Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/404

394 And many a time his brow grew sad, And many a time his eye grew moister, When lute-like voices, young and glad, Were wafted to his cage-like cloister.

And so, like captive bird, he sung Of cups that kindlier tables graced, Of swords at knightlier sides that hung, Of lips ’twere deadly sin to taste.

The knights he sung were scarce of earth, Not ruffians as we oft behold here, All loyalty and truth and worth, Each one an army in a soldier.

The wines he sung might glad the hoard Of Duke, Archbishop, or Elector, The produce of some fairy hoard, Imprisoned sunbeams changed to nectar.

But sweet as ever woke his lays To celebrate good wine or true man, The rare quintessence of his praise Was thine, inexplicable Woman.

He praised thee in thine April morn, All tremulous with beauty’s budding, When tender thoughts are newly born, And bathe the cheek in roseate flooding.

He praised thee in thy May of youth, The heroine of antique story; Bound soul to soul in ardent truth, And granting maiden love for glory.

He praised thee, peerless queen of home, The hearth-imparadising mother; Fount of the Strong and Fair to come, Most blest in blessing most another.

By Henry wept no child or wife, When bowed to death his silver head; But angel wings, unknown in life, Threw their bland shadows o’er his bed.

Touch closed his eyes more soft than ours, Fair hands dropt wreaths the kind old man on, And eight bright ladies, crowned with flowers, Bore to his rest the genial Canon.

those cardinal defects of our railroad system, on which I have already recorded my dissatisfaction, there are scores of others not less annoying, though perhaps less serious. “Les petites misères de la vie en chemin-de-fer,” would form an appropriate title for such a work as I should like to see written. Railway annoyances do not belong to the order of troubles that are soon forgotten. On the contrary, the traveller has time to brood over them to his heart’s content or discontent, as he is jolted along mile after mile and hour after hour. For my own part, I do not consider railway journeying to be conducive to pleasing reflections. As long as you can look out on the passing scenery, well and good; as long as you can sleep, well and better; but, if the prospect from the windows is dull and dreary, or if it is too dark to see anything, and if you cannot sleep, then I fancy most persons’ reflections on a solitary journey are not peculiarly lively ones. The swaying to and fro of the carriage produces that feeling of heaviness which, as every seafaring traveller knows, is the first step in the downward path towards nausea. Thus the mind is apt to brood over the discomforts of one’s position. During a long series of such after-dark journeyings, when I was too tired to read and too wide awake to sleep, I have pondered sadly over the short-comings of our railroad management and some few results of these ponderings I wish now to convey to others.

In the first place then, according to the custom of reformers, let me name my own particular personal grievance. If the tyrant Gessler had placed the apple on the head of Master Schmidt or Meyer instead of on that of young Tell, very likely the Swiss revolution would never have taken place. In the same way, to compare small things with great, if our railway companies had not systematically refused to provide for my individual comfort, I should not perhaps have been tempted to launch these censures on their devoted heads. As the St. Albans potwhalloper said, I am not venal, but I am accessible to persuasion; and supposing I had no personal cause of complaint, my sense of the public wrongs might not be as vivid as it is. This I own in justice to abstract truth; yet at the same time, I feel some satisfaction in knowing that my own wrongs are also those of a large portion of the public. To tell the truth, I am addicted to smoking. This may, as a fashionable ladies’ doctor once said to me, be a nasty habit, an expensive habit, and a degrading habit. About that I say nothing. I only aver that in company with nine railway travellers of the male sex out of ten, I do like a cigar while I am travelling; and, what is more, I indulge my liking. If I had a penchant for picking pockets or for slashing cushions with a pen-knife, I could hardly be treated with greater severity. I have to indulge my taste slily, surreptitiously, and ignobly. I look out for empty carriages. I give bribes to officials, who are at once offensively servile and insultingly familiar. I am liable at any moment to be insulted, committed and fined. I am pained by the consciousness that the carriage, when I leave it, will smell unpleasantly of stale tobacco, and that the next occupant may be a lady, to whom the odour is really unpleasant; and, in fact, I am kept in a state of equal discomfort whether I smoke or do not smoke. And these penalties are inflicted on me simply and solely because I do what I am allowed to do in every other place that I frequent. No doubt there is a difference on our various lines. The Great Northern, for instance, inclines to stern severity with respect to smokers; the Great Eastern is lax to a degree hardly consistent with dignity; the North Western is accessible to reason in the person of its officials; the South Western is capricious in its policy; while the South Eastern line is positively Draconian in its antipathy to smoking, and, not content with fining detected offenders, actually gibbets them for weeks afterwards by affixing their names, occupations, and punishments on the walls of its stations—an excess of cruelty which I doubt being justified either by humanity or law. Still one and all these