Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/509

. 24, 1863.]

The berried holly’s leaf of thorn, I think thou wilt not dread or scorn; For thou hast learn’d the lesson rare Of patience,—both to do, and bear.

Encircled thou, in twofold light From both the worlds thou hast in sight: Like Cortes, blessing on his knees His God, as he two oceans sees.

Not mine, as yet, to know thy calm; Not mine to raise thy peaceful psalm; But I may love thee, and not less For thy more perfect happiness.

So, sitting the ripe shocks beneath, I crown thee with an Autumn Wreath; And hail thy birthdays as they flow:— Our hearts were one, long, long ago!

upon a time when London was threatened with an earthquake, a quack doctor advertised his pills as good for the occasion. It is not to be supposed that, gullible as is the Britisher generally, it was intended to physic Mother Earth with boluses, but simply so to physic her children with gamboge or whatever other drug might be current, as to render them quite prostrate and indifferent to what further might befall, as in the case of sea-sickness. On another occasion, some years back, when this terrible prognostic was again broached, people left London in numbers, i. e., those who had money wherewith to travel out of it, and wives wrote to their husbands to join them on that day that they might at least die together—at which a French writer remarked that “they had not been long married.”

The “Times,” for two successive days, has had its columns filled with letters testifying to a veritable earthquake, in this our England, on the night of October 6th. The descriptions and signs given by so many persons, all tallying, render it tolerably certain that this was no false alarm, albeit more fright than hurt. The hollow rumbling sound, as of a carriage or fire-engine driving up and suddenly stopping, is a familiar image with all who have ever experienced an earthquake. For my part, I did not know of the earthquake till it appeared in the “Times,” and had I awaked, sleeping some thirty feet above the ground, in a brick house built in this century, I should not have considered it a condition of absolute safety.

I once, as our Gallic neighbours have it, assisted at an earthquake in a far-off land. It was no sudden fright and away again, but a piece of earnest business. It shook down whole streets in towns; it drove ships ashore and swallowed up rivers of clean water to vomit them forth again in avalanches of mud; it killed people in thousands, albeit not their sleeping time. It never ceased for a whole month, with intervals of five minutes, and finally, it left some nine hundred miles of sea-coast and “pented hills with all their load,” permanently raised a fathom higher out of the ocean than they had been before.

It was a fine night, and the moon shone bright, when the distant roar was heard, and the earth swayed with a horizontal rocking movement, now north and south, and then east and west, and then in a circular whirl; huge trees bowed down like giants in sport; men and women rushed from churches and chapels; horses broke their bridles and halters and rushed with the cattle to the hills; the lake disappeared, and the wild birds from its surface flew screaming into the air. A sensation like sea-sickness came on; and, as on a ship’s deck in a heavy gale at sea, it was impossible to stand without stretching the legs wide. I was in a house at the time, and the house had a chimney of brick. It was like Paddy’s house, all the stories were on the ground-floor, built of wooden posts planted firmly on the ground and filled in with brushwood or wattle and daub, and heavily thatched with rushes. It was, before the earthquake, a very comfortable rustic dwelling. With the shock the chimney fell in through the ceiling; tables, chairs and bookcase were all heaped on one another, and covered in a cloud of dust and ruins. I was “nowhere.” The house lay like a ship on its beam-ends, and doors and windows were all jammed. To get out it was needful to wait till a reverse rocking enabled them to open. Once outside, there was a clear sky and bright moon looking down, and but for the thought that all in-door comforts were wrecked, and the possibility of a great ocean wave coming up the bed of the lake, and the lofty sand hills tumbling down into the valley, one might have imagined oneself at sea in a bright gale of wind. But the groaning of men and the screaming of women and children, dispelled that illusion. Their shouts to the Virgin for help were incessant.

Now, in all that country, houses of one floor—the ground—were the rule, and two floors the exception. The walls were very thick and very low, of bricks such as the Children of Israel made, but with good tough barley-straw entwined through them to hold them together. The tall churches of burnt brick toppled over like packs of cards, and wooden altar-pieces stood erect in the ruins, while even the low thick walls were thrown down. The people in the towns fled to the hills to dwell in tents, for the incessant shaking left them no hope of returning to their several dwellings; and when, two days after, a heavy and uncustomary rain set in, it added to their misery; but fortunately it did not continue. Attempts were made at repairs, but abandoned, for incessant shocks threw down the brickwork as it was being erected. And what were the poor people to do? They had no timber to build with, for rafters and roof-poles were brought from afar off.

Our English earthquakes are apparently but the reverberation of the distant mischief. We do not appear to live on the edges of the great cracks, the weak spots in the shell of the inner furnace, which serve as safety-valves; but there was once an earthquake in our neighbourhooodneighbourhood [sic]—Lisbon. Where the volcanoes are, the “imprisoned vapours in the womb of earth” find easier vent. Were a stopper put into the mouth of Hecla we know not how far the mischief might spread. The builders of Babel seem only to have been conscious of the evils