Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/350

338 twice the perfume of other flowers; and as we pace along the broad terraced walks in the twilight, the odours of the well-remembered bushes of lavender, and jessamine, and cistus (each growing where it has stood since we were born), fall on our senses like the familiar note of some dear old tune. The very sounds of the landrail in the grass, the herons shrieking among their nests, the rooks darkening the evening sky, the cattle driven in to milking, and lowing as they go, all in some way suggest the sense, not of restlessness and turmoil, like the noises of the town, but of calm and repose and the unchanging order of the "abode of ancient Peace."

Then the habits of the owners of such old seats are sure to fall into a sort of rhythm. There are the lesser beats at intervals through the long day, when the early labourer's bell, and the gong at nine o'clock, and one o'clock and seven o'clock, sound the call to prayers and to meals. And there are the weekly beats, when Sunday makes the beautiful refrain of the psalm of life. And yet again, there are the half-yearly summer strophe and winter antistrophe of habits of each season, taken up and laid down with unfailing punctuality; while the family life oscillates like a pendulum between the first of May, which sees the domestic exodus into the fresh, vast old drawing-room, and the first of November, which brings the return into the warm oak-panelled library. To violate or alter these long-established rules and precedents scarcely enters into the head of any one, and the child hears the old servants (themselves the most dear and permanent institutions of all) speak of them almost as if they were so many laws of nature. Thus he finds life, from the very beginning, set for him to a kind of music, simple and beautiful in its way, and he learns to think that "Order is Heaven's first law," and that change will never come over the placid tenour of existence. The difficulty to him is to realize in after years that any vicissitudes have really taken place in the old home, that it has changed owners, or that the old order has given place to new. He almost feels, — thinking perhaps of his mother in her wonted seat, — that Shelley's dreamy philosophy must be true —

The anticipation of perpetual variety and change which is the lesson commonly taught to children by town life, — the Micawber-like expectation of "something turning up," to amuse or distract them, and for which they are constantly in a waiting frame of mind, is precisely reversed for the little scion of the old county family. For him nothing is ever likely to turn up beyond the ordinary vicissitudes of fair weather and foul, the sickness of his pony, the death of his old dog, or the arrival of his new gun. All that is to be made out of life he invents for himself in his sports and his rambles, till the hour arrives when he is sent to school. And when the epochs of school and college are over, when he returns as heir or master, life lies all spread out before him in a long straight honourable road, all his duties and his pleasures lying by the wayside, ready for his acceptance. For the girl there is often even longer and more unbroken monotony, lasting (unless she marry) into early womanhood and beyond it. Nothing can exceed the eventlessness of many a young lady's life in such a home. Her walks to her village school, or to visit her cottage friends in their sicknesses and disasters; her rides and drives along the familiar roads which she has ridden and driven over five hundred times already; the rare arrival of a new book, or of some old friend (more often her parent's contemporary than her own) make up the sum of her excitements, or even expectations of excitement, perhaps, through all those years when youth is most eager for novelty, and the outer world seems an enchanted place. The effects on the character of this extreme regularity and monotony, this life at low pressure, vary, of course, in different individuals. Upon a dull mind without motu proprio, or spring of original ideas, it is, naturally, depressing enough, but it is far from equally injurious to those possessed of some force of character, provided they meet the affection and reasonable indulgence of liberty, without which the heart and intellect can no more develop healthfully than a babe can thrive without milk, or a child's limbs grow agile in swaddling-clothes. The young mind slowly working out its problems for itself, unwarped by the influence (so enormous in youth), of thoughtless companions, and devouring the great books of the world, ferreted out of a miscellaneous library by its own eager appetite and self-guided taste, is perhaps ripening in a healthier way than the best-taught town child, with 