Pencillings by the Way Part 4

I wrote to you after my pilgrimage to the tomb of Was.h.i.+ngton. It was almost the only object of natural or historical interest in our own country that I had not visited, and that seen, I made all haste back to embark, in pursuance of my plans of travel, for Europe. At Philadelphia I found a first-rate merchant-brig, the Pacific, on the eve of sailing for Havre. She was nearly new, and had a French captain, and no pa.s.sengers--three very essential circ.u.mstances to my taste--and I took a berth in her without hesitation. The next day she fell down the river, and on the succeeding morning I followed her with the captain in the steamboat.

Some ten or fifteen vessels, bound on different voyages, lay in the roads waiting for the pilot boat; and, as she came down the river, they all weighed anchor together and we got under way. It was a beautiful sight--so many sail in close company under a smart breeze, and I stood on the quarter-deck and watched them in a mood of mingled happiness and sadness till we reached the Capes. There was much to elevate and much to depress me. The dream of my lifetime was about to be realized. I was bound to France; and those fair Italian cities, with their world of a.s.sociation and interest were within the limit of a voyage; and all that one looks to for happiness in change of scene, and all that I had been pa.s.sionately wis.h.i.+ng and imagining since I could dream a day-dream or read a book, was before me with a visible certainty; but my home was receding rapidly, perhaps for years, and the chances of death and adversity in my absence crowded upon my mind--and I had left friends--(many--many--as dear to me, any one of them, as the whole sum of my coming enjoyment), whom a thousand possible accidents might remove or estrange; and I scarce knew whether I was more happy or sad.

We made Cape Henlopen about sundown, and all shortened sail and came to. The little boat pa.s.sed from one to another, taking off the pilots, and in a few minutes every sail was spread again, and away they went with a das.h.i.+ng breeze, some on one course some on another, leaving us in less than an hour, apparently alone on the sea. By this time the clouds had grown black, the wind had strengthened into a gale, with fits of rain; and as the order was given to "close-reef the top-sails," I took a last look at Cape Henlopen, just visible in the far edge of the horizon, and went below.

OCT. 18.--It is a day to make one in love with life. The remains of the long storm, before which we have been driven for a week, lie, in white, turreted ma.s.ses around the horizon, the sky overhead is spotlessly blue, the sun is warm, the wind steady and fresh, but soft as a child's breath, and the sea--I must sketch it to you more elaborately. We are in the Gulf Stream. The water here as you know, even to the cold banks of Newfoundland, is always blood warm, and the temperature of the air mild at all seasons, and, just now, like a south wind on land in June. Hundreds of sea birds are sailing around us--the spongy sea-weeds, washed from the West Indian rocks, a thousand miles away in the southern lat.i.tudes, float by in large ma.s.ses--the sailors, barefoot and bareheaded, are scattered over the rigging, doing "fair-weather work"--and just in the edge of the horizon, hidden by every swell, stand two vessels with all sail spread, making, with the first fair wind they have had for many days, for America.

This is the first day that I have been able to be long enough on deck to study the sea. Even were it not, however, there has been a constant and chilly rain which would have prevented me from enjoying its grandeur, so that I am reconciled to my unusually severe sickness. I came on deck this morning and looked around, and for an hour or two I could scarce realize that it was not a dream. Much as I had watched the sea from our bold promontory at Nahant, and well as I thought I knew its character in storms and calms, the scene which was before me surprized and bewildered me utterly. At the first glance, we were just in the gorge of the sea; and, looking over the leeward quarter, I saw, stretching up from the keel, what I can only describe as a hill of dazzling blue, thirty or forty feet in real alt.i.tude, but sloped so far away that the white crest seemed to me a cloud, and the s.p.a.ce between a sky of the most wonderful beauty and brightness. A moment more, and the crest burst over with a splendid volume of foam; the sun struck through the thinner part of the swell in a line of vivid emerald, and the whole ma.s.s swept under us, the brig rising and riding on the summit with the buoyancy and grace of a bird.

