pelled to live with him; and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions: and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping); and instantly I awoke: it was broad noon; and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside; come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces. garden gate; and immediately I saw upon the left a scene far different; but which yet the power of dreams had reconciled into harmony with the other. The scene was an Oriental one; and there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early in the morning. And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city-an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of Jerusalem. And not a bowshot from me, upon a stone, and shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman; and I looked; and it was-Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly; and I said to her at length: "So then I have found you at last.” I waited, but she answered me not a word. Her face was the same as when I saw it last, and yet again how different! Seventeen years ago, when the lamplight fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not polluted), her eyes were streaming with tears: the tears were now wiped away; she seemed more beautiful than she was at that time, but in all other points the same, and not older. Her looks were tranquil, but with unusual solemnity of expression; and I now gazed upon her with some awe, but suddenly her countenance grew dim, and, turning to the mountains, I perceived vapours rolling between us; in a moment all had vanished; thick darkness came on; and, in the twinkling of an eye, I was far away from mountains, and by lamplight in Oxford Street, walking again with Ann-just as we walked seventeen years before, when we were both children. As a final specimen, I cite one of a different character. I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May, that it was Easter Sunday, and as yet very early in the morning. I was standing, as it seemed to me, at the door of my own cottage. Right before me lay the very scene which could really be commanded from that situation, but exalted, as was usual, and solemnized by the power of dreams. There were the same mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but the mountains were raised to more than Alpine height, and there was interspace far larger between them of meadows and forest lawns; the hedges were rich with The dream commenced with a music which white roses; and no living creature was to be now I often hear in dreams-a music of preseen, excepting that in the green churchyard paration and of awakening suspense; a music there were cattle tranquilly reposing upon the like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, verdant graves, and particularly round about and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast the grave of a child whom I had tenderly loved, inarch-of infinite cavalcades filing off-and just as I had really beheld them, a little before the tread of innumerable armies. The mornSunrise in the same summer, when that child ing was come of a mighty day-a day of crisis died. I gazed upon the well-known scene, and of final hope for human nature, then sufand I said aloud (as I thought) to myself, "It fering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring yet wants much of sunrise; and it is Easter in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew Sunday; and that is the day on which they not where somehow, I knew not how-by celebrate the first-fruits of resurrection. I some beings, I knew not whom-a battle, a will walk abroad; old griefs shall be forgotten strife, an agony, was conducting,—was evolvto-day; for the air is cool and still, and the ing like a great drama, or piece of music; with hills are high, and stretch away to heaven; which my sympathy was the more insupportand the forest-glades are as quiet as the church-able from my confusion as to its place, its yard; and, with the dew, I can wash the fever from my forehead, and then I shall be unhappy no longer." And I turned, as if to open the I, as cause, its nature, and its possible issue. had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake; some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro: trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad: darkness and lights: tempest and human faces: and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed --and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then-everlasting farewells! and with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated -everlasting farewells! and again, and yet, again reverberated--everlasting farewells! And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud"I will sleep no more!"-Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. THE WORTH OF HOURS. BY LORD HOUGHTON. Believe not that your inner eye For every man's weak self, alas! But if in earnest care you would Mete out to each its part of good, Trust rather to your after-mood. Those surely are not fairly spent, And more, though free from seeming harm, If then a painful sense comes on Of something from your being's chain Upon your heart this truth may rise,- So should we live, that every hour That every thought and every deed FANCIES ON A TEA-CUP. BY THOMAS HOOD. I love to pore over old china-and to speenlate, from the images, on Cathay. I can faney that the Chinese manners betray themselves, like the drunkard's, in their cups. How quaintly pranked and patterned is their vessel!