Ils ont trouvé le berceau du Messie, Rougis de lui, vain et superbe monde : D' Emannuel meconnois la beauté : C'est dans l'exces, de cette humilité Que son amour, pour nous pecheurs, abonde. Luis dans nos coeurs, Etoile matiniere Repands sur nous la lumiere des cieux. Precede nous, au chemin glorieux Que le Seigneur a tenu sur la terre. Translation. O what soft beam is this so fair, In eastern heavens new and bright; Never so beautiful a star Pierc'd the sombrous veil of night. Behold her beckon and allure, And point to Bethlem's sainted wall, Guiding the faithful watchers sure, That wait the hope of Israel. They found him; to his leafy bed With agitated love they stept; Where swaddled mean, rude swains amid, His chaste and holy beauties name, Reddens the world with bitter blush; But where he stoops to woe and shame, The full streams of his kindness gush. B Lumine our breast, bright dawn of faith, The God Man glorified below. On coming in somewhere to dinner in one of the centre counties, I was not ill pleased to find a talkative, well intentioned sort of man haranguing the company about Mr. Owen's plans, deprecating the absence of religious motive in them, but affirming that he put many Christians to shame with benevolence. It is pleasant on a journey to recognise any trace of pious reflection; but this is the last that I remember to have lighted upon till I arrived at London. In England, Wales, and Ireland, it is common for the younger branches of the population to run after the carriages of travellers for the purpose of handing in nosegays; to tumble also, and play antics for money, and on the whole, fairly to enter upon the roll of mendicity. This is not frequent in North Britain; indeed I cannot charge my memory with having seen it practised north of the Tweed. I hope our peasantry would consider such conduct as having a degrading tendency, and keep out of it as long as they can; although I am in terror about the generation of all such modes and propensities, by the continued prevalence of compulsory assessments for the poor, notwithstanding all that Dr. Chalmers has both said and done upon the subject. While ascending a hill, a squinting urchin, a little boy in girl's clothes, cried out to somebody on the top of the coach in the Lancashire dialect, that if he would "gie him a haupenny, he would both pretche and seeng;" but as his demand was not complied with, I did not see the result. When we arrived at the Inn, somewhere in the evening, no one can relate the confusion and tiresomeness of this caravansera, and its congeries of mailcoach wayfaring folks. Tongue cannot tell the troubles incident to our getting the luggage first out of the coach, then into the lobby, and lastly up stairs: nor the difficulties which detained tea and muffins for an hour in travelling from the lower regions. Many a one has obtained a seat in parliament with less personal ado, than I had in procuring a bed that night: for the principal chambermaid seemed to be in a most crabbed, and even ferocious temper, and I was glad at last to escape up stairs to bed-room, number something, within No. something else, out of the tyrannical maiden's tongue, who was rating the waiters severely, and explaining to her master that so and so was not chambermaid's duty; as for her she shan't do so and so; those that had a right to do such and such things might do them when they chose, &c. &c. Such stormy altercations pervading the common life of the British isles, made me, upon arriving at the Continent, the more to admire the su perior cultivation of our courteous neighbours across the channel and it seems as it were morally impossible that the rudeness of an English mail-coach station, could ever have place in the polished realm of France. Travel ten miles in almost any part of it, and you have seen every inch of England. Rich green fields, exuberance of wood, old high trees, and cottages clad with roses. I never know the difference of one place in that country from another. There is scarcely what we Scots would call "a kenspeckle station" in all South Britain: that is, a mansion, a height, a reach of lake or river, that is unique, and is instantly felt by its deep features, and characteristic impress, as distinct from every other in the Empire. The soft beauties of Cruikston in Renfrewshire, can never be mistaken by the traveller for the frowning terrors of Castle Campbell: nor the cheerful aspect of the Gare-loch, for the solitary wilds of Kenlochleven, in whose awful retreats the outlaw Alan Breck, sheltered himself after having shot Campbell of Glenure in the wood of Appin. Nothing flattens and depresses me like journeying over a plain monotonous level. The want of the charming variation of scene, the mountain of unwonted form, seems to a Scotsman like the loss of all. Perhaps it will be thought affectation or weakness, when I confess that much as I admire cultivated scenery, I am ever oppressed in travelling through England, with sensa tions of dejection and gloom, which I find difficult to throw off. I am continually inclined to exclaim internally, "O that I could but enjoy for one quarter of an hour, the azure sky reflected from the surface of some lake; or just get up to a hill top, to breathe heaven's breeze out of the horrible ennui of these endless trees, and perpetual hay crops !" But even from the heights of Harrow or Richmond, the dead green gloom of the surrounding world of wood and plain, is appalling to the spirits, compared with the serene but animating delights of the vast and verdant mountain side, sloping upwards to the placid sky; fringed towards the base with oaken and birchen copses, and all sparkling with the rays of the setting sun. Nevertheless I may well suspect that this shrinking from the beauties of England must be owing to some physical perversion in my own system, as that land cannot fail to be of preeminent loveliness, whose features Cowper and Thomson both appreciated and sang. Leaving this to be settled at the pleasure, or the experience of the reader, I proceed to draw near to the metropolis, as I do not remember being struck with any thing else, except with the country north of Birmingham, which might in one place be designated, the region of the ten thousand furnaces; which has a forlorn look of desolation and wretchedness in day light, but at night must no doubt assume an aspect of great conflagrant magnificence. B* |