The single view of the ocean which I got at that moment, will be impressed upon my mind for ever. Nothing that I ever saw on land at all compares with it for splendor. No sunset, no lake scene of hill and water, no fall, not even Niagara, no glen or mountain gap ever approached it. The waves had had no time to "knock down," as the sailors phrase it, and it was a storm at sea without the hurricane and rain. I looked off to the horizon, and the long majestic swells were heaving into the sky upon its distant limit, and between it and my eye lay a radius of twelve miles, an immense plain flas.h.i.+ng with green and blue and white, and changing place and color so rapidly as to be almost painful to the sight. I stood holding by the tafferel an hour, gazing on it with a childish delight and wonder. The spray had broken over me repeatedly, and, as we s.h.i.+pped half a sea at the scuppers at every roll, I was standing half the time up to the knees in water; but the warm wind on my forehead, after a week's confinement to my berth, and the excessive beauty lavished upon my sight, were so delicious, that I forgot all, and it was only in compliance with the captain's repeated suggestion that I changed my position.

I mounted the quarter-deck, and, pulling off my shoes, like a schoolboy, sat over the leeward rails, and, with my feet dipping into the warm sea at every lurch, gazed at the glorious show for hours. I do not hesitate to say that the formation, progress, and final burst of a sea-wave, in a bright sun, are the most gorgeously beautiful sight under heaven. I must describe it like a jeweller to you, or I can never convey my impressions.

First of all, a quarter of a mile away to windward, your eye is caught by an uncommonly high wave, rus.h.i.+ng right upon your track, and heaping up slowly and constantly as it comes, as if some huge animal were ploughing his path steadily and powerfully beneath the surface. Its "ground," as a painter would say, is of a deep indigo, clear and smooth as enamel, its front curved inward, like a sh.e.l.l, and turned over at the summit with a crest of foam, flas.h.i.+ng and changing perpetually in the suns.h.i.+ne, like the sudden outburst of a million of "unsunned diamonds;" and, right through its bosom, as the sea falls off, or the angle of refraction changes, there runs a s.h.i.+fting band of the most vivid green, that you would take to have been the cestus of Venus, as she rose from the sea, it is so supernaturally translucent and beautiful. As it nears you, it looks in shape like the prow of Cleopatra's barge, as they paint it in the old pictures; but its colors, and the grace and majesty of its march, and its murmur (like the low tones of an organ, deep and full, and, to my ear, ten times as articulate and solemn), almost startle you into the belief that it is a sentient being, risen glorious and breathing from the ocean. As it reaches the s.h.i.+p, she rises gradually, for there is apparently an under-wave driven before it, which prepares her for its power; and as it touches the quarter, the whole magnificent wall breaks down beneath you with a deafening surge, and a volume of foam issues from its bosom, green and blue and white, as if it had been a mighty casket in which the whole wealth of the sea, crysoprase, and emerald, and brilliant spars, had been heaped and lavished at a throw. This is the "tenth wave," and, for four or five minutes, the sea will be smooth about you, and the sparkling and dying foam falls into the wake, and may be seen like a white path, stretching away over the swells behind, till you are tired of gazing at it. Then comes another from the same direction, and with the same shape and motion, and so on till the sun sets, or your eyes are blinded and your brain giddy with splendor.

I am sure this language will seem exaggerated to you, but, upon the faith of a lonely man (the captain has turned in, and it is near midnight and a dead calm), it is a mere skeleton, a goldsmith's inventory, of the reality. I long ago learned that first lesson of a man of the world, "to be astonished at nothing," but the sea has overreached my philosophy--quite. I am changed to a mere child in my wonder. Be a.s.sured, no view of the ocean from land can give you a shadow of an idea of it. Within even the outermost Capes, the swell is broken, and the color of the water in soundings is essentially different--more dull and earthy. Go to the mineral cabinets of Cambridge or New Haven, and look at the _fluor spars_, and the _turquoises_, and the clearer specimens of _crysoprase_, and _quartz_, and _diamond_, and imagine them all polished and clear, and flung at your feet by millions in a noonday sun, and it may help your conceptions of the sea after a storm. You may "swim on bladders" at Nahant and Rockaway till you are gray, and be never the wiser.

