A CAMPAIGNER AT HOME.

ROS

I.

LABURNUM LODGE.

OSE'S cottage was nearly as sweet and dainty as its mistress.

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells:
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear
The windy clanging of the Minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies

A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream,
That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar,
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,

Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge
Crown'd with the Minster towers.

Now, that is precisely the sort of place which suits me. I am not a recluse. I could never live alone on the top of a column, except in a posthumous way, worked

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in bronze or marble. I don't like solitude—at least all the year round I should prefer the solitude of a crowd to the solitude of the desert. My faculties are apt to get rusty when they are left to air in the fields too long. The earliest days of a country life are very well; but after a bit the first wonderful green fades out of the leaves; the noises of the woodland are no more noticed than the noise in the Strand; the thrush loses its voice; the sun rises later and later every day, so that it is often mid-day before we sit down to breakfast. I know that there are many men whose minds are keener and more elastic; with whom familiarity does not breed contempt; whose exquisitely delicate appreciation is never blunted; to whose eyes Nature never ceases to disclose her earliest virginal bloom. man like Charles St. John could live all his days in a marsh or on a sandbank, and never feel that the hours had leaden feet. The architecture of a common sparrow's nest was as wonderful in his eyes as the architecture of St. Peter's; and the print which a passing wild bird had left upon the sand opened as wide a field of conjecture and inquiry as the footprint in 'Robinson Crusoe.' Weary of the country indeed! Were there not the ever-changing seasons-winter, spring, summer, autumn? Could he not watch the birth of the wild flowers, and the yellowing of the leaf? Did not all sorts of creatures lay strangely pictured and gorgeously-adorned eggs, from grubs and caterpillars up to ospreys and golden eagles? Could he not listen to the call of the partridge, or of the lap

wing, or of the corn-crake o' June nights, to the beat of the mallard's or the widgeon's wings when the October twilight was falling, to the trumpet call of the hooper when the land was white with snow, and the chaste moon high in the silent heaven? But then the naturalist's sense, like the poet's, must be born with him; no amount of education will enable you to see if Nature has not given you eyes; and that fine faculty of observation which St. John, and White of Selborne, and Izaak Walton, and a few of our minor earlier poets seem to have had, is a gift—very admirable, but very rare; and none the less admirable or rare because the common people (I do not mean the lower classes, but people who are not uncommon) will insist on believing that it is neither the one nor the other. The life which these men live is, I think, a beautiful life-pure, pious, and happy; it is the nearest approach that remains to the ideal Arcadian life; for it is calm, without being stagnant; active and manly, and yet not simply physical; and tender, without being vulgar or gross, like the tenderness of real shepherds and shepherdesses. But then to be able to live this rustic saintly life, it is needful not only to have been born with some of the faculties of the saints, but to have dwelt apart from the congregation of sinners. As for myself, I have mixed in the great game. The poison is in my veins. The habits of birds are very well in their way; but, after all, the proper study of mankind is man.' I must be able to meet and mix with human beings when I choose; to feel the stir and

throng of the crowd; to keep within sight of the council-hall and the market-place. In this way only can a weak and sinful mortal preserve, undefiled and undimmed, his devotion to the moon, and the stars, and the running brooks, and the purple moorland, and the windy bents. I fancy sometimes that nature was intended to serve chiefly as a background. In the front we have the fights of heroes; behind us rise the passes of Thermopyla, and the hills that hem in Marathon.

O nostra mente cupida e superba!

But though sorrowfully aware that the simple monastic life of the pure lover of nature is beyond my reach, I would not willingly set up my tent in the dusty high road. I do not like the town cross either of a village or of a city. It is not good for us to see overmuch of our fellow-creatures. 'A fellowcreature, indeed; why a bug might as well call you its bedfellow.' The pithy and sinewy contempt which Cobbett could express in such sterling English was learned, I supposed, at the plough. People who live in villages, in fact, always quarrel. I don't wonder that they do. They see so much of each other, and so little of the rest of the world. They are continually running against their neighbour in the street, and tramping on their neighbour's corns. I have thus a great horror of villages. The necessity of nodding to, or Good-day'-ing, every second man you meet, keeps you in a state of incessant irritation. The tyranny of small and familiar things is the worst of tyrannies;

and it becomes insufferable when you are jammed into a corner, where every living being, from the parish constable to the apothecary, knows you by head-mark.

You will understand by this time why it is that I care to dwell neither in the country nor in the town. And happier than mortals commonly are in the accomplishment of their desires, I have found a sort of nook that is neither the one thing nor the other -like a mermaid, or a centaur, or the faun of Praxiteles and Mr. Hawthorne, or Her Majesty's present Administration, excepting always my Lord Palmerston, who, they tell me, is a pure Tory, and has nothing of the hybrid in him. Such a nook have I found, and, grateful to Heaven, who has anchored me in a quiet harbour at last, I christen it, 'Rest and be thankful.' This was how I found it :—

I have been knocking about the world in a casual and incidental way for the last thirty or forty years. I have made acquaintance with all sorts of things and people-Choctaws, Yankee editors, gorillas, and other miscellaneous members of the human family. I believe that I have visited the seven wonders of the world, though I am not sure that I could enumerate them at the present moment. I have been at the bottom of the great Geyser, and at the top of St. Peter's. I was blessed by the Pope, and narrowly escaped being eaten among the Fans by their Chancellor of the Exchequer. I have ridden along the Chinese wall-the wilderness on one hand, the oldest and strangest civilisation of the world on the other. I