-exquisitely outlandish, yet not har barian. How daintily transparent! It should be no vulgar earth that produces that superlative ware, nor does it so seem in the ena melled landscape. There are beautiful birds; there, rich flowers and gorgeous butterflies, and a delicate clime, if we may credit the porcelain. There be also horrible monsters, dragons, with us obsolete and reckoned fabulous; the main breed, doubtless, having followed Fohi (our Noah) in his wanderings thither from the Mount Ararat. But how does that impeach the loveliness of Cathay? There are such creatures even in Fairy-land. I long often to loiter in those romantic para dises-studded with pretty temples, holiday pleasure-grounds-the true Tea-Gardens. I like those meandering waters, and the abounding little islands. And here is a Chinese nurse-maid, Ho-Fi, chiding a fretful little Pekin child. The urchin hath just such another toy, at the end of a string, as might be purchased at our own Mr. Dunnett's. It argues an advanced state of civilization where the children have many playthings; and the Chinese infants, witness their flying fishes and whirligigs, sold by the stray natives about our streets, are far gone in such juvenile luxuries. But here is a better token. The Chinese are a polite people; for they do not make household, much less husbandry drudges, of You may read the women's for their wives. tune in their tea-cups. In nine cases of ten, the female is busy only in the lady-like toils of the toilette. Lo! here, how sedulously the blooming Hyson is pencilling the mortal arches and curving the crossbows of her eyebrows. A musical instrument, her secondary engagement, is at her almost invisible feet. Are such little extremities likely to be tasked with laborious offices? Marry, in kicking they must be ludicrously impotent; but then she hath a formidable growth of nails. By her side the obsequious Hum is pouring his soft flatteries into her ear. When she walketh abroad (here it is on another sample) he shadeth her at two miles off with his umbrella. It is like an allegory of love triumphing over space. The lady is walking upon one of those frequent pretty islets, on a plain as if of porcelain, without any herbage, only a solitary flower springs up, seemingly by enchantment, at her fairy-like foot. The watery space between the lovers is aptly left as a blank, excepting her adorable shadow, which is tending towards her slave. How reverentially is yon urchin presenting his flowers to the Gray-beard! So honourably is age considered in China! There would be some sense, there, in birth-day celebrations. Here, in another compartment, is a solitary cholar, apparently studying the elaborate didactics of Con-Fuse-Ye. The Chinese have, verily, the advantage of us upon earthen-ware! They trace themselves as lovers, contemplatists, philosophers: whereas, to judge from our jugs and mugs, we are nothing but sheepish piping shepherds and fox-hunters. THE FAINT-HEARTED LOVER. Why so pale and wan, fond lover? Prithee why so pale? Will, when looking well can't move her, Looking ill prevail? Prithee why so pale? Why so dull and mute, young sinner? Will, when speaking well can't win her, Quit, quit, for shame; this will not move, If of herself she will not love, Nothing can make her: The devil take her. SIR JOHN SUCKLING (1638). REVERSES. The evening of Thursday, the 15th of February, 1827, was one of the most delightful I ever remember to have spent. I was alone; my heart beat lightly; my pulse was quickened by the exercise of the morning; my blood flowed freely through my veins, as meeting with no checks or impediments to its current; and my spirits were elated by a multitude of happy remembrances and of brilliant hopes. My apartments looked delightfully comfortable, and what signified to me the inclemency of the weather without. The rain was pattering upon the sky-light of the staircase; the sharp east wind was moaning angrily in the chimney; but as my eye glanced from the cheerful blaze of the fire to the ample folds of my closed window curtains-as the hearth-rug yielded to the pressure of my foot, while beating time to my own music, I sung, in rather a louder tone than usual, my favourite air of "Judy O'Flannigan;"-the whistling of the wind and the pattering of the rain only served to enhance, in my estimation, the comforts of my home, and inspire a livelier sense of the good fortune which had delivered me from any evening engagements. Men-married men-may expatiate if they will, in good published sentences, on the delights of their firesides, and the gay cheerfulness of their family circles; but I do not hesitate to affirm that we, in our state of single blessedness, possess not only all the sweets of our condition, but derive more solid advantages from matrimony itself than any of these solemn eulogists of their own happiness can dare to pretend to derive from it. We have their dinners, without the expense of