The "middle watch" is called, and the second mate, a fine rough old sailor, promoted from "the mast," is walking the quarter-deck, stopping his whistle now and then with a gruff "How do you head?" or "keep her up, you lubber," to the man at the helm; the "silver-sh.e.l.l"

of a waning moon, is just visible through the dead lights over my shoulder (it has been up two hours, to me, and by the difference of our present merideans, is just rising now over a certain hill, and peeping softly in at an eastern window that I have watched many a time when its panes have been silvered by the same chaste alchymy), and so after a walk on the deck for an hour to look at the stars and watch the phosphorus in the wake, I think of ----, I'll get to mine own uneven pillow, and sleep too.

LETTER II.

AT SEA, OCTOBER 20.--We have had fine weather for progress, so far, running with north and north-westerly winds from eight to ten knots an hour, and making, of course, over two hundred miles a day. The sea is still rough; and though the brig is light laden and rides very buoyantly, these mounting waves break over us now and then with a tremendous surge, keeping the decks constantly wet, and putting me to many an uncomfortable s.h.i.+ver. I have become reconciled, however, to much that I should have antic.i.p.ated with no little horror. I can lie in my berth forty-eight hours, if the weather is chill or rainy, and amuse myself very well with talking bad French across the cabin to the captain, or laughing at the distresses of my friend and fellow-pa.s.senger, Turk (a fine setter dog, on his first voyage), or inventing some disguise for the peculiar flavor which that dismal cook gives to all his abominations, or, at worst, I can bury my head in my pillow, and brace from one side to the other against the swell, and enjoy my disturbed thoughts--all without losing my temper, or wis.h.i.+ng that I had not undertaken the voyage.

Poor Turk! his philosophy is more severely tried. He has been bred a gentleman, and is amusingly exclusive. No a.s.siduities can win him to take the least notice of the crew, and I soon discovered, that, when the captain and myself were below, he endured many a persecution. In an evil hour, a night or two since, I suffered his earnest appeals for freedom to work upon my feelings, and, releasing him from his chain under the windla.s.s, I gave him the liberty of the cabin. He slept very quietly on the floor till about midnight, when the wind rose and the vessel began to roll very uncomfortably. With the first heavy lurch a couple of chairs went tumbling to leeward, and by the yelp of distress, Turk was somewhere in the way. He changed his position, and, with the next roll, the mate's trunk "brought away," and shooting across the cabin, jammed him with such violence against the captain's state-room door, that he sprang howling to the deck, where the first thing that met him was a was.h.i.+ng sea, just taken in at mids.h.i.+ps, that kept him swimming above the hatches for five minutes. Half-drowned, and with a gallon of water in his long hair, he took again to the cabin, and making a desperate leap into the steward's berth, crouched down beside the sleeping creole with a long whine of satisfaction. The water soon penetrated however, and with a "_sacre!_" and a blow that he will remember for the remainder of the voyage, the poor dog was again driven from the cabin, and I heard no more of him till morning.

His decided preference for me has since touched my vanity, and I have taken him under my more special protection--a circ.u.mstance which costs me two quarrels a day at least, with the cook and steward.

The only thing which forced a smile upon me during the first week of the pa.s.sage was the achievement of dinner. In rough weather, it is as much as one person can do to keep his place at the table at all; and to guard the dishes, bottles, and castors, from a general slide in the direction of the lurch, requires a sleight and coolness reserved only for a sailor. "_Prenez garde!_" shouts the captain, as the sea strikes, and in the twinkling of an eye, everything is seized and held up to wait for the other lurch in att.i.tudes which it would puzzle the pencil of Johnson to exaggerate. With his plate of soup in one hand, and the larboard end of the tureen in the other, the claret bottle between his teeth, and the crook of his elbow caught around the mounting corner of the table, the captain maintains his seat upon the transom, and, with a look of the most grave concern, keeps a wary eye on the s.h.i.+fting level of his vermicelli; the old weather-beaten mate, with the alacrity of a juggler, makes a long leg back to the cabin panels at the same moment, and with his breast against the table, takes his own plate and the castors, and one or two of the smaller dishes under his charge; and the steward, if he can keep his legs, looks out for the vegetables, or if he falls, makes as wide a lap as possible to intercept the volant articles in their descent. "Gentlemen that live at home at ease" forget to thank Providence for the blessings of a permanent level.

