COMING HOME To be homeless.

77

child!" albeit assurance follows that both are well. Molière's Scapin insists that however brief may have been a père de famille's absence from home, he ought to make up his mind to all sorts of distressful accidents to be discovered on his return, and therefore to figure to himself en route his wife dead, or his house burnt to the ground, at the very least. "Il doit promener son esprit sur tous les fâcheux accidents que son retour peut rencontrer, se figurer sa maison brûlée, sa femme morte," etc. The burnt house is the Vicar of Wakefield's lot: "It was now near midnight that I came to knock at my door: all was still and silent: my heart dilated with unutterable happiness, when, to my amazement, I saw the house bursting out in a blaze of fire, and every aperture red with conflagration!" The late Mr. Leigh Hunt was often heard to say that he never left home to return at night without a dread lest he should find his house in flames. One of the Idylls of the King describes him returning o'er the plain that then began to darken under Camelot; whence the king looked up, calling aloud, "Lo there! the roofs of our great hall are rolled in thunder-smoke! Pray Heaven, they be not smitten by the bolt;"-and a page or two later we read

"So to this hall full quickly rode the king,
In horror lest the work by Merlin wrought,
Dreamlike, should on the sudden vanish, wrapt
In unremorseful folds of rolling fire."

78

FOREBODINGS ON THE THRESHOLD.

The ninth chapter of Mr. Crabb Robinson's Reminiscences closes with the avowal of his indulgence, so he calls it, in "a little act of superstition," which may recall Scapin's il doit promener son esprit. It records his arrival at Bury, between one and two at night, and his hurrying to his brother's house: "I had not heard of my brother for some months; and as a charm against any calamity to him or his family, I enumerated all possible misfortunes, with the feeling which I have had through life, that all calamities come unexpectedly; and so I tried to ensure a happy meeting by thinking of 'all the ills that flesh is heir to."" From the same feeling the poet of The Angel in the House, knowing, from what he noted in daily life, "that blows foreseen are slow to fall, rehearsed the losing of a wife, and faced its terrors each and all,”in a passage elsewhere turned to use in this volume.

When Salathiel the immortal reaches the foot of the long ascent from which his dwelling is visible, he feels an impatience beyond restraint, and spurs up the hill to allay it. "How fine the ear becomes when quickened by the heart!" he exclaims, as home sounds appear to reach it; and he pictures the dear group of household faces. The light thickens, and the intricacy of the forest impedes him; so that, chafing at the delay, he springs from his horse, and tries his path through a thicket on foot, struggling onward, and listening with sharpened anxiety for every sound of home. The anxiety is all too fully justified by the event,

MISGIVINGS IN SIGHT OF HOME.

79

One glance at Alphonso, in Southey's Roderick, on his way to Count Pedro's Castle :

"Youth of heroic thought and high desire,
'Tis not the spur of lofty enterprise

That with unequal throbbing hurries now
The unquiet heart, now makes it sink dismay'd;
'Tis not impatient joy which thus disturbs

In that young breast the healthful spring of life;
Joy and ambition have forsaken him,

His soul is sick with hope. So near his home,
So near his mother's arms;

alas perchance

The long'd-for meeting may be yet far off

As earth from heaven. Sorrow in these long months
Of separation may have laid her low."

Byron ceased his funning, and dropped his sneer, for one stanza at least, when describing Lambro's arrival at the summit of a hill which overlooked the white walls of his home:

"He stopp'd.-What singular emotions fill

Their bosoms who have been induced to roam !
With fluttering doubts if all be well or ill-
With love for many, and with fears for some;
All feelings which o'erleap the years long lost,
And bring our hearts back to their starting-post."

Wordsworth's Leonard and his brother - The Brothers-were the last of all their race: and now when Leonard, after long absence, had approached his home, his heart failed in him; "and, not venturing to inquire tidings of one so long and dearly loved, he to the solitary churchyard turned; that, as he knew in what particular spot his family were laid, he thence might learn if still his brother lived, or to the pile

80

'IF LUCY SHOULD BE DEAD!

another grave was added." From him glance aside to track the steps of Enoch Arden, wending homeward-home-what home-had he a home? after so prolonged and cruel an absence:

"Then down the long street having slowly stolen,
His heart foreshadowing all calamity,

His eyes upon the stones, he reach'd the home
Where Annie lived and loved him, and his babes
In those far-off seven happy years were born;
But finding neither light nor murmur there

(A bill of sale gleam'd thro' the drizzle) crept

Still downward, thinking, 'Dead,—or dead to me !""

Once more:-Mr. Coventry Patmore's comprehensive poem of household life and lives and loves shall furnish a terminal illustration of the theme of Wordsworth's moonlight ride to Lucy's cot:-the poet has been feigning advent calamity and rehearsing bereavement at its worst, and now he awakes, to wonder if there be realism in the dreamings after all; it is a varied reading of If Lucy should be dead!

""O Heaven!' I cried, with chill alarm,

'If this fantastic horror shows

The feature of an actual harm !'

And coming straight to Sarum Close,
As one who dreams his wife is dead,
And cannot in his slumber weep,

And moans upon his wretched bed,

And wakes, and finds her there asleep,

And laughs and sighs, so I, not less
Relieved, beheld, with blissful start,

The light and happy loveliness

Which lay so heavy on my heart."

NOCTAMBULISM.

Y some accounts, Theseus met with his death

BY

through missing his step on the highest cliffs in Scyros, and thence tumbling down headlong—the consequence of taking a walk after dark, as his practice was. Serve him right, will be the verdict of those to whom every species of noctambulism, civic or rural, appears a thing unnatural and baneful, and who would apply to every night-walker, on system, Seneca's reproach of baseness, Turpis est-on the score of perverting the proper uses of day and night— qui officia lucis noctisque pervertit. We have holy writ for it, that if a man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world; but if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.

Nevertheless the taste, not to call it instinct, for noctambulism is in some people so strong as to be practically irresistible. It may be a morbid preference, after the manner exemplified in Elsie Vennerthat curious physiological study of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's—who at that period of the year when, on account of rattlesnakes, the Rockland people were most cautious of wandering in the leafier coverts which

G