them; we have their parties, without the fatigue of those interminable domestic discussions which are inseparable from the preliminary arrangements; we share the gay and joyous summer of their homes when they are illuminated for company, and escape the intervening winter of darkness and economy; and having participated in the sunny calm, the halcyon hours of the establishment, we depart before the unreal and transitory delusion is dispersed, and leave the husband to contemplate the less brilliant changes of the lady's countenance and temper, and to maintain a single combat against the boisterous perversities of her offspring. No man can be really chez soi-can be in the full enjoyment of all the accommodation afforded by his own house, and fireside, and furniture, and presume to exercise the right of a master over them, unless he be independent of the fetters of wedlock. No man, I repeat it, can be in the entire enjoy ment of life unless he be a young, unmarried man, with an attached elderly valet to wait upon him,—I am so thoroughly persuaded of this fact, that nothing on earth but my love for you, Maria, could persuade me to relinquish "my unhoused, free condition." Nothing but my adoration of such a union of various beauties, and almost incongruous mental accomplishments, could have induced me to abandon my present state of luxurious independence; but, under my peculiar and most favoured circumstances, I only pass from a lower to a higher degree of happiness: True, the idle, the downy, the somewhat ignominious gratifications of celibacy are sacrificed; but they are exchanged for the pure and dignified enjoyment of labouring to secure an angel's happiness, beneath the cheering influence of her exhilarating smiles. I thrust my hands into the pockets of my dressing gown, which, by-the-by, is far the handsomest piece of old brocade I have ever seen—a large running pattern of gold holly hocks, with silver stalks and leaves, upon a rich, deep, Pampadour-coloured ground and walking slowly backwards and forwards in my room, I continued "There never was, there never can have been, so happy a fellow as my self! What on earth have I to wish for more? Maria adores me-I adore Maria. To be sure, she's detained at Brighton; but I hear from her regularly every morning by the post, and we are to be united for life in a fortnight. Who was ever so blessed in his love? Then again John Fraser-my old school-fellow! I don't believe there's anything in the world he would not do for me. I'm sure there's no living thing that he loves so much as myself, except perhaps his old uncle Simon, and his black mare. I had by this time returned to the fireplace, and reseating myself, began to apostrophize my magnificent black Newfoundland, who, having partaken of my dinner, was following the advice and example of Abernethy, and sleeping on the rug as it digested-" And you too, my old Neptune, aren't you the best and handsomest dog in the universe?" Neptune finding himself addressed, awoke leisurely from his slumbers, and fixed his eyes on mine with an affirmative expression. "Ay, to be sure you are; and a capital swimmer too." Neptune raised his head from the rug, and beat the ground with his tail, first to the right hand and then to the left. "And is he not a fine faithful fellow? And does he not love his master?" Neptune rubbed his head against my hand, and concluded the conversation by again sinking into repose. "He That dog's a philosopher," I said. never says a word more than is necessary. Then, again, not only blessed in love and friendship, and my dog; but what luck it was to sell, and in these times too, that old lumbering house of my father's, with its bleak, bare, hilly acres of chalk and stone, for eighty thousand pounds, and to have the money paid down on the very day the bargain was concluded. By-the-by, though, I had forgot: 1 may as well write to Messrs. Drax and Drayton about that money, and order them to pay it immediately in to Coutts's,-mighty honest people and all that: but faith, no solicitors should be trusted or tempted too far. It's a foolish way, at any time, to leave money in other people's hands-in anybody's handsand I'll write about it at once." As I said, so I did. I wrote my commands to Messrs. Drax and Drayton to pay my eighty thousand pounds into Coutts's; and after de siring that my note might be forwarded to them the first thing in the morning, I took my candle, and accompanied by Neptune, who al ways keeps watch by night at my chamber door, proceeded to bed, as the watchman was calling 'past twelve o'clock," beneath my window. It is indisputably very beneficial for a man to go to bed thus early; it secures him such pleasant dreams. The visions that filled my imagination during sleep were not of a les animated nature than those of my waking lucubrations. I dreamed that it was daybreak on my wedding morning; that I was dressed in white satin and silver lace, to go and be married; that Maria, seated in a richly painted and gilt sedan chair, was conveyed to the church by the parson and clerk, who were white favours in their wigs, and large nosegays in the breasts of their canonicals; that hands were joined by Hymen in person, who shook his torch over our heads at