OCT. 24.--We are on the Grand Bank, and surrounded by hundreds of sea-birds. I have been watching them nearly all day. Their performances on the wing are certainly the perfection of grace and skill. With the steadiness of an eagle and the nice adroitness of a swallow, they wheel round in their constant circles with an arrowy swiftness, lifting their long tapering pinions scarce perceptibly, and mounting and falling as if by a mere act of volition, without the slightest apparent exertion of power. Their chief enjoyment seems to be to scoop through the deep hollows of the sea, and they do it so quickly that your eye can scarce follow them, just disturbing the polish of the smooth crescent, and leaving a fine line of ripple from swell to swell, but never wetting a wing, or dipping their white b.r.e.a.s.t.s a feather too deep in the capricious and wind-driven surface.

I feel a strange interest in these wild-hearted birds. There is something in this fearless instinct, leading them away from the protecting and pleasant land to make their home on this tossing and desolate element, that moves both my admiration and my pity. I cannot comprehend it. It is unlike the self-caring instincts of the other families of Heaven's creatures. If I were half the Pythagorean that I used to be, I should believe they were souls in punishment--expiating some lifetime sin in this restless metempsychosis.

Now and then a land-bird has flown on board, driven to sea probably by the gale; and so fatigued as hardly to be able to rise again upon the wing. Yesterday morning a large curlew came struggling down the wind, and seemed to have just sufficient strength to reach the vessel. He attempted to alight on the main yard, but failed and dropped heavily into the long-boat, where he suffered himself to be taken without an attempt to escape. He must have been on the wing two or three days without food, for we were at least two hundred miles from land. His heart was throbbing hard through his ruffled feathers, and he held his head up with difficulty. He was pa.s.sed aft; but, while I was deliberating on the best means for resuscitating and fitting him to get on the wing again, the captain had taken him from me and handed him over to the cook, who had his head off before I could remember French enough to arrest him. I dreamed all that night of the man "that shot the albatross." The captain relieved my mind, however, by telling me that he had tried repeatedly to preserve them, and that they died invariably in a few hours. The least food, in their exhausted state, swells in their throats and suffocates them. Poor Curlew! there was a tenderness in one breast for him at least--a feeling I have the melancholy satisfaction to know, fully reciprocated by the bird himself--that seat of his affections having been allotted to me for my breakfast the morning succeeding his demise.

OCT. 29.--We have a tandem of whales ahead. They have been playing about the s.h.i.+p an hour, and now are coursing away to the east, one after the other, in gallant style. If we could only get them into traces now, how beautiful it would be to stand in the foretop and drive a degree or two, on a summer sea! It would not be more wonderful, _de novo_, than the discovery of the lightning-rod, or navigation by steam! And by the way, the sight of these huge creatures has made me realize, for the first time, the extent to which the sea has _grown_ upon my mind during the voyage. I have seen one or two whales, exhibited in the docks, and it seemed to me always that they were monsters--out of proportion, entirely, to the range of the ocean.

I had been accustomed to look out to the horizon from land (the radius, of course, as great as at sea), and, calculating the probable speed with which they would compa.s.s the intervening s.p.a.ce, and the disturbance they would make in doing it, it appeared that in any considerable numbers, they would occupy more than their share of notice and sea-room. Now--after sailing five days, at two hundred miles a day, and not meeting a single vessel--it seems to me that a troop of a thousand might swim the sea a century and chance to be never crossed, so endlessly does this eternal horizon open and stretch away!

