it for some years) one of the prettiest of England. Poets' (vulgarly called Millfield) Lane crossed it on the side next Highgate, at the foot of a beautiful slope, which in June was covered with daisies and buttercups; and at the other end it descended charmingly into the Vale of Health, out of which rose the highest ground in Hampstead. It was in this spot, and in relation to it and about this time (if I may quote my own verses in illustration of what I felt), that I wrote some lines to "Gipsy June," apostrophizing that brown and happy month on the delights which I found again in my native country, and on the wrongs done him by the pretension of the month of May. "May, the jade, with her fresh cheek, As the luxury seems the best,- While its perfume breathes all over, "Oh! could I walk round the earth June and no variety, Loitering here, and living there, With a book and frugal fare, With a finer gipsy time, And a cuckoo in the clime, Work at morn and mirth at noon, And sleep beneath the sacred moon." No offence, nevertheless, as John Buncle would have said, to the "stationary domesticities." For fancy takes old habits along with it in new shapes; domesticity itself can travel; and I never desired any better heaven, in this world or the next, than the old earth of my acquaintance put in its finest condition, my own nature being improved, of course, along with it. I have often envied the household waggon that one meets with in sequestered lanes-a cottage on wheels-moving whithersoever it pleases, and halting for as long a time as may suit it. So, at least, one fancies; ignoring all about parish objections, inconvenient neighbourhoods, and want of |