XVI.

GETTING ASHORE.

GREAT is travel! Yesterday Memnon, to-day a crocodile, to-morrow dancing-girls-and all sunned by a January, whose burning brilliance shames our fairest June fervors. This comes of going down to the sea in ships, and doing business upon the great waters, and Sinbading round the world generally.

Yet there are those who cultivate chimney corhers, and chuckle that a rolling-stone gathers no noss, who fillip their fingers at Memnon and the sources of the white Nile, who order warm slippers and declare that travelling is a fool's paradise. Yes. But, set in the azure air of that paradise stands the Parthenon, perfect as Homer. There are the Coliseum, the Forum, and the earth-quaking memories of Rome. There Memnon sings and the Gondolier. There wave palms, and birds of unimagined plumage float. There are the mossy footsteps of history, the sweet sources of song, the sacred shrines of religion.

Objective all, I know you will respond, fat friend of the warm slippers, and you will take down your Coleridge and find,

"O lady, we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does nature live."

Yes-again, but I mistrust your poet was abroad when he sang those numbers. The melodious mystic could not reach the fool's paradise through the graceful Grecian gate, or the more congenial Egyptian Pylon-so through rainbow airs, opium-pinioned, he overflew the walls, and awhile breathed other airs. The lines are only partially true. Elia, copying accounts in the India House, could not enjoy in the wood upon which he wrote, the charm of the tree which had "died into the desk." And though nature be the mirror of our moods-we can yet sometimes escape ourselves-as we can sometimes forget all laws. "Go abroad and forget yourself," is good advice. The Prodigal was long and ruinously abroad before he came to himself. And poets celebrate the law unlimited, which circumstances constantly limit. You would fancy Thomson an early riser. Yet that placid poet, who rented the Castle of Indolence, and made it the House Beautiful, so that all who pass are fain to tarry, used to rise at noon, and, sauntering into the

garden, eat fruit from the trees with his hands in his pockets, and then and there composed sonorous apostrophes to the rising sun.

Travelling is a fool's paradise, to a fool. But to him, staying at home is the same thing. A fool is always in paradise. But into that delight, a wise man can no more penetrate than a soul into a stone. If you are a fool, O friendly reader of the rollingstone theory, you are in the paradise you dread, and hermetically closed in. The great gates clanged awfully behind you at your birth. But if you are wise, you can never by any chance get in. Allons, take your slippers, I shall take passage with the fool.

All this we say, being somewhat sleepy, under the bank at Esne, on the verge of tumbling in. Good night! But one word! You, facetious friends in the hot slippers, what is our so stable-seeming, moss-amassing Earth doing? Truly what Rip Van Winkle heard the aged men do among the mountains--rolling, rolling, rolling forever.

O, friends of the Verde family, have you duly meditated these things?

XVII.

FAIR FRAILTY.

FRAIL are the fair of Esne. Yet the beauty of gossamer webs is not less beautiful, because it is not sheet-iron. Let the panoplied in principle pass Esne by. There dwell the gossamer-moraled Ghawazee. A strange sect the Ghawazee-a race dedicate to pleasure.

Somewhere in these remote regions lay the Lotus islands. Mild-eyed and melancholy were the forms that swam those calm waters to the loitering vessel, and wooed the mariners with their hearts' own longings soothlier sung

"Here are cool mosses deep,

And through the moss the ivies creep,

And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,

And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep."

To those enchanted islands and that summer sea, is not this river of unknown source the winding avenue? Through its silence, ever silenter—along the peaceful waving of its palms-azure-arched and lotus-shored, leads it not backward to that dream?

Yes the Howadji felt it. The day whispered it at noon. The palms at sunset waved it from the shore. The stars burning ever brighter with the deepening south, breathed it with their greater beauty all night long, "Mild-eyed, melancholy" were the men. But along the shores of this labyrinth, which we so dreamily tread, are stations posted, to give exquisite earnest of our bourne. And here are maidens, not men, vowed to that fair forgetfulness of yesterday and to-morrow which is the golden garland of to-day.

These azure airs, soft and voluptuous, are they not those that blew beyond the domain of conscience—remote region of which Elia dreamed? Is not the Bishop of that diocese unmitred here? For the nonce I renounce my fealty, and air myself beyond those limits: and when I return, if mortal may return from the Lotus islands, and from streams enchanted, that good Bishop shall only lightly touch me with his crosier for the sake of bright Kushuk Arnem, and the still-eyed Xenobi.

Did you sup at the Barmecide's in Bagdad, with Shacabac and myself, that Arabian night? Well, the Ghazeeyah Kushuk Arnem, a girl of Palestine, claims descent from him. Or did you assist at Herodias's dancing before the royal Herod? Well, the Ghazeeyah Kushuk Arnem dances as Herodias