OCT. 30.--The day has pa.s.sed more pleasantly than usual The man at the helm cried "a sail," while we were at breakfast, and we gradually overtook a large s.h.i.+p, standing on the same course, with every sail set. We were pa.s.sing half a mile to leeward, when she put up her helm and ran down to us, hoisting the English flag. We raised the "star-spangled banner" in answer, and "hove to," and she came das.h.i.+ng along our quarter, heaving most majestically to the sea, till she was near enough to speak us without a trumpet. Her fore-deck was covered with sailors dressed all alike and very neatly, and around the gangway stood a large group of officers in uniform, the oldest of whom, a n.o.ble-looking man with gray hair, hailed and answered us. Several ladies stood back by the cabin door--pa.s.sengers apparently. She was a man of war, sailing as a king's packet between Halifax and Falmouth, and had been out from the former port nineteen days. After the usual courtesies had pa.s.sed, she bore away a little, and then kept on her course again, the two vessels in company at the distance of half a pistol shot. I rarely have seen a more beautiful sight. The fine effect of a s.h.i.+p under sail is entirely lost to one on board, and it is only at sea and under circ.u.mstances like these, that it can be observed. The power of the swell, lifting such a huge body as lightly as an egg-sh.e.l.l on its bosom, and tossing it sometimes half out of the water without the slightest apparent effort, is astonis.h.i.+ng. I sat on deck watching her with undiminished interest for hours. Apart from the spectacle, the feeling of companions.h.i.+p, meeting human beings in the middle of the ocean after so long a deprivation of society (five days without seeing a sail, and nearly three weeks unspoken from land), was delightful. Our brig was the faster sailer of the two, but our captain took in some of his canvas for company's sake; and all the afternoon we heard her half-hour bells, and the boatswain's whistle, and the orders of the officers of the deck, and I could distinguish very well, with a gla.s.s, the expression of the faces watching our own really beautiful vessel as she skimmed over the water like a bird. We parted at sunset, the man-of-war making northerly for her port, and we stretching south for the coast of France. I watched her till she went over the horizon, and felt as if I had lost friends when the night closed in and we were once more

"Alone on the wide, wide sea."

NOV. 3.--We have just made the port of Havre, and the pilot tells us that the packet has been delayed by contrary winds, and sails early to-morrow morning. The town bells are ringing "nine" (as delightful a sound as I ever heard, to my sea-weary ear), and I close in haste, for all is confusion on board.

LETTER III.

HAVRE.--This is one of those places which scribbling travellers hurry through with a crisp mention of their arrival and departure, but, as I have pa.s.sed a day here upon customhouse compulsion, and pa.s.sed it pleasantly too, and as I have an evening entirely to myself, and a good fire, why I will order another _pound_ of wood (they sell it like a drug here), and Monsieur and Mademoiselle Somebodies, "violin players right from the hands of Paganini, only fifteen years of age, and miracles of music," (so says the placard), may delight other lovers of precocious talent than I. Pen, ink, and paper for No. 2!

If I had not been warned against being astonished, short of Paris, I should have thought Havre quite an affair. I certainly have seen more that is novel and amusing since morning than I ever saw before in any seven days of my life. Not a face, not a building, not a dress, not a child even, not a stone in the street, nor shop, nor woman, nor beast of burden, looks in any comparable degree like its namesake the other side of the water.

It was very provoking to eat a salt supper and go to bed in that tiresome berth again last night, with a French hotel in full view, and no permission to send for a fresh biscuit even, or a cup of milk. It was nine o'clock when we reached the pier, and at that late hour there was, of course, no officer to be had for permission to land; and there paced the patrole, with his high black cap and red pompon, up and down the quay, within six feet of our tafferel, and a shot from his arquebuss would have been the consequence of any unlicensed communication with the sh.o.r.e. It was something, however, to sleep without rocking; and, after a fit of musing antic.i.p.ation, which kept me conscious of the sentinel's measured tread till midnight, the "gentle G.o.ddess" sealed up my cares effectually, and I awoke at sunrise--in France!

