Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/23

Rh especially of travels in Africa, that were early predominant in her mind, we need but revert first to the voyage made while yet a youth by her father, and next to a book which he gave her, bearing the title of "Silvester Tramper." This was the pet among her "pleasure books," rivalling for a time even Robinson Crusoe, and decidedly eclipsing her fairy tales. She tried, in after life, to procure a copy of this work, but never could. Like Pistol, "it spoke of Africa and golden joys." It professed to be a narrative of travels in a region to her so fatal, and was full of wonders connected with bushmen, and lions literal and metaphorical—recounting narratives of much enterprise and adventure, illustrating, or rather exaggerating, the power which the arms and resources of a civilised few gave them over the savage many. At last her father presented her with the "Arabian Nights," and this acquisition soon settled the claims of Silvester and Robinson, by supplanting both. "Many a weary day," observes her brother, "those same Nights occasioned me—I had to hear all!" L. E. L. reminded her brother, in a poem addressed to him in after years, of another volume, whose hero for a time eclipsed every other hero. Truth seemed indeed stranger than fiction as they read Cook's voyages: "It was an August evening, with sunset in the trees, When home you brought his Voyages who found the fair South Seas; . . . . . For weeks he was our idol, we sailed with him at Sea, And the pond amid the willows our ocean seemed to be; The water-lilies growing beneath the morning smile, We called the South Sea islands, each flower a different isle. Within that lonely garden what happy hours went by, While we fancied that around us spread foreign sea and sky."