Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/502

494 eve; a feeling of the difficulties and interests that will engage and distract mankind on the morrow. Nor can it be enough for enduring fame in any age merely to throw a golden halo round the secularity of the hour, or to make glorious the narrowest limitations of the passing day. If we think what a changed sense is already given to criticism, what a different conception now presides over history, how many problems on which he was silent are now the familiar puzzles of even superficial readers, we cannot help feeling that the eminent man whose life we are all about to read, is the hero of a past which is already remote, and that he did little to make men better fitted to face a present of which, close as it was to him, he seems hardly to have dreamed.

 

It was again spring, always late, cold, and bleak among those eastern downs approaching the coast. The fogs from Holland alternated with the whistling winds that blew over the German Ocean, lashing it to a fury, and raising on that long line of unsheltered sandy shore perfect whirlwinds of sand. These threatened to bury the inhabitants in their houses, as it buried their gardens, which were dug out annually.

Yet hardy fisher-folk and traders clung in great clusters for centuries—back even to the Danish invasion, to such towns as Cheam, and had thriven and flourished in them. There was as stout and faithful a population inland, who had settled on the bare, wide meadows, with deep ditches and slow streams, and who had fattened in them like their own oxen. Into strong, shrewd, stubborn natures they had taken the great, plain, unvarying traits of the landscape around them, and cherished it as far before the gardens of roses or frowning grandeur of mountains with which the imaginations of more sensitive people had on occasion tried to tickle the fancies of those dwellers in an eastern county.

There were not more staunch countrymen in all England. Not in soft and bold, flowery and rocky Devon, which, to complete its contrasts, breaks into vast moorlands—not in the bowery hop-gardens of Kent, or the sunny wheat-fields and shady coppices of Berkshire, or the romantic glories of hill and dale in Derbyshire—was there a more home-loving, attached population than was to be found in that county to which belonged Cheam and Saxford. There were many such stirring coast-towns, the birthplace of ancient mariners and naval heroes of all time, with forests of shipping, old market-places, and line old churches; and there were many such sturdy little villages, with small, square-towered, thatch-roofed churches and churchyards mossy and turfy, on the outskirts, and general stores for shops, and inns—half inns, half alehouses—for village centres.

As extremes meet, so in the extremes of prose in this land there was a curious, as it were unconscious, poetry, just as on its noisy, weather-worn quays, and in its crowded town lanes, and in some of its quiet, slumbrous halls and heavy, comfortable farmhouses, sad enough tragedies had been enacted.

And that late, cold spring-time of the east counties, which the very natives would deplore, had an unspeakable freshness in its blustering gales, and in the lingering frost-nips that contended with the increasing warmth of its sunshine, and with the springing sap of all life, such as no tender, balmy spring of the south or the west could command. It may be that it requires youth and health, or at least the recollections and associations of youth and health, to appreciate such rough, coy springs; but given the conditions, and no fair judge will deny that under all its disadvantages the much-belied east-coast spring has a charming something, invigorating and bracing, that is denied all other springs, and which is well-nigh worth their counterbalancing attractions.

A pedestrian who was in the neighbourhood of the manor, and who, by the way, was not an east-countryman, revolved some of these thoughts. The flats were not dull, wearisome, and heavy beyond bearing, but in their wide space and' monotony, their comparative emptiness and loneliness, had something of the impressiveness, and even something of the vague sadness, which captivates the wanderer among mountains. The chill of this spring-time was not mere grey cloudiness, piercing to the bone and marrow, but was also illumined pure blue, that got into the blood and roused it to such sensibilities