It is a common thing enough to go abroad, and it may seem idle and common-place to be enthusiastic about it; but nothing is common or a trifle, to me, that can send the blood so warm to my heart, and the color to my temples as generously, as did my first conscious thought when I awoke this morning. _In France._ I would not have had it a dream for the price of an empire.

Early in the morning a woman came clattering into the cabin with wooden shoes, and a _patois_ of mingled French and English--a _blanchisseuse_--spattered to the knees with mud, but with a cap and 'kerchief that would have made the fortune of a New York milliner.

_Ciel!_ what politeness! and what white teeth and what a knowing row of papillotes, laid in precise parallel, on her clear brunette temples.

"_Quelle nouvelle!_" said the captain.

"_Poland est a bas!_" was the answer, with a look of heroic sorrow, that would have become a tragedy queen, mourning for the loss of a throne. The French manner, for once, did not appear exaggerated. It was news to sadden us all. Pity! pity! that the broad Christian world could look on and see this glorious people trampled to the dust in one of the most n.o.ble and desperate struggles for liberty that the earth ever saw! What an opportunity was here lost to France for setting a seal of double truth and splendor on her own newly-achieved triumph over despotism. The washerwoman broke the silence with "_Any clothes to wash, Monsieur?_" and in the instant return of my thoughts to my own comparatively-pitiful interests, I found the philosophy for all I had condemned in kings--the humiliating and selfish individuality of human nature! And yet I believe with Dr. Channing on that dogma.

At ten o'clock I had performed the traveller's routine--had submitted my trunk and my pa.s.sport to the three authorities, and had got into (and out of) as many mounting pa.s.sions at what seemed to me the intolerable impertinencies of searching my linen, and inspecting my person for scars. I had paid the porter three times his due rather than endure his cataract of French expostulation; and with a bunch of keys, and a landlady attached to it, had ascended by a cold, wet, marble staircase, to a parlor and bedroom on the fifth floor: as pretty a place, when you get there, and as difficult to get to as if it were a palace in thin air. It is perfectly French! Fine, old, last-century chairs, covered with splendid yellow damask, two sofas of the same, the legs or arms of every one imperfect; a coa.r.s.e wood dressing-table, covered with fringed drapery and a sort of throne pincus.h.i.+on, with an immense gla.s.s leaning over it, gilded probably in the time of Henri Quatre; artificial flowers all around the room, and prints of Atala and _Napoleon mourant_ over the walls; windows opening to the floor on hinges, damask and muslin curtains inside, and boxes for flower-pots without; a bell-wire that pulls no bell, a bellows too asthmatic even to wheeze, tongs that refuse to meet, and a carpet as large as a table-cloth in the centre of the floor, may answer for an inventory of the "parlor." The bedchamber, about half as large as the boxes in Rattle-row, at Saratoga, opens by folding doors, and discloses a bed, that, for tricksy ornament as well as size, might look the bridal couch for a faery queen in a panorama; the same golden-sprig damask looped over it, tent-fas.h.i.+on, with splendid crimson cord, ta.s.sels, fringes, etc., and a pillow beneath that I shall be afraid to sleep on, it is so dainty a piece of needle-work.

There is a delusion about it, positively. One cannot help imagining, that all this splendor means something, and it would require a worse evil than any of these little deficiencies of _comfort_ to disturb the self-complacent, Captain-Jackson sort of feeling, with which one throws his cloak on one sofa and his hat on the other, and spreads himself out for a lounge before this mere apology of a French fire.

But, for eating and drinking! if they cook better in Paris, I shall have my pa.s.sport altered. The next _prefet_ that signs it shall subst.i.tute _gourmand_ for _proprietaire_. I will profess a palate, and live to eat. Making every allowance for an appet.i.te newly from sea, my experience hitherto in this department of science is transcended in the degree of a rushlight to Arcturus.

I strolled about Havre from breakfast till dinner, seven or eight hours, following curiosity at random, up one street and down another, with a prying avidity which I fear travel will wear fast away. I must compress my observations into a sentence or two, for my fire is out, and this old castle of a hotel lets in the wind "shrewdly cold," and, besides, the diligence calls for me in a few hours and one must sleep.

