[I DID not think it probable that I should have a great many more talks with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much as I could into every conversation.That is the reason why you will find some odd, miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to tell at least once, as I should not have a chance to tell them habitually at our breakfast-table.- We're very free and easy, you know; we don't read what we don't like.Our parish is so large, one can't pretend to preach to all the pews at once.One can't be all the time trying to do the best of one's best if a company works a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn't be straining themselves all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff.Let them wash some of those lower-story windows a little.Besides, there is no use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get through this paper.]
- Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels.I am thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy.Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.I can prove some facts about travelling by a story or two.There are certain principles to be assumed, - such as these:- He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.- To-day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution.A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr.Gould's private planets.- Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.- Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home, -which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than increased vitality.There was a story about "strahps to your pahnts," which was vastly funny to us fellows - on the road from Milan to Venice.- CAELUM, NON ANIMUM, - travellers change their guineas, but not their characters.The bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon Street.- Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for "establishing raws" upon each other.- A man shall sit down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the question they had been talking about under "the great elm,"and forget all about Egypt.When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another that his argument was ABSURD; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase "reductio ad absurdum;" the rest badgering him as a conversational bully.
Mighty little we troubled ourselves for PADUS, the Po, "a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!
- Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or annexed, or implied.
Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in UNDRESS often affects us more than one in full costume.
"Is this the mighty ocean? - is this all?"says the Princess in Gebir.The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come.But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle - ALTAMAENIA ROMAE - rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.
I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St.Etienne du Mont.The tomb of St.Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace.These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls.It told how this church of St.Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of the parish (FILLES DE LA PAROISSE) fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured.Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum.(Look at Carlyle's article on Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but these two "filles de la paroisse," - gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on that day.
Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle, reach us most nearly.I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant from that day forward.I have forgotten the famous bears, and all else.- I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick, - the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle, - and why? Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water, - which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life.