the altar, and danced a pas de deux with the bride down the middle of Regent Street, as we returned in procession from St. James's; that I walked by the side of Neptune, who was, in some unaccountable manner, identified with my friend John Fraser, and acted as father of the bride, and alarmed me in the midst of the ceremony by whispering in my ear that he had forgotten to order any breakfast for the party; that on returning to my house, which appeared to be the pavilion at Brighton, I found a quantity of money bags, full of sovereigns, each marked | priated it to himself; and never took the ordi£80,000, ranged in rows on a marble table; nary measure of leaving me a memorandum of that I was beginning to empty them at the the transaction! Why, sir, I might have drawn feet of the bride with an appropriate compli- a bill this very morning-many things less ment-when my dream was suddenly inter- improbable occur-and might have had my rupted by the hasty entrance of my valet, who draft refused acceptance!" stood pale and trembling by my bedside, and informed me, with an agitated voice, that he had carried my note, as ordered, to the office of Messrs. Drax and Drayton, the first thing in the morning, and he had seen Mr. Drax; but that Mr. Drayton had decamped during the night, taking away with him my £80,000 and £500 of his partner's. I was horror-struck!-I was ruined!-what was to be done? The clock had not yet struck ten, but, early as it was, I was determined to rise immediately, and see Drax myself upon the subject. In an instant-in less than an hour-I was dressed, and on my way to Lincoln's Inn. Twenty minues after, I stood in the presence of Mr. Drax. He appeared before me, among the last of the pig-tails, with his powdered head, his smooth black silk stockings, and his polished shoes, the very same immutable Mr. Drax whom I had remembered as a quiz from the earliest days of my childhood. There he stood, in the same attitude, in the same dress, the same man of respectability, calculation, and arrangement, that my father had always represented to me as the model of an attorney, but with a look of bewildered paleness, as placed suddenly in a situation where his respectability became doubtful, his calculations defeated, and all his arrangements discomposed. "Oh, Mr. Luttrell!" he exclaimed, "I beg pardon, Mr. Lionel Luttrell, you've received intimation, then, of this most extraordinary Occurrence; what will the world think?what will they say? The house of Drax and Drayton! Such a long-established, such a respectable house!-and one of the partnersMr. Drayton, I mean-to abscond!" "Ay, Mr. Drax, but think of my eighty thousand pounds!" A "Went away, sir, without leaving the slightest instruction where he might be met with, or where his letters might be sent after him! most extraordinary proceeding!" "You'll drive me mad, Mr. Drax. Let me implore you to inform me what's to be done about my money?" "Your money, Mr. Lionel Luttrell?-here has the same party taken off with him £500 of the common property of the house; all the loose cash we had in our banker's hands; drew a draught for the whole amount; appro "Oh, Mr. Drax, this torture will be the death of me. Sir-sir-I'm ruined, and I'm going to be married!" "A most unfortunate event. But, Mr. Luttrell, you gay young men of fashion at the west end cannot possibly enter into the feelings of a partner and a man of business. My situation Incapable of listening any longer to the lamentations of Mr. Drax, and perceiving that he was too much engrossed by the perplexities of his own affairs to yield any attention to my distresses, I seized my hat and hastily departed, to seek elsewhere for the advice and consolation I required. "I'll go to John Fraser," I exclaimed; "he's always sensible, always right, always kind. He'll feel for me, at all events; he'll suggest what steps are best to be taken in this most painful emergency.' Upon this determination I immediately proceeded to act, and hastened toward Regent Street with the rapidity of one who feels impatient of every second that clapses between the conception and the execution of his purpose. As I was pressing forward on my hurried way, my thoughts absorbed in the anxiety of the moment, and my sight dazzled by the rapidity of my movements, and the confused succession of the passing objects, I was checked in my course by Edward Burrell-the Pet of the Dandies-"Stop, Lionel, my dear fellow, stop. I want to congratulate you." "Congratulate me! Upon what?" "On your appointment: Inspecting Postman for the district of St. Ann's, Soho:-of course you're he-none but personages of such elevated station could be justified in using such velocity of movement, and in running over so many innocent foot passengers." 64 Nonsense! Don't stop me! I've just heard of the greatest imaginable misfortune. Drayton, my attorney, has decamped, Heaven only knows to what country, and carried off the whole of my fortune." "Oh! indeed! So you're one upon the innumerable list of bankrupts! A failure! a complete failure! Don't be angry, Lionel; I always said you were rather a failure. And so now the attorney-man-what's his name?-has absconded and ruined you for life by his successful speculations in hops." |