Among my impressions the most vivid are--that, of the twenty thousand inhabitants of Havre, by far the greater portion are women and soldiers--that the buildings all look toppling, and insecurely antique and unsightly--that the privates of the regular army are the most stupid, and those of the national guard the most intelligent-looking troops I ever saw--that the streets are filthy beyond endurance, and the shops clean beyond all praise--that the women do all the buying and selling, and cart-driving and sweeping, and even shoe-making, and other sedentary craftswork, and at the same time have (the meanest of them) an air of ambitious elegance and neatness, that sends your hand to your hat involuntarily when you speak to them--that the children speak French, and look like little old men and women, and the horses, (the famed Norman breed) are the best of draught animals, and the worst for speed in the world--and that, for extremes ridiculously near, dirt and neatness, politeness and knavery, chivalry and _pet.i.tesse_, of bearing and language, the people I have seen to-day _must_ be pre-eminently remarkable, or France, for a laughing philosopher, is a paradise indeed! And now for my pillow, till the diligence calls. Good night.

LETTER IV.

PARIS.--It seems to me as if I were going back a month to recall my departure from Havre, my memory is so clouded with later incidents. I was awaked on the morning after I had written to you, by a servant, who brought me at the same time a cup of coffee, and at about an hour before daylight we were pa.s.sing through the huge gates of the town on our way to Paris. The whole business of diligence-travelling amused me exceedingly. The construction of this vehicle has often been described; but its separate apartments (at four different prices), its enormous size, its comfort and clumsiness, and, more than all, the driving of its postillions, struck me as equally novel and diverting.

This last mentioned performer on the whip and voice (the only two accomplishments he at all cultivates), rides one of the three wheel horses, and drives the four or seven which are in advance, as a grazier in our country drives a herd of cattle, and they travel very much in the same manner. There is leather enough in two of their clumsy harnesses, to say nothing of the postillion's boots, to load a common horse heavily. I never witnessed such a ludicrous absence of contrivance and tact as in the appointments and driving of horses in a diligence. It is so in everything in France, indeed. They do not possess the quality as a nation. The story of the Gascoigne, who saw a bridge for the first time, and admired the ingenious economy that placed it across the river, instead of lengthwise, is hardly an exaggeration.

At daylight I found myself in the _coupe_ (a single seat for three in the front of the body of the carriage, with windows before and at the sides), with two whiskered and mustached companions, both very polite, and very unintelligible. I soon suspected, by the science with which my neighbor on the left hummed little s.n.a.t.c.hes of popular operas, that he was a professed singer (a conjecture which proved true), and it was equally clear, from the complexion of the portfeuille on the lap of the other, that his vocation was a liberal one--a conjecture which proved true also, as he confessed himself a _diplomat_, when we became better acquainted. For the first hour or more my attention was divided between the dim but beautiful outline of the country by the slowly approaching light of the dawn, and my nervousness at the distressing want of skill in the postillion's driving. The increasing and singular beauty of the country, even under the disadvantage of rain and the late season, soon absorbed all my attention, however, and my involuntary and half-suppressed exclamations of pleasure, so unusual in an Englishman (for whom I found I was taken), warmed the diplomatist into conversation, and I pa.s.sed the three ensuing hours very pleasantly. My companion was on his return from Lithuania, having been sent out by the French committee with arms and money for Poland.

He was, of course, a most interesting fellow-traveller; and, allowing for the difficulty with which I understood the language, in the rapid articulation of an enthusiastic Frenchman, I rarely have been better pleased with a chance acquaintance. I found he had been in Greece during the revolution, and knew intimately my friend, Dr. Howe, the best claim he could have on my interest, and, I soon discovered, an answering recommendation of myself to him.

