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Untitled Article
vale ?—ajncl Hampton Court , with its stately avenue ?—and Hampstead , with its breezy heath ?—and Woodford , with its tangled glades ?—and the wooded hills of Surrey ? All this , and much more , is in London , —4 n it more truly than ever the people were in the House of Commons , or will be even under the
amended representation of the Reform Bill . It is but an hour or two , and then you are in country , real country , free of all city sights aud sounds , —alone in green pasture or bowery lane , or on a sunny hill-side looking down on the reapers in a cornfield , or in the shade of a village church thinking it a strangeness and a pity that Gray did not leave it you for to write the < Elegy /
The best scenery is but suggestive . The enjoyment of it arises , not from what it is in itself , but from what it excites in the mind . Its power is simply in calling up rich trains of associations in the spectator ; and he whose mind is well stored and well exercised needs never be destitute of the external , material , suggestive object , not through the dreariest days of a London autumn . Was not the best descriptive poem of modern days , the most rustically
poetical and pictorially faithful , written on a Sofa ? Those thronging passengers , and the very coaches and steam-boats to which they are hurrying , excite a vivid picture of all the loveliness on which they are eager to gaze , and surround the imagination in a moment with a peristrephic panorama . ' A boat for the James Watt ! ' Yes , happy soul , you will see the sun rise to-morrow blazing through the time-cleft walls of Bamborough
Castle ; and glittering white in its beams will be the Percy pillar on the Cheviot hills ; and Holy Isle below will be the vignette of the volume that is before you : and you shall come to Wolf ' s Craig and St . Abb's Head , and the Bass and North Berwick Law shall be to you no pillars of fiercules ; but on shall you go till the setting sun sinks lingeringly from the loveliest of cities , and Arthur's lion slumbers in the twilight . You shall see them
then ; I see them now . And there drives a stage that , in twelve hours , will be deep in the depths of the New Forest , and dark in its shadows ; the billowy tree-tops of that infinite green ocean will be heaving around , and the scattered light will be playing more fantastically and gracefully among the stems and leaves than ever it did amid the pillars of the coral caves . Yon ' bit of bunting / as Canning insolently called it , the striped and starry
banner that floats from a mast in the river , unabashed by the royal standard near , —O ! that is a flag under which fancy has already crossed the Atlantic ; it has made visible the majesty of the Hudson , and audible the thunders of Niagara . And there he goes : the very Egyptian boy who last night sang to me the strain of the Muezzin , when from the rpinaret be calls to prayer , till every mosque ia Cairo was distinctly visible . Old Father Nile ;
Untitled Article
JM 6 Autumn in London .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1832, page 666, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1822/page/18/
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