The province of Normandy is celebrated for its picturesque beauty, but I had no conception before of the _cultivated_ picturesque of an old country. I have been a great scenery-hunter in America, and my eye was new, like its hills and forests. The ma.s.sive, battlemented buildings of the small villages we pa.s.sed through, the heavy gateways and winding avenues and antique structure of the distant and half-hidden chateaux, the perfect cultivation, and, to me, singular appearance of a whole landscape without a fence or a stone, the absence of all that we define by _comfort_ and _neatness_, and the presence of all that we have seen in pictures and read of in books, but consider as the representations and descriptions of ages gone by--all seemed to me irresistibly like a dream. I could not rub my hand over my eyes, and realize myself. I could not believe that, within a month's voyage of my home, these spirit-stirring places had stood all my lifetime as they do, and have--for ages--every stone as it was laid in times of worm-eaten history--and looking to my eyes now as they did to the eyes of knights and dames in the days of French chivalry. I looked at the constantly-occurring ruins of the old priories, and the magnificent and still-used churches, and my blood tingled in my veins, as I saw, in the stepping-stones at their doors, cavities that the sandals of monks, and the iron-shod feet of knights in armor a thousand years ago, had trodden and helped to wear, and the stone cross over the threshold, that hundreds of generations had gazed upon and pa.s.sed under.

By a fortunate chance the postillion left the usual route at Balbec, and pursued what appeared to be a bye-road through the grain-fields and vineyards for twenty or twenty-five miles. I can only describe it as an uninterrupted green lane, winding almost the whole distance through the bosom of a valley that must be one of the very loveliest in the world. Imagine one of such extent, without a fence to break the broad swells of verdure, stretching up from the winding and unenclosed road on either side, to the apparent sky; the houses occurring at distances of miles, and every one with its thatched roof covered all over with bright green moss, and its walls of marl interlaid through all the crevices with clinging vines, the whole structure and its appurtenances faultlessly picturesque, and, when you have conceived a valley that might have contented Ra.s.selas, scatter over it here and there groups of men, women, and children, the Norman peasantry in their dresses of all colors, as you see them in the prints--and if there is anything that can better please the eye, or make the imagination more willing to fold up its wings and rest, my travels have not crossed it. I have recorded a vow to walk through Normandy.

As we approached Rouen the road ascended gradually, and a sharp turn brought us suddenly to the brow of a steep hill, opposite another of the same height, and with the same abrupt descent, at the distance of a mile across. Between, lay Rouen. I hardly know how to describe, for American eyes, the peculiar beauty of this view; one of the most exquisite, I am told, in all France. A town at the foot of a hill is common enough in our country, but of the hundreds that answer to this description, I can not name one that would afford a correct comparison. The nice and excessive cultivation of the grounds in so old a country gives the landscape a complexion essentially different from ours. If there were another Mount Holyoke, for instance, on the other side of the Connecticut, the situation of Northampton would be very similar to that of Rouen; but, instead of the rural village, with its glimpses of white houses seen through rich and luxurious ma.s.ses of foliage, the mountain sides above broken with rocks, and studded with the gigantic and untouched relics of the native forest, and the fields below waving with heavy crops, irregularly fenced and divided, the whole picture one of an overlavish and half-subdued Eden of fertility--instead of this I say--the broad meadows, with the winding Seine in their bosom, are as trim as a girl's flower-garden, the gra.s.s closely cut, and of a uniform surface of green, the edges of the river set regularly with willows, the little bright islands circled with trees, and smooth as a lawn; and instead of green lanes lined with bushes, single streets running right through the unfenced verdure, from one hill to another, and built up with antique structures of stone--the whole looking, in the _coup d'oeil_ of distance, like some fantastic model of a town, with gothic houses of sand-paper, and meadows of silk velvet.

You will find the size, population, etc., of Rouen in the guide-books.

As my object is to record impressions, not statistics, I leave you to consult those laconic chronicles, or the books of a thousand travellers, for all such information. The Maid of Orleans was burnt here, as you know, in the fourteenth century. There is a statue erected to her memory, which I did not see, for it rained; and after the usual stop of two hours, as the barometer promised no change in the weather, and as I was anxious to be in Paris, I took my place in the night diligence and kept on.